I

American criticism has come to Heidegger, or he to it, very late, and for the most part by indirection. The detour produces a certain, inevitable distortion, like the itinerary of a translation, though it may be no more than the inevitable misinterpretation already posited in the Heideggerean hermeneutic. On the other hand, this lateness circumvents not a few historical distractions. While our philosophers have had to confront the politics as well as the “language” of Heidegger, literary criticism has been able to ignore the kind of resistances which, according to Jacques Derrida, mark in one way or another almost every “reading” of Heidegger in Europe — the political resistances which conceal deeper resistances, and reciprocally. Derrida remarks in various places upon the apparent obligation to begin a consideration of Heidegger with a kind of apologetics for the political and/or ideological contaminations that threaten his readers. We have been spared this for the most part, only perhaps because we have been spared a direct Heideggereanism.

But we have not been spared the problems of a certain historical seam-liness. What historians of modern thought have come to distinguish as two Heideggers (the existentialist-phenomenologist destroyer of metaphysics; and the celebrant of poetic “dwelling”), we have received in a more or less single package of transcriptions which tend to suppress the difference, or at least to remove it as a primary concern for literary criticism. Beyond that question, however, another one arises. Presuming two Heideggers, even if one is continuous with the other, do the two lend themselves to a unified hermeneutical method? It is not my concern here to take up the question of this historical placing of an early and late Heidegger, and certainly not to consider the sameness and difference in any “evolution” of his thought.

The task here is much more modest — to remark the “place” of Heidegger in certain “projects” of literary criticism. But for this purpose, one cannot ignore that the commercial (Heidegger might say, technological) chance of his translation into English texts has provided his thought with a kind of interpretive framing — the appearance in the early fifties of parts of the Hölderlin book, combined with the more recent translations of Heidegger on language and poesis, bookending the earliest and basic text, Being and Time. Setting this historical dislocation aside, there is the other fact that whatever impact Heidegger has had on literary criticism comes not so much directly from his own critical writings, via comparatist critics alert to the intellectual dialogue in Europe, as by another indirection: the absorption of the Heideggerean hermeneutic into various European criticisms, from existentialism to the “criticism of consciousness” to structuralism. In particular, one would have to say that the so-called Geneva School, which has had an indelible impact on American criticism, again by a certain indirection, is situated in a critique of “consciousness” and “place” which is at the same time undergirded and undermined by Heidegger’s early writing. But at the very moment that a “criticism of consciousness,” with its phenomenological orientation, had begun to offer a fruitful alternative to American formalist and thematic criticism, another kind of formalism known as structuralism and directed explicitly at the “ground” of phenomenology, the priority of consciousness, had begun to be translated into a variety of American methodologies.

What has been missing from the American debate, however, except in the work of a few critics with deep continental roots, is the considerable history of hermeneutical thinking which has crisscrossed Europe in the last hundred years. At the center of that thinking has been the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, but no less the retrieval and reinterpretation of Hegelian and Nietzschean thought, the appropriation of psychoanalysis by philosophy, and the centering of criticism on the problematics of language opened up by the new linguistics. The history is familiar enough in its broader outlines, though for the most part the American critic’s awareness of the dialogue between phenomenology and structuralism has been so foreshortened (condensed largely within the past decade) that the intellectual consequences of the confrontation have been repressed. The dialogue has come so late to the American academy that, with certain powerful exceptions, we find ourselves in a “post-structuralist” period without having suffered the rites of initiation into that which it has displaced. This can lead to superficial jokes about the abbreviated half-life of the Parisian element of ideas. It is disconcerting, after all, to be reminded that within a singular deployment of a hermeneutical method derived in part from Heidegger (and from Nietzsche and Freud), translated as a “destruction,” or more precisely, “deconstruction” of metaphysics, we may find lumped into one grand “metaphysical” heap: not only Platonic idealism and Aristotelian formalism but all of the varieties of subjectivism from Descartes through Hegel and Nietzsche as well, which we recognize in one form or other of romanticism or dialectical thought; not to say phenomenology (which thought to escape the subject-object problem), existentialism, and even structuralism itself; and finally, even the deconstructors themselves (especially Heidegger). In short, all of Western (Heidegger called it onto-theological) thought, including even the thinking of the thinkers who have tried to “overthrow” metaphysics, are combined into a “deconstruction,” as in the Derridean analysis, that only reveals the historical “net” of “white mythology.”

Every “move” of this (non-) history of ideas surpasses and displaces a previous move which it appropriates, surpasses and displaces that which has no history itself, since it is coexistent not only with the history of the West but with the history of history (that is, the history of meaning) itself. In a succession of “moves” that now reveal something more like a game of chess (Derrida says, somewhere, played upon a multi-leveled board without bottom) than an advance, we experience the foreshortened history of ideas which culminate in a variety of attempts to “close” metaphysics and “overthrow” it, appropriate it, or, more radically, step outside it: Nietzsche’s naming of Hegel as the end of metaphysics; Husserl’s dream to write its closure; Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s will to power as the ultimate subjectivism; and the revival of the Nietzschean question of interpretation in the recent work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and, in a certain “advanced” sense, Jacques Derrida. Derrida, in fact, in an essay entitled “Les Fins de l’homme,” calls this latest overthrow by the name of “France” or “French thought” (in contrast, obviously, to the closures of German thought, particularly Heidegger’s).¹ Have we, in and through these names, arrived at the “end of philosophy” which Heidegger long since announced as Nietzsche’s capital achievement? arrived there by the disruption achieved in the Derridean deconstruction of Heidegger’s destruction? The question, which could be made portentous, is obviously beyond our asking here. But a more modest question can be posed. Translated over into a more limited field, what does this “deconstruction of metaphysics,” or what does deconstruction as a method, portend for literary criticism which in one way or another has to embrace all the assumptions of an “aesthetic” that is part and parcel metaphysical, an aesthetic which assumes the indissoluble relation between poetry and truth, and thus privileges form, consciousness, and even “poetic language” itself? In one way or another, as Derrida has indicated in a series of essays,² literature is considered a metaphor (for) (of) truth, of meaning or sense, or is inflated into the kerygmatic utterance of the single “word” which all metaphysical thinking in one way or the other pursues as its lost origin.

