Husserl does recognize the ability of indication to be independent of expression, but my sense is the thinks this is already intuitively obvious from everyday examples. Neither Husserl nor Derrida seem to expend effort defending this claim. — The Great Whatever

But that's the point, it is essential to Husserl that indication is independent of expression. Take a look at the beginning of the chapter. The subject being addressed is described as "the exteriority of indication in relation to expression". Husserl wants to "reduce" indication as an extrinsic empirical phenomenon. It is a motivator, or "motivation". Then towards the end of the chapter it is said that all other "reductions", to follow, are dependent on this hiatus. There is what is in the world, psychical, and what is not in the world, transcendental.

Clearly, Derrida is not ready to accept this separation, and this is evident in the final sentence of the chapter "Although there is no possible discourse without an expressive kernel, we could almost say that the totality of discourse is gripped by an indicative web".

It seems to me that when Derrida emphasizes Husserl's purported need for indication to be extrinsic to expression, he's trying to paint Husserl as someone trying to preserve expression from a kind of contamination. So, analogously, an idealistic artist might want to say that social differentiation is extrinsic to taste. Though the artist would certainly agree that social differentiation can be understood without reference to taste, what he'd really be concerned about is establishing the existence of a pure realm of aesthetic appreciation which is not interwoven with social concerns. This seems to be the portrait of Husserl Derrida is trying to paint, except with meaning instead of taste. The emphasis is on the purity of expression, not the independence of indication.

Re: the last paragraph, it's aim seems to be to indicate the ramifications of Derrida's investigation, an attempt to explain how this seemingly trivial point about indication and expression has implications beyond what is immediately obvious. In particular, it bears upon "all the reductions to come, whether they are eidetic or transcendental." The whole first part of the paragraph (up to the words "And yet Husserl... (middle of p.26)) is just a series of ways of saying the same thing. Every 'reduction to come' will be affected by this problematic (I don't want to say problem), such that "indicative signification will cover, in language, all of what falls under the blows of the “reductions”: factuality, mundane existence, essential nonnecessity, non-evidence, etc." The bit about the 'hiatus' between indication and signification again, just says the same thing.

At this point (after 'And yet Husserl...), Derrida indicates that there are 'two paths', as it were, that one can follow at this point, paths opened up by Husserl himself. Husserl opts to follow one path, but Derrida signals his intention to follow the other. One is to follow Husserl in simply bracketing indication as something that must be taken into account, only be to put aside, as it were, in following the travails of expression. The other is to ask what would happen if we take indication to be intrinsic to expression itself, if, by necessity, it 'contaminates' the purity that ought to characterize expression. Derrida clearly opts for this latter understanding: "Although there is no possible discourse without an expressive kernel, we could almost say that the totality of discourse is gripped by an indicative web."

You can start here to see Derrida's complex relation to the phenomenological project more generally; Derrida never claims to be engaged in a 'critique of phenomenology'; rather, he always generally takes himself to hewing closer to the foundations of phenomenology than Husserl himself. Elsewhere (I can't remember where), he will speak of the necessity of the phenomenological reduction as a starting point for philosophy in general. Len Lawlor sums up Derrida's strategy thus: "Derrida argues that every time Husserl tries to define the transcendental without the empirical he fails, necessarily, to be rigorous. The transcendental is contaminated by the empirical and vice versa." This is the program that will be pursued in the following chapters.

It seems to me that when Derrida emphasizes Husserl's purported need for indication to be extrinsic to expression, he's trying to paint Husserl as someone trying to preserve expression from a kind of contamination. So, analogously, an idealistic artist might want to say that social differentiation is extrinsic to taste. Though the artist would certainly agree that social differentiation can be understood without reference to taste, what he'd really be concerned about is establishing the existence of a pure realm of aesthetic appreciation which is not interwoven with social concerns. This seems to be the portrait of Husserl Derrida is trying to paint, except with meaning instead of taste. The emphasis is on the purity of expression, not the independence of indication. — csalisbury

The problem I see, is that in the end, it is "sign" which needs to be defined, and this cannot be done by reference to expression alone, we need to refer to indication as well. If we allow the separation intended by Husserl, we have two distinct senses of "sign", one in relation to expression and one in relation to indication. Objectivity will be lost. Then if we come full circle, and look at what it means to be a sign in the sense of indication, without expression, and this I take to be a natural indication. we will find absolutely no meaning here, of any sort, without referring to expression. This undermines the whole practise of separation which would bring us to this point in the first place.

