A master thinker is influential with respect to the ensuing discussion that, on one interpretation, takes form in the horizon formed by the master’s thought. Precisely this status was claimed for Heidegger in Koyré’s introduction to the initial translation of Heidegger’s writings into French. This claim is meaningful only if it can be shown that Heidegger’s theory exerts a dominant influence in the contemporary French philosophical debate. This is the first of two chapters that will demonstrate the dominant influence of Heidegger’s theory within contemporary French philosophy.
Suggestions of influence are easy to grasp but difficult to evaluate. “Influence” is intrinsically vague. Virtually any relation between two thinkers might be construed as indicating the influence of one on the other. Yet many forms of influence are unimportant, certainly philosophically unimportant. Although Hegel saw Napoleon on horseback at the Battle of Jena, it is philosophically unimportant to know the color of the horse. Yet it is philosophically important to understand how Hegel’s observation of Napoleon relates to the Hegelian concept of the role of the great man in history.
To illustrate Heidegger’s influence in contemporary French philosophy, it is useful to distinguish between three types of philosophical discussion: that devoted mainly or even solely to Heidegger’s theory; that which makes use of Heideggerian insights as an aid in studying the philosophical tradition; and that so-called creative philosophical work that draws on Heideggerian insights to develop a position that may or may not remain within the Heideggerian orbit.
Heidegger specialists, whose work is devoted to preparing editions of his writings, to their translation, and to interpretation of his ideas, obviously tend to be influenced by his theory. Here the relevant factor is the very size of the French Heidegger debate in which in recent years as many as fifteen or more books on the master’s thought have been published each fall. It is easy to pick out a Heidegger scholar, or at least no more difficult than it is to pick out, say, a Plato scholar. Frequently those whose work consists in scrutinizing texts in the closest possible way are reluctant to do more than that, particularly reluctant to criticize. There seems to be an inverse relation between detailed, expert knowledge of any philosopher’s thought, especially Heidegger’s, and the desire or willingness to raise, or even to entertain, objections to the position.
It must be highly unusual for someone to devote himself to detailed exegesis of the thought of a writer held to be less than first rank. Those whose theories receive and merit such scholarly devotion are usually the very few thinkers of the highest philosophical importance. One way to measure Heidegger’s influence in contemporary philosophy is through the sheer number of philosophers engaged mainly or wholly in some form of Heideggerian exegesis in the wider sense of the term, those who regard their primary or perhaps sole philosophical task as preparing the texts or as getting out the Heideggerian message.
In French philosophical circles, those committed to Heideggerian exegesis seem more numerous than elsewhere. In part, we have already considered Heideggerian exegesis through the instructive example of Jean Beaufret who, in many writings devoted to Heidegger’s theory, presents an insurpassably orthodox view of the master’s own theory, including his reading of selected figures in the philosophical tradition. But there are many others who, while they may not adopt the seamlessly orthodox interpretation that Beaufret favors, are close, often very close to it. They include, in no particular order, such writers as François Fédier, Emmanuel Martineau, Henri Birault, Jean Greisch, Alain Boutot, François Vézin, in certain of his moods Jacques Derrida, and others.
Heidegger’s theory is at best difficult to understand. There is certainly room for a faithful effort to explain the main lines of a difficult theory without criticism. Such careful explanation is different from a further, more orthodox effort at what can fairly be called philosophical hagiography. An admittedly extreme, recent example is provided by the short presentation of Heidegger’s thought due to Boutot,1 who earlier published a study of Heidegger and Plato.2 Even when we take into account the fact that this little study is written mainly for the wider public, it exhibits an extreme type of orthodoxy simply antithetical to philosophy that has here been replaced by a kind of philosophical cult of personality.
In his book, Boutot simply reproduces the usual clichés of orthodox Heideggerianism without criticism of any kind. Examples include the idea that Heidegger is incontestably one of the major thinkers, even the major thinker of this century, that his thought moves through all the controversies it has engendered without any damage whatsoever, that the history of philosophy since the early Greeks is the history of the forgetfulness of being, that we still have not begun to think, and that Heidegger’s thought is one of those rare views that end up by transforming all of human existence.
It is not difficult to pick out those who specialize in Heideggerian exegesis. It is more difficult to distinguish between those employing Heideggerian insights to read other views and those employing such insights to so-called original philosophy. In practice this distinction is mainly honored in the breach, for instance in Heidegger’s theory which, like Hegel’s and many others, combines insights borrowed from the philosophical tradition with systematic discussion. It is likely, then, that no firm distinction between the history of philosophy and systematic philosophy can be drawn since this distinction is at best relative and never absolute.3 In fact, many French philosophers present interesting, original theories in part through the guise of a novel reading of prior philosophy, most recently in Dominique Janicaud’s discussion of the theological transformation of French phenomenology.4
Heidegger’s influence in French cultural life is wider than the philosophical discussion. It includes, for instance, the views of the psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. The latter’s peculiar form of Freudianism is influenced directly by his reading of Heidegger and indirectly through Heidegger’s influence on Kojève’s Hegel interpretation. Lacan’s well known thesis that “the unconscious is structured like a language,”5 deriving from the later Heidegger’s turn to language,6 is understood by him as a form of antiHegelianism.7
Heidegger’s impact on contemporary French studies of the history of philosophy is difficult to overestimate. An example is the interpretation of Kierkegaard, whom some writers regard as the first important existentialist thinker. For Lévinas, who acknowledges that Henri Delacroix and Victor Basch already studied Kierkegaard at the beginning of the century, we owe to Heidegger the philosophical reading of Kierkegaard.8
In France, Heidegger is still commonly regarded as a phenomenologist. Heidegger profoundly influences French interpretation of phenomenology, as well as the development of the French phenomenological tradition. French studies of Husserl may overlook Heidegger,9 but even in the most orthodóx treatment Husserl’s theory invariably or nearly invariably figures in the works on Heidegger’s.10 In part through Lévinas’s continuing influence, French Husserl studies have never been free from a certain Heideggerianism.
According to Paul Ricoeur, a major contributor to French phenomenology as well as a scholar and translator of Husserl’s thought, French Husserlian studies were literally founded by the appearance of Lévinas’s first book, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl in 1930.11 This work, which was Lévinas’s dissertation, is ostensibly devoted to Husserl. Yet Lévinas, who studied with both Husserl and Heidegger, was never only a Husserlian. In fact, he has always provided a somewhat violent reading of Husserl’s thought,12 with important Heideggerian components.
