INTRODUCTION I Deconstruction, Best-Known Through the Works

INTRODUCTION I Deconstruction, best-known through the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, has offered the most rigorous critique of the metaphysics of the subject. According to both Heidegger and Derrida, the tradition of metaphysics has always been the metaphysics of the subject, as the concept 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 meaning of beings. 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 being the ground, in decentring the subject as the ground, deconstruction 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 “Humanism”’ (Heidegger) and ‘Ends of Man’ (Derrida) are the canons of philosophical anti-humanism.1 Deconstruction is distinct from nihilism in that it seeks to think the question of the ground more radically than what the modern tradition does through the subject (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl). The concepts such as ontological difference 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 ontology. 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 sense of genealo- gi cal 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). 300439 300439 2 introduction history as the synthetic activity of the subject, or without turning history itself into a transcendental ground. In Being and Time, Heidegger thinks history according to his conception of ec-static temporality and as a communal dimension of the authenticity of Dasein. 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 metaphysics of presence. For Derrida, history is metaphysical when it is founded upon a privilege of presence. The concept of history “has always been in complicity with teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of presence 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 historicity ( 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 conceived in the sense of self-identity. It is in Emmanuel Levinas’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, however, belongs to an eschatology which he opposes to history. History, for Levinas, betrays subjectivity. There are thus two conflicting positions: on the one hand, a historicity that is without the subject, and, on the other, 2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 291. 3 Derrida, Margins, 11. 4 It is against the dominant reception of deconstruction as the dissolution of the question 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 discourse around a subject 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 world, etc…. but which would define the subject rather as the finite experience of non-identity to self, as the underivable interpellation inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the other, with all the paradoxes or the aporia of being- before-the-law, and so on. Jacques Derrida, Points… interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 266. 300439 300439.

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