Geoffrey Hartman has recently posed the desperate question (or is it a plea?) for the humanist “crisis” of our time: “Is it too late, or can our age, like every previous one, protect the concept of art?”³ (One deploys “crisis” in quotation marks, mindful of Paul de Man’s alignment of the terms “crisis” and “criticism” as nearly interchangeable.⁴) Art, of course, is a “concept” and as such takes its meaning within the horizon of the very metaphysics which is under attack by those who would save art from metaphysics. The fact that Hartman’s question (rhetorical) is posed most desperately in the face of the “baroquely elaborated asceticism of the School of Derrida” is revealing, for it is a plea (almost certain to have a rippling or doubling effect) to maintain the fiction of “self-presencing” even in the face of a questioning which forces his recognition that the fiction is only itself a simulacrum. Hartman’s plea may sound Heideggerean in urging a return to “wonder” and therefore to an “authentic” art which will preserve us against an inauthentic (ascetic) (deconstructive) thought. And it may well share something with the early Heidegger, though with a difference which is of no point here. Heidegger surely does make a last, late defense of the “concept” of art, displacing as it were the classical conception of representation (which Hartman, following his master Auerbach, has reappropriated) with another (presencing), but in no way moving beyond the implication of art in the concept presence, as Derrida has repeatedly shown. Is Derrida, then, the great disenchanter, who in making a game of the concept has placed the concept hors jeu? that is, declared it offside? Has Derrida’s disruption of the “play of language,” which Heidegger so eloquently proclaims as “bound to the hidden rule”⁵ that commands the reciprocal difference of poetry and thinking and thus governs aletheia — has Derrida’s “play,” by revealing the “hidden rule” as the law of all metaphoricity, destroyed the concept of art and perhaps given us back “literature” (again, in quotation marks)? In a way (not Heideggerean) this essay will concern itself with the different paths broken by this figure of language’s “play” in Heidegger and Derrida, since it is within the parentheses of these names that the future of the metaphor “(poetic) language” (as an illusion?) turns (tropes).

II

Even for the literary critic, the basic Heidegger text remains Being and Time,⁶ appropriately incomplete, almost a pre-text to a writing that would appear in another, fragmentary form, primarily as “lectures” or “essays.” Being and Time is, in a sense, a clearing of obstacles (classical ontology) in a path that will lead “to” language — a methodology which destroys by overcoming, that is, reappropriating. But it has turned up in literary criticism in a number of ways in-different to its methodology: as an existential analytic, as a text of modern “thematics,” with its identification of care, anxiety, fallenness, being-toward-death, being-in-the-world, and so on, the themes, in short, of a phenomenology. Its method, however, has tended to undermine “thematics,” which is always tied to the ontology against which the book was directed. Thus Heidegger begins with a hermeneutic already situated within a “tradition” of conceptualization, and proposes to clear that “history” as a way of gaining “access” to the “primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part genuinely drawn” (BT, 43). His delineation of a method which will “destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology” (BT, 44) proceeds through the matrix of a philosophical metaphoricity which presents itself as a “content.” It is an exercise in language, in “translation,” an etymological un-weaving which finally comes to the point of declaring its own theme as the problematics of “language.” (The English version of the text thus might appear as the translation of a text on translation, a text composed originally in the “possibilities for thought” Heidegger finds inherent in the German language. Heidegger thus employs this “power” to unveil the same originating “spirit” and “power” of the Greek language, long obscured and dulled in the metaphysical translation of pre-Socratic concepts.⁷)

As he protested in later texts, the “destructive” hermeneutic was easily misinterpreted, as a kind of etymological retreat in search of the archaic origin of conceptuality and even for the origin of language (see QB, 93 — where he says that, despite hostile misinterpretations, the “destruction” did not “desire to win back the original experiences of metaphysics...”). The clearing projected a reappropriation, not a philological archaism. The development of what would later become the poetics of Being, of the metaphysical forgetting of Being as the unconcealed, of logos as the reciprocal difference of physis, of the Same that marks the difference between thinking and saying, does seem implicit in the “destruction.” Certainly the figure of “breaking” a “path,” of opening the “way” to language, and therefore of achieving an “authentic” language or “articulating” the “proximity” of Being and being, is anticipated by a destruction which no more advocates a return to some ideal or primordial philosophisizing than it suggests a full recuperation of some lost essence or truth. Heidegger’s early discourse on his method locates his search clearly within the temporal horizon of Dasein, and thus within the “limits” of interpretation.

The “theme” of language emerges rather late in the first section of Being and Time, and then as language in general, or more accurately, as the speech or discourse of “interpretation” through which Dasein discloses itself. The interpretation of Greek ontology uncovers the “definition” of Dasein as that “living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse” (BT, 47). Language as such becomes the relation of the temporal unfolding of the Being of Dasein. Thus when Heidegger finally arrives at language as “theme” (BT, 203), he must preoccupy himself largely with a “destruction” of the concept language as the “deposited” understanding of historical knowledge (Gerede or “idle talk”), but reserves the privileged concept of speech or discourse as the “structure” of Dasein. As Derrida reveals in a “reading” of Heidegger’s famous footnote on time (see BT, 500), this early Heideggerean separation of the authentic and inauthentic, of the primordial and the derivative, of discourse as the structure of the Being of Dasein and “idle talk,” of Verfallen as the passage from one temporality to the other, constitutes a reappropriation of metaphysics: “Is there not at least some Platonism in the notion of Verfallen. . .?”⁸ If the “destruction” suspends nostalgia, as Derrida indicates elsewhere, and repudiates the dream of some recovery of archaic concepts, it produces on the other side of nostalgia the figure of the potential return of presence, a figure that always effaces itself, producing in Heidegger a kind of metaphysical “hope,” the “quest for the proper word and the unique name.”⁹