The Heideggerian element in French Husserl studies is stronger in the writings of those closer to Heidegger, including former Beaufret students Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Luc Marion,13 and above all in the works of Jacques Derrida.14 Courtine and Marion are both exceptions to the frequent French philosophical tendency, encouraged by Heidegger and practiced by Beaufret, to consider Heidegger’s thought as beyond comparison with philosophical theories. With others, such as Jacques Taminiaux15 and Marion, Courtine has for years been concerned with careful discussion of the relation of the views of Heidegger, particularly the early Heidegger, and Husserl.16 Marion, as will emerge below, has recently devoted intensive study to the relation of the early Heidegger and Husserl in the process of working out his own position.17
Heidegger’s impact on Sartre’s theory is arguably even more significant. Sartre’s thought continues to attract attention elsewhere, particularly in the United States.18 His near total eclipse in France at present is directly traceable to his loss of the philosophical battle with Heidegger for influence in the philosophical discussion.
Sartre was characteristically generous in assimilating his thought to Heidegger’s, and in minimizing the importance of Heidegger’s turning to National Socialism for the latter’s position.19 In view of Sartre’s well known political commitment, his clement — some would say his overly clement — attitude toward Heidegger’s Nazism, unusual in a thinker who quarreled with virtually everyone with whom he came into contact, is attributable to a double failure on his part.
On the one hand, there is his superficial reading of Heidegger’s thought — precisely the point that Heideggerians constantly raise — typical of a thinker who apparently rarely read anyone’s work with care. On the other hand, there is his questionable attachment to Heidegger’s theory precisely when the latter was most overtly politically active, during Heidegger’s period as rector of the University of Freiburg. Sartre, the apostle of intellectual responsibility, was simply not responsible enough to examine the link between Heidegger’s theory and his Nazism with any care.
What I am depicting as Sartre’s double failure significantly enabled him at the end of the Second World War to invoke Heidegger as someone who held views relevantly similar or even identical to his own. This is something he could not have done had he been willing to put into question either his blindness to Heidegger’s political activism or its link to Heidegger’s philosophy.
Sartre, who was not disinterested, was generous in his appraisal of Heidegger’s position; but Heidegger and the Heideggerians, who are also not disinterested, have not been generous to Sartre. After a period in which Sartre’s theory was dominant in the French philosophical debate, particularly in French phenomenology,20 its influence quickly declined. This decline was helped by at least three factors. One was Sartre’s death in 1980 that brought to an end his phenomenal intellectual productivity. Another was the attack on his thought launched by Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism”, and later prolonged by Beaufret, Derrida and others. Finally, there is the emergence of French structuralism, with existentialism one of the two most significant French philosophical movements in the postwar period, in the revolt against Sartre’s intellectual hegemony.
Heidegger’s influence on the French reading of the history of philosophy is not confined to phenomenologists such as Husserl and Sartre, but extends to numerous other figures, including Nietzsche, Schelling, Descartes, Suarez, Aristotle, and Parmenides. The French discussion of Nietzsche began in the late nineteenth century. His writings were translated into French by Eli Halévy and Henri Albert as early as the end of the last century.21 His thought influenced many French writers, including Gide and Valéry.22
Although there was a steady stream of works in French on Nietzsche’s position, and an occasional book concerning Nietzsche’s thought was even translated into French, his theory was not always held in high esteem. At the beginning of the century, for example, Emile Faguet suggested that Nietzsche was not a very original philosopher since all his views could be entirely reconstructed from those of La Rochefoucauld, Goethe and Renan.23 The early French appreciation of Nietzsche was so coarse grained that as late as 1927 Julien Benda could refer in passing to Nietzschean pragmatism24 and even later in 1946 Henri Lefebvre could classify him as an existentialist.25
Heidegger and Jaspers were both interested in Nietzsche. Jaspers’s study of Nietzsche’s thought attracted notice in the French discussion.26 Yet the ongoing French Nietzsche discussion27 was transformed by the publication in 1961 of Heidegger’s two volume study of Nietzsche. The appearance of this study led to a revival of French interest in Nietzsche. This revival was fueled by a number of factors, including the relatively rapid translation of Heidegger’s massive Nietzsche study into French in 1971, the impact of Nietzsche’s theory, particularly as interpreted by Heidegger, on Pierre Klossowski,28 the translator of Heidegger’s study, as well as on Gilles Deleuze29 and above all on Michel Foucault.
In the wake of Heidegger’s study of Nietzsche’s thought, the French philosophical interest in Nietzsche ran wide and deep.30 Vincent Descombes believes that the entire generation of the 1960s in France was dominated by a Nietzschean perspectivism.31 Most recently, a series of writers have used the vehicle of a collective work on Nietzsche to free themselves from the French philosophical assault during the 1960s, under the influence of Heidegger and then Derrida, on the ideals of the Enlightenment.32
In France, all observers agreed with Heidegger that Nietzsche was an important figure, although few follow Heidegger’s tendency to read Nietzsche’s theory with the same seriousness as if it were, say, Aristotle’s.33 Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is at least partly responsible for the very wide range of opinions concerning his thought. Philippe Raynaud distinguishes three recent forms of French Nietzscheanism due respectively to Deleuze, Foucault, and to Nietzsche’s wider impact on French culture.34 Certainly, Nietzsche is a central theme in the writing of Georges Bataille.35 An incomplete sample of recent French debate on Nietzsche includes a rightwing effort to recuperate Nietzsche on behalf of so-called individualism,36 an interpretation of Nietzsche as completing the Copernican Revolution,37 a study of Nietzsche and metaphor,38 and so on. Many, but not all French students of Nietzsche are more or less strongly influenced, both positively and negatively, by Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation.
As could be anticipated, as always Heidegger’s closest follower was Jean Beaufret. As early as his first book concerning Heidegger’s theory, Beaufret contends that since most French writers on Nietzsche incorrectly see him as having surpassed Platonism — although for Heidegger Nietzsche reestablished a form of Platonism — most French Nietzsche scholars have failed to understand either Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche or Nietzsche’s thought.39 Beaufret develops Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s theory in detail throughout his four volumes of dialogues with Heidegger. Beaufret’s reading of Nietzsche’s theory has recently been restated in briefer fashion by Courtine.40 Others who contest Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s theory in various ways include François Laruelle, who criticizes Heidegger’s supposed reduction of Nietzsche to an imperialist thinker in favor of an interpretation of Nietzsche as an antifascist,41 and Derrida, who tries several times to “save” Nietzsche from Heidegger’s interpretation.42 In fact, Derrida can be said to attempt to turn Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche against Heidegger in maintaining that despite his later opposition to metaphysics Heidegger also remains a metaphysical thinker.
