forgetting the text derridas critique of heidegger david couzens hoy 1979

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#font 421 "Helvetica BoldOblique 118 0" The Archaeology of Knowledge, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Language, but someone else s is it surpris ing primitive The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics On Time and Being, Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays on Husserl s Theory of Signs, Spurs, Wegmarken Wegmarken, Early Greek Thinking, The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, On Time and Being, #font 419 "Helvetica 120 0" Michel Foucault, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith New York: Harper and Row, 1972 , p. 162. Ian Hacking, Cambridge: Cam bridge........

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#font 421 "Helvetica BoldOblique 118 0" The Archaeology of Knowledge, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Language, but someone else s is it surpris ing primitive The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics On Time and Being, Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays on Husserl s Theory of Signs, Spurs, Wegmarken Wegmarken, Early Greek Thinking, The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, On Time and Being, #font 419 "Helvetica 120 0" Michel Foucault, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith New York: Harper and Row, 1972 , p. 162. Ian Hacking, Cambridge: Cam bridge Univ. Press, 1975 , p. 168. Hacking, p. 168. Hacking discusses the principles of charity and humanity in Chapter 12, "Donald Davidson s Truth," especially pp. 146 1 50; he cites Richard Grandy who defines his principle of humanity as follows: "So we have, as a pragmatic constraint on translation, the condition that the imputed pattern of relations among beliefs, desires and the world be as similar to our own as possible" p. 149 . Hilary Putnam calls this the Principle of Benefit of the Doubt and makes it an important ingredient, along with a causal theory of reference and a Tanki "correspondence" theory of truth, in his scientific realism, which is captured succinctly in the following rhetorical question in "What is Real ism? ": "Given the Quinian Predicament Kantian Predicament? that there is a real world we can only describe it in the terms of our own conceptual system Well? We should use conceptual system? that reference has this character of apparent triviality?" p. 192 . See my "The Owl and the Poet: Heidegger s Critique of Hegel," published in the Winter 1975 issue of this journal. For a critical comparison of the objectivist hermeneutics of E. D. Hirsch and E. Betti with the hermeneutic theory of Heidegger and Gadamer see my book, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1978 . Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh New York: Harper and Row, 1972 . p. 24. Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in trans. David B. Allison Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973 , p. 159. pp. 110. My translation is taken from "Zur Seinsfrage," in Martin Heidegger, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967 , p. 243. p. 245. Published in Martin Heidegger, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi New York: Harper and Row, 1975 . Sarah Kofman, "Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis" trans. David B. Allison , in ed. David B. Allison New York: Delta, 19771, p. 212. See p. 24, 41. #font 400 "Times Bold 108 0" 3 #font 369 "Helvetica BoldOblique 106 0" Spurs Spurs: Nietzsche s Styles, S. Of Grammatology, L Ecriture et la differance Of Grammatology, aucun sens decidable, S., #font 363 "Helvetica 112 0" book is, Kofman argues, an attack on Aristotle s reading of the history of philosophy as a continuous process of evolution: "Instead of considering pre Socratic philosophy to be a simple and impedimented speech that was gradually smoothed out by later Greek thought as Aristotle does Nietzsche finds a veritable break between the dawn of philosophy and its later development: the pre Socratics belong to a rare type; they are irre ducible to any other."16 Both Derrida and Heidegger may thus have been anticipated by Nietzsche s criticism of Aristotle s use of the principle of charity, and in particular, Derrida s critique of Heidegger s project of de struction may have been presaged in Nietzsche s reading of Heraclitus critique of Anaximander. By heightening the undecidability of itself through the hint that the essay is only a "parodying graft," however, Derrida tantalizes the hermeneutic reader who prefers to think that the issues between them, while not necessarily decided, are not undecidable. To claim that the essay is a parodying graft on these forgotten texts of Heidegger and Nietzsche would be to fall into Derrida s trap by searching for hermeneutical keys and hidden allusions that are as farfetched as his own playful readings of