Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality:

Heidegger in Question 1st ed. 2022

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Challenging a
Fictitious Neutrality

Edited by
Luce Irigaray
Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality
 Luce Irigaray
Editor

Challenging a
Fictitious Neutrality
Heidegger in Question
Editor
Luce Irigaray
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.)
Paris, France

ISBN 978-3-030-93728-7    ISBN 978-3-030-93729-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93729-4

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 Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Emma Reed Jones, David Farell Krelll and Mahon
O’Brien for having entrusted to my care their reflections on how to chal-
lenge a fictitious neutrality from their reading of Heidegger. The thought
of Heidegger is really difficult to approach and to collaborate on such a
topic was not an easy task, all the more so since it concerns the heart of
his thinking: the status of Dasein. What is more, the matter was also to
detect what in his way of thinking has allowed Heidegger to commit
political mistakes. From that task most have shrunk back either by simply
rejecting Heidegger’s work as a whole or by remaining under its spell and
unable to distance themselves from it. Our want was thus to combine our
respect for a thinker who cannot be ignored with an accurate attention to
the aspects of his thought that must be criticized and overcome. Besides
these aspects often correspond to a sort of caricatural emergence of the
background which underlies almost all our tradition and even our own
way of thinking. Questioning Heidegger amounts to questioning a meta-
physical tradition to which we are heirs and which Heidegger himself
tried to leave, providing us with some elements which are helpful in
achieving a task that he was unable to accomplish in his own time. I hope
that our contributions will represent a further stage towards the comple-
tion of such an undertaking.

v
vi Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Emma, David and Mahon too for having devoted time
to reread the English version of my own texts.
Also I would like to thank Palgrave for welcoming the outcome of our
efforts and for having encouraged and supported them whatever the dif-
ficulty of the times we were all enduring.
 Contents


Introduction: Heidegger as an Exemplary Case  1
Luce Irigaray


The Destitution of Dasein 13
Mahon O’Brien

Against Neut(e)rality 73
David Farrell Krell

Heidegger Without Limits119

Emma Reed Jones


The Appropriation of Being161
Luce Irigaray

 Way of Epilogue: The Historical Task of Thinking207

By
Luce Irigaray

Index215

vii
 Notes on Contributors

Luce Irigaray is a retired director of research in Philosophy at the Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), Paris. A doctor in phi-
losophy—thesis: Speculum, The place of women in the history of philoso-
phy (Un. Vincennes, 1974)—Luce Irigaray is also doctor in linguistics
(with a thesis on The language of the demented persons (Un. Nanterre,
1968) and in philosophy and literature (with a thesis on Paul Valery (Un.
of Louvain, 1955). She is also trained in psychoanalysis and in yoga. Now
acknowledged as an influential thinker of our epoch, her work mainly
focuses on the elaboration of a culture of two subjects, masculine and
feminine—particularly through the constitution of a cultural feminine
subjectivity and the way of making possible an intersubjectivity respect-
ful of difference(s)—something she develops in a range of literary forms,
from the philosophical to the scientific, the political and the poetic. She
is the author of more than thirty books translated in various languages.
Her most recent publications include In the Beginning, She Was (2013),
To Be Born (2017) and Sharing the Fire (2019). Since 2003, Luce Irigaray
holds an annual one-week seminar for researchers doing their PhD on
her work, and she edited books gathering some of their first publica-
tions—cf. Luce Irigaray: Teaching (2008, co-edited with Mary Green),
Building a New World (2015, co-edited with Michael Marder), Towards a
New Human Being (2019, co-edited with Mahon O’Brien and Christos
Hadjioannou).
ix
x Notes on Contributors

Emma Reed Jones is a practicing psychotherapist in the San Francisco

Bay Area. She studied philosophy and literature at the New School for
Social Research before earning a Doctorate in philosophy from the
University of Oregon and a Masters in counseling psychology from the
California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the author of numerous
book chapters, and her articles have appeared in journals such as Epochē
and L’Esprit Créateur. Dr. Jones is also the author of a book on relational
ontology in the work of Luce Irigaray, forthcoming from Palgrave
Macmillan.
David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul
University, Chicago, and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of
German Studies at Brown University, Providence. His philosophical
work focuses on the areas of early Greek thought, German Romanticism
and Idealism, and contemporary European thought and literature. His
most recent scholarly books include The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter
(London: Bloomsbury, 2019), and The Cudgel and the Caress: Reflections
on Cruelty and Tenderness (SUNY Press, 2019). He has also published a
number of short stories and three novels.
Mahon O’Brien is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex,
UK. His work is largely concerned with issues in phenomenology, in
particular, the work of Martin Heidegger. He has published three books
on Heidegger: Heidegger and Authenticity: From Resoluteness to Releasement
(2011), Heidegger, History and the Holocaust (2015) and Heidegger’s Life
and Thought: A Tarnished Legacy (2020). He is also interested in the his-
tory of philosophy more broadly and has published papers on Irigaray
and Plato. In 2019 O’Brien co-edited a volume of essays with Luce
Irigaray and Christos Hadjioannou—Towards a New Human Being.
 Introduction: Heidegger
as an Exemplary Case
Luce Irigaray

To perceive the meaning of Heidegger’s thought, it is suitable to situate it

in the context of our philosophical tradition, which, moreover, represents
his main concern. Three aspects of the western way of conceiving of phi-
losophy are particularly important to approach his work: the question of
origin, the elaboration of the world and the definition and status of each
of the elements which compose the world as a whole, and the situation of
human being in the world.
It is surprising that western philosophy does not acknowledge our ori-
gin as the result of a conjunction between two different living beings.
There is thus an original denial of reality, and of truth, in our way of
thinking. From the beginning, the background of our reasoning, our eval-
uation of truth, our logos and conception of logic is founded on a con-
struction, mainly by man, that does not take the real into account. All is
reduced to one and only, presumably universal, subjectivity, one and only
world, one and only discourse. A sort of basic contradiction between our
origin as living and what ought to correspond to our spiritual and truly

L. Irigaray (*)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), Paris, France

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

L. Irigaray (ed.), Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93729-4_1
2 L. Irigaray

human being underlies what we say, what we think, even what we are. In
order to enter the cultural universe, we ought to give ourselves up as living
and become a man-made product dependent on means and rules of pro-
duction which do not amount to our real identity. From the beginning,
we ought to leave our natural belonging and its potential for growing and
moving, for building a world, for expressing itself and thinking, as well as
for entering into relation in order to submit it to norms, which are in large
part extraneous to it and are imposed on us from an outside, that con-
strain us to surmount, and finally forget, the original being which is our
own. Then we wander as artificial beings in an artificial world and with an
artificial language waiting for the revelation of our own truth, our own
energy and becoming from something or someone external to ourselves:
our parents, our masters, our God, our environment, our past culture and
so on. Instead of remaining rooted in a genesis which amounts to a
dynamic process, which we must assume and make blossom as a specific
living fruit, we ought to accept becoming a sort of fabricated product, put
in the neuter as such, and thrown into a world to which we ought to be
open in order to receive from it the/our truth, even if it is historically pro-
visional. No doubt we ought to make this truth more authentic. But is it
not from a mode of being which prevents us from doing that?
We could wonder whether ‘Being’—the English translation of the
German Sein—does not represent a sort of projection or substitute
regarding our unrecognized origin as a conjunction between two differ-
ent living beings. The appropriation by only one of this origin, which
arises from two, has at least two effects: the necessity of putting ‘Being’ in
a fictitious neuter which makes it difficult to interpret its meaning and its
quite magical character and potential due to the fact that it conceals a
difference and capitalizes an energy which does not belong to one alone.
In reality, ‘Being’ concentrates in itself various meanings and questions,
which makes it incomprehensible, all the more so since the initial capital
letter removes, from this word, the dynamic potential of a verb, which
exists with ‘Sein’ and could exist in ‘being’ but not in ‘Being’. Is not the
reader of the English translation of Heidegger confronted with a general
substantivization of the verb ‘Sein’—to be—which thwarts the Heidegger’s
will to surmount past metaphysics? The impact of Being on any being, in
particular on our being as human, is also to reduce it to a made product
 Introduction: Heidegger as an Exemplary Case 3

instead of leaving it to its living destiny. As such, our presence could cor-
respond to the fullness of our being even if it is partial as human and calls
for being united with the other(s), in particular the other(s) different
from itself by nature—its heteros. as the early Greek would say. Then to
be present does not entail being also absent, as Heidegger maintains, but
to be a particular being, a living and sexuate being which needs to be
conjoined with its other in order to ensure the motion of its becoming
towards its accomplishment.
The composition of the world as a whole is also a crucial question in
the work of Heidegger, as it is from the beginning of western philosophy.
But he, as is the case with most philosophers, little wonders about the
origin of this whole. What is the principle which governs the formation
of such a whole? What is the status of the elements which compose this
whole? How does the relation of interdependence between the whole and
the elements function? And such a relation between the elements them-
selves? Is the whole governed by a One under the authority of which the
elements are organized in a hierarchical way or is it the result of a link
between the elements themselves? What sort of bond connects the ele-
ments which compose the whole? Have we to deal with a parataxis, a
synapsis, a conjunction, a syntax? What logic governs the way elements
relate to/with one another? Is it sameness or difference which acts as the
most decisive assumption? And how is it assessed? In relation to a One
which dominates the whole or according to the way in which the various
elements can relate to/with one another? Is difference a comparative eval-
uation of each in relation to a sort of ideal or model to which it comes
more or less close or does difference correspond to the specificity of the
origin and identity of each element? Could not the former alternative be
appropriate to man-made products and the latter to living beings the
accomplishment of which results from their blossoming by themselves
and not from some closeness to a cultural ideal? Is difference not esti-
mated in the first case according to a logic of sameness and in the second
case according to the real and specific being of each element in its singu-
larity? Could it be possible to put all of them together and link them with
one another in the same whole?
Another crucial question concerns the way each element moves as well
as that of the whole. It seems that both the composition of the whole and
4 L. Irigaray

