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The Logic of Representation (and the Representation

of Logic)
Marian Hobson Professor of French
a
Queen Mary , University of London
Published online: 04 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Marian Hobson Professor of French (2004) The Logic of Representation (and the Representation of
Logic) , Parallax, 10:3, 53-69, DOI: 10.1080/1353464042000226071

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 parallax, 2004, vol. 10, no. 3, 53–69

The Logic of Representation (and the Representation of Logic)

Marian Hobson

‘To which is painting directed in every case, to the imitation of

reality as it is or of appearance as it appears? Is it an imitation of
a phantasm or of the truth?’ ‘Of a phantasm’, he said. ‘Then the
mimetic art is far removed from truth, and this it seems, is the
reason why it can produce everything, because it touches or lays hold
of only a small part of the object and that a phantom [eidolon]’
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Plato, Republic, 598b1

Towards the beginning of ‘The Double Session’, the second article of Derrida’s
Dissemination, 1972, there is a paragraph dealing largely with seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries theories of mimesis and with the ‘catch 22’ value that imitation
acquires in them. To this, Derrida appends a long footnote, in which he speaks of the
‘schema of this “logic”’,2 putting the word ‘logic’ in inverted commas. Both the
footnote and the paragraph in which it occurs are illuminating. They pick out, in a
highly accurate, highly abstract pattern, the interrelation of the theories and the
development of their arguments as condemnation or defence of art as imitation.
Instead of a name-bestrewn history, as is more common in accounts of French classical
aesthetics, we have a schema – Derrida calls it a ‘machine’ – which illustrates the
logical relation between different conceptions of representation and suggests a
dialectical pattern for their generation out of each other through opposition. The
footnote is a brilliant illumination of a whole set of different aesthetics which preceded
Mallarmé, the ostensible subject of the article. However, a reader might wonder what
is meant by ‘logic’ in this context, and begin to speculate on the discrepancy between
the footnote’s typographical status and its explicative power, its rigorous exploration of
the two-way argument about the reality of the art-work, which is so important in the
tradition of aesthetics.

Another such discrepancy between explicative power and discursive status occurs
later, much later, in Derrida’s work, in a footnote in Specters of Marx, 1993,3 which
picks up remarks on the Husserlian noema in the article ‘Genesis and Structure’
in Writing and Difference.4 The noema, as Husserl explains his graecism (noema: thought,
intention), is a feature of experience through which it is intentional, that is, by which
it is directed to an object. It is a correlate immanent in the experience, indeed,
inseparably belonging to it as its meaning (Husserl, Ideas, §89), but it is non-real. In
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DOI: 10.1080/1353464042000226071 53
 this, the second footnote we are concerned with, the noema is presented as condition
of all experience. However, it is included in experience in non-real fashion, that is,
though it founds objectivity, being a feature of all experience, it is neither in the world
nor in consciousness. In the course of the following article, I shall try to put out a
bridge between what may be meant in the first footnote by the ‘logic’ of mimesis, and
Derrida’s connection in the second footnote of the Husserlian noema with what he
calls ‘spectrality’.

First, the inverted commas round ‘logic’ unsettle some readers: they act as a flag being
waved about the trustworthiness of the term, in spite of the fact that it is used fairly
frequently in for example Specters of Marx, and Limited Inc. They are interpreted as an
indication of what could be called an ‘attitude problem’,5 as if signalling a general
mistrust of logic as a technical practice. The second aim of this article is to see whether
this is accurate; what might be meant by the word ‘logic’, with or without its
punctuational guards in Derrida’s work: the representation of logic, in fact. It is
tempting to relate a cluster of terms round logic in the first footnote mentioned above:
‘programme’, ‘system of Plato’s concept of mimesis’, ‘schema6 of this logic’, to the
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concept of ‘logical form’ in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. I shall give in to

this temptation very briefly.

But at the outset, it needs to be remembered that Derrida began his professional
career by a very technical mémoire de diplôme d’études supérieures on The Problem of Genesis in
Husserl’s Philosophy, only published in 1990, though written in 1953–54, which shows a
far from superficial acquaintance with the whole of the German philosopher’s works,
including those on the philosophy of mathematics; indeed, it contains a probing
engagement with the great logician Frege’s criticism of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic.
This angle of this beginning is recognized by Derrida, for example in Sur Parole.7 Next,
it should be noted that in 1957, he registered his title for a thesis on aesthetics, L’idealité
de l’objet littéraire (The Ideality of the literary object). This was, as he says,8 undertaken in the
current of interest in Husserl, of the 50s. But with this project, he also put his finger on
one of the great strengths of the Husserlian legacy, its recognition of the imagination’s
importance in the life of the mind. So that the twin strands of the present article, logic
and representation in works of art have their roots right at the very beginnings of
Derrida’s career. And the footnoted status of the account of the ‘machine’ and the
noema may represent their importance as incompletely resolved pressure points in
Derrida’s ideas rather than the lesser weight of their matter.

1.1. A footnote which exists and an article which may not

The particular concept which has the ‘logic’ in the first footnote referred to above,
that of ‘The Double Session’, is not just any one, but one which comes, as he points
out, with an ancient history and a good deal of baggage. It is mimesis. The oddity of
the mimetic image, the strange mode of its non-existent existence, point back to Plato,
and as we shall see briefly at the end of this article, forward to the work of Gareth
Evans in Varieties of Reference, 1982.

What is the reference of a work of art? What it appears to depict? Or the structure by
which it can refer to what it appears to depict? In the footnote which reconstructs a
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54
 ‘logic’ of mimesis, Derrida alludes to an article he proposes to write on the subject,
whose title he gives as ‘Entre deux coups de dés’ (‘Between two throws of dice’, a
reference to one of Mallarmé’s own titles). As far as I know, it does not exist. He takes
two of the key passages in the Platonic corpus dealing with mimesis, and with the
ontological status of the mimetic image: round Republic 398a, and the Sophist 241. He
connects these further by pointing out that both involve a kind of ‘parricide’, of poet
and philosopher: of Homer, who is expelled from the city for the nature of what he
imitates (‘wailing and lamentations of men of repute’ (Republic. 387d), which show
great men at a disadvantage); and of Parmenides, whose principle – ‘that being must
not be allowed to non-being’ (Sophist. 237a) – is turned round, so that against him it is
forcibly contended that ‘after a fashion not-being is and on the other hand in a sense
being is not’ (Sophist. 241d), for otherwise it is impossible to speak of false words or of
false opinion without contradiction. The false words and false opinion are glossed by
Plato as ‘whether images [idols] or likenesses [icons] or imitations [mimemes] or
appearances [phantasms] or [...] the arts which have to do with them’ (Sophist. 241e).
In the process of the dialogue we pass from questions of image and likeness to the
problem of how being and not-being may be said in language. Against the dangers
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presented by the Sophist, ‘since the existence of false speech and false opinion has
been proved’, it is possible that ‘imitations of realities [...] exist and for an art of
deception to arise from this condition of mind’ (Sophist. 264d). The collocation of falsity
and deceit is important in the history of mimesis, though until the arrival of ‘virtual
reality’, it has not been much discussed in recent histories of the image.

