The Circles of Historicity: Derrida, Sartre and Heidegger

by Steve Martinot

Introduction

Part of the post-structuralist social vision has been that our Western humanist tradition has somehow turned against us, and become complicit, as a conceptual environment, in structures of social dehumanization and oppression. In "Les fins de l'homme" ("The Ends of Man"), <<1>> Derrida addresses an ethnocentrism that seems to secrete itself at the very heart of Western "humanism." Though metaphysical humanism extols the infinitude of human freedom, in universalizing "Man," it ends by anthropologizing "man," that is, objectifying the human and speaking for others in "Western" terms. Discerning the figure of "man" within thought, the rationalism of metaphysics succeeds in limiting the horizon of thought to "its" figure of "man."

The very conference at which he speaks, Derrida suggests, in calling itself an "international philosophical colloquium," is a case in point. It assumes both "national" philosophical identities and a "universality of philosophical discourse." The effect is both to absorb those who may understand philosophy on a different cultural basis, and to exclude others who locate themselves in a different internationality -- for instance, those involved in the upheavals against the "forces of order" in Paris, the US, and Vietnam at the moment of the colloquium (1968). Though the "democratic" ideal would seem to be served by openly including other traditions, such an invitation would also undermine that ideal by reaffirming the universal from which the exclusion and the invitation both emerged.

Derrida asks, is it possible to say "we" without speaking for someone else, without including others in a "we" that is not theirs, nor proper to them? In constructing a response, he addresses Sartre briefly, and Heidegger at length -- two figures with very different social visions and social presence. Derrida reproaches Sartre for having obstructed certain faltering philosophical steps within the western tradition away from anthropologism. <<2>> He also raises the "issue" of Sartre, not only to distance Sartre from himself, but also to introduce Heidegger's (1946) response to Sartre in the "Letter on Humanism." <<3>> In doing so, Derrida stages a confrontation between them -- a melodrama in which Sartre plays the (ethnocentric) Cartesian universalizer, and Heidegger the elusive detective who catches him red-handed in the act of metaphysics.

But Derrida produces an historical encounter that never occurred. Though Heidegger and Sartre speak of each other, they never really engaged one another, and the moments of their respective critiques pass like ships in the night. Sartre, who once dominated the scene of continental philosophy, has since undergone a certain eclipse, or been rendered history, by rereadings that have perhaps also been rewritings, <<4>> of which Derrida's "The Ends of Man" is itself not innocent. This essay will be a reading of that staged encounter, in which Derrida is both impresario and performer. We will begin with what a confrontation between Heidegger and Sartre might look like.

The Dialogue -- a Question of Inarticulables

Heidegger addresses himself to Sartre in 1946 because, in Sartre's public lecture of the same year called "Existentialism Is a Humanism," Sartre claims Heidegger as part of an existentialist tradition, <<5>> from which Heidegger wishes to differentiate himself (and not be spoken for). For Heidegger, Sartre's profession of the Cartesian cogito leads Sartre and existentialism back to metaphysics, against Heidegger's own chosen course. Because metaphysics is presuppositional, it constitutes a "technical interpretation of thinking" which "does not measure up to [thinking]." (LH,195) It sells thinking short. Sartre begins with the Cartesian cogito, Heidegger argues, and thus begins with the subject, the "I" in "I think," which renders thinking prior to existence and only an effect of Being. For Heidegger, thinking is what grounds subjectivity, and it is 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) The cogito, on the other hand, alienates Man <<6>> from Being by centering the essence of Man in the subject; it makes Man an ideological construct, an apriori concept. As a reduction of thinking that leaves unrealized the "proper dignity of man," (LH,210) it sells "man" short.

For Heidegger, the essence of man is his existence as a thinking being; and the essence of Being is that "thinking is." That "thinking is" says that Being has "embraced its essence." (LH,196) But if Heidegger is saying that "there is existence, therefore thinking is," then he has not wholly dispensed with the cogito; instead, he has transformed it to the 3rd person singular and inverted it.

This sense of inversion reverberates extensively between Heidegger and Sartre. <<7>> For instance, the idea of nihilation functions in an inverted manner between them. For Heidegger, affirmation and nihilation are aspects of Being and not of subjectivity (LH,238); that is, the essence of Being is existence, and with existence, there is already nihilation. Nihilation is what manifests itself as the negative; (LH,237) it is the essence of "thinking the nothing." (LH,239) For Sartre, nihilation pertains to the upsurge of consciousness; it is not the source of the negative, but the space of difference between existence and the world in which the negative, and absence, can exist. It opens the space of existence as a space of activity, which is primordial in the sense that activity is that through which one becomes who one is. Heidegger, in turn, argues that thinking must precede experiential activity since the latter necessitates a subject, which is already a conceptualization. Rather than become who one is through (Sartrean) activity, "man" (as preconceived subject) ceases to know who he is, and activity will not find him for himself. The primacy of the subject only results in man's homelessness. Precisely, rejoins Sartre, man is always a project, an engagement in the world; to find himself at home, man must first make himself there in the world. For Heidegger, man will find himself only through entry into the meaning of Being, which involves detachment (gelassenheit), <<8>> i.e. letting Being be (LH,237). Ultimately, for Sartre, man discovers his being through what he sets for himself beyond himself, while, for Heidegger, man will discover what he has set for himself by being man only by returning to Being.

This inversion continues even in Heidegger's effort to rescue the term "existence" from the rationalist opposition of existentia and essentia. (LH,208) Sartre's "formula," that "existence precedes essence," he argues, continues their metaphysical meaning because, though Sartre reverses their order, he preserves the dichotomy by leaving the meaning of "precedence" unquestioned. For Heidegger, "ontological precedence" both pre-determines through differentiation (LH,208) and is an artifact of textuality. If the essence of "man" lies in his existence, there is no differentiation; precedence (or opposition) is a presumption. And if the non-distinction is inarticulable, then its articulation renders it other than it is, dissociated from the meaning of Being.

To preserve the inarticulability of "existence," Heidegger coins the term "ek-sistence." Its prefix signifies a "coming out," a non-oppositional "standing forth" of thinking from Being. To say 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). The implication Heidegger draws is that man can escape metaphysics only by not differentiating, by seeking to "exist in the nameless," in the meaning of the inarticulable. (LH,199) And his charge against Sartre is that the cogito articulates what must remain unspoken. In excising the inarticulable, Sartre has not let Being be.

It is true that Sartre expresses himself in worldly terms. He attempts to say what he means, while Heidegger asserts that inquiry itself is what means, and that the notion of "what one means" is a pretension, displaced from thinking. For him, thinking must reside at the level of the expression as well as the expressed. But it is at the level of Heidegger's expression, of his textual form, conditioned by his very desire to preserve the inarticulable, that we will discover an intimate connection to Sartre's text.

The Circle of Inquiry and its Homology

At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger introduces his methodological "backward and forward relatedness," by which he affirms the idea that questioning already implicitly contains a prior understanding of what is questioned. <<9>> "Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought." <<10>> That is, implicit prior knowledge conditions the inquiry's terms, which are realized in the explicit articulation of the matter addressed. One returns to the implicit by pressing forward toward explicit questioning. But such an inquiry into ek-sistence produces an aporia. "Man's" essence is to stand forth in ek-static emergence from Being, to which inquiry will ostensibly return "him." "The essence of man" is not to preserve the essence of his being in Being, but to return to it. Man is not as he is, simply because he stands forth from Being, enabling (and necessitating) a return. This aporia perfuses Heidegger's inquiry. If the meaning (or the truth) of Being is unknowable because inarticulable, inquiry's prior understanding of Being not only belongs to Being's unknowability, but preserves its inarticulability in inquiry by also questioning the questioner, Dasein ("the Being for whom Being is a question"). Dasein's aporia is the incommensurability of inquiring into the meaning of Being and residing in the unknowability of Being (and this aporia will play a central role in Derrida's critique of Heideggerian inquiry below). The terms of this aporia produce a circle: 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. <<11>> The inquiry into Being becomes other than it is because, while the ensemble leaves Being itself undefinable, (BT,23) each term on the circle "articulates" another. Each aporia escapes the aporetic through circularity. Heidegger had intuited this without "articulating" this circle as such. (BT,193-5)

There is a similar circle in Sartre, also produced by a discussion of a fundamental aporia. For Sartre, "man" is not as he is because "man" makes "himself." If, in making himself, he is other than he is, it is because as a product, he is other than a producer; that is, as a project, man is other than simply a for-itself. And this too generates a circle: the activity by which a person makes him/herself, realizes his/her project, must be intentional; but intentionality requires a subject; and the subject is engendered by activity. <<12>>

To recognize this circle in Sartre's text in its similarity to a circle in Heidegger's suggests three things: first, that the circle as a construct has a certain iterability that perhaps renders it a sign; second, that through this iterability there may be a discursive as well as a textual isomorphism between these texts; and third, that if the circle provides a formal link, then perhaps the philosophical relation between Heidegger and Sartre should be re-evaluated. We can begin that re-evaluation by returning to Sartre's cogito.

