Vivre une mort – La question de la genèse de l’idéalité chez Derrida à partir de sa réflexion sur la notion husserlienne de «monde de la vie»

The aim of the present paper is to scrutinize the starting point of Derrida’s philosophy, departing from his reflection on Husserl’s notion of the ‘life-world’. Reviewing the whole Husserl corpus available at the time, Derrida’s earliest work, The problem of genesis in Husserl’s philosophy, gives a very particular reading that was to have a profound impact on the development of his own philosophy. Derrida considers the question of the genesis of extratemporal ideality through temporal reality to be a leitmotif of Husserl’s philosophy. He supposes that the purpose of Husserlian philosophy is to avoid the dichotomy between ideality and reality, or essence and fact, and thus to find a third term to connect these – the genesis. Research of “one” origin, however, inevitably implies either the reduction of the fact to the essence or of the essence to the fact, neither of which allows Husserl to approach the genesis itself. The concept of the “life-world” represents one of the Husserlian attempts to find the connection between reality and ideality. The ambiguity of this notion, taken as a sensible actuality as well as the possible world in general in the sense of “et cetera”, reveals itself, in the eyes of Derrida, as “Idea in the Kantian sense”. According to Derrida, the achievement of this ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ suggests a sort of living of ideality that is nothing other than taking an attitude to death in general – we see this also from the notion of “philosophy”, similarly considered as “Idea”. Derrida describes this achievement as the ideal possibility of a real impossible. In Voice and Phenomenon, recalling the Finkian aporia of phenomenological reduction, Derrida shows this achievement as the possibility of impossibility.