The other is to ask what would happen if we take indication to be intrinsic to expression itself, if, by necessity, it 'contaminates' the purity that ought to characterize expression. Derrida clearly opts for this latter understanding: "Although there is no possible discourse without an expressive kernel, we could almost say that the totality of discourse is gripped by an indicative web." — StreetlightX

We could consider such contamination in the sense of an accidental. Indication is not essential to expression, but it just so happens to occur within expression. You are saying that expression is essential ("by necessity") to indication. I would question the necessity you refer to, is this the only place indication occurs. This would tie in with, why does it appear to exist as an external web, if it's really intrinsic to expression.

It has never been my impression that Husserl has tried to define the transcendental without the empirical, and on the contrary he insists that perception of an eidos can only ever come through the instantiation of some fact (cf. the fact-eidos connection and the inability of one to exist without the other in Ideas S. 2). This is why Derrida's way of speaking confuses me. He also seems to speak of the transcendental reduction in such a way that he thinks that empirical reality 'falls to' it, or 'outside of it.' This, if taken seriously, is a misunderstanding of the epoché; it's the eidetic reduction that deals with essence.

Indeed indication is itself something to be studied phenomenologically, and it's not as if Husserl expects all indication to disappear once the epoché is performed. The epoché does not bracket particular things or phenomena; it brackets an attitude and commits a reversal, so that previously one was seen to be constituted by preexisting things, now all these things are seen to be constituted by consciousness. This is not in itself a move to ideality in the relevant sense.

The problem that Derrida will go on to tease out however - and this is more indicated in the first chapter than this one - is that Husserl will go on to isolate a mode in which there is expression that explicitly excludes any kind of indication whatsoever. Hence the discussion (in the first chapter) about expression not being a species of the genera indication, which Husserl will go on to affirm.

He also seems to speak of the transcendental reduction in such a way that he thinks that empirical reality 'falls to' it, or 'outside of it.' — The Great Whatever

Derrida is very clear, that "the world" is psychical, and "the transcendental" is what is not contained within the world. He is quite unclear with his use of "empirical" though. Perhaps this will become clearer with more use, but I assume that this word indicates some relation between the world and the transcendental. I think that we should not be hasty in designating "the transcendental" as necessarily external to "the world", because there are internal aspects of experience which escape "the world", just as much as there are external aspects. Remember, Kant designated space as an external intuition, and time as an internal intuition.

I agree that showing that indication can't be disentangled from expression goes against what Husserl explicitly says. What I don't understand is why Derrida thinks this would be ruinous for the phenomenological project. There are many things Derrida is saying about the relation of indication and expression to fact and essence and so on, and the consequences for phenomenology, that I can't make sense of. I don't understand why he thinks the fact-essence distinction is mappable onto indication-expression, for example (there is an essence of indication, in fact Derrida himself describes it in Chapter 2, from Husserl's own text), and there are factual instances of expression, and neither so far as I can see is meant to 'fall to' the reduction.

But I want to put the 'problem sentences' up to go more into this.

In some analytic jargons, an utterance is literally sounds or marks used in communication. Is that the same as an artificial indication?

If two people are in agreement, we would say that both are prepared to assert the same proposition. One utters a sentence in order to express a proposition. Is this the way "expression" is being used? If not.. how is it different?

There are actually a few different types of expression (or, at least, ways of considering expression) that Husserl identifies in the first logical investigation - the expression of propositional content is indeed part if Husserl's picture, but only part. However, at this stage in V&P we haven't yet reached the explicit discussion of expression, & it's impossible to understand precisely what the term means through reading the first two chapters alone. Chapter 3 is where the discussion of expression really begins.

I agree that showing that indication can't be disentangled from expression goes against what Husserl explicitly says. What I don't understand is why Derrida thinks this would be ruinous for the phenomenological project. — The Great Whatever

The best I can think is that it would be a matter of evidence - if evidentiary intuitions* are built on the nonevident (or intertwined with them all the way down) that would be a problem for phenomenology, no? Though, you're right, that's not quite what Derrida himself is saying, at least thus far.

