The Spirit of the Time: Derrida’s Reading of Hegel in the 1964–65 Lecture Course

Author(s): Peter Gratton

Source: CR: The New Centennial Review , Vol. 15, No. 1, Derrida and French Hegelianism
(Spring 2015), pp. 49-66
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0049

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 The Spirit of the Time
Derrida’s Reading of Hegel in the 1964–65 Lecture Course

Peter Gratton
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada

If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the inter-
ruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève [aufgeben] wherever it operates.
What is at stake here is enormous.
—Jacques Derrida, Positions

Pure difference is not absolutely different (from nondifference). Hegel’s critique of

the concept of pure difference is for us here, doubtless, the most uncircumventable
theme. Hegel thought absolute difference, and showed that it can be pure only by
being impure.
—Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”

THE SPECTER THAT HAUNTS ALL OF DERRIDA’S WORK IS THE SPECTER OF

Hegel’s Geist. Derrida considered Hegel as summing up the Western onto-

theological tradition but also as someone whose dialectic would always al-

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 49–66. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

 49

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50  The Spirit of the Time

ready outflank any full-frontal confrontation with his logic, since any coun-
termove would only be sublated (relève) by the dialectic itself. Like Foucault
and other readers of Hyppolite, Derrida argues that to think Western meta-
physics to its end is to presume that one’s move of opposition or critique
would already be a moment in the Hegelian system, and thus any philosopher
after Hegel must work through the fantasy of absolute systematicity. Taking
up Derrida’s reception of Hegel means considering how one speaks to a ghost
that haunts all of twentieth-century French philosophy after Kojève’s lectures
of the 1930s. And like the ghost that, as Derrida noted in Specters of Marx
(1994), disrupts any coherence to questioning its presence or absence, its
identity or heterogeneity, and so on, the identity of the Hegel whose specter
haunts Derrida’s works is multiple: his earliest writings, including his 1964–65
lecture course, which will be the focus of this essay, target Kojève’s anthropo-
centric version of Hegel, disrupt the sovereignty and partial reading of Ba-
taille’s Hegel, and finally take on the view of Hegelian “whole” informed by his
engagement with Hyppolite, with whom he had an intellectually close profes-
sional relationship in the 1960s. While Bataille and Kojève read Hegel, as did
Sartre and others, through the master-slave dialectic, Derrida joins Hyppolite
in privileging his writings on logic and history, all as part of an overall move
toward the antihumanism for which the sixties generation became known
(Hyppolite 1997, 177–78). But more importantly, Hegel became the lens
through which Derrida understood his own reading of Heidegger—a figure, as
is well known, whose reception in France changed radically not least due to
Derrida’s own writings in the 1960s. While Derrida’s 1964–65 lecture course
Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’Histoire at the l’ENS-Ulm is largely dedi-
cated to Heidegger, it reveals how indebted “deconstruction,” a term used by
Derrida for the first time in these pages, is to thinking the relation between
Heideggerian “Destruktion” and Hegelian “Aufhebung.”1 In sum, deconstruc-
tion gets under way in Derrida’s thought by thinking the difference between
Hegelian and Heideggerian modes of thought—strikingly reading one in terms of
㛭 “The Ends of
the other throughout these lectures (and in “Ousia and Gramme,”
Man,” and other crucial early works). For Derrida, Hegel is not simply the
ultimate thinker of totalization and homogeneity—as, say, Jean-François Lyo-
tard would depict him in The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984, 33–34)—

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 Peter Gratton  51

but is also the tradition’s preeminent thinker of difference and relationality.

