Okay, it looks like the introduction deserves a separate discussion. With that said, are people okay with a ~2 month span, about a week per section?

If so, we should decide whether we want to have dedicated summaries, or do it more freestyle. Once we have a general format in mind, we can decide on a starting date and make a new thread. Do people need more time to get a copy of the work, and if so does anyone want leads or assistance?

I read most of the introduction over the weekend but stopped. The introduction requires a decent amount of prior knowledge of Husserl, both his overall project and some technical distinctions he made. I read Cartesian Meditations and a bunch of secondary literature on Husserl some years ago so I picked up some references but a lot was incomprehensible to me. I'm currently looking at the 'historical context' chapter of Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon by Vernon W. Cisney, and will have another crack at the intro afterwards.

I wonder if it would help for someone to provide a 'skeleton key' for each chapter.

I'm happy to provide 'technical advice' as it were, questions about terminology and so on. Note that it does get somewhat easier after the introduction, which is quite sweeping about the claims it makes. Once you get past it, Derrida's analyses get quite precise, and it may even be a good idea to read the introduction after the body of the book - or even revisit it at the end of the reading group.

Having read both through the introduction and the first chapter, I think it would be prudent to start with the first chapter instead. The intro is very dense and confusing, and makes extensive reference to issues in Husserl's project, like the difference between transcendental phenomenology and pure psychology, that seem more illustrative of general theses espoused in the text and may be distracting until we understand what those theses are. It seems that chapter one can be understood without an independent reading of Husserl or Frege, and where supplements are wanted there are just a couple relevant references that could be consulted (e.g. the beginning of the first Logical Investigation).

We could just have the Intro as the eighth part of the reading, functioning basically as a sort of conclusion.

Yeah, I like doing the intro at the end. What were you thinking for a timeframe? Maybe chapter one by next weekend?

I thought we could just pick an arbitrary day to start each week, and then spend the week discussing the chapter. So yeah, we could just say that each week starts on Sunday, and next Sunday is when the discussion proper will begin. I'll make a thread several days beforehand. Optimally everyone will have read before the start of the discussion but that's not totally realistic, so we should expect the week also to act as a continuation of the reading and a shoring up of it where things weren't clear.

sounds good to me

Got my order today (went overboard, b/c I got nothing else to waste money on rn) but, hey, I somehow fucked up the order and got an extra copy of Voice & Phenomenon. Anyone want it? pm me shipping info and its yours.

Nice! Have you read Husserl before? I think he's probably my least favourite writer. He expresses simple things in convoluted ways. I grabbed Logical Investigations from the library but can't bring myself to open it yet.

I'm good with discussion on Sunday. Means I can get the reading done on Saturday if I'm falling behind.

Pictures like that make me happy, haha. I should mention - not to burst your bubble! - that there's a newer translation of Ideas by Daniel Dahlstrom that was released just a couple of years ago as well. I've not read it, but it might be useful to consult if you get stuck on passages in the Moran translation.

Ideas is mind-blowing. Husserl comes off as a self-conscious, almost constipated writer, and so has the bizarre distinction of conveying almost mystically powerful truths in tortured academic prose.

Reading a bit of the Derrida beforehand, he comes off as highly elliptical and more allusive, even a bit playful (and may we not even call him rhetorical?) than analytical. I hope the lacunae in the (what I guess are supposed to be?) arguments is filled in as the work proceeds.

@shmik I've read Cartesian Meditations and a good chunk of Ideas. Definitely doesn't go down easy.

Compared to later Derrida though, this book feels remarkably lucid and controlled

I wouldn't know – but I'm having a very hard time reconstructing the points being made. Chapter 2 feels like a chunk is missing. He says some things, makes some distinctions, and suddenly we're over here and I can't for the life of me understand how we got there, even if I go back sentence by sentence.

Just read chapter two this afternoon & I gotta say I agree. It's fine when he's analyzing the text itself, but the sudden sweeping proclamations about the phenomenological project as a whole are frustrating.

We will probably talk about the in the group, but a large part of the project here seems to assume that if 'indication' were ineliminable from expression generally then Husserl would be in big trouble. This is asserted several times, but I can't figure out why. Maybe it would mean that Husserl was wrong in thinking one could be isolated from the other – but the broader implications for phenomenology are unclear.

Part of it seems to be an insistence that as indication belongs to 'mundanity' and the empirical, it is supposed to be cordoned off by the transcendental reduction, and that if we need it (although here I'm not clear on why 'need it for the analysis of language' means 'need it' simpliciter), then the reduction cannot be pure in the way Husserl wants it to be, since an empirical 'outside' that is non-ideal will always contaminate it.

But this just can't be Derrida's line of thought, because it betrays a very basic misunderstanding of the epoché as something that 'removes' some aspect of experience in favor of focusing on some other (and I worry about this because SX's summary post above seems to labor under this same misconception, and wrongly conflates the transcendental and eidetic reductions). On the contrary part of the point of the epoché is that it deprives us of nothing, and leaves us with all the richness of the empirical world just as it was, but now as 'world-phenomenon.' We expect indication to be included in the reduction, and indeed as Husserl says (and Derrida quotes him as saying), he intends phenomenology to investigate indication as a phenomenological theme in its own right.

Even if Husserl were mistaken that expression could be cordoned off from indication in soliloquy, this would just mean that in examining expression we would need to see how it intrinsically relates to indication, which isn't made any less possible from the fact that phenomenology deals in idealities. The whole point of the eidetic reduction is to extract essential structures from particular facts, and Husserl even seems to claim that it's impossible to perceive essences except via facts.

I think the ultimate target is presence, not mundanity (the introduction locks onto retention/protention and the alter-ego which renders possible intersubjectivity.) Indication involves passing from the known to the not-known (from what is present to what is not-yet-present) and I think this is why Derrida is honing in on it. I've only read the first two chapters, but I think the point is something like, if indication and expression are inseparable, then there is always a not-yet-present which makes what is present intelligible. Though I don't want to sap the convo from the not-yet-present reading group.

He comes back to it later I think.

Anyway this is kind of neat, it's like a big word puzzle. You have to stare at the sentences for a long time and figure out how the words fit together. Good mental exercise.

We may need to put up sentences and see who can 'crack' them fastest, maybe give out cash prizes. I also think I may need to reread the Investigations or Ideas, which I was kind of hoping not have have to do.

You're poisoning the well! No one will want to participate! The way I see the book, so far, is a super close reading of the first logical investigation punctuated by impatient anticipations of a broad conclusion (e.g 'do we not already have the right to say the entirety of phenomenology lies in the hiatus between indication and expression?' Well, no, obviously and if we did the rest of the book would be redundant.)The close reading bits, though, are keen enough to make it seem worth pushing on.