The Hidden Law of Selfhood: Reading Heidegger's Ipseity after Derrida's Hospitality

Despite his wide-ranging and incisive engagement with Heidegger's thought across his career, Derrida seems to have written very little about Heidegger's Ereignis manuscripts, which, according to many commentators, constitute the place where Heidegger's thinking comes closest to Derridean deconstruction. Taking up Derrida's comments in Hospitality 1 on the figure of ‘selfhood’ ( Selbstheit) in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, this essay argues that this dense but important moment of engagement with the Ereignis manuscripts reveals the extent to which Heidegger's thinking of selfhood, in spite of its fundamentally relational character, remains thoroughly determined by ipseity, the philosopheme that links selfhood, possibility, and sovereignty within the metaphysics of presence. Beginning with a reconstruction of the link between power and selfhood in Derrida's thinking of ipseity and a close-reading of the key passage in Hospitality 1, the essay then turns to Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin to show both the depth of Heidegger's commitment to a relational thinking of selfhood and the philosophical and rhetorical safeguards by which he ensures that the relations of difference that constitute the self continue to function in the name of the ipseity, understood as the very Ur-form of sovereign power.

Not Just One, Not Just Now

This essay offers a vision of voice as relational and temporal, in contrast to figurations of voice as “one” (as a soliloquy that directly expresses a sovereign individual subjectivity) and “now” (as immediately present, in contrast to the spatial distance and temporal delay of writing or reflection). This abstract construal of pristine subjective oneness and atemporal objective presence underlies both Husserlian semiotics and the Derridean critique of the “metaphysics of presence” long associated with the voice. In practice, however, most vocal action (public singing and speaking, chatting and harmonizing with others, vocal uproar, protest, negotiation) is undertaken in relation to others and unfolds over time. Politically, the irrelational individual-expressivist figuration provides the metaphysical scaffolding for groupist-expressivist figurations of voice, in which homogenous collectivities are understood to speak in unison, cut off from interlocutors, response, or counterpoint—cut off, that is, from actual sociality. What political and ethical possibilities might open up by turning from irrelational soliloquy to relational colloquy, among others, in time?

Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies

This chapter examines the centrality of popular assemblies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty by taking seriously the role they play in “maintaining sovereign authority,” which can only be done by sustaining or reenacting the source of that authority: the living body of the people themselves. Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies are often taken to be the clearest expression of his investment in what Jacques Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence.” Even as Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies provide the foundation of collective self-rule, however, the occasion through which the people’s will is expressed as law, they also serve an underappreciated ritual function, giving reenacted form and continuity to the very people whose will is expressed through them. The assembly form is the necessary—and necessarily hidden—supplement from which the people’s seemingly unmediated will is derived. The sovereign assembly is at once the source of the people’s collective autonomy, and the heteronomic support which provides its ongoing conditions of possibility.

SICHÜBERLIEFERUNG: RE-MOVING THE HISTORY OF BEING AS PRESENCE

How are we to responsively belong to tradition? This paper retrieves the concept of self-tradition (Sichüberlieferung) in Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927). We will take as a guiding light Heidegger’s designation of a mode of his phenomenology as “phenomenology of the inapparent” expressed in the 1973 Zähringen Seminar. We will pay special heed to the function of the middle voice, neutrality of Da-sein, and tautology in the question of Being and history and bring to light the relation between authentic temporality and authentic historicity in a tautological turning of the selfsame. We will make a remark on the delay of Da-sein’s authentic historicity in the light of the “self-tradition” which marks Heidegger’s non-metaphysical response to the heritage of metaphysics of presence. In the wake of the phenomenology of the inapparent, we will turn to Derrida’s 2008 text The Animal that Therefore I Am to explore Derrida’s different approach to free the “I am” from that of Heidegger’s Dasein whose being is set in Jeweilig-Jemeinigkeit. We will show how Derrida’s invention of animot enables him and us to speak with the voices of our non-human animal others and enables us to free ourselves from the fixities of presence of the present in our thought, language, and sensitivity. In a relay of the two philosophers’ reading of us and their ways of self-overcoming of man as rational animal, we will learn to be in question and to learn to relate to one another without reducing one to the other and other to the one.

