When Silence Strikes: Derrida, Heidegger, Mallarmé

Abstract

This paper attempts to rethink difference and divisibility as conditions of (im)possibility for love and survival in the wake of Derrida's newly discovered—and just recently published—Geschlecht III. I argue that Derrida's deconstruction of what he calls ‘the grand logic of philosophy’ allows us to think love and survival without positing unicity as a sine qua non. This hypothesis is tested in and through a deconstructive reading of Heidegger's second essay on Trakl in On the Way to Language, where Heidegger's phonocentrism and surreptitious nationalism converge in an effort to ‘save the earth’ from a ‘degenerate’ Geschlecht that cannot survive the internal diremption between Geschlechter. I show that one way of problematizing Heidegger's claim is to point to the blank spaces in the ‘E i n’ of Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’, an internal fissuring in the very word Heidegger mobilizes in order to secure the future of mankind.