The Derrida Essay

[sodapopinski51]

I'd have to scan it and save it as 38 different files, this is just too time consuming an endeavor. Instead, I'll type out the footnote that puzzled Derrida in its entirety, and then summarize his position as well as Heidegger's as best I can, and we can discuss. Im sorry for the inconvenience. If you have it in your possession then please feel

Comments

[sodapopinski51]

Derrida is a master of this sort of reading against the grain to discover what is unthought, because ala Heidegger what is unrepresented always causes anxiety, the nothing that cannot be represented haunts the text. Derrida says this footnote precludes a book that would never be written, Being and Time volume two (in fact Heidegger wrote 450 pages on Being, forgot to talk about time, and then put it all in this footnote! he later wrote a short lecture called Time and Being devoted to time

[sodapopinski51]

Non-presence is always thought in the form of a minor-term in a binary opposition dominated by the major term which is always "presence" presence/nonpresence, which assumes that "non-presence" is a quality that can be represented. Derrida, by way of Heidegger's footnote, is challenging the reader to think the irreducibility of "non-presence" to form and perhaps even the conventions of formal logic (my reading of Heidegger and Derrida both is that they view formal logic as a great achievement but there are some certain tendencies in its overall presuppositions that lead to calculative thinking, in other words, philosophy should not always pretend to be a science, this is Heidegger's view and I think Derrida accepted that for some time, because philosophy should help people think and live their life) Subjecting a thought to the rigid laws of logical proofs reduces thought to a representation, the irreducible quality of thought, the contingency and unpredictability of thinking, the meditative quality of thought are all lost in this

[sodapopinski51]

Derrida at one point shows his skepticism regarding the possibility of conceiving of time any other way, he says, "Is it even possible to think of time any other way". It may be impossible to think time in a non-vulgar sense. Derrida thinks vulgar time is thinking time as a series of successions, which I think Heidegger DID think about time, Derrida is trying to make Heidegger into a deconstructionist and Im not sure he is, especially based on my readings of Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars where he and Medard Boss discuss "Dasein-analysis" and in "Time and Being" which I read as the sequel to Being and Time, he talks of a certain conception of time as non-spatial, unthingable, unrepresentable, probably closer to a "deterritorialized flow" in the sense that D&G would use those terms. But then again I may be wrong.