Archetypical Techniques and the House of Being:

Space to Play and the Temporal Question of Structure

Randall E. Auxier

To ask the hard question is simple
The simple act of the confused will            
But the answer                                 
Is hard and hard to remember
                              W.H. Auden

While it would be fair to say, in my estimation, that a number of concerns will be raised in the following, and that none of them will find any completion of their own, nevertheless, the provisional character of this study has implications beyond those traceable to the insufficiencies caused by limited scope. More straightforwardly, what I mean to say is that this study should be provisional even though it had been a lifetime in the preparation, and even if it offered to read the cube of the texts it does. So this may be taken as apologetic, if not as an apology, by way of preface. 1

This is to be a study of the ambiguous relation between Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger. It is not only of interest in that the one is a Jew and the other was once a Nazi, but also because the work of the former has a peculiar dependence upon that of the latter. The evidence suggests that Derrida has recently become somewhat defensive about his reliance upon a thinker alleged by many to be more than just a Nazi-by-circumstance. An example of this defensiveness has recently appeared in the popular press. Thomas Sheehan reports in the New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993, 2 that Derrida has shown a willingness to use something like strong-arm tactics to prevent the publication in English of an interview he granted to Le Nouvel Observateur in 1987 (entitled Philosophers Hell). What may be motivating Derrida to act as a censor, or to put hjs earlier self under erasure, is difficult to divine.

Now, evidently either regretting the remarks he made about Heidegger in that interview, or not wishing to have them associated with other literature critical of Heidegger, Derrida calls Richard Wolins book: a sneaky war-machine for attacking Heidegger (according to Sheehans review). The critics seem not to agree, however. In an area where much mud has been irresponsibly slung in Heideggers direction, 3 Wolins book The Heidegger Controversy, seems not to be another addition to the smear campaign. The present essay is not another one on Heidegger and National Socialism, however. Derridas current activities aside, there was an earlier time when he exhibited a more careful ambivalence towards Heidegger, for it is difficult to decide whether so profound a man as Heidegger can or should be forgiven for a serious mistake. If Derrida is taken to be defending Heidegger now, I would have to count that as a change in his view from the late 60s and early 70s.

The aim here is not an historical but a philosophical investigation of that complex early relationship between Heideggers thought and Derridas struggle with it. Heidegger was first viewed through husserlian eyes by Derrida, and in the gaze cast by Heideggers former Jewish teacher, Heidegger can appear no better than a naughty and ungrateful apprentice. Still, he appears little worse than this either. What I mean by this cannot be made clear too quickly.

Historicity at the Onset

Heidegger and Derrida have in common, among other things, Geschichtlichkeit, historicity. Generally speaking, Heidegger is credited with the introduction of this concept (if one could call it that) into the philosophical vocabulary.4 The way in which the term geschichtlichkeit or historicity gets its inaugural use in philosophical discourse is not insignificant, and it will be worth quoting at some length:

Laying the foundations, as we have described it, is rather a productive logic --in the sense that it leaps ahead, as it were into some area of Being, discloses it for the first time in the constitution of its Being, and, after thus arriving at the structures within it, makes these available to the positive sciences as transparent assignments for their inquiry. To give an example, what is philosophically primary is neither a theory of the concept-formation of historiology nor the theory of historiological knowledge, nor yet the theory of history as the Object of historiology; what is primary is rather the Interpretation of authentically historical entities as regards their historicity. 5

It is worth noting that the dynamic described above is that of an entering into the text (in this case the text would be presently available words about history, or historiology) and arriving at structures so that it is clear that the entering in is not itself an aspect or modification of the structures disclosed. This general insight becomes much more than an example by the end of Being and Time. Heidegger later says:

The movement of existence is not the motion of something present-at-hand. It is definable in terms of the way Dasein stretches along. The specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself along, we call its historizing. The question of Daseins connectedness is the ontological problem of Daseins historizing. To lay bare the structure of historizing, and the existential-temporal conditions of it possibility, signifies that one has achieved an ontological understanding of historicity. 6

The implications here are legion, but offer themselves as something of a puzzle. What makes them so difficult to comprehend is that we have, in the space of these two quotes, stripped the concept of historicity of every familiar association which would derive from our ordinary understanding of the cluster of meanings which revolve around history and the historical. Whatever historicity may be, it seems not to be associated with the study of history, or the writing of history, and it no longer seems restricted to time past, or even human self-under-standing as it arises from one place/time and leads to another place/time.