The “destructive” method of Being and Time employs a hermeneuticaI violence or a systematic interrogation of the onto-theological concepts which reside within and govern the structure of Western thought: particularly the concepts that define the relation between Being and beings. Thus the crucial concept of “time.” This interrogation differs from “understanding,” as Heidegger presents it in Section 32 of Being and Time (pp. 188 ff.), in the sense of a “development” that overthrows the concept understanding. The development is disruptive — a disruption of any significance that may be presumed to inhere in the already interpreted (the present-at-hand), and thus disruptive of the habit of imposing significance upon the present as if that significance were immanent in the thing. Interpretation as reappropriation is grounded in understanding, but always goes beyond it, breaking the interpreted free from its circumspect context of involvements. Interpretation always involves a putting in question, the assumption of a point of view (not in this case subjective); the displacement effected in interpretation is a kind of “articulation,” an assertion that communicates, and thus a “retelling” that is shared with Others (sometimes viewed as a theory of intersubjectivity). Interpretation is therefore grounded in what Heidegger calls “fore-having” (Vorhabe, or “what is before us” or “what we have in advance”), “fore-sight” (Vorsicht, or “what we see in advance”), and “fore-conception” (Vorgriff, or anticipation, “what we grasp in advance”). This Heideggerean foreplay as anticipation disrupts the concept of the a priori. It presents the present-at-hand to be interpreted as the already interpreted, as already appropriated in the structure of discourse that is at the same time originary and fore-structured. Language is always involved in interpretation, in an always incomplete disclosure.

For literary criticism this projection of the “fore-knowledge” may be the literary text itself, as Paul de Man has argued — and thus what de Man interprets as authentic or literary language is that language which has already achieved the highest form of “self-understanding” or the fullest possible interpretation (a kind of totalized understanding).¹⁰ This “text” is situated in a “context,” a language within language, a text which is at the same time concealed and unconcealed, an interpretation demanding interpretation. Every interpretation already presumes a meaning (or “operates in the forestructure,” as Heidegger writes), but more significantly, it presumes a point (a proximity) between the concealed knowledge of the text and that knowledge which interpretation can disclose: “Any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (BT, 194).

Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, however, is not a vicious circle, not closed. It is a circle which in its approximation of closure allows the text to become fully disclosed, though such an ideal disclosure would also lead to a disappearance or effacement of the text as a fore-structure.¹¹ Thus the hermeneutic circle, though inescapable, is liberating. It embraces the limitations of the “existential constitution of Dasein” (BT, 195). “What is decisive,” Heidegger writes, “is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way,” by a deliberate process of determining the fore-structure; for once the circle is defined as the potential for interpretation, we discover that it hides within itself a “positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing” (BT, 195). But as de Man further indicates, the possibility of a full disclosure, or an ideal commentary, is already denied. Interpretation bears within its structure an always deferred end.

At the point in Being and Time where assertion as predication and communication become the way of “methodological foresight,” Heidegger introduces language as his “theme for the first time” (BT, 203), language “which already hides in itself a developed way of conceiving” (BT, 199). Language here is the structure of Dasein, and not yet, as it will become, the “house of Being,” poetic language. But even here, language as discourse is identified with the presencing of speech and not the secondariness of writing: “The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk” (BT, 203). Talk as communication is always about something, but this something is not simply a thing explained or defined: “What the discourse is about is a structural item that it necessarily possesses, and its own structure is modelled upon this basic state of Dasein” (BT, 205). Language is the structure of Man.¹² (At this point in the text, page 202, Heidegger projects the full development of the question of Being in a later section, which he did not write, except in the sense of the later fragments, essays, lectures on language as the “house of Being.”) But language is not the ontological structure of man as subject. As Heidegger indicates in the “Letter on Humanism,” the “proximity” of man and language confirms the proximity (nearness) of man and Being, not in the sense of two existences but in the sense of their sharing the same structure of presencing. In Being and Time, however, the particular nature of poetic language is defined as a very special form of communication: “In ‘poetical’ discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one’s state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence” (BT, 205).

The seeds of a phenomenological poetics lies within this kind of “possibility,” though “state-of-mind” here is not pure consciousness or cogito, but a consciousness of consciousness, an interpretation of consciousness as projected in the structure of language. In the later Heidegger, poetry will become the purest mode of interpretation of poetry because as the primal form of discourse or talk it is a disclosure of the “structural item that it necessarily possesses.” The destruction of metaphysics, then, clears the way for the later meditations on the “way to language,” by a discourse that reveals the structure hidden within “idle talk” or received historical understanding. As a method, the “destruction” can only be the reverse form of the later interpretation of poetry or “authentic” language, since as an interpretation of the “inauthentic” it is an interpretation of the world as “text,” as fallenness, the “world” as already interpreted. The destruction makes way for “thinking,” and for a kind of interpretative commentary which is reciprocal with the “saying” of poetry, with poetry as originary naming.

It is the status of the “language of Being,” or language which situates the “nearness” of man and Being, that has been the object of Derrida’s most severe questioning. (As he puts it in “Les Fins de l’homme,” this “proximity” does not mark the relation between two ontological beings but between the “sense” of being and the “sense” of man — a kind of security that today is being displaced by a thinking that announces the “end of man” to be implicit in the language of Being.¹³) And ironically, as Heidegger has moved more and more toward the prophetic and oracular celebration of a “poetic” language as the “house of Being,” and man as the “shepherd of Being,” Dasein has tended to be displaced, and with “him” the structural model of discourse as “communication.” Heidegger’s later method, fully embracing poetic language as originary speech, has become increasingly less useful for literary criticism. Paul de Man, for example, has been one of the subtlest interpreters of Heideggerean hermeneutics for American criticism, arguing for the privilege, the “authenticity,” of “poetic language.”¹⁴ But he stops short of embracing the “prophetic poeticism” of the later Heidegger.¹⁵ Instead, he begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of the “positive possibility for the most primordial kind of knowledge,” which is hidden within language, and derives from it a view of the irreducible doubleness of “literary language” which he can accommodate to even the most severe post-structuralist critiques of Heidegger.