its motion can result either from an external intervention—more natural

or more divine or human—or from a motion which starts above all from
elements themselves. But how can a whole be formed by elements which
are at once living and fabricated on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
how can a whole be composed by living elements which do not stop
evolving and the relationships of which cannot be defined once and for
all? Did our tradition, as is the case with Heidegger himself, not favour
the constitution of the whole to the detriment of the development of liv-
ing beings? Is this not due to the fact that man can mastery, if only in
imagination, a whole but not the way of evolving of both living beings
and their relationships? Hence the necessity of reducing the living to
‘things’ corresponding to a certain form—which needs the privilege of
appearing and the contribution of the logos. Indeed, if I maintain that
what can unite the ensemble of the living is air, how could man compose
and control such a whole? And if the desire of each element and its long-
ing for the other(s) is that which causes, at least in part, the motion, how
could the motion of the whole be determined from an outside? Does the
respect for the growth and the motion of the living not require that their
beings and their relationships remain evolving, and that the whole is thus
kept always open and dependent on the blossoming of life itself? Does
that sort of whole exist in our philosophical tradition? Does it exist in the
thinking of Heidegger? Does he not speak of a constant tension between
the world into which we are thrown and our Da-sein? What is the cause
of this tension? What is at stake in his call for a search for ‘authenticity’
in the relationships between the world and the Da-sein? Is it a question of
the adaptation of our Da-sein to the world through the logos or of the
transformation of the whole of the world because of the nature, or the
‘essence’, of the being which underlies this Da-sein? What is the deter-
mining factor? Can this wavering explain the arising of the power of
technique and the cybernetic in which Heidegger so much concerned
himself?
If we are thrown into the world, according to the word of Heidegger,
this entails that we do not come into the world as begotten living beings
among others, sharing with them at least our living belonging, and thus
not completely extraneous to the environment in which we were born.
We already communicate with it through air, the light and warmth of the
 Introduction: Heidegger as an Exemplary Case 5

sun, but also through the fruits of the earth. The world into which we
come is, from the beginning, familiar to us and even intimate with us.
And we are open to it, even without our willing and knowing it, on pain
of death. Coming into the world means entering into communion with
elements of this world. Thus how can Heidegger maintain that we are
merely thrown into the world? Does that not amount to ignoring the liv-
ing background of our being—which will also act on our consciousness
regardless of where we are aware or not aware of it?
What then happens to our Dasein? First, we must wonder whether we
have to understand the word as a substantive or a verb. Do we correspond
to a Dasein or are we the ones who are being there and facIng a ‘there is’?
Are we thrown into the world as a Dasein or are we beings which are
capable of situating ourselves in front of the world—Da-sein—and of
both adapting ourselves to the world and questioning and modifying it?
As is often the case concerning the work of Heidegger both alternatives
seem to be possIble, in particular according to the English translation.
Indeed, when it is a question of ‘Sein’, the English version often leans
towards reducing the verb to a substantive—thereby making being a
product of the world more than an agent of its production. Anyhow, even
as a potential actor in our Da-sein, we must wonder about the part of
ourselves which remains still present and active given that we have been
deprived of our living origin and our living way of entering into the
world. Of what and in what then can our Da-sein consist? Is it not reduced
to a sort of abstract device functioning according to the determinations
of a historical epoch? Is there a living subjectivity, or even any subjectiv-
ity, in the connection between our Da-sein and the world? Are we not
confronted with and even assimilated to a sort of computing mechanism
which connects our personal software with the hard disc of the world
with a certain, but unequal, reciprocity with regard to the capability of
leaving an imprint on the other? It is thus understandable that Heidegger
takes such an interest in the essence of technique, that he is so puzzled
about the question of the sexuation of Dasein or Da-sein, and that he
maintains that the thing about which we have yet to think in his/our
times is the status of subjectivity. However, his perplexity regarding the
sexuation of Dasein or Da-sein looks more clever than the fashionable
artless and arrogant way of affirming the importance of sexuality without
6 L. Irigaray

first wondering about what a sexuate identity and a sexuate subjectivity

mean. Heidegger remains more prudent notably about the possible man-
ner of giving up the traditional way of conceiving of our subjectivity.
Could Heidegger have succeeded in opening our past metaphysical
horizon a little by substituting a questioning Da-sein for a subjectivity
which confines itself to being the holder of negativity? Or are we faced
with the same sort of subjectivity which amounts to mere mental mecha-
nism and not to our whole being? Furthermore, the thinking of Heidegger
could be weaker than that of Hegel because he fails to attach the same
importance to the negative and leaves an undecidable truth—and even
being—on hold, in particular through Being. Hegel is more rigorous
concerning the issue of the subjective practice that he proposes. He sug-
gests to what can lead the unfolding of the dialectical process, entrusting
to us the care of pursuing it. Heidegger leaves us as much lost on the path
as we were thrown originally into the world—and we no longer have the
negative at our disposal. Could his merit be to have paid a greater atten-
tion to language itself, and to have more understood the necessity of
modifying it in order to exceed our past logic and return to a more
embodied subjectivity? However, his failure, as that of almost all the past
philosophers, is to have not sufficiently considered syntax itself to be a
key to interpreting and changing our logical economy. There is no doubt
that he broaches the question, for example in his dialogue with a Japanese
master. But he contents himself with the way of expressing the motion of
natural phenomena without yet wondering how to express the dynamism
of our living being and how it can share with a different dynamism. What
would the reaction of Heidegger have been when discovering that a spe-
cific syntax corresponds to each sex—as the analyses and interpretation of
many discourses produced by mixed representative samples prove? Could
he remain unconcerned about the difference of syntactic structures
between the discourses produced by girls or boys, women or men?
The aspect of his thought from which the four contributors to
Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality question Heidegger is the neutrality,
even the neutered character, of our being in the world, our Dasein.
Indeed, this point can bear witness to his way of considering three deter-
mining factors in the history of philosophy: the problem of origin, the
way of structuring of the world, and the situation of human being in
 Introduction: Heidegger as an Exemplary Case 7

relation to the world. The status of Dasein is thus a key issue to approach
Heidegger’s thought and the one which is likely to unveil how Heidegger
attempts to overcome past metaphysics towards another way of thinking.
Given what is at stake, it has seemed suitable to invite as contributors two
men and two women who, each in their own way, have already meditated
on the work of Heidegger, notably on the possible link between his theo-
retical positions and his lack of discernment regarding some political
choices.
Mahon O’Brien begins his text by situating it in the context of the
western tradition that he describes as ‘myopic’ and ‘monadic’ when sexu-
ate difference is at stake. Then he approaches the question of the insis-
tence of Heidegger on the neutral character of Dasein whatever his
insights concerning its social constitution. After he dwells a little on the
specific meaning of the word Dasein, its evolution in the Heidegger’s
work and its relation to human being, Mahon broaches the problem of
what he calls a ‘neutered Dasein’, a Dasein which ought to be asexuate
and disincarnate. This modality of Dasein would be necessary, according
to Heidegger, to establish the fundamental ontology that he endeavours
to introduce. But Mahon wonders, following Luce Irigaray, how it would
be possible to erase the sexuate nature of Dasein given that sexuation
determines all our behaviours in a specific way, which brings about the
fact that the Dasein of one sex cannot be substituted for the Dasein of a
different sex. Mahon then analyses how Derrida interprets Heidegger’s
silence on sexuality, which he first questions in a critical way (in 1982)
but later (starting from 1983) defends as an ‘original and powerful neu-
trality’ which would correspond with an originally ontological ‘asexual’
or ‘monosexual’ level of being and would avoid falling back into the onti-
cal binary opposition that sexuate difference is presumed to involve. The
neutrality of Dasein, Heidegger maintains, is a manner of preserving the
‘positivity and potency of the essence’ as well as the transcendental a pri-
ori constitution of the being that we are and is designated as Dasein. After
a detailed argument about the position of Derrida regarding the sexua-
tion of Dasein, Mahon considers a text by Ann Van Leeuwen who tries to
mediate between Irigaray and Heidegger through Derrida. In the last part
of his chapter, Mahon questions the position of Heidegger on the world-
lessness and historylessness of certain peoples, unable to reach a personal
8 L. Irigaray

