Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sex, part 1

For a couple weeks now I have been thinking or circling about a certain passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am, and its relation to a certain motif, a certain problematic, that stretches itself through Derrida's entire corpus, indeed announcing itself (quite literally: you can find it there in the text), if not always, then with surprising frequency.
It itself was largely the subject of a series of seminars on philosophical nationalism Derrida held in the late 80's. Hopefully these will all eventually be published. But the motif or problematic I am talking about is not just confined to the issues it involved and which these seminars (and the articles and works explicitly published around them or with reference to them, which included Of Spirit and The Politics of Friendship)--that is, sex or all the words centering around Geschlecht, including sex, gender, race or breeding, nation--so much as an issue revolving around Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the problem of reproduction and biology and/or technology which extends much further than the apparent (that is, explicit) reach even of (this subject of) Geschlecht.
(In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida says the following, which approximates--and yet I wonder whether we might ever get an abstracted, pure formulation of this, outside of any text, any project like The Politics of Friendship--the problem or motif I am trying to get at, but as a particular conceptualization and/or question of politics:

The concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of the State to the family., without what we will call a schematic of filiation: stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation... This is once again the abyssal question of the phúsis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition.
-The Politics of Friendship, viii.)
First, the passage. Derrida is talking about how the issue of whether and how an animal could see itself (and perhaps see itself naked, i.e. feel shame) within a mirror, whether it can apprehend its own reflection--how this issue is not found discussed in any discourse of a philosophical type (with the exception of Lacan, who ends up saying that the animal actually does not "see"). He suggests that this is because these discourses would have to "know for certain" the following:

Where do the mirror and the reflecting image begin, which also refers to the identification of one's fellow being? Can one not speak of an experience that is already specular as soon as a cat recognizes a cat and begins to know, if not in the end to say, that "a cat is a cat?" Does not the mirror effect also begin wherever a living creature, whatever it be, identifies another living creature of its own species as its neighbor [prochain, also "its next"] or fellow [semblable, also "its likeness"]? And therefore at least wherever there is sexuality properly speaking, wherever reproduction relies on sexual coupling?
-The Animal That Therefore I Am, 59.

It is this last sentence which made me think. It brought me around to that motif which I began to think about seriously when writing a paper on The Gift of Death--if only because it seemed like I had always thought along the lines of the necessity that the motif indicates, it captures and thematizes so very well the general experience that one has (and I certainly had) while reading Heidegger's Nietzsche. Indeed, in The Gift of Death, one finds a refrain of sorts that goes as follows: "that would be more Nietzschian than Heideggerian." So one finds, while Derrida is discussing a claim of Patocka's:

Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in the figures or modes of the entity developed as myths or fictions. Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian.
-The Gift of Death (Second Edition), 39.

The refrain is important in this text for two reasons: 1) Derrida rarely economizes in this way by referring not even to the proper name but to the type or kind of discourse that is generally assumed to be that of a particular proper name--though The Gift of Death is indeed a rare text, full of many other rare instances of economizing, precisely--and 2) Nietzsche, as my friend Sand said to a class that included me several months ago, plays a crucial part in this book, if it all in fact does not wholly stand or fall with its take on Nietzsche.
But the importance is not just local: reading it, I remembered a phrase all the way back in Of Grammatology which seemed to bear upon this very refrain.

Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference, and all the "empiricist" or nonphilosophical motifs that have constantly tormented philosophy throughout the history of the West, and besides, have had nothing but the inevitable weakness of being produced in the field of philosophy, Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with Hegel and as Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth or the primary signified, in whatever sense that is understood. Reading, and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche "originary" operations... with regard to a sense that they do not first have to transcribe or discover, which would not therefore be a truth signified in the original element and presence of the logos, as topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori necessity. To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type [my italics], it seems that we must above all not attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive "ontology," composed of profound ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text... Therefore, rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely [my italics again], underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness...
-Of Grammatology (Corrected Edition), 19.

If we ignore the Saussurian language regarding "the liberation of the signifier"--this has been too much commented upon, in my opinion--we find that there is a proposal for rebelling against the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche, and in a unique way (that annuls itself or self-destructs as rebellion--we will return to this later): that is, much of what will become Spurs. But before turning to that text--another in the motif we are establishing--we must ask, Why does Derrida propose (to take back) this rebellion? Why should we protect Nietzsche from Heidegger in the first place?
It is not that Heidegger's reading of Neitzsche itself fails to give due credit to certain crucial aspects of Nietzsche, namely those "nonphilosophical" ones Derrida speaks of--essentially his engagement with positivism (psychology) and his appropriations of Darwin. This would be, fundamentally, Deleuze's objection to the Heideggerian reading, along, perhaps, with Foucault. It is not, then, the oft noted fact that Heidegger takes the "late" Nietzsche, the most rigidly philosophical or schematic Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Will to Power, as the useful Nietzsche (indeed, if one wanted to really make this argument, one would encounter much opposition from the fact that Heidegger does interpret much early Nietzsche, if not so much in his two volumes on him then in other texts, where he usually brings in most of the corpus--the early writings and even some early fragments, not to mention much of Zarathustra). This despite the unbelievable extent of the prejudice against these aspects of Nietzsche that Heidegger expresses so often in his later work and so (there is no other word for it--though "hastily," "unthinkingly," "inappropriately," "misleadingly," "slanderously" all come to mind, and I use this one precisely to call up or recall what Heidegger himself said of his affiliation with the National Socialists--and I would argue this is just something basic about Heidegger, to be reviled and unceasingly argued against rather than mocked or dismissed, because it is right beside the brilliance of his interpretations) stupidly in remarks like the following: Nietzsche's philosophy, he says,

