((318))
complètes, Pléiade edition (Paris, 1945), p. 381;
Mallarmé, tr. Anthony Hartley (Baltimore) ,
p. 194.
12.Martin Heidegger,
The Question of Being, tr. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde, bilingual
edition (New York, 1958), hereafter cited in the text as QB.
13.Because it overlooks the invisible erasure, the usual superficial criticism of Derrida goes as
follows: he says he is questioning the value of “truth” and “logic,” yet he uses logic to
demonstrate the truth of his own arguments! (A characteristic example would be Lionel Abel,
“Jacques Derrida : His ‘Difference’ with Metaphysics,” Salmagundi 25 [Winter, 1974] : 3-21.)
The point is, of course, that the predicament of having to use resources of the heritage that one
questions is the overt concern of Derrida’s work, and as such is prepared for, as I shall show,
by the fundamental questionings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger.
14. »La différance, » Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 62, iii (1968) : 103. This
remark occurs in the discussion following the lecture and is neither reprinted in MP nor
translated in SP.
15.Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962) ; translated as The Savage Mind
(Chicago, 1966) .
16.Ibid., Eng. tr., p. 17.
17.Ibid., pp. 44 f.; Eng. tr., pp. 16 f.
18.Here Derrida’s often implicit Freudianism surfaces. The history of metaphysics, like a
dream-neurosis-psychosis, is constituted by distortion. Metaphor and metonymy are rhetorical
translations of “condensation” and “displacement,” two major techniques, as Freud pointed
out, of dream-distortion (see also page xlvi) .
19.Marx is conspicuous here by his absence. Derrida’s detachment from Marxist texts is often
a ground for dissatisfaction among younger French and American intellectuals—some of the
Tel Quel group, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson. I believe there is a simple enough
explanation for this detachment. Derrida’s method of deconstructive reading is laboriously
textual. As a young philosopher he has coped with specifically “philosophical” texts. Catching
the Freudian avant-garde of the fifties and sixties, he has coped, and is coping, with the texts
of Freud. His interest now, for reasons I discuss on page lxxii, is going toward “literary” texts.
In general, the literature of Marxism is so thoroughly schematized that for him to direct the
same painstaking attention to the texts of Marx and Marxism will require a good stretch of
time. In answer to a question of Jean-Louis Houdebine, Derrida presents a long and
interesting answer which, for my purposes, can be summed up as follows: Marx, and his
intertextuality with Hegel, Engels, Lenin, Mao, et alia, are still to be submitted to the protocol
of reading. See Pos F 82 f., Pos E II 33 f. The distinctions between super- and infrastructures
must be reexamined. The textuality of “economic” structures (in a narrow sense) must be
opened up to a more general concept of economy. . . . A remote prospectus may be glimpsed
in MP, pp. 257-58n, “White Mythology,” tr. F. C. T. Moore, NLH VI. i. autumn, 1974, pp. 14-
16, and “Economimesis,” Mimesis: desarticulations (Paris, 1975)
20.”Uber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” Werke (hereafter cited in the text
as NW), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York, 1973), vol. III, part
2, p. 370; “On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense” (here-after cited as TF), The
Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York, 1964), 2: 174.
21.”Der Wille zur Macht,” Books i & 2 Nietzsche’s Werke (Leipzig, 1911), part 2, vol. 15
(herafter cited as WM 1), p. 448; Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann (hereafter cited in the
text as WP), (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 227.
22.”Der Wille zur Macht,” Book 3 & 4, Nietzsche’s Werke (Leipzig, 1911), part 2, vol. i6, p.
20 (hereafter cited in the text as WM 2); WP 273.
23.“Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,“ NW V. ii, 146; The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kauf-mann
(hereafter cited in the text as GS) (Vintage Books, 1974), p. 168.
24.Phillippe Lacoue-Laharthe, « La dissimulation: Nietzsche, la question de l’art et la
‘littérature,’ « Nietzsche aujourd’hui? (Paris, 1973), 2: 12.
25.”Zur Genealogie der Moral,” NW VI. ii, 330. “The Genealogy of Morals” (here-
((319))
after cited in the text as
GM), On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, tr. Walter
Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1969), p. 77.
26.MP, 270–71; “White Mythology,” tr. F. C. T. Moore, pp. 26-27.
27.For a discussion of the use of the stigme in Aristotle see Derrida, “Ousia et grammè: note
sur une note de Sein und Zeit,” MP, pp. 44 f., translated as “ ‘Ousia and Gramme’: A Note to a
Footnote in Being and Time,” by Edward S. Casey, Phenomenology in Perception, ed. F. J.
Smith (The Hague, 1970), pp. 63 f.
28.”Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben,” NW III. i, 320; “The Use and
Abuse of History” (hereafter cited in the text as UA), The Complete Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Lévy, vol. 5, p. 89.
29.Sigmund Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” Gesammelte Werke (hereafter cited in the text
as GW) (Frankfurt am Main and London, 1940), 13: 46 f.; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,”
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter cited
in the text as SE), ed. James Strachey (London, 1959), 18: 44 f.