Heidegger: The Question of Being and History

by Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington (Translation)

Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time . They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida’s primary conceptual concerns—indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word “deconstruction”—but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy.
           
Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger’s prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger’s Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into “solicitation” and “deconstruction”) of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger’s thinking.
           
This is a rare window onto Derrida’s formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we’ve come to recognize—one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his. 

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2016

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pernicious teleology haunts how we observe the world. The being that matters the most, the being that is most important to us is the being that can take a stand on its own understanding, Dasein. There’s a reason why Heidegger calls it Dasein and not ‘man’, or ‘human’, or consciousness or as Sartre would wrongly think ‘human reality’ (Sartre is wrong about everything when he talks about Heidegger, if you don’t believe me just read ‘Being and Nothingness’). Derrida will point out how Heidegger of all the philosophers stays away from the telos trap best of all and will hint at why Heidegger uses Dasein (‘being there’) instead of the other labels.

The presence of the present is filtered through the ‘revelation of being’ as technology obscures the essence of reality (we are thrown into the world and are constantly falling as we get engulfed with ‘idle chatter’, distractions, and convoluted entanglements and misleading attunements). Derrida says that about Heidegger or something really close to that as he dissects Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and Heidegger’s Turn. There’s nothing really new within these lectures, perhaps, in 1965 when they were given they were cutting edge, but today I would say they would be familiar to those who have read lots of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Husserl, Kant and Hegel all of who are mentioned within these lectures.

As I was reading this book, I’ve been reading Richard Rorty’s ‘Contingency, Irony and Solidarity’ and this book makes me realize how full of shit Rorty really was. Rorty mis-understands Derrida (at least this 1965 version of Derrida) and leaves a wrong impression on what Heidegger was getting at. Rorty is not completely void of insightful observations, but he definitely needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and in spite of all that he gets wrong in his book, I still enjoy it enough to want to finish it.

Derrida will question ‘care’ as the ontological foundation for Dasein in as much as it is future looking beyond our present and needs the ‘presence of the present’ in order to have an historical nature while not displacing the temporal. In the end, Heidegger will not be able to deconvolve the past from the present through the future from our caring, at least Derrida will say something like that (where’s Henri Bergson when you need him?).

This book (mostly a detailed transcription of notes of a series of seminars held in the early part of 1965, with footnotes and a lot of German words spread throughout) is a pretty good discussion on ‘Being and Time’ and some latter Heidegger. Overall, I would strongly recommend instead of this book the book by Jarava La Mehta ‘The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger’. It’s a better book (I’ll even say it’s a book as opposed to notes of a seminar as this ‘book’ was), and covers the same kind of topics with more coherence and context, and this book (Derrida’s) cost $30 plus dollars as a Kindle (and I only bought it because I had a 20% off coupon from Amazon) and one would be better served by finding a cheap used copy of Mehta’s book. Regardless, this is a good book but I would recommend that one has first read ‘Being and Time’ at least twice and have listened to Hubert Dreyfus’ freely available course on Division I of ‘Being and Time’ before reading Derrida’s book, but one could read Mehta’s book before having read Heidegger or having listened to the Dreyfus course.


As a footnote to my first line in this review, one can read Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘The Function of Reason’ for an absurd non-self aware example of a philosopher falling into that trap and why I think: ‘pernicious teleology haunts how we observe the world’ and why history (and science, and life) is best never thought of with the hindsight of the now. Also, a very good book I just finished ‘Inheritance of Rome’, the author (a historian) knows that history must always be seen through its own terms in order for it to be properly understood today, and Heidegger (and Derrida in this seminar) understands that Dasein (and Being) need to be understood in a similar way not teleologically (darn that Aristotle!).