I will ultimately want to claim that historicity is a word which names the order which is presupposed in the concept of structure itself. But this order is not itself merely another structure. Rather, it is the structurality of structure, but what this means is not yet altogether clear (and is not likely to become so, given that every essential configuration of Geist has two meanings, according to Heidegger). Let us not get ahead of ourselves, except insofar as there is no helping it. Heidegger offers more by way of explanation of historicity, and historicity turns out to be still more fundamental than we have previously seen:

Dasein factically has its history, and it can have something of the sort because the Being of this entity is constituted by historicity. . . .the ontological problem of history is an existential one. The Being of Dasein has been defined as care. Care is grounded in temporality. Within the range of temporality, therefore, the kind of historizing [stretching along] which gives existence its definitely historical character, must be sought. Thus the Interpretation of Dasein's historicity will prove to be, at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality.7

This is about as central to what Heidegger claims as his project as anything could be. A more concrete working out of temporality can be had in the Interpretation of Dasein's historicity, and the Being of Dasein is constituted by historicity. Recalling that it is through only the Being of Dasein (we are ourselves the entities to be analysed),8 that entities of our sort could/can ask the Seinsfrage, then it begins to appear that the interpretation of the concept/function of historicity is in fact the Seinsfrage asked in its most primordial form. However, this interpretation appears one way early in Being and Time, and like quite another at the end. In the section on the destruction of the history of ontology (in the second part of the introduction), a section which has become of singular importance for recent French thought,9 Heidegger uses historicity as follows:

Daseins Being finds its meaning in temporality. But temporality is also the condition which makes historicity possible as a temporal kind of Being which Dasein itself possesses, regardless of whether or how Dasein is an entity in time. Historicity, as a determinate character, is prior to what is called history.10

This seems consistent with Heideggers claim that historicity is constitutive of Dasein, and consistent on the relation of historicity to temporality. Historicity is the kind of temporality which entities of Dasein's character possess. Thus, the interpretation of Dasein's historicity may be inroad (or even the Way itself) to a more primordial understanding of something like temporality as such. At this point that it could be pausibly said that Heidegger may have painted himself into a corner, in that temporality may be something greater than can be ascertained by means of the Seinsfrage. Heidegger pointed to the interpretation of Dasein's historicity as a more concrete working out of temporality, but this is not to say that historicity grounds temporality (and it is made clear in the last quote that historicity is contained in the range of temporality).11 However, the question of the nature of temporality as such (that is, temporality as it would be if it were not understood and conditioned in its concretion by historicity) turns out to be a question we cannot pose.

This limit is imposed on us by language (among other things), because all Daseins questioning with respect to its kind of Being, and hence all its questioning of Being as such, must be questioning in language. Thus, by way of illustration, language becomes for Heidegger analogous to the Kantian regulative idea in relation to historicity which can be understood as an analogue to the constitutive idea.

However, we must not take the analogy too far. The thing which is of value, and can now for the first time be seen, is the relation which emerges between historicity and language.12 Dasein is constituted and regulated in the play of these two. A dance of the Apollinian and Dionysian? Not quite. The reason, as we will see is that historicity and language each have an Apollinian and Dionysian moment, to borrow an idea from Hegel which seems appropriate to discussing the concrete manifestations of temporality in Daseins historicity.

Before we emerge from Being and Time, a few more things need to be pointed out in regard to it. Heidegger says:

Historicity stands for the state of Being that is constitutive for Dasein's historizing as such; only on the basis of such historizing is anything like world-historyor can anything belong historically to world-history. . . .Whatever the way of being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever understanding of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally, and within a certain range, constantly. By this understanding, the possibilities of its Being are disclosed and regulated. Its own past --and this always means the past of its generation-- is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it.13

A great deal is prefigured in this paragraph. If read closely, I believe that it may be taken to suggest that historicity has both a constitutive and a regulative function, and hence Dasein and that which constitutes it are only ambiguously characterized in these archetypical terms We will later see that language itself harbors the self-same ambiguity. Keeping in mind that this elemental historicity of Dasein may remain hidden from Dasein itself,14 we are prepared to take on the last of the puzzles which Being and Time offers regarding historicity (at least the one discussed in this essay). It seems that historicity has both an authentic and an inauthentic moment, but that historicity as such hovers above both of these moments:

That which we have hitherto been characterizing as historicity to conform with the kind of historizing which lies in anticipatory resoluteness,15 we designate as Dasein's authentic historicity. From the phenomena of handing down and repeating, which are rooted in the future, it has become plain why the historizing of authentic history lies preponderantly in having been. But it remains all the more enigmatic in what way this historizing, as fate, is to constitute the whole connectedness of Dasein from its birth to its death.16

