Tout contre Heidegger

François Raffoul

Introduction
Derrida’s relation to Heidegger can fairly be described as ‘complicated’,
and marked by a deep ambivalence. In his 1999 interview with
Dominique Janicaud, Derrida describes that relation in this way: ‘In
any case, it is one of admiration, respect, recognition, and at the
same time a relation of profound allergy and of irony’.1 Although
he has always recognized his debt towards Heidegger, although he
went so far as to state that, ‘What I have attempted to do would not
have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions’,2
Derrida also insisted on his ‘profound allergy’ towards Heidegger—
an allergy that is not without recalling Levinas’s famed remark on
the ‘profound need to leave the climate’ of Heidegger’s philosophy.3
Nevertheless, Derrida presents his relation to Heidegger as unique, if
not incomparable: ‘For me, it is unique. I know of no other thinker,
either in this century or in general, with whom I have had, with
whom I still have, a concerned relationship of frustrated admiration.
Really, I am never bored when I read him. I know it will be endless, I
know that I will never ultimately settle matters with him. For me, it is
an inexhaustible relationship, which is made of, again, movements of
positive admiration, of recognition, of debt and then, sometimes quite
severely, of critical impatience, and always very ironic’ (HF, 347).
In that same interview, Jacques Derrida portrayed Heidegger as a
kind of contre-maître for him (literally, a counter-master, but which,
in French, has the everyday sense of a work supervisor, an overseer,
someone in a position of authority who watches over someone else,
often disapprovingly). ‘For me, he is something like a watchman

The Oxford Literary Review 43.1 (2021): 82–106

DOI: 10.3366/olr.2021.0352
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/olr
François Raffoul 83

[veilleur], a thinking that always keeps watch over me—an overseer

[surveillant] who is always watching over me, a thinking that, I feel,
has me under surveillance’ (HF, 347). Derrida pursues this metaphor
and amplifies it, comparing Heidegger to a kind of suspicious super-
ego. ‘When I say: “counter to Heidegger’s order”, it is because he
haunts me. . . he is always there, watching me and reproaching me for
something. . . I am always in the process of disobeying a Heideggerian
injunction, which I, nonetheless, sense in myself. And so he is there,
he haunts me like a sort of strict father’ (HF, 355). Heidegger would
thus be for Derrida a master against whom one thinks, a contre-maître,
although this thinking-against can quickly become a thinking against
oneself for a Derrida perpetually at war with himself. ‘As it turns out,
the word ‘counter’ [contre], if I may be allowed to emphasize it myself,
plays a very turbulent role in this text. I am always going on about
‘counterparts’, ‘counterexamples’, ‘counterpaths’, etc. I present myself
as someone who relates to himself all the time as a counterexample—
or as the counterpart of himself; someone who has to incorporate,
take into account the counterpart or the counterexample of what he
is, does, or thinks. I am the counterexample of myself, I am in a
sort of contradiction. Thus, I say—I think it is in Circumfession—
that deep down, I, more than anyone else (or at least as much as
anyone else), am a metaphysician of presence: I desire nothing more
than presence, voice, all these things I have questioned; therefore, I
am, as it were, the counterexample of what I am advocating’ (HF,
355). The reader is thus often faced with this ambivalence in Derrida’s
writings, which offer, on the one hand, uncannily precise and insightful
readings of Heidegger’s texts, with on the other hand less than generous
interpretations. We find a Derrida tout contre Heidegger, at once
entirely against Heidegger, but also right up close to Heidegger.4
This ambivalence accounts in any case for how Derrida perceived his
own position, which he described in a 1999 interview as being caught
in a sort of ‘cross-fire’, as it were, between the ‘Heidegger devotees’
and the run-of-the-mill anti-Heideggerians: ‘I found myself, I still find
myself, with others, in the situation of a nondevotee who, at the same
time, cannot stand the anti-Heideggerians. We are caught in the cross
fire. I am as allergic to the Heidegger devotees as I am to the run-of-the-
mill anti-Heideggerians. I strive to find a path, a line, a place where one
might continue to read Heidegger seriously, to question him without
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giving in either to political Heideggerianism or to its opposite’ (HF,

345). Interestingly, this late statement echoes, almost word for word,
a passage one finds in a footnote from ‘Ousia and Grammē’, in which
Derrida already denounced ‘the complicity which gathers together, in
the same refusal to read, in the same denegation of the question, of the
text, and of the question of the text, in the same repetitions [redite],
or in the same blind silence, the camp of Heideggerian devotion
and the camp of anti-Heideggerianism’.5 This certainly explains why
Derrida was doubly attacked: by the anti-Heideggerians, but also by
the Heidegger devotees such as François Fédier or Jean Beaufret: ‘In
1969 I was already persona non grata! Before, I was not considered a
bona fide Heideggerian nor was I one. I read Heidegger, but I was not
known in those circles as someone who had a privileged connection to
Heidegger’ (HF, 345).
During the interview, Derrida returns to his intellectual formation.
What is most striking in that account is how early and prominently
Heidegger already figures: Derrida mentions having first heard of the
name Heidegger as early as hypokhâgne, in the year 1948–1949;6 he
recalls having read, in the University of Algiers library, texts by Sartre
containing numerous references to Heidegger, as well as the texts by
Heidegger that were collected and edited by Henri Corbin, namely,
fragments from Sein und Zeit, and Was ist Metaphysik? As early as
1948–1949, then, Derrida recounts, ‘I was also very aware of him,
because of classes and because of the role that I saw him play in the
French intellectual landscape—with Sartre notably, and more distantly
Merleau-Ponty’ (HF, 337). Significantly, Derrida describes how he felt
so much closer to Heidegger than to Husserl (he insists on the fact that
he studied Husserl only after he had been working on Heidegger) and
how he ‘resonated’ with the ‘pathos’ of Heidegger’s questions. ‘The
question of anxiety, of the experience of nothingness before negation,
corresponded well to my personal pathos, much more so than the cold
Husserlian discipline, to which I came only later’ (HF, 337). Then,
in the early fifties, after having entered the École Normale Supérieure,
Derrida attended the lectures of Jean Beaufret, the addressee of ‘The
Letter on Humanism’. One must also mention here the several courses
that Derrida devoted to Heidegger in the early sixties when he was
teaching as an assistant at the Sorbonne: for instance the 1960–1961
course on the present; the 1961–1962 course on the notion of world in
François Raffoul 85

Heidegger; the 1963–1964 course on error and errancy in Heidegger;

and the 1964–1965 on the question of being and history in Heidegger.7
In ‘Heidegger, the Philosophers’ Hell’, Derrida states that, ‘For more
than a half century, no rigorous philosopher has been able to avoid
a debate with [explication avec] Heidegger’,8 a thinking, continues
Derrida, that ‘is also multiple and that, for a long time to come,
will remain provocative, enigmatic, still to be read’ (Points, 182–183).
Even through the criticisms, reservations, and explications (a word
that in French refers both to a debate and an argument), Derrida
still considers to Heidegger to be an indispensable resource for future
thought. Indeed, ‘from the moment one is having it out with [s’explique
avec] Heidegger in a critical or deconstructive fashion, must one not
continue to recognize a certain necessity of his thinking, its character,
which is inaugural in so many respects, and especially what remains to
come for us in its deciphering?’ (Points, 183–184).