The second point in the footnote (point b) relates mimesis to ‘diaresis’, the method
used to catch the Sophist, that of division of every question into two branches (as if for
a rat running a maze). The Sophist’s art must be either an act of production or an act
of acquisition (it is rather the latter, as the Sophist is presented as a kind of travelling
performer and is quite keen on being paid); but it is neither. For just as the painter by
his art can make ‘mimemes’ which have the same name as the real thing (Sophist.
234b), and which will deceive the slow among the children, so the Sophist can exhibit
‘spoken images of all things’ which will be taken for the truth, and from which there
will be a painful awakening. He can mime productive art, which, Derrida points out,
already contains the mimetic. As Derrida says, ‘he produces production’s double’.9
Within this, the Sophist is finally driven between two forms of mimesis, ‘eikastic’ and
‘phantastic’ (Sophist. 235d). ‘Eikastic’ mimesis uses the proportions of the original as
paradigm, whereas the ‘phantastic’ corrects what is painted using perspective,
according to the distance and angle it is seen from (Sophist. 235e; 236a). ‘So the artists
abandon the truth and give their figures not the actual proportions but those which
seem to be beautiful’. It appears but is not like, it can be called an appearance or
‘phantasm’. (Sophist. 236b)

It is at this, third, point (point c) in Derrida’s footnote that the inverted commas,
which are suspensive but not quotational, appear. ‘Prior’ to the philosophical
‘decision’ a kind of mimesis which was not ashamed or hugger mugger was possible.
By these words, in their commas and with their emphasis, the linking of non-being
and imitation with mimesis in ‘The Double Session’ is made analogical to Foucault’s
‘grand renfermement’ of the mad in the seventeenth century. In ‘Cogito and the
History of Madness’ in Writing and Difference, 1967, it is suggested that a separation or
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 ‘decision’ between mad and sane is worked through to the point where a complex is
carved up into opposed poles. In that article, there are ideas which when linked with
‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, the first article in Dissemination, and then with ‘The Double
Session’, make the reader see these as accounts of other stages in a history of
philosophy and a philosophical history. In these three articles, there emerges a kind of
history of rationality where a complex, neither concept nor experience but both, is
both chronologically and logically prior to the separation of madness from sanity,
falsehood from truth. Gradually it is worked and skeined out until madness and
reason, falsehood and truth, are at opposite poles.

The implication in the footnote is that in the Platonic texts it discusses, namely the
Sophist and the Republic, a reassignment of values occurs, following which, mimesis will
be ontologically inferior, that is, less real. Derrida further extends this history by
remarking that Plato disqualifies what modernity most values: the mask, the
appearance of the author, the simulacrum, anonymity, apocryphal textuality, are
exactly the values of ‘modernity’ (here again, Derrida uses inverted commas). Plato is
suggesting, it seems, that there is a good mimesis and a bad mimesis, but the good
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mimesis, though good, cannot cease to be imitation, and thus is always somehow less
existent than the real.

Now modernity, Derrida suggests, has actually gone back, regressed, to pre-Platonic
values in art. After Plato, and before modernity, it seems there comes mimesis as a
‘logical machine’,10 which produces the double valuation assigned to mimesis, and the
double set of consequences derivable from the relation to being it is given. For in its
last paragraph, this long note becomes schematic. First, mimesis produces a double,
but one different only numerically from what is imitated; from this flow three
consequences: the double has no value through itself but only through the value of the
model, good or bad; and this dependence on the value of what it imitates is itself bad.
The second branch of the fork: the double is something and does exist in some way,
but then the double is added to what it imitates, and so isn’t nothing; since it is added
to what it imitates, it can’t be exactly the same. And finally, the third: the double can
always be trumped by the original, it is always less, however perfect or improved in
itself. The paradoxes of mimesis in this logical machine make the art always
secondary, since it imitates – ontologically, it is always less than its model. The
machine, as Derrida reconstructs it, catches art in a fork of ontological inadequacy.
Art is either more beautiful than the real, but if it is so, then it may be incredible and
implausible, for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for instance; or it is merely
unreal, and thus of less value than its model. Derrida develops this further in the main
flow of the article, by giving examples from the arts poétiques of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.11

Such aesthetics are modelled on theories of truth, or rather, theories of the

apparition/appearance of truth. Truth can be revelation: a flash of illumination and
then a retreat; or else, a structural correspondence between model and its imitation.
Derrida, following Heidegger’s article ‘Plato’s doctrine of truth’,12 names the first with
the Greek word for truth, aletheia and the second with the Latin adæquatio, implying
measure or equality of proportion. Heidegger had given a chronological sequence to
these. Derrida explicitly though politely resists this suggestion.
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56
 1.2 Writing as a double: its space in history

To speak of appearance implies a contrast with what appears. It is to perform an

automatic doubling, what appears and its apparition or appearance. The themes of
the three articles collected in Dissemination are dense, but cluster round the motif of the
double. It is in terms of the double, or perhaps the dual, that is given an account of the
status of the art object: in relation to Plato, then to Mallarmé, and finally, to the
modern novelist Sollers.

