Spiriting Heidegger

A discussion of Jacques Derrida's De l'esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Galilee, 1987, 184 pages. English translation, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, by Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 1988.

DAVID FARRELL KRELL

University of Essex

Goethe says: "It is not always necessary for the true to be embodied: enough if it hovers like a spirit [geistig] and produces accord; enough if it wafts through the air, earnest and amicable, like the sound of a bell." - Martin Heidegger, "Art and Space"

Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit. I begin with this bald and bold claim because this "Discussion" is already overdue and I may get lost in my effort to recount and counter, report and reply. Therefore let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style. Wholly in the spirit of Heidegger, but also spiriting him across borders into strange territories, in a spirit quite foreign to his, though whit as every thoughtful. " Spirit? And Heidegger,? \ The book shows ten sections. It spans Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) -- and the Trakl essay of 1953, "Die Sprache im Gedicht." Major way-stations include the rectoral address of 1933 and the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935. Yet Derrida also manages to draw Heidegger's Nietzsche, Holderlin, and Schelling into his account, and to touch on scores of other themes and figures in the Heideggerian text. I shall begin with a brief account of the book's

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gestation, then report on the book's ten sections, posing a number of questions along the way, especially concerning the final turns the book takes in the direction of Georg Trakl. De l'esprit is not a member of the Geschlecht series, even though that theme in Trakl's poetry is the pole to which the book as a whole is drawn. It is the text of a lecture delivered in March 1987 at a colloquium organized by the College International de Philosophie under the title "Heidegger: Open Questions." A private seminar at Yale and a talk at the Essex International Philosophy Colloquium, "Reading Heidegger," in Spring 1986 (see Research in Phenomenology, volume XVII) were significant stages in the preparation of De l'esprit, these in turn having arisen from work done in seminars during the past few years at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Pratiques on "Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism." No doubt the four principal "threads" of De l'esprit (1. the question of the question in Heidegger's texts; 2. the "essence" of technology and the contamination of all essences; 3. animality and the philosophy of life; 4. the problem of the "ephocality" of being) are visible in earlier works of Derrida's, such as the various Geschlecht papers, "Envoi," "The Retrait of Metaphor," and Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. These texts, culmi- nating at least in part in the book under discussion, complicate and deepen Derrida's earlier work on Heidegger, best known through the articles, "The Ends of Man" and "Ousia and Gramme." Yet in none of these earlier texts, nor even in the talks immediately preceding De l'esprit, is there evidence of the spirit that is haunting Derrida. For that one would have to turn to Glas, La carte postale, and the recently published Mimoires: For Paul de Man, Schibboleth, Ulysse gramophone, and Feu la cendre. I had intended to review all the works just mentioned, but will no doubt have difficulty in doing justice to De l'esprit alone, with its four threads and its ten sections.

1. "Spirit" is a word Heidegger advises the fundamental ontologist to avoid. It is one of those words like subject, person, rational animal, consciousness and ego that most need deconstruction. He often places the word "spirit" in quotation marks, as though mentioning it without using it; these "scare quotes" and other means of avoiding a word (crossing through, erasing, employing the subjunctive mood, and so on) preoccupy Derrida throughout his text. In choosing the title De l'esprit, he is emphasizing another kind of avoidance-or at all events another sort of lack or dissymmetry. The title is unmistakably French, and not merely because the word esprit belongs to the French language. The treatise form De ... (cf. Traiti de ..., Discours de ...) conjures the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French scholarly and essayist traditions; De l'esprit is the title of a book by Helvetius burned (the book, not the author, not quite) on the steps of the Palais de Justice in 1759. The formula is ultimately Ciceronian, hence utterly Latinate, so that the gap between spiritus and Geist-the entire problem of translation-opens at the