the umbrella fragment. Nevertheless, a parody must be a parody of some thing, and without the parodied text it would not even be amusing. Both the destruction and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy have the effect of leading not to a forgetting or an overcoming of it, but to an increased preoccupation with it. Nietzsche and Heidegger recognize this and, regretting that this concern with overcoming inhibits creativity, wish to abandon the overcoming in favor of another kind of philosophy alto gether.l Derrida comes to the same recognition, but concludes that there is no other kind of "philosophy." The objection that his critique of Heidegger thus comes down merely to an undecidable disagreement about the meaning of a word should, of course, not disturb him. In the epoch of philosophy in quotation marks nothing more is to be expected. Barnard College, Columbia University NOTES 1 Jacques Derrida, trans. Barbara Harlow Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1976 . Hereafter cited as 2 Jacques Derrida, trans. G. C. Spivak Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976 ; see especially Part I, Chapter 1. section 3. See also Paris: Seuil, 1967 . p. 427. Derrida, p. 24. 4 "Structure1 lement emancipee de tout vouloir dire vivant, elle peut toujours ne rien vouloir dire, n avoir jouer parodiquement au sens, se deporter par greffe, sans fin, hors de tout corps contextuel ou de tout code fini" p. 102 [my emphases1 1. #font 341 "Helvetica 100 0" Heidegger to claim that his destruction of metaphysics puts him in a more privileged position than previous thinkers by enabling him now to "remember" Being, and to represent and name it as it truly is. Another passage that Derrida may have forgotten inveighs against the superficial misunderstanding of destruction either as a demolition of metaphysics that smashes it to bits only to pick up and use the pieces again in a new way, or even as "a deconstruction Abbau of familiar but now empty represen tations in order to win back the original experiences of Being in meta physics."14 Derrida probably intends his exposition of the umbrella fragment to prevent similar misunderstandings of his own conception of deconstruction. With these misunderstandings aside then, there is no reason to chide Heidegger for searching for a single meaning underlying this history of otherwise discontinuous discourses. When Derrida in "White Myth ology" deconstructs the various metaphors of presence from Plato to Hegel, he is also inserting an interpretive principle of continuity into this history. Derrida is not committed, of course, to the belief in a single thing called presence, since the metaphors are only illusions and are necessarily multiple. But neither does Heidegger have to think the forgettings of Being are alike, and he can speak of the necessary plurality of ways in which this forgetting manifests itself without asserting that Being could possibly not be forgotten. Whether Heidegger formulates and practices his theory of de struction as consistently as he should, however, is a different question. In this regard there is another work by Heidegger that Derrida could also have recalled, for it is one that is perhaps in many respects like his own commentary on the Nietzsche fragment. "The Anaximander Fragment"15 is also a notorious case of the overinterpretation of a single sentence fragment with an irretrievable context. It should not be overlooked that this essay is not a direct reading of Anaximander, but of a reading of Anaximander by Nietzsche in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks . Anaximander and Nietzsche are, moreover, the beginning and the end of the history of metaphysics, and Nietzsche s entrapment in this history is shown, Heidegger thinks, by his unimaginative blindness to the Anaximander fragment. If Derrida forgets Heidegger s text, he also forgets Nietzsche s book, where his own notion of "ontological undecidability" could be rooted. In an illuminating study Sarah Kofman points out that Nietzsche here revives the notion of an indemonstrable, undecidable philosophy, a conception he attributes to Heraclitus, who goes even beyond Anaxi mander, the philosopher of the "indefinite," in saying that everything is both itself and its opposite and thus denying the principle of noncontra diction. In contrast to Aristotle, Heraclitus is said to prefer a philosophy based on the metaphor rather than on the concept, the concept being simply a forgetting of an original metaphor. Furthermore, Nietzsche s #font 312 "Helvetica BoldOblique 92 0" need #font 306 "Helvetica 94 0" Heidegger s strategy of carrying out this destruction by showing that the history of philosophy is the history of the forgetting of Being thus appears only to catch him in the use of "Being" as yet another metaphysical name for the ground of everything, including language. In contrast, Derrida argues that "there never has