Whatever may be his influence in literary circles, Derrida's beginnings were as a philosopher whose primary masters are Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger—but above all Heidegger. Heidegger's question is about the meaning of Being, where Being is experienced as that which lets a being (Aristotle's on, i.e., whatever "is") be what and how it is. For Heidegger at the beginning of his quest for its meaning, then, Being is experienced, so to speak, as the "is" of what-is, precisely inasmuch as it is different from what-is, the difference being designated the "ontological difference." This question, fundamental though it may be, is for Heidegger not strictly speaking a "metaphysical" question, for metaphysics since Aristotle asks about "beings as beings" (on hei on), and this formula in turn came to mean the question either about beings in their most abstract generality (so-called ontology) or about beings in terms of the supreme one among them that founds the rest (so-called theology). By reason of its very structure, then, metaphysics becomes "onto-theo-logy". Heidegger's question is more fundamental still than the metaphysical question. According to an early metaphor, he seeks to "lay the groundwork" for metaphysics, but later on he speaks rather of the "groundlessness" or "abyss" (Abgrund) that his question opens up. In any case, the earlier, more flamboyant Heidegger claims that the task involves the "destruction" of the "traditional content of ancient ontology (i.e., onto-theo-logy) until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being-—the ways which have guided us ever since". [P. 44] It is the thrust of such an enterprise that Derrida has transformed and made his own.

For "deconstruction," the term that most comprehensively describes Derrida's own effort, is the term by which he very neatly transforms (he would not say "translates") the Heideggerian term "destruction":

I try to respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play of philosophemes or epistimemes by making them slide—-without mistreating them-—to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure. To "deconstruct" philosophy, thus, would be to think-—in the most faithful, interior way—-the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine—-from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy—-what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated repression. P. [6]

The full import of this formulation will appear as we proceed. For the moment let it suffice to remark that the Derridean enterprise, like the Heideggerian one, has a positive as well as a negative component in its movement, operating "at the limit of philosophical discourse" (Derrida's emphasis), perhaps, but not on the premise of its "death". His use of the word "philosophy," however, warrants pause.

By "philosophy" Derrida understands the metaphysical tradition, to be sure, but in a sense different from Heidegger’s. What characterizes metaphysics for Derrida is the emphasis on "presence" (and its correlative negation, "nonpresence"). This lies at the base of all the classic issues of metaphysics: being, unity, truth, the good, reason, identity, continuity, meaning, subjectivity, authenticity, the principle of noncontradiction, and so forth-—and their opposites. All these and like notions find their center, he claims, in the notion of presence, which in turn centers the history of metaphysics. The result is a "centrism," which Derrida characterizes, because of the master quality of the name logos for Greek thought, as "logocentrism." But the very notion of "center" here is problematic, for in his view there really is no center, and every presumed "center" yields to another that follows as its trace. Derrida's task is to deconstruct logocentrism.

Pp. 161-2

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