Abstract
Derrida on Heidegger’s opposition, in Being and Time, to the metaphysics of subjectivity, Heidegger’s notion of man as asking the question of Being, as ek-sistence, as leaping beyond the ontic to the ontological; Heidegger’s rejection of notions, such as consciousness, soul, and spirit, associated with the metaphysics of subjectivity; Derrida on Heidegger’s celebration of spirit in the 1933 “Rectorship Address,” and his ongoing inquiry into spirit from that point on; spirit as the ‘flaming hearth’ of Heideggerian discourse; Heideggerian spirit’s connection to the question of Being, to world, to earth and blood, to resoluteness; Derrida on spirit in Heidegger’s readings of Schelling and Hölderlin; Derrida’s deconstructive reading of spirit in Heidegger’s essay on Trakl; spirit as identified with doubling, difference, and writing; the blurring of Heidegger’s hierarchical distinctions between spirit’s inside and outside, proper and improper spirit, spirit as air and spirit as fire; metaphysical spirit as an ineluctable ghost that haunts Heidegger’s attempts to escape it; spirit as trace, as différance; despite deconstructing the elements of Heidegger’s thought on spirit, Derrida avoids deconstructing its overall logocentric structure; Derrida avoids linking the various steps in Heidegger’s argument for the animality of Germany’s Other; Derrida avoids uncovering the underlying metaphysical structure of Heidegger’s discussion of spirit, and its political consequences; Derrida avoids linking Heidegger to Nazism directly; Derrida avoids acknowledging Heidegger’s guilt; Derrida’s appropriation of Heidegger’s arguments for his own philosophical purposes: to show how Heidegger’s reflections on origin lead to Derrida’s différance; Derrida avoids acknowledging the metaphysical nature, hierarchical structure, and violence, of Heidegger’s thought on difference; Heidegger does, yet doesn’t, transgress metaphysics: his hierarchy of differences retains propriety as a metaphysical value; hierarchical thinking is manifest even in Heidegger’s 1953 essay on Trakl, though couched in eschatological language; failure of Derrida’s putative extrication of the Trakl essay from the racist context of Heidegger’s thought on spirit.
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- 1.
Quoting Heidegger’s Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Heidegger 1985).
- 2.
What does Derrida say about the status of the spirit and soul in Judaism? Does the Hebrew word for spirit–ruah—denote the outside of that ‘inside of Europe’ denoted by pneuma , spiritus , and Geist? Yes, in the sense that the “trio of languages ,” as Derrida puts it, apparently avoids relating to, or highlighting an affinity with, yet another notion of spirit, namely, the Jewish notion. The trio isn’t open to Jewish spirit, Derrida argues, and indeed exists as Europe’s “inside” only by casting out the Jewish notion of spirit. And no, inasmuch as there is nonetheless an affinity between the Jewish notion of spirit (ruah), on the one hand, and the Greek pneuma , and the Latin spiritus , which Derrida claims are simply translation s of the Hebrew term for spirit, on the other. Moreover, in two specific contexts there is an astonishing affinity between the Jewish ruah and the German Geist. First, discussions of spirit in Jewish thought throughout the ages constantly invoke the idea of fire (Derrida 1989, 100–1). To illustrate his point, Derrida cites connections drawn in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption between “fire, spirit, blood, and promise” (137). Second, in the Jewish tradition, as in German thought, and all the more so Heideggerian thought, spirit is linked to evil: the Jewish “holy spirit” (ruah hakodesh), Derrida asserts, can become the “evil spirit” (101). Thus on both sides of the Judeo–German differend, to use Lyotard’s term, evil is conceived as a spiritual entity, as immanent in spirit. Derrida seems to avoid explicitly situating the Jewish notion of spirit, and Judaism in general, outside the game of the semantics of spirit, and thus outside European history. Consequently, spirit in the Jewish sense is not the Other of European spirit, whether Greek, Latin, or German. On the contrary, there is a salient link between spirit in its German (and European) and Jewish senses, a link forged by fire and flame.
- 3.