Though in these articles Derrida works round what is in fact a proliferation of doubles
which mesh and strand into each other, it is perhaps writing which has most struck his
readers, first studied in Of Grammatology 1967, and then studied as a double, in the
article ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination. In Plato’s Phaedrus, human memory is finite
and writing stands as a momento, or memory-aid to bring back into the mind by the
aid of signs what is to be remembered. Writing is a prosthesis, or a supplement: it
moves to top up what is felt to be lacking, or to replace what is absent. However, why
should this stop? The opening of dissatisfaction, by this very movement, leaves ready
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the possibility of the replacement itself being unsatisfying. The supplement replaces,
but by replacing, pulls in another double to supplement the supplement. ‘As soon as
the supplementary outside is opened, its structure implies that the supplement itself
can be “typed”, replaced by its double, and that a supplement to the supplement, a
surrogate for the surrogate, is possible and necessary’.13 Though this movement of
replacement and displacement has been developed in Of Grammatology à propos
Rousseau, there is an extension and deepening of it at this point in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.
‘To be typed’ (Se faire typer) is perfectly comprehensible, but it is descriptive of the
beginning of a process rather than suggestive of a stable distinction. If this is compared
with one of Anglo-Saxon philosophy’s recent treatments of the problem of universals
(and the temptation to respond to the hint is strong) then it seems that the Derridean
‘supplement’ actually moves between what there would be called ‘token’ and ‘type’. So
there is an important difference from Peirce’s pair. Derrida’s process of instantiation of
the type in the token may be repeated and this repetition makes of the same instance
both exemplar and example, giving rise to the generating movement which is being
described. ‘Supplement’ points to the way an individual instance (token) may become
its own type, and thus a series of repetitions of itself. A meta-level is not allowed to
form in any stable fashion.

Writing is ‘that process of redoubling in which we are fatally (en)trained’, a

‘supplement to the supplement, signifier of the signifier, representative of a
representative’.14 Heidegger in his lectures on the Sophist had made of writing the ‘idol’
(eidolon) of living speech.15 Now ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in a footnote16 uses the words
‘simulacrum’ (a different translation of the Greek ‘eidolon’) or ‘phantasm’ of writing
and warns that with these, Plato seems to condemn what is most radical and
demanding in modern writing. For the footnote endorses the way ‘writing’ ‘exceeds’
the conceptual opposition of truth and falsehood (the words ‘exceed’ and ‘excess’ refer
back to Writing and Difference and have in that collection of essays an increasingly
specialized meaning), that is, it escapes the partition creating the opposition by being
chronologically and logically prior. The separation of truth and falsehood develops
logically and chronologically out of a preceding, undifferentiated matrix. In ‘Plato’s
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 Pharmacy’ a history of writing (in the broader sense Derrida has given it) is developed,
one that is related to the history of rationality of the earlier volume (‘Cogito and the
History of Madness’). But in the later article, there is an account of how the separation
and its repetition came about. And the repetition is no longer serial, as in ‘Cogito’, but
has its own logical momentum, one that will be spelled out in the footnote to the next
article in the volume, the one that concerned us at the beginning. It is the ‘logical
machine’.

So Plato’s work, it is being argued, has the effect of separating out oppositions: true/
false, essence/appearance etc., develop into pairs where the poles exclude each other.
One of these pairs of oppositions must stand in for the rule that creates the series; one
of each pair is likely to be ontologically stronger. But writing has no essence, and
cannot be corralled into the series. It is called a ‘pharmakon’, a medicine that is also
a poison (as most drugs are), that with its cognate terms comes prior to and ‘exceeds’
the opposition of truth and falsehood, before Plato, and the swell of the slowly
constituting discipline of philosophy which divides true from false.
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In a long parenthesis, allusively, Derrida locates his own position in this history, within
the modern part of the history of writing. It might seem that in so doing, he presents
his work as being in the spirit of the Sophists and their contrast with Plato, and that he
is arguing that the question of writing arises only with a questioning of the ‘question of
truth’.17 It would thus be waiting for the separation of truth and falsehood by Plato. ‘In
many ways, and from a viewpoint that does not cover the entire field, we are today on
the eve of Platonism. Which can also, naturally, be thought of as the morning after
Hegelianism [i.e. the fusing of opposites and their absorption in a synthesis]’.18
However, here a different mode of historical movement is immediately suggested, and
a different relation between opposites. For the contesting by writing is not turned
upside down. ‘Philosophia’ and ‘episteme’, the concepts of what will be philosophy,
developed within Platonism, and assumed within this new mode of thinking, will be
resituated, ‘according to a more subtle excess of truth’. (A phrase already ambivalent.
An excess of truth, too much truth, or truth’s excess, its over-powering force?)

What does this mean? Since there is a resiting, we do not remain locked in the
oppositional. Derrida is setting out a relation between Platonism and Sophism, where
these are not ranged against each other, but change places within the logical machine,
and to do so, have to be on common ground. The other of that common ground is
evoked briefly as an absolute shadow, ‘some resistance having no common
denominator with this whole commutation [of Platonism and Sophism]’.19 The
resistance evoked here is not that of a new set of opposites. Derrida needs, it seems, to
destabilize any field of argument by pointing, however briefly, to where it opens.
Within the field in question here, there are opposite tendencies internal to a history of
philosophy in sixth century Athens, and thus internal to a commutation between
Platonic and Sophist positions.20 The common ground is there to develop a history, to
act as the matrix in which events (or arguments) can unfurl. The opening indicates a
beyond. It is not a complement. Derrida can thus point to a move beyond such a
matrix, and beyond a logic of opposites.

Plato’s dialectic, in opposition to Sophism, wishes to do without signs, wishes for

transparency onto being and meaning, whereas the Sophist ‘sells the signs and insignia
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 of science: not memory itself (mneme), only monuments (hypomnemata), inventories,
archives, citations, copies, accounts, tales, lists, notes, duplicates, chronicles,
genealogies, references. Not memory but memorials’.21 And in the presentation of
writing as mere simulacrum, mere technique for shoring up human memory, it might
have seemed that Sophist doctrine was being emphasized by Derrida against Platonic
values. But this interpretation is not quite sufficient. For in the account of Platonism
being written in the article, Derrida points out that there are elements which move
beyond it. There is the already-quoted ‘according to a more subtle excess of truth’.22
Then Plato has adapted and adopted some Sophist arguments – for instance, human
memory, Plato accepts, is indeed finite. But once more, as with his evocation of the
‘absolute shadow’, Derrida suggests in relation to this terrestrial finitude something
more complex in Plato’s argument. He picks up the use of ‘dream’ (Republic. 533b) for
reasoning in geometry. Here, making a contrast to the mixture of uninvestigated
assumptions and jumbled connecting steps that geometry usually is, Plato speaks of
‘the clear waking vision of being’. Beyond a simple putting in contrast of Plato to
Sophism, geometry to hypomnesis, on which the passage in the Derridean argument
seems to be articulated at this point, there is an undercutting of the simpler opposition
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to Plato. This is made to hinge on the ‘dream’. By insisting on the word ‘dream’ and
following it with an elliptic causal phrase, Derrida links the word to the lack of
homogeneity Plato is pinpointing: ‘But what Plato dreams of is a memory with no sign.
[...] And this at the very moment and for the very reason that he calls dream the
confusion between the hypothetical and the anhypothetical in the realm of
mathematical intelligibility (Republic. 533b)’.23 Although the argument here relies,
perhaps overmuch, on the word ‘dream’, it warns the reader that Derrida is in fact
following very closely both the rhythm and the minute detail of Plato’s dialectic (the
passage in the dialogue prepares the presentation of dialectic as ‘the only process
of inquiry’). This allows the non-present to be called back by admission of the
heterogeneous. The to-and-fro of dialectic, of question and answer means that what is
not there is constantly suggested – is suggested to bring about that ‘clear waking vision
of being’ Plato opposes even to geometry. The word ‘dream’, Derrida seems to
suggest, escapes from a two-valued logic.

