I started reading Jacque Derrida's Of Spirit Heidegger and the Question this afternoon. The question refers to Heidegger's association with German National Socialism---Heidegger's infamous "accommodation" with the Nazi authorities throughout the years 1933-4; plus the various attempts to understand both the question of politics in Heidegger's thought and the thought that gives rise to that question.

As I understand it what Heidegger called 'Platonism' or 'metaphyics' or 'onto-theology' Derrida calls 'the metaphysics of presence' or 'logocentrism' (or, occasionally, 'phallogocentrism'). Derrida pretty much repeats Heidegger's claim that this metaphysics constitutes the core of Western culture. Both see the influence of the traditional binary oppositions as infecting all areas of life and thought, including literature and the criticism of literature. So Derrida entirely agrees with Heidegger that the task of the thinker is to twist free of these oppositions, and of the forms of intellectual and cultural life which they structure.

However, Derrida does not think that Heidegger succeeded in twisting free. Hence his critical stance to Heidegger. He does so by reversing Plato's (and Heidegger's) preference for the spoken over the written word. Derrida interprets Heidegger to be attempting to express the ineffable as a struggle to break out of language by finding words which take their meaning directly from the world, from non-language. This struggle has is doomed because language is, as Saussure says, nothing but differences: words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words. Consequently, no word can acquire meaning in the way in which empiricist or analytic philosophers have assumed:-- by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object etc).

Of Spirit is dense in its deconstruction of Geist --which I generally interpret as a (national) culture in historical time along Hegelian lines, rather than mind as in individual mind. Derrida discusses both in Chapter 4.

next