Chapter 5 - The God of mathematics

Summary

On May 29, 1964, in the Salle des Actes at the ENS, Jacques Derrida received the “Prix Cavaillès for Modern Epistemology” in recognition of his translation of, and commentary on, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry. In his address to the assembled members of the Société des Amis de Jean Cavaillès, Raymond Aron proudly asserted that with the work of Derrida and Roger Martin (the other laureate) “Jean Cavaillès's work will continue [aura les continuateurs].” The Prix Cavaillès is often listed in short summaries of Derrida's work, brief biographical paragraphs and the like, but it is never remarked how incongruous the award seems. After all, Cavaillès was a philosopher of logic, trained in mathematics, whose work seems almost totally at odds with conventional presentations of Derrida's thought. It was not just the name of the award, given by the Société two or three times a decade, but also its recipients who seem so out of place. Jacques Bouveresse, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, and Suzanne Bachelard all grace the lists of laureates for works on rationality in physics, symbolic logic, or mathematical idealities. This was no Adorno prize, another, later, addition to Derrida's CV.

If the conferral of the Prix Cavaillès seems strange to us today, it was not necessarily so at the time. Derrida's engagement with a more scientific branch of French phenomenology in The Problem of Genesis gives a clue why his first publication might have been welcomed by the epistemological community. Admittedly things had changed in the ten years since Derrida had written his Mémoire: the early enthusiasm for Husserl amongst Marxist philosophers had mostly waned. As we shall see in the following chapters, communist thinkers instead looked outside of phenomenology for resources to ground scientific and objective thought. But the initial Marxist reading had left its mark, and the interpretation of phenomenology as a philosophy of science had become mainstream; the late 1950s saw an attempt to integrate Husserl's work into the broader French epistemological tradition. As I will show in the first part of this chapter, Derrida's Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry participated in this form of scientific or logical phenomenology. As surprising as this may sound to today's readers, Derrida's first book was a project in the philosophy of mathematics. In 1962, at least, Derrida was good company for the likes of Suzanne Bachelard, Jacques Bouveresse, and Jean-Toussaint Desanti.