De Man’s interpretation of “literary language” as that which forever names the void lying between sign and meaning derives from Heidegger’s non-expressive view of a discourse that names the “existential possibilities of one’s state of mind,” in the sense that it always names the difference of understanding, of mediation. Thus literature, for de Man, always names itself as “fiction.” It is the fore-knowledge of our understanding of the special nature of language. For de Man as for Heidegger, literary language is never self-deceived about the problematic that opens between the word and the thing; though unlike Heidegger, de Man will not pre-figure what literary language does name, the void, as the site of an emerging “truth.” De Man is a negative Heideggerean, like Maurice Blanchot. The privileging of literary language for de Man is not derived from its power of unconcealing but lies in its resistance to self-mystification, its refusal to name presence and its repeated naming of distance that is “nothing.” (Perhaps de Man’s use of “literary” language rather than “poetic” language is one evidence of this difference; he comes close to identifying literature with Derrida’s rhetoric or grammatology rather than with Heidegger’s presencing speech.¹⁶) For de Man there is the “void” rather than “proximity” or the “site.” The “authenticity” of literary language lies in its persistent naming of itself as “fiction,” and thus of its unique double function as the origin of the “self” and the naming of the self’s nothingness, the naming of the “subject” as a necessary function.

III

De Man, then, begins as a “critic of consciousness” intent on putting that criticism within definite parentheses, marking the limits which govern the strengths (the blindness and insight) of the phenomenological critique. For de Man there can be an authentic criticism as well as an authentic literature, so long as that criticism is oriented toward the literary text as a kind of foreknowledge, as a totalized understanding of the absolute fissure between language and what it is presumed to name or to disclose. Inauthentic criticism, on the other hand, idealizes or mystifies poetry. And Heidegger’s late “prophetic poeticism” is for him a form of this self-mystification.

De Man’s reappropriation of Heidegger is not offered here simply as one form of American mistranslation, but because it points up some of the possible directions criticism takes from Heidegger’s overthrowing of metaphysics. But de Man’s interpretation of “literary” language as authentic does not derive solely from Being and Time; it comes as much by way of some intermediary texts. Both Blanchot’s hermeneutics and de Man’s move by way of the insertion of the “nothing” into the Heideggerean critique, the “nothing” of “What Is Metaphysics?” which is conceived as the “pure ‘Other’” and as the “veil of Being.” Heidegger’s own philosophical “turn” (Kehre) from language as the structure of Dasein to language as the “house of Being” depends on his thinking of the abyss and thus on the thinking of “nothing” as a productive principle.

The consequences of this for his thinking of the nature of language is revealed in another early lecture, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (first read in 1935),¹⁷ a deconstruction of the concept aesthetics as it is implicated in classical ontology. Though a bridge to the later thinking of poetry as the presencing of presence, the essay has not yet adopted the full-throated kerygmatic tones of the later meditations, perhaps because the essay’s concern is as much with the “work” as “thing” as with the problem of origins. Still, Heidegger’s ultimate concern is with art as truth (aletheia). Therefore, the opening of Being through language, while set against the metaphysical concept of the “subject” as origin and so against all theories of art as expression or representation, is presented as a metaphorical “rift.” This is not the basic dualism of a subject become exterior, or an idea fallen into form, but the double nature of unconcealedness. Metaphorically, Heidegger presents this rift as between “earth” and “world,” between the closed and the open, opposites always in conflict, reciprocal differences: “Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-uncovered, the un-covered, in the sense of concealment. In unconcealedness, as truth, there occurs also the other ‘un-’ of a double restraint or refusal. Truth occurs as such in the opposition of clearing and double concealing” (PLT, 60). One recalls the figural “place” of the poet in the Hölderlin essays, situated in the “time” of the “double-Not” (need) of the old gods who have disappeared and the new ones who have “not yet” come.

The “rift” is a “between” that is a “measure.” The conflictual situation of “earth” and “world,” which seems to anticipate the later redefinitions of physis and logos in An Introduction to Metaphysics and elsewhere, is a “figural” place — the place as figure, the figure as place. “Createdness of the work means: truth’s being fixed in place of the figure. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself” (PLT, 64). In the later essays, this place of poetry’s opening will be presented figurally (as the “house of Being” or “bourne of Being,” etc.), but a figure that is already doubly effaced and rendered as the Being of language (beyond metaphor). In this essay, the figure is double-faced, a Gestalt, a form of writing. Thus Heidegger opens up the possibility of a “figural” analysis of the kind proposed by de Man, in which the “rift” of the figure is the nothing it names, the distance between sign and meaning. But in Heidegger the figure is the “appearance,” as opposed to the “expression,” of truth. Language now appears as something other than the vehicle of communication: “language is not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what is to be communicated. It not only puts forth in words and statements what is overtly or covertly intended to be communicated; language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time” (PLT, 73). Thus the reification of poetry as “inaugural naming.”

In the same gesture, language for Heidegger is turned into a figure for some primal signification: “Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy” (PLT, 74); that is, poetry is the secondary sign, words, in which a primary language, poesy, takes its place. The primal is not the primitive but the originating. Art is historical for Heidegger in the sense that it reinvents the beginning of history as an opening. It is an appropriation and an overthrowing of the historical, and thus an original beginning (origin as Ursprung or “primal leap”). Poetic language overthrows “actual language,” of which it is the origin; yet in its appearance it doubly effaces itself. Poetic language cannot be analyzed and criticized as a system of signs, but only prompted to bespeak itself. Veiled in a figural shape that has already disrupted the metaphoricity of actual language, it speaks of Being as at once inside and outside of metaphor. It introduces us to a “history” that holds out the hope for some full recovery of presence, as Derrida indicates in “La Différance,” pointing to the evocation of “the first word of Being” in “Der Spruch des Anaximander.” To “find a single word, the unique word,” is the possibility harbored in “every language.”¹⁸

Poetic language, then, portends a text that overthrows its own temporality. (Poetic) language is a metaphor of that which is the “author” of all metaphor, the non-metaphoric Being. It is the “first word” without which the origin of language, Being, could not have its Being. Thus Being must also be metaphoric, already inscribed in the system as the name of the origin of the system — a system in Heidegger’s case which fully declares itself as “language.” (See Derrida’s discussion of philosophical metaphorics in “La Mythologie blanche.”¹⁹) Heidegger admits to the “mystery of language” which “admits to two things”: “One, that it be reduced to a mere system of signs, uniformly available to everybody . . .; and two, that language at one great moment says one unique thing, for one time only, which remains inexhaustible because it is ordinary . . .” (WICT, 191-92).²⁰ The first recalls the “idle talk” of Being and Time, or “actual language,” but even these “signs” do not submit to the materiality of linguistic description. Both written language and acoustical sounds are for him “abstractions.” “Words” are “well-springs” (WICT, 130), and they can be named only metaphorically. They must be repeatedly “dug up.” Thus poetic language is the excavation of language by language.

