First of all, and setting aside for the moment all the various controversies and disputes, Heidegger and Derrida are the great prophets of the principle of performativity. Both Derrida and Heidegger take as their starting point the premise that it is impossible to sever the connection between a text’s form and its content. The text doesn’t merely say something, but actually does what it says. Both Heidegger and Derrida set out to deconstruct the foundational premises of metaphysics, and this deconstructive enterprise is accompanied by deconstruction of the homogeneous and hierarchical structure of the text, a structure that follows, of course, from the foundational premises of metaphysics. According to both thinkers, the text’s cohesiveness falls apart: the beginning becomes the end; the central becomes marginal and the margins slip inward toward the center; the conclusion is given at the beginning, and the end turns out to be the middle.
Yet this violation of the text’s ordered structure does not disrupt it, but is, rather, the text’s very goal. For it makes possible the surprising appearance of the unexpected associative connection—a connection that seems to come from the future and may give us the shivers—in which the text’s meaning, to which both the author and the reader are introduced at the very same time, is to be found.
This is so because the text does not originate in the author. The author, in writing, is only responding to a claim that comes from the outside, whether we call it ‘Being’ or ‘Alterity .’ The text is transformed from a suppressive mechanism intended to preclude any possible appearance of Alterity in its all-encompassing and totalitarian ordered structure, into a space whose sole raison d’être is to generate the conditions that render possible the appearance of Alterity . To render possible the appearance of that ‘Being’ or ‘Alterity’ in the text’s seams and gaps, while paying the utmost attention to its language , Heidegger and Derrida harness their linguistic virtuosity to reduce, as far as possible, the disparity between the textual language’s materiality and its meaning, a disparity within which the crux of the matter becomes buried.
It follows that, for Heidegger and Derrida, language is not an empty vessel that is filled with ideational content which has independent, extra-linguistic existence . On the contrary, language itself plays an important, and even decisive, role, not only in how an idea is expressed, but also in its very formulation. Since Saussure , the phonetic and visual dimensions of language have been grasped as inextricably connected to meaning. This is true not of just any language, but of one’s mother tongue, the writer’s mother tongue—the dialect—which alone can serve as a space for the appearance of Alterity , which nurtures and motivates writing. From this perspective, translation is always an irreparable loss of absolute Alterity, of dialect, of idioms, expressions, sayings, turns of phrase, of the untranslatable elements that give a language its uniqueness, and endow it with its distinctive flavour. Heidegger’s philosophy could have been written only in German, and Derrida’s only in French.
Writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue flattens what is said and undermines the possibility of maximal correspondence between form and content, between a language’s materiality and its meaning. Writing in a non-native language also undermines the notion of the text as a platform for the appearance of that which is Other , that which deviates from the accepted order, is unexpected, is futural. But as I said, it is precisely in these gaps that meaning is to be found. Hence any philosophy, and any writing on philosophical questions, must be done in one’s mother tongue.
Having highlighted the idea of performativity, let me now characterize the book more directly. This book is not about Heidegger ‘in himself,’ nor about Derrida ‘in himself’—assuming the phrase ‘in himself’ still has meaning in the post-Heideggerian, post-Derridean era. Nor does it seek to trace the philosophical genealogy leading from the one to the other. Moreover, it is not a comparative study of specific issues in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. Rather, it seeks to reflect on Heidegger’s thought through the lens of a specific Derridean mode of thinking, a specific Derridean ‘thesis,’ so to speak, though we must bear in mind that Derrida himself vigorously contested the possibility of setting down any thesis in the traditional sense of the word. More precisely, it will endeavour to reflect on Heidegger’s thought on Being via what can be termed Derrida’s logocentrism thesis. The premise underlying this project is that neither Derrida himself, nor the commentators on his work, subject Heideggerian thought to this test in a sufficiently-compelling manner. My primary focus is not examination of the affinity between Derrida and Heidegger, but rather examination of Heidegger’s thought in relation to Derrida’s logocentrism thesis. It is plain that the two are interconnected. Indeed, the presence of logocentric practice can serve as a litmus test for residual metaphysical elements in the Heideggerian corpus, and would explain the emphasis Derrida places on distancing himself from Heidegger’s thought.
Why does the existence of logocentric practices attest to the existence of metaphysical presuppositions? As will be argued in greater detail in Chapter 4, logocentrism and metaphysics go hand in hand. This ensues from the fact that logocentric practice is grounded in two metaphysical premises. The first is that there is pure presence that is not contaminated by its derivatives and signifiers, or in Derridean language , that there is a signified that is ‘transcendent ’ to what Derrida calls the “order of the signifier.” The second is that this signified is accessible, regardless of the name it acquires. The fundamental premise of any thought or system that employs logocentric practices is that there is a privileged type of signifier—speech —through which the yawning gap between signifier and signified is reduced to almost nothing, allowing intimate access to the signified. The logocentric dimension in Heidegger’s thought attests to the residual presence of metaphysical elements.
A comprehensive account of the import of Heidegger’s logocentrism has yet to be put forward in the interpretive literature, nor is there such an account in Derrida’s writings themselves. The question of Heidegger’s logocentrism has indeed been addressed in various contexts, but to the best of my knowledge, it has not received the warranted critical scrutiny. Even Derrida himself does not provide a thorough treatment of this question. He addresses it in at least three different places: at the beginning of Of Grammatology (Derrida 1974, 20–24), in the book of interviews Positions (Derrida 1981b, 10–11), and in “Heidegger’s Hand” (Derrida 1987, 181). But his treatment of Heidegger’s logocentrism , as opposed to that of other thinkers—Saussure , Plato , Rousseau , Husserl —is incomplete.
This is surprising, since it is evident that highlighting Heidegger’s logocentrism could have helped Derrida situate Heidegger within metaphysics, and thereby situate himself outside metaphysics. My argument in this book should, therefore, be viewed as supplementing—in the Derridean sense of the term—Derrida’s logocentrism thesis. My reading adopts the Derridean approach to texts, with the goal of exposing the layer of logocentric thinking still detectable in the deepest stratum of Heidegger’s thought; this residual vein of logocentrism has broad philosophical and political implications. In view of this goal, I will restrict my attention chiefly to Derrida’s first five books, which were published between 1967 and 1972.1 Two later works, both of which deal with Heidegger, and are thus pertinent to the question at issue—“Heidegger’s Hand” and Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question—will also be discussed.
Right at the outset, it is important to stress that my focus is not so much the question of logocentrism , but rather, that of writing. Namely, can the theme of writing, and in particular, the theme of the denigration or ‘debasement’2 of writing, with all it implies, not only in the philosophical context, but in the political context as well, be detected in the Heideggerian corpus? To allay the suspense, the answer is, it can.
What, then, is the connection between the two questions—that of logocentrism , and that of writing—and why does investigation of the former necessarily lead to the latter? The main thrust of Derrida’s logocentrism thesis is an effort to expose the fact that throughout its history, metaphysics has given precedence to phonetic signs over written ones. Phonetic signs are grasped as sustaining a close connection to what metaphysicians refer to as “presence,” and enabling access to it. This creates a hierarchy of signs, with ‘good’ ‘transparent’ signs that allow access to presence at the top, and ‘bad’ ‘opaque’ signs, which deny us such access, at the bottom. The hierarchy of signs originates in nearness to presence, which is also responsible for the debasement of the written, and for the view that, relative to speech , the written is secondary and derivative. This hierarchical distinction between phonetic and written signs can be found, Derrida claims, in every metaphysical system that upholds the notion of presence and the possibility of access to it.
But the main import of my argument is that writing should not be taken only in the literal sense of inscribing signs on physical materi...