or state Dasein, as is the case for animals and elements of the natural
world as, for example, stones. Heidegger contrasts the being of animals
and of certain peoples as limited to life, even to a cosmic life, with the
being of humans, the essence of which is determined by temporality as
historicity and a relation to death. Mahon finds in such an opposition
further proof of the disincarnate, disembodied and asexuate character of
the Dasein, the validity of which he contests.
David Farell Krell first lingers on the fact that Heidegger considers
‘neutrality’ and ‘sexlessness’ as that which can preserve the transcendent
power and potency of the essence of human kind. He alludes, in this con-
nection, to the texts of Derrida about the topic of sexuality in Heidegger’s
work and the possible meaning of his insistence on the neutrality of
Dasein. Next, David questions why the figure of Elis in Georg Trakl’s
poetry is interpreted by Heidegger as sexlessness, as ‘not yet sexualized’
and corresponding to a ‘neutered’ existence, the only one which would be
capable of guaranteeing serenity and gentleness between the sexes. He
wonders whether the ‘absorption of maidenhood into boyhood’ does not
instead conform to the traditional canon of past metaphysics, which
takes little account of the lovers and the sister in Trakl’s work. In the later
part of his text, David endeavours to develop the interest of Heidegger in
the direction of what English grammar designates as ‘neutral verbs’ or
verbs of being, which, according to him, are in the service of the femi-
nines of « the clearing », « nature » and « truth », die Lichtung, phusis and
alètheia’. He then underlines the fact that the motif of ‘mana’, insistent
in the so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, can have a relation to being, accord-
ing to Heidegger himself. This leads David to meditate on Schelling’s
interest in the ancient Goddesses of Samothrace, like Demeter and
Persephone, and gods who are con-sen-tes, who seem more able to pass on
‘mana’ to us than disembodied spiritualities and ‘neut(e)ralised philoso-
phemes’. Such considerations encourage David to favour, along with
Luce Irigaray, the discovery of a fleshly culture over the supposed inno-
cence of children and Heidegger’s ‘fantasia of a unified and neut(e)ralised
Geschlecht’. Indeed, could a fleshly culture not contribute more to the
development of our whole being and the emergence of the new human
being that it is incumbent on us to become? Finally, David wonders
whether the god for whom we could still wait—‘ the only one who can
 Introduction: Heidegger as an Exemplary Case 9

still save us’, as Heidegger maintains in an Interview with Der Spiegel—

must not be as much ‘languishing’ as ‘plenipotent’ as the ancient god-
desses. Does divine plenipotence not arise from a ‘poverty’ and a ‘longing’
that deities are capable of sharing with the mortals?
In her chapter, Emma Jones explores the question of truth through the
relation between lethe and aletheia in the post 1930 texts of Heidegger,
with a particular focus on the role that ‘unconcealment’ plays in his con-
ception of truth. She is above all concerned with the meaning of lethe as
an ‘original and originary obscurity’. Rather than dismissing the latter as
a mysticism unsuitable for a philosopher, Emma wonders, as Heidegger
himself does, whether truth does not require obscurity as part of its
essence. And she does not hesitate to resort to a psychoanalytical perspec-
tive, namely Lacan’s, to investigate what could ‘remain hidden from
Heidegger’s view’ in this obscurity. There is no doubt that this would
have surprised, irritated and/or amused Heidegger, who kept away from
psychoanalysis and about Lacan famously said ‘Perhaps, he begins to
think’. Before she appeals to a psychoanalytical reading, Emma makes a
detour via the critique of Giorgio Agamben on the use of lethe in
Heidegger’s phenomenology, given the opposition that he notes between
the ‘closedness of animal life’ and the ‘openness’ of Dasein which ‘can and
has led to totalitarian, and indeed genocidal, consequences’ because of
‘the negation of the actuality of nature and the reduction of animality
and even living itself to a mere closedness or concealment’. Without
neglecting the warning of Agamben, Emma tries to practice a more bal-
anced interpretation of the relation between lethe and aletheia through a
psychoanalytical reading of key texts of Heidegger. She comments on the
fact that if Heidegger attempts to deepen his way of conceiving of nature
through a return to the Greek phusis, he does not consider what
lethe/aletheia could mean in terms of ‘relationality, sexuate difference and
sexuality’. Thus ‘Heidegger’s thinking is ultimately lacking a critical limit,
that of sexuate difference’. Now sexuate difference—a concept that Emma
inherited from Luce Irigaray—could perhaps unveil something of the
obscurity or mystery of lethe—and also save women from being catego-
rized alongside animals in the Heideggerian dichotomy human/animal.
According to Emma, what prevents Heidegger from approaching the
question of human relationality and experiences which have to do with
10 L. Irigaray

unconscious processes is a sort of ‘castration anxiety’ resulting from a lack

of limits that the existence and/or recognition of another subject could
bring to him.
Luce Irigaray—by the way it is my name—uses another method to
question the neutrality, or neutered status, of the Heideggerian Da-sein.
Instead of facing the problem directly, she interrogates the background
from which it arises. The traditional western way of constituting the
world in which we are situated as human beings does not allow for a
Dasein other than as neutral and asexuate. A serious consideration for the
crucial determination of our being that sexuation represents calls for a
new foundation of our culture and not merely some adjustments to our
sexual practices. The matter concerns the definition and status of subjec-
tivity itself. But how can we escape our subjection to the totality of a
world of which we are both agents and patients? Resorting to self-­affection
and hetero-affection could provide us with a means of leaving the vicious
circle in which we are trapped. This means passing from a world in which
forms are defined by sight and representation to a world in which indi-
viduation is first shaped by touch, which better corresponds with living
beings and their necessity of at once dwelling in themselves, developing
and communicating or communing with one another. The flesh born
from touch needs a frame to be appropriated in order to receive qualities
and welcome the other without fragmenting, dispersing, even vanishing.
Sexuation can act as a structuring which assembles and differentiates each
flesh so that it could evolve while preserving what is its own. Then, the
truth which is unveiled to us, including our own truth, springs from our
relating to/with the other and keeps the irreducible part of obscurity that
a natural difference involves. From the obscure background of our being
rooted in nature, two clearings—lichtung—can be opened that are yet to
be explored: one corresponding to the self appearing and moving of every
living being, and the other to desire and our touching one another as a
specifically human clearing which calls for being thought and shared.
Thus the matter is not one of cleansing our being in the world—our
Da-sein—of living determinations, among others the sexuate ones.
Instead working out our subjectivity from our natural belonging seems to
answer our feeling nostalgic for a pre-metaphysical Greek way of perceiv-
ing in order to overcome its neutral and disembodied metaphysical status
 Introduction: Heidegger as an Exemplary Case 11

towards a post metaphysical era of being and thinking in which flesh

itself reaches a transcendental determination through the assumption of
the negative of a subjective sexuate difference.
Heidegger remains torn apart between the Greek pre-metaphysical
way of thinking and a post-metaphysical way of thinking which he was
in search of (cf. notably Héraclite, a seminar held by Martin Heidegger
and Eugen Fink in 1966–1967, Chapitre VI). But has he not denied the
relation to life which could provide him with the means of passing from
the former to the latter? Indeed, what is at stake is how to transform the
immediacy of a living perception of the real into a perception which
reaches transcendence without abolishing the living nature of both the
one who perceives and what is perceived. This requires us to assume a
negative which serves life instead of a cultural construction which removes
from life—our own life but also that of what or whom we perceive.
The way of perceiving of the Greek philosopher corresponds to an
immediacy which does not involve a negative. Inside the metaphysical
horizon, the negative is used by subjectivity for, supposedly, ensuring a
transcendental dimension of perception, notably through overcoming a
natural immediacy. But this is to the detriment of life itself and ends in
exhausting the living being, and even the subjectivity which exercises the
negative, and little by little gives up its power to a Gestell at the service of
mere technique. The task which is incumbent on a post-metaphysical
thinker is to recover a relation to life and so make our subjectivity lively
again without for all that neglecting the negative that it needs to think.
This is possible by leaving a logic based on sameness for a logic which
resorts to difference. But difference, and the negative that it involves,
henceforth does not relate and apply only to the predicates but to the
subjectivity which produces the discourse and establishes the identity and
truth of each being.
Only our sexuate belonging seems to be able to allow us to assume
such undertaking. Sexuation corresponds to a real which determines
every subjectivity, even without its willing and knowing, in its relating to/
with our self, the other(s) and the world. Assuming our sexuate specificity
and difference asks us to take on a negative at the level of subjectivity, and
even of being, itself. But this negative is that which allows us to keep or
recover a relation to and with the natural world, including as a part of
12 L. Irigaray

ourselves. However, this relation reaches another sort of immediacy,

which is now cultivated in a human manner and provides us with a tran-
scendence in the way of relating which remains alive and sensitive thanks
to the respect for the difference between living beings.
In fact, Heidegger did not realize that instead of taking a step back-
wards he had to take a step forwards, but not in a linear space or time.
And instead of leaping, notably to regain a Greek way of relating to the
real, he had to inhabit his own body and carry out a transformation of his
sensitivity in order that he could perceive the transcendence of the sexu-
ally different other and share with her in a transcendental way. This ges-
ture could let him cross the limits of the metaphysical horizon over to
another horizon, another way of being and of thinking, which would
have allowed him to experience how the Greek philosopher considered
truth without in a way contenting himself with it. Perhaps to succeed in
clearing such a path he needed to close, if only for a moment, his eyes and
pay attention to what touch and being touched bring to him in order that
he would become able to reach another way of relating to the other, all
living beings, and the world. Could this happen through discovering a
transcendental way of looking which could perceive, beyond the natural
light and the one conveyed by representation and metaphysical theory
which let above all the forms of beings appear, a light emanating or radi-
ating from a flesh animated by life, an amorous desire or a carnal thinking
likely to unveil being itself?
 The Destitution of Dasein
Mahon O’Brien