This operation, the gift of Being, can only be accomplished metaphorically: one can only dig in a “place.” Things only bloom in a “field”: “the saying [of poetic utterance or authentic thinking] speaks where there are no words, in the field between words . . .” (WICT, 186). The remark comes in regard to a commentary on a text of Parmenides, and emphasizes the “paratactic” grammar of this pre-Socratic style of thinking, including the significance of the graphic sign of punctuation, the colon. But contrary to the reading of such signs in modern linguistics or grammatology, Heidegger reads them as figural measures of a saying which speaks in silence. Thinking and saying speak in a “place” marked figuratively by the sign, but they speak a “proper word” to which “words” are related as Being is related (or articulated) to beings. Writing, or “script,” on the other hand, is for Heidegger a near total repression of the “saying” of speech. Writing of Nietzsche, and of the sometime need to resort to writing, Heidegger remarks on the Nietzschean style as a generative violence directed against philosophical writing. If originary saying is related to speech, a response to some “call” or “appeal,” there are occasions, says Heidegger, when only a “scream” will answer the “call.” But the “scream” is difficult to achieve in writing:

Script easily smothers the scream, especially if the script exhausts itself in description, and aims to keep men’s imaginations busy by supplying it constantly with new matter. The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way. (WICT, 49)

The privileging of speech over writing (speech as presenting-saying and not speech as acoustic sign, another form of writing) is, as Derrida points out, persistent and massive in Heidegger, and is consistent with the valorization of presence which entangles him in the very metaphysical network he has so methodically overthrown and announced as ended. (Derrida thus marks the difference between the “closure” of metaphysics and the “end” of philosophy, as Heidegger announces it in his book on Nietzsche.) More of this later. But at this point it is necessary to consider the consequences for literary criticism of the suppression of the “text” explicit in Heidegger’s view of (poetic) language. Quite obviously the idea of a “text” has always included not only the idea of totalization but also the economy of the signifier — the “text” not only as scripted writing, as Derrida says, but as a “re-mark,” a re-inscription of a previous discourse and its conceptualization. “Text” is therefore itself a metaphor for a totalization of elements which reveals itself as a metaphor of this totality.²¹ For Heidegger, poetry or even “literature” cannot be this kind of re-marking, since it is original, the original speech of the (not-yet-disclosed) “proper word.”

“Script,” which smothers the “scream,” is for Heidegger a kind of second-order language, representational, unless the style can overcome itself. Heidegger’s example of Nietzschean writing which overcomes the “script” is an “aphorism,” the writing of a poetic utterance which overthrows sense or ordinary understanding. The writing-speech of aphorism is therefore the utterance of the “one thought” that every true thinker repeatedly thinks, or the “one unique thing” that authentic language says “at one great moment” (WICT, 191). It is not rhetoric. Like the “single poetic statement” which at once rises from and remains concealed in the “site” (as “source”) of every poet’s saying, and “always remains in the realm of the unspoken” (OWTL, 160),²² (poetic) language is a silence which speaks Being but has no being. The “source” of metaphor, the “site” of figure, it is non-figural. And its origin is “natural,” in the sense of physis. The poetic text, then, is only a kind of veil, or the rhythm of a passage, a trace of Being, a metaphoric detour which at the same time turns the “thinker” of the text toward the “site” and prevents his looking directly into its full light. (Poetic) language cannot be destroyed, or appropriated, in the sense of overthrowing the metaphysical concept; any interrogation of it must take the form of a “dialogue,” a “poetic dialogue,” that emerges in the “reciprocity between discussion and clarification” (OWTL, 160).

There is an “authentic” criticism, then, or an ideal commentary as de Man says, already posited in Heidegger’s early writing, that emerges as a proximal possibility in his later work. If poets think the “holy,” the true dialogue would be like a “conversation” between poets. On the other hand, there is the “dialogue” between “thinking” and poetry (as “saying”), or between two different kinds of discourse which share a “proper” “relation to language.” But even in the conflictual reciprocity of this dialogue, Heidegger returns to the caution of the Hölderlin essays, that the critical statement must open a way to the pure utterance of the poem and in that act annihilate itself, or become the silence of the “unique word”: “in order that what has been purely written of in the poem may stand forth a little clearer, the explanatory speech must break up each time both itself and what it has attempted. The final, but at the same time the most difficult, step of every exposition consists in vanishing away together with its explanation in the face of the pure existence of the poem,” allowing the poem to “throw light directly on the other poems” (EB, 234-35).²³

Taken as a description of the critical discourse, this kind of statement might point toward a criticism which begins with individual poems but evolves into a study of the unitary metaphorics of the poetic canon, a criticism of consciousness as the exploration of the one poet’s site. But this figural site is the site of all authentic poets, the site of “poetry” itself. Commentary, Heidegger writes, should ultimately sound like the “fall of snow on the bell” (EB, 234), the figure itself derived from Hölderlin, from authentic language. In the poetic fragment from which it is drawn, the metaphor of snow falling on bell is a figure of dissonance, of that which smothers the “tune” of the bell which calls one to meals, to sustenance. (We might as well vulgarize Heidegger here, and say that he considers most explanation a snow-job.) Heidegger’s deployment of this figure appears in a “Prefatory Remark to a Repetition of the Address,” itself an explanation of his own repeated “smothering” of the pure self-interpretation of poetic language, and is thus a fore-structuring of his own “lecture” as that which will vanish in his utterance, re-membering the “poet” in the silence of its own end. Heidegger’s essays on poets and poetry regularly “end” in the poet’s words, with the poem which is the first and last word. Heidegger’s dialogue with Hölderlin turns out to be an effort in self-annihilating “thinking,” an apology for the reappropriation of pure “saying” in the explanation which transcribes, translates, and transgresses poetic language, turning it into its other. Thus Heidegger’s “Preface” turns his after-word into a fore-word that fore-warns of its own dulling of the pure tones of the “holy.” It marks off the critical text as a by-path to the poetry which has already explored the by-path of poetic homecoming.