Though Sartre speaks of the cogito and claims to begin with it, it plays a different role for him than for Descartes. Descartes meditatively posits the cogito at the end of skepticism, and "before the fact," to serve as a first certainty that something is "there" (namely, that "I" am). Sartre, on the other hand, argues from the existence of negativity that nothing is "there" in order to arrive at the cogito. <<13>> And for Sartre, the for-itself is the absoluteness of that nothing; it is the absoluteness of contingency or indeterminacy whose certainty is a freedom unable to escape its own freedom (even in self-denial). Descartes' certainty is that "I exist;" and for this notion, the "ego" of "ego cogito" must be central in order to avoid reduction of human existence to an object. But if Sartre begins with the autonomy of nihilation, as the autonomy of freedom, the indeterminacy of awareness aware of itself (EH,36), then he is centering the "think" of "I think," a "thinking" whose foundation is the inarticulability of freedom. That is, he phenomenologically decenters 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. There is only the certainty of freedom, the certainty of an indeterminacy in which subjectivity is "always already" free. Sartre names this the "cogito," but insists that the name is permissible only because the (Cartesian) cogito itself can be escaped. (BN,90)

In converting Descartes' "ego cogito" into "the cogito," Sartre wrests the "cogito" from Descartes' grasp. This is his critical move beyond the "I" to the autonomous subject. <<14>> For the Sartrean subject, there is only autonomy, an autonomy of absence, prior to a 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. Any critique of the Sartrean cogito, the term he uses to name that autonomy in its indeterminacy, must take this distinction into account -- which Heidegger has not. Sartre does not begin with the "I", as Heidegger claims, simply because he deploys the cogito. The "I" emerges later as an object; the ego is but another nihilation.

In other words, freedom is not the product of the cogito; the cogito instead constitutes an act of naming the indeterminacy of freedom. <<15>> As the impossible (indeterminate) foundation of the subject, it signifies a subjectivity that is neither Cartesian nor determinate. For Sartre, it answers the question of the essence of man ("the human way to be") and not of whether man is or not. The Sartrean cogito is the name for the truth of what cannot be said, because there is nothing to be said about it except that it "is." And that unspokenness is congruent to the inarticulability of Heidegger's "truth of Being." As such, the "cogito" plays the same role in Sartre's text as ek-sistence plays in Heidegger's. Though Sartre bespeaks existence, he is not saying that there is man, but rather, like Heidegger, that man begins with an indeterminacy, an inarticulable. Though Heidegger objects to having his unspoken meanings spoken by Sartre, he misses Sartre's own preservation of the unspoken.

In sum, between these two texts, there are parallel aporias, similar circularities, and a common centering of an inarticulable for which the circle is a sign -- all of which constitutes a structural homology between them. This sheds a different light on Heidegger's charge that Sartre has chosen the language of metaphysics, of existentia rather than ek-sistence. Sartre's use of the term "existence" relates homologically to Heidegger's, as does his use of "precedence" to Heidegger's use of "priority" (cf. the section headings of the Introduction to BT). Indeed, though Heidegger does not speak of precedence, he enacts it in his "forward and backward relating," while ignoring a congruent structure in Sartre.

And this implies that Heidegger's rejection of Sartre's use of "existence" resides on a different level of discourse. In EH, Sartre choose Heidegger (and not Aquinas or Berkeley) to be his immediate tradition, and this cannot be taken lightly. The idea that a tradition can be "chosen" is not trivial; it is, as Bakhtin says, one's very choice of language. For Heidegger to read Sartre's term "existence" as existentia and not as "ek-sistence" is to disregard Sartre's choice, and to impose a different choice upon him. Rather than read or misread Sartre, Heidegger transforms and rewrites him. <<16>>

In effect, Heidegger's critique of Sartre's language amounts to a language demand -- a demand similar in form to that made by any chauvinism. Chauvinism says to the person it denigrates: "Be like me, though of course you can't, and I will hold that against you." And Heidegger says to Sartre: Write like me, though to do so will be to codify my language, render it metaphysical, and hence be not to write like me" -- for which Heidegger chose to criticize Sartre. <<17>>

Ultimately, Sartre's inarticulable is more convincing than Heidegger's -- perhaps because it is more tangible. Against Heidegger's silhouetted absent positivity, Sartre posits (in a further inversion) a manifest present nothingness. It is a nothingness one can apprehend in all one's own everyday refusals and nostalgias. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine Dasein in the first person singular without that being already a betrayal (Heidegger's notion of jemeines seems at times to reduce us (his readers) to voyeurs). Heidegger avoids this inversive differential by disputing Sartre's terminology, but Derrida suggest he is perhaps a little too self-righteous in it:

Heidegger's argument (against ontology, metaphysics, and Sartre) is against rendering thought a "thing." For him, "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, Heidegger must construct a discursive space in which there is some-thing that signifies "this is not a thing" without saying so, without rendering that signifying act 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. Non-expression must be a sign without a signifier, an unexpressed coincident meaning of something else. But even coincident meaning, Derrida argues, only attaches to the system of signs that produce it, be they a language or a text. Even the inexpressible attaches to the thingness of its coincident signs. Heidegger wanted the non-thingness of Being to have the full positivity of its Being in (non)expression; but that requires something more subtle than even "the nameless" (or sinnlosigkeit, or gelassenheit, which reify themselves), something that engenders naming without being a name. It is what Derrida approaches with the word differance, and what we are attempting to approach through the notion of textual form.

The Sartrean Universal and its Difference

Before summarizing this notion of textual form, and turning to Derrida, who is its real source, let us carry this "dialogue" between Sartre and Heidegger one step further, since the homology discovered between them will have a bearing on Derrida's role in this drama, and on his charges against Sartre.

Sartre's 1946 lecture ("Existentialism Is a Humanism") is a response to charges by Christian and Marxist critics that existentialism did not sufficiently elevate "man" nor affirm a divine or class ideal, and thus was not humanist, which Sartre is at pains to refute. Delivered in the politically charged atmosphere of newly liberated France, the real purpose of Sartre's lecture was to popularize existentialism in order to engage it in the political landscape of that historical moment. Thus, he tends to be somewhat sloganistic (which Derrida notices, but Heidegger does not). "Every action implies a human setting and a human subjectivity." "Existence precedes essence." "Subjectivity must be the starting point."(EH,13) As such, Sartre's style is wholly "in context" with the political situation in which he acts.

Sartre's philosophical thought is, of course, more elaborate than can be represented by slogans. For Sartre, the possibility of understanding the world can only arise through the freedom of the mind that conceives it, a freedom that makes its own meanings and apprehends the world through them. In its freedom, it pre-empts all givenness and a priori, precludes them, and ultimately chooses them for itself. In particular, the very notion of human nature is chosen. If "man" him/herself must exist before a conception of him/her is possible, then "man's" existence is the condition for the conceptualization and discernibility of "man," of the human. Definitions can occur only at his/her own hands. This is what Sartre means by "existence precedes essence;" conceptualization and self-conceptualization proceed from the activity of consciousness aware of its existence. It is not the existence of consciousness (existentia) that precedes its own essence (essentia) as a thing, for Sartre, but consciousness aware of its existence (what it does rather than what it is) that precedes (and produces) all essence. (EH,36) No essence is pre-ordained, neither by class nor divine influence. "We are on a plane where there are only men." (EH,22) <<18>> "Man's" destiny is only to be, to live the experiential component of the subjective, viz. activity (Man "is nothing else than a series of undertakings" -- EH,33).

However, Sartre is not saying that one is simply a subjectivity that acts; one becomes what is manifest by one's actions, pursuant to a project that is both lived and envisioned. The past that conditions the lived, and one's flight to a pre-envisioned future (the already and the not yet), are the foundations for each other. Like Heidegger's inquiry, which moves backward toward the meaning of Being by moving forward to what manifests that meaning, the for-itself as a project engenders its future in terms of a past it only realizes as a past by discovering (inventing) that future. These are congruent (and again, inverted) constructions. (And this suggests the tantalizing notion that Heidegger's sense of inquiry already contains, in a formal congruence, a sense of temporality that remained uncompleted in Being and Time.)

The homology between them now brings Sartre's discourse into a different relation to Heidegger's. First, the homology suggests that the for-itself's (freedom's) relation to its projects parallels Being's relation to Dasein: freedom underlies those projects, is not them, is manifest through them, and is the context in which they are, as Being does Dasein. The difference lies in the narratability of choice, responsibility, flight, etc., through which freedom manifests itself, and which Heidegger subsumes in the notion of inquiry. This also suggests that nothing in Heidegger corresponds to what Sartre calls Being-in-itself. <<19>> For Heidegger, there are beings (seiendes), the ontic, the ready-to-hand, but they do not stand opposite Being; they manifest Being, in the way that the meanings of objects and situations given by one's project manifest one's freedom, for Sartre. But they are not given Being, as in Sartre (BN,lxxix).