Thus the question of connectedness re-emerges (as it was bound to --cf. the quote from p. 31 above). Once historizing is grasped as a transmitted, genetic phenomenon, then the question of its structure is inevitably destined to follow on the heels of this.17 In the moment of vision, Heidegger says that historicity discloses itself as fate,18 and fate incorporates into its existence birth and death and their between.19 We are, as Derrida will point out, dancing in the between. Heidegger reminds us that we need not be cognizant of this:

In inauthentic historicity,. . . .the way in which fate has been primordially stretched along has been hidden. With the inconstancy of the they-self Dasein makes present its today. In awaiting the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one.20

Historicity as such remains constant, but when we lose sight of our extremities (birth, death) we lose our between as well -- sinking into the they-self.

What has preceded then, is the raw material with which Derrida and the later Heidegger are to work. It will become necessary to recall and reappropriate bits of this exposition as we proceed. What needs to be shown next is the way in which Heidegger has opened up the archetypal possibility of talking about language in a particular fruitful way in Being and Time.

The Space to Play

While it is true that in Being and Time Heidegger grounds language in Rede,21 I think that this sense of language is best understood as a language, or a natural language. Rede is one among the three existential structures belonging to Dasein, which, Heidegger claims, can be disclosed or laid bare. These structures or existentialia (ways in which Dasein is related to its kind of Being) are given in section 34 of Being and Time as Rede, Befindlichkeit, and Verstehen.22 One might well expect each of these in turn to be taken up when the existential analytic is rerun under the aspect of temporality in Division II, and in a sense they are.23 There is, however, an asymmetry among the existentialia. They are matched up with the three aspects of temporality (see footnote 21), and Rede is the one left out, while a more primordial ontological structure of Dasein, Falling, is put in its place. It was perhaps clear to him that situatedness and understanding each have an authentic and an inauthentic moment. He was even willing to endow falling with an authentic moment, although this strikes one as odd.24 With Rede, the fourth of the existentialia since falling now seems to be among both the Trinioty of Care and the existentialia, and so I suppose there are now four of the latter rather than three), a strange difficulty arose. First of all, there was the absence of the authentic and the inauthentic moment, and this was the result of the absence of a particular aspect of temporality to which one might hook language. Certainly does discuss Gerede or idle talk, but Rede and Gerede are not treated as different moments of the same existential structure (in the way that, for example, anticipation and awaiting are different moments of understanding as an existential structure). Further, there are only three aspects to temporality (past, present and future), and Heidegger had disclosed four existentialia (perhaps this is attirbutable to yet another clash between pagan and Christian metaphysics). Add to this that one need not look too long at Rede before one sees that it manifests itself over all three aspects of temporality (by way of tenses), and one may have the makings of a fairly major fault-line in the structure of Being and Time. It was the first and last truly systematic work Heidegger wrote, and one might speculate that his abandonment of the systematic approach may have been fueled in part by just such difficulties.

Regarding this particular asymetry with Rede, this is another way of saying that a sort of space is opened up here. Rede begins here to look as if it might be more than just an existential structure --and Heidegger's later work will bear this hypothesis out I believe. We find that each of the existentialia is taken up into a different level of discourse in the later Heidegger, and that this level of discourse appears to correspond to the difference between the Being of beings, and the beings. When one considers the former of these, what is revealed is the way in which beings have Being, and these can be discerned as structures of the existence of the Being of Dasein --existentialia.

So beings have Being. However, what is concealed in this revealing is the way in which Being has beings --in a manner of speaking somewhat alien to the Heideggerian idiom (Being is said to eyeball beings, address them, claim them, etc. in various later works). Indeed, It is exactly this that the later Heidegger set out to describe in my estimation, and language was the clue to the flip side of the ontological difference (and one cannot listen to both beings and Being at once, any more than one can listen to both sides of a tape recording at once).

I can offer no more than a very brief and general argument for this interpretation at present, although I consider it to be something worth investigating in the future. If this is the right way to understand the relation of Being and Time to the later work (and to my knowledge no one has looked at this way, excepting perhaps Derrida --who has been quite cryptic about it), then a number of things can be explained. First of all, one can view the later Heidegger notion of thinking as the correspondent of understanding considered from the other side of the ontological difference. The same relation holds true of presencing and falling. And it is the relation which holds between situatedness and historicity as well, but this is actually beginning to work itself out in the body of Being and Time itself. Recalling that Being and Time is an unfinished work, it leads me to wonder whether the rest of this might have gotten worked out in the remainder of the book, had Heidegger finished it. Still, there is something too tidy about such a claim, and thus I do not stand by it wholeheartedly.