I.
What is at stake, then, in this explication, this ‘Auseinandersetzung’?
Derrida considered that in several key moments Heidegger’s thought
remained caught in the very metaphysics it attempted to overcome,
an interpretation that seems to capture Derrida’s general strategy with
respect to Heidegger: ‘despite this debt to Heidegger’s thought, or
rather because of it, I attempt to locate in Heidegger’s text . . . the
signs of belonging to metaphysics, or to what he calls onto-theology’
(Positions, 10). In particular, Heidegger’s determination of difference as
difference between being and beings, as ontico-ontological difference,
‘seems to me still held back in a strange way within metaphysics’
(Positions, 10, modified). In contrast, Derrida seeks to open a thought
of différance that ‘is no longer determined, in the language of the West,
as the difference between Being and beings’ (Positions, 9–10). While
marking his debt, Derrida thus also marks a distance with what he
considers to be Heidegger’s remaining caught in a certain metaphysics,
namely the metaphysics of presence, going so far as to state that, ‘I
sometimes have the feeling that the Heideggerian problematics is the
most ‘profound’ and ‘powerful’ defense of what I attempt to put into
question under the rubric of the thought of presence’ (Positions, 55).
This question of presence—and its deconstruction—is without a
doubt the veritable knot between Derrida and Heidegger, as Derrida
86 Oxford Literary Review

recognizes: ‘indeed, I found a knot there, which at bottom I have

always thought was there, whether rightly or not’ (HF, 346). From
that moment on, ‘an endless Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger
was engaged and set forth in all my texts’ (HF, 346). Is that
différend not apparent in the fact that for Derrida deconstruction
is above all the deconstruction of presence (despite what he says
about being a ‘metaphysician of presence’ and desiring ‘nothing more
than presence’), whereas for Heidegger Destruktion seeks to unveil
the original meaning of being as presence, Anwesenheit? Being, for
Heidegger, means presence. In Four Seminars, in the 1969 Thor
seminar, we thus read: ‘The previous session concluded with a
recollection upon how the question of being was first raised in Being
and Time. . . . [Heidegger] begins by naming the authentic name
of the method followed: ‘destruction’—this must be understood in
the strong sense as de-struere, ‘dis-mantling’ [‘Ab-bauen’], and not as
devastation. . . But what is dismantled? Answer: that which covers over
the meaning of being, the structures amassed upon one another that
make the meaning of being unrecognizable. . . Further, destruction
strives to free the original meaning of being. This original meaning
is presence [Anwesenheit]’.9
The question of presence is by no means the only différend between
Derrida and Heidegger. In the 1987 interview, Derrida gives a fairly
long, though not exhaustive, list of his places of contention with
Heidegger. They include: the ‘questions of the proper, the near
[proche], and the fatherland (Heimat) [patrie], the point of departure of
Being and Time, technics and science, animality, or sexual difference,
the voice, the hand, language, the “epoch”, and especially, this is
the subtitle of my book [Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question], the
question of the question, which is almost constantly privileged by
Heidegger as “the piety of thinking”’ (Points, 182). He then adds
regarding this list: ‘As regards these themes, my reading has always
been, let’s say, actively perplexed. I have indicated my reservations
in all my references to Heidegger, as far back as they go’ (Points,
182). As readers of Derrida reading Heidegger, we could add to that
list: Derrida’s questioning of Heidegger’s alleged anthropomorphism,
from ‘The Ends of Man’ to The Animal that Therefore I Am and The
Beast and the Sovereign, the hierarchies of Being and Time (such as the
subordination of regional ontologies to fundamental ontology or the
François Raffoul 87

distinction between existential analytic and biology and anthropology,

between existence and life), the motif of the ‘as such’ in the existential
analytic, the prioritization of death as some transcendental ground
of existence, a certain solipsism of the existential analysis excluding
the death of the other from its domain, the notions of ‘truth of
being’ and ‘ontological difference’, the privileging of the gathering
(Versammlung), which suppresses otherness, the problematic of truth
and truth-keeping, the unity of the history of being, etc. As Derrida
sums up, ‘So there we have a knot, a great number of knots’ (HF, 359).
With respect to the question of presence, and its deconstruction, let
us mention that the debate around the senses to give to deconstruction
constitutes one of the key knots in Derrida’s relation to Heidegger:
‘my endless debate with Heidegger concerns the meaning to be given to
“deconstruction”, the usage of this word. What concept corresponds to
this word? This is an endless explication’ (HF, 348). Let us recall here
that the very word déconstruction originated in a reading of Heidegger,
and more precisely as a translation of Heidegger’s Destruktion, as
Derrida recognized in the 1983 ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’. In that
text, Derrida begins by recalling how ‘deconstruction’ is already by
itself a problem of translation, and how even in the French language
itself, the word déconstruction mobilizes the question of translation
within one’s language (‘one should not begin by naively believing that
the word “deconstruction” corresponds in French to some clear and
univocal signification. There is already in “my” language a serious
[sombre] problem of translation’10 ), indeed already suggesting that
the term déconstruction is not a master-word or a transcendental
signified but always already caught in a ‘context’ and in a metonymic
chain of signifiers, enjoying no particular privilege there. ‘The word
“deconstruction”, like all other words, acquires its value only from
its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too
blithely called a “context”’.11 Thinking is translating, and translating
is circulating in the metonymical chain of signifiers. Derrida then
states how that term, déconstruction, was chosen as a translation of
Heidegger’s Destruktion: ‘When I chose this word, or when it imposed
itself upon me—I think it was in Of Grammatology—I little thought
it would be credited with such a central role in the discourse that
interested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate
and adopt to my own ends the Heideggerian word Destruktion or
88 Oxford Literary Review