In an extended account of the Sophist Gorgias, Derrida evokes a ‘space’: ‘We are in
the ambivalent, indeterminate space of the pharmakon, of that which in logos remains
potency, potentiality, and is not yet the transparent language of knowledge’.24 It is one
in which not-being can be spoken of, whereas the logical machine is in another space,
one which develops out of Platonic mimesis, and which always boxes imitation into a
weaker position, as a kind of not-being.

2 How to speak of nothing: ‘The condition of possiblity of a discourse on the

false, the idol, the icon, the mimeme, the phantasm, and ‘the arts concerned
with such things’25

Writing has no essence: ‘The point is that there is no as such where writing or play are
concerned. Having no essence, introducing difference as the condition for the
presence of essence, opening up the possibility of the double, the copy, the imitation,
the simulacrum – the game and the graphe are constantly disappearing as they go
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 along. They cannot, in classical affirmation, be affirmed without being negated’.26
Writing, the game and mimesis – for mimesis has been called a sort of game27 – will
be subject to the ‘dialectical confiscation’,28 to be rigorously detailed in the second
article in Dissemination, in the long footnote discussed above. Derrida has already
referred to Freud’s Traumdeutung and the logic of the dream, where in the story of the
borrowed kettle, the man who returns it damaged defends himself with a set of ‘logical
contradictions’. Here the quote marks are Derrida’s, indicating that the phrase does
not go far enough.29 The ‘dialectical confiscation’ that concerns us now is doing
something more than this shaky set of incompatible disculpations. Derrida refers to a
series of Platonic dialogues to suggest that the game, the variety of dual behaviour
being considered here as non serious, enters into a ‘logos’ with a strange logic – ‘his
logos is then subject to that untold constraint that can no longer even be called
“logic”’.30 Here losers are victors, where game and art are lost in being saved, because
they can’t be spoken of without being simultaneously denied – on the lines of ‘it’s only
a game’. This separates true and false, appearance and reality but raises the problem
of the Sophist.
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The Sophist places the Eleatic stranger and Theaetetus in front of a difficulty: how to
speak of the sham, of imitation, the opposite of reality, without giving it a kind of
reality (Sophist. 241b).31 In that they agree, as we have seen, they are going against the
injunction of Parmenides, and allowing things which don’t exist to have a kind of
existence (Sophist. 241d). Plato’s cajoling humour of shock/horror at this point seems
then to move outside the constraints of logic, Derrida suggests. However strongly one
resists the equation of ‘untrue’ with ‘image’, however one unties the question of
whether the non-existent can be spoken of without giving it some kind of existence,
the problem that the Sophist poses can’t and shouldn’t be solved by being declared
non-existent.

The Sophist is like an artist – he can make everything among the created beings as if
with a mirror (Sophist. 234a, and the very similar Republic. 596c); he is at the third
remove, from the way things are (Republic. 602c, 597c) and the truth. For painting is an
imitation of appearance, ‘of a phantasm’. ‘Then the mimetic art is far removed from
truth; and this, it seems, is the reason why it can produce everything because it touches
or takes hold of only a small part of the object, and that a phantom [eidolon]’ (Republic.
598b). The stick that looks bent or broken in water is launched on its long career in
the river of philosophical example (Republic. 602c); scene painting and painting in
perspective exploit the judgement and its interpretation of optical illusionistic
techniques (Republic. 602d).

We come back to the question posed in my epigraph. Although Socrates speaks at the
beginning of the Sophist, this is a dialogue between Theaetetus and an ‘eleatic stranger’
that is, a member of the Eleatic school, a follower of Parmenides and Zeno.32 At the
beginning occurs a kind of doubling, they speak of ‘another Socrates’ and Theodorus
introduces the Stranger, who plays a Socratic role and whose name we never learn.
The latter, though he claims to prefer developed discourse rather than a Socratic
question and answer session, yet unlike the type of the Sophist, doesn’t go around like
a showman demonstrating his power of speech. The dialogue starts with an attempt to
define the Sophist, using diaresis, that is, as we have seen, dividing any position into
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 two, and driving the Sophist down one branch. So gradually, he is classified and his
range narrowed as one who possesses opinion rather than true knowledge (Sophist.
233c); who can make everything (Sophist. 234a), because like a painter he can make
imitations to which we give the same name as real things (Sophist. 234b): ‘the Sophist
then makes spoken images [idols] of all things’ (Sophist. 234c). And thus, idol making
can be divided into two: we have seen that the Sophist will be for his part a maker of
fantastic images, or, second type of idol making, there will be one who makes eikastic
images. This latter follows the proportions of the original; the fantastic image-maker
on the contrary allows for size and distance and angle in the seeing, giving ‘not the
actual proportions, but those which seem to be beautiful’ (Sophist. 236a). Seen from
the intended angle, it appears beautiful, but it is not, nor is it even resembling. The
problem of painting indicated here is whether the object should be painted so that
at the distance and with the angle it is being viewed at, it appears but is not like.
It is an appearance (Sophist. 236b). The problem33 runs through Renaissance and
modern discussions of perspective; if visible appearances presuppose a subjective
transformation of dimensions, should we show the results of the process, or paint the
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causes, leaving the eye to do with the painting the very same thing it does with the
model in reality (Sophist. 235e)? In the Sophist, the question of perspective slides into
the question of seeming without being. Discussion of appearance leads to the
discussion of being, and this discussion to the discussion of the negative, of not-being.
Appearance in these passages is linked to perspectival realism in art; the artist who
employs perspective is a kind of Sophist.

