Heidegger with Derrida: Being Written attempts, for the first time, to think Heidegger's philosophy through the lens of Derrida's logocentric thesis, according to which speech has, throughout the history of metaphysics, been given primacy over writing. The book offers a detailed account of Derrida's arguments about the debasement of writing, an account that leads to a new definition of writing, conceiving it epistemically, rather than linguistically. Heidegger's analysis of the gaze and critique of the modern subject are shown to have logocentric features. This surprising conclusion entails that Heidegger is well within the metaphysical tradition, which he labored so intently to overcome. The book sheds new light on the philosophical roots of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism, arguing that his hierarchical thinking--the hallmark of logocentrism and metaphysics?condones violent differentiation between the ‘proper’ race and the Other.
First of all, and setting aside for the moment all the various controversies and disputes, Heidegger and Derrida are the great prophets of the prin- ciple of performativity. Both Derrida and Heidegger take as their starting point the premise that it is impossible to sever the connection between a text’s form and its content. The text doesn’t merely say something, but actually does what it says. Both Heidegger and Derrida set out to decon- struct the foundational premises of metaphysics, and this deconstructive enterprise is accompanied by deconstruction of the homogeneous and hierarchical structure of the text, a structure that follows, of course, from the foundational premises of metaphysics. According to both thinkers, the text’s cohesiveness falls apart: the beginning becomes the end; the central becomes marginal and the margins slip inward toward the center; the conclusion is given at the beginning, and the end turns out to be the middle.