The first half of Given Time is a study of Heidegger’s late essay ‘On Time and Being’ (1962). Its movement was to distance Derrida further from the master, by showing again what was obvious, but which he felt needed to be said over and over again in various voices: that Heidegger was part of the 'great transcendentalist tradition’. Heidegger had revolutionized the German term and activity ‘thinking’ which he had inherited, into an activity combining thinking and thanking, thanking Being for having given itself as philosophy, and thanking it by thinking upon it. Such a stance, a comportment, was the earthy and revolutionary destruction of idealistic thinking into something other, something which was seen by him as a truer and more attuned thought. But this thought is not abandoned to the totality of things without an anchor. Its anchor is in what Heidegger termed the 'Origin,' the factual conditions of Ancient Greece; the 'Other Origin' is in the factual historical situation of Germany or Europe, it is Germany. The Being in question is the collection of beings which constitute Europe and the Greek-German axis, the places to which Being gives with most care, and the thought of whose people should be filled with the most thanks and meditation of the gift they have received from Being.

But if Being gives/gibt, then it gives, Heidegger says, on the condition that the Greeks alone really receive, and that they reciprocate. They receive because they alone are able to think/thank. From this nation-centred giving by Being which determines the shape of thinking, and which is naturally limitless and self-originating, and which Heidegger interprets as a conditioned gift, Derrida takes away the certainty, since he is concerned that determining the unknown like this is dangerous and illegitimate, as it forces transcendental limits to It, signing a pact with the unknown to safeguard it and to control its power within known limits. The circle of control, of history, of Greece giving to Germany, and of spiritual Being giving to both, in an event of Ereignis which thought can control and master by its labour, is a circle which, Derrida says, cannot contain Being itself, since Being as the giving power sets the circle in motion, and yet must also contain it, neither as interiority nor exteriority. Paul de Man had made the same point in an essay on Hölderlin's 'Andenken' In his Blindness and Insight (1983).

Pp. 135-6

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