Abstract

Following Derrida’s early claim from Voice and Phenomenon that Husserl’s phenomenology was a philosophy of life, the article focuses on the second of two aspects that there are to such a claim. While the first one – which amounts to revealing negatively (as Derrida does) that the Ego in Husserl is immortal, that Husserl is unable to grasp the temporal structure of the Ego in its dependency from its finitude and thus from death (which supposedly only Heidegger did), and so forth – is well-known and widely debated, the second one has been mostly ignored so far: Is Derrida not also implying – positively, as it were – that Husserlian phenomenology does indeed have the potential to show a way to a philosophy of life escaping the pitfalls of transcendental egology? Might deconstruction (an „affirmative business“ after all, as the later Derrida kept reminding us) not be an attempt to a critical, i.e. a non-naïve, philosophy of life and thus a re-appropriation (under better circumstances, as e.g. the knowledge of Husserl’s later and latest works and notes) of motifs known from Georg Misch’s 1930 pioneering project of an approximation of phenomenology and philosophy of life, re-arranged in Derrida and others around the decisive shift of view from death to birth, from being singular to being plural – to the community?