“The truth in this charge is that Derrida did, in fact, question the ideal of a final account, an ultimate system — not by bombing, but by tickling and teasing.”
“Derrida would delay the arrival of an answer, wiggling one word here and another there in the texts he read, to the point where he inspired many readers to let go of their desire for a solution and simply keep reading, reading.”
“Derridean reading is hardly chaotic or nihilistic; deconstruction is not destruction. (Even though he often uses the word “destruction” in his Heidegger seminar, it translates Heidegger’s Destruktion and means dismantling or deconstruction, not annihilation.)”
“All of Derrida’s interpretations presuppose a deep study of the traditional canon, and he pays homage to the texts he reads, though not necessarily to the grandiose ambitions of their authors: he honors the texts by meticulously sifting through their nuances and ambiguities.”
“In Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, the text under examination is Martin Heidegger’s groundbreaking Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), which Derrida reads in light of the tradition that Heidegger himself addresses, including Husserl, Nietzsche, Hegel, and other great philosophers going back to the early Greeks.”
“Derrida’s is not an interpretation for beginners. The audience is presumed to have “read carefully the whole of Sein und Zeit,” as well as other Heideggerian texts such as Introduction to Metaphysics.”
“For those who are prepared, this text makes for absorbing reading, and its style is not as precious and convoluted as that of Derrida’s published books. These are lecture notes, which suffer from some incomplete sentences and some formulations in need of revision, but which are meant to be intelligible to an audience of advanced students.”
“Derrida begins by asserting that in Being and Time, Heidegger is not trying to found a new system. Heidegger is “not here undertaking […] the foundation of anything at all, in any sense at all.” Instead, he is questioning a tradition that we can conveniently sum up with the word “metaphysics.””
“That tradition cannot be refuted; in fact, the very “concept of refutation belongs — implicitly — to an anti-historical metaphysics of truth.””
“Instead, what Heidegger and Derrida insinuate into the metaphysical edifice is “a slight trembling of meaning,” a kind of “shaking” that does not bring the construction down, but “bring[s] out the structures, the strata, the system of deposits.” Deconstruction isn’t shattering; it’s shuddering.”
“But what is metaphysics, and why should it shudder?”
“In Heideggerian terms, metaphysics is any attempt to sum up how things are in general — to characterize beings as a whole and give a clear account of them, typically by taking a certain kind of entity as the prime model or point of reference. The problem is that such a project turns its back on the question of being (Sein). The meaning of being is enigmatic, and it is essentially historical.”
“Metaphysics “wrench[es] itself away from historicity” for the sake of “total presence.””
“The dream of perfect presence — an ultimate truth, a complete answer — pretends that we can refute the past, overcome it, or do without it. But if history can’t be eliminated, there is no possibility of “a pure point of departure” — or, for that matter, a pure arrival.”
“Metaphysics defines past and future in terms of the present: it reduces the past to a bygone present, and the future to a present that hasn’t yet come.”
“Instead, it’s the other way around: the present is defined by future and past. From this perspective, the present is “no longer the originary and absolute form of experience but the past of the future.””
“Here is the justification for Derrida’s proclivity for the future perfect in his later texts — the “will have been” construction that was adopted as an affectation by some of his imitators.”
“Heidegger, who in one of his texts envisioned “the end of philosophy and the task of thinking,” came to see philosophy as ineluctably metaphysical. “Philosophy, what Heidegger wants to transgress, is in its entirety a philosophy of the Present, privileges the Present.””
“Some philosophers seem to appreciate history, but they end up denying it.”
“If there’s anything Derrida calls into question, it’s that ideal, which is based on the metaphysics of presence.”
“Hegel is an “infinitist,” and infinitism is precisely what Derrida (with Heidegger) is trying to shake.”
“It might seem that the clearest example of unalloyed presence is presence to oneself — Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” Apparently,
I am is the proposition of being that is the clearest and the surest, because I know what being I’m talking about and I know what being I’m talking about because here the proximity of the one speaking to the being that he is seems absolute, absolute to the point of being not even a proximity but an identity.”
“However, the assertion “I am” presupposes some familiarity with what it means to be — and this meaning turns out to be elusive.”
“Descartes and Cartesians of all stripes are exposed as would-be masters of truth who in fact are just sweeping the uncertainties under the metaphysical rug. (A case in point is Sartre, whose Cartesian misreading of Heidegger in works such as Being and Nothingness comes in for repeated criticism in these lectures: 88, 135, 187, 192.)”
“I do not know myself with perfect clarity, any more than I know what it is to be human. The question of my own being is important, but “[t]he response will never take the form of an object coming to fill or satisfy an expectation or a desire”; the response can only be an “awakening that has never ceased to wake up to itself.””
“To awaken from the metaphysics of presence is to come to appreciate history.”
“But Derrida observes that although historicity is the theme of the dramatic climax of Being and Time, section 74, what Heidegger says about it is primarily negative, and his positive account is largely just a restatement of his theory of temporality.”
“After this climax, Being and Time seems to peter out, to “[run] out of breath” — and in fact, the book was forever to remain unfinished. Instead, Heidegger turned to new styles and themes in a search for the “historicity […] of being.”
“The one specifically historical concept in Being and Time, says Derrida, is Wiederholung, or “repetition” (“retrieval” would be a less misleading translation).”