Second, the homology serves to disclose an unspoken "ontological difference" in Sartre's text. For many commentators, Sartre's notion of freedom is contradictory, in its conflation of the for-itself's absolute ontological freedom and one's relative freedom in a world of determinations and of others. <<20>> Sartre himself is ambiguous on the question. But if we turn to Heidegger, we encounter a structure that is both comparable and relevant. For Heidegger, if beings are, and as such manifest Being, then Being must persist in beings as a trace; and indeed, Heidegger addresses the question of Being by tracing back the inarticulable presence of Being in beings, and its erasure of itself in the specificity of beings. Sartre's notion of ontological freedom can similarly be understood as a trace within each person's situational choices. In order to be unfree or constrained in any way, one's freedom must be there as a trace that constitutes its absence. And that trace must be absolute; in order for one's freedom to be situationally abridged, it must already have been to that extent ontologically unquestionable. Indeed, it is only through the trace of absolute (ontological) freedom that a determined and determining world is lived as determining. In that sense, Sartrean freedom is an "ontological difference" between one's absolute freedom as indeterminacy and the dependent strategies and tactics through which one lives the world and one's project. In effect, within Sartre's language, a structure appears as an ambiguity which, in Heidegger's language, will appear as a discernible structure that can be homologically related back to Sartre.

Third, a certain congruent notion of humanism emerges in both. For Heidegger, the human implies being-in-the-world and care. But "world" means neither the objective nor the spiritualized nor what pertains to a subject-object relation, but "man's" standing forth, in ek-sistence, in "his" essence. That is, being-in-the-world means "experiencing the essence of man more primordially" (LH,225) than the level of conceptualized values, logic, or spirit that metaphysical humanism renders "objects" for thought (LH,229). (And the isomorphic counterpart of this in Sartre is that ontological freedom can never be delimited as "being free from," or "being free for.") The non-metaphysical humanism that Heidegger is attempting to silhouette is itself being-in-the-world as the essence of ek-sistence. (LH,231) Being-in-the-world is not a state or condition, but thinking which is not conceptual, that is " more rigorous than the conceptual." (LH,235) Heideggerian humanism is thinking that is not subsumed by a subject-object relation or an intentionality structure, but rather is active in the "light of the truth of Being," (LH,193) containing subject-object relations as only one of its forms. Being-in-the-world is an openness of Being in which "man" stands, in which one's primordial attention is to the "not yet" from the point of view of being with the "already," which Heidegger calls "care" as "the human way to be." Similarly, the Sartrean notions of responsibility, choice, flight, etc. reside in the "not yet" from the point of view of the "already;" and as the way one lives one's ontological freedom, they manifest one's being-in-the-world in the Sartrean sense. In the Sartrean language, it is through their situationality and narrativity that such manifestations of ontological freedom constitute the "human way to be." When Sartre says "there is no human nature because there is no god to conceive it," he is contesting the same objectivizing (third person) point of view that for Heidegger characterizes metaphysics.

And this in turn highlights an important differences between Sartre and Heidegger, a difference in the way Sartre is read. In terms of the homology, Sartrean subjectivity (the for-itself) would be neither an analogue nor a translation of Heideggerian Dasein. Rather, in its isomorphism to Heidegger's notion of inquiry itself, "human reality" names more than just Dasein, embracing not only Dasein but its disclosure and the discourse of its advent as well. <<21>> This implies that human reality is not a human universal for Sartre, and neither is freedom; they are both the very absence of such, an absence which is the only universal; "There is a universality of man; but it is not given, it is perpetually being made" (EH,39). To understand the subject as freedom is not to place "man" (or the "I") at the center of a space called "human reality;" it is instead the emptiness of that space which constitutes the existence of the human.

But now, this notion of a universal needs more attention. Sartre claims that all people are understandable to him, and that no subjectivity understood in its situation need be strange (EH,39). There seems to be a Eurocentric pretensions within this "non-universal." And then Sartre says:

Is this a foundation (archia) that Derrida would locate as the "essential operation of metaphysics," or one's situation? Is this a universal or a relativism? For Sartre, the "universal" is neither truth nor Being; it is the nothingness from which there emerges the freedom to choose, to adapt, to go beyond, to acquiesce or rebel. Abstract moral principles tend to run aground, Sartre suggests, and one is left to choose on concrete and often invented bases. (EH,47) "Two strictly opposed moralities" can amount to the same thing in that what both "set up as a goal is freedom." Thus, what is "absolute" (non-strange) is not only indeterminacy, but the contingency of any social context, of the terms by which the world is given, to which and in which the individual responds (as responsibility) in making that world his/her own. One's social context can be a system of narratives, a structure of scientific reasoning, a myth structure or a system of yearly or quadrenniel voting rituals, or a purely ideosyncratic reconstruction or schizophrenic remetaphorization of one's language; what is common to all is that each appears as given, foundational, and for Sartre, understandable as that in which each person emerges living that contingent social context as necessity. (EH,39) In short, when Sartre says that all people are understandable to him, he does not mean that they can be measured according to European standards, but that all people must be granted their tradition and the necessity of their world in the same sense that Flaubert must be granted his passivity within the bourgeois republic. Not to do so would be to obviate a person's ability to rebel against his/her situation from within it.

But there is a doubleness to this that Sartre doesn't see. To relativize through the contingency of social context, and to understand living that context as necessity, as together the absence of universal, is nevertheless to couch each situation in the western philosophical binary of contingency and necessity. This binary bestows upon the "situation" an objectivity that obviates modes of participation in the operation of social context that may not only be alien to western thought, but to which the notions of acquiescence and rebellion are not relevant. We see this clearly when Sartre says:

Sartre is Eurocentric in presenting these as "invariants," giving them a certain "thereness," though he then problematizes that Eurocentrism in decategorizing them as "neither subjective nor objective." <<22>>

Recently, the "charge" of relativism has been the content of an attack on cultural autonomy and cultural difference, as a form of judgment. As an attack, it asserts the existence of absolutes of moral judgment or ethical discourse. But if to judge is to reserve for oneself the power to be oneself, from whatever (ontic) absolute one judges, one must grant the same power to all others to be themselves, from their own absolutes. The very existence of an absolute necessitates this relativity, if it is not to impose itself, or deny the other's judgment as such. It is not a question of agreeing with the other, but of hearing him/her, as the only basis upon which dialogue can proceed. If, relative to the constraints of human institution and interaction, the absoluteness of freedom is indispensible, then, mutatis mutandis, for absolute ontological freedom, relativism is both irreducible and necessary to the recognition of another freedom. One's situational relativity implies an absolute; the absoluteness of one's being implies relativism.

The programmatic difference between Sartre and Heidegger across the homology of their staged historical confrontation is a case in point. Heidegger calls for a return to man's essence, a rescinding of the "technical interpretation of thinking," and he calls for "man" to find his way back to the nearness of Being by learning "to exist in the nameless."(LH,199) This programmatics involves replacing metaphysical "humanism" with his own notion of the human. The "nameless," as existence without differentiations, constitutes escape from the false consciousness of objective non-involvement; the "nameless" is where "care" can predominate. But Heidegger is being programmatic without a program, since the nameless must be named without being addressed. His program is an epoché; if determination cancels thinking and care, then a suspension of all determinations, points of view, ideologies, etc. is required. 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. And Heidegger's leap of faith is that upon realizing the "lived epoche," man will be man.

Heidegger's "lived epoche" is what Sartre refuses. Though for Sartre, freedom is autonomous of the doctrines and projects that structure the world, it cannot escape them. It must return to them, because it already lives in them in the world (as Being resides in beings). There is no ontological freedom without situational freedom as such (just as there can be no situational unfreedom without the absoluteness of ontological freedom). Because one is free, living the epoch is an illusion.

If the "real" difference between Sartre and Heidegger is programmatic, then their dispute on humanism becomes a political one. This might explain or provide the situational context for Heidegger's rather surprising choice to focus his high-powered discussion on Sartre's little popularization, rather than on Being and Nothingness. And the context for both is the war. Post-war France lurks in everything Sartre says in EH: in his choice to popularize, his stories and terms, and the role he gives phenomenology. If the form of his presentation amounts to a promotion of existentialism, then the act he performs in that historical context is what is programmatic. It is a call for liberation from given aprioris (be they Marxist, Christian, etc., a call to live the world. For Heidegger too the war lurks in what he says. He has just been through investigation by allied de-Nazification procedures, and knows he has left much unspoken concerning his membership and activity in the Nazi Party up to 1945. <<23>> Perhaps he addresses himself to Sartre's lesser text because, for a man in his position, to re-establish himself, he must let the unspoken be. His text is programmatic, while it is the historical act he performs that is a promotion -- of himself.

The Circle as Such

To recapitulate, a common circular structure has been discovered in the discourses of Sartre and Heidegger, from which a homology of discursive form emerges involving a number of parallels and inversions. But is there a significance to this triadic circle, as a particular instance of discursive form?