The “Preface,” then, repeats the essay’s own theme of incompleteness, of the poetic deferral of the naming of the “holy.” It repeats for us the poet’s theme of poetic foreknowledge: “his knowledge of the mystery of the reserving proximity” (EB, 269). This site of “proximity” or place of mystery is the place of the “double-Not” (EB, 289). The “mystery” is not revealed by the poet, but is only protected. This “mystery” as “reserving proximity” is the mystery of language, its generative power or Being, that must be protected from writing. The poet, whose “singing” still lacks the proper word or “naming word,” offers a “song without words,” a song which holds open, by deferring, the “end” in which the “others” (the non-poets) may also have their “homecoming,” the ultimate “understanding” of the proper word. As Heidegger interprets Hölderlin, the poet protects the “reserving proximity” so that the “others,” those “of writing and of thinking,” may always be directed towards the true source of language and not be side-tracked by its historical mis-adventures. The poet protects the “mystery” by calling to the others, by calling their thinking to his saying, thus re-membering the “community” of man.

IV

Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s “metaphorics” takes not only the form of systematic questioning, but consists in itself of a methodological doubling of the “destruction,” a strategy, as he warns, which must go beyond the fundamental “inversion” of basic concepts and mark a “divergence” which will prevent the conceptual reappropriation of those same concepts. Derrida finds the Heideggerean error to lie in this “destruction” which inverts and reappropriates, thus overthrowing metaphysics and reinscribing it fully within the thinking of presence. The question of the “resemblance” between their two methods — the “destruction” and the “deconstruction” — has compelled Derrida toward a statement on the nature of “écart” and “renversement.”²⁴ Heidegger presents a problem for Derrida at every turn. He has been the subject of two essays in particular, but the “name” reverberates everywhere in the Derridean canon, as an example of the problematics involved in any metaphysical reappropriation or in any overthrow of metaphysics, not the least being the “inflation” of language and the relating of “literature” and truth in Heideggerean thinking.²⁵

Derrida never underplays the difficulty of reading Heidegger, nor ignores the implications of turning a methodology against itself, of deconstructing the deconstructor. One might say, then, that Derrida underwrites Heidegger, in the various and contradictory senses of that word: to place the thinking of presence in italics, to become a signatory to the difference, to re-mark the metaphysical implications of writing an “end” to metaphysics, to submit Heidegger’s valorization of speech to the mark of a proto-écriture which it tries to conceal, etc. Derrida’s relentless questioning of the metaphysical hierarchy which places speech in a privileged relation to presence, and reduces writing to a secondary function, is literally an underwriting of the idea of a “poetic language,” of language that claims to escape the double sense of the metaphoric.

In “La Différance,” Derrida submits the Heideggerean text, “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” to an extensive deconstruction, concentrating on the Heideggerean language of presence and the difference “between pre sence and pre sent” (SP, 155-60).²⁶ The thrust of the Derridean critique inserts a double mark into Heidegger’s attack on metaphysics which has, as Heidegger notes, “forgotten” the difference between Being and beings. Derrida submits the Heideggerean figure of the “trace” of the difference, which must be effaced in the appearance of being-present, to an irruptive discourse. What Heidegger calls the “matinal trace” (Spur) of the difference which effaces itself in the moment of Being’s appearance, in order that Being might maintain its essence or its difference from beings, is also a figure analogous to what he calls the “mystery” of poetic language: the “difference between Being and beings” can be forgotten only if it is already “sealed in a trace that remains preserved in the language which Being appropriates” (quoted in SP, 156-57). Derrida’s questioning of this “trace” traces it to its source in another language. In repeating the Heideggerean step, he disrupts the Heideggerean “way.” The “trace” as “sustaining use” is a simulacrum of the name of Being, and not the appearance of the difference itself.

In this classic of deconstruction, Derrida interrupts the Heideggerean text in order to reveal that Heidegger’s deployment of the concept “difference” reappropriates the metaphysical text it seems to disrupt; and in the same gesture, Derrida disrupts the thinking of hierarchical difference. “There is no essence of difference,” he writes, and thus no “trace” or name for it that is not already a metaphysical inscription or another trace, the trace of a trace. Thus Derrida, who has already coined the name of “différance” as a trace of the concept difference which turns out to be a trace, a trace which has already effaced itself, provides a model of a critique which resists the reappropriation of the concept through inversion; he re-marks the divergence of a name that is not a word, not a concept, though it may simulate the concept (which is already a trace). (Derrida’s neologism is coined in a manner to reveal the hidden functioning of priority in ontological concepts, wherein the phonetism of the letter “e” marks no “différence” from the letter “a,” a différance marked only in writing.) Rather than examining a “text” for its concealed sense, or for its thematic differences which trace a hidden unity or promise a recovered word, Derrida inserts another language into the text, in order to reveal that the “text” is composed of different orders of signs and not signs which trace a single sense. The language of différance under writes the concept difference and renders it a “simulacrum” or “undecidable.” It names the name of the difference, the word which is the name for all the possible substitutions for any of the commanding or privileged concepts which might govern the differences of the text — whereas Heidegger sees the metaphysical “forgetting” of the difference to be the determining movement of Being, and can thus promise in his own text what is always deferred in his interrogations of language, the ultimate overcoming of the difference of Being and being in the “proper name.” But as Derrida concludes, the writing of différance reveals that there never was a “proper name” but only the “unnamable” play that produces “nominal effects,” just as “the false beginning or end of a game is still part of the game” (SP, 159).

