Pierre-Jean Renaudie

In spite of Brentano’s considerable influence on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, their analysis of intentionality is significatively different regarding some fundamental points, such as the status of reality, the nature of intentional acts, and their relation to the world. The core of the opposition between Brentano and Husserl is to be found in the ontological background of their theories, as a result of which they hold two different approaches of the existential import of intentionality. This paper investigates those differences in order to ask whether a relational understanding of intentionality is likely to give a satisfying account of reality. Both Brentano and Husserl’s analyses provide important clues regarding this issue and stress the main difficulties of the question, even if their theories fail to take into consideration the actual insertion of intentional acts within the world.

According to Jacques Derrida, the tradition of metaphysics is dominated by a basic distinction between presence and absence that plays a fundamental role in Husserl’s theory of meaning and contaminates the core of his phenomenological project. If Husserl’s distinction between indication and expression in the 1st Logical Investigation is credited for opening a ‘phenomenological breakthrough’, his account of the entwinement between the indicative and expressive functions of linguistic signs is accused of restoring and maintaining the metaphysical primacy of presence. In the last chapters of Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida focuses especially on the cases of indexical or ‘essentially occasional’ expressions, whose concrete meaning is a function of the occasion of their use and which rely on the indicative function of meaning. According to Derrida’s reading, Husserl holds that such indexical meanings like ‘I’, ‘here’ or ‘now’, are necessarily always fulfilled and cannot lack of intuitive fulfilment. Consequently Derrida takes Husserl’s account of the meaning of ‘I’ as an obvious symptom of his inability to move away from the myth of pure expressivity, bringing phenomenology back into the history of metaphysics. Husserl would have failed to acknowledge that indexical meanings, like ideal or objective meanings, can remain unfulfilled and deprived of intuition. This article demonstrates that Derrida’s critique misses the most important point in Husserl’s analysis of the meaning of ‘I’, and argues that indexical or subjective expressions are somehow insensitive to the prospect of intuitive presencing and fulfilment.