A few words should be said about "form" in general first. Form occurs to the textuality of a text through what the text says rather than to what the text says; <<24>> it belongs to what Derrida suggests is always there in a text that exceeds meaning. A reading of form gives space to the non-text of textuality that exceeds its own meanings. Indeed, it is that "non-text," which says (in not saying) what is not said (in saying) that makes the text, and its logos, both possible and polyvocal. In such readings, textual or discursive forms become specifiable or discernible as patterns or structures through recognition, and that recognition is provided by homology. Homology de-privileges the literal ("ontic") text in order to discern the structuring of language behind what that language says. Textual forms, to the extent they are discerned homologically as entities, signify in a sense incommensurable with the text's language. Like Being, the meaning of textual form emerges, stands forth, and calls to itself inarticulably as meaning without a signifier in the text as such, but only through its iterability as an entity in that textuality.

Let us look again at the circle of the meaning of Being again, which was reiterated in the Sartrean circle of activity. It was reflected in the inquiry into the meaning of Being; and we can now see it in Heidegger's treatment of inquiry in general. For Heidegger, the fact of questioning already contains implicit knowledge of what is questioned. Alongside this, there is an act of questioning ("Inquiry itself is the behaviour of a questioner" -- BT,24) that, in explicating the implicit, opens inquiry to a response, to an articulate meaning that is to be understood. But if the response must conform in some sense to the question's explicit terms, then it is those explicit terms that implicitly guide the meaning of the response. Thus, finally, a response as such is always already the implicit goal or thing whose existence is made explicit by the fact of inquiry itself. That is, the act of inquiry conforms to the fact of inquiry, the response conforms to the act of questioning, and the inquiry conforms (has already conformed) to the existence of a response.

An inner structure becomes discernible in this circle. The act of questioning, as an explicitness, gives form to the fact of questioning, whose implicit knowledge becomes its content -- that is, the signified for which the act of questioning is the signifier. The response gives form to the terms of the act of questioning which, in calling for a response as such, become in turn its content. That is, in Heidegger's account, the meaning of the response is not what the question lacked in being a question, since it had implicit knowledge of it. Rather than a relation of signifier to signified, the relation of response to question is one of bearing witness, a relation of artifact to the process producing it. Finally, the fact of the question, as an inquiry, gives form to the response as a meaning (rather than as a response), a meaning which, as a concretization of the inquiry, becomes its content -- not in the sense of signified and signifier or production and product, but in the sense of Being and beings. In sum, the act of questioning is the form for which the fact of questioning is the content; the response is the form for which the act of questioning is the content; and the fact of questioning is the form for which the response is the content. Form and content are aporetically divided in each of the circle's three moments, and braided by the act of circling. <<25>>

To discern and recognize a form such as the circle is to encounter it as an entity different from other forms. It is no longer to be restricted to a general amorphous notion of form. To have recognized this triadic circle in Heidegger, to have given it that iterability, implies that as a form it pertains to the textuality of Heidegger's text rather than to its topic. It has, however, also been discovered in Sartre's text. Thus, it signifies a mode of textuality that transcends Heidegger's.

Two points can be made here about this triadic circle. First, what generates each circle (of Being or action) is the aporetic nature of the circle's "issue" (which is not a concept as such). Aporia results when a movement divides itself between two incommensurable moments. The circle provides a third term that, by mediating those moments, re-establishes an intelligible connection. And it reveals the incommensurability to be self-referential -- for instance, Heidegger's ontological notion of "man" refers to itself rather than to foundations. In effect, the circle substitutes itself for foundations by means of a self-referentiality that produces itself as foundational through that circularity.

Second, the circle presents a generalized and self-referential structure of mediation. As an endless braiding, the circle provides each aporetic pair of terms with a third term that mediates them. Inversely, each moment on the circle can be seen as a mediation between its own form and content which are divided among the succeeding and preceding terms. That is, what pretends to be a substantial term on the circle shows itself to be actually a mediation of what constitutes yet lies beyond it (as form and content, or signifier and signified). In effect, mediation in general is the "materiality" of inarticulability. Neither semiotic nor Platonic, the triadic circle presents itself both as a foundation without archia, and as a sign for the signified whose signifier is always elsewhere.

Derrida and the Drama of Persons

When Derrida brings Sartre and Heidegger together on the historical stage, he too must necessarily step onto it. In his first act, which is to establish his own confrontation with Sartre, preparatory to his critique of Heidegger, he also addresses Sartre's language. But he does not paint it with the same brush that Heidegger does. He recognizes that Sartre speaks of "human reality" in order to "suspend the presuppositions" attendent upon traditional rationalist notions of "man." But Derrida sees this as insufficient for Sartre's own purposes. Sartre leaves unquestioned the "meaning and origin of the concept of (human) reality" (M,116), or of "man." To ignore the "history of the concept" (whether of "human," "reality," or "man") as if it were self-evident, and had "no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit," is to render it a priori. The concept becomes self-referential, closing off investigation. If this recalls Heidegger's judgment about metaphysics rendering thought self-referential, it also centers the question of history in Derrida's own critique of metaphysics.

In "The Ends of Man," this history occurs in a triadic language. First, there is a language of that history itself, which Derrida invents and narrates for the other two in the third person. Second, there is a historicity which Sartre and Heidegger lived in 1946 in the first person, for which the other provided a discursive moment, a system of signifiers. And third, there is a language of oblique address, by which each of the three renders another historical for himself, as if in the second person. History, historicity, and historicality couch themselves in a syntax of persons. And to this, Derrida adds the "1st person plural," the "we" of philosophy through which he historicizes himself, and which provides a rubric for a critique of ethnocentrism.

For Derrida, the philosophical "we" constitutes the self-referential moment of humanism -- that is, the point at which the meaning of a sign or a text is self-generating, its speculative (and self-contextualizing) moment in which "nothing cannot be made to make sense." <<26>> What he addresses is the supplement to such a "we", the possibility of saying "we" without speaking for someone else. It is to open the terms of this question that he introduces the confrontation between Sartre and Heidegger, through which to differentiate two senses of "we." And he approaches this differential by historicizing philosophy's limits for "man," its sense of the "ends" of "man."

For phenomenology, the ends of "man" have always appeared in two modes; first, an objectification of the human, and second, what transcends objectification by including self-presence in the apprehension of presence. (M,123) For Hegel, "man" supersedes himself, for which the "we" becomes a reunifying synthesis as self-presence -- leading Hegel back into a metaphysical ideality. For Husserl, "man," as transcendent, transcends himself in order to be himself; but if this occurs as ego, self-presence becomes a self-objectification, which reconstitutes the anthropologism it had sought to escape. In both, Derrida concludes, phenomenology succeeds only in reinscribing "the name of man" in metaphysics, as both an infinite and finite end (M,121) -- a confluence of the unlimitedness of "man" to "himself" (a transcendental humanist self-referentiality) with his own limitedness as "man" (an anthropological finitude). "Man" is always between these two ends, as an implicit internal fracture in humanism. Each "end" is the condition of the other; "The transcendental end can appear to itself and be unfolded only on the condition of mortality, of a relation to finitude as the origin of ideality." (M,123)

If "man's end" is equivocal -- an internal difference in humanism itself -- then a difference in the "we" of humanism seems already implicit. To articulate this difference, Derrida returns to Heidegger, and the "Letter on Humanism." For Heidegger, metaphysics forgot the question of Being by assuming that Being could be understood as beings, as the named. Though metaphysics purports to be about consciousness, or thinking, it sets at its foundation a naming of thinking, as subject or consciousness, which it then understands self-referentially through the name. Thinking names itself, and then understands itself as the thing named. For Derrida, this suppression of the opposition between the naming of thinking and thinking itself characterizes metaphysics. (And this is the sense in which Heidegger claims that Sartre's "cogito" names something while his own use of "ek-sistence" does not.)

But the foundation for this argument occurs earlier in Heidegger, to which Derrida turns. In BT, Heidegger argues that while the question of Being can only be approached through beings, it must not lose itself in them. The inquiry itself necessitates a being that can be addressed, but in which Being is not lost in the process. That being is Dasein, the being in greatest proximity to Being, because it is the being for which Being is a question. But if Dasein is the being questioned, as well as the being that questions, it sets itself in ontic self-presence from which the ontological (Being) retreats into the distance, as a trace. That is, in its inquiry into the meaning of Being, Dasein is both the closest to Being (in form, as inquiry) and the most distant (in content, as the subject matter of inquiry). (cf. note 10). Thus, the near and the far reflect the ontological difference as the form and content of the inquiry.

Derrida deconstructs Heidegger's inquiry by noticing that the "near" and the "far" map a structure of metaphor which carries Heidegger's argument into the discursive. "It remains that Being, which is nothing, is not a being, cannot be said, cannot say itself, except in the ontic metaphor." (M,131) That is, it is within a "metaphoric insistence that the interpretation of the meaning of Being is produced." Thus, the metaphorics of the near and the far is anterior to the question of the meaning of Being. In effect, Heidegger deploys the language of ontology as a metaphorics in order to critique the ontology that produces that language.