While of course the difference between difference and identity is sublated
under identity in the Hegelian logic, Derrida recognizes Hegel, as he put in
famously in Of Grammatology, as the last philosopher of the book and the first
thinker of writing. “The horizon of absolute knowledge,” Derrida writes, “is the
effacement of writing in the logos . . . the reappropriation of difference” (Der-
rida 1976, 26). Nevertheless, “all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all that
is except eschatology”—which Derrida’s thinking of finitude must reject for
reasons discussed below, since any eschatology is a determination of the
future from the present—“may be reread as a meditation on writing” (26).
Thus, “Hegel is also the thinker of absolute difference” (26). In what follows, I
proceed in three phases: first, I detail Derrida’s main project in the 1964–65
lecture course, first going through his reading of Heidegger, then describing
how he follows on the heels of Heidegger’s own rendering of Hegel. Second, I
note the ways in which this Hegel becomes the term of art in Derrida’s early
and later writings for onto-theology, and the most thorough one at that. But
last, I move away from this early lecture course to discuss how Derrida dis-
places a certain Heideggerian version of Hegel, one who is too often only a
thinker of totality and presence. In this last section, I discuss how Derrida
reads through Hegel a thinking of time not subsumed under presence, one
that a reading of the Heideggerian type disallows, and that then places Hegel
as the hinge figure between (absolute) metaphysics and its yonder—a thinker,
yes, of totality (the book) but also of difference and dissemination, that is, a
thinker of writing and the trace.
Given at the time in which he was writing Of Grammatology (published in
1967), one can read through the 1964–65 lectures contemporary arguments
over the legacies of the three H’s (Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger), arguments
that are largely left in the background when Of Grammatology is published two
years later. The deep readings of the three on the meaning of history, the
question of the cloture of Western metaphysics, as well as their mutual inter-
relation are generally left aside and taken for granted in that crucial book, and
before long one is deep in the weeds of Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, Sau-
ssure’s accounts of signification, and Rousseau’s dangerous supplement. Be-
ginning readers thus have to rely on the introduction of Gayatri Spivak in the

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52  The Spirit of the Time

English edition to paint just some of the background out of which Derrida’s
text is intervening. That Derrida at one point before 1967 considered publish-
ing the course (Janicaud 2001, 96) means perhaps a missed opportunity in the
reception of his work, since what was at stake in Of Grammatology and the
other works of 1967, Voice and Phenomenon and Writing and Difference, was
less the enunciation of a theory of texts, that is, a “literary theory” in the most
reduced sense, than an attempt to tease out central questions relating to
Heidegger’s task of a Destruktion of the history of ontology (with an emphasis
and interrogation of each one of these terms). This history of ontology is first
and foremost represented and offered by Hegel. I’m not denying the impor-
tance of semiology in Derrida’s early writings and teachings, but this part of
his thinking arose by critiquing those moves within structuralism and others
to remove from a given historicity a transcendental signified their works
should otherwise have disallowed, a move in these lectures he identifies also
as the metaphysical attempts of Hegel and Husserl to find an ahistorical
signified beyond temporalization and the structure of the trace (Derrida 2013,
226–27). What he aims to show is that Hegel’s eschatology is a move to a
presence that itself must be absolved from the movement of the dialectic and
historicity. “Every ontology,” Derrida writes, “has implicitly chosen as its guide
such and such a type of being without making its choice a theme or a prob-
lem,” including at times, Hegel’s (Derrida 2013, 123). Derrida’s early reception
in literary theory took up just one thread of a multifaceted trajectory, leaving
to the side his rereadings of classical questions concerning the meaning of
Being and the question of history that are central to his 1960s work (Gratton
2014, 201–15)—and deriving from Heidegger’s project of thinking Being as
time and Hegel’s attempt to think irreducible difference.
Given during his first year as caïman at l’ENS-Ulm beginning November 16,
1964 and ending nine classes later on March 29, 1965, Heidegger: la question de
l’Être et l’Histoire is important for considering the Derridean reception of
Hegel for at least four reasons: 1) Hegel and Heidegger’s writings had been
largely taken up within France—Hyppolite’s focus on the Logos and sense
notwithstanding—in terms of a vague anthropology on loan from selective
readings of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Being and Time, and Derrida’s
lectures look to sever Hegel and Heidegger from the violent readings of Kojève,