*I'm sure my terminology's off, because it's been a while, but referring to the opening sections of Ideas here.

I can see this, but the discussion of time-consciousness then seems far more relevant than the discussion of expression, whose significance I still don't really understand. I know Derrida wants to show there is no pre-linguistic substratum of experience, and that the fact/essence distinction somehow maps onto the indication/expression distinction, and that these distinctions can't be made pre-linguistically, but thus far I only know that he claims these things, but neither why nor how.

To the best of my knowledge Derrida is being faithful to Husserl here. Husserl is broadly Kantian on this point: the transcendental conditions of experience are unworldly, not in the world, but are themselves experiential (except, confusingly, perhaps the transcendental ego, though this changes in his later philosophy). This is an important point about Husserl's philosophy: Husserl believes that you can perceive essences as well as facts. This is a kind of empiricist-rationalist 'fusion:' Platonic forms are real but experientially constituted, in such a way that you can literally see them. Just not in the same way you see an empirical object, because it's not the same sort of thing (though forms depend on empirical objects for their existence). Perception for Husserl is the ur-epistemological act; his 'principle of principles' which Derrida will mention later is founded on perception in this extended sense.

'Empirical' so far as I can see is just a synonym for 'worldly' with Derrida, but it also implies non-essentiality, belonging to matters of fact rather than essence. For Husserl, essences are 'irreal,' which he means in a technical way not as unreal or fake, but as opposed to 'reality' in the way that the transcendental idealists roughly use it (bound up in causal efficacy, in the world, etc.)

Consider this passage from p25 then, and see if you can interpret it for me, because I'm stuck.

"Motivations linking lived-experiences, the acts intending objective-ideal, necessary, and evident idealities, may be of the order of contingent and empirical, 'non-evident' indication. But the relations uniting the contents of ideal objects, in evidential demonstration, do not belong to indication. The entire analysis of section 3 demonstrates that (1) even if A indicates B with a complete empirical certainty (with the highest probability), this indication will never be a demonstration of apodictic necessity, and, to find here again the classic schema, it will never be a demonstration [31] of 'truths of reason' in opposition to 'truths of fact'. Section 3's analysis also demonstrates (2) that even if indication seems nevertheless to intervene in a demonstration, it will always be on the side of psychical motivations, acts, convictions, etc., and never on the side of the contents of truths that are linked together.

I can see this, but the discussion of time-consciousness then seems far more relevant than the discussion of expression, whose significance I still don't really understand. I know Derrida wants to show there is no pre-linguistic substratum of experience, and that the fact/essence distinction somehow maps onto the indication/expression distinction, and that these distinctions can't be made pre-linguistically, but thus far I only know that he claims these things, but neither why nor how.

Yeah, I agree. (My cynical suspicion is that Derrida's starting with indication/expression for the theatricality: The very first distinction in the very first logical investigation! In Phenomenology's beginning lies its ruin! The optimistic and charitable part of me hopes this is cleared up a bit as the book progresses.)

I'm going to take a crack at the supplementary text to see if it has any ideas, but so far I haven't found it extraordinarily helpful. Much of the front matter before the text seems irrelevant, and the discussion of the text itself seems in some places to be reducible to repetitions of what Derrida actually says with certain things repeated and certain words italicized.

My copy of Logical Investigations mentions another book that includes a close (though critical) reading of V & P (one chapter for each chapter of V&P) - Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice by Joseph Claude Evans. Gonna see if there's any insight there.

The lived experiences are what's going on with the thinker when they make some logical deduction. These are connected to each other – one motivates the other, but because they are psychological processes taking place in an empirical mind, they only indicate one another. We move from one thought to another via the suggestion of one thought by another, but not in such a way that the association between these thoughts is in any way logically guaranteed. Rather, it's subject to the frailties of our mental capacities and our powers of association, and there is no logical guarantee that one thought will suggest another in strict logical fashion (we can make deductive mistakes). The things thought about however, in making the deduction, don't have this empirical flavor: a syllogism shows the truth of its conclusion being guaranteed by its premises in such a way that this truth must follow, the conclusion is tied to the premises with 'adequate evidence' or with 'insight.' Thus even though our thoughts are empirically collocated, what we think about in making logical deductions is not; they are related by an internal necessity, and we deduce correctly insofar as our contingent psychological powers lead us to see this with adequate evidence.

