Re (In Effect) Reading Sartre
Introduction
In "The Ends of Man,"[1] Derrida addresses the anthropologism, or ethnocentrism revealed in western "humanism." In the inescapability of its telos and universality (M,123), the finitude and infinitude (fini and infini), or boundedness and unboundedness, lie the hungers (les faims) of western man to be Man. Even the colloquium at which he is reading, in calling itself an "international philosophical colloquium," both excludes and absorbs an uninvolved outside cultural world for which its self-proclaimed "internationalism" speaks. To question the power of this tendency, Derrida rereads a certain misreading that he claims French humanism has consistently given to an attempt at non-anthropologism in the writings of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. His point of departure is Sartre's (mis)translation of Heideggerian "Dasein" as "human reality" (which articulates a generality Heidegger did not intend). In giving a history of this rewriting, he argues that both the attempt to escape anthropologism and the attempt to undo it from within western metaphyics are both 'false exits.' The problem is deeper; metaphysics' "outer" (textual) being is already the inner logic of its "inner" (ethnocentric) history.
If we give ethnocentrism its right name, we would have to call it chauvinism, a term which will include patriotism, sexism, racism, etc.[2] Though it is surrounded by a body of violence and juridical domination (laws of segregation and disenfranchisement), boundedness and expansion, chauvinism exists as a rhetorical mode founded upon a system of narratives of the other. These are narratives that substitute themselves for experience of the other, obviate such experience, and render its prescriptive experience impervious to argument. The Other is absorbed as text and excluded as human.[3] Although psychology, sociology, historical and political analyses, have described chauvinism's origins, they have not touched its power or tenacity. The structure of its imprint remains beyond understanding. Though we have a wealth of political experience in contesting its overt power, we do not yet know how to stanch its fragmentation of the mind in whose name humanity is not differentiated but truncated.
My concern is the beginning of a different alignment to the question. Derrida's assessment of 'false exits' points to ethnocentrism's continual reassertion of itself, its writing of the other in the name of a reading; it touches upon chauvinism's untouchability. The purpose of this paper is not to point to a full understanding of chauvinism (it will not go away just because we do our philosophy better); it is to give the question a rereading in the light of the deconstructive attitude. And this rereading will involve a return to Sartre through a theoretic of rereading, a return reposing (itself) within Derrida's rereading of Sartre.
Sartre, once dominating the continental philosophical scene, has been eclipsed, or rendered history by readings that reached into his own history, to Heidegger and Nietzsche. To reread Sartre's text is to raise the question of its history, because a rereading is an historical act. History is, after all, a reconstruction of what is read backwards. The question can be exemplified as follows. The text of history generally regards documents and actions as historical data. The historical actors who wrote and read those documents and actions were affected by them, and the history they enact in turn (such as Derrida's presentation) becomes those documents and actions 'in effect'. History is the effect of reading -- its events (and documents) constitute a "reading-in-effect." And the text of history is the reading-in-effect of rereading history. But to reread a history is always to read it in terms of a language that supersedes that history from within it, that is different from history's enacted languages -- a multiplicity of languages engendered by reading-in-effect). Thus, the question of a history circles back and forth between reading and reading-in-effect, between the fact of history and its enactment.[4] To return to Sartre through Derrida's text of history will be to return to Sartre in a language that will no longer be his -- a return in terms of his having been reread (by both Derrida and Heidegger).
In rereading, Derrida attempts to decenter the definite, and to deprivilege the dominance of the literal.
It is a question of determining the possibility of meaning on the basis of a "formal" organization which in itself has no meaning. (M,134)[5]
Derrida's leads us to an arena of confrontation between a signifier's textual form, and that signifier as text (content). Textual form is counterposed to the literal, and undermines it. But we cannot accept that it "has no meaning." If it undermines the literal, textual form must be likewise a signifier, though with a signification that resides elsewhere than in the text's literality. The place from which textual form signifies (its "phase space," to borrow a term from the science of Chaos) corresponds to the moment of undecidability between reading and its effect. Phase space embraces the inarticulable boundary between reading the text and textual form as reading-in-effect.
In the history Derrida has set in question under the title of "The Ends of Man," Sartre and Heidegger confront each other as reading-in-effect. Rereading this confrontation (whose subject is the 'cogito') through Derrida's text of history will return us to the two "false exits" from ethnocentrism and a third opening Derrida has made in it.
Heidegger's Inverted Cogito
In his 1946 Letter on Humanism, Heidegger addresses Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism,"[6] and focuses on the cogito's metaphysical nature. The trouble with metaphysics, for Heidegger, is that it is presuppositional -- like ideology, a false consciousness, a "technical interpretation of thinking" which "does not measure up to [thinking]."(LH,195) It sells thinking short. Heidegger attacks Sartre for grounding his account of thinking in subjectivity rather than in a questioning of Being. To begin with the 'I' in "I think" (EH,13) is to begin with an effect of Being. To center the essence of man in the subject, as Sartrean humanism purports to do, is to make Man[7] an ideological construct. It is an alienation of Man from Being, from thinking, that leaves unrealized the "proper dignity of man."(LH,210) It sells man short. For Heidegger, thinking, which grounds a subjectivity that can look at itself and say 'I am,' is already suspended in something more primordial, in Being as its realm of "accomplishment." "Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man." (LH,193) That "thinking is" says that Being has "embraced its essence." (LH,196) Heidegger inverts the Cartesian cogito: "there is existence, therefore thinking is."
Heidegger's inversion constitutes the core, or the "name," for a substantial disagreement between himself and Sartre. For Heidegger, affirmation and nihilation are aspects of Being and not of subjectivity (LH,238) -- the essence of Being is existence, and with existence, there is already nihilation. Sartre, on the other hand, begins with nihilation as precisely the upsurge of consciousness. Similarly, for Sartre, activity is primordial; it is that through which one becomes who one is. Heidegger argues that thinking must precede (Sartrean) experiential action, since the latter necessitates a subject, already a conceptualization. Rather than become who he is through Sartrean activity, man ceases to know who he is, and activity will not find him for himself. The primacy of the subject results in man's homelessness. Finally, for Sartre, man is always a project, engagement in the world. For Heidegger, man will only find himself through entry into the meaning of Being, which involves detachment (gelassenheit),[8] i.e. by letting Being be (LH,237).
Sartre maintains a schema of ontological precedence, in which the subject precedes action, thinking, and the project (the subject's self-generated ideological constraint). If Heidegger were translatable from Sartre, Being would precede thinking, action (accomplishment), and then the subject (Being's ideological constraint). That is, Heidegger would invert Sartre's schema. But Heidegger seeks to escape the very idea of "ontological precedence" as rationalistic -- i.e. as both a pre-determination through differentiation, (LH,208) and an artifact of textuality. If the essence of man lies in his existence, then there is no differentiation, and any precedence (or opposition) is already a false one.