Two points can be made about Derrida's argument. First, Heidegger has already provided the context for it in his previous shift of language (the "Turning"). "Language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being." (M,131) It is in language that nearness and distance themselves occur. Second, for Derrida, Heidegger's very repetition of this metaphor structure (the near and the far) renders it a sign for a proximity to Being expressed in a language of Being that is "not ontic proximity." This sign (that metaphoricity itself) signifies a structure of discovering what is already known while posing as the act of seeking. Thus, it envelops in itself the aporia in the meaning of Being. It presents itself as a metaphoric sign, but one that remains unliteralizable because expressed in the writing of an ontic metaphor for Being that is also not ontic. Thus, it is a sign for a signified that has no non-metaphoric signifier, in short, a signified without a signifier -- that is, a self-referential point whose signifier (name) is again Heidegger's call to "exist in the nameless."

What Derrida is pointing to, as both inarticulable and self-referential, is always implicit in the explicitness of definitive reference. It is not metaphysical self-referentiality, generated by an erasure of history. Rather, generated by repetition, and constituted by a structure of differences which imparts to it its very self-referentiality, the inarticulable that Derrida describes is that of writing in general. <<27>> As such, it is the possibility of all definitude. But as an inarticulable self-referential moment, it also maps the space of incommensurability between writing in general and its manifestation in a particular writing (a text, speech, a pathway through the forest, etc.) -- that is, the space that constitutes an "ontological difference" in Derrida's discourse of writing. In effect, this "Derridean inarticulable" is comparable to Heideggerian ek-sistence or the Sartrean "cogito."

In the context of this inarticulable, as an "ontological difference" in a system of signs, Derrida then addresses Heidegger's "explicit" use of the "we". Heidegger says: "we always already conduct our activities in an understanding of Being." (M,125) That is, all inquiry deploys an "is" in its predications whose meaning, and thus the meaning of Being, it already tacitly assumes it understands (cf. note 9). And Derrida points out that Heidegger's "we", as well as the "always already" that accompanies it, are determined in correspondance with that understanding of Being that is always already accessible to that "we". Along with the philosophical "we" that includes (speaks for) others as soon as it pretends to refer, there is thus an anterior "we" that is "always already" in operation and which is beyond the objectivity of "inclusiveness." When Heidegger says "We do not know what Being means," he includes others in this "we" who do not necessarily have the same priorities. But that "we always already comport ourselves ..." invokes an anterior condition as the condition for there to be a "we" in the first place. The "we" is both in proximity as anterior (presupposed) and distant as imposed. In the first sense, the "we" is not "that," and in the other, it is not "there." The inarticulable self-referentiality of the implicit that inhabits the non-impositional "we" remains a trace that constitutes the ability of the inclusive "we" to mean (as with the trace of Being in beings). This interior division and incommensurability in the "we", which repeats and reflects the division and ambiguity in humanism, is not a question of a term's existence ("we") in "language," but of a structure of discourse in which that existence becomes both a formal and a metaphysical possibility.

And we can now discern what this (second) structure is, as it appears in both the "we" and the "ends" of "man," as well as silhouetted in humanism and in inquiry. It is a structure of incommensurability that inhabits the fracture that the inarticulable self-referentiality of language opens in the definite, for which there is not only no region of overlap, but a persisting inseparability or mutual conditioning across the fracture. Like two lines in space that are in relation yet non-intersecting and non-parallel, the divided elements of this structure can be said to run skew to each other. Since skew is an ungainly word, I will coin the term "intraphor" for this structure, invoking the notion of metaphor (carrying beyond) as a structure of difference and connection, while implying a notion of interior fracture and incommensurability. The intraphor is not dialectical because contradictions and negations are not incommensurable, by definition.

The "always already" is just such an intraphor. In Derrida's critique of Heidegger, the always already is inseparable from the "we" that understands, and imparts an internal difference to the "we", as a mode of ontological difference. The intraphor is the structure of emergence of an ontological difference within an entity. In Heidegger, the near and far of Being in Dasein's inquiry is intraphoric, as is, in Sartre, the relation of the for-itself's situational freedom in its project and its freedom as absolute. This intraphor names the congruence between the 1st person singular of Sartre's narrativized subject and the 3rd person singular of Heideggerian Dasein; thus, it is the form of congruence between those "syntactical persons" and the "we" as fractured by the "always already." In this tri-partite congruence, the notion of a "middle voice" -- that extinct verbal mode which Derrida recalls in his discussion of "differance" -- is invoked. In the sense that the "middle voice" suggests an incommensurable adjunction of active voice and passive speaking subject, action without a self, it too would constitute an intraphor. <<28>>

In his critique of Heidegger's metaphorics, Derrida argues that "Man" and Being are not only inseparable in their incommensurability, but that their difference is internal to that inseparability. What the anteriority of metaphor to the meaning of Being implies is that, within this intraphoric space (the "ontological difference"), "Man" and Being evince a mutual properness, a "co-propriety." "Man is the proper of Being," and "Being is the proper of man." (M,133) These two relations, though they be one notion, resist interpretation in that they articulate a conflation of inarticulables. However, they co-habit the same house, as it were, whispering, as Derrida says, in each other's ear. (M,133)

By eavesdropping on this secret "whispering" within "co-propriety," Derrida draws a triad of summary statements: first, "the end of man is the thinking of Being;" second, "man is already the end of the thinking of Being;" and third, "the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being." (M,134) As sibling paraphrases of the same "co-propriety," these three are softly synonmous. But in their formal differences, they diverge metaphorically toward other meanings. The third suggests that man's mortality is the end of questioning, the self-referential anthropological death that ends one's thinking and the question of Being. The first suggests that every telos that "man" sets for him/herself has the thinking of Being within it as its end -- or at least as a trace, as mirrored in Heidegger's metaphorics, for instance. The second, finally, is that "man" cannot escape the (inarticulable) self-referentiality that constitutes the space of these endeavors. One is oneself the thinking of Being. The thinking of Being is not elsewhere, nor does questioning carry "man" beyond him/herself.

What these "metaphorize" are the three pivotal notions of Derrida's critique -- mortality, infinite telos, and co-propriety; and as such, they become elements of a triadic circle. First of all, the presence of mortality, as the condition of self-presence that leads phenomenology back into anthropology, positions mortality as the form that Man takes as a thinking being. That is, in the context of a critique of "humanism," mortality is the form that the infinite telos of thinking takes. Second, Derrida's notion of co-propriety, that "man is the proper of Being," expresses the anteriority of language to Being, an anteriority that is the inescapable content of the infinite telos of "man." The infinite telos of thinking is the form taken by anteriority (the anteriority of language to Being) as co-propriety; in other words, the infinite is the form co-propriety takes.

Finally, co-propriety, the mutual properness of "man" and Being, shows itself to be the form that mortality takes; to see this, we must simply look at the anteriority of language to Being from the perspective of the inescapability of death implicit in that anteriority. One meaning attaching to the anteriority of language (to the question of Being) has been signalled in this essay by the quotes insistently placed on the word "man." These quotes transcribe Derrida's expression "we men," which is in turn a less covert reference to the exclusion of other people who are not male and/or not of this philosophical "we." The difference between "man" and "people" (some of whom are elsewhere and others of whom are "here" but effaced by the term "man") is generated by these signals (quote-marks), from within their use as "language" (in a manner not strictly separable from the enactment of "grammatical" persons -- first, second, etc. -- of these texts). Exclusion and effacement are things people do -- through the term "man," in this case -- but which "man" does not in "his" own terms. People historicize, while "man" gets historicized; "man" is an effect of reading people through those signals that are neither names nor concepts, and thus remain indiscernible in their historicization. The anteriority of language puts people in the place of reading "man," and reads "man" in the place of people.

But how, then, does one encounter the mortality contained implicitly in the historicity (where the story of each death is told) that fills the space between "man" and "people"? It is not simply that death (in its properness, as one's own) is knowable only in metaphor, as an extrapolation to oneself of another's death; the other's death is always elsewhere, a sign for what it is not (one's own). Neither can one ignore that one's thinking always already signifies immortality, precisely in the unknowability of one's own death (if one's own death implies that time stops for oneself, and one can never know that time ever stops because death ends all knowing, then for each person time never comes to an end; one lives immortal in the first person, and yet dies in the 3rd). Death is a metaphor that can never be literalized; it remains a sign that is not what it is. In other words, the anteriority of language, in which death is both an endless metaphoricity and a name for what is always elsewhere, is the necessary condition for mortality. That is, co-propriety, as the anteriority of language to Being, including the necessity of metaphor and name to mortality, is the form that mortality (not death) takes. (And we must not lose sight of the fact that the chauvinism in the term "man" and the ethnocentrism of the philosophical "we" are both ineffacible from this argument, thereby locating this notion of mortality only within the western philosophical deployment of this "man" and this "we" -- which Sartre loses sight of above, even in the space between the objective and the subjective.)

