Upsetting the Set Up: Remarks on Heidegger's Questing after Technics

Abstract

Is post-structuralist theory in North America beginning to catch up with its past? The past I am alluding to can be described, at the risk of drastic simplification, as the problematizing of representation: in art and literature, in criticism and aesthetics, in theories of language, knowledge and history, in political and social thought. The problematic of representation has for some twenty years imposed itself through the writings of Derrida and Foucault, Lacan and Barthes, Deleuze and Lyotard. Their writings in turn promoted the rereading of a certain number of predecessors: Saussure, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, but also Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, et al. Such a list can of course be only indicative. But the most glaring and symptomatic omission is clearly that of Heidegger. Not that there have been no important texts written in North America seeking to reread Heidegger in relation to poststructuralist problematics: this is obviously not the case.' The omission is nonetheless glaring, because the concern with Heidegger has, at least until recently, been in no recognizable proportion to the seminal importance explicitly attributed to Heidegger by Derrida, from his earliest writings on2, or, for that matter, by Lacan, less massively, perhaps, but no less emphatically. The work of Paul de Man can also be read as an unremitting 'Auseinandersetzung' with Heidegger. And since there can be no doubt as to the role played by Heidegger in problematizing representational thought, the lack of attention so far devoted to his work is symptomatic of a resistance, one which is not very difficult to explain,