been and never will be a unique word, a master name . . . not even the name of Being." He accordingly bases his deconstructions on a conception of language as a play of differences between signifiers, presumably on a purely syntactic level with no need for a "transcendental signified" that comes to presence in language and grounds it. Heidegger and Derrida do differ on whether language has built into it a transcendental need for referentiality, but this disagreement should not lead to the misconstrual of Heidegger as a metaphysical dualist with a correspondence theory of truth. Heidegger, in this respect like Derrida, is quite effective in showing the emptiness of traditional philo sophical dualisms. Furthermore, there is no such thing as the meaning of Being, according to Heidegger, and one suspects that he gradually comes to realize that "Being" is merely a metalinguistic notion resulting from a transcendental deduction based on the for something to which language could refer. Although this result still puts Heidegger at odds with Derrida, it is a much weaker conclusion than would follow if he were actually presupposing the metaphysics of presence. To worry about the term "Being" at this point, however, is to get on the wrong Holzweg and to forget that the history of metaphysics is the history of the forgetting of Being. Does Spurs itself forget this forgetting? Is "forgotten" only by coincidence the central word in "I have forgotten my umbrella"? Of course not, but nevertheless Derrida waits until a second postscript as if he had twice forgotten to begin explicating it, and then says merely, "Let us not pretend to know what it is, this forgetting" S., p. 109 . He could have explained, although we perhaps all know, that Heidegger owes his special understanding of the word to Nietzsche. De rived from the Platonic doctrine of recollection, forgetting is not a deriva tive state occurring only after a prior instance of conscious knowledge since knowledge involves deliberation and reasoned justification . It is also not a negative phenomenon, and in the second "Untimely Medi tation" Nietzsche makes it an essential precondition for transcending the despair of nihilism and becoming truly creative. Much of this explication occurs in Heidegger s "Zur Seinsfrage" a crucial background text for Spurs , and in the postscript on forgetting Derrida cites the following passage which he maintains he had forgotten while writing Spurs although he had quoted it in an earlier essay : "Thus, the forgetting of Being has frequently been represented as if Being were, figuratively speaking, an umbrella that had been left somewhere through the forgetfulness of a philosophy professor."13 The forgetting of Being, properly understood, would thus not be a phenomenon that could lead #font 285 "Helvetica Oblique 84 0" Wirkung. Ill. The Destruction Deconstruction of the History of Philosophy #font 277 "Helvetica 86 0" A third feature of Derrida s picture to be reconsidered is his claim that hermeneutics must attribute a totality to a text or corpus, even when deconstruction can show that such a structure does not exist. While it is true that for hermeneutics there is a tendency in all interpretive under standing to posit a unity or coherence to a work, this positing is only a regulative ideal that does not rule out the possibility that a work may fail to satisfy it. In "The Origin of the Artwork" Heidegger describes interpre tation as a preservation of the work, and also says that preservation must be creative. He therefore holds a reception theory of artworks according to which no interpretation or reading is ever final. Gadamer complements this point with his theory that a work of art or literature only comes to be in an act of understanding or reading and is thus constituted by the history of its effects, its The literary text is thus for hermeneutic theory not an independent and autonomous object, an interpretation is not a representation, and the relation between text and interpretation cannot be one of correspondence. These points obviate Derrida s now irrelevant fourth criticism, which is that hermeneutics has an unquestioned onto logical commitment to a metaphysics of presence since it presupposes an independent signified behind any significant discourse, no matter how indirect and elusive. Heidegger s metaphors often do make him vulnerable to Derrida s criticisms, though, and there is no point in defending his opaque language too ardently, especially since Derrida often only corrects misreadings of Heidegger including, however, Heidegger s own misreadings of himself . Although hermeneutics does not require anything like the metaphysics of presence mentioned above and is entirely unmetaphysical in this sense , the implications of this fourth criticism for Heidegger s programmatic destruction of the history of ontology are worth considering further. However much Derrida may wish to deconstruct