Page 42 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
logical implications of this move: a translation, as Derrida puts it, of discourse into history. The extreme privilege that Heidegger grants to German, or German-and-Greek, is well known; 'horribly danger- ous and wildly funny,' says Derrida. Heidegger's geo- politics forms a sort of selective Eurocentrism with the Greek pneuma, the Latin spiritus, and the German Geist inscribed in what Derrida calls a 'linguistico- historical triad' of spirit. German is still privileged here because it depends on what Heidegger claims is an 'ordinary meaning.' The whole situation should by now be familiar: maintenance of the same by exclusion of the other, endorsement of the same by a myth of origin.
Deconstructive analysis intervenes by showing the other as already inscribed within the same, and under- mines the myth by showing the origin as already het- erogeneous and hence not a pure identity. The stages are no longer spelt out as they were in previous works, but the strategy survives. In a piquant move, the tri- adic foreclosure of spirit is opened up to include the Hebrew ruah, with as good a claim to origin as any other term for spirit; it is 'what Greek and the Latin had to translate by pneuma and spiritus? Moreover, ruah is shown as linked with pneuma through the Gos- pels, and as containing both good and evil in the manner that Heidegger ascribes to Geist. What was avoided has been included, from the outset.
8.2 Heidegger's Deconstruction
Geist is itself, to an extent, avoided by Heidegger. It never receives the interrogation afforded to terms like Dasein or Denken—this despite Geisfs importance in the nineteenth century, not only as an index of national culture, but also as a focus for philosophical enquiry, as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is part of Heidegger's great work of 1927, Being and Time, to question this importance and this focus, inso- far as Geist follows a Cartesian emphasis on sub-
jectivity that for Heidegger marks a wrong turning in philosophy. As he recounts this questioning, Derrida is in fact describing a Heideggerian deconstruction, which will expose the apparent autonomy of cogito ergo sum as fissured by the ignoring or avoiding of sum; emphasis is all on the cogito, which leads to a subsequent 'neglect of being,' a failure to investigate existence, in the 'Cartesian-Hegelian' tradition. Being and Time attempts a reorientation: 'the "substance" of man is not spirit as a synthesis of the soul and the body but existence.' The suspect term 'spirit' is commonly placed between quotation marks in Being and Time—a typographical warning which, like Hei- degger's crossings-out, has had its own influence on Derrida—who, after all, derives 'deconstruction' itself from Heidegger's Destruktion and Abbau. He could easily have used Destruktion for Heidegger's ques- tioning at this point; instead, he uses his own word and invokes his own practice, as if to emphasize that
deconstruction is no absolute safeguard against the snares of thought. For there is a drastic change to come.
8.3 Heidegger's Logocentrism
The 'tortuous prudence' of Being and Time is aban- doned in 1933, when Heidegger, as the newly- appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, gives an address on the self-assertion of the German uni- versities. The prophylactic quotation marks are deleted as he offers a 'spiritual world' which 'guaran- tees the people its grandeur,' and which is not the people's culture or knowledge but 'the deepest power of conservation of its forces of earth and blood.' The exaltation of will, order, and destiny, the rejection of academic freedom, are unmistakably Fascist. 'One could say,' writes Derrida, 'that he spiritualizes National Socialism.' But in doing so Heidegger goes back on his own deconstruction, at least insofar as the 'massive voluntarism' of the address, its will to power, is a return to the subjectivity which he had been at pains to question.
Of Spirit follows the fortunes of Heidegger's Geist through the various stages of its 'inflammation and inflation'—terms that turn out to be more than meta- phorical. The book is described as surrounded by fire; its climax comes in Heidegger's comments on the poet
Trakl, where the inflammation is actual. Here, 'Der l1
Geist ist das Flammende' and Der Geist ist Flamme ; spirit is a 'flame which inflames, or which inflames itself; it'candevourtirelesslyandconsumeeverything up to and including the white of the ash.' As he has done before, Derrida shows how what had been excluded returns in Heidegger's discourse; and here he invokes Hegel whose determination of spirit had previously called for deconstruction. Now Derrida points the reader towards the treatment of Hegel in Glas; and, turning to that text, he quotes Hegel's description of spirit as luminous essence, in terms that sound very like Heidegger's spirit-in-flames:
Pure and figureless, this light burns all. It burns itself in the all-burning it is; leaves, of itself or anything, no trace, no mark, no sign of passage.
(Derrida 1986:238)
Heidegger has rejoined Hegel and the logocentric tra- dition. The purity of this self-consuming, figureless figure recalls 'I am that I am' (and perhaps the burning bush) in its reflexive autonomy, free of difference, free of the other as residue. Again, Derrida does not spell out the deconstructive response to all this. Rather, he invokes the inevitable return of the other, the haunting revenant in its full range of implications from semantic difference to social difference. Some of this range is suggested in Glas when Hegel's pure light is described as a kind of offering or sacrifice, but Derrida imposes another term:
. . . the word holocaust that happens to translate Opfer is
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