Abbau’,12 ‘borrowing’ from Heidegger’s conceptuality, as it were, ‘the

stones that we throw against its own edifice’ (HQBH, 159). Curiously,
although he recognized that debt in the passage just cited from ‘Letter
to a Japanese Friend’ (1983), in his late interview with Janicaud,
Derrida no longer recalled exactly when he heard the term: ‘It makes
me sad, but I am not able to reconstitute this evolution and this
transformation for myself, in other words, the moment I arrived at
the schema of deconstruction (the word Destruktion, for example, I
don’t remember—but is my memory reliable?—having paid attention
to it thematically during those years). I think it is later. I wouldn’t
swear to it’ (Janicaud, 341). Heidegger had attempted (among other
places, in the 1955 essay, On the Question of Being) to articulate
the positive intent of the term Destruktion by appealing to the word
Ab-bau. He explained there that ‘the failure to reflect began already
with the superficial misconstrual of the “destruction” [“Destruktion”]
discussed in Being and Time (1927), a “destruction” that has no other
intent than to reattain the originary experiences of being belonging
to metaphysics by deconstructing [Abbau] representations that have
become commonplace and empty’.13 The French translator of that
essay (which appeared in French in 1968 in Questions I), Gérard
Granel, a close friend of Derrida since their years together at the École
Normale Supérieure, rendered Abbau (described as a dismantling or
a taking things apart, senses that would become central in Derrida’s
understanding of deconstruction as the opening of a différance, as gap
or as spacing) as Dé-construction.14 The term appeared in Derrida’s
writings at the same time, and it is highly probable that Derrida
discovered or rediscovered the term in his friend’s translation.15 The
term déconstruction thus first entered the intellectual world in France as
a translation of Heidegger.
Derrida explains in the 1983 letter that he chose the word
déconstruction—or ‘when it imposed itself upon me’—in order to avoid
the negative connotation of the term destruction to render Destruktion.
Now, in his 1964–1965 course, Heidegger: The Question of Being and
History, Derrida did translate Destruktion by the French destruction,
but he already gave the following indications on how one should
hear that term. ‘As to this notion of destruction, a few remarks are
necessary. (1) Destruction does not mean annihilation, annulment,
rejection into the outer darkness of philosophical meaning. It does
François Raffoul 89

not even mean critique or contestation or refutation within a theory of

the knowledge of Being. The point is not to say that all the thinkers
of the tradition were wrong or committed an unfortunate error that
would need to be corrected’ (HQBH, 2). Heideggerian destruction,
he continues, is ‘neither the critique of some error, nor the simply
negative exclusion of some past of philosophy’. Said positively, the term
déconstruction appears: ‘It is a destruction—that is, a deconstruction,
a de-structuration, the shaking that is necessary to bring out the
structures, the strata, the system of sedimentations (HQBH, 9, tr.
modified) [C’est une destruction, c’est-à-dire une déconstruction, c’est-
à-dire une dé-structuration, c’est-à-dire l’ébranlement qui est nécessaire
pour faire apparaître les structures, les strates, le système des dépôts.].
And further: ‘Heidegger wants to destroy—that is, to deconstruct, de-
structure, shake (solicit), to bring out the thinking of being that is
hiding under the ontic sedimentations’ (HQBH, 18) [‘Heidegger veut
détruire, c’est-à-dire déconstruire, déstructurer, ébranler (solliciter) pour
faire apparaître la pensée de l’être qui se cache sous les dépôts ontiques’].
Destruktion is a putting into question, a shaking [une mise en branle], a
trembling, ‘a slight trembling of meaning that we must not overlook,
for the whole seriousness of the enterprise sums up in this its fragility
and its value’ (HQBH, 9). To deconstruct is to let tremble and see
what appears in this trembling.
The term déconstruction was is any case taken up by Derrida in his
own thought of différance, and if deconstruction has become identified
with the name and the thought of Jacques Derrida, its provenance
was decidedly Heideggerian. Let us briefly unfold the stakes and
history of this question. The term was first used, as is well known,
by Heidegger in paragraph 6 of Being and Time as the Destruktion
of the history of ontology. The necessity of such Destruktion lies in
the essential historicity of the being of Dasein, and of the question
of being itself, i.e., the fact that phenomenological ontology cannot
avoid its own historicity and must integrate a relation to history into
the determination of its method. Philosophy, as Nietzsche had insisted,
must become historical philosophizing: ‘everything has become: there
are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently,
what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with
it the virtue of modesty’.16 As if echoing that passage, Heidegger
characterized Destruktion as a ‘historical knowing’,17 and he always
90 Oxford Literary Review

approached Destruktion in its relation to history.18 In the 1962 lecture,

‘On Time and Being’, in the context of a reflection on the epochal
sending of being (Geschick des Seins), within the perspective of the
history of being, Heidegger still stressed this connection between
Destruktion and history, here understood as the history of being in its
epochal sendings: ‘The epochs cover each other in their succession so
that the original sending of being as presence (Anwesenheit) is more
and more obscured in different ways. Only the dismantling (Abbau)
of these obscuring covers—that is what is meant by “Destruktion”’
(GA 14, 13/9, modified). What is striking here is that Heidegger
approaches history as a force of expropriation, and Destruktion as a
counter-expropriative gesture.
To undertake the task of an elucidation of the meaning of being,
a destruction of an improper tradition is required, a destruction of
a ‘sclerotic tradition’, for Destruktion is above all for Heidegger a
destruction/deconstruction, a dismantling (Abbau) of an obscuring
tradition. ‘If the question of being is to achieve clarity regarding its
own history, a loosening of the sclerotic tradition and a dissolution
of the concealments produced by it is necessary. We understand this
task as the destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology
which is to be carried out along the guidelines of the question of being’.19
As the method of ontology, Destruktion means the reappropriative
dismantling of our tradition. Heidegger indeed stressed the positive
intent of Destruktion, which aimed at retrieving the original experiences
of being. Its negative or negating function, Heidegger admits, is
undeniable, but given its ‘positive aim’, the former is merely ‘tacit and
indirect’ (SZ, 23). Destruction is a positive reappropriation (positiven
Aneignung) of the forgotten sources of the tradition. As we saw above,
for Heidegger Destruktion seeks to unveil the original meaning of being
as Anwesenheit.
Now this is where Derrida seeks to introduce a break with
Heidegger. For what does deconstruction give access to? Not to some
original givenness of being, as Derrida believes Heidegger may have
‘hoped’, not to some transcendental signified escaping the play of
différance, but rather to an unsubstantial gap or spacing, to the a of
différance, that is, to a nothing, a trembling with no substantiality of
its own. With respect to this reference to origin, one may note here
in passing that Heidegger’s recognition of the facticity and historicity
François Raffoul 91