Now, it is not so much this interrogation of Heidegger which should instruct us here, as it is the Derridean thinking of textuality itself — though in this particular case, Derrida’s critique of the Heideggerean “language of Being” is also a critique of the authenticity of poetic “speech.” If poets are, as Heidegger wrote in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” those who “sense the trace of the fugitive gods” and thus trace the realm of the “holy,” they provide only traces of traces, and thus protect the “mystery” of the source (PLT, 94). “Language,” which is “not poetry because it is primal poesy,” is itself only a trace, a figural play of irreducible differences. Thus the expanding network of Heideggerean figures for present and presencing — site, house, bridge, etc. — might be analyzed as metaphorical traces of a word that is always already metaphorical, the name of the origin, the name that is already inscribed in every system as the “center.” Language, for Heidegger, is the “name” of Being as presence, the name of naming. “Language” not only “gathers” the two-fold, it is an already doubled metaphor. Heidegger features the double function of the present participal, at once noun and verb, as the temporal naming of Being — gathering, thinging, thinking, saying, bridging, dwelling, building, showing, relating, blooming, etc.

In The Question of Being, Heidegger speaks of authentic language as a “meaning-fullness.” Its plenitude of sense is not an historical accumulation, but a “play” of unfolding, a “play which, the more richly it unfolds, the more strictly it is bound by the hidden rules” (QB, 105). The “play” of meaning is always commanded by an origin it can never fully name; the “meaning-fullness” of the word is determined by a rule that is fuller than meaning, by Being which appropriates that which in every appearance leaves it behind in bringing it to light. This is a “play” easily comprehended within the “tradition” in which we measure the depth of the work of art, a fathomless, resource-ful text which interpretation can never exhaust. Derrida, on the other hand, inserts into the thinking of the “text” and interpretation a more playful figure of “play,” in which the production of meanings turns upon a meaning-lessness, an absence of the commanding, originating word, and the play of the supplément which stands for that word (that center) in the text. In doing so, Derrida deprives us of literature in its relation to truth, only to give us back “literature” already in quotation marks, a text whose meaningfullness resides in its play of differences, including the insertion within it always of disruptive re-marks, other texts, signs that are not filled with meaning but are always already doubled and mark the double play of the text. Criticism begins with an insertion of a question into the opening provided by the text, into the double sense of the operative signifier; an operation which often consists of raising the illusory governing concept or “proper word” from the text in order to re-mark it, to mark its double sense and doubling function, and to trace its itinerary as a simulacrum. Thus Derrida’s own (non-) concepts: trace, différance, supplément, Pharmakon, dissémination, écart, hymen, gramme, etc., which he calls “undecidables” or “simulacra,” words and concepts that are only the semantic mirage of real words and concepts, as if there were “real” words and concepts.

As example, we might point to the two complementary essays, “La Mythologie blanche”²⁷ and “La Double séance,”²⁸ which are both implicitly and explicitly deconstructions of the Heideggerean principle of “thinking” and “saying.” “La Mythologie blanche” is a rigorous interrogation of metaphor in philosophy; “La Double séance” is a systematic disruption of the “idea” of literature as truth, either as representation or as aletheia, at once a disruptive reading of an imaginative text (Mallarmé’s Mimique) and of idealized or totalized readings of that text. Characteristically, Derrida’s strategy is to approach one text through another, whether the second text is a reading of the first or not. The indirection or detour is consistent within the “nature” of all textuality — that is, a text is never self-sufficient or self-present, never in itself a totalization of meaning or a concealment/unconcealment of a unitary sense. “La Mythologie blanche” introduces the problematics of philosophical language through the imaginary dialogue of a “literary” or fictional text (by Anatole France), itself already a kind of parody of the philosophical dialogue. “La Double séance” opens in the “field” between a philosophical (Platonic) and an imaginative (Mallarmean) text, texts which in their way mark the opening and closing of metaphysics and in which is posed the question of the absolute reciprocal “difference” between two modes of “truth.” This involves Derrida in an examination of various rhetorical strategies — including the placement and function of operational elements, both verbal and non-verbal, in the text, the deployment of the title, the use of epigraph, the function of grammatological marks. (The essay is the middle one in a “book,” La Dissémination, which is introduced by a “Preface” about the function of prefaces, a preface with its own doubled title, “Hors Livre.”)

The “central” text of “La Double séance” is Mallarmé’s, the title of which already provides a capital instance of the question of representation and “what is represented?” But Derrida does not submit the work of “literature” to criticism. His “reading” is a re-marking of the text within other “readings” of it, in particular the impressive book of J.-P. Richard which incorporates the coherent thematic play of this one Mallarmé work into a totalized reading of the Mallarmé canon as an imaginary “world”: a “world” or unity evident in the intricate play of thematic differences which dialectically unfold and enfold the unity of “consciousness” or “imagination.” For Derrida, such readings of the thematic or semantic richness of work only reveal that the depth of the text is a semantic mirage generated by the play of heterogeneous signifiers which refuse to be commanded by any single element within (meaning) or without (author) the text. Thus Derrida deconstructs Richard’s and other critical readings of Mallarmé by raising the textual undecidable, the “hymen,” from its thematic role in order to show how it works as a grammatological function to disrupt the concept of mimesis named in the title and already displaced as an initiatory key to the text. It functions as a mark, a slash (/), and as a title with two faces; it functions always to disrupt the positioning of any representation that is not itself a representation of a representation. Thus it functions to upset the illusion that in literature there can be truth, or the “appearance” of an unrepresented in the represented, the concealed which is unconcealed yet hidden, a unity of consciousness or the “reality” of an imaginary “world.”

There is nothing represented that is not already a representation, just as in “La Mythologie blanche” there is no pure or natural origin of metaphor which stands behind or beneath the play of traces, but only metaphorical play itself. Derrida’s strategic re-marking of concepts, by a forceful inversion followed, as he says, by a divergence, is necessary to keep his own undecidables in play, and to resist the overpowering tendency of the “names” to be reconceptualized. Thus Derrida’s artful footwork of renaming his “positions” so as to avoid any one of his “names” falling into a position of initiatory concept: most obviously, the undecidable écriture which many critics of Derrida have tried to locate as his privileged position. (He has even been called a nominalist, even though nominalism is a classical form of representation, the privileging of the word-concept.) All of his undecidables recall, like a distant echo or a veiled shape, some etymological legacy which they at the same time underwrite, trace, and efface. Thus, the conflictual nature of the Derridean text inverts the Heideggerean conflict, and diverges from it; Derrida’s gap or break or hymen redoubles Heidegger’s rift; his dissemination disrupts Heideggerean flowering.