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 Peter Gratton  53

Sartre, and others (Derrida 2013, 283–84). 2) Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927)
suffered from an intermittent and incomplete set of translations since its
publication, which had its own mark on Heidegger’s reception in France.
Derrida’s lectures, during which he translated many German passages him-
self, aimed in part to re-introduce Heidegger to the French academy, reorient-
ing Heidegger studies away from the grips of existentialist renderings (e.g.,
Derrida spends little time on Dasein’s care structure from Division I of Sein
und Zeit) toward Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of ontology and its
relation to the German Idealism represented by Hegel. Derrida will refuse as
misreadings attempts to create a mélange of Hegel and Heidegger in the
manner of Kojève and Sartre that only manages to repeat the dogmatic meta-
physical gestures critiqued by both Hegel and Heidegger (e.g., Derrida 2013,
139). 3) In light of his Destruktion of the history of ontology, Heidegger’s
reading of Hegel will be—both in the course and for the purposes of this
essay—crucial. It is certainly true that at times Hegel becomes in Derrida the
proper name for metaphysics tout court, and that the mere mention of his
name, say, in proximity to a discussion of Husserl is enough for the reader to
understand that Husserl was implicated in a metaphysics he presumed he had
surpassed (Derrida 2013, 20). This is also a maneuver he reproduces through-
out his career, for example, in aligning Heidegger to a certain Hegelianism,
such as from the very title forward in Of Spirit (1989). Yet we see through the
lectures and other early writings how he shifts crucial ways of receiving
Hegel’s writings on history. 4) Finally, we should note the politics of the ENS in
the mid-sixties. Althusser and his followers were returning to Spinoza to think
a Marxism unallied to the “power of the negative” found in the supposed
Hegelianism of Marx’s early writings—this matching a supposed “anti-
Hegelianism,” however ambiguous, of much 1960s French philosophy. In
striking passages, while not mentioning Althusser, Derrida argues that to
understand Marx’s work on labor, for example, one must return and reread
Hegel critically on precisely these points—not dismiss him (Derrida 2013,
286–88). Derrida’s long engagements with Hegel—he is either the subject of or
cited heavily in just about every essay Derrida published in the 1960s—show
the import of Hegelian negativity for deconstruction, however much that
went against a certain spirit of the time.

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54  The Spirit of the Time

On the other hand, Derrida sets out to displace—one can think of Sartre’s
later work here in the Critique of Dialectic Reason—those who took Hegelian
totalization as providing a concrete telos to history the left should be looking
for. Against these supposed radical political programs, Derrida’s course
makes clear his view that the most radical dis-assembling of the history of
ontology and the latter-day politics to which it gave rise springs not from
reinvigorating a moribund Marxism or to dismiss dialectic and difference in
toto to interpolate class apparatuses. For Derrida, all the key terms thrown
around in that era, from “materialism” to “structure” to “metaphysics” to
“history” to “totalization” and so on, are to be rethought by way of a long
engagement and deconstruction of the Heideggerian Hegel (and vice versa).
Of course, much of the lectures are given over to step-by-step analyses of
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, as well as ancillary writings up to the time in which
Derrida was lecturing. Derrida’s approach is to concentrate on those passages
in Heidegger that call for a rethinking of history and for reopening the ques-
tion of being—along with those passages that portend the foreclosure of a
once-promised third division. His reading of Heidegger is, for the most part,
sympathetic, and all of his important later readings of Heidegger, such as in
㛭 Of Spirit, and Aporias, among numerous other places,
“Ousia and Gramme,”
are set up here. Yet the text begins with a consideration of what “refutation”
means in light of taking up the legacy of a given thinker, especially as it
pertains to the writings of Hegel, given the work of Aufheben, which neither
refutes nor simply abandons any term or idea. That is, he is thinking of
Heidegger’s relation to the metaphysics represented by Hegel, noting that
neither simply affirming nor abandoning a term, as in Hegel, is of absolute
proximity to the Destruktion of the history of ontology in Heidegger’s work,
which must take on, in both senses of the phrase, a given conceptual legacy—
neither refuting metaphysics nor simply standing in opposition to it. For
Derrida, it is Hegel who sets up Heidegger’s discussions of the end of the West
and so on: “The philosophy of Hegel as last philosophy has been the philoso-
phy that has thought in itself the essence of the last philosophy in general, of
what the last would mean in philosophy” (Derrida 2013, 28), which is why
Hegel is invoked, Derrida argues, from the very first paragraph of Heidegger’s
magnum opus to its last pages. And it is why Hegel himself cannot be sublated