‘Consider then this very point. To which is painting directed in every case, to the
imitation of reality as it is, or of appearance as it appears? Is it an imitation of a
phantasm or of the truth?’ (Republic. 598b) The mimetic art is ‘far removed from truth’
and that is why it can produce everything; it exploits the weakness of our nature.

In the Republic, sham and deceit, that is, appearing and seeming, that is, not-being, are
assimilated to falsehood. But in the Sophist, at 240b, another step seems to be taken:
what doesn’t exist, in the sense that it only seems, yet does exist:

Stranger. That which is like, then, you say does not really exist, if you
say it is not true.
Theatetus. But it does exist in a way.
Str. But not truly, you mean.
Th. No, except that it is really a likeness.
Str. Then what we call a likeness, though not really existing, really
does exist.

But the Sophist will then be able to argue that being is being attributed to non being,
says Theaetetus: we dare to say that falsehood exists in opinions and words and he will
say that we are thus forced repeatedly to attribute being to not-being. If we do, then
we seem to be transgressing the law of the excluded middle, and to be suggesting
grades of being between the two poles: using ‘different from’ rather than ‘is’ and ‘is
not’.
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61
 G.E.L Owen shows that many modern readings don’t take seriously the dialogue’s
running in tandem of ‘being’ and ‘not being’. But the negation of ‘to be’ doesn’t mean
the contrary of being, any more than ‘not’ in ‘not large’ compels us to interpret this as
‘small’. The identification ‘what is not’ and ‘nothing’ is the Sophist’s and not ‘a special
sense of the verb ‘to be” but a mistake about negating it. There are many ways of
speaking of something and even more ways of saying in what way it isn’t something
‘and so in relation to each of the classes, being is many and not being is infinite in
number’ (Sophist. 256e). So ‘not’ does not mean an opposite: ‘it signifies not the
opposite of being, but only the other of being and nothing more’ (Sophist. 258b). The
‘form of non-being’ is not any one thing; the other, the different is distributed
throughout all existing things. ‘To use ‘is not’ or some negative construction of the
verb ‘to be’ in describing [something] does not preclude ascribing some proportion of
being to it, that in saying that it ‘is’ so and so’.34 ‘Not being’ can be used of a thing on
the terms of being different from, various other things: ‘when we say not-being, we
speak, I think, not of something that is the opposite of being, but only of something
different’. (Sophist. 256b)
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The Eleatic stranger had earlier drawn the conclusion, as we have seen: ‘Then what
we call a likeness [icon], though not really existing, really does exist?’ (Sophist. 240b)
But later, they agree that ‘the other’ [the different], like being, permeates all the classes
of beings, distributed ‘in small bits throughout all existing things, in their relation to
one another’ (Sophist. 258e). It is this which permits the ‘not large’ not to be necessarily
‘small’. And that implies that ‘not-being’ is not the opposite of being, and they
therefore do not have to say that not-being exists: ‘For we long ago gave up speaking
of any opposite of being, whether it exists or not and is capable [logon] or totally
incapable of definition [alogon]’ (Sophist. 258e–259a).35

3.1 Deceit [apate]

So it is the other, or the different, which allows articulation and thus, the speaking of
something. The other is distributed throughout everything, sometimes allowing the
classes of being to mingle, but is ‘still not that in which it participates, but other’
(Sophist. 259a). So we do not have to equate being and non-being nor to put them on
a level, as the Sophist’s manoeuvres seemed at first sight to bring us to, by making
them either identical, or utterly separate. The way in which not-being is distributed
through everything is compared to the mixture of letters of the alphabet, as vowels
separate consonants from other consonants, the ‘symploke’ of language.36 In ‘Plato’s
Pharmacy’, Derrida generalises the import of this comparison: ‘It then follows that the
absolute precondition for a rigorous difference between grammar and dialectics (or
ontology) cannot in principle be fulfilled. [...] that is the difference that prevents there
being in fact any difference between grammar and ontology’.37 Although there may be
in principle a separation between being and language, it is in fact impossible to take no
account of language, and as Derrida’s discussions suggest at different points, even no
account of the particular language.38 There is a kind of short-hand at work here in the
sentence just quoted and its punctuation, where ‘in fact’ italicized acquires a sense
from Derrida’s writings on Husserl.39 In principle, grammar and ontology may be
totally distinct, but in practice, the implication is, the entities carved out by language
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 overlap with those apparently ‘just there’ in the world, since our practice is unfailingly
exercised in language.

In his final summary of the Sophist’s activity, the Eleatic Stranger returns to the
‘image-making’ as a definition: ‘The imitative kind of the dissembling [eironikou] part
of the art of opinion which is part of the art of contradiction and belongs to the
fantastic class of the image-making art, and is not divine, but human, and has been
defined in arguments as the juggling part of productive activity’ (Sophist. 268c–d).
Untersteiner has spoken apropos the ancient sophist Gorgias of the ‘universalization of
artistic experience’.40 For Gorgias, he says, the ‘irrational power of logos [...] deceives,
persuades and transforms a disconnected knowledge into knowledge which creates or
discloses links and relationships’. Plato’s arguments set up the Philosopher (the name
of a dialogue he never seems to have written, part of a trilogy with the Statesman, and
the Sophist) against the Sophist. ‘Gorgias is not a sceptic nor a relativist but a tragic
philosopher and an irrationalist. Knowledge of the power perceived by the irrational
constitutes the victory of the tragic’.41 The gods may deceive man, clouding his
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judgement and leaving him the plaything of hostile forces. The Nietzsche who
influences Untersteiner for these remarks is also present in Derrida’s relation to
Plato.42 Nevertheless, Derrida in his discussion of the ‘pharmakon’ does not turn
Gorgias’ Sophist position nor his logos in his Praise of Helen into sheer opposition to
what will be Plato’s; he points out that ‘logos’, as the term used for relation (or
‘analogy’) between body/pharmakon [drug] and soul/logos, dominates the contrasted
pairs of which it is also a member, and therefore is part of the movement of separation
of true from false, logos from alogos.