In general, Sartre focuses on expressing his meaning in worldly terms, while Heidegger is investigating what is always already there in the "question of the meaning of Being". Where Sartre attempts to say what he means, Heidegger asserts that inquiry is already what means. With respect to activity vs. thinking, project vs. detachment, thinking as nihilation vs. nihilation as Being, Heidegger wishes to escape literality and speak at the level of the expression rather than the expressed. For him, while the act of questioning explicitly opens itself to the meaning of what is sought, the fact of questioning must implicitly contain a prior understanding of it. One already reads the response in the question, and one reads only the question-in-effect in the response. The response is an effect of reading after reading has been 'in effect.' In other words, the act of response already finds its form in the question's terms, and the fact of a response is itself the content of the question. Where the answer finds its form in the fact of questioning (its terms), and that finds its form in the act of questioning (as a question), the act of questioning, finally, finds only its form in the answer. Heidegger generates a circle on which each moment must look back at the preceding for its content, for what it is saying, while what it is doing it only finds up ahead. In this way, the inarticulability of Being can be addressed without becoming less that it is. It is this inarticulability that Heidegger claims Sartre has excised by centering the cogito. Sartre has not let Being be.[9]
Heidegger addresses himself to Sartre because Sartre claims Heidegger as part of his existentialist tradition, and Heidegger wants to clearly differentiate himself. It is important to Heidegger that the term 'existence' be rescued from rationalism's opposition of existence to essence. Sartre's "formula," that 'existence precedes essence,' only reverses classical metaphysics without transcending it, without questioning the meaning of "precedence." For Heidegger, the real 'existential,' for which he coins the term 'ek-sistence' (the prefix emphasizing that it is a "coming out", a "standing forth" of thinking from Being), is given non-oppositionally by the notion that "the essence of Dasein lies in its existence." That "Man ek-sists" answers the question of the essence of man, not of whether man is or not (LH,207). "Ek-sistence can only be said of the essence of man, of the human way to be" (LH,204).
However, Heidegger's move generates an aporia, one which becomes a point of formal convergence between himself and Sartre. If Man's essence is to stand forth in ek-static emergence from Being, then the essence of man is precisely not to preserve the essence of his Being in Being. Man is not as he is because he stands forth, necessitating and enabling a return, a re-approach to the truth of Being. Sartrean activity appears aporetic in a similar fashion, though in different terms. For Sartre, man is not as he is because man makes himself. He not only makes himself other than the organism he already is, but, as a product, he is other than a producer -- as a project, man is other than a for-itself. In both (essence and action), the aporia reflects the essential condition of self-referentiality; and both can be expressed in circular fashion. In Sartre's case, action must be intentional; but intentionality requires a subject, and the subject is engendered by action. For Heidegger, Being reveals itself in the meaning of Being; the meaning of Being reveals itself in the unknowability of Being; and the unknowability of Being reveals itself in Being.[10] This is a similar circularity to the one just encountered in Heidegger's approach to inquiry.
Though their texts and contexts are different, this aporetic congruence (in phase space) suggests that Heidegger has misread Sartre. There is a transposition of form and content between himself and Sartre that he has not seen. Heidegger preserves the inarticulable (that to which he does not make reference) because its entextualization would render it other than it is, viz. metaphysical. For him, man can escape from metaphysics only by "existing in the nameless," (LH,199) in the meaning of the inarticulable. His claim is that Sartre, in "taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning" (LH,208) (i.e. not in the ek-static sense), is bespeaking the necessarily unspoken. It is true that Sartre does not use the term ek-sistence, and does use the Cartesian cogito. But for Sartre, the cogito is transformed to an act of naming.[11] It signifies a subjectivity that is non-Cartesian, a subjectivity whose condition is not the determination of a relation to the world of Cartesian existence, but the indeterminacy of freedom.[12] Subjectivity is 'always already' free. Rather than the product of the cogito, freedom is its essence, the essential condition for the subject. It answers the question of the essence of man ("the human way to be") and not of whether man is or not. As such, Sartrean freedom is a deconstruction of all determinisms built into the very foundation of thought. All prior structures of thought and apriori propositions are always already chosen. Freedom is the indeterminacy that underlies all expression. Thus, its relation to the cogito parallels Being's relation to beings: Being underlies them, is not them, is manifest through them, and is the context in which they are. Like Heidegger, Sartre is not saying that there is man, but rather, that man begins with an indeterminacy, with the inarticulable.[13] The difference lies in the fact that freedom manifests itself as choice, responsibility, flight, etc. -- aspects of one's project to which Sartre can make reference in telling their stories -- rather than existentials. In effect, what appears as the form of expression in Heidegger is transposed to the content of the expressed in Sartre, though its ground, the inarticulable, persists. Heidegger misses this shift.[14]
Heidegger also misreads Sartre on a contextual level. Sartre chooses Heidegger (and not Aquinas or Berkeley) as his immediate tradition. The idea that a tradition can be "chosen" is not trivial. It is, as Bakhtin says, one's very choice of language. (And, in fact, Sartre's choice of Heidegger is evinced in his attitude toward language as instrumentality rather than as universe of instrumentality.) To translate Sartre's use of "existence" as "existentia" and not as "ek-sistence" is to disregard Sartre's choice, and thus to rewrite Sartre through recontextualization. For Heidegger, Sartre's use of 'precedence' justifies this. But if we turn to Heidegger's 'forward and backward analytic' in Being and Time, (BT,27) the means whereby he investigates "ground," we see a formal sense of precedence in Heidegger's "backward" direction. Sartre has again transposed Heidegger's form to his own content.
With Derrida, we can recognize that a reading is always a misreading, because a "reading must always aim at a relationship unperceived by the writer between what the writer commands and does not command in the language he uses."[15] That is, a reading does not reproduce the author's intentionality; it does not simply "double" the text. But here, though Sartre has written what Heidegger left unwritten, Heidegger has in fact rewritten Sartre, "doubled" his text as other than it is. There are two ways of misreading. To reread is to misread by reading the multiplicity of a text's languages; to misread through imposition of one's own language upon the text, however, is to rewrite.
Ultimately, Heidegger's argument is against rendering thought a "thing" (the attitude whose name is 'metaphysics'). He is saying that "existence precedes essence" must be read: "there is a thing called existence, and it is theoretically precedent, in a theoretical thing called ontology, to something about things that we call essence.' In order to escape thingness, there must be something that means 'this is not a thing' without saying so, and thus rendering itself a thing. In saying 'the essence of man lies in his ek-sistence,' Heidegger attempts to rip the terms away from thingness, and make them signs for non-thingness. But, in expression, the non-expression of Being is always already transcended to thingness. The clarity and energy of the privative, "non-thingness," is too strong for the positivity of Being; it reifies itself. Heidegger wanted the non-thingness of Being to have the full positivity of its Being in its (non)expression, but that requires something more subtle, something that engenders naming without being a name (as in Derrida's use of differance).