In recent work such as To Be Born and Sharing the Fire Luce Irigaray revis-
its some perennial themes associated with her vision for a new humanity.
In particular, Irigaray continues to fasten on the myopic (we might say
‘monadic’) focus of the Western tradition when it comes to its failure to
acknowledge sexuate difference. Irigaray has successfully diagnosed the
patriarchally over-determined nature of that tradition masquerading
behind a façade of objectivity and neutrality in ways that continue to open
up interpretive and critical possibilities in terms of reading the canon
today. Some issues that frequently exercise Irigaray are ones that a number
of twentieth century phenomenologists addressed with more and less suc-
cess, namely, questions concerning alterity/otherness, questions of inter-
subjectivity, the phenomenology of sociality, what have you. Heidegger, in
particular, ploughed the rough field of some of these concerns in ways that
would appear, prima facie, to proffer fertile soil for some of Irigaray’s
undertakings. And yet, Irigaray levels a powerful challenge against

M. O’Brien (*)
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
e-mail: mahon.o-brien@sussex.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 13

L. Irigaray (ed.), Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93729-4_2
14 M. O’Brien

Heidegger’s conception of Dasein and his point of entry into ‘phenome-

nological ontology’. Thus, Heidegger, the thinker that Irigaray, arguably,
engages with most positively in some of her recent work is charged not just
with the ‘exsanguination’ of his conception of Dasein, as it were, but with
having neutered Dasein in a way that is all too characteristic of the monadic
tendencies of the Western tradition and its enduring suppression of sexu-
ate difference. Part of what we will examine in some depth in this section
of the book then is a blindspot in Heidegger’s account of Dasein which,
for all of his insights concerning the social constitution of Dasein, leaves
him open to some of the criticisms which Irigaray has successfully levelled
against an entire tradition.1

Dasein
In Being and Time Heidegger spends some time looking at the meaning-
fulness of being for that being that alone finds being meaningful—whose
being is an “issue” for it. That being is picked out by the term Dasein. In
ordinary German—the word ‘Dasein’ simply means ‘existence’ and its
use in German philosophy predates Heidegger. In his Beiträge, Heidegger
summarises the traditional way that the term was used in philosophy:

In metaphysics ‘Da-sein’ is the name for the manner and way in which
beings are actually beings and means the same as being-extant—interpreted
one definite step more originarily: as presence…running throughout the
whole history of metaphysics is the not accidental custom of transferring
the name for the mode of actuality of beings themselves and of meaning,
with ‘Dasein,’ ‘the Dasein’ [existence], i.e., a completely actual and extant
being itself. Thus Dasein is only the good German translation of existentia,
as a being’s coming forth and standing out by itself, presencing by itself
(and a growing forgetting of aletheia).
Throughout [metaphysics] ‘Dasein’ means nothing else. And accord-
ingly one could then speak of thingly, animal, human, temporal Dasein [as
mere existence]. (Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 209)

Heidegger uses the term Dasein in an unusual and quite extraordinary

way, however. The word Dasein is a compound of ‘da’ (here or there) and
 The Destitution of Dasein 15

‘sein’ (to be). Dasein is the term that supposedly translates/corresponds to

the Latin term existentia—whatever is present in the traditional sense.
However, Heidegger immediately signals his departure from this more
orthodox notion of Dasein by emphasizing the two words that form the
compound. As Heidegger begins to expand on his notion of Dasein in
the 1930s, we see that he tries to link the notion up to the idea of another
beginning which would traverse a different trajectory to that taken under
the auspices of the history of the metaphysics of presence:

The meaning and matter of the word Da-sein in the thinking of the other
beginning is completely different, so different that there is no mediating
transition from that first usage to this other one.
Da-sein is not the mode of actuality for every type of being, but is itself
the being of the t/here [Da]. The t/here [Da], however, is the openness of a
being as such in the whole, the ground of the more originarily thought
aletheia. Da-sein is a way of being which, in that it ‘is’ the t/here [Da]
(actively and transitively, as it were), is a unique being in accordance with
and as this outstanding being (what is in sway in the essential swaying of
be-ing). (idem)

Heidegger is not interested in an analysis of the existence of a human

subject or a person in the traditional sense. These notions are too static
and do not track the movement involved in our lived awareness—we ‘are’
insofar as we are be-ing. Dasein is a term, for Heidegger, that tracks our
‘to-be-ness’. In Being and Time, Heidegger offers an analysis of Dasein’s
everyday way of being in the hope of securing some evidence or clues as
to what our ordinary, average, proximate understanding of being might
be before then considering what all of these various ‘meanings’ them-
selves might presuppose or depend on. However, as he proceeds to
describe the world of everydayness, he is clearly describing the kind of
existence and lives which we would typically associate with people, ‘our-
selves’, human beings. Thus, it easy to see why one might alternate
between the notion of Dasein and the notion of a person or human being
quite readily; and this is understandable since it is difficult to do other-
wise. However, even in Being and Time Heidegger makes it clear that he
is not interested in discussing the traditional subject or the human being
16 M. O’Brien

understood from an anthropological point of view. Rather he is inter-

ested in the being of that being that or who is ‘here’ or ‘there’ as a site for
the occurrence of meaning.
In his appendix to his translation of Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
Albert Hofstadter tries to shed some further light on Heidegger’s notion
of Dasein in ways that will prove relevant to our questions later—not
least in terms of the supposed distance that Heidegger begins to intro-
duce between Dasein and the human being. Granted Hofstadter’s analy-
sis relies heavily on Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as one finds it in Basic
Problems of Phenomenology. Notwithstanding, it is worth bearing in mind
that Heidegger very clearly thought of Dasein as a term that picked out
that entity whose mode of being was being-da—sometimes conveyed by
the term ‘existenz’:

And the decisive point is that this Da or essential disclosedness—by which

spatiality, a spatial world, and spatial interrelationships of entities within
the world and of being-in-the-world (Dasein) toward such entities are all
possible—is an essential aspect of the ontological constitution of the being
which each human being is, and which is therefore called the Dasein.
(Hofstadter, “Translator’s Appendix”. In The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology, p.335)
The German for to be the Da is Da-sein. The entity, the being whose role
it is to be the (its) Da can therefore be called the Dasein. Here Heidegger
uses a Sein-word, a being-word, to denominate a Seienden, to name certain
beings, those whose role it is to sustain this mode of being. The Dasein’s
role is to sustain Da-sein, and that is why it has this special ontological
name. (idem)

Hofstadter goes on to quote from Being and Time where Heidegger

makes some famous remarks about Dasein as being itself the ‘clearing’.
However, he also states, crucially, that

The Dasein brings its Da with it from the very beginning; lacking the Da
it is not only factually not the entity with this essential nature but is not
this entity at all. The Dasein is its disclosedness. (op.cit., p.336)2
 The Destitution of Dasein 17

It is perhaps salutary here to remind ourselves of the precise way that

Heidegger introduces the term ‘Dasein’ in Being and Time in section nine
where he wishes to discuss the theme of the analytic of Dasein.
We are ourselves the entities to be analysed. The Being of any such
entity is in each case mine. These entities, in their Being, comport them-
selves towards their Being. As entities with such Being, they are delivered
over to their own Being. Being is that which is an issue for every such
entity. This way of characterizing Dasein has a double consequence:

1. The ‘essence’ [“Wesen”] of this entity lies in its ‘to be’ [Zu-sein]. Its
Being-what-it-is [Was-sein] (essentia) must, so far as we can speak of it
at all, be conceived in terms of its Being (existentia). But here our
ontological task is to show that when we choose to designate the Being
of this entity as ‘existence’ [Existenz], this term does not and cannot
have the ontological signification of the traditional term ‘existentia’;
ontologically, existentia is tantamount to Being-present-at-hand, a kind
of Being which is essentially inappropriate to entities of Dasein’s char-
acter. To avoid getting bewildered, we shall always use the Interpretive
expression ‘presence-at-hand’ for the term ‘existentia’, while the term
‘existence’, as a designation of Being, will be allotted solely to Dasein.
The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those character-
istics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-­
at-­hand of some entity which ‘look’ so and so and is itself
present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and
no more than that. All the Being-as-it-is [So-sein] which this entity
possesses is primarily Being. So when we designate this entity with the
term ‘Dasein’, we are expressing not its ‘what’ (as if it were a table,
house or tree) but its Being.
2. That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each
case mine. Thus Dasein is never to be taken ontologically as an
instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are
present-at-hand. To entities such as these, their Being is ‘a matter of
indifference’; or more precisely, they ‘are’ such that their Being can be
neither a matter of indifference to them, nor the opposite. Because
Dasein has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], one must always use a
18 M. O’Brien

personal pronoun when one addresses it: ‘I am’, ‘you are’. (Heidegger,
Being and Time, 67. My emphasis)