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Death is a wakeless sleep’ is an example of a metaphor. A metaphor is, of course, speaking of something as something else, something it is not. Metaphoricity is a dissimulation by which the subject of the metaphor is lost, obscured behind the metaphoric definition or proposition. To speak metaphorically is to establish that something is something it is not, but by way of doing so to raise behind the metaphor an obscure shadow of the subject of the metaphor. This aspect of metaphoricity continually brings up a further questioning, further reading and writing, ever delaying and deferring any answer as to the ‘truth’ of what ‘is.’ Any sense of presence is constantly thrown back upon a future, of which it would ever be but a past. Metaphoricity opens the space for a multiplicity of possibilities, while ever withholding the impossible just beyond the limit.
To say that Derrida’s thought is a sort of terrorism, that Derrida is an intellectual terrorist, is also a metaphor – it says nothing of his thought or who he is, but only what he and his thought are not. This metaphorical-mythical misunderstanding of Derrida’s thought arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of deconstruction, which could be allayed by a reading of this early series of lectures from ’64 – ’65 in which Derrida works through the Destruktion of Heidegger in a way that reveals the workings of Derrida’s own thought as well. Metaphoricity is highly important to Derrida’s thought, and in this rigorous reading of Heidegger, it is found to be of just as much import to the latter’s thought. In opening up the thought of Heidegger through this questioning search, Derrida also opens up the workings of his own thinking to us, showing us some of his own roots.

These lectures are historically situated in a period in France in which Heidegger’s though was still not widely known – Sein und Zeit had still not been completely translated into French. Derrida demonstrates his clear grasp of Heidegger’s thought, as he does not view Heidegger as founding yet another ontology through Sein und Zeit, as many early interpreters believed. He outlines how Heidegger sought to escape from ontology, the thinking of being by way of beings – and hence why later abandons the term ‘ontology’ altogether. Heidegger was not concerned with another foundation, but rather with a certain destruction. This Destruktion is not a complete annihilation, a clearing away as in Descartes, nor is it a refutation in Hegel’s sense of the historical progression of philosophy. Destruktion is not a negation, but a repetition of thought in which thought is solicited, shaken so as to remove the metaphysical sediment, or at least uncover it as sediment. It is also a retrieval, for what is called out through the solicitation, what is brought into question, is what has been covered over by the sediment of metaphysical thinking. The history of philosophy that is subject to Destruktion is questioned as to that which has ever remained in silence, covered over and unspoken – being.
It is herein that Derrida locates one aspect of metaphoricity in Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger, in a way, seeks to show how the history of philosophy hitherto has spoken of being metaphorically, through beings, by speaking of being as the being of beings, the most general concept. Derrida terms this ‘ontic metaphor.’ In a sense, all of philosophy has been merely telling stories, weaving fictions, by speaking of being metaphorically and taking this metaphor as being the truth. It is the forgetting of metaphoricity that is the problem. In taking the thought of being qua the being of beings as the truth of being, we gets lost in the oblivion of being – we lose being completely. If we take ‘death is a wakeless sleep’ as the truth of death and not a metaphor, we erect a presence before death as concept, the concept providing a presence for death. Thus can we know it. But do we know death, knowing it thus? Or do we lose the movement of death altogether? Heidegger says that we have done the same with the thought of being. Death works well in this situation as it too, like being, is not something, it is not, and so we cannot but speak metaphorically, speak around it, whenever we attempt to speak of it. It is being aware, not forgetting this metaphoricity, which is the important step. One must question the meaning, or metaphoricity, of being in order not to lose being to forgetfulness, in oblivion. Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of philosophy, of metaphysics, works through questioning what is called the meaning of being in Sein und Zeit, which was the inaugural text of said Destruktion.
In what could be viewed as a somewhat humorous counter to the, at the time of these lectures, future accusations of obscurantism leveled against his thought and his writings, Derrida explains how the true obscurantism is this telling stories and passing them off as truth; speaking metaphorically while forgetting or neglecting to accept the metaphoricity of the propositions, and thus considering the questions asked and answered, and thus understood. But in so doing the real questioning is lost, and this is what Derrida spent his life thinking through and attempting to show – how our answers may not be answers at all, our certainty is a veil that hides the cracks in our foundations, hiding the fact that we have yet to really question.
In truly questioning, and not settling for metaphorical, metaphysical answers, we are opened up to a perhaps shocking awakening: there is no response, no answer; there are only ever dissimulations. As Derrida puts it, “the question lets us expect nothing … except its own awakening that has never ceased to wake up to itself” (85). In asking the question of being, we are opened up to the questionability that being is manifest as. Being is never present, it is not a thing, and it is not a general concept – but in the continual dissimulation, the unfolding or unconcealment, a sort of shadow of being is hinted at, is brought into question once more. Not as some transcendental signified, but as an unknowable (by reason at least) difference. This questionability, the question of being, necessitates a history – a history of questioning. And here Derrida turns to questioning history in Heidegger.