Non-expression must be a sign without a signifier, the unexpressed meaning of something else. As the deconstructive attitude reveals, the form of a discourse is such a non-linguistic sign (composed of linguistic signs, the expressed). Hence, the question of textual form is central to what Heidegger is doing (as Derrida has pointed out repeatedly, more in form than in content). Expression engenders discourse by being expressed. Discourse also engenders expression by being the context in which an expression's (expressed) signs obtain their meaning. Though expression and discourse aporetically take each other as form, expression (literal meaning) emerges from textual form only through the latter's unsignified meaning as context. I.e. the unfolding of discourse in expression (discourse finding its form) is mediated by the unexpressed, by discursive form and its content (as context). The discursive text, the unexpressed, and the expressed again engender a cyclic configuration, inseparable in any text. Each finds its form in the next, and its content in the preceding. Thus, two features of the content of textual form have been given. First, it constitutes a moment in a circular reading-in-effect; second, it is the context of the dehiscence of textual form into actual expression.
Sartre's Converted Cogito
Sartre's 1946 lecture ("Existentialism is a Humanism") addresses Christian and Marxist critics who claim that existentialism is not humanist, that it does not elevate man nor sufficiently perpetrate the image of a divine or class ideal. It is a popularization of existentialism, and tends to be sloganistic. "Every action implies a human setting and a human subjectivity." "Existence precedes essence." "Subjectivity must be the starting point."(EH,13) Sartre's tone fits the politically charged atmosphere of newly liberated France. As a popularization, it is "in context."
Sartre's central conception, of course, is more elaborate than slogans can represent. The possibility of understanding the world only through the freedom of the mind that conceives it, viz. the centrality of the "subject," precludes all givenness, especially that of human nature. Man himself must exist before a conception of him is possible, and thus definitions can occur only at his own hands. Nothing is preordained, neither by class nor divine influence. "We are on a plane where there are only men." (EH,22)[16] Man's destiny is only to be, to live the experiential component of the subjective, viz. activity ("A man is nothing else than a series of undertakings" -- EH,33). One becomes what is manifest by one's actions, a project that is both lived and envisioned -- both already having been and not yet being, each of which is the foundation for the other (again, Heidegger's "backward and forward" analytic transposed to Sartre's subject matter). There is not even presence-at-hand; instrumentalities arise from within one's project, and not vice versa. (This is a move Heidegger himself made in his "Turning". When he speaks of 'thinking' rather than Dasein, and of 'nearness to the truth of Being' rather than questioning the meaning of Being, he transforms instrumentalities (presence-at-hand) into ways of dwelling in that 'nearness.') Thus, what resides at the core of Sartre's articulations is an inarticulable, the freedom that can never be delimited as "being free from," or "being free for," and to which his articulations point back. Heidegger's objections arise from the unspoken meanings he sees spoken by Sartre and rendered metaphysical. Sartre has similar unspoken meanings, "sensible" as soon as his content is deprivileged. His text is isomorphic to Heidegger's.
For Sartre, the cogito plays a wholly different role than for Descartes. For the latter, the cogito serves as a first certainty that something is "there". It is chosen meditatively as a foundation, always before the fact. Sartre, on the other hand, rather than imply that something is "there", argues from the existence of negativity that nothing is there, and says, in effect, "there is nothingness; therefore, Being-for-itself is." Descartes establishes the cogito in order to arrive at the 'there,' while Sartre establishes that 'nothing is there' in order to arrive at the cogito ("Consciousness apprehends the world as meanings"). Where Heidegger negates the cogito in form (while inverting it in content), Sartre negates the Heideggerian cogito in content. Unable to escape its own freedom (even in self-denial), the Sartrean cogito's (aporetic) truth is the absoluteness of absence, of contingency. There is only the certainty of human freedom, of indeterminacy. If the subject is a reading-in-effect of the text of nothingness, beyond and looking back on the text (consciousness) it is about, the cogito is the emptiness of awareness aware of itself (EH,36).
Sartre has wrested the "cogito" from Descartes' grasp. For Descartes, the "ego" of 'ego cogito' is central to not reducing the human to an object. For Sartre, the "think" of "I think" is central, transcending the ego that is only another nihilation in the emptiness. This conversion of the "ego cogito" to "the cogito" constitutes the critical Sartrean move away from the self to the autonomous subject.[17] Its effect is to phenomenologically decenter the Cartesian 'his'-ness, the priority of the 'he' (Descartes) that thinks it sees, or thinks it thinks, in the skeptical attitude. For Sartre, certainty begins with the meaninglessness of such a topos, or of any pre-defined substance to activity. Instead, there is only autonomy, an autonomy of absence, prior to the acting cogito, prior to self-awareness constituting itself as a self. For the autonomous self, autonomy is an attribute; for the autonomous subject, however, the subject is only an attribute of autonomy. When Sartre speaks of the autonomous self, he has indeed entered the realm of the named, the determined, the metaphysical. But where he establishes the primordiality of human freedom, he is not yet there; he is still speaking of the autonomous subject. Any critique of the Sartrean cogito, which he uses to name autonomy, must take this distinction into account.
In particular, Derrida's charge against Sartre must be re-evaluated. Derrida claims that Sartre's pretension to "universality" is an ethnocentric stance. While Sartre does speak of "universality", what he posits as universal is neither truth nor Being; it is the nothingness that constitutes the freedom of man to choose, to adapt, to go beyond, to acquiesce or rebel.
There is no difference between being free, like a configuration,... and being absolute."(EH,40)
Truth is thus both secondary and arbitrary; it is the arbitrarity of one's choice of project. Even the 'truth of Being' is a truth that is choosen. There is no particular necessity for whatever apriori one uses to construct one's world. One chooses it, and one's project becomes the signifier of one's being within the paradigm, the parameters and structure of that choice. In essence, all projects differ only in text, in content, in the terms from which choice is possible, be they a mythology, a science, a ritual, or a schizophrenic deformation of the psyche. One gets a sense of this in the way Marxism, for instance, a wholly western industrial ideology, has been chosen and adapted to agrarian anti-colonialism around the world, or in the way westerners, who have little notion of three-valued logic systems, have chosen and adapted zen as an avenue for displacing alienation. The common absoluteness of all subjectivity (that no subjectivity can be strange) is thus the absoluteness of the indeterminate, the undefined as non-strangeness. In effect, the for-itself is a sign system, a chain of signifiers, all of which are arbitrary. Their trace is the system of differences between lived moments of the for-itself, discerned deictically through its project; i.e. their source of meaning is the project as the thinking of difference. Heideggerian Dasein can be seen the same way. Dasein is also a sign system whose signs are arbitrary because its foundation is in all cases the indeterminate, the nameless.
In effect, the for-itself stands in the same relation to its project, which is its advent into the world, its ability to constitute a world for itself in its freedom, as Being stands to Dasein, which is the advent of Being in the world, its ability to constitute a world for itself. That is, as viewed through a certain Derridean language, there is a formal congruence between these two texts, a phase space equivalence. If the Sartrean cogito is the truth of what cannot be said, because there is nothing to be said about it except that it 'is', its unspokenness is the unspeakability of Heidegger's 'truth of Being.' Where Heidegger turns the cogito around, Sartre puts it on, like a shirt inside out: it fits, but the label shows.
