Being in Mime: Heidegger and Derrida on the Ontology of Literary Language

Abstract

purpose of this essay is, to a degree, a polemical one. It is to situate the question of the nature of literature as formulated by Jacques Derrida within Martin Heidegger's problematically similar readings of poetry. One of the more peculiar aspects of this project is that, despite the gathering momentum of deconstruction, its necessity or even its possibility seem to have passed unnoticed. This disregard is nevertheless contemporary with broad recognition of the importance of in Derrida's project of deconstruction. Manfred Frank, for example, has recently analyzed the affiliations between Heidegger's critique of modern metaphysics as essentially a metaphysics of the subject with similar arguments in post-structuralist texts.' Indeed, it is usually in relation to the question of man and the human subject that and Derrida have been brought together. massive collection of papers from the Cerisy 1980 conference on Derrida, for instance (Les fins de l'homme)2, concerns particularly Derrida's The Ends of Man (1968)3 with its questioning of Heidegger's notion of Dasein in relation to the meaning and status of humanism. It has been unusual, however, for to be discussed in relation to specific questions of textuality prominent in Derrida's work. Rodolphe Gasche's two essays, Du trait non adequat: la notion de rapport chez Heidegger (1981)4 and Joining the Text: From to Derrida5 (1983) are practically alone in following