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ment” of a text. (KPM G 194, KPM E 222) (It is interesting to note that, in the first published
version of De la grammatologie, Derrida uses the word “destruction” in place of
“deconstruction.”) Describing Derrida’s own procedure, Paul de Man gives us something very
close to these Heideggerian passages: “His text, as he puts it so well, is the unmaking of a
construct. However negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the possibility of
rebuilding.”48 Because the author fancies himself sovereign, there is a point, Heidegger
suggests, where his own conception of the text blinds him: “Descartes had to neglect the
question of Being altogether”; “the doctrine of the schematism . . . had to remain closed off to
Kant.”49 Like the analyst moving with his patient in the seesaw of a “transference-
relationship,” the deconstructing critic must “free and . . . safeguard” the intrinsic powers “of
a problem.” ( KPM G 185, KPM E 211) In Derrida’s words :
Reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what
he commands and what he does not command of the schemata of the language that he uses.
This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness
and force, but a signifying structure that critical reading must produce. . . . [Without] all the
instruments of traditional criticism, . . . critical production would risk developing in any
direction and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guard-rail has
always only protected, never opened, a reading (227, 158) .
To take apart, to produce a reading, to open the textuality of a text. Der-rida shares these
procedural guidelines with Heidegger. Freud has helped to push the procedure further—given
him some means of locating the text’s “navel,” as it were, the moment that is undecidable in
terms of the text’s apparent system of meaning, the moment in the text that seems to
transgress its own system of values. The desire for unity and order compels the author and the
reader to balance the equation that is the text’s system. The deconstructive reader exposes the
grammatological structure of the text, that its “origin” and its “end” are given over to
language in general (what Freud would call “the unknown world of thought”), by locating the
moment in the text which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the
limit of a text which cannot be dis-missed simply as a contradiction. In the Grammatology’s
reading of Rous-seau, this “moment” is the double-edged word “supplement.” In La
pharmacie de Platon, it is the double-edged word
“pharmakon” as well as the absence of the
word “pharmakos.” In Derrida’s brief reading of Aristotle’s Physics IV, it is the unemphatic
word “ama,” carrying the burden of differance. (Dis 69-197, MP 31–78)
One important difference between Heidegger and Derrida lies in their concepts of time.
Through a delicate analysis that I shall not attempt to re-
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produce here, Derrida demonstrates that, although Heidegger would purge Kant and Hegel—
indeed what Heidegger sees as the entire Aristotelian tradition—of “the vulgar concept of
time”—there can be no concept of time that is not caught within the metaphysical clôture:
“wishing to produce that other concept, one quickly sees that it would be constructed with
other metaphysical or onto-theological predicates.” (MP 73) 50 Heidegger catches a glimpse
of this through his crossing-out of “Being.” At the stage of Sein and Zeit, however, Heidegger
still thinks of “time” as that which “needs to be explicated originarily [einer ursprünglichen
Explikation] as the horizon for the understanding of Being.”51 Time is still the model of pure
auto-affection, where something ideal—Being
as such—is produced without having to relate
to an object. (Derrida puts auto-affection in question and suggests that it always already
carries an irreducible element of hetero-affection, desiring and relating to an alterity, which in
this case is the question of Being—or Being under erasure.) For the earlier Heidegger, then,
the “question of Being,” as Derrida points out in “Ousia et grammè,” seem interchangeable.
By the time of Der Spruch des Anaximander,52 Heidegger himself sees Being as
precomprehended and nonsignifiable, and the presence seemingly signified in a text is seen as
the only means for language to point at the effaced trace (MP 76–77) . Heidegger has by then
arrived at the crossing-out of being, and does not find the meaning of being in temporality.
But time itself seems more effectively crossed out for Der-rida through the Freudian
suggestion that time is the discontinuous perception of the psychic machinery.
Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger. All three concerned with a problem that Heidegger would
articulate thus: “More originary [ursprünglich] than man is the finitude of the Dasein in him.”
(KPM G 207, KPM E 237) All three proto-grammatologues. Nietzsche a philosopher who cut
away the grounds of knowing. Freud a psychologist who put the psyche in question. Heideg-
ger an ontologist who put Being under erasure. It was for Derrida to “pro-duce” their intrinsic
power and “discover” grammatology, the science of the “sous rature.” That sleight of hand is
contained in the name itself, “the logos of the grammè.” The grammè is the written mark, the
name of the sign “sous rature.” “Logos” is at one extreme “law” and at the other “phonè”—
the voice. As we have seen, the grammè would question the authority of the law, deconstruct
the privilege of the spoken word. The word “Grammatology” thus appropriately keeps alive
an unresolved contradiction. Derrida sets forth the meaning of this contradiction in the section
of our book entitled “Of Grammatology as A Positive Science.” And the texts of Nietzsche,
Freud, and Heidegger are this contradiction’s pre-text.
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(The importance of the text of Edmund Husserl for Derrida lies precisely in its self-conflict.
Husserl seems to Derrida to be a more than usually resolute suppressor of the more than
usually astute grammatological suggestions implied by the Husserlian text.)
It is of course futile to trace the origin of a particular thought: “We know that the metaphor
that would describe the genealogy of a text correctly is still forbidden” (iØ, 101). Yet one
might wonder if the thought of “writing” in Derrida is not a sort of answer to the question of
“geometry” in Husserl. As I have mentioned, Derrida’s first book is a translation of and
introduction to Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry.” The question asked by Husserl is precisely a
question of the relationship between subjective and objective structures. How can the forms of
an absolutely ideal objectivity—the essence of geometry (not actual systems of geometry)
arise within the ,structures of the subject? At the end of his long introduction, Derrida sug-
gests that Husserl’s answer, if “produced” fully, would be that the possibility of objectivity is
lodged within the subject’s self-presence. The transcendental subject’s ideal object is itself. In
its contemplation of itself the self cannot remain within the “simple now-ness of a Living
Present,” it must give itself a history, differentiate itself from itself through a backward glance
which also makes possible a forward glance: “An originary consciousness of delay can only
have the pure form of anticipation.... With-out this [consciousness] ... discourse and history
[and Geometry as the possibility of history] would not be possible.”