Questions and quotes for "Genesis and Structure":

• - how is aspiring to a “continuity of explication [that] must dispel the shadow of a choice” different than speculative closure?
• - "There are layers of meaning which appear as systems, or complexes, or static configurations, within which, moreover, are possible a movement and a genesis which must obey both the legality to and the functional significance of the structure under consideration. Other layers, sometimes more profound, sometimes more superficial, are given in the essential mode of creation and movement, that is, in the modes of primordial origin, or becoming, or of tradition; and these require that in speaking of them one use the language of genesis, supposing that there is one, or that there is only one."
• These are incommensurate because of a lack of an ability to think of an immanent genetic movement
• - There's a doubleness Derrida notes in the way that Husserl thinks of genesis: both as "the true meaning, the authentic and original meaning of set theory and number theory" and also as a return to the spontaneity of the "activities of colligation and numeration in which collections ('totalities', 'sets') are given in an originally productive way."
• This doubleness indicates a tension between the spontaneous activity of generation and its necessary truth-value or -determination
• Derrida anticipates the counter-claim to his critique, that Husserl was not driving at a "transcendental genesis" except, naively - at least initially, as a "psychological genesis" with its own "structural a prioris". 
• While Husserl might have conceived as genesis and structure as always complementary and inseparable, Derrida wants to get at a play between these concepts that underlies phenomenological thought, one which drives its reductions and leaves "every major stage of phenomenology" unbalanced in an endless oscillation that will never succeed in reactivation, but only in the perpetuation of phenomenology's own movement.
• In fact, Husserl's project can be conceived of simply as a "metaphysics of history" which relies on the "solid structure of a Telos" to allow the illusion of an untamed, but delimited, "genesis" to appear. This is the same metaphysics of a dead structure haunted by spirit that the phenomenological reduction intended to escape. And yet, this failure of the attempt to reconcile the "structuralist" and "genetic" demands might be what gave rise to phenomenology in the first place, as a science doomed to endlessly repeat its original failure.
• Husserl's phenomenology is irreducible to psychologism or some "autonomy of logical ideality as concerns all consciousness in general" because Husserl, "for his part, seeks to maintain simultaneously the normative autonomy of logical or mathematical ideality as concerns all factual consciousness, and its original dependence in relation to a subjcetivity in general; in general, but concretely." In order to walk the line between what, for him, were two traps of thought, he had to insist on a "concrete, but nonempirical, intentionality, a 'transcendental experience' which would be 'constitutive,' that is, like all intentionality, simultaneously productive and revelatory, active and passivity."
• The insistence on this synthetic (in one sense of the word) position doesn't eliminate the problem of "the foundation of objectivity"
• Husserl's critique of Dilthey's confusion of "the truths of fact and the truths of reason" can also be used to understand the limits of a phenomenology."Pure truth or the pretension to pure truth is missed in its meaning as soon as one attempts, as Dilthey does, to account for it from within a determined historical totality, that is, from within a factual totality, a finite totality all of whose manifestations and cultural productions are structurally solidary and coherent, and are al regulated by the same function, by the same finite unity of a total subjectivity."
• Derrida writes, "What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed," where it is sutured, to an infinite subjective opening on truth. Husserl, by noting the structurality of such an opening is unable to eliminate this epistemological problem.
• " History does not cease to be an empirical science of 'facts' because it has reformed its methods and techniques, or because it has substituted a comprehensive structuralism for causalism, atomism, and naturalism, or because it has become more attentive to cultural totalities. Its pretension to founding normativity on a better understood factuality does not become more legitimate, but only increases its powers of philosophical seduction. A confuion of values and existence, and more generally, of all types of realities and all types of idealities is sheltered beneath the equivocal category of the historical."
• “The exigencies of life demand that a practical response precede an absolute science whose conclusions it cannot await.” — This alludes to the problem of the temporality of totalization, which is always one of the simultaneous necessity of anticipation and impossibility of deferral
• ‘Thus, if Husserl distinguishes between empirical and eidetic structure on the one hand, and between empirical and eidetic-transcendental structure on the other, at this time he as not yet taken the same step as concerns genesis.”
• Part of the reason for this hesitation is the admitted lack of exactitude of “the essences of pure consciousness” because of the difficulty of identifying an “abstract eidetic element” that can transition to the limit. Such an identification would require the possibility of closure. (footnote 14)
• The genetic element cannot be closed off without Husserl resorting to some kind of abstract psychologism that he wants to resist. “… the opening to the ‘as such’ of Being and to the determination of the totality of regions in general, cannot be described, stricto sensu and simply, on the basis of a determined regional structure.” The opening that the noematic element of the object (as experienced in thought) is the pole of “pure passivity” which must leave consciousness open and receptive to the world.
• Phenomenology, then, must remain open to a metaphysics of presence unless it were to embrace the possibility of a “structuralist psychology” parallel to the movement of transcendental phenomenology. 
• “This distance which must separate a phenomenological psychology from a transcendental phenomenology” is precisely what registers as “nothing” to the phenomenologizing consciousness. This nothing is the space of appearance of meaning, and would have to be dealt with by a “genetic phenomenology” which would totalize genesis, distilling off the moment of passivity that must be left as an opening for phenomenology to function. This instance of self-division (for JD the difference between speaking and writing) is both what conditions a phenomenology, and prevents it from suturing the (non-)gap between genesis and structure that allows for metaphysics.
• “… in criticizing classical metaphysics, phenomenology accomplishes the most profound project of metaphysics”.
• “… to ask oneself about the meaning of the notions of structure or genesis in general, before the dissociations introduced by reduction, is to interrogate that which precedes the transcendental reduction.”
• Just as for Lacan, memory is not a condition of repetition but one of its syntactic effects, likewise, "The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer" because it is from the repetition of "the question of the possibility of that question" that the illusion of an answer arises and defers itself.