Big Nothing

Kant defends the logical consistency of metaphysical groundlessness from the objection that a groundless being would be grounded on nothing, and therefore, on something—a “Big Nothing.” Instead, what is groundless has non-being for its ground; logic yields a formal concept of non-being as the negation of all that exists. Heidegger goes further in giving a positive characterization of the nothing: the nothing “makes possible the manifestness of beings” and “belongs to their essential unfolding.” Our openness to beings reveals beings as distinct from the nothing. The internal structure of this openness (‘something and not nothing’) is revealed in fundamental attunements like anxiety. I consider objections to Heidegger’s account from Carnap and Wittgenstein and offer a Heideggerian response. I show that Wittgenstein’s final assessment of metaphysical statements is more ambivalent than Carnap’s. Where Carnap mocks Heidegger for expressing his feelings in the form of a theory, Wittgenstein recognizes the direction of Heidegger’s thought, and concludes that what Heidegger wants to express is—Schade!—inexpressible. There is a there there; it’s just that language isn’t capable of saying so. Heidegger’s response is that metaphysics neglects to ask about the condition (being/the nothing) that makes beings possible — it identifies being with presence. Ironically, the attempt to eliminate metaphysics through the logical regimentation of language terminates in metaphysics—a metaphysics of presence. This metaphysics flattens every attempt to think about the world into a consideration of beings without any room for consideration of being, as that which makes their manifestation possible. For Heidegger, by contrast, nothing is the ground of grounds, the reason for reasons. We find things intelligible because of the nothing that allows us to find ourselves in a world of beings.

Machinic Phylum and Architecture

The chapter draws on the anti-substantivist and anti-hylomorphic legacy of two significant Deleuze and Guattari’s interlocutors: Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon. Ruyer vehemently opposed the logic of mechanicism without regressing to (active) vitalism. His masterpiece Neofinalism, yet to be fully appreciated in architectural circles, is an ode to multiplicity or ‘absolute form’. The title is to be read as a challenge to the hegemony of the step-by-step causation and partes-extra-partes mereology. According to Ruyer, non-locality is the key, not only to the question of subjectivity, but to the problem of life itself. Simondon too shies away from the metaphysics of presence. For him, the process of individuation cannot be grasped on the basis of the fully formed individual. In other words, the knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge. Simondon’s highest ambition in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects was to integrate culture and technics (tekhne). The conviction that culture need not be antagonistic to technology is particularly pertinent to the ecologies of architecture. In the second half of the chapter, the affordance theory meets contemporary neurosciences.

Contextualizing Rosenzweig’s and Levinas’ Notions of the Other by Derrida’s Construal of Difference

The article focuses on juxtaposing the stances of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas on the notion of the Other based on the metaphysical principles of modernity so as to expose the prerequisites for their attitude to metaphysics in whole. The peculiarity of the proposed approach is the analysis of the notions of the Other in Rosenzweig and Levinas from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the assumption that the national philosophies, having been considered as the specific response to the effects of the encounter of societies to be modernized with the spreading modernity, for that very reason attach great importance to the construal of the Other. It is emphasized that the similarities between the national schools of philosophy indicate correlating the particular with the general as the paradigm for the comprehension of the Other, whereas the Jewish philosophy has previously conceptualized that paradigm by way of the opposition of “Athens and Jerusalem”. In an effort to assess the capabilities of the above-mentioned paradigm the analysis of the relevant range of problems is set into the wider context and they are considered in connection with the transition from essentialism to anti-essentialism that characterizes already the late modernity. It is disclosed that Rosenzweig’s stance was still essentialist, while Levinas tried to abandon the essentialist understanding of the Other, albeit he did not complete the transition to anti-essentialism. Levinas’ break with metaphysics was brought to a close by Derrida whose anti-essentialist stance on identity and difference radically diverges from the thinking that adheres to the “metaphysics of presence”. In the issue, Derrida who does not formally belong to the Jewish philosophy could afford to summarize Rozenzweig’s and Levinas’ approaches to the problem of the Other, and in so doing he makes a contribution to both general and Jewish philosophy.