The familiar circle thus enacts itself (with a circularity that is Heideggerian, an enactment that is Sartrean, and a self-referentiality that is Derridean). Mortality is the form infinite telos takes; infinite telos is the form co-propriety takes; and co-propriety is the form mortality takes. The first moment represents Derrida's dicussion of humanism with respect to Sartre -- Sartre's acceptance of a unitary humanism, and the deconstructive division of humanism between presence and self-presence. The second represents Derrida's discussion of the philosophical "we" with respect to Heidegger -- Heidegger's acceptance of a unitary Being, and the deconstructive division of the "we" in congruence with the intraphoric connection of Being and "Man." And the third represents Derrida's discussion of the "ends of man" with respect to his own critique of language as anteriority itself, and the deconstructive division of those ends between a metaphorics and a naming, as an intraphoric structure congruent to the "always already," or the middle voice.

This third circle gives an urgency to the question of what it means that the philosophical "we", the "humanism" of western metaphysics, and the "ends" of "man" are all equivocal in the same way; it is the question of how the intraphor itself operates as a sign. In Derrida's discourse, the intraphor is both a structure of incommensurability that opens itself to mediation (circling), and a textual form that names the space at the center of the Derridean circle composed triadically by the anteriority of language to Being (for Derrida), the anteriority of Being to Dasein (for Heidegger), and the anteriority of the for-itself to language (for Sartre). It is the form that names the two dynamic relations of the circle itself: first, the transformation of each element into a mediation of its own form and content; and second, the braiding of those around the circle. The meaning of the intraphor is that the division within Being, or "man," or the for-itself, is a difference of incommensurable levels of discourse, in which each misreading of another returns to itself through the mediatation of still another on the circle.

In sum, from the initial necessity to historicize the concepts of metaphysics, Derrida has reread and rewritten the language of those concepts, that of "we" and "man," which divide against themselves. The divisions revealed in language, between levels of language that are skew to each other in the intraphor structure, point to Derrida's programmatic. For him, the call is to "speak several languages ... at once" (M,135), a deployment of language designed to break the arrow of history that is "played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other" (M,134). And this implies the west's launching an arrow against itself from that "elsewhere" (its own violence) as its own other target.

The Gap of Reverse Historicity

We have focused on three incommensurabilities between the texts of these three thinkers, while their homologic relation has engendered a certain conjunction between them. Three circles have emerged from Heidegger's critique of Sartre, and Derrida's critique of Heidegger. The third (missing) critique that would fill out the picture has been rendered impossible by history, viz. Sartre's critique of Derrida. But in offering a defense of Sartre, this essay has envisaged some possible elements of what the reversed historical arrow would impart.

Derrida criticizes the pre-conceptuality of Sartre's "human reality," and argues that phenomenological ontology, in the guise of anthropologism, imprisons the human behind its conception of itself. Though Sartre opposes his ontology to a metaphysical unity of Being, Derrida charges that this opposition pretends to be more than it is.

But Sartre's notion of human reality, his "response" to the question of "the unity of Being," 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. Sartre does not deny that "human reality" is conceptual, but it is so only in silhouetting the inarticulable at its core, from which it emerges.

This "we" represents "human reality," but it constitutes a shift of discourse that doubles Sartre's text. First, he is speaking in general of human reality, the for-itself, Man, the conceptual dimension for which freedom is the inarticulable; he then shifts to a "we" who are narrativized, concretized in this "end" in its futility. "We" are both included in Sartre's generalization, and excluded in being told "we" cannot do what it is this inclusion requires to be done. Is Sartre's own metamorphosis from "it" to "we" fortuitous, or does it represent a prior intraphoric structure? For Sartre, the for-itself, in its being, is "made to be" in relation to its object (being-in-itself), which is in turn nihilated by the for-itself. That is, the for-itself is what it is not, and not what it is. Being-for-itself is itself in skew with itself incommensurably; Sartre's "we" is only a narrativized case of this structure. Human reality in its conceptuality is intraphoric; "in its project" it is not a unity, but a vain attempt to "appropriate the world as a totality." What, for Derrida, "goes without saying," that the "unity of human reality" can be realized, is precisely what is not said. Instead, each subjectivity approaches itself anew and as different. Sartre indicates that the for-itself is not generalizable as such by embedding his discourse of subjectivity in narrativities which preserve the specificity and individuatedness of each subjectivity. <<29>> The for-itself in skew with itself, as an intraphor, is a confluence of the general and the narrative, the "made to be" and the rediscovered, the indeterminate and the non-general.

But then, so is Sartre's reference to "god." Derrida assumes only a generality for "god" when he claims, for Sartre, that "human-reality is a failed god" (M,116n). But Sartre's claim is not that "synthetic unity (human reality) is determined as lack ... (of god)", (M,116n) but that "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.

In this sense, Derrida misreads Sartre's formal use of the term "god," as he misreads Sartre's allusive "use" of god. There are two kinds of god for Sartre. (BN,284) The first, which metaphysics and its allegories speak about, is always a character in a narrative, for which Man is the form and the idea of god the content. "Metaphysics" totalizes such a god by rendering the story a conceptual 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, of the unknowable behind a readable world. It answers an unaskable question (though the question gets asked anyway). The question in turn produces this god, for which the inarticulable totality is the form and "man" (the one who asks) is the content.

Sartre doesn't name a god as totality. The Sartrean project names a god to metaphorize the for-itself's quest for freedom as an in-itself, as totality or world; this is the obsession Sartre calls the for-itself-in-itself -- the "useless" attempt ("Man is a useless passion") to enter and appropriate the inarticulable. This inarticulable would be the mystical god if it were not the ontological core of subjectivity. But as the intraphoric core of subjectivity, it is also self-referential. Thus, it is homological to the Derridean point of (inarticulable) self-referentiality, which stands beyond meaning as the anteriority of language, rather than as a oneness itself anterior to language. In effect, Sartre's text of subjectivity evades universal oneness both through its narrativity and through its homology to the Derridean anteriority of language. When Derrida posits a metaphysical unity of Man with God for Sartre's text, he conjoins man with a narrative god, one for which a collective and reified story is implicit. He thus confuses it with the inarticulable god of the for-itself's desire for self-totalization. In confusing these two incommensurate senses of god, Derrida is also neglecting Sartre's intraphoric use of the term "god," as well as his "ontological difference," the difference between freedom and project, between ontological and situational freedom.

And the critique of Derrida that is implicit in this defense of Sartre is that though Derrida insists on the internal difference, the intraphoric form for the "we", and the "human," he does not extend this to the operation of the signifier "god" in Sartre's text. But if only certain signifiers are going to be extended the possibility of intraphoric form, then they will become transcendent signifiers, whose form itself achieves transcendent signification, imparting to them a doctrinal content whose form would be a metaphysical foundation.

Conclusion: the Structures of Ethnocentrism

Out of the misreadings and rewritings expressing the incommensurabilities of these texts, a system of homologous circularities and corresponding inarticulables has emerged. Though the motif of the homology is the ontological difference, in its guises as Being and beings, writing in general and writing, ontological and situational freedom (which can now be seen as the intraphors of the near and the far, the "always already," and the for-itself that is what it is not and not what it is), they have been brought into textual rather than philosophical confrontation. Yet inseparably so, in that they also arrange themselves in a circle. For Sartre, meaning produces writing as its being; for Derrida, writing produces being as its meaning; for Heidegger, being produces meaning as its advent or expression, as its writing.

In structuring this inseparability, the circle attaches meaning to itself. As a circle, it becomes an icon for a Derridean mediation, for the interior difference of the intraphor; in its circularity, it becomes an icon for the Sartrean absence of an absolute as the only absolute, the endlessness of universality and its absence becoming each other; and in its spatiality, it becomes an icon for the (Heideggerian) "ontological difference" between the circle's triad of elements and the inarticulable at its center. Thus, as a whole, the circle signifies the inarticulable, and its form becomes a sign for that center. It does not represent a dialogue or a co-existence of these three but a mutual involvement that preserves their difference.

But what of their comportment toward each other in this proximity? Does it perhaps provide the scene of an ethics of the inarticulable? Does the circle reveal a limit for the space of misreading?

The inarticulable -- a signified without a signifier that can only be discerned in the guise of intimations, or in the disguise of implications -- exudes a certain inviolability, an implicit desire that its inarticulability remain inviolate. 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 ground the subject in a plural context. For him, each subject, through its project, points to a particular context through which it makes itself the project or subject that it is. Heidegger does not want to violate the absoluteness of Being; he would have to do so to recognize Sartre's ontological distinction between freedom and the project, since that would imply recognizing a plurality of inarticulables. For him, ontic beings point only to a oneness of inarticulable Being, the trace of which presents itself as beings, and indeed as projects. Derrida does not wish to violate the absoluteness of a sign structure's self-referential singularities, of writing in general; he would have to do so to recognize a non-Heideggerian, non-transcendent inarticulable in Sartre's text, since that would affirm a plurality of anteriorities, beyond language as anteriority itself. For him, the extended notion of text still points to itself as writing, as a system of signs, in which a particular structure of differences, sometimes discernible as textual form, constitutes it as the writing that it is.

