Time after History: Derrida’s Two Readings of Heidegger

ABSTRACT

The essay situates and dissects Derrida’s two catalytic interventions into Heidegger’s thought on time and history—the seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being & History (1964-5) and the essay Ousia and Grammē (1968). The first aim is to explicate the relation of history to time in Heidegger’s seemingly untroubled passage from a textured and striated temporality into historicity, understood as structured, inscribed, and in a privileged sense, human time. Sustaining the difference of the inseparably intertwined notions of time and history is paramount for Heidegger, yet the place and function accorded to history will mark for Derrida, nothing less than the ultimate impasse of the project of Being and Time. Accordingly, the second aim of the essay is to present and question the productive elision of time and history that Derrida effects through narrative. On the one hand, this elision offers the ground of a forceful critique of the project of Being and Time. On the other hand, this pivotal gesture of deconstruction will always be compelled to seek, through a proliferation of names, those a-temporal and a-historical vanishing points for time and history that undercut the mutual conditioning of the two that it has laboured to effect.     

Arrested Development: On Hegel,Heidegger and Derrida

ABSTRACT

Although both Heidegger and Derrida criticize Hegel as the archetype and historical culmination of the metaphysics of presence, Hegel’s dialectics also serves as a model for their critical destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics. Through an analysis of the notions of ‘arrest’ and ‘halt’ in Derrida and Hegel, this paper will show how both Heidegger and Derrida take up elements of Hegel’s theory of the development of consciousness, which is characterized both by an ‘unhalting forward motion’ but also by delay, interruption and inertia. This paper will develop the strange parallel between Derrida’s notion of l’arrêt and the halting movement of spirit in Hegel. It will show that Hegel’s ‘rhythm of the concept’ is not so distant from the ‘arrhythmia’ Derrida finds in the notion of l’arrêt. It will thus show how time, history and spirit are linked in a self-deconstructive manner in this unstable point of the arrest/halt.     

Heidegger and the question of animality 1

Abstract

It is widely recognized that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein outlines a novel dissolution of the epistemological problems of modern philosophy. However it has not been fully appreciated that this analysis presupposes a conception of human beings which radically separates them from all natural, animal life. Focusing on Heidegger's analysis of Mitsein it is argued that this separation prevents Heidegger from achieving a conception of human existence which avoids the distortions of the humanist tradition against which it recoils. Against Heidegger, it is argued that a philosophically satisfactory conception of human existence must be more smoothly naturalistic.     

From Gegenstand to Gegenstehenlassen: On the Meanings of Objectivity in Heidegger and Hegel

ABSTRACT

One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of (the presence of) the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the being of beings in terms of the objectivity of the object. In this paper, I trace Heidegger’s analyses of objectivity, through which Heidegger consistently establishes objectivity as non-primordial and derivative. In order to do this, however, Heidegger had to identify a specific, narrow (spatio-temporalized) conception of objectivity (in terms of Gegenstehenlassen and Vorstellen) as the hallmark of modern philosophy. I show that it is unclear whether that conception is a justified result or rather an unjustified presupposition of his approach. I then suggest what meanings of objectivity might be lost after Heidegger, by pointing to several aspects of Hegel’s notion of objectivity that are incompatible with Heidegger’s account, to wit: the lack of ‘subject-object’-terminology in his definitions of objectivity; the special language of ‘forms of’ objectivity; Hegel’s critique of representation; his notion of Gegenstand as a content with a categorical form, and, finally, that Aristotle’s notion of hypokeimenon might provide a clue as to how Hegel’s notion of object can be understood.     

Auto-affection and the Curvature of Spacetime: Derrida Reading Heidegger Reading Kant

ABSTRACT

This paper has a twofold objective. First, it engages with the interrelation of time, space, and matter in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida and questions whether and how this interrelation effects the possibility of self-relation. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger suggests that the very structure of subjectivity is constituted by what he calls the ‘pure self-affection’ of time and thus the possibility of self-relation is intimately bound up with the temporalizing of time. In his 1964–65 seminar, Heidegger: the Question of Being and History, Derrida translates this pure affection of time into the more generic term ‘auto-affection,’ which will remain a pivotal reference point for his deconstruction of the metaphysical privileging of time as presence. Derrida shows how the (im)possibility of auto-affection is bound up not only with time but also with space, or rather with the ‘spacing of time’ that he also refers to as ‘the trace.’ Second, the paper moves across the frontiers of philosophy and physics posing anew the question concerning the interrelations of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. With reference to what in general relativity is called ‘the curvature of spacetime,’ the efficacy of materiality in the movement of auto-affection is called into question.     

