Edmund Husserl’s Semantics and the Critical Theses of Late Structuralism

The article contains a review of the main arguments proposed by the philosophers of late structuralism (including the so-called post-structuralism) against Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly, his theses on semantics. Polemics against the Husserlian conception of semantics are grounded in the structuralists’ opposition to the various theses of Husserl’s phenomenologies (both the transcendental constitutive and the genetic). Initially (particularly in the 1950s), it was an attempt at combining the logical and linguistic theses of Husserlian phenomenology with the structuralist theses proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, as known from late works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the 1960s, it was an attempt at challenging the status of subjectivity – the subject, including the transcendental ego and the role of consciousness. Simultaneously, it is a polemic against essentialism, in regard to ontological, epistemological and anthropological theses. In the article, I focus on the polemics of the thinkers (i.a. Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard) that reformulated Saussure’s theses, against Husserlian semantics which they considered in reference to the broad understanding of a sign, exceeding the sign of language.