DERRIDA AND PHENOMENOLOGY To begin with the immediate intellectual background to the theory of deconstruction, the early Derrida, as is well known, worked out a detailed critique of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Derrida, like others of his generation, started from Husserl's standpoint and developed it, but then went beyond it altogether. From the perspective of a radical critique of reason, he showed that Husserl's philosophy contradicted its own presuppositions and could not be sustained. The way in which he did this will help us to clarify the connection between his position and Hegel's.
Now so far as Derrida's critique of Husserl's philosophy is concerned, we need stress only the following points. First, Husserl aimed to found a science - a "rigorous science" - called "phenomenology", and with that to satisfy the highest theoretical and practical needs of philosophy. To this end, and in conformity with the whole movement of modern philosophy, he made the ego the fundament of all knowledge and consciousness. This ego, as he understands it, is utterly abstract and formal, and every object, every content, is freely constituted by it and rendered transparent. Second, the ego is not only this conscious freedom and activity, but an existing, living individual, and its life presupposes a world that is prior to consciousness and its reflective operations. Phenomenology, in this sense, seeks the origin of truth and consciousness, and finds it in the immediacy of feeling or intuition.
According to Husserl, "whatever presents itself in 'intuition' in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality) is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself The origin of the judgement of a thing is to be found in the intuition of the thing as it is present in bodily experience. This "principle of principles" is for Husserl in every instance "a source of authority (Rechtsquelle) for knowledge."
Phenomenology as we see it through Husserl has a positive though subordinate role to play within Derrida's thinking. This is clear from what Derrida himself has to say about "the hidden historical field" of phenomenology. Husserl makes meaning into an infinite principle which for Derrida means that it is undermined by its opposition to the finite. The problem in Husserl is that of a pure consciousness, an empty ego, which presupposes being but can neither overcome it nor make it intelligible. Husserl sets himself the task of rendering being intelligible, but this task can never be realized, is there simply in the form of "an infinite Idea", the content of which "can never immediately and as such present itself in an intuition".
Derrida goes beyond this opposition in his meditation on language (langage). Language is the place in which Husserl's demand for absolute truth can appear. It is "the indispensable medium and condition of possibility for absolute ideal Objectivity, for truth itself ". Language in the form of speech dissolves the immediate givenness of things and continually shapes and reshapes our vision of the world. "Speech (parole) is no longer simply the expression (Aüsserung) of what, without it, would already be an object: caught again in its primordial purity: speech constitutes the object, and is a concrete juridical condition of truth." Speech is the pure nullification of the antithesis between object and subject, of finite being in its opposition to truth.
Taken from the essay "BEYOND DECONSTRUCTION" by Kenneth Kierans at:
http://www.mun.ca/animus/1997vol2/kierans1.htm