As a philosophical movement at the forefront of contemporary thought, phenomenology might be thought to have had its day. Since Edmund Husserl recast the term in his 1901 Logische Untersuchungen from earlier Hegelian and Kantian usage, it has come to be employed mainly as a yardstick against which to size up other features in the contemporary philosophical landscape, features that are themselves considered to be post-phenomenological. Terms such as ‘intuition’ and ‘reduction’ retain the faint nostalgic glow of a simpler age, when meaning was given to consciousness and the philosopher could go about her business secure in the knowledge that, if certain rigorous procedures were followed, the world and its contents would inexorably surrender their treasures to consciousness. Husserl himself is now very much a philosopher's philosopher, studied less in his own right and more as a figure whom it is necessary to have encountered if one is to grapple with more recent thinkers. Furthermore, the clutch of philosophers whose thought could be classed as ‘phenomenological’ – Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau- Ponty, to complete the quartet chosen for a recent multi-volume study – have, if not faded from view, then at least been eclipsed by the shooting stars of Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan and, above all, given his close engagement with phenomenological themes, Derrida, whose decisive contributions still dictate the terms of the debate.

Of all the claims to have upset the phenomenological applecart, Derridean deconstruction is hailed with the greatest fanfare. Studying phenomenology today is more often than not a means to the end of coming to grips with Derrida’s reading of Husserl in early works such as his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, La Voix et le phénomène and L’Écriture et la différence.