Francisco Suarez, the Spanish philosopher of the sixteenth century, is a key link in Heidegger’s reading of the philosophical tradition. In Being and Time,he remarks that through Suarez’s Disputationes metaphysicae the Greek metaphysical impulse is transmitted to modern philosophy, determining even Hegel’s position.43 Heidegger amplifies this statement in a lecture course from the same period. He claims that Suarez, whom he regards as more important than Duns Scotus or even Thomas Aquinas, provides a system for Aristotelian metaphysics that determines all the later discussion up to and including Hegel.44 Heidegger points to Suarez’s distinction between metaphysica generalis, or general ontology and metaphysica specialis, or special ontology, including the theories of the world, nature, psychology, and God. He points out that this distinction recurs widely in later thought, for instance, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.45
Courtine applies this Heideggerian scheme in a detailed, recent study of Suarez. The aim of the work, he tells us, is to situate Suarez in the history of metaphysics, or in still more Heideggerian language, to determine “the nature and the significance of the turning, ‘the historicality,’”of Suarez’s contribution.46 Echoing Heidegger’s view that Suarez is the author of the system lacking in Aristotle’s Metaphysics — precisely that system that permitted its later influence in the modern philosophical tradition as well as the Heideggerian idea of ontotheology — Courtine states his desire “to contribute… to the general study of the system of metaphysics,that is the stages of its systematization, through the guiding thread of an elaboration, which is historical,of the logic of its ontotheological constitution.”47 In his conclusion, more than 500 pages later, Courtine offers the hypothesis, again following Heidegger, that the problem of the analogia entis is,as Heidegger seems to have suspected, unthought within metaphysics. And he underlines the importance of not conflating various Heideggerian distinctions.48
Throughout his career, Heidegger derives an important source of inspiration from his meditation on Greek philosophy and Greek poetry. In a sense, Being and Time is the form taken by a book on Aristotle originally planned by Heidegger but never written. Many of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts can be understood as revisions of Aristotelian concepts.49 Heidegger’s interpretations of selected Greek philosophers, like other aspects of his thought, are controversial and have attracted criticism from some observers.50 Others, particularly French writers, regard them as casting an important new light on ancient Greek philosophy.
In France, a Heideggerian approach to the interpretation of Greek philosophy has been fostered by Beaufret, who, unceasingly orthodox in all things Heideggerian, devotes an entire volume of his Dialogues with Heidegger to the latter’s views of Greek philosophy,51 and Pierre Aubenque, the influential Aristotle scholar. Aubenque was aided in making his case for a Heideggerian approach to Greek philosophy and to philosophy in general through his own important studies of Greek thought, his chair in Greek philosophy at the Sorbonne, and his presence in several key committees that influenced philosophical appointments in the highly centralized French educational system.
Aubenque’s works on Aristotle’s views of being52 and prudence,53 on which his scholarly reputation is mainly based, reflect more than a simple awareness of Heidegger’s theory. Although frequently critical of Heidegger’s specific readings of particular texts, he accepts a broadly Heideggerian approach to Greek thought. His study of the problem of being in Aristotle significantly begins with a citation from Heidegger about metaphysics as a designation for the philosophical predicament.54 Following Heidegger’s concern to destroy the history of ontology, his aim is nothing less than, as he writes, “to unlearn all that the tradition has added to the primitive Aristotelianism.”55 He holds that “the restitution of the living Aristotle” is important since the way in which Aristotle’s thought was understood has decisively influenced its interpretation.56
Heidegger’s understanding of Greek philosophy becomes even more important in Aubenque’s later writings. In a recent article on the contemporary significance of Aristotle’s thought, he describes its manifold influence on a series of propositions basic to later Western views of the world. These propositions form a structure that, following Heidegger,57 he labels ontotheological.58 And he follows Heidegger’s view that the contemporary interest in metalanguage is the consequence of Aristotelian metaphysics.59
Aubenque acknowledges Heidegger’s concept of ontotheology as an appropriate appellation for the metaphysical framework deriving from Aristotle’s thought. Rémi Brague, the most important younger Aristotelian scholar in France today, presupposes Heidegger’s concept for his discussion of Aristotle’s idea of the world. With respect to Heidegger’s understanding of Greek philosophy, the difference between these two Aristotelian scholars is that Aubenque was closer to his mature understanding of Aristotle before he encountered Heidegger whereas Brague — a student of Aubenque and the author of the most important French study of Aristotle since Aubenque’s study of Aristotle’s view of being — encountered Heidegger’s view of Greek philosophy at an earlier point in his career, before his own views were fixed.