“Retrieval takes place when one “takes up transmission, the return of the past, going back to the origin.””
“Of course, that origin is not a once-intact presence that can be brought back to life. Instead, “the historian” — and anyone who is trying to establish an authentic relationship to history — “must [retrieve] a past that was also an opening toward the future, which never was a present and positive fact.””
“If this all seems excessively abstract, consider that individuals and communities are always engaged in some kind of relation to their past, and disputes over the nature of that relation can be passionate and consequential.”
“like every historical entity, the United States is constituted not by a set of self-evident truths, but by a nest of interminable debates.”
“The question of being — seemingly the most abstract of all — actually requires us to engage with our own history.”
“For instance, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger makes the etymological argument that Indo-European words for being develop from three roots that Derrida sums up as “live, blossom, dwell. The significations have been erased and the history of the word be is the history of this erasure.””
“The point is not to insist that being should revert to meaning only these three things, but to appreciate the process by which “in this erasure […] being [liberates] itself from the metaphysics of living, of blossoming, of dwelling, to such a point that it [can also] mean the non-living, the non-blossoming, the non-dwelling.””
“Derrida celebrates this “liberation with regard to any possible metaphor.” In order to think of being (Sein, être), we have to stop treating it as if it were a being (Seiendes, étant).”
“We must stop telling “stories” about it and approaching it metaphorically. “[T]he thinking of being announces the horizon of non-metaphor.””
“But it would make no sense for Derrida, of all people, to try to think literally rather than metaphorically, as if we could pin down the way things really are in themselves, forcing them into pure presence. “The proper meaning whose movement metaphor tries to follow without ever reaching or seeing it, this proper meaning has never been said or thought and will never be said or thought as such.””
“Echoing Nietzsche’s saying that “truth is a mobile army of metaphors,” Derrida calls metaphor “the beginning of language” and says that “language itself is metaphysics.””
“So Derrida’s project is not to think, speak, or write without metaphors, but to realize that we have been driven by metaphors all along.”
““[I]n a new metaphor the previous metaphor appears as such, is denounced in its origin, in its metaphorical functioning and in its necessity.” We are no longer the captives of a metaphor that we mistake for fact. Instead, we learn to feel ourselves gliding from metaphor to metaphor, to understand that this gliding is “the very movement of language” and that “the metaphorical process itself [is] historicity itself.””
“But once we have awakened to this metaphorical process, we can also detect a hint of something else at “the origin of language.” To appreciate “the finitude of meaning,” we may need to recognize “a certain silent permanence of non-meaning, or rather an absence of meaning that precedes the opposition between meaning and non-meaning.””
“This is the “shadowy zone against which [what seems self-evident] stands out.””
“In conclusion, Derrida points out that the words “being” and “history” are themselves metaphors, as is the name “Heidegger” — and even the word “metaphor” itself.”
“All this stands to be deconstructed. But deconstruction “will not be a gesture decided and accomplished once and for all, by someone in a book, a course, in words or deeds. It is accomplished slowly, patiently, it patiently takes hold of the whole of language, of science, of the human, of the world.””
“. It also shows just how indebted Derrida is to Heidegger, who is treated with deference here despite the occasional beginnings of a critique.”
“For example, Derrida points out that Heidegger sometimes uses the metaphor of reading — as if being, or we ourselves, were texts — despite the fact that Heidegger, like many philosophers, tends to privilege oral over written communication.”
“In contrast, Derrida proposes that speech is “already text”:
[D]egradation, forgetting, chatter, the moment of the text, are all essential possibilities that are always already present at the heart of speech […] inauthenticity does not supervene on authenticity, does not surprise it from the outside but is its essential, permanent and necessary accomplice.
He was to develop this thought at length in Of Grammatology (1967).”
“A fascinating list of Derrida’s other courses from 1960 to 1984 includes studies of figures as diverse as Hume, Lautréamont, and Gramsci, and enticing titles such as “To Think Is to Say No,” “Can One Say Yes to Finitude?” and “Respect.” We can look forward to more publications from this trove, which will no doubt eventually be translated into English.”
“Derridean instability is like the turbulence we encounter on our flights, which rattles us a bit and induces some queasiness, reminding us that our arrival is never guaranteed — that we are “at the mercy of an unforeseen breath of air.””
“Derrida’s aim is to unsettle the authority of those who determine our flight plans and destinations — those who, however “good” their intentions may be, deceive us with the illusion that we are approaching a final presence, and tempt us to forget that we are always on the way.”
“The fight against this temptation is, for Derrida, a noble cause: as he puts it in his 1989 essay “Force of Law,” “deconstruction is justice.” (For Derrida on terrorism, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida [University of Chicago Press, 2003].)”
“What Derrida calls “the sciences of the psyche” — today, neuroscience in particular — are as likely as mullahs, metaphysicians, or politicians to assure us that they’ve determined what it’s all about.”
“All such poses that claim certainty about beings ignore the ways in which being and history — if we may call them that — irritate all certainties.”
“There is no way to prevent “significations from signifying the opposite of what they signify.””
“But for those who like to keep reading, the ineliminable ambiguities are a source of both pleasure and illumination. Paths “that do not arrive [are] not […] the worst paths of thought.””
“Richard Polt holds a BA in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.”