ABSTRACT
Metaphor and metaphysics are finely interwoven in the work of Heidegger,
Ricoeur, and Derrida. The ‘woven’ metaphor is intentional. The relation
between metaphor and metaphysics is a complex one, requiring assessment
or reassessment of how fundamental concepts, such as art, language, per-
ception, truth, and reality, are interlaced with one another. In Ricoeur’s and
Derrida’s responses to Heidegger’s metaphysics, and in Ricoeur’s and Derrida’s
responses to each other, there is a dense network of agreement and dis-
agreement over what the relations between these fundamental concepts might be. For Ricoeur, the interwoven nature of metaphor and metaphysics
appears as his notion of the intersection of discourses while, for Derrida, it
unfolds as the many meanings of the retrait of metaphor. As Derrida points
out in ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’, there is much that he and Ricoeur agree
upon, yet there are also many respects in which they diverge (Derrida 1998:
107). In this chapter, I plot Ricoeur’s and Derrida’s responses to the ques-
tion of metaphor and metaphysics as it is posed by Heidegger, and argue
that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology makes available an understanding of metaphor which requires us to rethink how Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida
stand in relation to one another.