The implicit identification of God with doubling is made in Derrida (2007, 191–225). Derrida puts forward a two-stage argument, which begins by discerning a duality in the meaning of the word “Babel,” and ends with Derrida’s identifying “Babel” with the name of God. As a metaphor for language in general, the word “Babel” encompasses the originary situation vis-à-vis translation , or what Derrida calls “internal translation” (in contrast to Jakobson’s intralingual translation): it is both a proper name, the name of a city, and a common noun designating confusion (“bilbul” in Hebrew). It thus contains an a priori duplicity . The translation thus acquires the sense of difference (or “contract”), and thereby separates the two reciprocally-indebted meanings:
Anyone whose so-called mother tongue was the tongue of Genesis could indeed understand Babel as “confusion”; that person then effects a confused translation of the proper name by its common equivalent without having need for another word.
It is as if there were two words there, two homonyms; one of which has the value of proper name and the other that of common noun: between the two, a translation . (Derrida 2007, 198, emphasis added)
Derrida thus deconstructs the traditional, mimetic view of translation as a secondary and later supplement to the original. The translation sways at the origin, and acquires the status of an original, of an ‘arche-translation.’
The next stage of Derrida’s argument transfers the semantic duplicity of the word “Babel” to God Himself. This replication is made possible by the fact that, according to Voltaire, whom Derrida quotes, the word “Babel” names not only the city Babel, but also its father: God Himself. Derrida connects the duplicity that is in God, or perhaps God as a double , to the name for God in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, “he war” (196), which contains an irreducible duplicity—two different meanings in two different language s. In English, it connotes war, whereas in German, ‘war’ being the first person singular past form of the verb ‘sein’ (to be), it has an ontological connotation. God’s name is thus constituted by the intersection of these two meanings: the name of God “utters the declaration of war (in English) of he who says, “I am that I am” [Exod. 3:14, DP] and that thus was (war)” (196). The God who is fractured by difference, the God of confusion and dissemination, is the God of deconstruction . Derrida tells us that “the proper name of God [he war/Babel, DP] is divided enough in the tongue, already, to signify also, confusedly, ‘confusion’ [bilbul, DP]. And the war that he declares has first raged within his name: divided, bifid, ambivalent, polysemic: God deconstructing” (Derrida 2007, 196). This argument hints at the violence always already present at the origin, violence that breaches the origin while precluding its being classed under the metaphysical categories of identity and presence. This violence is evident in God’s actions, which punish those who, seeking to forge linguistic, geographic, and national unity, built the Tower of Babel. This punishment forces upon them the original difference , the difference of dissemination, the difference that ruptures and divides, that precludes any possibility of ever constituting an absolute origin; that also, of necessity, generates totality. But the original violence of difference, or the violence of the origin as difference, is ethical in the sense that is preferable to the identity -driven violence that reigns in metaphysics. On the God of deconstruction , see also Derrida (1992).
- 4.
The word “trait” used here to translate the German “Riss,” meaning a break, crack, or split, does not have that meaning in contemporary English, but rather means a characteristic or attribute. It does, however, have another rarely-encountered meaning, namely, stroke, touch, or trace .
- 5.
Heidegger links the decomposed kind and the type of man he classifies as animal rationale in the course of interpreting two Traklian idioms: the “blue game” (Blaues Wild) (Heidegger 1971, 165–67, 186), and “animal face” (Tiergesicht) (166). In setting the stage for his discussion of Trakl’s decomposed kind, Heidegger interprets both these idioms as poetic epithets for man as animal rationale . His description of the decomposed kind in terms of wildness and animality in the continuation of the essay is based on these idioms.
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Différance.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 1–27. Essex: Prentice Hall; Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” translated by Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 253–309. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 2007. “Des Tours de Babel,” translated by Joseph F. Graham. In Vol. 1 of Psyche: Inventions of the Other, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 191–225. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work.” In On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz, 159–98. New York: Harper & Row. First composed 1952.
Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press. First composed 1936.
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Pimentel, D. (2019). Derrida’s Avoidance. In: Heidegger with Derrida . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05692-6_9
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