Here we invoke the Humean notion of contiguity never implying necessity, and the corresponding division between matters of fact and matters of reason. No matter how strongly A suggests B (there are lightning storms often here in Chicago; whenever you see a certain sort of flash from indoors, you can bet with an extremely high probability that a roll of thunder is coming in several seconds), there is nothing essential about B's following from A. It is only their constant juxtaposition that psychologically inclines us to see A as justifying B, as movement from one empirical state of affairs to another. So we can expect thunder form lightning, and be justified in doing so, but cannot deduce thunder from lightning, nor any indicated thing from its indication.

When we appeal to indication in talking about logical deduction, we always do it with respect to our psychological acts or thoughts, where one indicates another empirically, like lightning and thunder. The ideal objects themselves, however, do not indicate one another but are demonstrated from one another. In showing how a syllogism works, we do not point to the psychological acts that discover how it works, because these are irrelevant, except insofar as they serve to get us to see the connection that lies between the ideal objects themselves.

This isn't totally relevant, but I thought it was funny: The introduction to Strategies of Deconstruction includes a gallery of existing interpretations of V&P & one interpreter, Scanlon, thinks that the book is written in character, that it's a subtle joke - Derrida isn't writing as Derrida, is the idea, but as a caricature of a pedantic academic exegete, a bumbling one who believes that every detail of the text has to manifest, equally, the idea of the metaphysics of presence (perhaps the way a goofy monk might try to argue that that the most trivial or auxillary sentence in the bible is a perfectly clear manifestation of the essence of God's will.)

I think this is obviously absurd but its a funny lens through which to view the text (and i suspect Scanlon himself, whoever he is, probably views his reading the same way I do)

What I don't understand is why Derrida thinks this would be ruinous for the phenomenological project. — The Great Whatever

I get what you mean, though I think this is (partly) an issue with the book's structure. The first part of the book is given over to explicating 'the problem of the sign' (note that this is the subtitle of VP itself), while the second half (chpts 4 onwards) shows how this problem comes to bear on the phenomenology of internal time consciousness, and then consequently the phenomenological project as a whole. I think you're right that at this point in the book, Derrida is making claims he's not yet really entitled to, but I think he will begin to remedy this as the book goes on.

I like that, although I think I would like it even more if it were real. Deep cover jokes that can only be gotten by an extremely narrow audience are great – like the Sokal hoax but with a real 'journal' and a real 'social scientist.' I'm sure Borges' Tlönian philosophers would approve, as would paradigm pirates. And there's an exquisite pleasure in coming to understand that you're reading a joke after careful study, especially if others who are less attentive or skilled have been unable to 'get it' and made fools of themselves trying to take it seriously.

I once tried to write a parody Wikipedia-style article on continental philosophy, in the overly affected style of a continental philosopher, but I found I just didn't have the knack for it. I think I might be able to do an analytic one.

I remember reading somewhere (I can't remember where) that Derrida was told by his teacher Jean Hyppolite (one of the major progenitors of French post-war philosophy) that Derrida would need to put out some more 'serious', studied work before he could practice the kind of playful, wandering writing that would characterize his later work. Voice and Phenomenon was, apparently, one of the fruits of that advice.

Note also that VP is not Derrida's only work on Husserl. Pretty much the entirety of 'early Derrida' is marked by an engagement with Husserl, from his doctoral dissertation (The Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy in Husserl) to the two other essays which are commonly cited ("Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction" and "‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology" (in Writing and Difference). Some further secondary reading would be:

Leonard Lawlor - Derrida and Husserl
Paola Marrati - Genesis and Trace: Reading Husserl and Heidegger
Joshua Kates - Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction

Re: Evans, he and Lawlor have been arguing about how to interpret VP for ages. There's an interesting exchange in the Philosophy Today journal between them, with Lawlor defending Derrida from Evans, although their exchange has taken place outside that journal as well. I read the exchange a long time ago so I don't quite remember the meat of it, but I can provide... things to anyone interested in the exchange.

