ABSTRACT
Derrida’s debt to Heidegger is immense. In Positions he says, ‘What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions’; and in a later interview, published in the same volume, ‘Heidegger’s text is extremely important to me; …it constitutes a novel, irreversible advance all of whose critical resources we are far from having exploited’. Indeed, Derrida claims that all of the essays he published up to 1971 constitute ‘a departure from Heideggerian problematic’; they display a kind of ‘fanaticism’ in their calling into question ‘the thought of presence’ in Heidegger.1 Heidegger’s concepts of origin, fall, propriety, proper meaning, proximity to the self, body, consciousness, language-especially etymologism in philosophy and rhetoricDerrida puts into question. Yet he is careful to distance himself from those who have reduced Heidegger to German ideology between the wars or to antisemitism. During the last fifteen years, Heidegger’s importance for Derrida has in no way subsided. Unlike Derrida’s readings of Plato, Rousseau, Poe, Mallarmé, Freud, Saussure, Genet, Artaud, Lévi-Strauss, however, his readings of Heidegger have been more thematic than textual, focusing more on single words or concepts than on their full textual embodiment.2 The notable exception to this procedure is the long final section of The Truth in Painting, entitled ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing’. Here Derrida offers a meticulous reading of Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art and his most sustained meditation on a Heideggerian text.