Sartre and Heidegger can now be seen to have isomorphic approaches to humanism. For Heidegger, humanism means "meditation and caring." (LH,200) Care is attention to the "not yet" from the point of view of being with the "already." It characterizes humanism as a move back to the essence of man, while also referring to thinking always being ahead of itself -- in other words, "in phase" with what Sartre calls "flight." Flight, choice, responsibility, etc. which Sartre sums up as 'human reality,' constitute the substance of what he calls humanism. And each of them resides in the "not yet" from the point of view of the "already." If, as Derrida argues, Sartre accepts the mistranslation of Dasein as "human reality," (M,115) and defines for Heidegger something that Heidegger wants to leave undefined, he nevertheless, in form, is doing something different than simply metamorphizing Dasein into metaphysics. When Sartre says 'there is no human nature because there is no god to conceive it,' he is opposing the same third person point of view that for Heidegger characterizes metaphysics. And in opposing, both reside where the not yet and the already are inseparable, directed by a meditation and a choice of project.
Heidegger avoids this question by disputing terminology, but he cannot escape. Derrida asks a question that implies Heidegger's critique of Sartre is a little self-righteous.
Is not the opposition of the primordia to the derivative still metaphysical? Is not the quest for an archia in general, no matter with what precautions one surrounds the concept, still the "essential" operation of metaphysics? (M,63)
Though the humanity of man may lie not in man but in Being, the use of the term 'humanity' already hierarchizes the relation of man and Being; the destructive critique of humanism re-establishes ontological precedence.
Heidegger is calling for a return to man's essence, for an escape from the "technical interpretation of beings". "If man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless."(LH,199) The "nameless," as existence without differentiations, constitutes escape from false consciousness to where "care" can predominate. Heidegger polemicizes 'humanism' to reassert it programmatically another way. But Heidegger is being programmatic without a program, since the nameless must be named without being addressed (to determine is to undermine). That is, his program is an epoche. The notion that each determination is a cancellation of meditation, of care, requires a suspension of all determinations, points of view, ideologies, etc. The call to 'think there' (Da-Sein) in "the nameless", prior to determination, means to live the epoche (LH,203), and not simply reflect on thought through it. This 'lived epoche' enables Heidegger to propose and oppose humanism at the same time. It is a program in a zen koan sense (the empty fullness of zen mind) and Heidegger's leap of faith is that at its realization, man will be man. Sartre refuses Heidegger's 'lived epoche.' Though Sartrean freedom is autonomous of the doctrines and projects that structure the world, it cannot escape them. It must return to them, as it realizes ever anew that it already lives in them in the world. One is free, yet living the epoche is an illusion.[18] It would appear that the real difference between Sartre and Heidegger is programmatic, and that their dispute on humanism is essentially political.
It is rather surprising that as high-powered a discussion as Heidegger's would ensue from Sartre's little popularization. Given the weight of Being and Nothingness, why would Heidegger choose to focus on Sartre's speech, rather than carry the investigation back into that greater work? The answer lies perhaps in its context, which is the war.
Post-war France lurks in everything Sartre says: in his choice to popularize, his choice of terms, and the role he gives phenomenology. The content of his popularization becomes a context for an 'interior' (programmatic) discourse on the post-war situation, to liberate oneself from given aprioris (be they Marxist, Christian, or psychological), and live the world. For Heidegger too the war is the context. In post-war Germany, a man in his position would grasp at whatever he could to begin re-establishing himself. Heidegger would present his terminological and programmatic argument as a context in which to promote himself. That is, Heidegger inverts Sartre; his text is programmatic, while its interior context is a popularization (of himself).[19]
Derrida's Diverted Cogito
In his text of history (of reading/misreading and its 1946 moment), Derrida recognizes that Sartre substitutes 'human reality' for 'the notion of man' in order to 'suspend the presuppositions' attendent upon traditional rationalist (ethnocentric) notions of 'man'. But this move, he claims, is insufficient for its own purposes. Though BN concerns the origin of human reality in the freedom of the for-itself, it says nothing of the "origin of the concept of (human) reality" (M,116), which it accepts from the anthropologist (universalizing) tradition. "Human reality" emerges from a construct transformed into an apriori. One must not only question what is meant by "human", but transcend the "human" tendency to prioritize concept.
To address the anthropologism of metaphysical humanism, and to read its ethnocentric meaning, Derrida considers the difference between the Heideggerian 'we' and the 'humanist' (ontic) "we men". For Derrida, the ontic 'we men' is a conceptual, already universalized "we," and thus an imposition on others who may have a different sense of 'we', or of "men." "In the horizon of humanity" (M,116), the horizon where it is understood, the ontic "we" is only the ("necessary and inaccurate") mode of having already entered the realm of metaphysics. That is, as the ontic metaphor of an ontological 'we', it is an interpretation within a chosen metaphoric 'insistence.' As an ontic interpretation, it defines -- which means it also literalizes the metaphor, placing it under erasure.
The ontological (Heideggerian) 'we', Derrida argues, transcends the ethnocentric 'we men' because it emerges from the interrogation of Being. In choosing the questioning being as the questioned being (the being for which Being is a question), Heidegger brings together the proximity of self-presence and the distance of thinking from Being. Thinking can avoid conceptualizing self-presence by remaining beyond itself in the nameless, in indeterminacy; and ontological self-presence, which in form is not there (it is in the distance), and in content is not that (not what is spelled out), can then ground an indeterminate ontological 'we.' This ontological "we" (homologous to differance), which thinks the difference between proximity and distance, dehierarchizes and decenters the self-other relation by transcending definitional absorption of the other.
Derrida's embrace of the Heideggerian "we" is thus an extension of his own discourse on language. For Derrida, writing in general is that for which language is a metaphor, already literalized and put under erasure.[20] In de-privileging the ontic text, Derrida beguiles into non-textuality what lies behind the logos, and says (in not saying) what is not said (in saying) that makes the logos possible. In other words, the form of the text (as reading-in-effect) is interposed into the literal text as read. Writing in general points to itself in non-articulation as the inarticulable in language. Like ontological self-presence, it is the near and the far in language. But rather than Heideggerian ontology finding itself instantiated in Derrida's grammatology, Heidegger has really entextualized as the ontological difference what Derrida (subsequently) leaves purely formal, the non-text (where the non-text is understood as textual form as signifier) of what language is. In effect, the Derridean non-text finds itself instantiated by the Heideggerian "we." Furthermore, as a metaphor which remains distant, writing in general is already literalized in the ontic text; that is, it is not what it is. And the ontic text, the proximate dispersed (or disseminated) by its own form, is not yet determinate, not yet what it is; that is, it is what it is not. Writing in general is isomorphic to Sartre's for-itself. That is, precisely in its embrace of the Heideggerian "we," the Derridean discourse reasserts a relation to Sartre.
Pursuing this relation, we note that writing in general is nothing if not activity. Humans do it (together, actually, in dialogue). If the non-text, the indeterminacy of textual form, constitutes the enactment of writing in general, it is itself in turn enacted. The text is, and meaning is what is done: a state and non-act. The non-text of writing in general returns to Sartrean activity, both in primordiality and polyvocal signification; and it does so as reading-in-effect. The ontic 'we' and the ontological 'we' that circumscribe the Heideggerian ontological difference are filled in by the difference between what humans do and what the text does, between reading and reading-in-effect. Sartrean activity, which is already there as not this (not this act) and always this as not yet there (consciousness is always ahead of itself), constitutes differance. That is, the form of Sartrean activity is inscribed precisely where writing becomes a reading-in-effect that thinks 'writing in general.'