Écriture is not the name for the physical mark of writing, but the doubleness of which the physical mark is always a sign — a sign that has no signified except another sign. Thus the productive function of écriture which, like différance, initiates by an instant re-play. The limitlessness of “literature” is not the concealed fullness of language, but its disruptive and temporalizing function. “Literature” is neither a full text nor an empty text, neither a presence nor an absence. There is no “literary language,” not even in de Man’s sense, for there can be no privileged language. Derrida’s critique disrupts the classical play of difference which always begins or ends with one of the two terms in a “position” of “authority.” “Literature” can be privileged, then, only because it is the purest function of the self-dissimulating movement of writing. “Literature” is writing — the “figure” of a productive function for which the produced text is only a simulacrum, a facsimile, a fac-simile, a “factor.” The literary text is a play of textuality, not simply in the obvious sense that a “work” of art always originates in the historical field of predecessors. Its own play of differences mirrors its displacement and reappropriation of other texts, and anticipates the necessary critical text which must “supplement” it, insert into it the undecidable or raise the undecidable which is dissimulated in it as a unique word. The Derridean rhetoric names the double-play of chance as the (non-) law of “literature.” Thus Derrida threatens to disrupt the whole cultural order which has given literature a “place” at the center because it could assume that literature was the arche and eidos of order. But then, he gives us back “literature” as the double-name of man, who makes metaphor, who interprets.

Derrida is a kind of Dupin, whose literary function he explores in a recently published essay, “Le Facteur de la vérit锲⁹ — a de-cipherer in pursuit of a letter which is always moving, always displaced, always doubled, always at hand and underhanded, an “author” who is already only the sign of another (pre-) text.

Dupin who:

observed them [the edges of the exterior of the letter] to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having once been folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed.

Dupin who: through the distracting ruse of some “pretended lunatic” reappropriates the letter and replaces it with a “fac-simile (so far as regards externals),” but with an inside which is a sign reappropriated from literature and marking its transgressions.

Dupin who: is the double of the narrator, shares the sign (“D—”) of the thief, and is the double-name of author-interpreter-seducer, who cannot write either a beginning or end to literature, who cannot escape the circuit of the sign as the “factoring” (bearing, like a mailman) of a “truth” that never gets outside “literature,” and is never fully delivered.

University of California, Los Angeles

NOTES

1 “Les Fins de l’homme,” Marges, de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 135-36, 161. Translated as “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30 (Sept. 1969), 31-57.

2See, for example, “La Parole soufflée,” L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 253-92; and “La Double séance,” La Dissémination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 199-317.

3The Fate of Reading, and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 107.

4See “Criticism and Crisis,” Blindness and Insight, Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 3-19. First published in 1967, this essay situates the present “crisis” in criticism, the challenge of structuralism to a criticism of consciousness or to a criticism which privileges the subject, within Mallarmé’s pronouncement almost a century earlier of a “crisis” in poetry, and concludes that creative periods are always critical, marked by pronouncements of rupture, displacements, violent changes, discontinuities, etc., enacted upon and within received conventions. So, in any such pronouncement, the crisis lies in the criticism.

5The Question of Being, trans, and introd. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1958), p. 105. Hereafter noted in text as: QB.

6Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Hereafter noted in text as: BT.

7See An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 47.

8“Ousia et Grammé,” Marges, pp. 73-74. Translated by Edward S. Casey, in Phenomenology in Perspective, ed. F. J. Smith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), pp. 54-93; see esp. p. 89.

9“La Différance,” Marges, p. 29. Translated as “Differance” in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans, and introd. David B. Allison (Evanston, III.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 129-60; see esp. pp. 159-60.

10Blindness and Insight, pp. 30-31.

11Blindness and Insight, pp. 30-31.

12See Derrida, “Les Fins de l’homme,” Marges, pp. 160-61 (“The Ends of Man,” pp. 54-55), on this restoration of “humanism” as the determination of the “end” of man in the thinking of Being. The major thrust of the essay is a deconstruction of Heidegger’s thinking of proximity. In his conclusion, Derrida offers a project of two kinds of deconstructive thinking, and thus marks the difference between Heidegger’s and his own. I will discuss this in the last section of the essay.

13Marges, pp. 160-61 (“The Ends of Man,” pp. 54-55).

14Blindness and Insight, pp. 29-32, 76, and passim.

15Blindness and Insight, p. 100.

16See also Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 173-209; and “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics, 3 (Fall 1973), 27-33.

17In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans, and introd. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 17-87. Hereafter noted in text as: PLT.

18Marges, p. 29; Speech, p. 160.

19Marges, pp. 247-324. Translated as “White Mythology,” in New Literary History, 6 (Autumn 1974), 5-74.

20What Is Called Thinking, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968). Cited in text as: WICT.

21See Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 81-82, and passim. Parts of this text are translated in Diacritics, 2 (Winter 1972), 35-43; and Diacritics, 3 (Spring 1973), 33-46.

22On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Cited in text as OWTL.

23Existence and Being, trans., introd., and analysis by Werner Brock (Chicago: Gateway ed., 1949). Cited in text as: EB.

24Positions, pp. 73, 81; see Diacritics, 2 (Winter 1972), 40-43. See also Marges, pp. 162-64 (“The Ends of Man,” pp. 56-57).

25See De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), pp. 33 ff.; and references in footnote 2.

26Marges, pp. 24-29.

27Marges, pp. 247-324. (See footnote 19.)

28La Dissémination, pp. 199-317.

29“Le Facteur de la vérité,” Poetique, 21 (1975), 96-147. This essay, which is soon to be translated in Yale French Studies, is a “reading” of the Lacanian “Seminar” on “The Purloined Letter,” and thus a reading of the psycho-analytic appropriation of literature as truth. Derrida reads “The Purloined Letter” in and through the interpretations of Marie Bonapart and Jacques Lacan, and in the context of Freud’s reading of a “literary” text.