‘Eleatic Stranger: But now, since the existence of false speech and
false opinion has been proved, it is possible for imitations of realities to
exist and for an art of deception to arise from this condition of mind’
(264d).

The long standing tradition of art as illusion, mocking deception, seems then to go
back at least to the Sophists, and to Plato’s attack on them. As does Derrida,
Untersteiner quotes the Dissoi Logoi, [literally ‘Double Words’, a text from around 400
BC known from the manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus]: ‘I shall now turn to the arts
and the creations of the poets, for in tragedy and in painting the perfect artist is he
who deceives by the creation of works similar to the reality’.43 The artist and the
Sophist are both deceivers.

3.2 Phantasms and ghosts

In my epigraph, Plato used ‘phantasmata’ of the appearance imitated by art. In

Diogenes Laertius’ definition, it is defined as ‘a kind of fanciful thought which occurs
in dreams, whereas an ‘impression’ is a printing in the soul’.44 The phantasm then, is
distinguished from the sense-impression, as a deceptive image. But it can also be an
apparition: Iamblichus (c. early fourth century A.D.) wrote: ‘Phantasms are not truth,
but something else which resembles reality, they are not in the spirits which appear of
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63
 themselves but present themselves as true as them; they participate in the false and in
deception, as the forms appearing in the mirrors are like’.45 Self-presentation is not
possible for phantasms, they are bound up with deception, not with emanation from a
true god: ‘A god does not transform itself into phantasms’.

To St Augustine, the theatre is a kind of offering to demons, for the imaginary action
is the appearance of evil acts offered ritually to evil gods.46 But Christ came to set us
free from the tyranny of demons47 who work by the falsehood of phantasms and
the delusive playing of empty forms. This is contrasted for St Augustine with sense
knowledge, perception in the mind, not of things but of images like these things;
whereas one needs no such knowledge to be certain of the self’s existence.

So there is, as noted earlier, an ambiguity in the idea of ‘appearance’, in what might
be called its ‘logical form’, in the sense of the shape that a particular word appears to
impose upon its relation with other words.48 The problem is, as Proclus wrote, ‘Being
is invisible if it does not coincide with appearance; appearance is unreliable if it does
not coincide with Being’.49 As in the question of the relation of being and language,
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appearance may overlap with being, but identity with or total difference from it are
equally impossible extremities of the relation. And, in parallel, some of the neo-
Platonic and early Christian theories of phantasms make of them strange products of
the imagination which actually exist outside – both internal state and external
apparition.50

4. Noema and phantasm

‘Socrates to Theatetus: And if someone thinks mustn’t he think

something? – Th: Yes, he must. – Soc: And if he thinks something,
mustn’t it be something real? – Th: Apparently.

And mustn’t someone who is painting be painting something – and

someone who is painting something be painting something real! – Well,
tell what the object of painting is: the picture of a man (e.g.), or the
man that the picture portrays?51

Wittgenstein here brings up two problems already touched on: that an image can be
both example and exemplar – a picture can show us what a man, or an anteater, as a
species, looks like, if we don’t know. But a portrait of something might seem also to
imply that that thing exists, and has been painted, whether from life or from memory,
or indeed from another picture. The picture refers to it, it picks the thing in the
outside world out for us. It is at this point that I need to bring in the distinction made
by Frege between sense [Sinn] and reference [Bedeutung]. Frege wished to explain
how a statement of identity can be informative, if the statement is matching its two
sides as identical. Why is it not a tautology? His examples were that knowing that ‘the
morning star’ is identical with ‘the evening star’, or, finding out that two mountains
discovered from two different sides and given different names are actually identical,
are genuine pieces of knowledge. The two expressions about the planet Venus, he
called ‘senses’ and the planet that they referred to, which turn out to be not dual but
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 single, he called the reference.52 In a way that is at first startling, Frege says that the
reference of a sentence is a truth value. What then happens to sentences which have
a sense, but no reference? (The senses of a sentence together make what Frege called
a ‘thought’: as Michael Dummett explains, ‘To grasp the thought a sentence expresses
is to grasp the condition for it to be true).53

In the article ‘On Sense and Reference’, as in the letter to Husserl of 24 May 1891,
Frege turns to what may be the strongest example of sense without a reference:
literature. He brings up literature directly after the account of the difference between
sense and reference. Sentences which have proper names without reference have
sense, but having no reference, cannot have a truth value. ‘The sentence ‘Odysseus
was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ obviously has sense. But since it is
doubtful whether the name ‘Odysseus’ occurring therein, [refers to] anything, it is also
doubtful whether the whole sentence does. [...] In hearing an epic poem, for instance,
apart from the euphony of the language we are interested only in the sense of the
sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused’.54 (In a footnote, Frege
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suggests: ‘it would be desirable to have a special term for signs having only sense. If we
name them, say, representations, the words of the actors on the stage would be
representations; indeed the actor himself would be a representation’.55 This remark
seems to imply, correctly, that there are different types of signs with sense in a work of
art or literature.) In the letter to Husserl, in explanation of his diagram, and having
just explained that there can be concept words which have a sense but no reference,
he explains that the reference of the concept word is on the same level, has the same
objectivity as the object that fails under the Concept: ‘For the poetic usage it is
sufficient that everything has a sense, for the scientific use the references mustn’t be
lacking’.56

Gareth Evans in the first chapter of his posthumous book, Varieties of Reference, brings to
the forefront of his discussion the problem: if sense is, as Frege says, a ‘mode of
presentation’ how can there be such if there is ‘no object to be presented’? ‘So on this
matter of the senses of empty singular terms Frege was inconsistent? Why? [...] The
answer I think is that Frege found a convenient mat under which he could sweep the
problem posed for his theory by his assigning sense to empty singular terms, a mat we
might label “Fiction”’.57 Evans maintains that, for a large swathe of things we might
want to talk about, if they have no object as their reference, then they have no sense
(they are ‘empty singular terms’). If the sense is the mode of presentation, the means
whereby an object can be singled out for attention, then the fact that there is no object
means, he argues, that it cannot be presented.

