Ignorance and irony

I hope soon to write something on what Heidegger means by "authenticity" in Being and Time and elsewhere. But for now I can at least give an example of how badly the word is misinterpreted in the United States.
First of all, just note that the translation of eigentlich by "authenticity" is by no means a standard translation. Here is a list of words that eigentlich can translate as: "intrinsic," "really," and, perhaps the best, "underlying," are also available. "Authentic" has such a specific connotation in English that it actually is one of the words that is farthest from the German in the way Heidegger uses it.
For "authentic" means something like "proper" to us. Now, witness my example (here is the mp3 of it) of what a mess you get yourself into when you interpret the word this way. It is an interview with the pretentious Robert Harrison, who thinks he knows his Heidegger and who also thinks he is smart enough to get the better of a incisive, rigorous Heideggerian like Andrew Mitchell. Harrison is a postmodernist, and, as such, is led naturally by many of the reflections of Derrida to a critique of all that is "proper." So naturally when he sees "authentic," in the Robinson and Macquarrie translation of Being and Time, he has to criticize it as implying some type of unfounded "moral" message, i.e. favoring one element in a binary as more "proper" than the other, turning an opposition into a heirarchy because, as Derrida continually emphasized, there can be no binary where the terms of it are indifferent to each other. Notice how Mitchell corrects him and says that there is no real connection between the German eigentlich and the proper. And observe how Harrison believes that because he is a Heideggerian, Mitchell is merely subscribing to the definitions of the proper that Heidegger erected in his work.
Now, I'm not agreeing with any Heideggerians in denying that the word "authentic" does not carry a moral message of some sort, as Harrison accuses Mitchell of doing: I'm not showing Harrison to be an idiot because he doesn't know a "real" reading of Heidegger. I'm merely showing that Harrison could never know Heidegger at all. This is because he cannot see how his own critique of the proper is bound up in a Derridian viewpoint that is based on an elaboration of Heidegger's ideas. That is, he does not see that the Derrida he spouts so righteously was perhaps one of the best readers of Heidegger ever, and how he developed his critique of the proper precisely out of the critique of Being as the present that Heidegger developed in that very work Harrison criticizes, Being and Time. As long as he remains ignorant to Derrida's connections to Heidegger and how Heidegger's term eigentlich makes possible a critique of Being as presence or (what is the same thing) Being as the proper, the stable, the substantive, the non-becoming--as long as he remains ignorant to this, he will, like many, many people in America, remain unfit for any genuine encounter with Heidegger at all, let alone a criticism of his use of the word eigentlich. In other words, like many in the United States academy, it is the mere appearance of the word (and, remember, a word that appears as the badly translated "authentic") that provokes a critique of Heidegger's reliance on Being as the proper, and keeps one ironically ignorant to the fact that Heidegger, through his integration of his readings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Greeks in Being and Time, made possible this interpretation of Being as the proper. Of course, this type of academic will say (and I should say it is only a type of academic--I'm not saying all or most or even a little amount of academics in America are of this type), there remains a reason why the text exists as such with its translation of eigentlich as authenticity--there is some connection between the German term and the idea of the "proper." And indeed this is so: Derrida in his criticisms of Heidegger gets at how this is not a mistake, how Heidegger himself succumbs to the history of Being as presence and the proper that he would like to critique. But Derrida shows this necessity of a connection between the German term and the idea of the proper, so nicely brought out by the term "authentic," by resisting merely pointing it out, that is, by reading Heidegger. By "reading" I mean that he sees that this bad translation is indeed bad, is indeed a poor relation of the sense of the German that Heidegger writes. This labor and the joy of reading is what is refused by merely pointing at the connection between eigentlich and the moral, the proper: the depth of what Derrida does with Heidegger, and what Heidegger himself makes available (namely, the critique of Being as the proper, as presence), is completely lost in this banal, easily and perversely fashioned link between the two.