In any case, language seems to offer itself as the key to making the move from the preliminary study of the Being of beings to the later study of being. If this is the case then the discussion of Being-in as dwelling on p. 80 of Being and Time turns out to be prophetic. From that passage on, the designation of Language as the house of Being was destined to arrive, and it was always only a question of time, so to speak.

I have no doubt gotten ahead of myself (as if that could have been avoided), and I must retrace my steps and show that the suggestions I've just made do in fact emerge from the text. The basic assymetry between aspects of temporality and existentialia is taken up by Heidegger as follows:

Tenses, like other temporal phenomena of language -- aspects and temporal stages -- do not spring from the fact that discourse expresses itself also about temporal processes, processes encountered in time. Nor does their basis lie in the fact that speaking runs its course in a physical time. Discourse [Rede] in itself is temporal since all talking [Reden] about . . . ., of. . . ., or to. . . .,25 is grounded in the ecstatical unity of temporality.26

The ecstatical unity of temporality? This is cryptic. It is, I think, exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) for Heidegger to show how temporality is itself a unity-- as opposed to a medium, or simply the aggregate of possibilities taken from some static end-point (some point of crystallization). What is the ecstatical unity of temporality? Ultimately Heidegger is reduced to saying that temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been,27 and this expresses its ecstatic unity insofar as it can be expressed in language. The sentence quoted makes liberal use of all the possibilities for speaking about the aspects of temporality in language, but those aspects, as expressed, remain separate from one another.

Saying that they possess an ecstatic unity, or that they are possessed by an ecstatic unity, gets one no closer to that unity itself than would simply refraining from saying the same thing. That we claim to utter a profound truth and yet have no thought to accompany it may alienate some sorts of philosophers. However, emptiness is not entirely to be despised.

What is significant here is that the tug Heidegger must have felt to account for this tendency of language to choose a standpoint or a single tense (as if that were possible), and then proceed to range over all aspects of temporality, freely making itself (language that is) manifest in all sorts of sub-tenses (e.g., employing the present and the past to express the future as pointed out in the footnote above). At this point in Being and Time, It begins to look like language might be more than the concomitant natural languages, and hence, more than Rede. Thus, it is no accident that the question what is language began to pose itself even at this early date.

This question began to be asked, then, with reference to the unity of temporality, and how it might be possible to formulate such a question in language. A clue as to how that question would ultimately be put is in evidence in Being and Time:

The ecstatical temporality of the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein, makes it intelligible that space is independent of time; but on the other hand, this same temporality also makes intelligible Daseins dependence which manifests itself in the well-known phenomenon that both Dasein's interpretation of itself and the whole stock of significations which belong to language in general, are dominated through and through by spatial representations. This priority of the spatial in the Articulation of concepts and significations has its basis not in some specific power which space possesses, but in Dasein's kind of Being.28 Dasein does interpret itself to itself, and Heidegger is here interpreting that interpretation. The realization of this drives him eventually to a metaphorical idiom to later offer an account of the status of the language of this interpretation of Daseins self-interpretation. It is as if the only way in which temporality (normally conceived as a plurality in the way of possibilities) can be made to appear unified, in the final analysis, by means of a spatial metaphor: interpretations of self-interpretations do not simply use language, but rather, language uses them insofar as they dwell and have the Being in language. Hence, language is the House of Being. In Being and Time, this space is not thematized, but merely opened up into a Spielraum, a place in which, through interpretive and meta-interpretive exchange, the play of language itself might occur.

At this point I have given an account of the move from preliminary and provisional analyses of Dasein's kind of Being which are offered in Being and Time (and serve to get us into the circle in the right way), the move from this to the highly metaphorical wiederholung which Heidegger insists is prefigured in Being and Time, and in which he partakes in his later work. Coming to see Language as the House of Being then will be the pivotal spot where he turns the corner. falling can only then be presence, and understanding becomes thinking, while situatedness explicitly comes to bear the full relation to historicity it always already had.

However, this does not cohere exactly. Historicity figures prominently in Heideggers thought prior to the designation of Language as the House of Being. This anachronism will set the task for the rest of my paper. We are prepared to emerge from Being and Time, except insofar as we shall retrieve the account of historicity which constituted the beginning of this essay. It is almost as if I shall be forced to start over. It will not be surprising if we discover that the interpretation of historicity given early in this essay has a definite implication for the reading of Derrida which will be given late in the essay. The anachronism itself between historicity and the House of Being should be the thing to watch.