One thing I find interesting about Husserl is he is perhaps the most unflinchingly serious and earnest philosopher I've ever read. The greats that he respected, like Hume, all had a playful, deconstructive, even destructive side to them, but Husserl really had his nose to the grindstone. His distinctions and analyses are so numerous, so subtle, and so wide-reaching in scope and insight: I feel like for a lot of philosophers, it's a matter of 'there but for the grace of a serious work ethic go I,' I just don't see that kind of sheer backbone in a writer like Derrida or even Heidegger. Their writings are too eager to get to the point and to be clever, and lack that sheer earnest labor. Who but Husserl would be insane enough to bulldoze through the issue of other minds while swallowing all of the classical Cartesian assumptions?

What's interesting though is that the approach of Husserl and Derrida to their work is in some manner reflected in their various philosophies themselves. Husserl was after foundations, he appreciated the Cartesian drive for certainty, sought after essences and the guarantee of truths against the various 'crises' of European philosophy. In turn, Derrida's own playfulness is itself valorized in the 'play' that he affirmed at work in all philosophy, that play that will both unsettle and establish any philosophical system subject to the 'metaphysics of presence'. In other words, if Husserl's is a kind of principled seriousness, Derrida's is no less a kind of principled play.

True but I feel that while play always eventually gets boring, seriousness can suck you in and become increasingly enrapturing. And at the end of the day I want Husserls building the planes.

The ideal objects themselves, however, do not indicate one another but are demonstrated from one another. — The Great Whatever

OK, so here's the part which stumps me. He refers to the "contents" of ideal objects, and the relations between the contents, and that these do not belong to indication. How can there be a relation which is not indicative, what kind of relation is he assuming for these contents?

For example, I assume that logic proceeds through relating symbols, "if A then B", and such things, and these relations are in some sense indicative. This is one relation, which relates the symbols necessarily, it is established by the premise as necessary. There is another relation which relates the symbols to the content, "A" signifies a particular idea. This relation is contingent. But I don't see any relationship between the contents themselves, except those established through relating the symbols in the premises. All the relations between the contents are created through this extraneous means of relating the symbols.

Is it the case, that by "contents" he is referring to the symbols themselves, "A" and "B"? If so, then why does he call them the content of ideal objects rather than the formal aspect of ideal objects? As this is consistent with the traditional form/content distinction?

Then he distinguishes "truth of reason" from "truth of fact", which I don't see at all. Where does he pull "truth of fact" from, aren't logical truths, truths of reason? And finally, he concludes with "the contents of truths that are linked together". What is he referring to with "contents of truths"?

OK, in time for the start of the third chapter tomorrow, I have some puzzling sentences and what I have been able to make of them.

Indication falls outside the content of absolutely ideal objectivity, that is, outside the truth.

It seems that here Derrida is not accusing Husserl of disavowing empirical truth generally, but rather using 'truth' to mean the sort of truth provided by 'absolutely ideal objectivity.' I think this is fair, since reading the First Investigation, Husserl at least once does this himself, saying that an object perceived only mediately but not intuitively given (like someone else's mind), and so indicated, has 'no truth in it.' What Derrida seems to mean then is that indication can never provide for 'truth' in this especial sense.

Here again, this exteriority, or rather this extrinsic characteristic of indication, is inseparable, in its possibility, from the possibility of all the reductions to come, whether they are eidetic or transcendental.

I'm still not sure what to make of this one. For one thing, the 'here again' seems to suggest that Derrida has made this point before, or given some justification for it; but I can't find anything to that effect. Grammatically, it's a little confusing what's being literally said here: is it that the reductions cannot be performed without making use of indication? Or is it that indication cannot happen without the reduction? Presumably the former is more in keeping with the tone of the text. But then I do not know why this is so.

Having its "origin" in the phenomena of association and always connecting empirical existents in the world, indicative signification will cover, in language, all of what falls under the blows of the "reductions": factuality, mundane existence, essential non-necessity, non-evidence, etc.