Brague draws insight from Heidegger’s study of ontology to interpret Greek philosophy. Heidegger criticizes the traditional view of ontology, based on what he calls presence-to-hand (Vorhandenheit)in favor of his own alternative conception. For Brague, Heideggerian phenomenology is a mode of access to Greek philosophy, and Heidegger’s corpus can be regarded as an effort to work out the original conception of ontology lying behind the ontology historically attached to Aristotle’s name.60
Brague’s study of the question of the world in Aristotle’s thought applies Heidegger’s conception of the world to the interpretation of the ancient Greek tradition. As part of his critique of Descartes, Heidegger develops a lengthy analysis of the worldhood of the world that he understands as neither the entities in the world, such as tables and chairs, nor as the being in general of these entities.61 For Brague, Aristotle’s position can be grasped through a relation of coimplication among concepts of ontology, anthropology, and cosmology within a presupposed but unthematized concept of the world. “World” is understood in a Heideggerian phenomenological sense as “that in which we are,”62 a concept that Greek philosophy presupposes but does not explore.63
In a lengthy study that maintains a constant dialogue with Heidegger, Brague utilizes this concept unthought by Aristotle but explicated by Heidegger to illuminate the Aristotelian corpus. He discerns a deep parallel between Heidegger’s ontotheology, or the name for traditional metaphysics, and what he calls, in an untranslatable neologism of his own devising, katholou-prôtologique64 The latter concept, which is wider than ontotheology, is present as well within the various domains of Aristotelian ontotheology.65 In Brague’s Heideggerian reading of Aristotle, the domains of ontology, anthropology and cosmology revolve around a central point running “from presence to the present, from being to the entity.”66 In short, Brague’s reading of Aristotle’s presupposes Heidegger’s ontological difference, or a basic distinction between being in general and entities. According to Brague, the conception of being in the world, or Dasein, that is never thematized but latent in Aristotle, forms a whole with the “kathologicalprotological” structure of Aristotelianism.67
We can end this section on Heidegger’s impact on the French study of the philosophical tradition with a remark on Beaufret’s orthodox Heideggerian reading of Parmenides. In Being and Time,Heidegger indicates that his characteristic doctrine of truth as disclosure derives finally from Parmenides’s thought. According to Heidegger, for whom Karl Reinhardt has finally solved the vexed problem of the unity of Parmenides’s poem,68 Parmenides’s assertion of the identity of thought and being yields the thesis that truth is the beholding that founds Western philosophy.69 Heidegger later elaborates his view of Parmenides’s theory in a number of places, including a lecture course in 1942–1943,70 and a lecture in 1957.71
In his writings on the master, Beaufret dwells frequently on Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides’s poem, most explicitly in two articles in the first volume of his Dialogues.72 Beaufret asserts that it is not possible either to summarize or to expound Heidegger’s thought.73 This claim, if true, undermines the intention, even the possibility of his “dialogues” with Heidegger over some thirty years, “dialogues” intended to make available Heidegger’s own view of his thought to the French. He develops a Heideggerian reading of Parmenides’s view in detail in a translation and commentary on the latter’s poem.74
Beaufret’s introduction frequently adverts directly to Heidegger’s interpretation, or defends it against possible misreadings. He dwells at length on why the overwhelming Platonism of the philosophical tradition impeded the correct understanding of the unity of Parmenides’s poem until, as Heidegger notes,75 Reinhardt’s breakthrough.76 For Beaufret, following Heidegger, there is an original unity of thought and being in Parmenides’s poem prior to any artificial separation and later juxtaposition.77 Parmenides presents the view of truth as disclosure78 foreshadowed in the “Letter on Humanism” and developed elsewhere, the ideas that entities are sent to us, that they are literally mittances of Being.79
Heidegger’s impact is strongly felt in the the positions of contemporary French philosophers. Numerous French philosophers are uninterested in Heidegger’s theory; others oppose it, even frankly oppose it, often for reasons linked to his Nazi turning, including Nicolas Tertulian, the well known Lukdcs specialist, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, two young anti-establishment thinkers, Christian Jambet, a former nouveau philosophe, and others. Still others, sometimes after an initial enthusiasm, take a more nuanced, often critical line, including Janicaud, Ricoeur, Henry, Marion, perhaps Courtine, and in some of his moods Derrida. Yet it is fair to say that the vast majority of French philosophers since the war have been marked by their encounter with Heidegger, including, in no particular order, such well known thinkers as Lévinas, Kojève, Koyré, Hyppolite, Lyotard, Foucault, Janicaud, Brague, Courtine, Aubenque, Deleuze, and others.
Virtually everywhere one looks in the contemporary French philosophical debate, one espies ideas that owe something, often more than just a little, for some thinkers even the essence of their positions, to a “postmodern” reading of Heidegger’s thought. Like others influenced by Heidegger’s position, Lyotard is an original thinker, whose position is more than a pale copy, a simple restatement, an echo however distant of Heidegger’s thought, but which takes shape in the horizon formed by Heidegger’s study of being.
“Foundationalism,” the main epistemological strategy of modern times, can be succinctly characterized as “the view, most prominently illustrated in Descartes’s position, that knowledge can be based on an initial point known with certainty and from which the remainder of the theory can be deductively derived.”80 In Being and Time, Heidegger stakes out an antifoundationalist theory, consistent with his anti-Cartesianism, in his analysis of the hermeneutic circle of the understanding, in which knowledge in the classical philosophical sense yields to interpretation.81 In his later studies of Nietzsche, he consistently interprets the slogan “God is dead” as signifying the advent of modern nihilism.82 In his study of the modern condition, Lyotard, who seems immune to Heidegger’s view that truth rests on the disclosure of being, carries forward the basic Heideggerian insight that knowledge in our time must assume another form, including another form of justification.
For Lyotard,a science is modern in virtue of its concern to justify itself. The history of modern science is a series of crises concerning the various overarching justifications (grands récits) proposed. Philosophy is nothing other than scientific discourse aimed at the justification (légitimation) of claims to know.83 In the postmodern period, by implication that period beyond philosophy where perfect epistemological justification is no longer, or at least no longer thought to be, possible, knowledge has also changed.84 At this late date, no overarching justication of any form is still credible.85 Yet a science that is not justified is no more than an ideology that represents a certain form of power.86 Since in the postmodern period scientific knowledge is self-validating through immanent rules, by implication philosophy is over.87 Even the idea of a common justification must be abandoned since the different forms of knowledge deriving from different language games have nothing in common.88
In his own way, Foucault argues a similar point. He is sometimes classed as a structuralist, and structuralism is widely thought to dispense with subjectivity, even to be “the philosophy of the death of man.”89 Yet, as his exchange with Derrida makes clear, Foucault does not so much dispense with as offer a novel analysis of the subject. In a typically lengthy discussion of Foucault’s remark in passing on Descartes’s thought,90 Derrida objects, thereby adumbrating his own later view of textuality (textualité),that on Foucault’s reading of Descartes there could be something outside of, or prior to, the realm of philosophical discourse.91 Foucault’s response, criticizing Derrida for reducing “discursive practices to textual traces,”92 points to the need to go beyond the texts, or abstract philosophical discussion, through analysis. For Foucault, who is influenced by Nietzsche, this leads to analysis of the mechanisms of power within which the ideas of truth and of subjectivity are meaningful. Since truth is relative to the domain of power,93 and since there is nothing outside of power structures, the problem is not to change people’s consciousness but rather to change the regime that produces the truth within the particular relations of power.94
Heidegger’s view that philosophy since Descartes has tended to privilege the subject at the expense of the object, by inference to make objectivity dependent on subjectivity, leads to his effort to decenter the subject.95 For Foucault, the mechanisms of power are prior, not only to the analysis of truth, but also to subjectivity. He sees the alternatives as the idealist view of the subject as constitutive, for instance in the Kantian or Marxian senses, and the phenomenological view of subjectivity, even in historicized form, in which the subject evolves over time. His insistence that one needs to dispense with the constituent subject would lead to the death of subjectivity only if there were no other alternative. In an important passage linking his genealogical analysis to subjectivity, he insists on the need “to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework.”96 The result is to make subjectivity genuinely historical by inverting the relation between subjectivity and objectivity or history. Foucault continues:
And this is what I would call genealogy; this is a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.97
A student of French philosophy does well to remember the importance of religion, particularly Catholicism, throughout French life, including French philosophy. Perhaps because of the similarity between Heidegger’s idea of being that in Being and Time took shape as an analysis of the meaning of the being of beings,98 and the Thomist thesis that the being of beings is God, Heidegger has a special attraction for philosophers positively inclined towards Roman Catholicism. This natural attraction has only been strengthened by the theological turning in French phenomenology, including such important phenomenologists as Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion, that Janicaud traces to Lévinas.99 Janicaud’s thesis receives indirect support in a recent collective volume on phenomenology and theology, presented by Courtine, and offering essays by Henry, Ricoeur, Marion, and Jean-Louis Chrétien.100
Although still not as well known as Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida, Henry is certainly one of the most original contemporary French thinkers.101 Like Sartre, Henry is both a successful writer as well as a philosopher.102 A number of elements of his strikingly original material phenomenology are already in place in his first major work, The Essence of Manifestation.103 His position can be described as resulting from a radicalization of the Cartesian theory, initially under Heideggerian and Husserlian influences104 — although more Husserlian than Heideggerian — that later develops, in reaction against Heidegger, in a resolutely Husserlian direction. In his more recent thought, Heidegger’s influence figures negatively in Henry’s theory, as a kind of antithesis that he strives to surpass.