of the questioning in fine suggests a deconstruction of the very idea

of origin. As Heidegger puts it in the 1923 Summer lecture course,
Ontology: ‘facticity is what is originary (ursprünglich), and what is
already equiprimordially found in it is a multiplicity (Mehrfachheit)
of different movements and interpretations and objects’ (GA 63,
108–109/84).20 This would place Derrida much closer to Heidegger
(‘tout contre’) than it would seem. For Derrida, deconstruction does
not lead to something existing or subsisting outside the structure,
it is not the access to another domain, but simply the differential
gap or spacing of the construction, the delineation of the structure
itself, the lines of the construct. Jean-Luc Nancy elaborates on this
conception of deconstruction as spacing in Dis-Enclosure, stressing
that deconstruction ‘belongs to a construction as its law or its
proper schema: it does not come to it from elsewhere’.21 The
movement of deconstruction reveals ‘the disjointing and dismantling
[désajointement] of stones’ with the gaze directed ‘toward the void
(toward the no-thing [chose-rien]), their setting-apart’ (D, 11). As we
saw, Derrida also wrote of stones in the 1964–1965 course, indicating
that is a matter of ‘recognizing, in deconstruction, the structure of
its stones and its contours and its capstone’ (HQBH, 159). It is
in this sense, Derrida clarifies, that the ‘undoing, decomposing, and
desedimenting of structures. . . was not a negative operation. Rather
than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an “ensemble”
was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end’.22 Between or among
these elements, the différance of a dis-, deconstruction has no proper
and exhibits nothing but the construction itself in its own assembling
and inner disassembling. Deconstruction is ‘the operation consisting
in dis-assembling the elements that constitute it, in order to attempt to
discern, between [entre] these elements and as if behind them, set back
from the construction, that which made their assembly possible. . . ’
(D, 32, tr. modified). It is as if deconstruction came to pass ‘even
before construction, or during construction and at its very heart’ (D,
58). Deconstruction is the law of the construction, its logic, the ‘space
through which the con-struction is articulated (s’ajointe)’ (D, 44, tr.
modified), a sort of com-position as one speaks of a painting, which
is as much a dis-position. Any construction presupposes a gap within
it, and that gap draws the contours of the construct, while marking its
limits, its exposure to the void, and already its self-deconstruction. It is
92 Oxford Literary Review

such a void that calls for a deconstruction of the structure, and in turn
it is that void that deconstruction manifests. ‘But this deconstruction—
which will not be a retrocessive gesture, aimed at some sort of morning
light—henceforth belongs to the principle and plan of construction.
Deconstruction lies in its cement: it is in the hyphen, indeed it is of
that hyphen’ (D, 58).
To that extent, both construction and deconstruction are
undecidably the same, as Nancy suggests when he states that the ‘com-’
designates both construction and deconstruction ‘taken together’ (D,
48). One could thus propose the general law of any construction,
itself harboring the principle of a deconstruction: ‘the construction
in question, like any construction, according to the general law
of constructions, exposes itself, constitutively and in itself, to its
deconstruction’ (D, 48). We know that for Derrida deconstruction
must be understood first and foremost as a self-deconstruction. In
the ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, Derrida explains that deconstruction
is not the act of a subject, that instead, ‘Deconstruction takes place,
it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness,
or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs
itself [ça se déconstruit]’.23 This ‘ça se déconstruit’ signifies here that,
‘Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens
inside’.24 It deconstructs itself because the construction harbors a fault
or an aporia within it. It is such a void that calls for a deconstruction of
the structure, and in turn it is that void that deconstruction manifests.
This is why deconstruction is not a return to and appropriation of
some original element of being, but rather the mark of the improper
structure of any construct. Deconstruction thus will not lead to the
reappropriation of the proper.

II.
Very early on, Derrida had taken issue with what he considered to
be Heidegger’s privileging of the proper in the thinking of being.
Indeed, Derrida sought to break with the very distinction between
what is proper (eigentlich) and what is improper (uneigentlich), a
distinction that for him is metaphysical, as we read in ‘Ousia and
Grammē’: ‘it can be asked whether the single distinction—whatever
its restructuration and originality—between proper and im-proper
temporality, authentic, originary and nonoriginary, etc., is not itself a
François Raffoul 93

tributary of Hegelianism, of the idea of a “fall” into time’ (Margins, 35,

note 11). The very idea of a fall, from the originary to the derivative,
is a metaphysical motif: ‘Now, is not the opposition of the primordial
to the derivative still metaphysical? Is not the quest for an archia in
general, no matter with what precautions one surrounds the concept,
still the “essential” operation of metaphysics?’ (Margins, p. 63). Derrida
makes the claim that for Heidegger, ‘the Primordial, the authentic
are determined as the proper (eigentlich), that is, as the near (proper,
proprius), the present in the proximity of self-presence’ (Margins, 64,
n. 39), Derrida arguing that the value of proximity and propriety were
established at the very beginning of Being and Time, namely ‘in the
decision to ask the question of the meaning of Being on the basis of
an existential analytic of Dasein’ (Margins, 64, n. 39). The privilege
granted to the propriety and proximity of self-presence ‘can propagate
its movement to include all the concepts implying the value of the
“proper”’. Derrida then adds in parenthesis a list (not included in
the English translation) that includes all cognates of Eigentlichkeit in
Heidegger’s thought: ‘(Eigen, eigens, ereignen, Ereignis, eigentümlich,
Eignen, etc.)’ (ibid). The dominance of the motif of the proper in
Heidegger’s thinking can be found in the relation established between
being and the human Dasein, Derrida associating ‘the proper’ (le
propre) with ‘the near’ (le proche). Starting from the nearness of the
human being to being and the nearness of being to the human being
(‘one must be able to say that Being is what is near to man, and that
man is what is near Being’), Derrida then writes: ‘The near is the
proper; the proper is the nearest (prope, proprius). Man is the proper
of Being, which right near to him whispers in his ear; Being is the
proper of man, such is the truth that speaks, such is the proposition
which gives the there of the truth of Being and the truth of man’
(Margins, 133). Gesturing to an outside that would come to threaten
this circularity, Derrida suggests that it is that very ‘security of the near’
that ‘is trembling’ today, and it is its privilege that he seeks to destabilize
and undo.
This accounts for Derrida’s critical reading of ‘gathering’,
Versammlung, in Heidegger’s work, Derrida noting that ‘it is always
the gathering (Versammlung) that Heidegger privileges’.25 He describes
his opposition to Heidegger in this way: ‘As you know, deconstruction
owed a lot to Heidegger. . . Nevertheless, one of the recurrent critiques
94 Oxford Literary Review