the methods of his philosophical parent, are the effects of his manner of reading the history of philosophy all that different from Heidegger s? The fourth criticism raises the queston whether Heidegger s frequent references to a still hidden truth of Being commit him to an ontology of a dualist or realist sort when he wishes to avoid ontology in the traditional sense altogether. The very project of a destruction of the history of ontology may even imply such a commitment since, as Heidegger himself says in a late work, "On Time and Being," To think Being without beings means: to think Being without regard to metaphysics. Yet a regard for meta physics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore, our task is to cease all over coming, and leave metaphysics to itself? #font 251 "Helvetica 76 0" Post structuralists like Derrida and Foucault thus picture even contemporary hermeneutics as the interpretive project of making the strange familiar, and of finding present beliefs and interests in what are actually incommensurable discourses or conceptual frameworks. Herme neutics is believed to make the mistake of an overzealous application of the principle of charity due to a misunderstanding of the nature of textu ality, one that leads to the illusory attempt to decode the text in terms of a hidden, underlying meaning. A text without such causal connections to the world would thus be the downfall of hermeneutics both practically since this text could not be deciphered and theoretically since the un questioned, and presumably unjustifiable, ontological presuppositions of hermeneutics would thereby be revealed. This picture attributes at least four theses to recent hermeneutic theory incorrectly. First, hermeneutics since Heidegger has not advocated bridging the gap between text and interpreter by translating all that is strange into familiar terms. On the contrary, contemporary hermeneutics is based on a thoroughgoing criticism both of the Enlightenment as sumption that everyone everywhere thinks essentially alike and of Schleiermacher s and Dilthey s tendency to presuppose the universal validity of their own beliefs, interests, and psychology. Heidegger s theory that the history of metaphysics is the history of the forgetting of Being, despite its many problems,9 does recognize the discontinuities or paradigm shifts in this history, and thus has as a central tenet which Heidegger himself unfortunately violates in some cases that the interpretive reading recognize the unique strangeness and perhaps even the incommensurability of these various moments. Gadamer also argues against reducing or col lapsing the horizon of the past into the present horizon. No elaborate argument is required, though, to make the point that just as poetry makes the ordinary appear extraordinary, so must interpretation be able to per ceive the unique strangeness of a text, no matter how familiar it may seem. If this is achieved through a deconstructive reading, then deconstruction may well be an essential moment of the hermeneutic circle, no point of which can claim to be the inevitable starting point, the origin, center, or beginning that will thereby have a special epistemic or ontological status in the interpretive understanding that results. The post structuralist picture of hermeneutics is also incorrect in attributing to it the methodological belief that there must be one right interpretation capturing meaning of the text. There are contemporary proponents of an objectivist hermeneutical tradition going back to Schleiermacher who do accept this ideal, but they are precisely the ones who attack Heidegger and Gadamer for being historical relativists. In another place I have argued that hermeneutic theory can avoid the para doxes of relativism without committing itself to the belief that there is only one right interpretation for any given text. #font 246 "Helvetica Oblique 74 0" In Defense of Hermeneutics the #font 244 "Helvetica BoldOblique 78 0" 11. #font 231 "Helvetica BoldOblique 66 0" Spurs #font 223 "Helvetica 68 0" of philosophy to avoid what he describes ironically as the commentators assumption that "it would be uncharitable, and indeed inhumane, if they did not interpret the greatest minds of the seventeenth century as discuss ing the problem in what are now known to be the right ways.,16 Speaking not of Heidegger s hermeneutics but of nineteenth century biblical exe gesis, he contrasts his own procedure with this older hermeneutical one: The hermeneuticist tries to re experience the ancient words in terms of his own life and problems, thereby uncovering the profound and hidden meanings that lie beneath the text. . . . Writing as I do in the heyday of the sentence I reverse the procedure of hermeneutics, charity, or humanity, and read only what is written on the surface, for there is nothing else. The procedure of charity or humanity that Hacking mentions along with