Thus, the form of Sartrean activity, Sartre's conversion of Heidegger's inverted cogito, is diverted by Derrida to a relation of reading and reading-in-effect, of text and non-text -- a cogito diverted to the interstices of inarticulability.[21] The near and the far, ontic proximity and ontological proximity, appear as the space of presence and the presence of space, which in the former is the erased trace of presence, and in the latter is the trace of that erasure. That is, metaphysics points back to writing in general which it erases in defining itself, yet as a trace which must persist if metaphysics is to be a text at all. Writing in general, the non-text of metaphoric language, is the trace of the erased trace.
A similar conformation can be found in the other two. For Sartre, all aprioris, because they are chosen, are the trace of freedom given up (a state), a freedom actively erased in acceptance (a non-act). Yet in accepting givenness, freedom must persist as a trace if a determining structure is to be lived as determining. And for Heidegger, all beings point back to Being, the trace of Being they erase in their ontic particularity, yet a Being that must persist as a trace of precisely that erasure in beings if they are to be. In both, at the moment of inarticulability, one finds the trace of the erased trace. They form an isomorphic triad whose topos is the cogito, and in which different terminologies fill parallel and linking structures of articulability and inarticulability. In Derrida's history, the cogito is a non-history that questions itself as text and non-text; in Heidegger's inquiry, it is an ontological difference that subjectivizes itself; and in Sartre's text, it is a non-text of the subject that 'historicizes' itself as project, as state and non-act. The cogito persists as a question, a history, and a structure, in all three. In diverting the cogito, Derrida has circled the wagons against what is already inside.
This triadic isomorphism suggests that, again, Sartre has been misread. Derrida centers his critique on Sartre's 'human reality' as a conceptualization. But Sartre himself says as much.
Each human reality is .. a direct project to metamorphose its own for-itself in an in-itself and a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality. ... Man loses himself so that God can be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain." (BN,754)
The generalized 'human reality' that translates Dasein must then be a meta-human-reality. But if it articulates the process whereby the subject/cogito engenders itself as a project, it is inscribed, as we have seen, within the indeterminate. This would appear to be an oversight Derrida inherits from Heidegger.
But Derrida also argues that phenomenological ontology, like anthropologism, by making man the measure, imprisons him behind his conception of himself. While Sartre opposes phenomenological ontology to the metaphysical unity of Being, Derrida claims it is an opposition that pretends to be more than it is.
It goes without saying that the metaphysical unity of Being, as the totality of the in-itself and the for-itself, is precisely the unity of human-reality in its project. ... What was named in this way ... was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God. (M,116)
But Sartre's notion of human reality, his answer to "the question of the unity of Being" that Derrida claims Sartre asks, is precisely that no unity is possible between the for-itself and the in-itself, that human reality is the impossibility of the unity of Being. On the one hand, the for-itself is 'made to be' by being-in-itself, but only as what it is not, while on the other, being-in-itself is nihilated as the for-itself itself, which is not what it is. "Human reality in its project" is not a unity, but the vain attempt to "appropriate the world as a totality." "What goes without saying" is precisely what is not said. It appears that Derrida privileges an "act of naming" in Sartre's literal text over a de-nominalization accomplished in the form of his argument. Derrida is correct that, for Sartre, "human-reality is a failed god"(M,116n), not because "synthetic unity (human reality) is determined as lack ... (of god)", but because "consciousness ... is a surface run-off whose origin is the impossibility of being a self-cause" (BN,620H). To be a failed god and to be a failed attempt at being god are two different things.
If Derrida misreads Sartre's formal use of 'god,' he also misreads Sartre's allusive 'use' of god. There are two kinds of god. The first, which metaphysics and its allegories speak about, is always a character in a narrative, for which Man is the form and god is the content. "Metaphysics" totalizes the story through retelling, conceptualizing it as an apriori. The second god is the unknowable god mysticism finds outside all articulation. Its form is totality itself. Such a god cannot be narrated. It exists as a trace of hidden oneness, unknowable in a readable world. It answers an unaskable question -- which gets asked anyway. If god the unarticulable totality is the form, man, the one who asks, is the content.
Sartre doesn't name a god as totality: the Sartrean project names god to metaphorize the quest for one's freedom as totality or world, the "useless" attempt ("Man is a useless passion.") to enter the inarticulable. The unity of Man with God that Derrida invokes, however, must take god as a character. As a "metaphysical unity," their collective story has already been told and reified as idea, as sign. Derrida confuses these two incommensurate senses of god; he has neglected Sartre's "ontological difference," the difference between freedom and project.
In the confusion, 'man' becomes divided. In theology, god is incarcerated within the four walls of narrative, rendering him the only Subject in town and abandoning him as such. Theology thus de-subjects man by presupposing a hyper-subject. Theological man is form without content. The inarticulable (or mystic's) god, as totality, amounts to a disembodiment of the world. When Derrida claims, for the de-anthropologizing tradition of phenomenology, that just as "one may imagine consciousness without soul, so one may imagine a consciousness without man," (M,118) he is calling the same move. As theology de-subjects man, transcendental phenomenology disembodies him. Phenomenological man is content without form. In effect, the two gods name the way theological man and phenomenological man come into being. However, the conflation of the two implied by Derrida's confusion of the two gods, a diversion of the ontological difference, is not onto-theological man, for "he" is already abstracted from narratives. Rather, Derridean Men (there is no Derridean Man), who have always yet to find themselves written in the dialogue by which they come upon each other in writing in general, stand elsewhere.
Perhaps anthropologism is too quickly attributed to Sartre. Freedom is not just the human condition, but the very absence of such. To place the subject at the center as freedom is not to place "man" at the center of a space called 'human reality;' it is to empty humanity of 'its' space, and that space of "humanity." To read Sartrean "human reality" as humanity-filled space is to congeal that space in (the reader's) prior codification. Sartre is not to be dispensed with so easily. One encounters both the possibility and impossibility of pinning him to the metaphysical board.[22] Sartre renders man indeterminate (neither finite nor infinite), to be thought in differance.[23] Derrida's insistence on thinking the text and non-text has opened language to this aspect of Sartre, and rescued Sartre from Derrida's own critique of him. At the same time, Derrida, by polemically privileging Heidegger with respect to Sartre, has gone against himself. He has both excluded and absorbed Sartre in a history (narrative) of humanism. Even in Derrida, man becomes a stranger to himself.