or deconstructive questions I pose to Heidegger has to do with the

privilege Heidegger grants to what he calls “Versammlung”, gathering,
which is always more powerful than dissociation. I would say exactly
the opposite. . . Once you grant some privilege to gathering and not
to dissociating, then you leave no room for the radical otherness
of other, for the radical singularity of the other’.26 Counter to
Heidegger then, Derrida draws further the contrast in his interview
with Dominique Janicaud: ‘I am on the side of dislocation, of
dispersion, of dissemination. It would be unfair and a simplification
to say that Heidegger negates difference, dislocation, or dissemination:
one could have a reading of Heidegger that would show that
he does think dislocation. But there is a force that draws him
toward gathering, toward being near oneself. The difficulty is one
of knowing whether one can think Versammlung while including
in it, integrating and assimilating into it, the play of difference,
of dislocation, of dissociation, or whether it is only to the extent
that there is an irreducible risk of dispersion, of singularity, of
dissemination, that Versammlung can emerge’ (HF, 356). Counter
to Heidegger’s gathering, here ‘the stress is instead on the side of
alterity, of dissociation, of infinite distance, of dispersion, of the
incommensurable, of the impossible, and of “destinerrance”’. Derrida
opposes to gathering the opening to otherness: ‘I resist it in the name
of what no longer allows itself to be gathered—alas! Alas and no,
in fact, because the fact of resisting the gathering might be felt as a
distress, a sadness, a loss—dislocation, dissemination, the not being
at home, etc.—but it is also an opportunity. It is the opportunity of
an encounter, of justice, of a relation to absolute alterity’ (HF, 358).
The logic of gathering represents ‘a certain blindness to the other’, and
can become complicit with the ‘worst’ in terms of political expression,
whereas ‘the side of dissociation’ is ‘the best opportunity’.
Counter to Heidegger’s thinking of gathering, of the proper and
the near, Derrida insists on the motif of the inappropriable, on the
impossibility of appropriation and the primacy of expropriation. In On
Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida cites a passage from The Gravity
of Thought where Nancy wrote that existence ‘is the appropriation of
the inappropriable’.27 Derrida reads that expression by insisting on the
‘ex-scription’ revealed in it, that is, on what remains inappropriable in
appropriation (‘it thus inscribes the uninscribable in inscription itself,
François Raffoul 95

it exscribes’, On Touching, p. 298). Derrida names such expropriation

of the proper ‘exappropriation’, a neologism that designates the
‘interminable appropriation of an irreducible nonproper’ that limits
‘every and any appropriation process at the same time’.28 In ‘Politics
and Friendship’, Derrida also describes a ‘paradoxical ex-appropriation’
as ‘that movement of the proper expropriating itself through the
very process of appropriation’.29 Thus, the most proper sense of
existence is such ‘on the condition of remaining inappropriable, and
of remaining inappropriable in its appropriation’. On the condition,
then, as Nancy put it, of existence ‘having weight or weighing [faire
poids] at the heart of thought and in spite of thought’.30 Such is,
precisely, ‘the weight of a thought’: ‘The weight of a thought is quite
exactly the inappropriability of appropriation, or the impropriety of
the proper (proper to the proper, absolutely)’.31 From this thinking of
weight as mark of the inappropriable in existence, Derrida introduces
the motif of the impossible: ‘Another way of saying that “existence”,
“is”, “Being”, “is quite exactly”, are all names of the impossible and
of self-incompatibility’.32 Derrida will seek to collapse the proper into
the improper, the possible into the impossible, indeed attempt to show
how the possible is possible as im-possible.
We can follow such an attempt in Aporias, where Derrida discusses
the Heideggerian expression, ‘possibility of the impossible’ as it
intervenes in the definition of death in Being and Time: ‘Death is the
possibility of the pure and simple impossibility of Dasein’ (SZ, 250).
Derrida seeks to reinterpret that expression (and make it aporetic), in
a counter direction from Heidegger, in order to mark the primacy
of the improper, and of the inappropriable. In fact, Derrida claims
that the expression ‘possibility of the impossible’ should be read as the
indication of the presence of an expropriation, an Enteignis, within
Eigentlichkeit (A, 77). Seeking to reverse it towards the impossible,
Derrida argues that it is a matter ‘of knowing in which sense/direction
[sens] one reads the expression the possibility of impossibility’ (A, 77),
reminding the reader, following the polysemy of sens in French, that
the term should also be heard as ‘direction’. Hence, reversing the
direction, the expression ‘the possibility of the impossible’ becomes
‘the impossibility of the possible’, Derrida ultimately seeking to grasp
possibility as impossibility. For Heidegger, as we know, death is the
most proper possibility of Dasein; for Derrida, on the contrary, it is an
96 Oxford Literary Review

issue of leaning towards the impossible, that is, the improper and
expropriation. For, as Derrida argues, if the most extreme and most
proper possibility turns out to be the possibility of the impossible,
then we will have to say that expropriation always already inhabited
the proper, and that death becomes the least proper possibility: ‘If
death, the most proper possibility of Dasein, is the possibility of its
impossibility, death becomes the most improper possibility and the
most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticating one. From the most
originary inside of its possibility, the proper of Dasein becomes from
then on contaminated, parasited, and divided by the most improper’
(A, 77). When Heidegger speaks of the possibility of death ‘as that
of the impossibility of existence in general’ (als die der Unmöglichkeit
der Existenz überhaupt), Derrida understands this ‘as’ as revealing that
possibility is approached as impossibility, for this is ‘not only the
paradoxical possibility of a possibility of impossibility: it is possibility
as impossibility’ (A, 70). Now, to my knowledge, Heidegger never
speaks of possibility as impossibility. Rather, he speaks of death as
the possibility of the impossibility of existence in general. Heidegger
stressed that death is a possibility that ‘must not be weakened’, and
that ‘it must be understood as possibility, cultivated as possibility, and
endured as possibility in our relation to it’ (SZ, 261).33 Yet Derrida
evokes a disappearance of the possible in the impossible, explaining that
for Dasein, death ‘is both its most proper possibility and this same (most
proper) possibility as impossibility’, and is ‘hence, the least proper, I
would say’, although he immediately concedes: ‘but Heidegger never
says it like that’ (AP, 70).
This stress on the inappropriable and the impossible explains why
Derrida, although he certainly shares with Heidegger the conviction
that deconstruction has a positive or ‘affirmative’ sense,34 nonetheless
maintains that it is an ‘experience of the impossible’. The affirmative
sense of deconstruction must always be associated, says Derrida,
with ‘the privilege I constantly grant to aporetic thought’.35 In
Aporias, Derrida returned to the long history of the aporetic in
his own thinking: ‘I recalled that, for many years now, the old,
worn out Greek term aporia, this tired word of philosophy and
of logic, has often imposed itself upon me, and recently it has
done so even more often’.36 A few pages further (A, 15), Derrida
gives a long list of the ‘numerous instances’ where the theme
François Raffoul 97