The idea that mundane existence "falls under the blows of the reductions" seems misleading. In introducing the epoché, Husserl is careful to explain that there is no particular phenomenon or set of phenomena that it cordons off, nor is the idea to shave off an empirical layer of the world to reach its non-empirical substrate. After reduction, the world faces us just as it was, empirical existents and indications and all, but just as world-phenomenon. The difference is not one of content, but of attitude, the exchanging of the natural attitude for the phenomenological. So we should expect, for instance, that within the reduction we will still undergo motivation via indication, and further that these indicative motivations will themselves be material for phenomenology. This is underscored by the fact that Husserl himself attempts to provide an essential analysis for indication (which would, according to his method, have to operate via eidetic reduction on particular cases of indication). So we should not be misled into thinking that the point of the reduction is to 'get rid of indication,' and therefore that any sign it might be 'seeping in' is a sign that the reduction has failed on Husserl's terms.

Do we not already have the right to say that the entire future problematic of the reduction and all the conceptual differences in which they are declared (fact/essence, transcendentality/mundanity, and all the oppositions that are systematic with them) are developed in a hiatus between two types of signs?

Here is sort of the clincher, and the most confusing part of the chapter. Why do indication and expression map onto these two sides of the dichotomy? And why should we see this linguistic difference as having consequences for all of phenomenology?

Going off of what csalisbury has said, I wonder if we should take the bolded words here more seriously. Maybe Derrida is being quite literal when he asks about the differences in which they are declared? As in, phenomenological results, in order not only to be communicated among phenomenologists, not only to be written down and stored, but to be conducted to begin with, must be encoded within the language of the phenomenologist? When we want to express phenomenological insights or formulate them, if indication is bound up with expression, then all phenomenological method will be indicative as well, and therefore purely eidetic results will be impossible, because we cannot coherently mean them, at least not in the way Husserl wants, not purely apodictically and securely in evident intuition. We would depend, for the security of these expressed results, on a gap or lack of expression coming from empirically recalling or representing what is absent. This is how we 'develop' the theory.

I went back (forward?) to the Introduction, and some support for this view seems to come from the following comment on p. 7:

And, as Fink has indeed shown, Husserl never posed the question of the transcendental logos, of the inherited language in which phenomenology produces and exhibits the results of the workings of the reduction.

Perhaps what is at stake here is not the reduction itself, but any efficacy it has in reporting its results. I suspect for Derrida that these two things turn out to be inseparable – if we can't secure phenomenological results, then tho that extent there really is no reduction the way Husserl wants for there to be one. This in turn seems to be based on the following gambit: knowledge is not properly knowledge unless it can be recorded and communicated linguistically, and Husserl's notion that there is a pre-linguistic stratum of experience is a fantasy. Husserl would hold, I imagine, that it is possible to conduct eidetic analyses intuitively, without needing to record them linguistically, and the fact that we must resort to language to communicate them is a mere accident (one that could perhaps be bypassed if we were a certain sort of intuitive mind-reader?) This can work to make Derrida read as someone throwing in his gambit against Husserl's, but not yet, so far as I can see, as someone deconstructing Husserl from the inside or even producing a convincing thesis counter to him. It seems like we can't trust Derrida in making these claims until we know beforehand how crucial language is to the enterprise.

Here’s a summary for Chapter 3.

In this chapter, Derrida is concerned with tracing Husserl’s move toward the ‘solitary life of the soul’ in Chapter 1: he expounds further on Husserl’s notion of expression and the steps that must be taken to isolate it from indication, and shows the way in which this requires an imaginative speech to oneself, in order to purge language of its communicative (indicative) elements. There is also a footnote in this chapter that lays out the course of the entire work in extreme brief.

—

The first thing to note about expression is that, like its prefix ex- implies, it’s a movement outward. From what, and toward what? First there is something a thinker experiences, in a pre-linguistic substratum of experience, which takes the form of some intentionality: there is an act and an object, and so the act reaches ‘toward’ the object (perceiving the sky, imagining a centaur, etc.). Once the meaning (in Husserl’s wider sense of Sinn, sense) is present, expression can then supervene on this and move it ‘outward’ again, by ‘reflecting’ or ‘mirroring’ the intentional object (the noema) in a linguistic expression of what is experienced. In effect, the experiencer comes to ‘say’ exactly what he ‘sees.’ In this way all pre-linguistic experience tends toward being expressed: it is there for the expressing, and giving it a linguistic sense in a way only reduplicates what was already there. Importantly, all of this takes place within experience, and does not involve the positing of or exiting toward an outer world transcending experience.

