ABSTRACT
An enormous task is proposed here. The texts pointed out are doubtless among the most diffi cult and most decisive of the history of philosophy. (38)
Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’ is a note on a footnote in Being and Time,2 itself a note on Hegel’s Jena Logic and Encyclopaedia, on Aristotle’s Physics, on Bergson. Thus, for example, Derrida on (Heidegger on) Hegel (on) Aristotle:
Here [in Hegel] the Aristotelian aporia is understood, thought, and assimilated into that which is properly dialectical. It suffi ces — and it is necessary — to take things in the other sense and from the other side to conclude that the Hegelian dialectic is but the repetition, the paraphrastic re-edition of an exoteric paradox, the brilliant formulation of a vulgar paradox. (43)
Yet a footnote checks this formulation, corrects ‘paraphrastic’
Hegel conceived his relation to the Aristotelian exoteric ... in an entirely other category than that of the “paraphrase” of which Heidegger speaks. (43, note 16)
And a laconic parenthesis within the footnote further queries the term itself:
1 Unless otherwise specifi ed, page-references throughout are to Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Harvester, Brighton, 1982. Page references preceded by M refer to Marges de la philosophie, Les Editions du Minuit, Paris, 1972. 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, p. 500, note xxx, referring to p. 484.
