Abstract

ABSTRACT The essay situates and dissects Derrida’s two catalytic interventions into Heidegger’s thought on time and history—the seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being & History (1964-5) and the essay Ousia and Grammē (1968). The first aim is to explicate the relation of history to time in Heidegger’s seemingly untroubled passage from a textured and striated temporality into historicity, understood as structured, inscribed, and in a privileged sense, human time. Sustaining the difference of the inseparably intertwined notions of time and history is paramount for Heidegger, yet the place and function accorded to history will mark for Derrida, nothing less than the ultimate impasse of the project of Being and Time. Accordingly, the second aim of the essay is to present and question the productive elision of time and history that Derrida effects through narrative. On the one hand, this elision offers the ground of a forceful critique of the project of Being and Time. On the other hand, this pivotal gesture of deconstruction will always be compelled to seek, through a proliferation of names, those a-temporal and a-historical vanishing points for time and history that undercut the mutual conditioning of the two that it has laboured to effect.

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