The views of Heidegger and Henry describe parallel, but separate trajectories in reaction to Descartes. Heidegger, who criticizes the Cartesian cogito ergo sum for neglecting the sum, addresses this problem in his theory of being through a conception of Dasein. Henry addresses the being of the cogito in order to describe the meaning of subjectivity. The problem of the being of the cogito belongs to first philosophy, which Henry identifies with universal ontology. The Cartesian beginning point is insufficiently radical, since it presupposes a more radical foundation that it does not explicate.105
Henry’s theory of the subject can be regarded as an effort to overcome the dualism following from Descartes’s inability to make the transition from the representation to the represented, from the transcendent to the immanent planes.106 More generally, Henry deepens phenomenology through a theory of affectivity. He holds that entities manifest themselves only in the form of an “effective phenomenological offer” within a horizon. Since the manifestation of an entity supposes a horizon, its affect on us, in fact “all ontical affection presupposes an ontological affection and finds within it its foundation.”107 Yet Henry goes further when he maintains that in the various “tonalities” of existence, such as despair or suffering, the absolute is constituted and revealed.108
In his many writings, Henry works out his theory through studies of the body, Marx, psychoanalysis, Kandinsky, socialism, and so on. In a recent work he defines the task of material phenomenology as a radicalization of phenomenology intended to “interrogate the way in which it [i.e. pure phenomenality] originally [originellement] phenomenalizes its substance, its stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made — its pure phenomenological materiality.”109 For Henry, the foundation of pure phenomenality is life understood not as a thing, but as the principle of everything that Heidegger is unable to capture in his ontological categories. In his study of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,Husserl argues that Kant’s theory presupposes the unthematized concept of the life world.110 Similarly, Henry understands his own material phenomenology as engaging the absence in Husserlian phenomenology of “a phenomenology of transcendental life” that apparently founds it.111
Marion is one of the most prolific and most interesting of the younger French philosophers. His work, like that of such younger scholars as Brague and Courtine, exemplifies a qualified return to the best traditions of French philosophical scholarship that have never ended but were temporarily suspended during the existentialist, structuralist and poststructuralist movements.
Marion has been influenced by Henry, Heidegger, Derrida, Husserl and Lévinas, as well as others. Like Henry, whose work he especially appreciates,112 he is engaged in working out what can loosely be characterized as a phenomenology of the invisible, in his case a theory with Heideggerian, Cartesian, and religious components. Again like Henry, there is a distance to Heidegger, in Marion’s case through his own theory of being.113
Marion’s writings can be said to fall into three main categories, including works on God and love, as well as technical philosophical studies.114 The latter include historical investigations as well as his own theory. In his scholarly writing, Marion has contributed important studies of Descartes, a traditional topic in French philosophy. His Descartes studies, among the very best in France at present, are distinguished by their quality and their frequent reference to Heidegger.115
More recently, he has published an impressive discussion of the problem of phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger up to 1926, the year prior to the appearance of Being and Time, where his own ideas frequently intrude. Here he exploits the obvious connection between the theories of Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger to examine the relation between Husserl and the early Heidegger, albeit from a perspective closer to the later Heidegger. He is concerned with the nature and significance of their respective attitudes toward Descartes116 and toward intentionality.117
Marion’s own phenomenological thought concerns the problem of givenness.118 Simplifying enormously, we can say that what Henry calls affectivity Marion calls givenness (donation). Phenomenology from his perspective is nothing other than the analysis of the given as it is given in order to complete metaphysics.119 Marion locates the relation of Heidegger to Husserl in a further elaboration of the latter’s critique of objectivation. The problem, then, is whether the return to things, or to things themselves, leads to their objectivity or to their being, or, as Marion also formulates the question, to a transcendental subject or to Dasein.
His most original idea concerns the relation of reduction and givenness. For Marion, an appearance (apparition)suffices for being only if, in appearing, it gives itself perfectly. Yet that entails a direct relation between reduction and givenness.120 On this basis, Marion differentiates no less than three forms of reduction: a first, or transcendental reduction; a second, or existential deduction following from entities and concerning being, with obviously Heideggerian overtones; and a third reduction whose “call however does not come from the horizon of being (or objectification) but from the pure form of the call.”121 Like the later Heidegger who desires to be open to being, Marion wants to be open to the call that questions us.
In comparison with others discussed in this chapter, a more extended treatment of Derrida is warranted because he is presently better known, certainly better known in the United States than other contemporary French philosophers. Like Lacan before him, for some years Derrida has been inventing his own persona in a series of carefully crafted, difficult texts, strewn with multiple distinctions and linguistic puns that often simply cannot be satisfactorily rendered into another language. Although Derrida’s view must be addressed, it is probably not possible to do so in a way that will satisfy his readers, particularly those, always more numerous in the US than in France, who are his disciples.