Heidegger and the contradiction of Being: a dialetheic interpretation of the late Heidegger

ABSTRACT

It is well known that, from the beginning to the end of his philosophical trajectory, Martin Heidegger tries to develop a fundamental ontology which aims at answering the so-called question of Being: what does Being mean? Unfortunately, in trying to answer this question, Heidegger faces a predicament: given his own premises, speaking about Being leads to a contradiction. Moreover, according to the majority, if not all, of the interpreters who admit the existence of such a predicament, Heidegger tries to avoid the contradiction in question. But is this the only way Heidegger tries to solve the predicament? In this paper, I argue that, in some of his late works and, in particular, in the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger also takes into serious consideration the possibility of accepting the contradiction he faces in speaking about Being as true. If this is correct, Heidegger endorses what nowadays analytic philosophers call dialetheism, namely the metaphysical position according to which some (but not all) contradictions are true.     

Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that Derrida can be read as employing what Foucault would call “technologies of the self” to not only show the play of possibility and impossibility at work in all politics and thought, but also to use his savoir to create two important and potentially constructive power structures. First, there is the power of deconstruction itself as a “militant critique” that calls for a forceful and irreducible justice. Second, there is the power of Derrida himself, understood as leaving behind a legacy of himself as the “originator” of deconstruction and as a public intellectual.

Winnicott and Derrida: development of logic-of-play

In this essay I develop the logic of play from the writings of the British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The logic of play serves as both a conceptual framework for theoretical clinical thinking and a space of experiencing in which the therapeutic situation is located and to which it aspires. I argue that both Winnicott and Derrida proposed a playful turn in Western thinking by their attitude towards oppositions, viewing them not as complementary or contradictory, but as 'peacefully-coexisting'. Derrida criticizes the dichotomous structure of Western thought, proposing playful movement as an alternative that does not constitute itself as a mastering construction. I will show that Winnicott, too, proposes playful logic through which he thinks and acts in the therapeutic situation. The therapeutic encounter is understood as a playful space in which analyst and analysand continuously coexist, instead of facing each other as exclusionary oppositions. I therefore propose the logic of play as the basis for the therapeutic encounter. The playful turn, then, is crucial for the thought and praxis expressed by the concept of two-person psychology. I suggest the term playful psychoanalysis to characterize the present perspective of psychoanalysis in the light of the playful turn. I will first present Derrida's playful thought, go on to Winnicott's playful revolutionism, and conclude with an analysis of Winicott's clinical material in the light of the logic of play.     

The Letter and the Witness: Agamben,Heidegger, and Derrida

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben introduces a particular conception of bearing witness to overcome the problems contained in an account of language that depends on the voice or the letter. From his earlier work, it is clear that his critique of the voice and the letter is not only directed to ancient and medieval metaphysics, but also concerns Heidegger's account of the voice and Derrida's account of the letter and writing. Yet, if Agamben is correct in claiming that bearing witness offers an alternative to Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, it is remarkable – a fact unnoticed in the available literature – that Agamben does not discuss how these conceptions of the voice and the letter are intrinsically connected to the problem of testimony for Heidegger as well as Derrida. To show how this lack of attention to bearing witness in Heidegger and Derrida affects Agamben's critique, this article proceeds as follows. First, we interpret Agamben's critique of Heidegger's conception of the voice and Derrida's conception of writing in terms of the presuppositional constitution of metaphysics. Second, we describe Agamben's concept of the witness and indicate how it offers an alternative to this presuppositional constitution of metaphysics. Finally, we show which role bearing witness plays in Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, and how our analysis presents a more precise version of Agamben's critique.     

Speaking out of Turn: Martin Heidegger and die Kehre

' Speaking out of Turn : Martin Heidegger and die Kehre ' examines the difference between Heidegger's own understanding of 'the turning' and that understanding which originated with Karl Lowith and was later presented to English-speaking readers by William Richardson in Martin Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought . The study focuses on Heidegger's own introduction to Richardson's book, and argues that, far from confirming Richardson's view that there is a 'Heidegger I' and 'Heidegger II' connected by the 'reversal' or turning, Heidegger sought to indicate with (sometimes indirect) reference to his own works that the 'turning' is a movement in thought that it was part of the original project of Being and Time to carry through, but which he only succeeded in describing much later. The study attempts to illustrate this by a close examination of the works to which Heidegger alludes in his Foreword to Richardson's book. Many of these were not available when Richardson published (1963), and so it has only more recently been possible to amplify Heidegger's earlier published works with reference to his lecture courses. The study concludes that the horizon of time and the analytic of Dasein never really disappear from his later thinking, as many have claimed, and proposes that the relationship between the earlier and later Heidegger be re-examined. This re-examination takes the form of accepting that far from the 'turning' representing a fracture, where Heidegger abandons the existential-temporal analytic of Dasein in favour of an attempt to think only being ( das Sein ) as such, the 'turning' represents the point of unity in Heidegger's work. This point of unity shows how Dasein and being 'belong together' in 'the event' ( das Ereignis ).     