hermeneutics is precisely what must also be rejecting. "Charity" is actually a technical term in current philosophy of language for the methodological principle that the beliefs expressed in a language foreign to us must be for the most part similar to our own, and thus the correct translation or interpretation will be that with the maximal number of truths, or the least number of falsehoods or contradictions, as de termined from our point of view.8 Since the Derridean quotation marks around texts would presumably cut off all questioning about common causal referents underlying them, and thus make texts incommensurable with one another, Derrida can be located in contemporary philosophical space by identifying his opposition to realists who insist on the principle of charity. Within the hermeneutical tradition this point has been argued in terms other than those of semantic theory. One of the first to defend something like the principle of charity as an explicit hermeneutical maxim is Schleiermacher the "veil maker" of the Derridean allusion to a way of veiling all differences by spreading one s own manner of thinking over other peoples and times. The hermeneutical bridge over the historical gap between text and interpreter is said to be formed by making the strange familiar. In wanting to hear precisely the strangeness of Nietzsche s voice, and in thinking of deconstruction as the process of letting this strangeness appear, Derrida is correct in resisting Schleiermacher s pontification. Yet he is wrong in supposing that this critique of nineteenth century hermeneutics will also be valid against the more recent hermeneutic theories of Heidegger, Gadamer, and others. Dei rida s deconstructive spurs are not the first to tear Schleiermacher s veil. #font 200 "Helvetica 60 0" This provocative thesis is vitiated, however, insofar as quotation marks do not always function as Derrida implies, and do not necessarily block all possibility of reference. Scarequotes, for instance, may still imply a referent. Speaking of somebody ironically as a "real athlete" does not deny that there are athletes in reality, but on the contrary presupposes that there are. Furthermore, even if an entire text were in quotes, the possibility of truth and falsity would still not disappear, since there would be, for instance, sentences about the textual lines or the fictional facts that are true or false. Finally, if the umbrella sentence had the status Derrida attributes to it, then it would not be an actual sentence in a discourse, but only the name of a sentence in a natural language. In the very act of trying to interpret the meaning of the sentence further, Derrida would be guilty of a mention use confusion. Since the requisite causal chain or historical explanation behind the actual use of the sentence is entirely lacking, it may well be part of the wisdom of hermeneutics that it does not try to interpret the fragment. Overlooking these features of quotation marks, Derrida drama tizes his opposition to Heidegger s conception of philosophy by claiming Heidegger fails to understand that Nietzsche is the very thinker who under cuts philosophy in this sense through his institution of what Derrida calls the epoch of quotation marks: The question of the woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and non true and inaugurates the epochal regime of quotation marks which is to be en forced for every concept belonging to the system of philosophical decidability. The hermeneutic project which postulates a true sense of the text is disqualified under this regime. Reading is freed from the horizon of the meaning or truth of being, liberated from the values of the product s production or the present s presence. . . . The stylate spur rips through the veil. S., pp. 83 85 In this epoch it becomes a characteristic of textuality as such to be in quotation marks, and thus methods of interpretation, like deconstruction itself, must resist trying to dig behind texts to find their "hidden mean ing," that is, some causal relation to an aspect of the real world. Derrida is not alone in contrasting this theory of textuality and of reading with a hermeneutical one. Like Derrida, Foucault criticizes hermeneutics and says historical discourses should be examined to see what is said, and not what might be meant.5 He also maintains that de scriptive terms in scientific discourses do not refer to theory independent objects, and that such discourses are incommensurable. In yet a different context. Ian Hackinq also stresses the need in writinq a historical account #font 187 "Courier Bold 52 0" Ol , #font 180 "Helvetica 54 0" can know what these works mean. The first point to clarify, then, is what might Derrida mean by "meaning? " There are at least three related terms that should be dis tinguished: a "meaning" strictly speaking, or sense; b meaningfulness, or significance; and c reference. The first is merely a