In any discussion of Derrida, certain caveats are in order. I will leave to one side the difficult, but tangential question of whether Derrida is a philosopher or only a philosopher122 in order to concentrate on his texts. Any discussion of what goes on in them is open to objection, hence must remain tentative, since Derrida prefers to apply his view rather than to describe it unambiguously. It might be thought, particularly by a Derridean, however that is defined, that I have failed to grasp Derrida’s theory, even described it incorrectly. But that is hardly to be avoided since a central theme in Derrida’s practice is precisely the effort to avoid being pinned down to any definite view or set of views. Such a reaction is all the more easy to understand since, if I am correct, Derrida is specifically concerned to provide a negative answer to the problem of reference, so important to analytic philosophy and which analytic philosophy has arguably failed to resolve,123 and that he apparently regards as an impossible quest.
Suffice it to say that Derrida’s relation to Heidegger requires special treatment in virtue of the size of Derrida’s corpus — at present more than forty volumes — the attention it evokes, and its extreme complexity. His relation to Heidegger clearly overflows the artificial distinction in use in this chapter. For in an obvious way he is devoted to Heidegger’s theory; he makes use of Heideggerian insights in his reading of the history of philosophy; and he is also a creative thinker.
This rarely studied124 relation is highly controversial. From this angle of vision, Derrida’s theory has been characterized as simple imitation differing only in Derrida’s peculiar style, described as “Heidegger + Derrida’s style”125 and as leading to a highly original view whose very fidelity to Heidegger’s theory paradoxically results in an opposition more important than any other thinker.126
Although the nature of the relation of Derrida’s theory to Heidegger’s is controversial, no one denies its existence. Our task will be to make a beginning toward an understanding of that relation, to show how it might be understood in more detail. In this respect, it is useful to look to the history of philosophy. It is not sufficiently noticed that chronologically later thinkers, who criticize their predecessors, often remain committed to their projects. Although Hegel is an original thinker of great power, his own position is inconceivable without Kant’s. There is evidence that the young Hegel intended to develop further and even to complete Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy.127
In the same way, it is consistent to regard Derrida, despite his criticisms of Heidegger’s theory, as finally remaining within the Heideggerian orbit. The point is neither to deny the originality of Derrida’s theory nor to make of Derrida a sort of latter-day Beaufret. It is, then, consistent to acknowledge that Derrida has criticized Heidegger on a number of grounds, such as valorizing unity over difference, gathering over dispersal, nostalgia over the violence of the past, presence over representation, meaning over dissemination, and so on, while still regarding Derrida as committed to a form of the basic Heideggerean project.
Derrida’s theory cannot be understood merely through its relation to Heidegger’s. Suffice it to say that it is triply determined by the positions of the “three Hs” in recent French philosophy: Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. Derrida interacts with Heidegger’s theory on at least four levels: as a reader and then as a defender of Heidegger’s texts, as a critic of others from a Heideggerean angle of vision, and in the way that he draws on it in his own theory.
To begin with, Derrida is an unusual reader of the texts of many writers, including Heidegger. After Beaufret’s death, Derrida maintains a similar fascination with Heidegger’s thought that he continues to subject to the most careful textual analysis.128 His analysis of the idea of sexual difference (Geschlecht, différence sexuelle) in a recent article indicates that, when he is finished reading Heidegger’s texts, often nothing is challenged, nothing is changed.129
After noting that Heidegger speaks rarely if at all of sex,130 Derrida proposes to study sexual difference through the word “Dasein.”131 In Derrida’s discussion, there is not even a single word devoted to a justification or explanation of the utility of this approach as if it were self-evident that Heidegger’s theory provides the adequate basis for an understanding of sexual difference. Yet this assumption is implicitly challenged by his acknowledgment that Heidegger never directly addresses the topic. Typically, the entire article — which never mentions either men or women, whose relation is in question, or other writers specifically concerned with this question, or indeed any other theory, including a philosophical theory, that might bear on the theme — is solely taken up with the elucidation of the question of sexual difference from a Heideggerian standpoint through the analysis of Heideggerian texts.
The conclusion of Derrida’s article raises more questions than it resolves. According to Derrida, who implicitly accounts for Heidegger’s failure to consider problems relating to human sexuality, Dasein is a being without sex since for Heidegger sexual difference must be thought through the structures of Dasein.132 Heidegger’s texts do not contain more than the most elliptical references to sexual difference since his thought moves on a deeper level than merely existential concerns.
This conclusion is comforting to an orthodox Heideggerian although perhaps not to anyone else. Derrida is unperturbed by the utter lack of any comment that might be relevant to the issue that concerns him in Heidegger’s text. Yet someone who holds that the master thinker must speak to every issue might be troubled, say, by Heidegger’s apparent failure to comment specifically about the social world, or about men and women other than in the most general terms, or even by his failure to comment on sexual difference.
Derrida’s conclusion is consistent with Heidegger’s remark in the “Letter on Humanism” that his thinking is prior to theory and practice.133 Heidegger’s humble claim disclaiming anything so mundane as a practical motivation for “thinking” points to its utter irrelevance for the problem that is Derrida’s concern in this text. Now if one’s concern is sexual difference from a Heideggerian perspective, the realization that Heidegger’s thinking is so deep as not to raise the question is hardly reassuring. This is still another example, if one is needed, of the incapacity of philosophical thought to find a way to take up the problems of the world in which we live, to which it prefers such topics as the worldhood of the world.134 Someone who is not an orthodox Heideggerian might read the same inference as revealing the inability of the chaster thinker to say anything useful about the problem. What is startling is Derrida’s own seeming lack of awareness that the master thinker has nothing to contribute to the topic of the discussion, no way to illuminate the problem, since there is nothing in his theory that is specifically relevant to the problem of sexual difference.
Second, Derrida is capable, as Beaufret was not, of defending Heidegger on a high philosophical plane as distinct from using ridicule to cast doubt on his opponents’ views. Derrida is especially concerned to defend Heidegger for actions linked to his Nazi turning. In the famous Vienna lecture that grew into the Crisis,Husserl suggests that Western philosophy is basically European.135 Derrida, who is interested in this idea as early as his own edition of Husserl’s essay on “The Origin of Geometry,”136 later used it in an invidious defense of Heidegger. He claims that although Heidegger has been criticized for his apparent abandonment of Husserl, from the spiritual perspective of European man not Heidegger but Husserl was at fault.137 As we shall see in the next chapter, Derrida further utilizes the spirit of Heidegger’s theory to defend it against its letter.
Third, Derrida presents a generally Heideggerian critique of other theories. This critique, inspired by the spirit of Heidegger’s theory, is directed against other theories, including Heidegger’s. For instance, Derrida’s attack on Sartre in “Les Fins de l’homme”138 creatively repeats, but repeats nonetheless, points previously raised by Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism.”
