Abstract
This paper will attempt to critique Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s critiques of Hegel and Aristotle. Our thesis is that a buried four-dimensional temporalization that eludes Heidegger’s Division Two of Being and Time grows out of an encounter with Aristotle and Hegel, once again, on the meaning of time; this then can help extend Derrida’s concluding reflections on ‘trace and erasure’ at the end of his famous “Ousia and Grammë: Note on a Note from Being and Time” (1968) on which he could go no further.
Derrida's "Ousia and Grammê: Note on a Note from Being and Time" is not just an article or an essay. It's not just a very long mini-manuscript, thirty-six pages in the English translation published in Margins of Philosophy (1972). One is reminded of Mozart's attestation of seeing the 'whole symphony in a note.' But this is not even a note, the point, the line, the plane. This is like an opera of operas, each section worthy of its own lengthy examination. Derrida's attempt to critique Heidegger's attempted critiques of Aristotle and Hegel by passing through Kant is bewilderingly complex as it is interesting. How he keeps all these plates spinning without dropping one is something of a marvel. Yet, I also feel, in the same token, that his literal exegesis of Aristotle's Greek and Hegel's German is almost like a spectator commenting on what he sees, unfiltered as if the text were more transparent to him compared to Heidegger who had to misunderstand them intentionally to advance his own 'originality.' Of course, Derridean deconstruction is suspicious of any attempt to end metaphysics and pass to another realm, that doesn't already fall back within the 'closure' of metaphysics itself, and this would have to include Heidegger, and most notably fundamental ontology that was being prepared by Being and Time. He, Derrida, has an uncanny ability to find more aporias within the aporias that the tradition presents starting with Aristotle's Physics, Book IV on the question of time (not to be conflated with the metaphysics of change and movement). He gives Hegel his due and spares him a bit from Heidegger's overhasty critique in Being and Time. One is impressed by the fact that in 1968 when the article was first published (and then republished in the collection of essays- Margins of Philosophy - in 1972), he has read thoroughly, not just Being and Time (in whatever French translation of the day) but also the Kant book of 1929 and some of Heidegger's works on the pre-Socratics. He doesn't shy away from plunging into Hegel's Science of Logic while attending to Heidegger's footnote on the Jena Logic, the Encyclopedia (particularly the Philosophy of Nature on space and time), and of course the Phenomenology of Spirit. One can inquire whether there is an article-length work by Derrida before or after this piece that tries to take on so many giants in the history of Western philosophy and on the most mysterious, most complex, least penetrable or understood, question of the 'meaning of time' (Derrida, 1986, p. 52).
In short, Derrida's magnificent undertaking, however limited it appears now looking in retrospect, cannot be evaded. Having said that, I see no real engagement with Being and Time as a whole since, presumably, he is dwelling on that one long, all-important endnote - xxx - in Chapter VI of Division Two (Heidegger, 1962, p. 500). No engagement with the 'quadruplicity' in the last chapter- The Absolute Idea - of the Science of Logic and no engagement with Aristotle's Metaphysics, particularly Book XII on movement and divine, other than very cursory reductions. Having said that, trying to critique Derrida in a superficial manner will not do either. This will take a painstaking review of each and every sentence in Derrida's text with ample time to reflect; but that could take years since as he says that what Heidegger is trying to deal with in Being and Time and the endnote on Aristotle and Hegel is this: "an enormous task is proposed here. These texts pointed out are doubtless among the most difficult and most decisive of the history of philosophy" (Derrida, 1986, p. 38).