Frege on the other hand, had no trouble with this conception: we can have modes of
presentation of non-existent objects, their senses, but the thoughts made up of these
senses do not lead us to think of a real state of affairs; they are not neither true nor
false, but false.58 Now in the long footnote in Specters of Marx, mentioned at the
beginning, Derrida brings up the Husserlian conception of noema which seems close
to the idea of ‘sense’ in Frege. Interpretation of the concept has been much debated.59
Derrida in the article in Writing and Difference makes of the noema something which is
neither the object, for the noema is the appearing of the object, nor a subjective
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65
 appearance, since the consciousness has the noema given to itself as an object. It
is ‘objectivity of the object, the meaning and the “as such” of the thing for
consciousness’.60 This is presented as a crucial feature of the noema by Derrida. It is
not located in any particular phenomenological ‘region’; yet it is the regionality of
Husserlian descriptions which ensure their rigour. The non-regionality of the noema
means that it is connected with the impossibility of closure for experience, as opposed
to closure in mathematics. Derrida here refers to Ideas §72 to argue that for Husserl,
maths is characterized by closure, which in set theory, as Husserl states of geometric
axioms generally, implies that operations carried out on elements of the set never
carry one out of the set: the elements generated remain within it and are (already)
members of it. But this implies that living experience is not susceptible to such
structuring: it is always open, there is a ‘structural impossibility of closing a structural
phenomenology’.61 The ‘anarchy’ of the noema implies consequently that living
experience is always open: ‘This irregionality of the noema, the opening to the ‘as
such’ of Being and to the determination of the totality of regions in general, cannot be
described, stricto sensu and simply, on the basis of a determined regional structure’.62
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With the result: ‘the transcendentality of the opening is simultaneously the origin and
the undoing, the condition of possibility and a certain impossibility of every structure
and of every systematic structuralism’.63 I turn now, not to closure and openness as
necessary and impossible features of systematic structure, and their relation to the
noema, but to the noema as between objectivity and subjectivity, as ‘irreell’ in
Husserl’s term.

We have seen that the noema is what there is about an act of thinking which makes it
directed to an object – it doesn’t matter whether such an object exists or not. In that
way, it is like the sense of an act – Husserl has quite deliberately extended the notion
of meaning beyond the linguistic.64 The noema is, to use the terms of Ideas §88, not a
real component of experience – it does not have ‘an individual connection with time
and duration’.65 According to the type of act, it is ‘perceptual meaning’, that is ‘the
perceived as such’, the ‘remembered as such’, ‘this of something’. (Ideas §88)

Now in the long footnote in Specters of Marx already mentioned, Derrida juxtaposes
noema and phantasma without identifying them: ‘the radical possibility of all
spectrality should be sought in the direction that Husserl identifies, in such a
surprising but forceful way, as an intentional but non-real [...] component of the
phenomenological lived experience, namely the noema’.66 It is the noema and its
non-real inclusion into the consciousness which makes it possible to speak of
phenomenonality in general. And he goes on to link this with the ‘essential, general,
non-regional possibility of the ghost’. In this way, he implies, the possibility of the
other, and of mourning, the loss of the other, are not the opposite of the self and of
appearance but part of them.

In this last section of Specters of Marx there is an almost subtextual comparison of

Marx to Plato: Derrida speaks of a ‘contre-sophistique’ which as a rhetorical ploy, is
in danger of repeating the logic of the adversary in replying to him. ‘This
counter-sophistics (Marx as paradoxical heir of Plato, as we shall see) has to
manipulate simulacra, mimemes, phantasms’.67 Marx in developing the idea of fetish,
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66
 of use value, describes how objects in society acquire a ‘spectrality’: ‘socialization or
the becoming-social passes by way of this spectralization’.68 For men’s social relations
take on a ‘phantasmagoric form’ for men as if they were relations between things. But
describing this processus, in his famous description of the dancing table, Marx is
reproducing the language of Stirner he had attacked in The German Ideology.69

‘Fetish’, ‘phantasm’ (or the synonyms for it, Spuk, Gespenst) used by Marx (and ‘Hegel’,
in the commentary in Glas) imply ‘true belief’, ‘true appearance’ and ‘real value’ as
their absent opposite. The noema allows Derrida to move out of an oppositional
relation of absence to presence and thus out of this structure. With the noema, ‘this
[consciousness] of something’ (Ideas § 88), Husserl seems to refer back to his ‘etwas’ of
the Philosophy of Arithmetic.70 And it was this ‘etwas’ that Frege in his review called ‘a
bloodless ghost’.71 For Frege, the sense of the ‘etwas’ in question, number, is an
equivalence class. When he spoke of thoughts and the senses that make up thoughts,
he spoke of a ‘third realm’. The senses are not objective, in the objective world; nor
are they subjective: ‘they are not subject to change, and do not act causally upon other
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objects. They are therefore neither contents of the mind nor located in space and time
within the external world: they inhabit a “third realm”’.72

Derrida in the end of the Specters of Marx arrives too at a ‘third space’ which is not a
Platonic place: ‘Far from effacing differences and analytic determinations, this other
logic calls for other concepts’.73 If this ‘other logic’ is not to trump ‘logic’ tout court,
then what is their relation? Not, or perhaps no longer, that of an opposition, if
opposition has dissolved into difference, if ‘virtual’ reality smudges the line between
presence and representation, real time and the time of a recording, effectivity and its
simulacrum, then their ‘logic’ ‘from now on’ cannot be opposed to logic.

Notes

1 8
All quotations from Plato use Loeb classical library Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis’, trans.
editions. Kathleen MacLaughlin, in Philosophy in France Today.
2
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara [ed.] Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge
Johnson, (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), University Press, 1983), pp.34–59.
pp.186–7. 9
Derrida, Dissemination, p.186, fn.14, § b.
3
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf 10
Derrida, Dissemination, p.187, continuation of
(New York and London: Routledge, 1994 [1993]), fn.14.
p.189, fn.6. 11
See Marian Hobson, The Object of Art, (Cambridge:
4
‘Genesis and Structure’, Writing and Difference, Cambridge University Press, 1982).
translated with an introduction and additional notes 12
Martin Heidegger, ‘Platon’s Lehre von der
by Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge and
Wahrheit’, in Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9
Kegan Paul, 1978), p.162, p.163.
5
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976).
See Joelle Proust, post face to her translation of 13
Derrida, Dissemination, p.109.
John R. Searle Pour réitérer les différences: réponse à Derrida 14
(Combas: Editions de l’Eclat, 1991) Derrida, Dissemination, p.109.
15
6
Translated as ‘outline’ by Barbara Johnson, in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol.19, 345, lectures at
Dissemination (London: The Athlone Press, 1981). Marburg in the Winter Semester 1924–1925.
16
But ‘schema’ makes clearer the slight infiltration of Derrida, Dissemination, fn.63, p.138.
17
technical logical language at this point. Derrida, Dissemination, p.108.
7 18
Jacques Derrida, Sur Parole (Paris: Editions Derrida, Dissemination, pp.108–9.
19
de l’aube, 1999). p.20. Derrida, Dissemination, p.108.