The Subverted Cogito
Though this has been a defense of Sartre, it has left Sartre enmeshed in isomorphic relations involving respective non-texts with his disputants. With each notion of the inarticulable, there is a wish not to violate it. Sartre does not want to violate the absoluteness of freedom; he would have to do so to recognize the distinction between ontological and ontic "we," since that recognition itself would place the core of the subject in a plural context.[24] Derrida does not wish to violate the absoluteness of writing in general, of the near and the far in writing (of the non-text); he would have to do so to deprivilege Heidegger with respect to Sartre since that deprivileging would be to recognize an entextualization of the non-text without overthrow of non-textuality (the non-textualization of the cogito in Heidegger, and the play of differance in Sartre). Heidegger does not want to violate the absoluteness of Being; he would have to do so to recognize the distinction between freedom and the project, since that recognition itself would mean they were not both aspects of his notion of the subject, that Being had a meaning beyond the inarticulable, an entextualization other than its trace in beings. Each is caught in choosing to consider their particular core of inarticulability as "philosophically sacred."
They are inextricably enmeshed in form. At the same time, in content, each returns to humanism. Sartre does so openly, Heidegger under cover of his existentials. Derrida follows suit. He returns through rejection of his false exits. One false exit is the attempt to return to origins without abandoning the arena of discourse, in which case one reasserts what had been already deconstructed. We have see this to be the case with Derrida vis-a-vis Sartre. The other is to change arenas, to place oneself definitively outside -- which is only to be sucked back in, precisely by one's definitiveness, as we have seen in the case of Heidegger vis-a-vis Sartre. Derrida's answer is to "weave" a "new writing," to "speak several languages at once." (M,135) When he says:
Man is the end of the thinking of Being, ... Man, since always, is his proper end. (M,134)
is he not weaving the humanism always implied by "man is ..." together with the Heideggerian and the Sartrean cogitos? Is not the arrival at the inarticulable the termination of arriving, the Heideggerian return to Being, man as his "own (propre) end," like Sartre's definiteness in the deconstruction of determinism? This weaving, then, this multiplicity of languages, lies precisely in reading the non-texts interwoven. How are we to grasp the content of textual form?
For Derrida, beyond the text of humanism, the text of the subject, lies the textual form of interrogation; with its inarticulable signified, it is the indeterminacy of what "human" might mean -- which means that beyond the meaning "human" lies the reread text of humanism. Thus, Derrida builds a circular sequence of de-expression in which the text of humanism implies the human, the human (by writing) implies the indeterminacy of difference, and the indeterminacy of difference (by already counterposing the non-text) implies the text of humanism. This is not a sequence of presuppositions, or of ontological precedence. That the text of humanism, the indeterminate, and the 'human' sequentially imply each other means that each provides the signified for the ("textual") form of the preceding, just as each finds its ("literal") content in the preceding.
In their respective uses of inarticulability, Sartre and Heidegger arrive at similar configurations, though in different topoi: Sartre on the human and Heidegger on the indeterminate. For Sartre, beyond the human lies the subjectivity of indeterminacy's meaning (the human implies subjectivity which implies indeterminacy); for Heidegger, beyond the indeterminate lies the humanity of what the human might mean (indeterminacy implies the human which implies humanism). It is the same circle, on which each starts at a different point, and around which they dance with each other, each in a different language. Sartre speaks in ontic terms, Heidegger in ontological, and Derrida in deconstructive. For Derrida, the subject is ontic (textual, metaphysical); for Sartre, it is ontological; for Heidegger, it is a destructive mediation of the two (i.e. deconstructive).
Sartre imprints the form of Heidegger's analytic in the structure of the subject which guises a non-text of freedom, a textual form homologous to what is written in Derridean differance. Sartre finds his content in Heidegger's form and his form in Derrida's content. Heidegger imprints the form of Derrida's deconstructive discourse in ontological difference which couches a non-text of Being, a textual form homologous to what is written in Sartrean freedom. Heidegger finds his content in Derrida's form and his form in Sartre's content. Derrida imprints the form Sartre gives human activity (freedom as the play of differences) in differance which ensconces a non-text of writing in general, a textual form homologous to what is written in Heidegger's ontological difference. Derrida finds his content in Sartre's form and his form in Heidegger's content. Each form adopted as content is an attempt to evade the metaphysics of humanism; and each content adopted as form is a subversion of the cogito. If the "content" of this circle is humanism, then humanism is the signified of this circle as sign.
Like the Oedipus complex, certain aporetic relations in literature require a third term in order to become intelligibile. To arrive at this triadic circularity is a way of reading, or rereading, in which the aporetic can be transcended to an intelligibility that does not violate the inarticulability housing aporia. It is a way of reading that looks at oppositions without privileging one side or the other, arriving at a relation of forms within a system of differences. Neither inherent, preordained, nor Platonic, the circle provides an assignment of meaning, as reading-in-effect, to the non-texts of each component, to the textual form of each as a sign. It is a way textual form attains a signified.
Now we can see why each generates an aporia in the first place; linguistic content moves in a different direction from textual form. To review: Sartrean activity is aporetic as it emerges from the inarticulable to generate the relation of for-itself and world. Heideggerian "standing forth" from the inarticulable is aporetic as abandonment and return to the meaning of Being. The Derridean play of differance is aporetic in being and cancelling itself in writing. Each undermines himself, and stands in opposition to the others. Yet, as mediation of an opposition, each becomes the unspoken context for the other two, a context chosen in the textual attention each gives to another. United in alterity, they engender a collective analysand for themselves, of which each is already the analytic product, an imprint of that analysand upon the plane of the literary.
The circle reveals several levels of signification: the braiding of the three as a separation of textual signifiers and signifieds; the triadic relation as a system of differences, an assignment of meaning to non-texts; and the circle as a sign itself. This suggests that the analysand, as sign and sign system, is more multidimensional, in a real sense that we live, then its various imprinted ontologies can deictically present.
The Reverted Cogito
But the analysand has already been sundered by an imposition of terms, by misreading as rewriting. Is not such an imposition, especially in the defense of a self-proclaimed sacredness, the act of a subject (perhaps lurking unseen behind the text)? If the terrain is the subject (the inverted, or converted, or diverted cogito), the insistence on language generates both false exits, as a doubling -- both an eschewal and embrace of the subject that takes the form of an exclusion and absorption of the other as subject: a unification in language rather than alterity in the circle. Let us look at it a moment in terms of the chauvinism the insistence on language engenders.[25]
Chauvinism doubles the other. Women are told they are included in the generic pronoun 'he', while 'he' refers only to men. Black and Native Americans, sent to Korea and Vietnam to fight, are included thereby in America, while that nation discriminates against and segregates them (with de jure Jim Crow laws before 1964, and defacto ones afterwards). As an aporia of absorption and exclusion, chauvinism is an overthrow of difference. Absorption (into the ethno-center) cancels difference through proclamation of identity (which does not equal equality). Exclusion cancels difference through decontextualization, a rejection of relationship in which difference can generate meaning. The relation of domination is a meta-relation (a relation that defines other relations) because it defines both a category relation that substitutes itself for intra-categorial (significational) difference, and at the same time defines an identity that prevents the resurgence of difference. Thus, domination defines the impossibility of relation (and hence, of difference) in terms of its preconceptual absorption and exclusion. It is indeed the establishment of exclusionary categories that authorizes the chauvinist to think in generalizations ("the trouble with you women is ..."; "some of my best friends are black," etc.).