of aporia has recurred in his own thinking, starting with ‘Ousia

and Grammē’ and the aporetics of time, the border as limit and
tracing, the margins of undecidability, the ‘so-called undecidable
quasi-concepts that are so many aporetic places of dislocation’,
the double-binds of Clang, the work of impossible mourning, the
invention of the other as impossible, the gift as impossible, and
all those phenomena that involve the impossible, beginning with
ethics, decision and responsibility. Deconstruction as such, Derrida
tells us, needs to be understood as aporetic thinking, and he still
evoked in a late text ‘all the aporias or the “impossibles” with which
deconstruction is concerned’.37 One of the senses of deconstruction,
as Derrida has conceived of it and practiced, has indeed been to
reveal the aporias inherent in philosophical systems. In Positions,
Derrida stressed that deconstruction consisted in accompanying
‘the internal, regulated play of philosophemes or epistememes by
making them slide—without mistreating them—to the point of their
nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure’ (Positions, 6), leading
them, as it were, to the place where they no longer work. This is
what Derrida clarifies in his later text on the secret, writing that,
‘deconstruction, without being anti-systematic, is on the contrary,
and nevertheless, not only a search for, but itself a consequence of,
the fact that the system is impossible’.38 In deconstruction, Derrida
explains, ‘it has been a question of showing that the system does
not work’ (TS, 4, my emphasis). Deconstruction reveals ‘a force of
dislocation, a limit in the totalization, a limit in the movement
of syllogistic synthesis’, a ‘certain dysfunction or “disadjustment”,
a certain incapacity to close the system. . . Basically, deconstruction
as I see it is an attempt to train the beam of analysis onto this
disjointing link’ (TS, 4). This is why, for Derrida, it is not a
question of reappropriating the proper of human existence and original
Dasein, and it is not a matter of a return to origins; rather, for him
deconstruction leads to the impossibility of the proper, to an aporia or
impossible.
Now, with respect to Derrida’s critique of Heidegger around the
privilege of the proper, we should note that Derrida has wavered
somewhat on this issue. Indeed, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, for
instance, Derrida recognizes that the Heideggerian thought of being as
event, as Ereignis, involves a certain expropriation. Going against the
98 Oxford Literary Review

grain, one must admit, of many of his own previous interpretations,

in which he tended to stress a privilege of the proper in Heidegger’s
work, here on the contrary Derrida claims that ‘the thought of Ereignis
in Heidegger would be turned not only toward the appropriation of
the proper [eigen] but toward a certain expropriation that Heidegger
himself names [Enteignis]’,39 recalling Heidegger’s own words in Das
Ereignis: ‘The expropriation points towards what is most proper to
the event’.40 Explicitly making the Heideggerian thought of the event
resonate with the experience of the inappropriable and the impossible,
Derrida writes: ‘the undergoing [l’épreuve] of the event, that which in
the undergoing or in the ordeal at once opens itself up to and resists
experience, is, it seems to me, a certain inappropriability of what comes
or happens [ce qui arrive]’ (PTT, 90, trans. slightly modified). Even
if Derrida recognizes that any event necessarily calls for a certain
appropriative reception, he insists on the fact that ‘there is no event
worthy of its name except insofar as this appropriation falters [échoue;
literally, fails, runs aground] at some border or frontier’ (PTT, 90).
There is thus an inappropriable in the happening of the event, and
Derrida recognizes its presence in Heidegger’s thought of being as
event, the belonging of Enteignis to Ereignis.
In fact, the inappropriable operates in Heidegger’s very under-
standing of Destruktion, and of the phenomenological method. As we
saw, Destruktion is a relation to an inappropriable (obscuring tradition,
concealment of being). Similarly, the concept of phenomenology,
insofar as it is defined by Heidegger as a ‘letting be seen’ (sehen
lassen), necessarily implies the withdrawal of the phenomenon. Indeed,
if the phenomenon was simply what is given and apparent, there
would be no need for phenomenology. ‘And it is precisely because
the phenomena are initially and for the most part not given
that phenomenology is needed’ (SZ, 36). This is why Heidegger
could write that the phenomenon, precisely as that which is to be
made phenomenologically visible, does not show itself, although this
inapparent nonetheless belongs to what shows itself, for Heidegger
also stresses that ‘“behind” the phenomena of phenomenology there
is essentially nothing’ (SZ, 36). What, then, is called a phenomenon
in a distinctive sense? What is the full, phenomenological concept
of the phenomenon? Here is Heidegger’s answer: ‘What is it that
phenomenology is to “let be seen”? What is it that is to be called a
François Raffoul 99

“phenomenon” in a distinctive sense? What is it that by its very essence

becomes the necessary theme when we indicate something explicitly?
Manifestly, it is something that does not show itself initially and for the
most part, something that is concealed [verborgen] in contrast to what
initially and for the most part does show itself. But at the same time it
is something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it
so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground’ (SZ, 35). The
entire phenomenological problematic (including Destruktion, which is
a key component of the phenomenological method) is thus rooted in
the concealment of being, in what Heidegger calls the forgetting of
being.
With respect to this forgetting, this concealment, let us recall that in
a seminar on the lecture ‘On Time and Being’, Heidegger distinguished
between the concealment proper to metaphysics (which ‘is the oblivion
of Being’41 ) and the concealment proper to Ereignis: ‘the concealment
which belongs to metaphysics as its limit must belong to Appropriation
[Ereignis] itself. That means that the withdrawal which characterized
metaphysics in the form of the oblivion of Being now shows itself as
the dimension of concealment itself’ (GA 14: 50/41). The difference
between the two concealments lies in whether the concealment itself
is. . . concealed or not. Whereas in metaphysics there is a forgetting
of the forgetting, since the withdrawal of being itself withdraws
(‘Metaphysics is the oblivion of Being, and that means the history
of the concealment and withdrawal of that which gives Being’, GA
14: 50/41), in the thinking of the truth of being such concealment
is meditated upon and remembered: ‘now this concealment does not
conceal itself. Rather, the attention of thinking is concerned with
it’ (GA 14: 50/41). Heidegger determines the thinking of being as
a remembering, which is itself to be understood paradoxically as a
standing in oblivion. Remembering is not the overcoming of oblivion,
but its guarding. There is thus a secret at the heart of the phenomenon.
This is why phenomenology, in its very essence, is a phenomenology of
what does not appear, a phenomenology of the inapparent, as Heidegger
put it in his last seminar in 1973: ‘Thus understood, phenomenology
is a path that leads away to come before. . . , and it lets that before
which it is led show itself. This phenomenology is a phenomenology
of the inapparent [eine Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren]’.42 In ‘The
Way to Language’, Heidegger would suggest that Ereignis is ‘the least
100 Oxford Literary Review