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 Peter Gratton  55

toward a “beyond” of metaphysics, to another last figure, not least since for
Derrida Hegel is the thinker of history and thus what any “beyond” would
mean. Rather Heidegger must, as the preface to Being and Time makes clear,
maintain a movement that neither strictly repeats Hegelianism nor leaves it
unscathed, producing a “trembling” that “says nothing else after the Hegelian,
that is to say, Occidental ontology that it is going to destroy. . . . [Heidegger]
does not propose another ontology, another theme, another metaphysics”—
here we read Derrida’s scathing criticisms of a whole generation of writing on
Heidegger, in France and beyond—“Heideggerian destruction is neither a
criticism of an error nor simply the negative exclusion of the past of philoso-
phy. It’s a destruction, that is to say, a deconstruction [c’est-à-dire, une décon-
struction], that is to say, de-structuration . . . in order to bring forth [Occiden-
tal ontology’s] structures, strata, and its system of sedimentation” (Derrida
2013, 34). Here in his first recorded use of this now historic term, Derrida links
“deconstruction” to a consideration of the “nothing” that Heidegger adds to
Hegel, arguing that it’s in the “difference between” the two that the questions
of the seminar take shape (30). For Derrida, Heidegger, while saying nothing
other than Hegel, will nevertheless have produced a “radical affirmation of an
essential link between being and history” (30). Of course, history as such was
never better formulated than in Hegel’s lectures on the topic, and no one
would deny that the epochality of Heidegger’s own history of ontology owes
much to Hegel’s own historicization (and eschatology) of philosophical
method. But Derrida will argue in the lectures that Hegel, like Husserl after
him, attempts to think absolute historicity while himself forcing a pivot out of
the stream of history to an eternal stance—a classical metaphysical move:

Ontology has always been constituted by a gesture of extraction [arrachement] from

historicity and from temporality, even for Hegel for whom the history of the manifes-
tation of an absolute and eternal concept, of a divine subjectivity which, in its origin
and in its end, appears to totalize infinitely its historicity, that is to say, live in the total
presence of being with itself, that is to say, in non-historicity. (Derrida 2013, 50)

Where Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit teases out the relation between Being and
history, Hegel’s mediation of both in terms of the concept means that he

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56  The Spirit of the Time

“ultimately reduces the thought of being to the concept of being” and his
Idealism “determines the whole of being as free subjectivity (founded on
Cartesianism) and the volition of volition [volonté de la volonté]” (Derrida
2013, 47). For Heidegger, despite all manner of complications, these both
follow from Hegel’s elucidation of time as the “negation of the negation” in
Philosophy of Nature, part 2 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
(Hegel 2004, 34), as well as his view that “Hegel’s conception of time presents
the most radical way in which the ordinary understanding of time has been
given form conceptually,” and this thinking of time informs both his and
Derrida’s readings (Heidegger 1962, 482).
In § 82 of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger sets out to demonstrate that Hegel’s
view of time follows from the “vulgar” view on loan from a tradition dating at
least to Aristotle. But also true to Aristotle’s treatment of time, found in the
Physics, Hegel’s analysis of time has its focus in the philosophy of nature, a
crucial error, for Heidegger, since it will mean that Hegel cannot think of time
in terms of the ecstatic structure of Dasein, that is to say, he can only think
time in terms of the now points that have given us the ticktock of the not-so-
modern clock. The “negation of negation” of Hegel’s time means nothing
other than a “punctuality,” a spatialization of time in terms of a chain of
externally related “nows” that are “present to hand” (Heidegger 1962, 432). Put
more simply, the negation is the spatialization or separatedness of each now,
and the negation of the latter negation is the ordering of those now in a given
line. Hegel’s view of time would be precisely an abstraction—perhaps a repe-
tition of the very first abstraction that allowed concepts, as it were, to move
outside of time in the theoretical glance—from the ecstases of past and future
of the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Hegel writes: “Time, as the negative unity
of self-externality, is similarly an out-and-out abstract, ideal being. It is that
being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is not, is; it is purely
Becoming intuited [das angeschaute Werden]” (Hegel 2004, 34). But as purely
intuited, as the nonsensuous sensuous, “in its Notion, time itself is eter-
nal . . . absolute Presence . . . The Idea, spirit transcends time because it is
itself the Notion of time; it is eternal, in and for itself, and it is not dragged into
the time process because it does not lose itself in one side of the process” (37).
In this way, Hegel will, on Heidegger’s view, depict Spirit as “falling into time”

