ABSTRACT
Derrida ‘turns’ or ‘reverses’ from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy much as Heidegger ‘reverses’ from Edmund Husserl’s. Heidegger attempts to pass through Husserl’s consciousness to secure his thinking on the ground of Being. Heidegger’s analysis of the self at times verges on mysticism. It seems that his ‘self is nothing more than Dasein’s relation to its own identity. Yet this self-relation is effectively an orientation towards a no-self. Heidegger uses privative interpretations on a number of occasions in Being and Time to indicate a kind of phenomenality which can occur in a negative fashion. After Being and Time much changes in Heidegger’s philosophy, and although the concept of death does not disappear, Heidegger scales down its role considerably. Being-towards-death is the final and most telling ‘reduction’ in Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology. For Dasein to show itself phenomenologically, ‘in its wholeness’, it must ‘bracket’ itself in an absolute reduction to nothingness.
