Description
Book SynopsisFew philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida's first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the cole Normale Sup rieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida's primary conceptual concerns--indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word deconstruction--but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy. Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger's prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to Fre
Trade Review"Heidegger: The Question of Being and History certainly (re)familiarizes Anglophone readers with the essentially historical orientation of Derrida's philosophical project. Given at the start of his remarkable career, at the age of thirty-four, and originally delivered over the course of nine sessions during the 1964- 1965 academic year at the cole Normale Sup rieure (ENS), Derrida's seminar offers a wealth of insights into the ways his published views on history fundamentally emerged out of a critical engagement with the introduction and the final sections of Martin Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time."--H-France Review "The publication of Derrida's 1964-65 seminar on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is a philosophical event of great significance. Despite dozens of detailed analyses, Being and Time remains one of the most misread books of the twentieth century. Humanist, anthropological, analytic, and transcendental-mystical readings have occluded the profoundly atheistic, 'ek-sistent' thing that is Dasein. Derrida's penetrating reconstruction of Heidegger's revolutionary 'aporetic style' illuminates Being and Time and the entirety of Derrida's own oeuvre. Although Derrida did not publish this seminar, its traces pervade the issues that dominated his thinking. Derrida's greatest insights into Heidegger's thinking are announced here: being is neither a 'cosmic ground' nor 'the highest being, ' the metaphors for being can never be stabilized by a logic, the 'mystery of Geschehen [originary movement]' marks an absolute temporal concealment, the 'destruction of ontology' is the work of ontology itself, the history of being is history itself. Derrida's focus is on the opening and closing sections of Being and Time, Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, his 'Letter on Humanism', and texts by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. This brilliantly translated seminar is required reading for students of Heidegger and Derrida. . . . Summing up: Essential." --Choice "For those who are prepared, this text makes for absorbing reading. . . . Because it dates from the early years of Derrida's career and because it is a series of classroom lectures, this book serves as a helpful preparation for reading the more intricate and playful texts that he published in the late 1960s and beyond. It also shows just how indebted Derrida is to Heidegger." --Los Angeles Review of Books