At this point (that is to say, in the late 1920s) it would seem that Heidegger
openly identifies the being of the human being (albeit not traditionally
construed in terms of its present-at-handness) with the being of Dasein.
In other words, Heidegger wants to consider the identity and the ‘to-be-­
ness’ of that entity which we might otherwise have called the human
being but which he refers to as Dasein. Why? Because he believes that the
notion of ‘the human being’ is too easily limited in terms of the way we
think of its being as something actually present in that static, continuous
sense—like an object, present-at-hand.3 The term Dasein—as associated
with the notion of ‘existentia’ belongs to a tradition which confines
Dasein, in terms of our understanding of it, to being an object, a present-­
at-­hand thing rather than as an example of ‘to-be-ness’. It seems clear,
nonetheless, that for Heidegger, while he has reasons for choosing the
term Dasein rather than ‘human being’, ‘subject’, ‘person’, he is still refer-
ring to that entity which ‘I’ am or ‘you’ are. Focussing on the way Dasein
‘is’, in other words, shows that it finds itself meaningfully present in a
context where things are being disclosed, revealed as meaningfully pres-
ent, and that this is forgotten or obfuscated by an analysis which begins
with something like the human being, person or subject since those
notions for Heidegger have already been overly reified. The categorial
approach has dominated the treatment of these notions which blocks the
dynamic, non-static nature of meaningful presence in the flow of
experience.
Granted, in some texts from the 1930s, Heidegger begins to compli-
cate this picture somewhat by intimating some kind of gap between
Dasein and the human being. However, if we are thinking of the being of
the human being, it is hard to see that he could be thinking of any kind
of human being, either authentic or inauthentic, for example, that would
not already be Dasein. He argues that the human being is not always or
not yet Dasein—but is rather the ‘bridge’ between being and the human
being. He seems to be leaning in that direction in many of his discussions
of Dasein and Mensch in the Beiträge and, more pointedly, in his recently
published private notebooks—GA 95 in particular. In Being and Time, as
 The Destitution of Dasein 19

we have seen, Heidegger argues that Dasein is the kind of being that what
we normally refer to as a human being ‘is’ since we are dynamic, sense
making and interpretive creatures who are not well captured by notions
such as subjectivity or any rendering that sees us somehow as objects—
present-at-hand. However, it seems as though Heidegger thinks that
Dasein is something that each of us already ‘is’ in Being and Time and that
we are just not well picked out by terms which carry a certain amount of
baggage such that we tend to be taken as discrete, static objects in a con-
tainer (world) with other objects and other subjects in the world around
us. However, the remarks in his Beiträge and in the Black Notebooks seem
to complicate this picture somewhat and, indeed, dovetail with some of
the darkest political views expressed in Heidegger’s writings. We will
expand on these concerns later.

A Neutered Dasein
It would be unfair to malign Heidegger’s account for failing to fully flesh
out an anthropological, embodied account of Dasein when that would
involve a digression from his central aim in Being and Time:

In our introduction we have already intimated that in the existential ana-

lytic of Dasein we also make headway with a task which is hardly less press-
ing than that of the question of Being itself—the task of laying bare that a
priori basis which must be visible before the question of ‘what man is’ can
be discussed philosophically. The existential analytic of Dasein comes before
any psychology or anthropology, and certainly before any biology.
(Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 71)

And, to give Heidegger his due, he acknowledges that one could and
would need to flesh out the skeletal account of Dasein that he offers in
Being and Time if one wanted to discuss the human being more fully.4
Thus, critiques which begin in this way are already missing the point to
some extent. It would also be a mistake to suppose that Irigaray’s criti-
cisms of Heidegger’s conception of Dasein are guilty of such a gross
20 M. O’Brien

category error. The issue then comes down to what Heidegger elects to
bracket from his own conception of Dasein—and bracket in ways that are
illegitimate.
If we think of how we are ‘thrown’ (that is, how Dasein finds itself
already situated and operative within a meaning laden, historical context)
the idea would be, for Irigaray at least, that part of how we find ourselves
(as thrown) is as sexuate and embodied beings in ways that Heidegger’s
account of Dasein fails to acknowledge. Part of what Heidegger’s account
seems to suggest then is that we are, at our most basic, liminal levels of
awareness, asexuate and disembodied.5 That is not to say that Heidegger
would want us to think that that is the case. However, one does have to
concede that his account fails to prioritise, the undeniably embodied
nature of our awareness and our constant sense of being sexuated and
thereby immediately distinguished, marked out and ‘defined’/identified
in certain ways.
There is a sense in which Dasein is conceived (one might say ‘immacu-
lately’) as asexuate and disincarnate. Furthermore, this is something
which could prove a major roadblock for the viability of Heidegger’s
notion of Dasein. We simply do not have even the most liminal, bare
sense of awareness where there isn’t already some sense of our sexuate
identity at work—it is as counter-intuitive as trying to imagine a sense of
any kind of conscious experience where we are not already somehow
embodied. There simply is no such ‘ghost in the machine’ experience
available to Dasein; neither is there any such awareness or experience that
we are capable of where we are behind or prior to our sexuation. As
Irigaray writes in her most recent book:

Wondering about this/our ‘to be’ as such is probably the task which is
incumbent on us in our epoch. What can contribute towards its achieve-
ment is, no doubt, to interpret the withdrawal of ‘to be’ from past
­metaphysics, to which Heidegger points, but also to consider the part of
this ‘to be’ that metaphysics did not take into account, especially regarding
the relationship between us as subjects who are naturally different. The
philosophers who criticize our past philosophical tradition do not wonder
whether the elusive character of ‘to be’, and even its forgetting, do not
result from our neglecting what occurs between us, notably as sexually dif-
 The Destitution of Dasein 21

ferent. And they do not imagine that it is there that the question concern-
ing ‘to be’ must be asked and something of the enigma of this ‘to be’ has to
be unveiled and kept. (Luce Irigaray, Sharing the Fire, p.8)

If Heidegger’s aim is to inaugurate a fundamental ontology, which in

time gives way to what is conceived as an attempt to overcome the meta-
physics of presence through the leap over to a new beginning; and, if the
first step along the way is to demonstrate how the ‘presentist’ prejudice of
our current metaphysical commitments is not even borne out by a careful
examination of the role that absence plays in the way being is understood
as meaningful for the one being who already has a sense of being to begin
with, then, sexuate difference should be a key find in the initial archaeo-
logical ‘dig’ through Dasein’s everyday understanding in the attempt to
determine the structures upon which it is necessarily based. Heidegger’s
ultimate goal is to underline the importance of absence to any sense of
presence that we might have. In other words, the way that anything is
revealed as meaningfully present to us presupposes absence and this is a
constant element of how things are meaningfully disclosed to us.
However, if Irigaray is right, then even this undertaking by Heidegger can
be thought to involve a bracketing of sorts which is illegitimate and fol-
lows an all too familiar pattern of foreclosure that Irigaray sees as shaping
the trajectory and unfolding of Western philosophy in particular.
Heidegger, in effect, is proceeding with a ‘stripped-down’ account of
Dasein’s thrown situatedness which brackets aspects of that awareness
and the dynamic, non-static nature of it which he so relied on, and, in
ways that are deeply misleading and problematic. The manner in which
something appears as one thing and not something else, for that Dasein
who witnesses it, is experienced by a Dasein, even in its modes of reflexiv-
ity, that is aware of the fact that it is its own Dasein and not someone else’s
and that it is sexuated one way and not another. We are speaking then of
the disclosure of meaningfully present things by (and to) a being that is
constantly revealed to itself, even given passively to itself, as sexuated one
way and not another. Thus—it is not a biologistic, naturalistic or anthro-
pological concern that Irigaray is dealing with. Rather, Irigaray is point-
ing to a major theoretical blindspot in Heidegger’s conception of Dasein.
Part of what one is already aware of (at some level) during the course of
22 M. O’Brien

any activity is that one is thinking, experiencing, feeling and so on as

sexuated. There is no getting behind this level of experience to an even
barer sense of Dasein, a ‘to-be-ness’ where one would not have this recog-
nition included. The failure to acknowledge as much or to prioritise it in
the characterization of Dasein, in Being and Time and elsewhere, amounts
to a theoretical failing on Heidegger’s part. It is a failure moreover which
is of a piece with a repeated failing throughout the Western tradition.

Derrida’s Early Apologia

Derrida offers a somewhat bewildering apologia for Heidegger on pre-
cisely this question in a characteristically imaginative and provocative
1983 paper. The rationale for Derrida’s stance is hard to fathom, not least
given the nuanced way that he introduces his own concerns on some of
these issues in various statements and discussions. For instance, in an
interview a year before the publication of the 1983 paper, Derrida offers
some insights which clearly resonate with much of what we have argued
in the foregoing as he looks askance at the phallocentrism of Levinas and
(initially) Heidegger—not least concerning the issue of the neutrality of
Dasein. It is hard to reconcile his remarks in parts of this interview with
his apparent volte face in other parts of the same interview and indeed in
the essay from the following year. In the 1982 interview, for example,
Derrida declares that “according to a superstitious operation that must be
flushed out, one insures phallocentric mastery under the cover of neutral-
ization every time.” (Mc Donald & Derrida, “Interview: Choreographies:
Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald”, 72) Derrida goes on to
criticise both Levinas and Heidegger in turn

Levinas indeed senses the risk factor involved in the erasure of sexual dif-
ference. He therefore maintains sexual difference: the human in general
remains a sexual being. But he can only do so, it would seem, by placing
(differentiated) sexuality beneath humanity which sustains itself at the level
of the Spirit. That is, he simultaneously places, and this is what is impor-
tant, masculinity [le masculine] in command and at the beginning (the
arkhe), on a par with the Spirit. This gesture carries with it the most self-­
 The Destitution of Dasein 23

interested of contradictions; it has repeated itself, let us say, since ‘Adam

and Eve,’ and persists—in analogous form—into ‘modernity,’ despite all
the differences of style and treatment…Is it not also the risk that Heidegger
runs? (Mc Donald & Derrida, “Interview: Choreographies: Jacques
Derrida and Christie V. McDonald”, p.74)