Derrida questions Heidegger’s thoughts on history in relation to those of both Hegel and Husserl. Heidegger does not view historicity as a teleological coming into consciousness of any concept, nor as an epochally determined phenomenon that grounds the sciences and is grounded in some ‘living present.’ Instead, he views historicity as a movedness, an unfolding, which is “the movement and linking of epochs” (133). The historicity of being, which is what Heidegger was aiming towards by questioning the historicity of Dasein, would be ungraspable from within any single epoch, for each is unfolded by and through this historicity. This is not to suggest that any of these epochs should not have been, that any period in the history of philosophy should never have occurred, for their errancy, their wandering, is necessitated by the unfolding of the historicity of being. As Derrida brings forward in session six of these lectures, inauthenticity is a necessary prerequisite for authenticity – no less in the historicity of being than in Dasein. Just as the inauthentic mode of being of Dasein is its primary mode of being and not some deficient mode, such inauthentic understandings of being, such representations and conceptions, are necessary as they are how being has been manifest historically. “It belongs to the historicity of Dasein and being that this historicity should hide in philosophy and in its theme: the presence of the present” (151). Each epoch in the history of philosophy has dissimulated and understood being differently – though they have ever failed to think being apart from ontic metaphoricity. And this is how being has been given, has been destined, historically. Heidegger then, through Destruktion, seeks to think each epoch in its epochality, to deconstruct its thinking of being through a repetition of the thinking of its central concepts – a repetition from outside of that epoch of thought. This ‘being outside’ necessitates a step back, in order to view each epoch of thought, the thought of each epoch, from a point at which a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence can be worked out, from which the ontic metaphor may be alighted upon. Heidegger hopes that this transgressive step back might open up a way that has previously been covered up and passed over – a step back into a new epoch which, in his Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Heidegger calls an other beginning.
The step back is of prime import to Heidegger, as the opening towards a step outside of metaphysics, a possibility for asking the question of being outside of and without metaphor, non-metaphorically. It is thus why Derrida views Sein und Zeit as a transgressive text, though of a failed transgression; an incomplete step, as the text still speaks from out of metaphysics, in the language of metaphysics. As Derrida says it, “at the very moment when Heidegger destroys metaphysics, he must confirm it, destroy it in its language since he is speaking and is making appear in the Present the very thing he is saying cannot be gathered up in presence” (151). The moment one says or writes ‘being’ one is no longer speaking of that which they seek to speak. By attempting to present being (that which we seek to signify by ‘being’), metaphoricity enters, and “being” absconds. Hence why Heidegger broke off the original projection of Sein und Zeit, leaving it forever unfinished in its originally proposed form due to the inherent interminability presented by the language in which it spoke. Hence too why in later works Heidegger plays with different ways of attempting to speak of being, or speak around being, such as in “Zur Seinsfrage,” where he writes being crossed out, beneath an X, under erasure, to show that it is not present in this word, that the sign fails to signify, though a trace remains. Derrida says here, as he ever continues to say, that language is metaphysics – that it is founded upon and founds the presence of the present – a thought that he spent his life attempting to deconstruct, which he initially mapped out in of Grammatology, wherein he famously writes the phrase “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” there is no outside-(con)text. Language is metaphysics, is metaphoricity – there is no way to speak outside this. But we can deconstruct this metaphoricity, we can work to unwork this oblivion that entraps us. And in so doing perhaps we work towards a future, not outside, but not inside either, for this binary too must be deconstructed. But would such a future, without outside-inside distinction, not be outside of metaphysics – outside of our conceptuality? Perhaps we may work our way out yet.
Such is perhaps Derrida’s aim through deconstruction, and he finds a sort of forefather to this thought in Heidegger. Through Destruktion, Heidegger’s aim is to repeat the thought of the past epochs, retrieving from them the possibility of a thought left unthought. We must repeat, for the future, the past which would be an opening to a future, a present that never was. To retrieve from what was what could have been, but was not – an opening onto what could be, again.
Heidegger’s thought, Derrida concludes, is a thought of metaphoricity – he ever speaks of being, when in fact what he speaks of is not being, not what he seeks to speak of, but a dissimulation, a metaphor. But he destroys or deconstructs this metaphor, revealing that it is not being, for being is not. Such a movement, which works to revoke what it has said, to erase what it has written, to take back its step that it has just taken, would then leave but a trace, like a footprint from the revoked step. This trace would be the possibility of the impossible – of thinking being outside of metaphysics; of thinking outside, thinking-without. “The thinking of being announces the horizon of non-metaphor” (223), Derrida writes, for it speaks, via a trace, of the unspeakable (as of yet, from within metaphysics) – of an impossible thought, impossible as of yet, ever yet to come.