In his remarks on Sartre, whom he evidently respects, Beaufret is mainly concerned to draw an ever clearer, more radical distinction between Heidegger and his French admirer. The relative calm of Beaufret’s remarks pales before the violence of Derrida’s attack that manifests no respect and yields no quarter. Derrida has said that although none of his work would have been possible without Heidegger,139 in everything that he writes there is a distance with respect to Heidegger’s own themes.140 Yet here the reputed distance is literally invisible in the midst of a veritable catalogue of Sartre’s faults arising from an alleged failure to understand Heidegger’s theory.
Derrida’s lecture can be regarded as an application of Heidegger’s effort, namely the effort to distance his own theory of Dasein from the sciences of human being, to the French philosophical concern with anthropological humanism at the end of the War. His point is simply to recall, against the initial French anthropological reading of Heidegger, Heidegger’s own proscription of any conflation between philosophy and anthropology.
In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger responds to Sartre without ever coming to grips with any single Sartrean text. Following Heidegger in his lecture, Derrida offers an excoriating, clearly Heideggerian reply to Sartre, again without ever coming to grips with any single Sartrean text.141
The title of the lecture contains a triple reference to the humanist concept of man, as Derrida makes clear through three quotations placed in exergue concerning: Kant’s view of human being as an end in itself, Sartre’s remark that ontology enables one to determine the ends of human being, and Foucault’s comprehension of human being as the result of a recent movement whose end is perhaps near. At the end of the war, Derrida notes, the French philosophical discussion was dominated by the humanist theme. Humanism peaks in Sartre’s position based on “the monstruous translation” of Dasein as “human reality” adopted — according to Derrida, who momentarily forgets Kojève — under Sartre’s influence, as a warrant of the tendency to read or not to read Heidegger.142
Following Heidegger’s objection to Descartes, Derrida contends that Sartre fails to question the unity of human being and, worse still, collapses the distinction between the philosophical and the human subject. In this way, humanism and anthropology, the themes common to existentialists of all stripes, Marxists, spiritualists, as well as social democrats and Christian democrats, are linked to an anthropological reading of Hegel, Husserl and, “perhaps worst of all [un contresens, peut-être le plus gravel” to Heidegger.143
Derrida has written widely on the positions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. His writings on the theories of Hegel and Husserl apply Heideggerian insights, often very critically, to their positions. Being and Time presents incompatible views of transcendental phenomenological truth (veritas transcendentalis)144 and a hermeneutical conception based on the circle of the understanding.145 If truth is based on a hermeneutical circle, traditional philosophical claims for absolute truth cannot be sustained. In Derrida’s writings on Hegel, one of the main themes is the application of this Heideggerian insight to questioning Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge.146
There is a strongly Heideggerian thrust to all of Derrida’s writings on Husserl. An example is the lengthy introduction to his edition of Husserl’s manuscript on the “Origins of Geometry,”147 with which Derrida first broke into print. A prominent theme here is his complaint that Husserl fails to “problematize” history.148 Another is his “Saussurian” approach149 to the problem of the sign in Husserl’s thought, centering on the question — present in the later Heidegger, prominently in the “Letter on Humanism” — of whether Husserlian phenomenology escapes or could even conceivably escape from a metaphysical presupposition.
In Being and Time,Heidegger notes the traditional approach to being as “presence” (Anwesenheit).150He amplifies this point in a late essay through the remark that metaphysics thinks entities in a representational manner through presence.151 In a lengthy passage, in which the Heideggerian genealogy of his analysis of Husserl is manifest, Derrida writes:
The most general form of our question is thus indicated: does phenomenological necessity, the precision and the subtlety of Husserlian analysis, the demands to which it responds and that we must take into consideration, nevertheless dissimulate a metaphysical presupposition? Don’t the demands hide a dogmatic or speculative adherence which, surely, would not keep phenomenological criticism outside itself, would not be a remainder of unthought naïveté, but would constitute phenomenology in its interior, in its critical project and the instituting value of its own premises: precisely in what it will soon acknowledge as the origin and guarantee of all value, the “principle of principles,” that is the originarily given evidence, the present or presence of meaning in a full and originary intuition. In other terms, we will not ask if this or that metaphysical inheritance was able, here or there, to limit the vigilance of a phenomenologist, but whether the phenomenological form of this vigilance is not already ordered by metaphysics itself.152
Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s theory as a nonanthropological humanism presupposes Husserl’s objection to the conflation of philosophy and anthropology as psychologism. In this respect, the main difference between Heidegger and Derrida is that the latter generalizes the problem of how to read the former’s theory to the positions of Hegel and Husserl as well. The anthropological reading that is incorrect for Husserl’s, for Hegel’s, as well as for Heidegger’s views only echoes Husserl’s misapprehension of Being and Time as “an anthropological deviation from transcendental phenomenology.”153 The result, despite progress in the French discussion, is to amalgamate the positions of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger as instances of the recurrence of humanist metaphysics. On behalf of Heidegger, Derrida affirms that “the thought of what is specific to human being is inseparable from the question or the truth of Being.”154 For Heideggerian humanism rejects an anthropological approach to human being that is properly understood in terms of being.
Derrida’s various criticisms of Hegel and Husserl155 depend on the later Heidegger’s view that metaphysics and, for that reason philosophy, has come to an end. Heidegger develops this view in a number of places, notably in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” where he maintains inter alia that metaphysics thinks beings as a whole, that metaphysics thinks presence through representational thinking, that metaphysics is Platonism, and that metaphysics, hence, philosophy, has come to an end.156 Derrida’s critique of Husserl in La Voix et le phénomène is intended to show that Husserlian phenomenology is vitiated by the metaphysical presupposition of presence.157
Hegel criticizes the critical philosophy while remaining true to its spirit in order to complete Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Derrida has a similar relation to Heidegger’s theory. In his criticisms of Heidegger’s writings, Derrida invariably judges the letter of the theory by its spirit. In his examination of Heidegger’s destruction of traditional ontology, Derrida maintains that despite Heidegger’s intention, he nonetheless remains faithful to traditional metaphysics.158 In Derrida’s reading, Heidegger fails to realize the intrinsic aim of his own theory. Derrida makes the same point again, on a different level, in his defense of Heidegger’s theory against its association with Nazism, when he concedes that, despite Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, Heidegger’s early thought remains metaphysical. This critique of Heidegger’s early theory means in essence that it is not consistent with its own intention, that Heidegger was untrue to his central insight; but it should not be taken as the suggestion, veiled or otherwise, that Heidegger’s central insight is untrue.