Historicity, Language and the False Center

We might well ask what else lives under the roof or within the house of Being, which Heidegger called language or metaphysics as such.29

In Being and Time, Heidegger aimed to disclose the most fundamental structures of the kind Being which Dasein has. We have now seen that these structures have a fault line, as all structures must. These structures have a genetic moment, a historicity of their own which is revealed in the absolute resistance to conceptualization which we discovered in the phrase the ecstatic unity of temporality.30

The fault line turned Heidegger around in the hermeneutic spiral so that a re-interpretation of what had gone before became both possible and necessary. This re- interpretation is to be found both for us and Heidegger in the Letter on Humanism. We will not need to dwell upon this here, for the re-interpretation of Being and Time therein is well-known. However, the inaugural use of the phrase "the House of Being" does occur herein. This is not insignificant and warrants a repetition:

Much bemoaned of late, and much too lately, the downfall of language is, however, not the grounds for, but already a consequence of, the state of affairs in which language under the dominance of the modern meta- physics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its element. Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of the truth of Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.31

I think the turn I suggested in the spiral is in evidence here. Considering the kind of Being which Dasein has is one study which clears the way for seeing the way in which Being is related to beings. Heidegger says in the paragraph following that if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being, he must first learn to exist in the nameless.32 I have a suggestion to make in a bit as to what might be "nameless," but it is the spatial metaphor which still intrigues me. Heidegger says:

Metaphysics does indeed represent beings in their Being, and so it thinks the Being of beings. But it does not think the difference of both. Metaphysics does not ask about the truth of Being itself. Nor does it ask in what way the essence of man belongs to the truth of Being. . . .the question is inaccessible to metaphysics as such.33

I suggested earlier that the turn in the spiral got its push from the difficulty in formulating the question what is language? using only the Rede concept. It may be that this difficulty is traceable to the fact that Rede is still a concept, and hence is still metaphysical. Thus, as Heidegger notes above (in effect), metaphysics fails to even knock on the door of the House of Being. This lends itself nicely to the claim that after Being and Time, Dasein can no longer set the transcendental conditions for Being. This would simply be so much more metaphysics. But what about this spatial metaphor, :the House of Being? Heidegger says:

Thinking builds upon the house of Being, the house in which the jointure of Being fatefully enjoins the essence of man to dwell in the truth of Being.34

The mention of fate, or unconcealed historicity is no accident here. The structure in question has a certain structurality about it. It is a structurality which suggests the possibility of enjoins us to an interpretation of our self-interpretation. This happens when we dwell in a certain way, for as Heidegger asks: do the houses themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?35 But recalling that thinking builds upon the house, we may add that:

. . .building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling --to build in itself is already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives a standard at all by which we can take the measure of dwelling and building? It is language that tells us the nature of a thing, provided that we respect languages own nature.36

This is an interesting bit of archae-tecture. It is time to allow Derrida, who has been at the margins and in the footnotes of this discussion, to take his place in the center of it for a time.

More than being an interpretation of Heidegger, that which has preceded is the groundwork for the interpretation of Derrida's Structure, Siqn and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences from Writing and Difference.37 Naturally, I hope that the reading I have offered has much wider implications , but with Derridas recent reversals, it is difficult to tell whether there is any lesson to be learned in treading where he has already been -- perhaps a negative lesson is better than no lesson at all, however.

The early Derridian project is parasitic upon the thinking of Heidegger. Structure, Sign and Play itself has a curious structure, so that how it is related (parasitically or otherwise) is obscured. Clear connections and themes do not persist throughout the essay, even from the point of view of the most generic features of deconstruction. Perhaps some connections can be provided.

Derrida begins this essay with the words:

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural --or structuralist-- thought to reduce or to suspect.38

We have, up to this point in my essay, been given the structure of the concept of historicity, and the history of the concept of historicity, and the structurality of structure has been discussed as well (and will be discussed more), but have we done the history of the concept of structure? We have, implicitly, I believe. Once it is seen what sort of structure is being put into question in Derrida's essay, it will be seen that it has in fact been given. Derrida continues:

What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture and a redoubling.39