The path outside is an extended detour via history, led by a questioning. Being must continually be questioned, deconstructed, in its saying; another metaphor must be attempted, tempted out and shaken as metaphor, solicited as to its metaphoricity. Such is the historicity of being, how being unfolds – as question, questioning, and never as any answer, present and true. Thought works its way out by unworking language, putting language out of work. If our thought is to lead us outside, away from the ficticity or fictionality of metaphysics and its inherent metaphoricity, then it must follow the path that Derrida and Heidegger both followed – the path of the question.
Deconstruction is not dead, not a past epoch in this history of being. It ever remains underway, before us, as a way out. As Derrida was often at pains to make clear, metaphysics is always already deconstructing itself. He was simply presenting this auto-deconstruction to us, to alleviate our forgetting. If we turn away from this then we fall back into oblivion. In order to continue to think (I do not write ‘philosophize’ or ‘do philosophy,’ but think) we must continue down this path, led by the question. To sum up simply a complex thought, as Heidegger is so poetically able to do, we shall end here with a quotation from Heidegger, knowing this end is no end but only a continuation, on the way, towards what is to come. But enough, the quotation:
Questioning is the piety of thought.

[Vinay Arun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puts into focus two points, the former of which is significantly less potent than the latter:
(1.) Derrida’s thought and the phenomenon of deconstruction as not only post-Heideggarian but post-phenomenological generally
(2) That the task, for Heidegger as for Derrida as for de Man, was to resist the anthropomorphism that inevitably lay on the other side of thought-as-determination. For late Derrida, that meant thinking the always already and the not-yet on the basis of a kind of “infinite task”, opening of l’avenir (Husserlian in its historico-scientistic demand of thought, not innocuously Levinasian); for de Man, it meant something far less inclined towards the demands of philosophical language, something closer to rhetoric’s in-difference towards philosophy (see Gasché) but similarly decisive, difficult, if not ethical. This kind of thought (whatever you want to call it, I prefer to use either a slightly perverse notion of “formalism” or de Man’s “reading”) has stakes not due to its applicability to questions of ontic/empirical determination, not due to its proximity to questions of methodology or logic (prepositional, modal, syllogistic, etc.), but because it is the only thought that opens up a formal vocabulary of risk, relapse, decision, and event. It is thought in suspension, without first principle (though it exists perhaps as the nightmare of Hegel).
It is not simply a matter of demystification, but of “solicitation” or the “trembling” that Derrida says distinguishes Heidegger from Hegel.
Still, truly, a perplexing demand for thought to this day.

Really terrific.

[Jeffrey Rubard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida at the Beginning

The work of philosophy in general, or rather, let's say, of thinking, far from simply consisting in crowning scientific work from the outside, in reflecting on it or criticizing it from the outside, in working on it; the work of thinking is basically nothing other, in what is called science or elsewhere, than this operation of destruction of metaphor, of determined and motivated reduction of metaphor, whenever and wherever it happens. Which does not mean that one leaves the metaphorical element of language behind, but that in a new metaphor the previous metaphor appears as such, is denounced in its origin and in its metaphorical functioning and in its necessity.

from Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History

One of the most interesting publishing projects of recent years has been the publication of seminars given at the Sorbonne and the ENS by the young Jacques Derrida. Derrida's intellectual celebrity in the English-speaking world cannot be equaled; his 'titanic' status has been retired, and European thinkers of the same calibre as Derrida can no longer claim the mantle of 'influencer' they did in the English-language press in the 70s through the 90s. His thought operated as a sort of 'word-virus' one was exposed to in an English seminar, an introduction to a dizzying game of puns and ever more outrageous anti-realisms. This makes Derrida's seminar on the concept of history in Heidegger's Being and Time all the more interesting; it is not at all what you would expect.