Fourth, Derrida advances his own position that is consistent with, arguably inspired by, his understanding of the spirit of Heidegger’s theory. Derrida, of course, is not a philosopher in any usual sense. He just never says anything as straightforward as “here is my position,” or “here is the view that I mean to defend against all objections,” or “here are the arguments that suppport my view.” In fact, he could not do so since part of his strategy is to avoid taking a definite stance that, in turn, could be relativized with respect to the ongoing discussion. So in conjunction with Bennington’s recent study of his thought, Derrida provides a text intended to show that it overflows, hence “evades,” the ideas that the scholar of his view employs to “capture” it.159
Nonetheless, Derrida’s writings contain ideas and practices that can be loosely labeled as his rather than someone else’s. What we can informally refer to as Derrida’s position is composed of close exegesis of Heidegger’s writings, criticism of other theories in terms of the spirit of those writings, as he interprets it, and a number of characteristic doctrines that are invariably either borrowed from, consistent with, or extensions of Heideggerian doctrines.
Here we see clearly the limits of the analogy between Hegel’s relation to Kant and Derrida’s to Heidegger. Despite the Kantian impulse in his thought, Hegel finally moves very far beyond Kant on any reasonable reading, as in his reinterpretation of the thing-in-itself in a way that arguably contradicts not only the letter but also the spirit of the critical philosophy. This is also the case for Gadamer, aside from Derrida the other important contemporary Heideggerian. Although in some ways, Gadamer remains very close to Heidegger, in other ways he transforms Heidegger’s theory into its opposite. In the working out of implications of the hermeneutic circle, Gadamer is led to revalorize the tradition that Heidegger precisely devalorizes in his supposed destruction of the history of ontology. Yet this is never the case for Derrida, whose ideas never conflict with the spirit of Heidegger’s later thought.160
It is not easy, despite the very number of Derrida’s writings, to specify even their main theme. Certainly, a persistent theme is his attack on so-called logocentrism that he, like Heidegger, associates with the metaphysical tradition. Derrida’s ongoing attack on the very idea of logocentrism is waged through his deconstruction of texts within the metaphysical, logocentric tradition. The practice of deconstruction rests on a concept that remains elusive since it has never clearly been stated in any of his many texts, but has clear precedents.
There is major difference of opinion about the idea of deconstruction in Derrida’s writings. Some writers regard Derrida as taking over and developing the Heideggerian idea of deconstruction.161 Others point to Derrida’s inconsistent claims and practice concerning the translation of “Abbau” as “déconstruction.”162 At least one observer regards deconstruction as a basically Kantian enterprise.163 Another is impressed by the way that deconstruction breaks down the distinction between philosophy and literature.164
In the present context, I will emphasize the phenomenological background that seems the most prominent component in Derrida’s thought. Suffice it to say that the idea of deconstruction (Abbau)165 has solid roots in the writings of the later Husserl166 and throughout Heidegger’s thought.167 In Being and Time,Heidegger insists on the importance of the destruction of the history of ontology.168 In lectures from the same year in which his main treatise appeared, Heidegger maintains that phenomenological method consists of three basic components: reduction, construction, and destruction. Heidegger describes his proposed deconstruction of metaphysics as a de-construction (Abbau). He speaks of “destruction” as “a critical process in which traditional concepts that at first must necessarily be employed are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.”169
Derrida’s own view of deconstruction can be understood as an effort to carry out the proposed destruction of the history of metaphysics in a way that escapes the problems of Heidegger’s own effort, compromised in Derrida’s eyes by its residual metaphysical character. Were he to be successful, he would carry out the intended Heideggerian critique of the Cartesian dream of self-founding and self-justifying philosophy in a way that circumscribes its limits from a place beyond it.170
With respect to philosophy, Derrida is a sceptic if scepticism is understood as the claim that theory of knowledge and knowledge are impossible within the framework of the philosophical tradition as it has been understood until now and as it can possibly take shape. He is, however, not a sceptic from a postmetaphysical, later Heideggerian stance located somewhere beyond philosophy. His characteristic doctrine of textuality extends Heidegger’s rather traditional form of textual deconstruction in new ways intended to realize its intrinsic aim: through the assertion that everything is a text or can be represented in textual terms adumbrated in his objection to Foucault’s reading of Descartes, and in the related assertion that texts cannot yield knowledge. He argues for the first claim by maintaining that there is nothing outside the text, that writing has primacy over speech, and that texts refer only to other texts. He argues for the second claim by attempting a deconstruction ranging over any possible statement in a text.
The latter amounts to an attack on referentiality, never so far as I know simply stated but rather exemplified. This attack is multiply determined by the views of Hegel, Husserl, and Saussure, among others. These and other thinkers take up a continental analogue of the problem of reference. In the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit,Hegel argues against sense certainty as knowledge, roughly on the grounds that you cannot say what you mean or mean what you say.171 Saussure’s theory of language rests on the distinction between the signifier and the signified. Like Frege, who created the analytic form of the problem, Husserl distinguishes between sense (Sinn)and reference (Bedeutung).172 His theory turns on the possible correlation of one with the other.
It is apparently inspired in the first instance by the Hegelian view that language is inadequate to refer. Starting with his published text, his edition of Husserl’s essay on the “Origins of Geometry,” Derrida similarly argues that any effort to refer to a real object turns out to refer to an unknowable absolute origin as we11.173 Through his reading of Husserl’s theory from a Heideggerian perspective, he comes close to the point that Hegel makes about sense certainty, a point that he then generalizes to cover any effort to know on the basis of his view of the failure of metaphysics, construed as logocentrism.
In sum, although Derrida correctly regards himself as questioning Heideggerian ideas, and although he depicts his reading of the master’s doctrines as a form of dissidence to the point of claiming that in everything he writes there is “a separation [écart] with respect to the Heideggerian problematic,”174 he remains mainly, perhaps even wholly within the Heideggerian fold. For if he occasionally rejects the letter of Heidegger’s position, he invariably accepts its spirit as he understands it. In Derrida’s writings, as in so many writings of orthodox French Heideggerians, everything happens as if Heidegger’s thought and Heidegger’s thought alone formed the horizon of the “philosophical” enterprise in general, of thinking as it is supposedly still possible after Heidegger in the space delimited by his thought.