Abstract
On the one hand and on the other hand. This is a pattern one finds in and among the writings of Derrida. It is a pattern one used to find in leading articles of The Times of London. In The Times the outcome was either a neutral, middle of the road compromise or a dissolution of an apparent conflict through the exposure of an equivocation in the terms in which the views of the parties to the dispute were expressed. This essay will come round to considering whether it is a meeting of extremes of this latter sort that we find in the essay by Derrida which is entitled ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ and which ends with the citation of the words ‘Extremes meet’ from ‘perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists’ (WD 153; 228).1 We can assert at the start that if Derrida subscribes to the idea that extremes meet, he certainly does not subscribe to the idea that they meet in some neutral middle ground, for example a higher or deeper synthesis such as is posited by the aforementioned Hegelianism.
Das Sein selber das Strittige ist. Martin Heidegger
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Notes
Abbreviated references in the text are as follows: pages in the original are given after a semi-colon when an English translation is cited: EDE: Emmanuel Levinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1982).
EE: Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978); De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1981).
EGT: Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment,’ in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1972).
M: Jacques Derrida, The Ends of Man,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982); Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
SZ: Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972).
TI: Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969); Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980 [1961]).
WD: Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967).
See John Llewelyn, ‘A Point of Almost Absolute Proximity to Hegel,’ forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference on Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, sponsored by the Philosophy Department of Loyola University of Chicago, March 1985. The present essay could perhaps be said to suggest that the relationship of Derrida to Levinas is one of what the latter would call ab-solute proximity.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 102.
See P.A. Schilpp and M. Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1967; London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 723.
See John Llewelyn, ‘Heidegger’s Kant and the Middle Voice’, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Time and Metaphysics (Warwick: Parousia Press, University of Warwick, 1982).
Levinas, ‘Le mot je, le mot tu, le mot Dieu’, Le Monde, March 19–20, 1978, p. 2. I am grateful to Gustave Calamand for sending me a cutting of this.
I am grateful to Adriaan Peperzak for a shrewd comment on this question.
Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism,’ in David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 217; Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), p. 338.
Ibid., p. 199; p. 319. Derrida, Margins, pp. 128–9; p. 154.
Levinas, ‘Tout autrement,’ in Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), p. 89.
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Llewelyn, J. (1988). Jewgreek or Greekjew. In: Sallis, J.C., Moneta, G., Taminiaux, J. (eds) The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, The First Ten Years. Phaenomenologica, vol 105. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2805-3_15
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