Derrida on teaching: The economy of erasure

This article explores Derrida's claim that teaching is a deconstructive process. In order to explore this claim, the Derridean concept of "erasure" is explored. Using the concept of erasure, this article examines two important aspects of teaching: the name that teachers establish for themselves, and, teaching against social power from a Derridean (erasure-oriented) perspective. Ultimately, the paper confirms Derrida's claim that teaching is indeed a deconstructive practice.

The destiny of freedom: in Heidegger

The essay recapitulates the decisive steps in Heidegger’s development of the problem of human freedom. The interpretation is set in the context of a general matrix for how freedom is treated in the tradition, as both a theoretical ontological problem, and as practical appeal. According to some readers, Heidegger’s thinking is a philosophy of freedom throughout; according to others his “turning” implies abandoning the idea of human freedom as a metaphysical remnant. The essay seeks an intermediate path, by following his explicit attempts to develop an ontology based on the concept of freedom in the earlier writings, showing how this is the central theme in his confrontation and also his final break with German idealism, with Kant and with Schelling in particular, and with the prospects for a system of freedom. However, this break does not terminate his preoccupation with the problem of freedom, which is then transformed into the idea of thinking as a practice of freedom, as a way of reaching into “the free”.

Habituality and Undecidability: A Comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on the Decision

This essay examines the relationship that obtains between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida through exploring an interesting point of dissension in their respective accounts of decision-making. Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy emphasizes the body-subject's tendency to seek an equilibrium with the world (by acquiring skills and establishing what he refers to as 'intentional arcs'), and towards deciding in an embodied and habitual manner that minimizes any confrontation with what might be termed a decision-making aporia. On the other hand, in his later writings, Derrida frequently points towards a constitutive 'undecidability' involved in decision-making. He insists that a decision, if it is genuinely to be a decision, must involve a leap beyond all prior preparations, and this ensures that an aporia surrounds any attempt to decide. One must always decide without any equilibrium or stability, and yet these are precisely the things that Merleau-Ponty claims that our body moves us towards. Most of this essay will explore the significance of this disparity, and it will be argued that many of Merleau-Ponty's insights challenge the Derridean conception of the undecidability involved in decision-making. This becomes most obvious when comparing the decision-making processes of those expert in a particular field to those who are merely competent (for example chess), and this essay will attempt to establish that the aporia that Derrida discerns can actually be seen to constrict.     

A ground completely overgrown: Heidegger,Kant and the problem of metaphysics

ABSTRACT

While we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not allow him to account for Kant’s critique of the metaphysical tradition.     

Naming the Unnameable God: Levinas, Derrida, and Marion

In this essay I present the postmodern phenomenological approach of Levinas, Derrida, and Marion to the problem of naming the unnameable God. For Levinas, God is never experienced directly but only as a third person whose infinity is testified to in the infinity of responsibility to the hungry. For Derrida, God remains the unnameable “wholly other” accessible only as the indeterminate term of pure reference in prayer. For Marion, God remains the object of “de-nomination” through praise. In all three, the problem of naming the unnameable God is necessarily linked to how we relate to fellow human beings, to the hungry in Levinas, justice in Derrida, and charity in Marion. I also reflect on the merits and adequacy of phenomenology as such for speaking of divine transcendence.     

Inheritance,Originality and the Will: Bergson and Heidegger on Creation

Abstract

In the work of Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger we find different responses to traditional ideas of ‘creation’. Bergson advances a philosophy of creation, wherein ‘creation’ is presented as the production of a ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ novelty, not only in art, but in all forms of human experience and biological life. Heidegger, in contrast, comes to criticise ideas of ‘creation’ in art as the expression of an alienated ‘humanism’ and ‘subjectivism’ essential to the modern age. This paper illuminates this divergence by showing how Bergson and Heidegger, despite appearances, grapple with the question of art-production – and with the attendant issues of inheritance and originality – in similar ways. It is only in recognising this proximity, I argue, that it is possible to perceive adequately what essentially distinguishes their approaches: Bergson’s conception of creation as a function of the will.