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 Peter Gratton  57

(Heidegger 1962, 428), therefore understanding Spirit as having an external

relation to time, even as that relation is said to be the relation of Spirit to itself.
Spirit becomes concrete and enters into the finite world only as it becomes
revealed as a process in time, which in turn is understood only in terms of a
“world-time” leveled-out and fallen from the temporality of Dasein’s being-in-
the-world. For Heidegger, Spirit does not fall into time and thus provide for
the concreteness of Dasein’s factical existence. Rather, Dasein itself is what
falls from primordiality into the public time that Hegel in turn reifies into the
time of nature in the second volume of the Encyclopaedia.
At key points in the 1964–65 lecture course, Derrida appears to repeat this
reading of Hegel, especially Heidegger’s view that Hegelianism is but a Carte-
sianism writ large. Heidegger is thus guilty of isolating but one moment in a
system that is itself an aufheben of another opposition, in some sense reifying
and abstracting a moment that is part of a developmental system—a reading
as one-sided as those that think all human relations in Hegel through the
master-slave dialectic. In short if we abstract one moment—however abstract
it calls itself, as Hegel does about time—we play into the (re)presentational
logic Heidegger is calling into question in the first place. “Metaphysics,” Der-
rida writes, “determines the world as an object and therefore as available
[disponible] for an action and a conception” (Derrida 2013, 200). In the lecture
course, Derrida leaves open whether there is a Hegel beyond the “literal and
conventional” (59), one who is not just the thinker of the nonhistorical becom-
ing of the Spirit to itself as absolute knowing and substance, of pure presence,
that is, the God of Hegel’s History lectures. In this way, Derrida will critique, as
he does Michel Henry (271), Husserl (among many places, 193), and at points
Heidegger as producing “Hegelian conclusions,” despite their supposed criti-
cisms, when they recommence his thinking of the self-present auto-affection
of the being for itself (268). This Hegelianism is nothing other than a synonym
for the metaphysics of presence, based on the supposition of a time beyond
time, of the ever presence of an eternity of which the passing “now” is but a
shadow. This thinking of presence allows Hegel to think the absolute avail-
ability of being since the past is always approachable only from the present—
and so too the future. Against this, Derrida’s whole thinking of the trace is
precisely of a past that can never be made present (Derrida 1982a, 21). Yet for

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58  The Spirit of the Time

Hegel, “there is only historicity inasmuch as the past and the origin can be
rendered present . . . Presence would be therefore the condition of historicity
and its form” (Derrida 2013, 211). This metaphysics of presence would be part
of a desire for seizing all, of all being available to Spirit, even its death. But,
“the certitude of the living present, as the absolute form of experience and
absolute source of meaning [sens], presupposes as such the neutralization
of my birth and my death. . . . The Present is by essence what could never
end. It is in-itself ahistorical” (214). Thus absolute knowing, as the telos of
Hegelian thought, would be a totalization that is less spatial than tempo-
ral—that is, an all-at-once in the eternal moment of absolute availability of
one and all, beyond or before all death, thus obliterating death in the first
and last moment of philosophy (224). “In spite of the immense Hegelian
revolution,” Derrida writes, “to think of death within the horizon of the
infinite and presence [la parousie] in an absolute fashion, which is pure
life” is a work that “sublimates death” (292).
What one could oppose to the presence of the now in time would be a
thinking based on its temporal modification, the eternal presence outside of
time of ahistoricity—a move familiar since Plato, which uses the inherent
contradictions of positing the now to oppose it to the eternity of pure presence
beyond time. But is there another course? What could one oppose to this false
option given by the metaphysics of presence, if the evidence of evidence, its
temporal mode, has always been a presence-to? What needs to be countered
to this self-evident temporal form, again this “evidence of evidence,” is not
“another form of evidence,” which could only be metaphysical, Derrida ar-
gues, but “historicity itself” (2013, 213). But this historicity would not be a
“becoming” (145), which itself would be a form of temporalization, suggesting
a continuity—say, in the form of a line—that can always be represented and is,
of course, the central moment in the Hegelian dialectic, since it is the very
form of movement from being to nothingness, from one thing to another. For
Derrida, one would have to think a historicity that would involve a past that
could not be made present—and also a future beyond the future present. Such
is the consideration of the trace structure of Derrida’s work from these lec-
tures to his last writings.