As a meta-relation, chauvinism arrogates to itself a hyper-subjectivity. It both excludes the Other as subjectless, as of a different category, and absorbs the other into its godlike self.[26] The other becomes the reading-in-effect of the text of the self, the cogito in its classical form. Yet it is an aporia for the chauvinist; he becomes a subject trapped in hyper-subjectivity confronting a denied and entrapped non-subjectivity he demands to be impossibly like himself. We have the example of Phyllis Wheatley, a slave in Massachusetts who wrote poetry, confronting a society that refused to believe a slave could do so.[27] For the colony's governance, the cogito applied to the slave was both converse and inverse: "I think, therefore you are not," and "those who are not, do not think." Thus, chauvinism holds its victims responsible for what it has done to them.
Although Heidegger inverts the cogito, he falls into its hyper-subjectivity. As we have noted, Sartre criticizes him for arriving at an account of the other only through attribution of one's own subjectivity (see note 13), the classical western mode of accounting for the other. And we can see that the language demand Heidegger makes on Sartre is the same demand chauvinism makes toward the other: "Write like me, though to do so will be to codify even my language, render it metaphysical, and hence be not to write like me." Such a rhetoric, or terminological insistence, is always already a narrowing of thought, a sectarianization of language that absorbs and excludes; Heidegger's "question" becomes less than a questioning.
As a meta-relation, chauvinism is a phase space phenomenon. It does not occur "in" any text because it is an overthrow of difference (it has no world because it obviates experience); its meaning is an abolition of meaning. Thus, it generates an inarticulable. Whereas the inarticulable we have been discussing has been a signifed for which no signifier could be assigned, chauvinism's is a signifier (the Other) whose content is cancelled. It can be approached only as form. In effect, the narratives that constitute chauvinism are parabolic, impossible of interpretation, yet constituting the totality of its "text". Though the Sartrean cogito metaphorizes an inarticulable for which no signifier can be assigned, he falls into its opposite inarticulability. Like Heidegger, he thinks language is an instrumentality, and, as Derrida points out, gives his statement screening his conversion of the cogito a generality that is, in the face of his inarticulable, also parabolic. Sartrean Man, for whom freedom is ground, begins as phenomenological Man, or form without content, a signifier for which no signified can be assigned -- though to live this is to enter the "lived epoche," which Sartre rejects.
And finally, as a meta-relation, chauvinism plays with history. It pretends to be the present moment of the Other, while remaining ahistoric because apriori. As ahistorical, it writes the history of the other, and writes its own history as the other's lack of history.[28] History becomes a trap for the other, and a trapping for the chauvinist. In other words, Derrida doesn't escape either. Though the history he writes attempts to narrate a rewriting (the critique of anthropologism), in telling his-story, he must rewrite its characters (a common effect of retelling); they become the reading-in-effect of his text of history. And in polemicizing what absorbs and excludes (a polemic bequeathed by Heidegger), he absorbs and excludes the historic moment of the post-war debate. That is, the nature of a polemic is to privilege one side. Thus, he recapitulates in form what he points to in content.
History is insufficient (even the 'history' of the concept 'man' that Derrida calls for). What must be added is its language(s). The history Derrida tells, as a reading-in-effect, is about a use of language that is already a reading-in-effect, a chosen language. In neglecting this, in his own reading-in-effect, Derrida denies the subject in the other. His-story of an imposition of language (translation as rewriting) is likewise an imposition of language.
What we are demonstrating (monstrously) here is not that modern philosophy is chauvinist, nor that chauvinism provides a formal mode of critique, but that what marks each text in its isolation from a multilanguage unity-in-alterity (such as the triadic circle) is isomorphic to aspects of chauvinism, and points to the multi-dimensionality of chauvinism revealed by the breakdown of the multilanguage analysand -- the imprint of ethnocentrism in writing that rewrites.
Both Sartre and Heidegger had sought to overcome the chauvinizing tendency in western thought, though not in those terms. The humanist seeks, through universalization, to undo the exclusion of the other, and succeeds only in absorbing the other to itself as center (men, the west, the subject, etc). The Heideggerian 'we,' seeks, through indeterminacy, through the distant proximity of the nameless and self-address, to undo universalization. But the inarticulable constitutes non-universalization only in remaining undefined, while the proximity of the interrogation of Being is precisely the proximity in which the other is pre-defined as familiar. The ontic "we" fails through exclusion of ontological form, and the ontological "we" fails through absorption of an ontic content. In their collective failure to escape, they reveal themselves to be, together, isomorphic to the ethnocentrism that gave them birth. They continue to inhabit the history whose question they raise.
The promise deconstruction holds out (its hidden political meaning) is of difference without domination, of equality without identity, without the binary opposition of superior to inferior.[29] In counterposing textual form to textual content, deconstruction reveals how exclusion is the form of every absorption, and absorption is the form of every exclusion. What it accomplishes, as reading-in-effect, is to open language as writing in general, to permit the multiplication (to de-universalize) the language of discourse. Yet, separately, it crashes (as do the others) against its own efforts.
The narratives composing chauvinism can never represent experience (of the Other) because they are always a rewriting of the Other. Yet by always preceding experience, they render the non-text of already cancelled experience wholly familiar and metanarratively apriori. This is what Derrida's history manifests, even in the presence of the Heideggerian 'we', without Sartre's indeterminacy of freedom. Chauvinism requires a 'we' that can not represent 'we men,' for it is neither humanist nor textualized; the chauvinist 'we' is always a non-text, an "understanding," while its victim (the "them") is always only a text. In hyper-defining the 'we' with which it creates an outside, a 'them,' it engenders itself as a language that already absorbs and excludes who can speak it. The Heideggerian 'we', even in the presence of the Derridean thinking of differance, manifests such an imposition of absorption and exclusion in the absence of Sartrean choice of project or of language. And finally, chauvinism is inaccessible to language, because difference is decomposed and overthrown. It is thus not confrontable solely in language. Even in manifesting the inarticulability of Being, Sartrean freedom becomes universalizing and absorbing of the other, without the Derridean attitude of questioning the 'concept' that instantiates its universalizations.
In effect, chauvinism (or ethnocentrism) has a dimensionality beyond what can be approached through a critique of metaphysics. This suggests that the critique of ethnocentrism is going to have to center itself elsewhere than in a critique of humanism. Remaining within the dimensionality of traditional critique (including metaphysics, psychology, sociology, etc.) has been a self-imposed barrier to understanding it, and thus to combatting it.
Endnotes
1 -- Derrida, Jacques; "The Ends of Man", in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chi. Press, 1982). Hereafter referred to in the text as M.
2 -- A number of texts have recently appeared addressing the question of chauvinism, racism, etc. from a textual point of view, rather than sociological, historical, or psychological. In particular, there is the recent volume of articles from Critical Inquiry, "Race, Writing, and Difference"; ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986). Also, Derrida's recent paper "Geschlecht II", in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: Univ. of Chi. Press, l987).
3 -- In describing chauvinism in this way, I am distinguishing it from scapegoating, which is a socio-political act that sometimes uses chauvinism as its conditions and context. See, in this connection, Todorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); and Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
4 -- Reading-in-effect should not be confused with "reader-response criticism;" it is to be understood "historically" as the effect of having read. It is the reader as the text of having read, not the reader as the text that reads.
