disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against
difference in general. If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of
the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That
necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary.
The Written Being/ The Being Written
The reassuring evidence within which Western tradition had to organize itself and must
continue to live would therefore be as follows: the order of the signified is never
contemporary, is at best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel—discrepant by the time of a
breath—from the order of the signifier. And the sign must be the unity of a heterogeneity,
since the signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not in itself a signifier, a trace: in any
case is not constituted in its sense by its relationship with a possible trace. The formal essence
of the signified is presence, and the privilege of its proximity to the logos as phonè is the
privilege of presence. This is the inevitable response as soon as one asks: “what is the sign?,”
that is to say, when one submits the sign to the question of essence, to the “ti esti.” The
“formal essence” of the sign can only be determined in terms of presence.
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One cannot get around that response, except by challenging the very form of the question and
beginning to think that the sign [is med kryss] that ill-named [thing med kryss], the only one,
that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: “what is ...?” 8
Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference, and all the
“empiricist” or nonphilosophical motifs that have constanty tormented philosophy throughout
the history of the \Vest, and besides, have had nothing but the inevitable weakness of being
produced in the field of philosophy, Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with Hegel and as
Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the liberation of the
signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of
truth or the primary signified, in whatever sense that is understood. Reading, and therefore
writ-ing, the text were for Nietzsche “originary” 9 operations (I put that word within quotation
marks for reasons to appear later) with regard to a sense that they do not first have to
transcribe or discover, which would not therefore be a truth signified in the original element
and presence of the logos, as topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori
necessity. To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type, it seems that we must
above all not attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive “ontology,” composed of
profound ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality
hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text. The virulence of
Nietzschean thought could not be more competely misunderstood. On the contrary, one must
accentuate the “naiveté” of a breakthrough which cannot attempt a step outside of
metaphysics, which cannot criticize metaphysics radically without still utilizing in a certain
way, in a certain type or a certain style of text, propostions that, read within the philosophic
corpus, that is to say according to Nietzsche ill-read or unread, have always been and will
always be “naivetés,” incoherent signs of an absolute appurtenance. Therefore, rather that
protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it
completely, underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in
a certain way and up to the
point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of
being, its form regains its absolute strangeness, where his text finally invokes a different type
of reading, more faithful to his type of writing: Nietzsche has written what he has written. He
has written that writing—and first of all his own—is not originarily subordinate to the logos
and to truth. And that this subordination has come into being during an epoch whose meaning
we must deconstruct. Now in this direction (but only in this direction, for read otherwise, the
Nietzschean demolition remains dogmatic and, like all reversals, a captive of that
metaphysical edifice which it professes to over-throw. On that point and in that order of
reading, the conclusions of
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Heidegger and Fink are irrefutable), Heideggerian thought would reinstate rather than destroy
the instance of the logos and of the truth of being as “primum signatum:” the “transcendental”
signified (“transcendental” in a certain sense, as in the Middle Ages the transcendental—ens,
unum, verum, bonum—was said to be the “primum cognitum”) implied by all categories or all
determined significations, by all lexicons and all syntax, and therefore by all linguistic
signifiers, though not to be identified simply with any one of those signifiers, allowing itself
to be precomprehended through each of them, remaining irreducible to all the epochal
determinations that it nonetheless makes possible, thus opening the history of the logos, yet
itself being only through the logos; that is, being nothing before the logos and outside of it.
The logos of being, “Thought obeying the Voice of Being,” 10 is the first and the last resource
of the sign, of the difference between signans and signatum. There has to be a transcendental
signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and
irreducible. It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental
signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots]. The voice is
heard (understood)—that undoubtedly is what is called conscience—closest to the self as the
absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time
and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in “reality,” any accessory
signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique
experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and
nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly
character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the
effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many—since it is the
condition of the very idea of truth—but I shall elsewhere show in what it does delude itself.
This illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. Within the closure of
this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the
signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This
experience is considered in its greatest purity—and at the same time in the condition of its
possibility—as the experience of “being.” The word “being,” or at any rate the words
lesignating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an “originary
word” (“Urwort”), 11 the transcendental word assuring the 3ossibility of being-word to all
other words. As such, it is precomprehended n all language and—this is the opening of Being
and Time—only this pre-,omprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense
of )eing in general, beyond all regional ontologies and all metaphysics: a quesion that
broaches philosophy (for example, in the Sophist) and lets itself
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