I just realized I spent most of the summer reading a lot of Heidegger. As classes begin, I'm wondering how what I read, and how I read it, relates to the tasks within an English department that I'll have to manage. In short, I'm wondering how the philosophy I read will relate to the critical theory I will engage with. This relationship will articulate itself I think as the relationship between Heidegger (who represents philosophy) and the person who is closest to my concerns with texts, and thus with literature, Derrida (who represents critical theory). Now, these two categories were and are constituted for me not by any intrinsic content: it is not as if Derrida is not philosophical and Heidegger is not able to be used heavily within critical theory. It just stems from the way I read the works--and this reflection in itself I think is an important one, perhaps one of the most important I've culled from out of the summer. I read Heidegger in a philosophical tradition (whose concerns were for me concepts like being, existence, essence, dialectic, appearance, time, etc.), whereas I read Derrida within a tradition of critical theory (whose concerns are for me concepts like the subject, the body, society and ideology, exclusion and inclusion): this is all that really made these texts philosophical or not. And the context in which I read them does make a difference: that is, each context for me constituted a different method of reading and interpreting, and its these two ways that I need to reconcile now. So, I'll put forward two ideas that will sum up what I know now about this relationship thanks to all that reading:
1. Derrida is, at his core, an immensely powerful reader of Heidegger--perhaps the most powerful of all readers of Heidegger. Derrida does not "copy moves" from Heidegger, or import them as something external to what he is talking about, but elaborates Heidegger, develops him, takes him further than he was willing or able to go. This makes the work of Derrida extremely philosophical and extremely anti-philosophical, if only because this was the character of Heidegger's work as well. But because Derrida elaborates and develops Heidegger, he pushes this philosophy/anti-philosophy towards new concepts that even the anti-philosophy of Heidegger could not develop (the closest Heidegger came to something this refined, this concretely anti-philosophical--and it is an amazingly significant intervention into "theory,"--were with his reflections on technology). In other words, Derrida links the philosophical/anti-philosophical tradition of Heidegger (characterized by concepts like being, existence, essence, etc.) with new concepts that this tradition can engage with (like ideology, the subject, exclusion, etc.) but no longer as this tradition, even in its anti-philosphical or anti-traditional strain. In other words, Derrida accomplishes the break with metaphysics that Heidegger sought, and this allows him to formulate what were metaphysical/philosophical questions with new concepts, or concepts that had been developing alongside philosophy for ages. Whether this break is a real break with metaphysics or is merely a substitution of other fields of thought for philosophical thought is questionable: all I'm saying is that the conception of the break (not how it was carried out) was the conception Heidegger sought. He accomplishes this break via our second idea:
2. Derrida develops the ideas of Heidegger by replacing the concept of Ereignis with the concept of the trace. Derrida, throughout his entire corpus, keeps ready to hand an amazing passage by Heidegger that appears in "The Anaximander Fragment," which tries to articulate, essentially, the presencing and withdrawing of Being--or the operation of Ereignis throughout the ontological difference--via a metaphor of writing, the metaphor of the trace that appears and yet erases and yet remains. In this passage, Derrida writes in "Différance," "the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace... it is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace" (24). "Différance" becomes the name for this locus of the trace in its movement, what in Heidegger was the ontological difference between Being and beings, and "trace" itself which makes up this locus and the essential movement itself becomes sort of a substitute for what Heidegger thinks through in his concept of Ereignis--that which brings Being to presence but, that does not have Being, that which is prior to the most prior, Being. It is this replacement of Heidegger's almost anthropomorphic metaphors that constitute his most essential terminology that Derrida is able to bring Heidegger's thought back into the thinkable and at the same time completely out of the concept of metaphysics (which may or may not be metaphysics itself) that he was trying to break with. Like many French appropriations of German concepts (think of Lacan's work with Freud, Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Husserl, or Sartre's interpretations of Hegel via Kojeve--and I mean all this in no bad way), this replacement reifies and concretizes what Heidegger can only describe as a movement. But this reification works against the process of reification itself with this particular concept: it is nothing less than what Heidegger needed to do with his thinking but could not bring himself to do.
Maybe this is too rigid a conception of the significance and not to mention the actual thought going on here, and maybe its totally off--I'm not sure if any of this is even right. But it seems to look this way, and if you make this connection at least you can pursue the relationship between Derrida and Heidegger without reference to their external connections: you see the movement between them, and between issues in critical theory and philosophy more generally, developing out of the concepts themselves as they work in their thinking. For me, its the limit of what I found this summer, amidst all sorts of other amazing things, and what will underlie much of what I deal with in the upcoming months. I hope its helpful!
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