Derrida's reading of Heidegger

Abstract

Derrida's first reading of Heidegger in the long text dedicated to Emmanuel Levinas and published in 1964 under the title Violence and Metaphysics shows that he understood the deep meaning of the Heideggerian question of being. Derrida attaches great importance to the passage, in the text that Heidegger dedicated in 1955 to Junger where Heidegger puts a cross over the word in order to avoid the almost ineradicable habit of seeing in being something subsistent and facing man: a gesture which Derrida sees as a way, in writing, of delimiting logocentrism and metaphysics of presence. Nietzsche is the theme of play that can be found in some of Heidegger's texts such as The Thing and The Principle of Reason. At the end of the first part of Of Grammatology Derrida stresses that the metaphysical concept of time cannot be used to describe the structure of the trace.