apparent’ of such inapparent: ‘Das Ereignis ist das Unscheinbarste des

Unscheinbaren—the least apparent of the inapparent’.43
As letting be seen, deconstructive phenomenology is hence a
wrestling with the secret of the inapparent, grappling with an
irreducible concealment and expropriation at the heart of the event
of being. Heidegger named this expropriation in his early courses,
‘ruinance’, which he characterized as ‘the movedness of factical life
which “actualizes itself” and “is” factical life in itself, as itself, for
itself, out of itself, and, in all this, against itself’.44 Life is a struggle
with and against itself, as it were at war with itself, a movement that
goes against itself. Life is further characterized by a constant moving-
away from itself (Abfallen), a constant fleeing away from itself, each
time differing from itself. Now, this falling away is ‘the ownmost
character of movement belonging to life’, and the expropriation
of ‘ruinance’ is thus the most ‘proper’ movement of life. In this
movement of falling away into ruins, life is opened to its own possibility
and becomes an issue for itself in an originary self-estrangement.
Destruktion in Heidegger’s sense manifests this struggle with such
expropriation and the concealment of phenomena, and manifests what
he called in his course on Plato’s Sophist ‘a constant struggle against
the tendency to cover over residing at the heart of Dasein’.45 This
betrays that Heidegger’s destructive phenomenology is a struggle with
expropriation, that it is, as it were, a negotiation with a secret, and
indeed perhaps an ‘experience of the impossible’, as Derrida attempted
to think it in his own ‘aporetic thinking’.
In fact, as Derrida had to admit, there is in Heidegger’s thinking
of being the presence of an irreducible expropriation. Each time and
throughout, one finds in Heidegger this motif of an exposure to an
inappropriable: in the ‘ruinance’ of factical life in the early writings
and lecture courses; in his definition in paragraph 7 of Being and Time
of the original phenomenon (that is, being) as that which does not
show itself in what shows itself; in the Uneigentlichkeit of existence and
the being-guilty of conscience; in the thrownness felt in moods and in
the weight of a responsibility assigned to an inappropriable facticity;
in an un-truth that is co-primordial with truth; in the concealment
that not only accompanies but is indeed harbored in unconcealment;
in the withdrawal in the sendings of being; and finally in the presence
of Enteignis within Ereignis. Indeed, the event of appropriation that
François Raffoul 101

Ereignis is said to designate includes eminently the expropriation of an

Enteignis, Heidegger explaining in On Time and Being: ‘Appropriating
makes manifest what is proper to it, that Appropriation withdraws
what is most fully its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought in
terms of Appropriating, this means: in that sense it expropriates itself of
itself. Expropriation [Enteignis] belongs to Appropriation [Ereignis] as
such. By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself—
rather it preserves what is its own’ (GA 14, 27–28/TB, 22–23, tr.
slightly modified). Heidegger shows that the belongingness to being,
to Ereignis, happens from a certain expropriative motion, as he stresses
the irreducible Enteignis at the heart of Ereignis. Corresponding to the
event of Ereignis means to be exposed to the expropriation that is its
‘heart’ (Innigkeit), to exist in a relation to the inappropriable. And it
may well be in this exposure to the inappropriable, in this ‘experience
of the impossible’, that Derrida is closest to Heidegger, tout contre
Heidegger.

Notes
1
Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David
Pettigrew (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), p. 347. Hereafter
cited as HF. In contrast, for what he knew about Derrida, Heidegger seemed
generally favorably inclined towards him, as we gather from two letters that he
wrote to Lucien Braun (the first from September 29, 1967 and the other from May
16, 1973), regarding the possibility of a meeting with Derrida, which Derrida had
encouraged. In the end, that meeting did not take place. On this missed encounter,
see Lucien Braun’s report in Penser à Strasbourg (Paris: Galilée, 2004), pp. 21–26,
as well as Walter Biemel’s comments in his 1999 interview with Janicaud where
he reports that Heidegger ‘followed’ Derrida and looked positively on his work
(‘Il suivait aussi Derrida et, à mon avis, il se réjouissait de voir cela’). Heidegger en
France, Volume II Entretiens (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), p. 41.
2
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 9.
3
Levinas stated that his work was ‘governed by a profound need to leave the climate
of that philosophy’. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), p. 4.
4
I owe this expression to Geoffrey Bennington, who, in ‘Derridabase’, would write
that ‘Derrida’s proximity to Heidegger implies an alterity that is more important
than in the case of any other thinker. Derrida is right up against [tout contre]
102 Oxford Literary Review

Heidegger’. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans.

Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.
276.
5
Jacques Derrida. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, Il: Chicago
University Press, 1982), p. 62, note 37, tr. modified.
6
In 1948, when he was eighteen years old, under the tutelage of his hypokhâgne
teacher, Jan Czarnecki, he wrote an essay for a philosophy club named ‘Cogito
club’. In it, he complained about Heidegger’s ‘noisy, pretentious and heavy
dialectic’, which was ‘disappointing and even sometimes grating’. He mentions
that the ‘crowd of neologisms of which a good part are superfluous, this reverse
preciosity, consists in leadening and complicating his language, as if for fun, and
in giving the most everyday, the simplest thoughts an appearance of profundity’.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Martin Heidegger’, Irvine, 2.40, sheet 1. Cited in Edward Baring.
The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1956–1968 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), p. 73.
7
Jacques Derrida. Heidegger. The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). Hereafter cited
as HQBH.
8
Jacques Derrida. Points. . . Interviews, 1974–1995, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 182, tr. modified.
9
Martin Heidegger, Seminare, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1981), GA 15, p. 337. Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and
François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 42. Hereafter
cited as FS, followed by page number.
10
Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and Différance, eds.
David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1988), p. 1.
11
‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and Différance, p. 4.
12
‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and Différance, p. 1.
13
Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1976), GA 9, p. 417. Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 315.
14
Martin Heidegger. ‘Contribution à la question de l’être (1955)’, in Questions I
(Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 240.
15
As Françoise Dastur observes, ‘If in Being and Time it is a question of Destruktion,
the term abbau, ‘deconstruction’, which is also present in Husserl, appears on page
315 in Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Question of Being’. . . where Derrida probably
found it.’ ‘The Reception and Non-Reception of Heidegger in France’, in French
François Raffoul 103

Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception, edited by David Pettigrew

and François Raffoul (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), p. 288, note 26.
16
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, ed. Richard
Schacht, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
p. 13.
17
In 1922, Heidegger had characterized Destruktion ‘in a radical sense’ as
‘“historical” knowing [‘historisches’ Erkennen]’, evoking the ‘deconstructive
debate [destructive Auseinandersetzung] with its own history [Geschichte]’.
Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu
Ontologie und Logik. Ed. Günther Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
2005), GA 62, p. 368. Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle:
An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation, trans. John van Buren, in Supplements:
From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (State
University of New York Press, 2002), p. 124.
18
On this connection, see William McNeill, ‘The Quiet Force of the Possible:
From Destruktion to the History of Being’, In The Fate of Phenomenology.
Heidegger’s Legacy (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020),
pp. 103–115.
19
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
1953), p. 22. I draw from both extant English translations: Being and Time, trans.
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), and Being and
Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2010). Hereafter cited as SZ, followed by the German pagination
of the seventh edition.
20
This reference to multiplicity should be put in resonance with later texts from
Heidegger where he stresses the irreducible multiplicity and polysemy of thought.
He for instance explains in What is Called Thinking that ‘there is no universal
schema which could be applied mechanically to the interpretation of the writings
of thinkers, or even to a single work of a single thinker. A dialogue of Plato—
the Phaedrus for example, the conversation on Beauty—can be interpreted in
totally different spheres and respects, according to totally different implications and
problematics. This multiplicity of possible interpretations does not discredit the
rigor of the thought content. For all true thought remains open to more than one
interpretation and this by reason of its nature. Nor is this multiplicity of possible
interpretations merely the residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity
which we properly ought to strive for but did not attain. Rather, multiplicity of
meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be rigorous
thought.’ Martin Heidegger. Was heißt Denken? (1951–2), ed. Paola-Ludovika
104 Oxford Literary Review

Coriando (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), GA 8, p. 75. What

Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper
& Row, 1968), p. 71, tr. modified. Such multiplicity is according to Heidegger
the very element of thought, just as ‘to a fish, the depths and expanses of its
waters, the currents and quiet pools, warm and cold layers are the element of its
multiple mobility.’ GA 8, 75/71. On this question, see my ‘Sexual Difference and
Gathering in Geschlecht III’, in Philosophy Today, Volume 64, Issue 2, ‘Reading
Derrida’s Geschlecht III: Responses to an Archival Discovery’, Guest Editors: Katie
Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo, Spring 2020.
21
Jean-Luc Nancy. Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina
Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008), p. 44. Hereafter cited as D, followed by page number.
22
‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and Différance, p. 3.
23
‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and Différance, p. 4, tr. slightly modified.
24
Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. Jack Caputo
(NY, NY: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 9.
25
Jacques Derrida. ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, in Psyche, Invention of the
Other, Volume 2, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 50.
26
Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 14. Françoise Dastur sees in this reading the sign
of Derrida’s proximity with the Levinasian thinking of the other, of transcendence
and separation. ‘It is quite evident, as was already pointed out, that Derrida asks
his questions from a site which is his site and which situates him in this period
at a greater distance from Heidegger than before. It can be said that the thinking
of the alterity of the other progressively became more and more important in his
work, so that in the last years of his life he seemed to stay in a great proximity to
the Levinassian “metaphysics of separation”. This explains why Derrida questions
the privilege given by Heidegger to the notion of Versammlung, assembling or
gathering. The debate which opposes Derrida to Heidegger is clearly a debate
between a writer of dissemination and a thinker of gathering so that the privilege
granted by Heidegger to unity is constantly suspected by Derrida in his texts
on Geschlecht. ‘Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’, in Interpreting Heidegger. Critical
Essays, ed. Daniel Dahlstrom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
p. 291.
27
Jacques Derrida. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizzary
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 299. See also Jean-Luc Nancy.
The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 81–82.
François Raffoul 105
28
Jacques Derrida. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, pp. 181–82.
29
Jacques Derrida. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 171.
30
Cited in Jacques Derrida. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, p. 299.
31
Cited in Jacques Derrida. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, p. 299.
32
Jacques Derrida. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, p. 299.
33
Further, in our coming near death in its anticipation, one does not come near
the actuality of death, but its possibility, a ‘possibility of the possible [that] only
becomes greater’. SZ, 262.
34
Derrida clarified this affirmative sense in 2004 interview with L’Humanité,
in terms of an openness toward what comes: ‘A slogan, nonetheless [of
deconstruction]: being open to what comes, to the to-come, to the other.’ (Un
mot d’ordre, cependant : être ouvert à ce qui vient, à l’à-venir, à l’autre).
https://www.humanite.fr/node/299140. My translation.
35
Jacques Derrida. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 174, note 3.
36
Jacques Derrida. Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1993), pp.12–13. Hereafter cited as A, followed by the page number.
37
Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow. . . , trans. Jeff Fort
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 48, tr. modified
38
Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret, eds. G. Donis and D.
Webb (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4, my emphasis. Hereafter cited as TS,
followed by page number.
39
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.
90. Hereafter cited as PTT, followed by page number.
40
Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 2009), GA 71, p. 150. The Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 129.
41
Martin Heidegger. Zur Sache des Denkens, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1962), GA 14, p. 50. On Time and Being, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 41, my emphasis.
42
GA 15, 399/FS, 80. Let us recall here that for Derrida, différance does not appear:
‘What am I to do in order to speak of the a of différance? It goes without saying
that it cannot be exposed. One can expose only that which at a certain moment
can become present, manifest, that which can be shown, presented as something
present, a being-present in its truth, in the truth of a present or the presence of
106 Oxford Literary Review

the present’. Margins, pp. 5–6. Différance, concludes Derrida, ‘is never presented
as such’. Margins, pp. 5–6.
43
Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klosterman, 1985), GA 12, p. 247. The English translation has: Ereignis
‘is itself the most inconspicuous of inconspicuous phenomena’. On the Way to
Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 128.
44
Martin Heidegger. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in
die phänomenologische Forschung, eds. Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), GA 61, p. 87. Phenomenological
Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 98.
45
Martin Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes, ed. Ingeborg Schüßler (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1992), GA 19, p. 52. Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and
Andre Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 36–37.