Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than
Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida's
first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and
1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of
the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and
his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight
into the gestation of some of Derrida's primary conceptual
concerns--indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation,
the word "deconstruction"--but an analysis of Being and Time that is
of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in
modern philosophy.
Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult
text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a
lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger's prose. At this time in
intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French
readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into
French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own
reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential
reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on
Heidegger's Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into
"solicitation" and "deconstruction") of the history of ontology, and
indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a
rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and
developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in
Heidegger's thinking.
This is a rare window onto Derrida's formative years, and in it we can
already see the philosopher we've come to recognize--one characterized
by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are
particularly and singularly his.
