ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger writes somewhere that ‘higher than actuality is possibility’. With this statement, the philosopher lifts the weight of prevailing conditions and makes room for untapped future scenarios — not in the sense of utopian blueprints but of open horizons and uncharted transformations. To be sure, preoccupied with the linkage of ‘being and time’, Heidegger always remained aware of the interlacing of temporalities — of the future-direction of the past as well as the past sedimentations in the future — and hence of the correlation of actuality and possibility. Yet, even in his case, the burden of an oppressive present tilted the balance;sometimes in the direction of radical transgression — as is evident in his writings on Nietzsche and some other texts penned during the 1930s.1 Suffering under the same oppressive weight, some of his later students or followers shifted the accent steadily towards transgression of, or noncompliance with, actuality; easily, the most resolute thinker in this respect is Jacques Derrida. Infl uenced by both Nietzsche and Heidegger (and some French Nietzschean thinkers), Derrida placed his focus entirely on ‘overcoming’ of the past — something he called ‘deconstruction’ and which involved the dismantling of the metaphysical-ontological premises or underpinnings of inherited frameworks and traditions of thought. Proceeding in this manner, Derrida’s life-work amounted to a restless journey or peregrination, a relentless exodus from all forms of positivism, conformism, and habitual practices — including the prevailing practices of democracy.