syntactical matter, and since Derrida himself says that "everybody knows what I have forgot ten my umbrella means" S., p. 99 and that it can be translated "with no loss" S., p. 1 he could not be talking about decidable meaning in this respect. Similarly, Derrida could not simply have significance in mind although that is clearly part of what he means since it is true for many texts that there is no such thing as the unique or ultimate significance of the text, and there are usually many possible implications or connotations that might be relevant, but might not. Of course, the umbrella passage is peculiar in that there is no available evidence for deciding whether it is significant at all. This makes it inaccessible in practice only, however, and Derrida is claiming that it is inaccessible in principle S., p. 97 . Since nothing so far would either explain such an inaccessibility in principle or be likely to thwart hermeneutics, Derrida s slogan will only be of interest if some views about reference and about truth are also implied. These views are difficult to pin down precisely, though, because Derrida s strategy is to find these implications buried in the figurative way Nietzsche speaks of women. The need for figurative language is not merely coincidental, however, if the conclusion at stake is the negative one that no theory of reference or of truth will be viable. It is also appropriate, then, that the paradigm sentence itself have no decidable referents or truth value. By extending this point analogically to Nietzsche s entire corpus, Derrida apparently intends to say both that Nietzsche does not have a metaphysical commitment to a "transcendental signified," and that there is in any case no way to determine the ultimate reference for a language, presumably not even in such general terms as "the True or the False," "the World," the "fact of the matter," or even simply "the facts." Whether Derrida can make this analogical inference depends, however, on a point that he mentions but does not analyze sufficiently. As the sentence "I have forgotten my umbrella" stands in the original, it is already in quotation marks. In this particular case it is also true that the quotation marks do prevent the identificaton of the referents of the terms, and the extension of the indexical or token reflexive "I" is in fact un decidable although its intention is not . The consequence of treating Nietzsche s entire work as if it were also in quotation marks and thus also had an undecidable truth value is that philosophy becomes like fiction, at least according to a common theory of fictional statements as being propo sitions that are uttered in tacit quotation marks and thereby not asserted to be true. Sir Philip Sidney s line about the poet, that he "nothing af firmeth and therefore never lieth," would also characterize the philoso pher. #font 145 "Helvetica Oblique 44 0" put out of order" S., 65 . Spurs Spurs S., S., know #font 143 "Helvetica 46 0" Derrida. "the very order that Nietzsche s operation should have otherwise p. Derrida rarely speaks in his own voice, but here in it is apparent that what holds for Nietzsche s text also holds for Derrida s own. He raises the question whether itself has any decidable meaning. To tell the truth, he says, it does not, but this information will not help a reader in his interpretive search for the presence or absence of such mean ing, since the best way to lie and dissimulate is precisely to say that one is telling the truth p. 107 . The paradoxical theory of truth at stake is clearly both Derridean and Nietzschean: there is no such thing either as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche s text. . . . Indeed there is no such thing as a truth in itself. Bu: only a surfeit of it. Even if it should be for me, about me, truth is plural. p. 80 Similarly, the umbrella passage can be read coherently in any number of ways, and the serious hermeneutic reader who thinks that a text cannot be interpreted unless the surrounding context or the underlying reference can be discovered is defeated. The possibility of a text with no decidable meaning would show that the limits of hermeneutics are only the begin nings for deconstruction. In fact, the poverty of hermeneutics is demon strated by the ability of deconstruction to "play" with all texts, even those that hermeneutics cannot take seriously. At the risk of being accused of lacking a sense of humor, how ever, hermeneutics must resist thinking that Derrida is right in saying that it is an intelligible possibility that texts could have the status suggested by his playful paradigm. There is nothing wrong with play, but even play would seem to be impossible for a text having "no decidable meaningt unless, that is, there is a sense in which this phrase does not imply the Pyrrhonism Derrida appears to be advocating. If Derrida is a skeptic, he is not a naive one, and cannot be refuted in the usual