rests on strange foundations. These foundations indeed show themselves to be based on a quite ordinary and metaphysically highly questionable "psychology." Yet Nietzsche can afford that.
-The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, (Heidegger's winter 1929/30 seminar), 74.

No, Derrida does not reject this regarding Heidegger's Nietzsche. Nor does Derrida here directly reject what this move of Heidegger's is affiliated with--a suspicion about representation in general, and about die Zeit des Weltbildes--which Derrida often critiques (cf. "Envois" in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I for an amazing extended discussion of "The Age of the World-Picture"). It is more complicated here than the particular characterization of Nietzsche as a thinker of being as will, as calculable representation, that Heidegger will often lament in his sketches and essays on the history of being.
The rejection is at once more simple and infinitely more profound--this is why it will have to be taken up again in Spurs, as well as--indeed--the rest of the Derridian corpus: it is too much to the side of the main theses of Of Grammatology to be examined with the attention it deserves (and indeed this is why it can here be so directly). Derrida dismisses the idea that things in the world must, for Nietzsche, have their sense in being--and this is precisely what Heidegger concludes must be the case. In other words, things in the world (I have to use this awkward phrase because to use "what exists" or "beings" is already to submit to a Heideggerian interpretation) do not admit of looking any deeper behind them for what their residence in the world is grounded within (even if this ground is an ungroundedness, an abyss, an Abgrund). And this "looking deeper" for a ground is precisely what Heidegger always does with whatever Nietzsche asserts about the world (again, precisely by conceiving of its ground as ungrounded: to assert that Derrida is wrong because he misses this aspect of Heidegger--which I have seen happen often, especially on the part of Heideggerians--is to willfully misinterpret what Derrida is saying). For Heidegger, the things in the world from Nietzsche's perspective are indecidable with respect to their sense, their meaning--and this, however, is precisely their meaning: whatever is there, even if it is only an upsurge of becoming, has being, in the sense that it is not nothing. In the end, Heidegger thinks that if what becomes is not nothing, it must have being for Nietzsche on some level. That is, until Heidegger starts to entertain certain thoughts even beyond enowning (Ereignis) seriously. But we will (have to) come to this later.
Now, again, we are not circling around an exact interpretation of what "becoming" means in Nietzsche--and if it sounds as if this is the case, it is due to my lack of mastery over what I want to say here. But this term (becoming--and, indeed, how it relates to being) is not the point of the contestation (I outlined Heidegger's view of this with more precision--that is, with respect to eternal return and will to power--in a post last summer). If it were, then it would be an issue of either of the two objections we already specified (Deleuze and Foucault's, for example, and another Derrida's). Rather, in this passage of Of Grammatology, and throughout the sort of debate running through Derrida's corpus that I would here like to trace, there is an issue over the precise way things mean or have sense in Nietzsche's view and how we ourselves should interpret it--in short, it's much more basic than any debate over meaning, precisely because its about the most basic sense of meaning (if that means anything). What is at issue is an approach to Nietzsche, and whether it does not admit of another--a wholly other--way of approach. It comes down to this difference: if we were to take Heidegger's standpoint, we would suspect that whatever becomes, at some basic level (perhaps the level of attunements, which are not conscious), would still exist rather than not. What Derrida is advocating for, on the other hand, is the interpretation of becoming (that is, the things in the world) as a suspension of this being or meaning, even at this most basic level that Heidegger would be looking at. The indeterminacy with respect to meaning then would not be something that could be grounded even in what is ungrounded. It would be both indeterminate with respect to whether it is or meant, and indeterminate with respect to whether it was not (i.e. did not exist), or was not meaningful.
The entire discourse of Nietzsche, then--i.e. whatever he said about anything--would have been indeterminate. (This, by the way, is the fundamental thesis of Spurs, to which we will return).
This makes it more than clear that the stakes in this similarly naive-sounding "Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian" are actually very high.
But before getting into this more, we must first ask about this detour I took with Derrida into Nietzsche and Heidegger--at bottom a detour towards a proposal for a saving (or not saving) of Nietzsche from (and by) Heidegger--and why I was reminded of it by a sentence on a discourse on animals. I say that there is a relation between the passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am and this this proposal. I will specify this relation--as well as develop this motif (by looking at remarks in both Spurs and Of Spirit, as well as the "Geschlecht" series of essays) in three or four more posts.