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67
 20
The work of Clémence Ramnoux, Etudes
Présocratiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970) and Mario
Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman
(New York: The Philosophical Library (1954)
[1948]), moved in the direction of a more complex
understanding of the relation of Plato to the
Sophists after the Second World War.
21
Derrida, Dissemination, p.107.
22
Derrida, Dissemination, p.108.
23
Derrida, Dissemination, p.109.
24
Derrida, Dissemination, p.115.
25
Derrida, Dissemination, p.164; Sophist (241e)
26
Derrida, Dissemination, pp.56–7.
27
Among the references Derrida gives are Republic.
602b; Sophist. 234b.
28
Derrida, Dissemination, p.156.
29
‘The returned kettle is new’; ‘the holes were there
when you lent it to me’; ‘I never borrowed a kettle
from you’.
30
Derrida, Dissemination, p.156.
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31
This problem, sometimes rather lightly dismissed
(see next section), seems not unrelated to Frege’s
struggles with the question of whether numbers can
be assigned to objects, or only to concepts: ‘This is
perhaps clearest with the number 0. If I say “Venus
has 0 moons”, there simply does not exist any moon
or agglomeration of moons for anything to be
asserted of; but what happens is that a property is
assigned to the concept “moon of Venus”, namely
that of including nothing under it’ (quoted in W.
and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), p.436.
32
Parmenides seems to have argued that there is
only one thing in existence; ‘Zeno’s arguments seem
designed to close not some but all avenues of escape
to anyone holding the unremarkable belief that
there is more than one thing in existence’, G.E.L.
Owen, Logic, Science and Dialectics: Collected Papers in
Greek Philosophy, [ed.] M. Nussbaum (London:
Duckworth, 1986), p.55.
33
See Robert Klein, La forme et l’intelligible (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), p.272.
34
Owen, Logic, Science and Dialectics: Collected Papers in
Greek Philosophy, p.113.
35
The translation ‘logical/illogical’ for ‘logon’/
‘alogon’ would be possible.
36
See Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986)
for an examination of this concept.
37
Derrida, Dissemination, p.166.
38
‘But as that sense is nothing outside of language
and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a
particular word or to a particular system of language
(concessu non dato), at least to the possibility of the
word in general’, Derrida, Of Grammatalogy, trans. G.
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1974), p.21; cf. ‘The Supplement of Copula’, trans.
Hobson
68
Alan Bass, in Margins of Philosophy (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982).
39
La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1972), p.113; c.f. G. Bennington,
‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very
Idea)’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 10, nos.1–2,
(1988).
40
Untersteiner, The Sophists, p.115.
41
Untersteiner The Sophists, p.115.
42
This tragic strand in Derrida’s thought has, as far
as I know, only been recognized by Henry Staten,
Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
But since both tragedy and Hegelian logic end,
neither can supply the key to ‘deconstruction’.
43
Untersteiner, The Sophists, p.109.
44
In AA Long and DN Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers (Cambridge: CUP, 1987) vol. I, p.236.
45
lamblichus, Des mystères d’Egypte, texte établi et traduit
par Edouard des Places, S.J., II.10 (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1966), p.94 (my translation).
46
City of God, ch.xiv. p.viii.
47
City of God, ch.xxvii, p.x
48
L. Wittgenstein, ‘Some Remarks on Logical
Form’, an address to the Aristotelian Society and
the Mind Association, July, 1929, Aristotelian
Society Supplementary, vol. IX, pp.162–71.
49
Untersteiner, The Sophists, p.121.
50
Hobson, The Object of Art, p.20; Klein, La forme et
L’intelligible, pp.65–88; G. Verbeke, L’évolution de la
doctrine du pnuema, du stoïcisme à Saint Augustin (Paris:
Desclée de Brouwer), p.372.
51
Wittegenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 518
52
‘On Sense and Meaning’, in Translations from the
Philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, trans. and ed. by
Geach and Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988 [1952]),
p.62.
53
Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytical
Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993), p.63.
54
Frege, Translations from the Philosophical writings of
Gottlob Frege, p.62.
55
Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege, p.63.
56
Nachgelassene Schriften und wissenschaftlicher
Briefwechsel, ed. G. Gabriel, H. Hermes, F.
Kambarten, C. Thiel and Veraort A. (2nd of 2 vols)
(Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1976), p.96.
57
Gareth Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford: OUP,
1982), p.28.
58
Evans, Varieties of Reference, p.29.
59
D. Føllesdal, ‘Husseri’s Notion of Noema, Journal
of Philosophy, vol. 66, (1969), pp.680–687; B.
Smith, ‘Frege and Husserl: The Ontology of
Reference’, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, vol.9 (1978), pp.11–125; M.
Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, 1993.
60
Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.163.
 61
Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.162.
62
Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.163.
63
Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.163.
64
M. Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy
(London: Duckworth, 1993) chap. 6.
65
Føllesdal, Journal of Philosophy, p.684.
66
Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf (New York and
London: Routledge, 1994 [1993]), p.189, n.6.
67
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.126.
68
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.156.
69
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.159.
70
Cf. Ortiz Hill, C. Word and Object in Husserl, Frege
and Russell (Athens: Ohio University Press) 1990,
chap.IV, section ‘Der Begriff Etwas’.
71
G. Frege, review of Husserl, Philosophie der
Arithmetik in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische
Kritik (Leipzig: Verlag von C.E.M. Pfeffer vol. I.
1894), pp.313–332, p.317.
72
Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, p.62.
73
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.163.

Marian Hobson is Professor of French at Queen Mary, University of London. Her

publications include The Object of Art: the idea of illusion in the eighteenth-century (Cambridge,
CUP, 1982), Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London, Routledge, 1998). She has also co-
edited different collective volumes on eighteenth century philosophy, including the
text by Diderot that landed him in prison, Letter on the Blind (Paris, Flammarion, 2000).
Hobson has also translated Derrida’s ‘dissertation’: The Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy
Downloaded by [ECU Libraries] at 06:11 10 October 2014

of Husserl (The University of Chicago Press).

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