"Event" of course becomes the new watchword for Heidegger, and the "rupture" is the destruction of metaphysics followed by a redoubling which I understand as reappropriating the tradition after its destruction is complete. In the most general terms then, event for Derrida is the word which captures this process, and the choice and emphatic disavowal of this term alerts us to its Heideggerian origin. This cryptic paragraph means that we can look at the something [that] has occurred in the history of the concept of structure as follows: the rupture is in fact the fault line, and the refuge sought at the level of metaphor;40 and the redoubling would be the asking of the Seinsfrage from the position of having made the turn in the spiral, which from that standpoint becomes an interpretation of our earlier interpretive activity. From this second position, it may be said that:

. . .for as long as the metaphorical sense of the notion of structure is not acknowledged as such, that is to say interrogated and even destroyed as concerns its non-figurative quality so that the non-spatiality or original spatiality designated by it may be revived, one runs the risk. . . .of. . . .being interested in the figure itself to the detriment of the play going on within it metaphorically.41

Something then gets suppressed in the spatial metaphor, or rather in the denial that the metaphor is metaphorical. Derrida opens the essay in question with an epigraph from Montaigne which enjoins us to interpret interpretations rather than things. Perhaps Heidegger forgot for a few moments which one of these he was doing. Perhaps the house of Being was more than an interpretation of an interpretation. Derrida continues:

Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure --or rather the structurality of structure-- although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.42

Some suggestions for deciphering this passage have already been made, but a passage late in the same essay brings it nicely to light:

The thematic of historicity, although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy [i.e., with Heidegger or perhaps as early as Dilthey], has always been required by the determination of Being as presence. With or without etymology, and despite the classical antagonism which opposes these significations. . . ., it could be shown that the concept of episteme has always called forth that of historia. . . .43

Add to this:

History and knowledge, historia and episteme, have always been determined. . . .as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence.44

The Heideggerian resolution, the thematic of historicity provides a structurality to structure which enables us to ultimately reappropriate presence which centers everything by neutralizing and reducing and this reappropriation is the event Derrida wishes to mark out and define. Note that mark out can mean to obliterate as well as to delineate. Decentering will be Derrida's strategy for marking out this event which strangely does depend upon Heidegger's work (or at least a certain reading of Heidegger's work, perhaps one similar to the one offered in the first section of this paper). Derrida needs the reappropriation of the tradition as an event to mark out.

We might ask how this de-centering is to be carried out. It is my view that the de-centering is carried out in the notion of play (the space for which Heidegger has himself opened). Derrida says:

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered. . .45

The occurence of anxiety here is not to be overlooked, since it is through that phenomena that Heidegger first discloses the threefold structure of care. This odd complement of play to structure can be juxtaposed to the tension of play and history:

Besides the tension between play and history, there is also the tension between play and presence. Play is the disruption of presence. . . .Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around.46

These two passages together can be taken to endorse Heidegger in a funny way. The later Heidegger tried to bring his project to full presence (doing ontotheology), instead of bringing it into full play. This sets Heidegger over against the tradition which led up to him:

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology --in other words, throughout his entire history-- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of play.47

Derrida is saying precisely the same thing about Heidegger that I suggested earlier: that we can find both of these moments in his thinking; he is a closet foundationalist who, haveing ripped open the closet door, finds himself staring squarely in a mirror -- and no saint is looking back at him. Heidegger is always either trying to escape play in seeking the most primordial origin (the Being of beings), or allowing metaphorical play only to close it off in the end (the quest for Being). What Derrida prefers is the play itself, or: Being. . . . conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play.48 This is what Heidegger missed, although there can be little doubt that he opened the very space in which this play could transpire.49 However, Levi-Strauss is given by Derrida as an example of someone who did not miss this (allowing his form of discourse ultimately to collapse in a play of its own).50 This is what I think is shown in the middle part of the essay. But it seems true that Heidegger had to have cleared the space for Levi-Strauss. We have reached a key juncture in this essay, and in order to proceed further, it will be necessary to quote Derrida at more length than good manners ordinarily permits. Derrida says:

And again on the basis of what we call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be called the origin or end, arche or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens] -- that is, in a word, history -- whose origin may always be rereawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaeology, like that of eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play. If this is so, the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonomies. Its matrix -- if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principal theme -- is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word.51

All of this is a characterization of the western tradition in which Heidegger simply occupied the next in a succession of positions. Heidegger just renames God (since God is a metonym for presence), like everybody else does. But it isn't quite so simple.