In short, each thinker produces the context required to preserve the particular inarticulable that renders it the text and context that it is. In so doing, each grants that inarticulable a mode of "philosophical sacredness," the reading of which produces a taboo articulation within the space it empowers. The circle of readings, however, reveals that each reading emerges from a different space, and empowers the reading of a different "sacred" inarticulable. That is, the homologic relation across this differential "sacredness" provides them with a formal commensurability. At the same time, the common desire to preserve inviolability produces a blindness to that commonality of alternate homologic spaces. Blindness excludes, and exclusion represents an exclusiveness. It is only the completed circle of interwoven "misreadings" that becomes what "sees" plurality, and includes. To sunder the circle again would leave each to its "sacred" isolation. But as a weave of individual inviolabilities, of differing philosophical "sacredness," this circle of texts becomes non-impositional because its modes of imposition of the "I" and "we" are divided against themselves and interwoven in the operation of circularity. It presents itself as a graphic illustration of a non-impositional "we."

And this returns us to the question of ethnocentrism. When Derrida counterposes Heidegger to Sartre to elicit a difference in the philosophical "we", he reveals a difference in ethnocentrism itself. Though Heidegger refuses Sartre's "we", he simultaneously exiles Sartre to a "they" of metaphysicians, of those excluded by their refusal of the inarticulability of Being. Both are political operations. One marks the ethnocentrism of inclusion in a "we" that is not one's own, and the second reflects the structure of a chauvinist act. Ethnocentrism is a blindness to the violation of identity produced by inclusion, and chauvinism is a violation by identity avowing itself through exclusion. Though incommensurable, both relations become mediated by the circle that weaves each in with the other.

In Sartre's text, where the "we" is shown to impose in the name of a universal, the "I" fills a space between the indeterminate and the narrative, and points to the inarticulable as freedom. In Heidegger's text, where the "we" is shown to include the space between the inarticulable and the discursive, the "I" imposes in the name of a language that points to the Heideggerian unspoken. In generating forms of imposition, both rely on a relation to their own inarticulable, and thus on an ethics of inviolability. But their incommensurability, as well as their respective impositions, requires a sundered circle. Non-mediation is the condition for pretending to see through a universalization to an ineluctable (humanist) inclusion, or a de-humanizing exclusion that pretends to see beyond universals.

Derrida had forewarned of these structures in his own text. In "The Ends of Man," he offers two deconstructions of western metaphysics, and two possible mediations back to the circle. The first deconstruction is the project of using the language of the metaphysical edifice against itself from within, which risks reconfirming and deepening that very language in its own definitudes and rationalisms, without overcoming the violence (as colonialism and "law and order," for instance) that these entail toward others. The second attempts to break out of that edifice, to engender a differentiation that would oppose it from an elsewhere. It, in turn, risks reconstructing a similar edifice on similar though displaced ground. Heidegger enacts the trap implicit in the first deconstruction, falling prey to the chauvinist impulse of renewed exclusions, the impossible condition that the other "speak like me" while remaining irremediably other. Sartre enacts the trap implicit in the second deconstruction, falling prey to a reabsorption of difference, blind to the imposition in a universal absence of universal. Derrida himself sees no structural alternative to these risks, and the traps of chauvinist and ethnocentric imposition they entail.

Does the circle, as a sign, point to an alternative? That is, is it potentially a political sign? On the one hand, the chauvinist injunction is to sunder the circle to generate or preserve identity for which others are objects, while the ethnocentric injuction is to break the circle in order to render identity an object. The sundering of this circle throws each text back upon its interior circle, the circle of its particular inarticulable by which a homology had been constituted in the first place, but which was itself the insulary sign of its incommensurability with its Other. On the other hand, because the "external" circle preserves inarticulability, its circularity conjoins identity and non-identity in a manner that is non-impositional. In mediating the incommensurabilities, it defuses the two ethnocentric operations by re-immersing them in the other imposed upon.

This process is exemplified by white identity in the US. Whiteness defines itself through another it defines as non-white, and by determining who the other must be and cannot be. This may emerge from diverse colonialist origins, such as the Puritan millenial approach (that saw the New World as "virgin" territory) or the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. But white identity can be defined as white only through defining an other as non-white, and one defines another as non-white in order to define oneself as white.

To invent an identity through something other than one's past, one's being in the world, or one's own activity, necessitates an Other through whom to provide the terms of that invention. One "others" the other to be the core of that construction, and one accomplishes this through a generalization of that "Other" as an "out-group," which functions thenceforth as a trace for the sign of identity. That is, the other is defined as the other with respect to "which" one defines oneself, as a group process. Thus, while the other becomes a sign absorbed into the core of group identity, one's individual identity then centers itself there in the other, as its sign. The Other becomes the language by which an identity constituted on that other speaks to itself, and to others of its group -- a sign system by which whites speak to each other as whites.

Regardless of the form of conquest, exploitation, or oppression generated by or generating this structure, the white finds the center of its identity, as identification, elsewhere in the other, rather than in itself. This is not only the source of the stupifying effect of racism on the white mind, its inability to know who it is, because it only mediates between its whiteness as content in the form of the other and its form as racism that constitutes the content of conquest, both of which are elsewhere than identity; but it reveals the source of the ineluctable violence without which racism cannot survive, in white obsession with the other as both nemesis and self. White identity must center itself in the other, and evict that other from that center in order to be itself.

The signs of "white" and "non-white" (designated "black" or other) are social designations, icons that have nothing to do with the spectrum of human hues, but with hierarchy, social being and language, the absorptions and exclusions that structure that hierarchy, under the aegis of iconized words for color. Color, in its iconicity, becomes a sign system, invented by designated "whites," in the name of which others, designated non-whites, or designated black, are subjugated.

In effect, racism is the form for which being white is the content; one's being as white is the form for which white identity is the content; and white identity is the form for which racism is the content.

This triadic circle does not present an alternative to chauvinism, because it is only a form. It suggests the possibility of an arena of alternative in which difference and the inarticulable can be respected. And neither is the circle programmatic with respect to opposition to chauvinism or ethnocentrism; what it provides is a possible insight into their structure. If the circle is not programmatic, it is nevertheless not the silencing of the inarticulable. It is not silence that resides within the inarticulable, but the efflorescence of language in its ability to transcend the a priori, the univocal, the universal, an efflorescence that is continually reaffirmed in the exorbitant styles by which these three thinkers couched the forms of their thinking.

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FOOTNOTES

1 -- Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man", in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chi. Press, 1982). Hereafter cited in the text as M.

2 - One issue Derrida mentions is Corbin's translation of Heidegger, in which "Dasein" is rendered "la realit humaine" (human reality), imbuing it with an humanist abstractness Heidegger did not intend. Derrida argues that Sartre, in accepting Corbin's translation, valorized it through his own prestige.

3 - Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism", Basic Writings. Hereafter referred to in the text as LH.

4 - On this question, see Denis Hollier, La Politique de la Prose, 1982; Hollier recounts the general atmosphere in French philosophy in the early 1980s, when it had become difficult to discuss Sartre. Two instances of a silent critique of Sartre are Roland Barthes's essay, "Writing Degree Zero," which confronts Sartre without addressing him; and Michel Foucault's book, The Archeology of Knowledge, in which he theorizes the discursive frame of historical consciousness without the phenomenological subject.

5 - Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philo. Library, 1957), p. 13. Hereafter referred to in the text as EH.

6 - The term "Man" is used by Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida in their own texts to refer to humanity in general. This traditional usage is a rationalism that is both chauvinist and inseparable from metaphysical humanism. It needs to be dealt with as such. Where appropriate, I will put the term "man" in quotes, when discussing or critiquing these texts. It will not be used by me when presenting my own ideas. To have attempted to find a non-sexist term for humanity with respect to these texts would have been to ignore that tradition by rewriting it, and thus not to deal with it even in the tangential manner done here.

7 -- 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 to discern some of the structure of their interrelation.

8 -- See Caputo, John D., The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Oberlin:1978), for a discussion of Heidegger's notion of gelassenheit.

9 - Heidegger; Being and Time, p. 28. Hereafter BT.

10 -- Heidegger continues; "The meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way. As we have intimated, we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us toward its conception. We do not know what "Being" means. But even if we ask, "What is 'Being'"?, we keep within the understanding of the "is," though we are unable to fix conceptually what that "is" signifies." (BT,25)

11 - A phenomenological version of this circle would read: 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.

12 - I introduce the double articulation (his/her) at this point specifically because an argument can be made that Sartre's notion of the subject and its "making itself" is not gender neutral. I will only point out this question, as a discussion of it, though relevant, would go beyond the space this article has already exceeded. But the fact that such a question can easily be raised concerning Sartre's thought, and less easily concerning Heidegger's, is not a testimony to Heidegger having transcended the gender hierarchy, but to the greater worldliness of Sartre's thinking.

13 - Jameson, Frederic; Sartre: The Origins of a Style, (New Haven: Yale, 1961), p. 114-6. Jameson 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, 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. Heidegger both absorbs and excludes the Other. See also Schroeder, Sartre and his Predecessors p. 130-173. He offers an interesting discussion of this issue from both sides.

14 - Dominick LaCapra, A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, l978), p. 51-2. See, also, Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego; trans. Forrest Williams (New York: Noonday Press, 1957).