Derrida's 1964-5 lectures are 'straight' interpretations; there is none of the neologism associated with him, and the presentations are as 'clear' as anyone could ask them to be. Derrida was merely 34 at the time of the lectures, and one sees an intriguing mixture of youthful self-assurance and uncertainty in the way that Heidegger's theories concerning the historicity of Dasein and being as a whole are presented here. The book cannot serve as a 'general introduction' to Heidegger from Derrida's hand, but it is certainly true that anyone who has an intellectual interest in Heidegger's philosophical legacy will find this an anodyne thing.

Although the lectures are largely devoted to an interpretation of Being and Time, particularly chapter 5 of Division II, Derrida insists on both continuity and rupture in Heidegger's thinking as it entered the period known as the Kehre. It is certainly one way to read Heidegger to stress that the historicity of Dasein as studied in the 20s and the "history of Being" Heidegger explored later are on a continuum, that Being and Time's Dasein was already a form of "being-historical thinking". It is perhaps a testament to the secret influence of Derrida as an interpreter of Heidegger that this is in a way an extremely natural thought; my own studies of Heidegger suggest that it is more truthful to stress the break between the "early" and "late" writing, that there is a loss of transcendence with the Kehre that it is important to note.

Still, a living part of Derrida's legacy is that of course we ought to be able to think things 'for the nonce', that a mentality which finds one certain spirit of philosophical exploration unacceptable is intellectually unsound. It is also well worth noting that these lectures predated the appearance of the two parts of Of Grammatology in Critique and Cahiers pour l'Analyse by no more than a year; considering that is a space we ordinarily reckon of almost no account in our own lives, when we are considering world-historically important writing we ought to be able to keep the 'contemporaneity' of the seminar and the book in mind. I recommend the book to anyone who wants to 'get clearer' about Derrida.

[Mavaddat · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a bound translation of loose lecture notes that Derrida made for himself. They stand quite poorly as an independent work, since there's no specific background asked of the reader nor any specific problems or questions the seminar is trying to work through. Although it's clear what theses Derrida thinks are important (e.g., that the being of beings is not itself a being, that in some contexts we need to reconcile ourselves to silence), it is unclear why Derrida wants to emphasize these. The focus of his seminar seems to be reading through Heidegger's “Being and Time”, but the exposition was abstruse and therefore tedious for me.

[Wessel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had to read 3 out of the 8 lectures in the book and while they serve as a good introduction to Heidegger's ideas I found it somewhat missing the point. Also sometimes he makes really unnecessary steps out, that might be logical in a lecture series but prove quite unlogical and unnecessary in the book. Those comparisons between Hegel/Husserl, Hegel/Nietschze for instance. I suppose this is a good introduction for people who want to understand Derrida more so then a good introduction to Being and Time/the Historicity of Being in Heidegger's thought.

[Purepazaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very thoughtful reading; situating heidegger as putting ontology itself to question and how this is the same as the history of ontology; and ultimately how questioning, the putting-into-question, engages once more that Janus faced metaphoricity; the (in)constant imagery that disappears and reappears when one has least expected; and to not take this repetition of the image as an expression of its absolute stature.

[Josiah]

Jumping to the punchline: "The title of this course was, I recall: 'Heidegger: The Question of Being and History.' You remember that I tried at the outset to justify each of the words of this title. Each of them, even the name Heidegger, has turned out to be metaphorical. There is one word, perhaps you remember, that I did not try to justify, and that was question."

[FusionEight · Rating 3 out of 5]

after 355 pages that alternate between nuggets of insight and tedious wankery, Derrida concludes that tl; dr- the things the whole book was about: "being" and "history" are "basically just metaphors lol". it did whet my appetite for Heidegger, it has some moments of lucidity, some fun historical comparisons with Hegel and Husserl but the infernal convolutions, the terminological pedantry (astonishingly even worse than that of Heidegger) make this a forgettable mush