ABSTRACT
Recently, Derrida’s writings have again been viewed as providing a path toward new and potentially more inclusive historiographies. In Derrida’s texts, however, history and historiography are disputed and contentious sites. Derrida repeatedly suggests that history and historiography have never, and indeed never, can fulfil their mandate to present events in their genuine singularity and as part of a radical becoming. Deconstruction, engaging a new form of écriture and a new meditation on what exceeds all presence, perhaps alone can fulfil history’s unkept promise. The present essay canvasses Derrida’s early work to examine the roots of his questioning of historical conceptuality, including his rejection of all forms of historicism. It then focuses on a seminar from 1964–65 Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. In it, Derrida conceives of a radical form of historicity and epochality, adjacent to Heidegger’s, one applicable to his own thought, thereby laying the ground for deconstruction’s claim to stand in for history. Yet even this version of his project for Derrida, unlike Heidegger, still diverges from all periodizable history and any working historiography.