Derrida then proceeds to sketch some ways that one might think of
rehabilitating Heidegger. He glosses many of the moves he will make in
the 1983 essay, conceding the apparent ‘neutrality’ of Dasein while flag-
ging again for the reader the importance of Heidegger’s philosophically
pregnant ‘silence’ on both sexuality and psychoanalysis, arguing that
Heidegger’s “silence on these questions punctuate or create the spacing
out of a powerful discourse.” (idem) He reprises this interpretive strategy
a year later. He suggests that Heidegger’s comments on asexuality are
borne of a desire to deal with sexual difference on a higher plane of
abstraction rather than the anthropological ways it is typically dealt with.
And, in terms of his defensive strategy on Heidegger’s behalf, one has to
say that Derrida is really stretching the limits of hermeneutic elasticity
here. Derrida wants to characterise Dasein’s asexuate nature as an “origi-
nary and powerful a-sexual neutrality which is not the neither-nor (Weder-­
noch) of ontic abstraction. It is originary and ontological.” (idem) It is not
so much that Dasein would not, in the end, belong to a sex, one of two,
but that

Dasein as Dasein does not carry with it the mark of opposition (or alterna-
tive) between the two sexes…Such an allusion would fall once again into
anatomical, biological or anthropological determinations. And the Dasein,
in the structures and ‘power’ that are originary to it, would come ‘prior’ to
these determinations. (idem).6

Derrida divulges some further clues as to the direction his own thinking
would take on this issue:

Now, as of 1928, the analytic of the Dasein was the thought of ontological
difference and the repetition of the question of being; it opened up a prob-
lematics that subjected all the concepts of traditional Western philosophy
to a radical elucidation and interpretation. This gives an idea of what stakes
24 M. O’Brien

were involved in a neutralization that fell back this side of both sexual dif-
ference and its binary marking, if not this side of sexuality itself. This would
be the title of the enormous problem that in this context I must limit
myself to merely naming: ontological difference and sexual differ-
ence. (idem)

It is Irigaray, however, that sets herself the task of thinking sexuate differ-
ence at the level of ontological difference and holds Heidegger to account
for certain failures in this regard. Might we not read Derrida against
Derrida here and note his own silence on a thinker who had already
embarked on such an undertaking in 1983?7 We should also note what
some commentators see as a certain uneasiness on this issue in Derrida’s
infamous Geschlecht III text. The text was long thought missing and was
only recently published. In this text, Derrida offers an extraordinarily
detailed, deconstructive, and often quite speculative, reading of
Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl’s poetry. Therezo (one of the transla-
tors of the English edition of Derrida’s text) notes a certain tension in
Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger on the question of sexual differ-
ence.8 On the one hand, Derrida fastens again on the idea of a pre-dual
sexuality which he had meditated on in Geschlecht I (with particular
emphasis on Heidegger’s 1928 lecture course). On the other hand,
according to Therezo, Derrida’s painstaking reading of Heidegger in
Geschlecht III demonstrates “his reservations vis-à-vis Heidegger’s neu-
tralization of sexual difference”. (Therezo, “From Neutral Dasein to a
Gentle Twofold: Sexual Difference in Heidegger and Derrida”, p.491)
Whatever one ends up making of Derrida’s putative (later) reservations
concerning Heidegger and sexual difference (and again, here, I would
argue that Derrida is excessively apologetic on Heidegger’s behalf at
times), in the Geschlecht I essay, he is clearly looking to credit Heidegger
with having seen the need for a primordial kind of sexual difference
beyond anything his critics on this issue appreciated.9
In his 1983 essay, Derrida concedes that Heidegger, in Being and Time
at least, appears to be silent on the question of sexuality and sexual differ-
ence and offers a pretty standard defence along the lines that Heidegger
is not offering a philosophical anthropology. Nothing terribly new there
one might conclude; and, what he will offer here is a more extensive
 The Destitution of Dasein 25

discussion of this view to that glossed in his 1982 interview. However,

Derrida’s next move is to ‘discover’ in Being and Time ideas which are
supposedly lurking beneath the surface based on a highly speculative
reading of some brief remarks taken from a lecture course in Marburg in
1928. It is worth noting that in the same remarks, Heidegger himself
frames his brief discussion of sexuality (in the context of Being and Time)
within the context of the problem of transcendence: “The problem of
transcendence and the problem of Being and Time”. Thus, Heidegger is
clearly approaching the issue or question of sexuality (and its irrelevance
to his conception of Dasein) from the standpoint of transcendence.
Heidegger reminds his audience again, that he is interested in fundamen-
tal ontology and that the analysis of Dasein is undertaken with this in
view: “The issue is therefore neither one of anthropology nor of ethics but
of this being in its being as such, and thus one of a preparatory analysis
concerning it;” (Derrida, 1983, p. 136) This seems to accord with much
of what we have unpacked in the foregoing to the effect that Heidegger is
interested in the ‘to-be-ness’ of that being that we normally refer to as the
human being rather than the human being understood as a biological or
anthropological thing. And yet, why would sexuate identity of necessity
have to reduce to the biological or anthropological? Is this not a false
dichotomy that Heidegger and Derrida (in his analyses of these com-
ments) have smuggled in here? Either asexuate (might we say ‘monadic’?)
and the ‘same’, or else dyadic and therefore biological, anthropological
sexuality and thus not a question of Dasein, that is, of our to-be-ness. In
1928, Heidegger felt compelled to clarify as follows:

1. The term ‘man’ was not used for that being which is the theme of the
analysis. Instead, the neutral term Dasein was chosen. By this we
designate the being for which its own proper mode of being in a defi-
nite sense is not indifferent.
2. The peculiar neutrality of the term ‘Dasein’ is essential, because the
interpretation of this being must be carried out prior to every factual
concretion. This neutrality also indicates that Dasein is neither of
the two sexes. But here sexlessness is not the indifference of an empty
void, the weak negativity of an indifferent ontic nothing. In its neu-
26 M. O’Brien

trality Dasein is not the indifferent nobody and everybody, but the
primordial positivity and potency of the essence.
3. Neutrality is not the voidness of an abstraction, but precisely the
potency of the origin, which bears in itself the intrinsic possibility of
every concrete factual humanity. (Heidegger, The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic, pp.136—137. My emphasis)

Admiration for Derrida’s characteristic ingenuity and subtlety in places

notwithstanding, when one reads Heidegger’s specific remarks above—
they don’t really appear to ‘rescue’ Heidegger in the way Derrida suggests.
Heidegger after all seems to simply conflate the notion of sexuality with
‘concretion’ and thus something derived from the positive sciences—
biology or anthropology for example. Derrida tries to exploit the defen-
sive nature of Heidegger’s comments but in ways that stretch the bounds
of hermeneutic credibility. Derrida argues that Heidegger is not simply
trying to annul sexuality or negate it. Indeed, Heidegger is only too aware
(according to Derrida) that he might be seen to be simply vitiating or
emptying the account of a crucial feature of its [Dasein’s] identity.
Nonetheless, beyond all of the philosophical cheek puffing and lofty,
grandiloquent rhetoric—what does Heidegger offer here? He will suggest
that this elevated neutrality is higher in a way and more original than the
actualised, concrete sexuality where Dasein has already been ‘determined’
as one of two. But what on earth does that mean? How is being the ‘one’
that anyone already is prior to the ‘two’ that we can become anything
other than the archetypical gesture of homogenisation—the denial of dif-
ference, a resiling from the embodied and the sexuate—both foreclosed
from the transcendental level and reduced exclusively to the biological or
anthropological? Note as well that Derrida himself forecloses the possibil-
ity of sexuate difference being understood as anything other than a mat-
ter of biology or anthropology for Heidegger’s critics whereas Heidegger
has something ‘higher’ in mind. However, simply stating that Heidegger’s
is an account of a more aboriginal, primordial possibility of sexuate iden-
tity doesn’t actually make it so. Derrida tries to elaborate on this sugges-
tion as though it was philosophically fecund and merited close scrutiny
in 1983 as a superior alternative to the discussions of sexuality and differ-
ence then in vogue. Indeed, when one reads the opening of Derrida’s
 The Destitution of Dasein 27

provocative account, one cannot but recoil at the scarcely disguised scorn
for what he takes to be the superficial nature of the ‘babbling’ on sexuality
that had emerged and the ill-informed, flat-footed criticisms of Being and
Time that were circulating. Derrida’s strategy is to show Heidegger as
already forestalling any such ill-informed criticism from the outset—as
early as 1928. Be that as it may, beyond the interpretive acrobatics and
the ability to conjure ideas and arguments out of ‘silence’, he doesn’t
really offer anything philosophically substantive—rather he reinforces
the problematic nature of Dasein in Heidegger’s early work.
To begin with, Derrida’s ‘re-reading’ proceeds in ways that leave
Heidegger open to the kinds of criticisms we have been levelling against
him, despite Derrida’s best efforts:

Now, the first trait that Heidegger underlines is its neutrality. First directive
principle: ‘For the being which constitutes the theme of this analytic, the
title ‘man’ (Mensch) has not been chosen, but the neutral title ‘das Dasein.”
At first the concept of neutrality seems quite general. It is a matter of
reducing or subtracting every anthropological, ethical or metaphysical pre-
determination by means of that neutralisation, so as to keep nothing but a
relation to itself, bare relation, to the Being of its being. (Derrida,
“Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference”, p. 69)