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 Peter Gratton  59

Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that
dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure
belongs to its structure [emphasis mine; we will see how Derrida reads this
through Hegel in a moment]. And only the erasure which must always able to
overtake it (without which it would not be a trace but an indestructible and
monumental substance), but also the erasure which constitutes it from the
outset as a trace. . . . The paradox of such a structure, in the language of
metaphysics, is an inversion of metaphysical concepts, which produces the
following effect: the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace.
(Derrida 1982a, 24)

In almost a “somnambulant style,” one could, Derrida warns, repeat a

“powerless” and “juvenile” style of aggression found too often with regard to
metaphysics and transcendental phenomenology. But this move, in which
one considers one’s “privilege” that one is in a Western epoch that is closing in
on itself and opening onto something else, is precisely “the Hegelian moment”
and gesture (Derrida 2013, 228). This would be Derrida’s critique of all consid-
erations of postmodernity, whose very name suggests one can posit oneself as
both within a given epoch (the modern, the metaphysical, and so on) and
erase that very historicity to think some beyond glimmering over the horizon
(231).
Soliciting Hegel would not seek merely to move aside his work and all that
it represents but would pay attention to those moments where Hegel unworks
the very systematicity for which he is the proper name—where his famed
“presuppositionless” is taken to its end to unground any metaphysical foun-
dation. To put it another way, to allow Hegel to be the last metaphysical
thinker, to assume his absolute systematicity that one is critiquing, is to give a
certain Hegel the final victory, a point, for example, that underlies Derrida’s
reading of Hegel’s early writings on Christianity and the family in Glas (1973).
One then merely represents oneself as an opponent that is outside a “whole”
that would be Hegelian thought, reifying what was supposed to be in conten-
tion, and thus one would make of Hegel merely a repeater of what has been
vulgar throughout the West, specifically its concept of time (Derrida 2013,
317–19). Beyond this vulgar Hegel is a reading of the Derridean type, one that,

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60  The Spirit of the Time

for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, who studied Hegel with Derrida, would find in
The Restlessness of the Negative while attuned to Hegel’s “infinite negativity of
the present,” and Catherine Malabou (1996), another student of Derrida, finds
in his notion of plasticity (Nancy 2002, 9).
It is precisely the question of vulgarity that Derrida takes up in “Ousia and
㛭 based, it’s clear, in large part on the lectures discussed above.
Gramme,”
Published first in 1968 and collected in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida’s essay
concentrates on the longest footnote in Sein und Zeit, from § 82, where
Heidegger encircles Hegel within a thinking of time going back to Aristotle.
㛭 is given over to a complex reading of Aristotle’s
Much of “Ousia and Gramme”
Physics (IV 10–14), as Derrida questions the distinction made by Heidegger
between a “vulgar” concept of time and a primordial temporality from which
it has fallen. In the vulgar concept of time, time comes as a repetition of nows as
Dasein is lost in its very concerns, in the “They” of everydayness. As he notes both
㛭 there can be no concept of the fall
in the lecture course and “Ousia and Gramme,”
outside an “ethico-theological orb” (Derrida 1982b, 45), but more to the point,
Derrida argues that any “concept of time belongs in all its aspects to meta-
physics [since] it names the domination of presence” (63), and for similar
reasons he will argue that he will not provide another ontology in the 1964–65
course but rather extend its deconstruction (Derrida 2013, 1–3). The target of
Derrida’s reading is less concerned with Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle than
Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, whom Heidegger had said merely repeated and
“paraphrased” Aristotle’s vulgarism of time—thus opening Heidegger up for a
critique of his notion of primordial time as well as what it means to read Hegel
differentially. Citing key passages from Hegel in the longest footnotes in “Ousia
㛭 Derrida notes that one can both “confirm” and “challenge” the
and Gramme,”
interpretation of Hegel in Sein und Zeit.
Derrida writes that Heidegger’s reading is based only on Hegel’s philoso-
phy of nature, as if that view of time could pass “unchanged into a ‘philosophy
of spirit’ or into a ‘philosophy of history’” (1982b, 46 n. 22). As Derrida notes—
in passages, admittedly, as opaque as any in his early writings, though filled in
now by relevant discussions in the lecture course—one can only do so by way
of a vulgar reading of Hegel himself: “time is also this passage” from nature to
history or spirit, since “time” is the “first relation of nature itself, the first