15 - Jameson (op.cit.), p. 183, discusses ways in which Sartre uses traditional terminology for other purposes. See also, Sartre's discussion in "Cartesian Freedom", in Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier, 1970).

16 - Ironically, Heidegger warns of inevitable misinterpretations of his own writing (LH,225-6). In misinterpreting Sartre on the issue of terminology, he has done the same. Heidegger does not say that the question of Being precedes anything, but rather that it is more fundamental, and that ontology is blind until it has "clarified the meaning of Being ... as its fundamental task." (BT,31) He thus calls to "man" to return to Being as Sartre calls for a return to freedom's responsibility.

But we can ask, is such a thing as a misreading? Differing readings emerge because the polyvalence of signs make alternative readings possible. Any reading, in striving for its own coherence of organization or thematic, will appear to have "misread" from the point of view of any other reading with a variant coherence. There are nothing but "misreadings" because all other readings are "other" readings. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Jonhs Hopkins, 1976), p. 158. In fact, rereading a text a second time is a case in point. A second reading is always different from the first because one "knows the ending." The first and second readings are each misreadings in terms of the other. If a reading is always a "misreading," then there can be no "misreading," since there is no non-misreading from which to judge it as such. Cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z.

17 - And we might note that this gives a different aura to Heidegger's disclaimer about the German language in his discussion of Holderlin. For Holderlin, German is to be understood as the world-historical language. Heidegger argues that Holderlin is not being nationalistic, but seeing the German language in its "nearness to the source" of Being, as destinal rather than regional. (LH,218) But we now see that there are more than ways than the regional to be chauvinist with respect to language.

18 - Though Heidegger argues with this statement in LH, his argument is gratuitous. He would change it to "we are on a plane where there is principally Being." But he argues that "plane" and Being are the same thing, and his sentence crumbles to "we are" and "Being" -- or "in our Being, we are what there principally is." In effect, his dispute with Sartre on this idea devolves to the issue of including beings; in other words, it is difference concerning objectivity.

19 - The correspondance of Being and Being-in-itself has been generally assumed. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, makes extensive use of this corresponance. And Ronald Aronson, Philosophy in the World (London: NLB, 1980), refers to it without reference or comment.

20 - Cf. for instance, Wilfred Desan, The Tragic Finale (New York: Harper,1957); and Aronson, Philosophy in the World, p. 92. Two notable attempts to resolve this question are Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago Univ. Press, 1984); and David Detmer, Freedom as a Value (LaSalle: Open Court Press, 1986).

21 - Sartre clearly differentiates "human reality" from Dasein in Being and Nothingness, speaking of both Dasein and "human reality" in quite different terms. For instance, Sartre recognizes that Heidegger presents Dasein in a wholly positive mode, (BN,18/54) while human reality is an emergence of a being from non-being; human reality emerges in nothingness. Dasein can find itself face-to-face with nothingness, (BN,17/53) but human reality establishes itself in nothingness. (BN,18/54) Sartre argues that Heidegger's account of Dasein has "deprived it of the dimension of consciousness," (BN,73/115) while for Sartre human reality is consciousness. Indeed, in Sartre's first mention of the term "human reality," which is in association with Heidegger, he places it in quotes, indicating that with respect to Heidegger, it comes from elsewhere (BN,xlviii/15); and his contiguous use of both terms indicates that he is preserving Dasein as an element of the Heideggerian discourse, while reserving "human reality" for his own. In general, for Sartre, Dasein is an empoverished notion. Thus, "human reality" does not translate but at best transforms Dasein.

22 - A case in point is Sartre's attack on anti-semitism. Sartre argues, in "Anti-Semite and Jew," that the choice to acquiesce or rebel against anti-semitism is never simple, nor absent. But Elizabeth Grosz, in a talk on Jewish exile and marginalization (UCSC, 1989) points out that Sartre understands the Jew as created by the anti-semite, and as one who seeks to assimilate through emphasizing the universal; but, she adds, he leaves out the positive existence of Judaism itself for Jews, and objectifies them in their situation, as only effects of antisemitism. But for Sartre, to say that the Jew is created by the antisemite is only to say that the Jew is a person in the situation of an antisemitic society, given and given to him/herself by that society. Also, the Jew does not create that person in that situation because the Jew does not participate in creating that situation. Grosz herself says that otherness cannot be self-chosen because it is always the result of a power relation. On Grosz's second point, Sartre is speaking of the "inauthentic Jew," the person who accepts the antisemitic characterizations, and humanistically seeks to universalize himself in order to escape them. For Sartre, both the authentic and inauthentic are in relation to antisemitism, for that is where the relevance of the question arises -- and thus is neither objective nor subjective. A person's relation to Judaism is relevant to the choice of authenticity or inauthenticity, which Sartre merely says each Jew confronts. It is the choice Derrida confronted as a philosopher (and as an ethical being) in critically addressing the ethnocentric universalization of the philosophical colloquium at which he spoke.

23 - Victor Farias, Heidegger and the Nazis. Cf. Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger and the Nazis," in New York Review of Books, 16 June 1988: a review of Farias' book. See also, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, eds. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon, 1990), for an overview of the issue.

24 - Derrida, Of Grammatology. In a sense, the whole book is a development of precisely this notion. See in particular p. 44-65.

25 - There are commentators who would argue that Heidegger would object to this use of the terms "form and content" with respect to his text. And it is true that for Heidegger, "form and content" reflect a duality that has since Plato been at the core of metaphysics. For Heidegger, in general, the notions of form and content represent a false separation between subject and object (cf. chap. 1, note 28). He argues, in "The Thing" (in Poetry Language Thought), that such a metaphysical approach to an object treats only with what the thing is, rather than what it does, or what it bears upon, or what it is concerned with. It signifies an object "without reference to the human act of representing it." (p. 177) Instead, form should be already understood as its content, beyond which the object becomes presence and instrumentality.

But in the "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger says: "Die Ek-sistenz, ekstatisch gedacht, deckt sich weder inhaltlich noch der Form nach mit der existentia" (Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 158). The translation (by Frank Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray) is: "Ek-sistence, thought in terms of ecstasis, does not coincide with existentia in either form or content." (LH,206) The German word Form refers to shape, appearance, or outward presentation; and inhalt signifies content in the sense of subject matter, the addressed rather than the contained; it is the term for Table of Contents. "Form" can be recast as location or structure, and the meaning that structure gives to what it is "about," to what it concerns or to what concerns itself with it. Heidegger thus suggests that neither form nor content is alien to the ek-sistentiality of Man. This is especially germane here; it is not an ontological but a semiotic relation that is in question.

26 - Cf. Alan Bass; note 23, in Margins, p. 20. This is a notion that Derrida posits in the form of an economy (oikos, home, residence), differing between a metaphysical economy and a general economy, where economy is a metaphor for the profitable (fertile) or for profiteering without substantial investment. (WD,251ff) In metaphysics, or a "restricted economy" of speculation, there is nothing that cannot be made to make sense (cents, percentage, profit), in the sense of getting something for nothing out of a discursive structure. For Derrida, this is the ultimate acheivement of reason. Beyond its limit, in a general economy which affirms that which exceeds meaning, there is a realm where there can be no speculative profit to be gained. Passing to that economy, through exceeding meaning, and refusing speculation, is Derrida's goal, or the tenor of the deconstructive, toward which Heidegger's inquiry took the first steps.

27 - Derrida, Of Grammatology, Chap. 2.

28 - Derrida speaks of the middle voice with respect to differance. In contemporary discourse, the middle voice would present itself as an allo-logic rather than a grammatical category. Derrida mentions that differance functions in this manner.

In the middle voice, the agent is both actor and acted upon, act and enacted, subject and object of an action at once. A power or dynamic other than the subject's own autonomy or intention is at work on the subject while at the same time "performed" by that subject. The active voice says the subject effects something; the passive voice says the subject is effected by something. The middle voice is not between these, but a relation in which they are in skew. In a more Sartrean vein, one might understand a middle-voiced act or agent as the space of an act that the agent performs, for which the action performed constitutes the way the agent lives that moment or space. The agent acts and the act agents (as a verb; in the same sense that the world worlds, in Heidegger).

For Derrida, because the "always already" does two things at once, bespeaking an internal difference, it pertains to such a "middle voice."

29 - A noteworthy dimension of Sartre's approach in his ontological writing is his continual deployment of narrative beyond the merely exemplary. Narrativity plays the role of preserving the particularity of the subject within a generalizing exposition. Sartre explains, in an interview with Alain Koehler, that philosophy misses the singular, what transpires for or happens to the individual. Narrative remedies this by reasserting the specificity of the subject, and complements it at the same time by signifying that what is generalizable is precisely the necessity to preserve specificity. Thus, Sartre turns to narrative (drama and fiction) to resolve or investigate questions that cannot be explored at the level of philosophical generality. Cf. Alain Koehler, in Perspectives du Theatre, no. 3 (March 1960): p. 18-23; and no. 4 (April 1960): p. 5-9.

In "The Itinerary of a Thought," in Between Existentialism and Marxism; p.49): Sartre says:

See also, "The Purposes of Writing," in the same volume.