Derrida's pre-or proto-deconstructive work focuses above all on opposing Husserl's concept of intentional history to empirical history, to the history that falls under Husserl's transcendental epochē and is therewith “bracketed” and “put out of play”. Indeed, in order to highlight this opposition, Derrida speaks of intentional history as “transcendental historicity” (Derrida [1978] 1989: 121). Derrida characterizes this opposition by drawing attention to the role Husserl assigns to language generally and written language pre-eminently in the constitution of the historicity of the objective meanings at stake in “transcendental historicity”. For Derrida, the phenomenological condition of possibility belonging to Husserl's early static investigations of objective meanings involves the exclusion of both empirical history (and therewith seemingly history per se) and the empirical significance of words (and therewith seemingly language per se), an exclusion that Derrida takes to be what Husserl thinks ensures the “purity” necessary for the phenomenological cognition of objective meanings.

In contrast, Derrida takes note of the fact that, as we have seen, in Husserl's late essay “The Origin of Geometry” language and history are not excluded from Husserl's account of the origin of the objectivity of the ideal meanings that, as a mathematical science, belong to geometry. On the contrary, it is language, in the guise of the graphic embodiment of words, which is to say, “writing”, that Husserl maintains is responsible for the objectivity – in the sense of the enduring intersubjective accessibility that constitutes the phenomenological meaning of a tradition – of the ideal meanings constituted by the first geometer.