In Being and Time Heidegger attempts to establish a new understanding of history that is no longer tied to the metaphysical subject (or the primacy of presence) and which lends itself to a science of history only by first recognising its possibility in the existential analytic of Dasein. This is the heady promise of Geschichtlichkeit. As one might expect, it is the injunction to think of a historicity beyond the assumptions of presence (as the principal form of consciousness, the guiding relation to objects in the world and the measure of time) that prompts Derrida to emphasize his own terminology, notably difference, text, trace and repetition.

¶ 7:45 AM