Something else happened with Heidegger; an event, a rupture, and a redoubling. Heidegger's centering devices (his metonyms) open up a new space or a very old one. As Irene Harvey sees it:

In a certain respect therefore the term thought, for Derrida performs the same function in his work as it does in Heideggers, though they define the term differently. For both it is that which exceeds metaphysics. . . .Metaphysics and language are thus profoundly synonymous for both thinkers. . . .Thinking, for both Derrida and Heidegger, provides an essential opening which draws one towards the abyss of the unknown, of the enigmatic, and hence of the as yet Unnameable.52

Earlier I emphasized Heidegger's suggestion about dwelling for a while in the unnameable in order to regain the nearness of Being. So both open up the space, but Heidegger goes ahead and centers it by naming it (and ultimately Derrida names it, after declaring it unnameable - he calls it differance - but this is not supposed to center that space). There is, nevertheless, a difference between the two. Derrida is moved to the point of ecstasy simply in writing in the fracture, the space opened up. Heidegger, on the other side, builds something out of nothing -- a house (recalling the earlier discussion here of Building, Dwelling, Thinking ), using the oldest trick in the book: he uses a logos to bring forth a cosmos from a chaos, which makes him an archetypical theological poet.

The link between Derrida's critique and Heidegger's house is not yet fully soldered. Derrida says:

The event I called a rupture. . . .presumably would have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said the disruption was repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth, it became necessary to both the law which somehow governed the desire for a center in the constitution of structure, and the procsss of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence --but a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute.53

This is why sections 68 and 69 of Being and Time had to fail. Here, Derrida shows that the process of signification (i.e., language, or the house [oikos] of Being), and law (i.e., law or nomos) are brought together. They create what Derrida later describes as a problem of economy,54 as language becomes its own problem, and realizes it must interpret itself and not things. The word economy thus comes, at length, to the center of this discussion. The term comes from the greek oikos for house, and nomos for law. It is the law of the house, and in this case, the house in question is the house of Being. The house is a structure, and the law in question governs (that is, orders, brings forth a cosmos from a chaos) within the structure, giving it limits and a center. But what of this center? [T]he notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself,55 Derrida says. Also, the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which, while governing the structure, escapes structurality.56

We must move very slowly over this. Can one sensibly say that something is by definition unique? More pointedly, can we think of anything else in the history of human thought which has been given the status of unique? To the first question, I would answer that it is not so much contradictory as it is paradoxical. This paradox is the one inevitable in trying to state in a definitive way the sign/signified relation.57 In answer to the second question, Derrida provides a list of concepts/things which have, at one time or another, first been given the status of unique, and then used as an undefined term in a system of ordering (for as Aristotle told us, one should not seek a demonstration of everything). Derrida's list reads: eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.58

The search for the omni-sign, the independent and organizing logos of all logoi, the law and master of the House of Being, which brings forth a cosmos from a chaos, is well characterized as a quest for the center -- for whoever and/or whatever lives in the house of Being. Naturally, Derrida's list must indeed represent in significant fashion the names of some family members in the Western House of Being, but what is sought by philosophies of structure is the head of the House of Being -- sought as though we could be certain there must be onesuch (in a thinly disguised fit of Platonism, we claim this unity must be ecstatic). This paradox of the center is described as belonging traditionally both within the structure and outside it by Derrida.59

This is consistent with the image of language/discourse/logos as a house (that is, consistent with Heidegger). Heidegger built a house, and Derrida needed one to take apart:

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation [both present in Heidegger] -- which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy [the laws of the house of Being, the language of meta- physics]-- together share the field which we call, in such problematic fashion, the social sciences.60

Groundless Speculation

Perhaps some of these odd turns of phrase which Derrida employs, and which make him such a challenge to read, are bit clearer now, at least in this context. Furthermore, I believe this essay on genesis and structure is, among other things, a half-hearted attack on Heidegger. The language chosen to defend Husserl seems to indicate this:

Thus, one might say, and in an entirely prejudicial fashion, that Husserl, by his rejection of system and speculative closure, and by virtue of his style of thought, is attuned to the historicity of meaning, and to the possibility of its becoming, and is also already respectful of that which remains open within structure.61

This cluster of words points to Heidegger, and the carefully chosen phrase about remaining open seems to be the key to decentering. It also calls to mind Bergson's notion of openness in his final work.62 Bergson and Husserl had not anticipated what was on the horizon of their own phenomenological analyses, however. Certainly genesis and structure are in tension, but in a creative, or even procreative tension. Not possessing the turn of mind peculiar to so many Christians, they did not conceive the claim of Being's ultimate and final arrival upon the scene of history. Nor would they have chosen a metaphor with which to close the field of play in which history is acted out -- it was far from their careful temperaments, although the one was a genius of metaphor, and the other a genius of system. Derrida wagers that Husserl would have been astonished at the presumption of a conflict between the genetic approach and the structural approach. There may be a tension, perhaps, but there could be no conflict unless it is assumed that genesis and structure are competitors on equal footing. As Derrida points out in a footnote, Husserl says this is not the case:

The phenomenology developed at first is merely static; its descriptions are analogous to those of natural history, which concerns particular types and, at best, arranges them in their systematic order. Questions of universal genesis and the genesis structure of the ego, and his universality, so far as that structure is more than temporal formation, are still far away; and, indeed, they belong to a higher level. But even when they are raised, it is with a restriction. At first, even eidetic observation will consider an ego as such with the restriction that a constituted world already exists for him.63

Inquiring into the genesis structure of the ego presupposes at least the structure of questioning; a constituted world always already exists for the ego after whose genesis structure we wish to inquire, and hence, we find ourselves within the House of Being from the start. This must always remain as a qualification of our description of that creative process, that temporal formation. The genesis structure of the ego also goes under another name, which may be more familiar to the present reader; it is also called the existential analytic of Dasein. What Husserl points out to Heidegger is that taking the Being of Dasein to have Being-in-the-world as its basic state,64 already affirms the genesis/structure tension. Why? Derrida's answer is that

the occlusion of this structure is non-sense itself. . . .One might think that once nonreality of the noema was acknowledged [by Husserl], a conversion of the entire phenomenological method would have followed, as well as an abandonment of transcendental idealism along with the Reduction. But would this not have been, then, to condemn oneself to silence. . . . .?65

In other words, one might well have expected Husserl to either take on Heidegger's project or fall silent (i.e., refuse to use language), given the nonreality of that which constitutes and fulfills phenomenological method. Husserl did not, however, follow this course:

. .the transcendentality of the opening is simultaneously the origin and the undoing, the condition of possibility and a certain impossibility of every structure and of every systematic structuralism. . . . .The necessity of this transition from the structural to the genetic is nothing less than the necessity of a break or conversion.66

The opening is the space opened up by the actual ontological difference,or differance --that is, phenomena given as constituted by structure (static), and phenomena taken as produced --generated in time. Both are either taken as or given as:

For within the most universal eidos of mental his- toricity, the conversion of philosophy into phenomenology would be the final degree of differentiation (stage, that is, Stufe, structural level, or genetic stage). The two previous degrees would be, first, that of pretheoretical culture, and next, that of the theoretical or philosophical project. . . .67

Hence we have what can be characterized as a threefold development -- culminating thus far in phenomenology-- but hardly finished history. Two key insights then distinguish Husserls approach to phenomenology from Heideggers. First, Husserl is not willing to say, except in provisional fashion, whether he is in a House that Being built. Otherwise put, he is not hypnotized by his own language, nor so pleased with his stack of blocks that he is unwilling to knock them over and start again. Nor is he likely to claim later (in a fit of bad faith) that what he said earlier about his stack meant something he had never previously thought of. Second, there is the difference between conflict and creative tension; a difference which is not allowed in Heideggers economics, for creative tensions are always grounds for excommunication from the House that Being built. In the end, Heideggers history of the house must become hypostatized into the historicity of humanity; an Hegelian pull which is alien to Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl allows provisional natural histories, recognizing always the distance and creative tension between actual developmemts through time and human interpretations of those developments. Heidegger insists upon an identity here which Husserl finds most baffling and insensitive to the phenomena -- groundless speculation.

Whether my case is yet made is for others to decide, but Irene Harvey's question about what lives in the House of Being remains open, for us if not for Heidegger. In fact, Being has or is a House only in a manner of speeaking, for what has come to be quoted as one of Heidegger's most famous claims has lostsomething through time. What Heidegger said was that Language is the House of the truth of Being. Somewhere along the highway of despair, the center dropped out of his phrase. We forgot, as is inevitable, what lived in the House of Being. We philosophers forgot what we went looking for. But whatever it was we were looking for, it always already had to be there for us. Aristotle said:

As regards the human part of the household, the first care is concerning the wife; for a common life is above all things natural to the female and to the male. . . . First, then he must not do her any wrong. . . . .this is inculcated by the general law. . . .that one should least of all injure a wife.68

Hence, it would seem that the center of the house of being leads us directly to Nietzsche's oft-quoted phrase about the gender of truth. It should be just as Nietzsche said, for the philosophers curse is that he was always looking for a space to play in, in the hope that something might come of it -- that something might be generated, but not from nothing..