5 -- Derrida reiterates this task in other words in a later essay.
A task is . . . prescribed to study the philosophical text in its formal structure . . . -- beyond what previously were called genres -- and also in the space of its mises en scene, in a syntax which would be not only the articulation of its signifieds, its references to Being or to truth, but also the handling of its proceedings, and of everything invested in them. (M,293)
6 -- Heidegger, Martin, "Letter on Humanism", Basic Writings. Hereafter referred to in the text as LH. He specifically addresses Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism". Sartre, Jean-Paul, Exsitentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philo. Library, 1957). Hereafter referred to in the text as EH.
7 -- The term "Man" is used by Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida in their own texts to refer to humanity in general. It is a traditional usage, in a rationalism that is already chauvinist, from which metaphysical humanism emerges, and needs to be dealt with as such. In this essay, I will use the term "man", as these texts do, when critiquing these texts. It will not be used by me when presenting my own ideas. But to have attempted to find a non-sexist term for humanity with respect to accounts and critiques in that tradition would be to rewrite them, and thus to not deal with it.
8 -- See Caputo, John D., The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Oberlin:1978), for a discussion of Heidegger's notion of gelassenheit.
9 -- The relation between them is, of course, extremely rich; richer, in fact, then either Heidegger or Sartre chose to publically acknowledge. See Fell, Joseph P., Heidegger and Sartre (New York: Columbia, 1979), and Schroeder, William Ralph; Sartre and his Predecessors; the self and the other (London: Rutledge Kegan and Paul, 1984). My purpose here is not to rehearse this relation, but only to set them in interrelation.
10 - In general, it appears as follows: Mind must be in order to define itself; it can only define itself for itself; it must define itself for itself in order to be. It is the attempt to solve this circularity, to straighten it out, that characterizes metaphysics.
11 - Jameson, Frederic; Sartre: The Origins of a Style, (New Haven: Yale, 1961), p. 183. Jameson discusses ways in which Sartre uses traditional terminology for other purposes.
12 - Sartre; "Cartesian Freedom", in Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier, 1970).
13 - Jameson, p. 114-6. He gives a traditional reading to Sartre's use of the cogito, yet recognizes that there are inarticulable structures that lie beneath it. "The merely named cogito is the wordless, unexplained center of Sartre's philosophy."
That Heidegger would overlook this is consistent with his account of the other-as-subject. See Sartre, Jean-Paul; Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York, 1956), p. 244-50. Sartre points out that Heidegger's account floats somewhere between assuming as natural the "ontological co-existence" whereby one's being is made to be already with the Other, and the solipsism of one's being that by which there is an Other. Not only does it reduce the subject to a commonality, but it magnifies the subject to the level of hyper-subject, which remains alone. Heidegger both absorbs and excludes the Other. See also Schroeder, op. cit., p. 130-173. He offers an interesting discussion of this issue from both sides.
14 - Ironically, Heidegger warns of inevitable misinterpretations (LH,225-6). In misinterpreting Sartre, because Sartre did not use his terminology, he has done the same. In effect, Heidegger, in his freedom, has chosen to interpret Sartre's use of 'existence' as metaphysical, rather than as a forward and backward 'existential analytic'. If saying that the essence of man lies in his existence is a way of calling Dasein to reapproach Being, to think the meaning of Being, it is also a way of calling human subjectivity to think the meaning of its freedom.
15 - Derrida, Jacques; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Jonhs Hopkins, 1976), p. 158.
16 - Heidegger's argument on this statement is gratuitous. He would change it to "we are on a plane where there is principally Being." But he claims that "plane" and Being are the same thing. His sentence crumbles to "we are" and "Being", or that "in our Being, we are what there principally is." His dispute with Sartre devolves to including beings; in other words, it is difference on objectivity.
17 - Dominick LaCapra, A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, l978), p. 51-2. See, also, Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego.
18 - Ultimately, the 'lived epoche' reveals a religiosity in Heidegger that appears both in BT and in LH. Heidegger's statement that "thinking lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being" (LH,194) is theological. Though the sentence is in the passive voice (in order for 'thinking to remain passive), there is an active agent in it, and it is Being. Heidegger has not escaped the subjectivity of the cogito; he has displaced it, or changed its "name". It is an active agent which stays unspoken and unarticulated in the background. This double sense of the unarticulated moment behind a double saying that says and does not say pervades Heidegger's critique.
The double sense in which we are to think of being because of Being, and of Being because of being, approximates the structure of Christian mysticism. The Christian, for instance, accepts the word of god because the Bible presents it, and accepts the Bible because the word of god presents it. This circle becomes mysticism when the spoken speaks the inarticulable. The being of god is manifest, but it cannot be grasped because it is prior to manifestation, though it is already grasped in what is grasped as manifest. God is revealed, and then hidden in the next breath. Similarly, Heidegger invokes Being, and then leaves it unwritten because to write it is to render it metaphysical. In effect, the unexpressed knowing the unknowable becomes a bond between Heidegger and Christian mysticism. Each would say that there was only one thing out there, since 'out there' refers only and already to the undetermined and indeterminate.
19 - There is a cloying quality to Heidegger's essay, different from the self-assuredness of BT. He repeats the phrase "The essence of man lies in his ek-sistence" several times, almost as a chorus to short verses. Its use is not lyrical, but definitive, the last line or coda to a categorical pronouncement. Pehaps that's what happens when you have to listen to too much military music on loudspeakers. See Thomas Sheehan; "Heidegger and the Nazis," in the New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988: a review of Victor Farias' book of the same title.
20 - Derrida, Of Grammatology. In a sense, the whole book is a development of precisely this notion. See in particular p. 44-65.
21 - Gardner, Sebastian; "Splitting the Subject," Auslegung, vol. 13(2), 1983: p. 186-92. Gardner argues that Derrida reveals a notion of the subject quite close to Sartre's.
22 - Jameson, p.183 Derrida has articulated two senses of "we," between which the Sartrean cogito suspends itself, neither articulating nor abolishing either one.
23 - Howell, Christina; Sartre and Derrida: Qui Perd Gagne: J. of Br Soc of Phen., 1982, v13, #1:26-34.
24 - Later, he attempts to do so in The Critique of Dialectical Reason.
25 - And here we might note that ethnocentrism does not carry the denigratory connotations of chauvinism, but it better accentuates a general colonial nature. The two, however, are structurally equivalent; the ethno-center's outside is already a reduction of the Other's status, and its absorption into the center (as standard) is a disparagement.
26 - Todorov, The Conquest of America -- esp. Chap. 3, his treatment of Las Casas, in which these two are united.
27 - Gates, Louis Henry; Figures in Black (New York: Oxford, 1987), Chap. 2.
28 - See Said, Orientalism, especially Chapter 2, in which he discusses the ways a scientific and historical rhetoric are used.
29 - Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti; In Other Worlds (New York: Methuen, 1987). She argues, in a number of places, for an existing harmony between deconstruction and feminism.