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 Peter Gratton  61

emergence of its for-itself, spirit relating itself to itself” (43), that is, time is the
self-externalization, on Hegel’s account, of any thing (say nature) from itself.
What Heidegger writes about Hegel’s view of time is “of limited pertinence due
to the relevant (cf. aufheben) structure of the relations between nature and
non-nature in speculative dialectics” (43). There is no simple nature and
therefore “time” (of nature) in Hegel, since “nature is outside spirit itself, as the
position of its proper being-outside itself” (43). Moreover, as the index of
exteriority as such, “at each stage of the negation, each time that the Aufhe-
bung produced the truth of the previous determination, time was requisite”
(42), even if Hegel were given, as he does in the Philosophy of Nature, to equate
the natural with time and the spiritual with the eternal in a Platonist trope
(Hegel 2004, 35). One cannot think, then, dialectics without the differential
structure of time and the trace.
Let me cite where Derrida both moves near and far from Heidegger’s
㛭
reading of Hegel in “Ousia and Gramme”:

Hegel calls the telos that puts movement in motion, and that orients becoming
toward itself, the absolute concept or subject. The transformation of parousia
in self-presence, and the transformation of the supreme being into a subject
thinking itself, does not interrupt the fundamental tradition of Aristotelian-
ism. The concept as absolute subjectivity itself thinks itself, is for itself and
near itself, has no exterior, and it assembles, erasing them, its time and its
difference in self-presence. (Derrida 1982b, 52)

In this way, Derrida writes in a footnote attached to the above, “if time has
a meaning in general, it is difficult to see how it could be extracted from
onto-theo-teleology” as in Hegel (53 n. 32). Because time means ultimately,
in metaphysics, its erasure, it “has been suppressed at the moment one
asks the question of its meaning, when one relates it to appearing, truth,
presence, or essence in general” (52, n. 32). If the meaning of time is its
presence outside of time—here, we can think in everyday terms of its
reducibility to a repeatable, eternal form: circle, line, point—then time is
only realized in its self-erasure; it can only be thought, that is brought
within the concept, as a “negative unity of self-externality.” As Hegel

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62  The Spirit of the Time

writes, “It is that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it
is not, is,” a “nonsensuous sensuousness,” and “empty intuition,” and so on
(Hegel 2004, 34). As Derrida rightly puts it, “The question asked at this
moment is that of time’s realization,” that is, time’s reality (or coming to
reality) outside a given concept, which can only be thought within a Hegelian
milieu, however, in which “being outside oneself,” for example, has any mean-
ing. Derrida continues: “Perhaps this is why there is no other possible answer
to the question or the meaning of Being of time [which had been, recall, the
entire project of Heidegger’s followed in Derrida’s 1964–65 lecture course]
than the one given at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit: time is that which
erases [tilgt] time” (Derrida 1982b, 53 n. 32). This erasure, though, is also a
“writing which gives time to be read, and maintains it in suppressing it” (53 n.
32). But by erasing time while writing it, the dialectic then, like the writing of
㛭 all the theology and
the trace in Derrida’s works, upsets any telos or arche,
teleology and all that a certain Hegel would be said to represent, even if, in the
end, time, differentiation, and the becoming-space of externalization that is
negativity itself could no longer be represented. Ultimately this marks a cru-
cial place of incursion by Derrida into Hyppolite’s rendering of Hegel. Recall
that for Hyppolite, Hegel’s key move is to render the absolute sensible—as
opposed, say, to Schelling’s prius, which must always be before intelligibility—
and also to claim that language is the very space of the Logos. This is a point
that Derrida makes central in the 1964–65 lectures, noting that both in Hegel
and Heidegger the coming to language of sense, of meaning, is the very place of
historicity, a point made by Hyppolite as well, and he weds Heidegger’s ac-
count of the “house of being” to Hegel’s account of the logos (Derrida 2013,
86–88), even if Heidegger himself reduces Hegel’s dialectic to a question of
presence to consciousness (222–23). Hyppolite writes:

The dialectical demonstration is intimately united to the reality that inter-

prets itself and reflects itself in meaningful language . . . Actuality understand-
ing itself and expressing itself as human language is what Hegel calls the
concept or sense already immanent to the being of absolute knowl-
edge. . . . Human language, the Logos, is this reflection of being into itself
which always leads back to being, which always closes back on itself indefi-

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 Peter Gratton  63

nitely, without ever positing or postulating a transcendence distinct from this

internal [read: to the system, not to an individual subject] reflection. (Hyppo-
lite 1997, 4)

In sum, then, “human language” is the “very medium of the dialectic”

(6), or as Derrida puts in his own reading of Hegel and Heidegger, “there is
no historicity without language” (Derrida 2013, 83). Hyppolite’s formula-
tion, of course, would be crucial to structuralism and poststructuralism to
follow, since historical instantiations of spirit and the sense of being are
productive of given forms of specific individual consciousnesses—against,
say, the voluntarist conceptions of Sartre—or rather, there is no language
without sense and vice versa (Hyppolite 1997, 21). Derrida’s intervention, at
this point, is to ask after the question of language and the privileging of the
presence of the speaking subject that is the linguistic analog of the privileging
of temporal presence, as Heidegger reads Hegel (Derrida 2013, 247, 320). If
language, as Derrida argues, is presuppositionless—without an outside guar-
antor, or transcendental signified—then one should wed this account to the
presuppositionlessness of Hegel’s dialectic, no longer present to an “outside”
of a given subject or eternal being. In this way, the dialectic becomes, as with
Saussurean semiology, a thinking of difference that is always related nega-
tively to every other moment of the system, a groundless ground trembling at
its nonexit from metaphysics, while testifying to its very limit. This means not
inventing, as Derrida makes clear in the 1964–65 lecture course and in “Ousia
㛭 another thinking of time, since “time” itself, as Hegel demon-
and Gramme,”
strates, only has a meaning “within” its self-differentiation from the trace of
metaphysical determinants that give it sense in the first place. Here we can
link, then, the erasure of time in the writing of Hegel to what Derrida describes
above as the writing and erasure of the trace: the absolute is the presence/
absence of the becoming-space of time (and vice versa), where writing is what
Jean-Luc Nancy calls excription (Nancy 2008, 17–19), a becoming and writing
of sense in the Derridean meaning of écriture not present to a given being (e.g.,
the human) and not precisely present in the temporal sense either. This is not
a “phantom of the ineffable,” as Hyppolite puts it, but the nonpresent logic of
différance tracing itself out in the thought of Derrida and Hegel. In this way, no

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64  The Spirit of the Time

system, even Hegel’s, can be presented “all-at-once,” here and now, and thus
available present to hand, as Heidegger wished to do. Thus it awaits its
invention and future beyond the Hegelian holisms of the oft-cited caricature.

NOTES

1. In his translation of Heidegger’s Destruktion, Derrida notes in the lectures his preference for
solliciter to translate this notion, derived from the Latin solus (whole) and ciere (to move) to
mean to make an entire thing tremble, as in the Western tradition read through his work.
See Derrida (1982a, 21; and 2013, 209).

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㛭
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66 

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