Second, expression is purely voluntary. Here Derrida’s translation of Bedeutung as vouloir-dire comes into play: expression must be intentional in the non-technical sense, it must be done on purpose by the thinker. This means that any accompaniment of expression that its non-essential to this intentional redoubling of sense has to be excluded, and this includes any communicative features carried along with the expression by accident (here facial features and gestures are mentioned, though presumably the form of the un-intentionality doesn’t matter, and presumably also these gestures can be voluntary as well). These things can merely accidentally indicate the sense that the speaker wants to express, and while other people can pick up on these indications and infer what the speaker thinks from them, they only do this insofar as they themselves express something with regards to the involuntary acts, intentionally; otherwise, the smile indicating happiness is much like smoke indicating fire, strictly speaking not meant. Expression has to be purged of all such indicative impurities. Derrida makes two accusations of Husserl at this point – first, that Husserl is reinstituting a kind of voluntaristic metaphysics, since all experience seems to ‘tend toward’ a voluntary reduplication of it, while passivity (i.e. indication) is set to the side as secondary, and second, that this sort of move represents a deep fear of death and lack of presence (and lack of control) that Husserl’s metaphysics of presence is trying to resolve, by keeping the willed and present front and center.

In this connection Derrida notes there is a sort of mind-body split, reborn in the split between the intentional and the accidental, which is involved in the way Husserl holds that all physical expression of a sign contaminates its expressive capacity with indicative elements. When listening, to someone, we must attend to the physical side of a sign, and from it perceive mediately the sense expressed. Communicative speech thus requires mediation through physical objects that indicate one another: we can see another’s feelings and emotions, but not purely intuitively or originarily by nature, we only originarily see the physical signs through which they’re conveyed. Although expression is therefore generally intended to be used in communication, communication itself paradoxically destroys expression in its most basic form. For that, we need a lack of indicative mediation, which means a lack of mediation through physical signs, which means a lack of mediation through other people: we essentially have to talk to ourselves.

In talking to ourselves, Husserl thinks, we are indifferent to the actual existence of any word, and only need to imagine the word being used. Furthermore, we indicatively communicate nothing to ourselves, since our meaning is already intuitively present in our own experience. In soliloquizing, the word, as ideal linguistic object, still has all of the same meaning it has when we employ it in actual acts of communication, and actual speech only exteriorizes this to intertwine it with an indicative function. Therefore it doesn’t matter if we actually speak or not, and therefore indication is absent in talking to ourselves because indication relies on the reality of the indicator to motivate conviction in the indicated. But here we have merely imagined words, not words themselves, and we are indifferent to whether anything indicator or indicated exists at all.

—

There are two other explanatorily important things I think should be discussed at some point about this chapter: first, that monster footnote on pp. 38-39 (which maybe has as much content as the rest of the chapter combined), and second, the technical jargon surrounding Husserl and Saussure that Derrida alludes to at the end, regarding the reality of objects.

good stuff - I probably won't be able to respond til tuesday, pulling a couple long shifts at work, but I'll join back in when I can.

Nice summary TGW, thanks for that. Here's my take.

I see three phases of separation, or "removal" in this chapter. First, and primarily, the word as it appears within a human mind is removed, or separated from the physical existence of the word. This is tied up with the separation between indication and expression. By removing the psychical occurrence of the word, its occurrence within the mind, from the physical occurrence of the word, Husserl is able to consider the imagined word as a pure form of expression. This is expression without indication. This form of pure expression is referred to as "the solitary life of the soul", talking to oneself, soliloquy. The expression is said to be pure because the meaning is self-present, there is no manifestation, no medium between word and meaning, and therefore no indication.

However, there is a second phase of removal described. This is the removal of the act of imagination from the thing which is imagined, in this case, the word. Following this there is a third phase suggested, and that is a removal of the contents of the act of imagination, the noema, from the act of imagination. Now it is implied, if not explicitly stated, that the contents of the act of imagination, the noema, is not actually the imagined words. If this is the case, then I believe that Husserl's claim that the imagined word is a form of pure expression, cannot be upheld. The act of imagination forms a mediation between the imagined word, and the content, or noema (this could be 'the concept') , and therefore I believe we have indication. In other words, the imagined words are not properly "the content" of the act of imagination, they are in some sense a manifestation, or indication of the actual content.