way by showing that he tacitly accepts the very beliefs he denies. The claim that there is no decidable meaning is purposefully vague, and Derrida knows that it will be almost impossible to decide what he means by it. He thus cannot be accused of attaching a special epistemic status to the claim, since he himself does not purport to what Nietzsche s fragment means. The point of the passage, and of Derrida s essay, may very well be to bring the whole enterprise of epistemology to an end, but the deconstruction that brings this about does not itself make any knowledge claims and does not pretend that its own standpoint is epistemologically privileged. The hermeneutical project of deciphering Derrida s and especially Nietzsche s works is bound to try to penetrate this obscurity, however, and will inevitably be dissatisfied with the implied conclusion that no one #font 104 "Helvetica Oblique 36 0" Of Grammatology of Grammatology diffbrance . Spurs Nachlass S. S., #font 102 "Helvetica 38 0" inability of Heidegger s destruction to transcend the metaphysical epoch. Despite Heidegger s efforts to avoid any commitment to an ultimate meta physical reality, Derrida thinks that Heidegger s talk about the presencing of Being and its appropriation involves such a metaphysical metaphor. In fact, it is Heidegger s theory of language that reveals his entrapment. intends to show that any theory of the sign as consisting of an irreducible dualism between signifier and signified is based on the meta physical illusion that a sign must be a sign something and that language needs this referentiality to be capable of expressing truths. Derrida s critique of Heidegger in is thus that Heidegger and hermeneutics are wrong in thinking that a theory of language must involve a theory of truth and of reference, and that Nietzsche is the one who in fact sees this. It will be a "difficult thought," Derrida tells us,3 to think of an alternative theory as he will try in working out the notions of trace and takes up the implications of this thought for Heidegger s method of reading Nietzsche. and in so doing generates not only a theory for the reading of all texts, but furthermore, a theory of the conditions for the possibility of any act of understanding, interpretation, and communication. Hermeneutics is precisely the area of philosophy that concerns itself with such theory, yet Derrida makes a point of opposing it. He emphasizes this opposition by selecting from Nietzsche s a para digm text that he thinks will inevitably frustrate the hermeneutic inter preter. This "text" is simply a scrap of paper, found with other apparently unrelated jottings, on which Nietzsche wrote, "I have forgotten my um brella" pp. 94 ff . . The interesting feature of this passage for Derrida is that the words are entirely translatable and unambiguous, and yet its interpretation is completely indeterminate. It necessarily escapes the hermeneutic circle of interpretation and the attempt to bring the totality of a text into an intelligible reading because it has, in Derrida s words, "no decidable mean ir~~."~ He also suggests, furthermore, that this lack of decidable meaning may hold for all of Nietzsche s writings, both individually and as a corpus. The play with this possibility is part of the "difficult thought" that is to take both Nietzsche and Derrida beyond the confines of the metaphysical epoch. Derrida is fully aware of the paradoxical character of his sug gestion, of course, and avoids any outright assertion that this is what Nietzsche does mean. Nevertheless, he makes the implications of his thought sufficiently clear, saying that there is no such thing as a "totality" to Nietzsche s writing, and "no measure to its undecipherability" p. 105 . Heidegger s attempt to show that the meaning of Nietzsche s writings amounts to a failed destruction of metaphysics thus does some thing that is proper only to a philosophical order, and this is indeed, says #font 58 "Helvetica 28 0" is actually an attempt at such a theory. Unlike Heidegger whose "destruction" of the history of ontology as originally announced in is to result in a more fundamental ontology that would over come this tradition, Derrida s method of "deconstruction" aims to dis mantle a style of writing and thinking to see how it works or in the case of traditional philosophy, to see how it does not work without any in tention of replacing it by a more proper one. The prescriptive thrust of Heideggerian destruction purportedly veils an ontological commitment to the "truth of Being" when this is the very sort of thing that should have been destroyed. Derrida s deconstruction is not to be yet one more on tology that will in turn be superseded. A form of playful irony, it remains nonprescriptive and merely allows previous metaphysics to destroy itself. Of Derrida s many deconstructions of philosophical and literary writings, none is more significant than that of