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Home , Being and Time, Dasein, Deconstruction, Writing and Difference

INTRODUCTION

I

Deconstruction, best-known through the works of and , has offered the most rigorous of the of the . According to both Heidegger and Derrida, the tradition of metaphysics has always been the metaphysics of the subject, as the con- cept of subjectum, whether conceived as the Greek hupokeimenon, or as the cogito, or as the “I think” of transcendental apperception, or as “spirit,” has always been determined as the condition of possibility of the of . In the modern tradition, it is in Man, the human subject, that the foundation is located. It would not be wrong to say that in displacing Man from his status of the ground, in decentring the subject as the ground, is not only in the company of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud but also converges with the human sciences’ famous proclamation of the death of Man. Texts such as ‘Letter on “”’ (Heidegger) and ‘Ends of Man’ (Derrida) are the canons of philosophical anti-humanism.1 Deconstruction is distinct from in that it seeks to think the ques- tion of the ground more radically than what the modern tradition does through the subject (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl). The such as ontological and differance cannot be thought under the category of the subject if the latter is conceived as the substantiality of self-presence, or, more broadly, the identity of the selfsame. Yet, the aim of the present work is to argue that deconstruction is not only not a dissolution of the subject, as it is often opined, but a thinking of the subject, or better, subjectivity otherwise than the transcendental philosophy or even . Within the tradition of deconstruction there are two apparently conflicting ways of thinking on the subject. On the one hand, there is the attempt to radically historicize, in the of genealo­ gi­cal unraveling, the subject. If deconstruction, in Heidegger and Derrida, puts in question transcendental subjectivity (Kant, Hegel, Husserl) it does so in order to think the historicity of the subject without referring to

1 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on “Humanism”,” in Pathmarks, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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­history as the synthetic activity of the subject, or without turning­ history itself into a transcendental ground. In , Heidegger thinks history according to his conception of ec-static temporality and as a ­communal dimension of the authenticity of . Derrida, however, has shown perspicuously that Heidegger’s own conception of “vulgar time” and of history as gathering still smack of a subtle resumption of the meta- physics of presence. For Derrida, history is metaphysical when it is founded upon a privilege of presence. The of history “has always been in complicity with teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in words, paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of pres- ence to which it was believed history could be opposed.”2 But, by the same token, in Derrida’s thinking, the deconstructive double gesture consists not in opposing the text to history, as it is often believed, but in overturn- ing and displacing the metaphysical, that is, the essential question of his- toricity ( the condition of the possibility of history) into the time of the entirely other. As Derrida writes, “If the word ‘history’ did not of itself con- vey the motif of a final repression of differences, one could say that only differences can be ‘historical’ from the outset and in each of their aspects.”3 But Derrida would maintain, in a post-structuralist manner, that the dimension of historicity as differences does not include the subject con- ceived in the sense of self-identity. It is in ’s work, on the other hand, that we find, perhaps for the first time, a theorization that defends what I may, borrowing from Derrida, call a post-deconstructive subjectivity, a subjectivity that is otherwise than ontology, a subjectivity that is non-self-identical.4 The subjectivity that Levinas defends, how­ ever, belongs to an eschatology which he opposes to history. History, for Levinas, betrays subjectivity. There are thus two conflicting : on the one hand, a historicity that is without the subject, and, on the other,

2 Jacques Derrida, , trans. Alan Bass (: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 291. 3 Derrida, Margins, 11. 4 It is against the dominant reception of deconstruction as the dissolution of the ques- tion of the subject that Derrida, in a conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy, exhorts us to think of the post-deconstructive subjectivity. Here is Derrida’s remark: I am thinking of those today who would try to reconstruct a around a sub- ject that would not be pre-deconstructive, around a subject that would no longer include the figure of mastery of self, of adequation to self, center and origin of the , etc…. but which would define the subject rather as the finite of non-identity to self, as the underivable interpellation inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the of the other, with all the paradoxes or the of being- before-the-, and so on. Jacques Derrida, Points… interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 266.

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