Husserls Wissenschaft des Absoluten und Derridas Fink-Rezeption

The relationship between Husserl and his critical successors is an ongoing topic of phenomenological research. Paul Ricoeur famously remarked that ‘phenomenology is to a large extent the history of Husserlian heresies’, which is particularly true for French adaptions of German philosophy and their, although mostly hidden, mediations via Husserl’s disciples, like Martin Heidegger or Eugen Fink. In this essay, I will examine the relationship between Derrida’s criticism of phenomenology as a representative of French reception of Husserlian phenomenology and especially concerning Husserl’s central problem of phenomenology as a ‘science of the absolute’. Derrida’s criticism, I will argue, will show its true radicality only in relation to the problem of the ‘absolute’ the later Husserl is after. But even before Derrida, Eugen Fink, formally assistant to Husserl, had engaged himself with the same problem in his recently published notebooks. He is, as I will show in this essay, the unseen mediator of the problem of the ‘absolute’ connecting Husserl’s later program of phenomenology with Derrida’s critical enterprise of a self-aware explication of ‘differance’, understood as the very structure of phenomenological principles.