deconstruction s own parent, Heideggerian destruction itself. Furthermore, since the major precursor for the project of an of metaphysics is Nietzsche, the paradigmatic problem for Derrida is to deconstruct Heidegger s de struction of Nietzsche. Any post Freudian can see that the successful resolution of this problem would have the effect of removing a threatening parent and replacing him with a less reproving and more playful grand parent. No one is more aware of this, of course, than Derrida himself. Since a good psychoanalyst would be suspicious of a subject s self analysis, I do not think the immanental strictures of deconstruction will be violated by challenging Derrida here. I thus propose to go back to Derrida s essay, which David Allison s commen tary has greatly illuminated, and question those points that are directed against Heidegger and the philosophical position called hermeneutics. Sub sequently, I intend to defend hermeneutics against this deconstruction and to suggest instead that deconstruction is simply one moment, although an important one, in the hermeneutical circle of understanding and interpre tation. My aim is to translate Derrida s ambiguous, indirect discourse into theses that will be provocative both for those who defend Derrida, and for those who, if my translation manual is appropriate, may now wish to oppose him. A footnote in reminds us that this is not the first time that Derrida has addressed the question of Heidegger s reading of Nietzsche as the thinker who in the very act of attacking the epoch of metaphysics remains unconsciously trapped in it. Of suggests that Nietzsche can be freed from Heidegger s reading not simply by defending Nietzsche, but by letting this reading reach its own limits, beyond which the unique strangeness of Nietzsche s text will appear in its own right.2 Heidegger s failure to perceive this strangeness is itself said to be due to the #font 56 "Helvetica Oblique 30 0" briture Being and Time ~berwindun~ Spurs: Nietzsche s Styles, I. The Deconstructive Ideal: No Decidable Meaning Spurs Grammatology #font 44 "Helvetica 20 0" The history of philosophy, perhaps like the history of poetry, has often changed, although not always progressed, as a result of one thinker s interpretation and criticism of a major precursor. Familiar examples are Aristotle on Plato, Berkeley on Locke, Kant on Hume, Hegel on Kant, and Heidegger on Husserl. Whether the newcomer s reading of his predecessor is a misreading, and whether misreadings are inevitable, would be difficult to ascertain unless such a judgment were itself absolutely certain. The task confronting a post structuralist and post modern theory of reading is to explain misreadings without generating ontological commitments of the same sort that caused previous distortions. One such commitment is the "metaphysical" belief that the current reading has grasped the indubitable truth while the prior misreading erred because it failed to grasp the essence of the matter. Whether Derrida s interpretation and criticism of Heidegger is the latest development in the history of philosophy is itself an important philosophical question. The answer depends partly on whether the post structuralist theory of reading is accomplishable, for Derrida s theory of #font 41 "Helvetica Oblique 18 0" David Couzens Hoy #font 39 "Helvetica Bold 22 0" Forgetting the Text: Derrida s Critique of Heidegger #font 7 "Times Italic 9 0" boundary2 boundary2 #font 5 "Times Roman 8 0" DavidCouzensHoy ,Vol.8,No.1,TheProblemsofReadinginContemporaryAmericanCriticism:A Symposium. Autumn,1979 ,pp.223 236. StableURL: links.jstor.org sici?sici=0190 3659 28197923 298 3A1 3C223 3AFTTDCO 3E2.0.CO 3B2 W iscurrentlypublishedbyDukeUniversityPress. YouruseoftheJSTORarchiveindicatesyouracceptanceofJSTOR sTermsandConditionsofUse,availableat www.jstor.org about terms.html .JSTOR sTermsandConditionsofUseprovides,inpart,thatunlessyouhaveobtained priorpermission,youmaynotdownloadanentireissueofajournalormultiplecopiesofarticles,andyoumayusecontentin theJSTORarchiveonlyforyourpersonal,non commercialuse. Pleasecontactthepublisherregardinganyfurtheruseofthiswork.Publishercontactinformationmaybeobtainedat www.jstor.org journals duke.html . EachcopyofanypartofaJSTORtransmissionmustcontainthesamecopyrightnoticethatappearsonthescreenorprinted pageofsuchtransmission. TheJSTORArchiveisatrusteddigitalrepositoryprovidingforlong termpreservationandaccesstoleadingacademic journalsandscholarlyliteraturefromaroundtheworld.TheArchiveissupportedbylibraries,scholarlysocieties,publishers, andfoundations.ItisaninitiativeofJSTOR,anot for profitorganizationwithamissiontohelpthescholarlycommunitytake advantageofadvancesintechnology.FormoreinformationregardingJSTOR,pleasecontactsupport@jstor.org. www.jstor.org MonJan1407:32:092008 #font 3 "Times Bold 7 0" ForgettingtheText:Derrida sCritiqueofHeidegger

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