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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.
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Notes
1. In Derrida (Citation1992, 105).
2. It remains a significant question, whether Derrida’s thought changes at all.
3. In Geoffrey Bennington’s introduction, one reads, ‘“Heidegger: The Question of Being and History” is thus a course that emerges from his own research and teaching work, and not a course on that year’s agrégation topic, for which he otherwise prepared his students’ (Citation2016, xv).
4. Spivak writes, ‘My teacher Paul de Man once said to another very great critic, Fredric Jameson, “Fred, you can only deconstruct what you love.”’ (Citation2016). Derrida often underwrites the comportment: ‘I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner’ (Citation1985, 87).
5. In Being and Time Dasein, as the Befragtes, is both the interrogating and the interrogated, the questioning and the questioned.
6. Derrida (Citation2016, 96): ‘The Geschehen is the originary movement, the emergence of what is subsequently called history, Geschichte. It is the supervening, advening, to-coming [à-venir – another notion forged as translation], all these words being dangerous insofar as they run the risk of being contaminated by the notions of event or advent that are in history.’
7. Derrida (Citation2016, 100): ‘In other words, the Greco-Latin concept of historia either (according to Hegel) illegitimately privileges one of the two co-originary significations, or else (according to Heidegger) inverts the true relations and makes the derivative originary.’
8. Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History writes, ‘We must assume that historical narrative appears simultaneously with the actual deeds and events of history, that they are set in motion together from an inner common foundation’ (Derrida Citation2016, 99, 101).
9. The function of (re-)collection that is effected by the work of art (Heidegger Citation2002b), constitutes in subsequent works, the provenance of the thing (Citation2001).
10. Late Derrida will thematise this nexus as ‘surviving’, the singularity of a life in which ‘death presents itself and lets itself be exceeded’ (Citation1992, 102).
11. It is not ‘the lack of understanding and the passivity of the reader’ (Derrida Citation2016, 160), but an integral necessity that leads to a break, not between the first and the second part of Being and Time, but rather within the first part, before the division titled ‘Time and Being’.
12. This is not one of the three listed conclusions, but it must be thought at this juncture, as its second fold.
13. The terms ‘always already’ and ‘arche-writing’ are hatching in precisely such articulations.
14. ‘Aristotle sees the essence of time in the nun, Hegel in the “now” (jetzt). Aristotle takes the nun as oros; Hegel takes the “now” as “boundary” (Grenze). Aristotle understands the nun as stigmé; Hegel interprets the “now” as a point. Aristotle describes the nun as tode ti; Hegel calls the “now” the “absolute this” (das “absolute Dieses”). Aristotle follows tradition in connecting khronos with sphaira; Hegel stresses the “circular course” (Kreislauf) of time.’ [In Derrida (Citation2016), the quotation stops here.] To be sure, Hegel escapes the central tendency of the Aristotelian analysis – the tendency to expose a foundational connection (akolouthein) between the nun, the oros, the stigmé and the tode ti. In its result, Bergson’s view is in accord with Hegel’s thesis that space ‘is’ time, in spite of the very different reasons they have given. Bergson merely says the reverse: that time (temps [in French in the text in order to oppose temps, time, to durée, duration]) is space.”
15. And: ‘[…] But hama gar kineseós aisthanometha kai khronou: “it is together that we have the sensation of movement and time”.’ ‘Time is the form of that which can occur only en téi psukhéi’ (48–49).