Derrida had earlier conceded that it is

as if, in reading Heidegger, there were no sexual difference, nothing of that

in man, or put otherwise in woman, to interrogate or suspect, nothing
worthy of questioning, fragwürdig. It is as if, one might continue, sexual
difference did not rise to the height of ontological difference, on the whole
as negligible, in regard to the question of the sense of being, as any other
difference, a determinate distinction or an ontic predicate. (Derrida, op.
cit., p. 66)

And yet, Derrida wonders as to whether it is ‘imprudent’ to trust

Heidegger’s apparent silence. Owing to the anthropologically motivated
criticisms of Being and Time—Derrida speculates that Heidegger was
forced to dispel misinterpretations on this question:
28 M. O’Brien

And yet the matter was so little or ill understood that Heidegger had to
explicate himself right away. He was to do it in the margins of Sein und
Zeit, if we may call marginal a course given at the University of Marburg/
Lahn in the Summer Semester 1928. There he recalls certain ‘directive
principles’ on ‘the problem of transcendence and the problem of SEIN UND
ZEIT’ (§10). The existential analytic of Dasein can only occur within the
perspective of a fundamental ontology. That’s why it is not a matter of an
‘anthropology’ or an ‘ethic.’ Such an analytic is only ‘preparatory,’ while the
‘metaphysics of Dasein’ is not yet ‘at the center’ of the enterprise, clearly
suggesting that it is nevertheless being programmed. (op.cit., p. 68)

Derrida, however, wants to suggest that Heidegger’s attempts to unfold

or enlarge upon this neutrality involves a ‘leap’ and that this in turn
points to a privileged conception of sexual difference which motivated a
highly nuanced approach to the question of sexual difference. All that
Derrida succeeds in doing, however, is to underline and reaffirm
Heidegger’s bracketing move, his attempted erasure, on what is made to
sound like an elevated plane of abstraction but in a way that is simply a
patriarchal gesture of erasure nonetheless. Furthermore, when we exam-
ine Heidegger’s own discussion in 1928, we find that he is simply under-
lining the transcendental and neutral nature of Dasein in Being and Time.
There is, furthermore, a tendentiousness to Derrida’s treatment of criti-
cisms of Heidegger in this context. He constantly conflates any such criti-
cisms with anthropological misreadings of Being and Time and thus the
failure to understand the function of the analysis of Dasein as part of an
attempt at a fundamental ontology. Derrida thus argues that “It is a mat-
ter of reducing or subtracting every anthropological, ethical or metaphys-
ical predetermination by means of that neutralisation”. (op.cit., p., 69)
However, should we be so ready to concede this characterization to
Derrida? As long as Dasein is not understood as a translation of ‘existen-
tia’—why should it have to be neutral? Has he not already begged the
question here? Why are notions of sexuate difference, of necessity, merely
anthropological or biological?
Derrida argues firstly that
 The Destitution of Dasein 29

the unfolding of this neutrality will be carried out with a leap, without
transition and from the following item on (second directive principle)
towards a sexual neutrality, and even towards a certain asexuality
(Geschlechtslosigkeit) of being-there. The leap is surprising. If Heidegger
wanted to offer examples of determinations to be left out of the analytic of
Dasein, especially of anthropological traits to be neutralised, his only quan-
dary would be which to choose. Yet he begins with and keeps himself lim-
ited to sexuality, more precisely to sexual difference. It therefore holds a
privilege and seems to belong in the first place—to follow the statements
in the logic of their enchaining [together]—to that ‘factual concretion’
which the analytic of Dasein should begin by neutralising. (op. cit., p. 69)

This seems excessively conjectural. First, it is simply not true that

Heidegger had remained silent about other misunderstandings of Dasein
or the existential analytic (a silence which in turn supposedly testifies to
the great importance he attached to sexuality). Neither does it seem plau-
sible to suppose that Derrida himself is oblivious to the fact that Heidegger
repeatedly responded to misreadings of Being and Time throughout his
career and often in more depth than we find in a fleeting aside on the
question of sexual difference. Second, his allusion to sexual difference
here does not, in itself, speak to the gravity of the concern that Derrida
wants to attribute to Heidegger. He will even concede that according to
his own interpretation of Heidegger that

If the neutrality of the title ‘Dasein’ is essential, it is precisely because the

interpretation of that being—which we are—is to be engaged before and
outside of a concretion of that type. The first example of ‘concretion’ would
then be belonging to one or another of the two sexes. Heidegger doesn’t
doubt that they are two: ‘That neutrality means also that Dasein is neither
of the two sexes [keines von beiden Geschlechtern ist].’ (idem)

We can identify the crux of the problem in the first line of the passage
quoted above. Derrida acknowledges that Heidegger is interpreting that
being “which we are”. However, Heidegger is interested in the transcen-
dental, a priori constitution of that being that we are—which he names
Dasein. And, what we are trying to argue in turn is, that this being, that
‘we’ are, even before we consider any example of ‘concretion’, is already
30 M. O’Brien

sexuated. It is not something that can be bracketed—even at this primor-

dial level.
Derrida wonders whether Heidegger felt compelled to confront mis-
readings of Being and Time, a failure in particular to appreciate what he
has to say in §10, for example, concerning biology and anthropology. In
this case, the remarks on sexuality in the Summer Semester course of
1928 might be best understood as follows:

Perhaps he was then responding to more or less explicit, naive or sophisti-

cated, questions on the part of his hearers, readers, students, or colleagues,
still held, aware or not, within anthropological space: What about the sex-
ual life of your Dasein? they might still have asked. And after having
answered the question on that terrain by disqualifying it, in sum after hav-
ing recalled the asexuality of a being-there which is not an anthropos,
Heidegger wishes to encounter another question, even perhaps a new
objection. That’s where the difficulties will grow. (op.cit., p.71)

There is an excessive dependence on interpretive acrobatics here, as

Derrida conjures up a kind of proto sexuality that is not yet concretised
(as man or woman, for example) and thus as an ontic occurrence
of Dasein:

If Dasein is neutral, and if it is not man (Mensch), the first consequence to

draw is that it may not be submitted to the binary partition that one most
spontaneously thinks of in such a case, to wit ‘sexual difference.’ If ‘being-­
there’ does not mean ‘man’ (Mensch)10, a fortiori it designates neither ‘man’
nor ‘woman.’ (op.cit., p.70)

Derrida goes on to note that this much should have been and indeed
remains obvious—that is, that the transcendentally conceived Dasein
would have to be asexual since this would be simply part of what is brack-
eted from the account along with all other anthropological, ethical or
biological elements. Note again, the reductionist move here whereby
sexuate difference can only be thought of on the level of anthropology, as
a reproductive concern of the species, and thus belonging to the study of
biology. And so much remains obvious for Derrida—anyone should see as
 The Destitution of Dasein 31

much. And yet, Heidegger right away feels compelled to resurrect the
issue of sexuality when he returns to the issue of Dasein’s neutrality in
1928. Of course, it may have been just a response to “naïve” questions on
the part of his critics—still enslaved to the anthropological outlook—
where he will “disqualify” this objection by recalling “the asexuality of a
being-there which is not an anthropos.” Derrida wants to go further, how-
ever, suggesting that Heidegger’s decision to deal with the issue specifi-
cally is significant—though it is worth pointing out that he has just
offered a pretty banal explanation to the effect that Heidegger might just
have been responding to hopelessly misguided questions from his critics
concerning Dasein’s asexuality. Derrida now suggests, however, that
“Heidegger wishes to encounter another question, even perhaps a new
objection. That’s where the difficulties will grow.” (Derrida, “Geschlecht:
sexual difference, ontological difference”, 71) Derrida wants to elevate
Heidegger’s concerns here to the lofty plane of “originary positivity”:

If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the two sexes, that doesn’t mean that
its (sic) being deprived of sex. On the contrary, here one must think of a
pre-differential, rather a pre-dual, sexuality—which doesn’t necessarily
mean unitary, homogeneous, or undifferentiated, as we shall later verify.
Then, from that sexuality [and yet Heidegger insists and Derrida concedes
that Dasein is asexual], more originary than the dyad, one may try to think
to the bottom of a ‘positivity’ and a ‘power’ that Heidegger is careful not to
call sexual, fearing undoubtedly to reintroduce the binary logic that anthro-
pology and metaphysics always assign to the concept of sexuality. Here
indeed is a matter of the positive and powerful source of every possible
‘sexuality.’ (op.cit., p.72)

Derrida goes on to acknowledge that the lecture course veers away

from any direct discussion of sexuality while suggesting that Heidegger is
dealing with it, indirectly, on a most profound level. However, even if this
were something that Heidegger was attempting to ‘say’ through his silence
on the issue, wary of further anthropological misinterpretations, it
remains a kind of erasure of sexuate identity nonetheless through the
bracketing of this feature from his account of Dasein that we have been
discussing in the foregoing. Indeed, this very characterization of sexuate
32 M. O’Brien

identity flies in the face of what Irigaray insists must be an ineliminable

part of any conception of Dasein and one that we cannot get behind or
before. Derrida concedes the scarcity of the term sexuality itself even in
some of the passages he adduces as part of his apologia on Heidegger’s
behalf before invoking the sole mention of the term in another 1928
text—“On the Essence of Ground”. In that same text Heidegger states,
unambiguously, that Dasein is sexually neutral:

Never, however, is selfhood relative to a ‘you,’ but rather—because it first

makes all this possible—is neutral with respect to being an ‘I’ and being a
‘you,’ and above all with respect to such things as ‘sexuality.’ All statements
of essence in an ontological analytic of the Dasein in the human being take
this being from the outset in such neutrality. (Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 122)

Derrida then makes the entirely arbitrary claim that

a discourse on sexuality which would be of this order (wisdom, knowledge,

metaphysics, philosophy of life or of existence) falls short of every require-
ment of an analytic of Dasein in its very neutrality. Has a discourse on sexu-
ality ever been presented not belonging to any of these registers? (Derrida,
“Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference”, p.73)

Again, it is difficult here to see Heidegger as expressing anything along

the lines of what Derrida is suggesting. Heidegger is clearly and simply
stating that Dasein is to be thought of in the neuter, neutralized, asexuate.
Derrida then puts an even more profound question to Heidegger
before looking to rescue his account again. He suggests that Heidegger is
already aware and worried by an even greater suspicion:

What if ‘sexuality’ already marked the most originary Selbstheit? If it were

an ontological structure of ipseity? If the Da of Dasein were already ‘sex-
ual’? What if sexual difference were already marked in the opening up of
the question of the sense of Being and of the ontological difference? And
what if, though not self-evident, neutralisation were already a violent oper-
ation? (op.cit., p.74)
 The Destitution of Dasein 33

This is indeed the worry, if perhaps an anachronistic one, that Derrida, in

1983 is trying to discover in the philosophical melting pot of Heidegger’s
concerns in the late 1920s; not only is this neutralisation an abstraction,
it is a violent and illegitimate kind of bracketing. Furthermore, any
attempt to move to a level of disincarnate, asexuate identity, to that kind
of ethereal transcendentality, smacks of nothing less than the traditional
patriarchal move that Irigaray diagnoses as all pervasive within the
Western philosophical tradition. Derrida concedes that Heidegger
appears to be suggesting that Dasein was “supposed to have or be a priori
(as its ‘interior possibility’) a body found to be sexual, and affected by
sexual division.” (op.cit., p.75) And, “Assigned to a body, Dasein is sepa-
rated in its facticity, subjected to dispersion and parcelling out (zersplit-
tert), and thereby (ineins damit) always disjunct, in disaccord, split up,
divided (zwiespaeltig) by sexuality toward a determinate sex (in eine
bestimmte Geschlechtlichkeit).” (op.cit., p. 76) Derrida reminds us of the
trap that needs to be avoided here of representing “a grand original being
whose simplicity was suddenly dispersed (zerspaltet) into various singu-
larities must also be avoided.” (idem) He attempts to wend his way
through Heidegger’s attempts to gesture at the aboriginal transcendental
potency of Dasein—thrown and suspended between the historical moor-
ings of birth and death as the hidden potency of all sexual difference in
the first place. Notwithstanding, it is hard to see that this is anything other
than an account of some “grand original being”. Despite all of the inter-
pretive acrobatics—the arguments are not entirely convincing:

Between birth and death, the spacing of the between marks at once the dis-
tance and the link, but the link according to a kind of distension. This
‘between-two’ as rapport (Bezug) drawn into relationship (trait) with both
birth and death belongs to the very Being of Dasein, ‘before’ any biological
determination, for instance. (op.cit., p. 77)

This claim itself is based on a reading of §72 of Being and Time; however,
within the same section, all that Heidegger is arguing is that it is a mis-
take to think of Dasein in terms of existentia, that is, as present-at-hand
when it is a constant having been and being-towards and is never ‘actual-
ised’ in a present moment. The claim that this itself is prior to or separate
34 M. O’Brien

to any anthropological or biological considerations labouring under the

metaphysics of presence is not nearly so compelling a defence of Heidegger
in the context of the challenge levelled against him. The sleight of hand
again, on Derrida’s part, is to dismiss any attempt to criticise Heidegger’s
conception of Dasein on the basis of sexuate difference as indicative of a
failure to see that the related views on sexuate difference are already mat-
ters of anthropology or biology. And this is an illicit move on Derrida’s
part—all that he has underlined again here (if that is what Heidegger is
saying) is that a disembodied, asexuate, transcendental notion of Dasein
must function as the condition for the possibility of any actual sexuate
identity. This fails entirely to meet the challenge levelled by those who
would argue that sexuate identity is in fact an aspect of Dasein’s basic
constitution.
Following his detour into Being and Time (where no mention is made
of sexuality), Derrida returns to the question of sexuate difference and
compounds this error of conflation:

As soon as it [sexual difference] is not placed upon a common doxa or a

bio-anthropological science, the one and other sustained by some meta-
physical pre-interpretation, sexual difference remains to be thought. (op.
cit. p.79)

Thus, any existing attempts to think sexuate difference can only have
operated within the confines of the bio-anthropological. What is this but
a statement of the archetypical prejudice? All concerns with sexuation
hitherto have been merely biological, of the body, anthropological in the
ontologically blind sense. Why automatically conflate questions concern-
ing sexuate difference with biology—beyond the obvious desire to imme-
diately point out that Heidegger is not interested in biology or
anthropology? (as if we didn’t already know) Furthermore, is that to say
that sexuate difference remains to be thought by Heidegger—and thus
remains unthought by Heidegger? Why not suppose that that is in fact
what a critic of Heidegger might have been trying to point out (even in
1983) instead of assuming that their criticisms are simply anthropologi-
cal misreadings? Derrida wants instead to champion Heidegger as the
thinker who began to see the need to acknowledge sexuate difference on
 The Destitution of Dasein 35

a transcendental level—if only indicated cryptically and in ways that

remain to be thought and thus as the first post-patriarchal thinker of
sexuate difference. Any other attempts to think sexuate difference must,
of necessity, have been confined to the positive, ontologically stunted sci-
ences—including on the part of Heidegger’s critics. And again, we ask,
“why?” Moreover, what would these embryonic attempts to think ‘sexual
difference’ entail, according to Derrida? They would have to be informed
by Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s spatiality, an ability to appreciate “an
inside and an outside, dispersion and proximity, a here and a there, birth
and death, a between-birth-and-death, a being-with and discourse?” (op.
cit., p.82) But, why, as part of this taxonomy, should we assume that
these considerations are ‘prior’ to sexuate difference? Is it not in fact the
case that this claim only works when one forecloses the possibility of
sexuate difference being anything other than a biological, concrete char-
acteristic always to be outranked by transcendental, neutral, asexuate fea-
tures of Dasein? Why can’t we think of ourselves as thrown between birth
and death and as simultaneously sexuated? Is Derrida’s foreclosure here
not, ultimately, the typical act of the patriarch? The obligation instead,
according to Derrida, is to think

a sexual difference that would not yet be sexual duality, difference as dual.
As we have already observed, what the Course neutralized was less sexuality
itself [and what exactly ‘is’ sexuality itself ] than the ‘generic’ [that is the
biological, species-characteristic of belonging to one or other sex] mark of
sexual difference, belonging to one of two sexes. (idem)

Why, however, does duality entail biology? This hidden assumption

undergirds Derrida’s entire argument here. Why must we assume that to
think sexuate difference in terms of duality is to only operate within bio-
logical registers? This is Derrida’s recurring gripe with the unnamed crit-
ics of Heidegger. Derrida, in a somewhat regressive way, asks us to “think
a sexual difference not sealed by a two?”—that is, a unisex, dare I say it, a
one-sex model of Dasein—Dasein as monad instead of dyad. Does not
this attempt to reduce the duality of sex to one, to level down difference
and homogenize such that all are considered exclusively from the point of
view of the asexuate, which is to say, one sex, that which sounds more
36 M. O’Brien

masculine than feminine, does it not in the end accord with a recurring
tendency within the Western tradition, one that Derrida himself warned
against a year previously as we saw above? Masquerading behind these
sophisticated attempts to respond to Heidegger’s critics and to reprove
the discourse on sexuate difference—is there not in fact an attempt to
insist on conformity and to insist that everything be submitted to the
one-sex model rather than two? Where Derrida suggests that the “with-
drawal [retrait] of the dyad leads toward another sexual difference”, is he
not in fact simply refusing an existing philosophical attempt to think
difference and insisting instead on conformity, on the primacy of the
monadic over the dyadic?

Rehabilitating Heidegger Mark II

Anne van Leeuwen takes up the Derridean mantle, attempting to medi-
ate between Irigaray and Heidegger through Derrida, arguing that
Heidegger can be re-appropriated in such a way as to articulate a philoso-
phy that remains sensitive to difference. Her approach is blighted by a
number of interpretive shortcomings however. To begin with, she
acknowledges a debt to Derrida’s first Geschlecht essay while exclusively
invoking the second essay in that series where he deals with the notion of
‘the hand’. However, if Derrida’s first essay fails in the ways that I have
argued that it does, then the second instalment becomes rather tenuous
and speculative at best and can’t really be thought to redeem Heidegger
in the ways that van Leeuwen suggests. Van Leeuwen summarises
Irigaray’s 1983 critique of Heidegger as follows:

In L’oubli de l’air, Irigaray criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of the prin-

ciple of identity as instantiating the same neglect of sexual difference that
has been inscribed throughout the history of Western metaphysics. (Van
Leeuwen, “Sexuate difference, ontological difference: Between Irigaray and
Heidegger”, p. 111)

As we saw in the foregoing, there are good grounds for seeing Heidegger
as guilty of as much. However, van Leeuwen credits Derrida with having
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