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Of all the aspects of Derrida’s thought, his interpretation of Husserl has occasioned the most debate.1 Although all of Derrida’s critics start out wanting to understand him—none, for instance, claim to do anything as extraordinary as “deconstruction”—none adhere to one of the most basic hermeneutical rules: reconstruct the context. Because critics neglect the context, some charge Derrida with interpreting Husserlian phenomenology merely as ontologism and intuitionism, in a word, as Platonism.2 They do this despite the fact that Derrida has repeatedly stated his allegiance to transcendental philosophy.3 Others charge him with failing “to recognize the subtleties of Husserl’s account of the interplay of presence and absence, of immanence and transcendence, of filled and empty intention,”4 even though Derrida appropriates precisely these subtleties to criticize the so-called “metaphysics of presence” he nevertheless finds in Husserl. The one-sidedness of such charges is startling. Perhaps however the critics’ negligence can be excused; to assemble all the parts of the Derridean context is an immense task. Roughly the context can be divided into two parts, and even these two do not exhaust it.

Pre-Soviet Russian philosophy had very little epistemological tradition of its own. “In Russian philosophy — so far as one can judge from its century and a half of development — there are certain specific characteristics which in general relegate theory of knowledge to a secondary place. With the exception of a small group of orthodox Kantians, Russian philosophers have tended in the solution of epistemological problems to ontologism, i.e. the recognition that cognition is not the primary and defining principle in man. ... we may say briefly that Russian ontologism expresses not the priority of ‘reality’ to knowledge, but the inclusion of knowledge in our relationship to the world, our ‘activity’ in it.”1 It was with the 1917 Revolution and the consequent shake-up in Russian society that the problem of knowledge came to Russia. It came as a part of ‘dialectical materialism’, a philosophic aggregate composed of selected passages from the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.2