In 1986 Derrida was at Yale and had various discussions about Heidegger that allowed him to consolidate his thinking. In 1987 these discussions were spun out a bit in his contribution to conference or joint-discussion entitled "Reading Heidegger." Derrida presented what he came up with the year before. This was published in Research in Phenomenology ("On Reading Heidegger," #17: p.177). David Krell outlines in the following what Derrida was saying at this conference, which hit at four points: as Derrida said, "four threads are to be drawn out here, emanating from four areas of hesitation and disquiet in my current reading of Heidegger..." I want here to focus on the second of these points, which Derrida specifies as "the privilege of essence in Heidegger's account of technique and the necessary contamination of essences."
I've tried in previous posts and papers to sketch certain aspects of the relationship between Derrida and Heidegger's notion of technics. My conviction is that Derrida has a lot to offer us thinkers of the philosophy of technics or technology, or philosophical thinkers the ramifications of technology, more than we expect. He also has a lot to offer Heideggerians, I think, for whom a Heideggerian formulation of technics remains perhaps the most crucial and lasting contribution of Heidegger's later thought. I think this is the case even though others see Derrida's contribution to technics being something more along the lines of providing a narrative of hominization, like Bernard Stiegler.
This does not interest me as much: I fundamentally don't think Derrida's thought hits its hardest there. For me, it is in the second point around C, in the outline below, which is the most crucial, because it extends a notion of technics to all of phenomenological thought: "withdrawal, reserve, reticence, holding-back, may well be a strategy of protection." He means a Heideggerian strategy of protection against contamination by technics (the non-essential technological aspect of technics). In other words, Heidegger performs what he says: withdrawal also, at the level of his discourse, his text, withdraws (from contamination).
But things don't stop with just this. For what this allows us to ask is the following: What could it mean to think withdrawal otherwise than as protection? This is what Derrida is getting at, this is what he thinks Heidegger falls a little short of doing. And it's understandable, for to think withdrawal otherwise than as protection against technology would be to think withdrawal as a function of technology, as permeated by the technical. This would in turn make the phenomenon itself--which is self-veiling or withdrawing--technical. A technical phenomenon: this is what it is impossible for Heidegger, and incumbent upon Derrida, to think. One then can think of a technical phenomenology, which would not look so much like the scientifically aided heterophenomenology of Daniel Dennett (as venerable and useful and amazing as that is), but more like grammatology, that science the impossibilities and possibilities (as impossibilities) Derrida looked at long ago.
Regardless, this is my case for looking at Derrida as different than Stiegler in his emphasis, which I think (as the two last volumes of Technics and Time recently made their English-language appearance) actually makes him more and more relevant for thinking technics in a unique way now. Here then, is the outline of what Derrida said then was his second point of hesitation about Heidegger:
II. The privilege of essence in Heidegger's account of technique and the necessary contamination of essences:
A. Heidegger avers that the essence of technique is nothing technological : his thinking of technique as such and as an essence tries in a classically philosophical manner to shelter the thought and language of essence from contamination.
B. Yet can anything in language and in thought be sheltered absolutely from technicity? In the very will to protect oneself against "x" one is more exposed to the danger of reproducing "x" than when one tries to think contamination.
C. Contamination, a contagion born of contact and a kind of touching, foils every strategy of protection; it puts at risk the central theme of Heidegger's thinking--that of the ontological difference.
1. Being's difference from beings is itself dissimulated in beings, and thus appears to be a kind of contamination. Yet Heidegger would insist that contamination is merely an "ontic" scheme, a mere "metaphor."
2. The Heideggerian figure of Being's self-veiling, its withdrawal, reserve, reticence, holding-back, may well be a strategy of protection.
3. Contamination requires the thinking of a kind of différance that is not yet or no longer ontological difference.
3 comments:
A novice question: what kind of contamination is Heidegger trying to guard against? Is it just Heidegger trying to stay away from our own technological way of thinking? Simply saying "No that's not the phenomenological structure of Dasien" but Derrida is saying that may be defined by the action of trying to get away from technological thinking?
Not novice--and you've got it exactly right. But there's more. I might put it also in terms that aren't so ad hominem (as Derrida himself does too): It isn't just that Heidegger is somehow "complicit" in some plot to try and keep things focused away from the technological way of thinking. It is that he thinks technology wrong in saying there is an essence to it which we need to focus on. Why? Because, according to Heidegger himself, if a technological way of looking at things has spread itself around, not only can't we get back to the being or the essence of technology, but we can't even be sure that we have even lost the ability to get back. So what is questionable about what Heidegger from Derrida's perspective is that he can claim to be sure there actually is something like an essence of technology behind technological beings. All this has less to do with Dasein than ontological difference (it really has to do with the disruption of what Heidegger calls ereignis), but it has ramifications for the analysis of Dasein too. But what's important is this isn't a refutation of what Heidegger says: Derrida accepts the analysis of Heidegger on technology as one of the best ones we have (along with the analysis of Dasein). This is why to some people he looks like a Heideggerian. It is just pursuing an avenue of what Heidegger says (that being is completely forgotten-i.e. even the forgetting is forgotten--with the dissemination of planetary technology) by seeing what would have to be modified about Heidegger if one took this avenue seriously. Does that make sense?
Thank you very much for these posts. I'm writing a thesis on logical positivism, and I'm very interested in the Heidegger-Carnap controvery (about science and logic).
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