What comes under the effect of repression returns, for repression and the return of the repressed are just the two sides of the same coin. The repressed is always there, expressed in a perfectly articulate manner in symptoms and a host of other phenomena. By contrast, what falls under the effect of Verwerfung 1 has a completely different destiny.
Jacques Lacan The Psychoses 1955-1956
Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time.
Jacques Derrida
Specters of Marx
History is a process without a Subject.
Louis Althusser Philosophy of the Encounter
In ‘Anaximander’s Saying,’ Heidegger retranslated one aphorism from the fragments of Anaximander to support his framing of the history of Being. Contrary to his earlier formulation, which considers the first beginning to have already deteriorated into metaphysics and the other beginning to be indispensable revising the former, the position taken up by him in this essay affirms the fate and necessity of such deviation and forgetting of Being unfolded in history.
Heidegger, in so doing, deduces the fate and essence of human beings to be the saving power of such emerging danger, thereby historicizing his age as the remaining hope for the salvation of the history of Being.
1 Rejection of the symptom ‘Anaximander’s Saying,’ especially in which Heidegger’s heterodox translation, was considered critically by Derrida in his Spectres de Marx . Specifically, Derrida claims Heidegger’s reinterpretation, which has downplayed the political, ethical, and legal elements in the fragment, has failed to escape being read as an ‘economy of revenge’ and, therefore, bearing normative connotations. In other words, even though the translation teases out words such as justice and retribution, it still renders the aphorism defending some forms of contestation with origin and original disjointure ( Un-Fug ). This essay agrees with such an interpretation, yet it speculates Derrida’s critique of the potentially totalizing structuration of history in the jointure of the disjoints.
The position taken up politically by Derrida, this essay argues, is ultimately not so different from Heidegger’s. To do so, this essay will first present a succinct recapitulation of the ‘Anaximander’s Saying,’ followed by a similarly selective presentation of Derrida’s engagement with it in Spectres de
Marx , before finally detailing the merits of both and the similarities in their ulterior motives of
overcoming history.
History as Forgetting
The task of translation, presented by Heidegger, is really a historical-philological endeavor that seeks not simply to recontextualize words in contemporary terms but, first of all, to understand them in their original language. Translations, therefore, are only faithful if they come from the language of the actual matters ( Sache ) themselves (243). Heidegger, then, not only offers his own translation by first ‘trimming off’ the former parts of the aphorism but, crucially, understands the key words dikē as Fug and adikia as Un-Fug , consequently hinting at certain deep- rooted presupposition of Western philosophy conveyed in this understanding.
Dikē , in later philology, translates almost always to “payment,” “punishment,” or even “justice;”
adikia , on the other hand, is understood as “injustice.” However, as noted above, Heidegger argues that such translations, while perhaps literally formal, do not necessarily “speak from the language of the actuality itself (243).” According to this understanding and translation, dikē and adikia speak as if they were moral and legal things such as “judgment,” “punishment,” and “injustice.” Moreover, since Anaximander himself is typically categorized as a “natural philosopher,” this aphorism is often understood as describing the emergence and disappearance of all things in nature in the guise of the human experience of punishment, compensation, and so forth, contextualized as moral and legal activities. Yet all of this, Heidegger claims, is “inappropriate preconception.” “In order to trans-late ourselves into that which comes to language in the saying, we must consciously set aside all inappropriate preconceptions behind” (250).
Heidegger’s choice of translating the two terms as Fug and Un-Fug is, in this vein, an endeavor to turn away from such moral and ethical impositions. Adikia , which used to be understood as the injustice of things, is now taken to be “that which presences and stays awhile as the dis-jointure in the while” (268). This presencing in dis-jointure, which at the same time is claimed to correspond to unconcealment, also does not lose itself in the dis-jointure, but it is the very thing that “gives jointure [ Fuge ],” and the jointure, claims Heidegger, is order [ Fug ] (268-269).
Thus considered, the duality of adikia and dikē as in-justice, which implies a moralistic gesture, has now been turned into dis-jointure, which is of solely ontological concern.
The meaning of Being in jointure is the next item to be explicated. Heidegger problematizes the translation of the first three words of the aphorism kata to chreōn . Chreōn is usually understood as a necessity, yet Heidegger thinks this translation does not fully explicate its existential-ontological connotation. Since chreōn means he cheir (hand), it can be translated as handling ( Brauch ) something, signifying at the same time a sense of protection of the things at hand.
In this way, being in dis-jointure, which gives jointure, namely, the unconcealed Being, are necessarily protected. Here, it is clear when Heidegger associates logos , moira (fate), and chreōn with this sense of protection, he has in mind nothing of the dis-jointure except as something to be overcome. The whole aphorism is now being translated as: . . . along the line of usage; for they let order and reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of dis-order (280).
Heidegger observes that since kata to chreōn already names, in the jointure, the presencing of the present, the relation between the presencing (Being) and that which is present (beings) is presented.
However, along the essence of the presencing and the present, the relation between the two, which is the ontological difference, remains unthought (274). This is, of course, the forgetting of the question of Being.
Moving on, Heidegger claims––and this is the crucial point––that such oblivion of Being is not a result of the forgetfulness of Being but belongs precisely to the essence of Being. That is to say, it is part of the destiny or fate of Being to be forgotten (275). This forgetting is the great event in Western philosophy: the event of metaphysics. The illumination of such ontological difference, then, is never the difference appears as an identity as such; rather, it only appears as the present (beings) announces itself in its presencing (Being), that is, it always appears as a relation (Being always shows itself in beings), and the phrase to chreōn names precisely such a relation.
It is for this reason that history (of Being), for Heidegger, understood existential- ontologically, operates not as the coming and going of beings that evolve towards some form of homeostasis or justice; instead, it is destined to be sent on the departure to the forgetting of Being, and together with its Being ultimately gathered and remembered in unconcealment, is the essence of Being. This whole history of Being is properly what Heidegger means by eschatology. “As destining, Being itself is inherently eschatological (246).”
Dis-jointure as Genesis
Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Anaximander’s aphorism, in simple terms, is that it still retains some forms of the mystification of the origin. He points out that the overcoming of dis-jointure as the task given to us in the history of the happening of belonging together with the conventional interpretation of the aphorism; that is to say, both can be identified with an ‘economy of exchange’ in which the seeking of teleological return is emphasized, be it moral (retribution) or ontological (unconcealment).
Derrida indeed credits Heidegger for rendering the disjointure a constitutive condition of the unconcealment of Being instead of as contingent historical happenings. However, the commitment to an origin of history in Heidegger’s framing of history as eschatology does present us with a problem Derrida identifies, which can completely alter our historical self-understanding.
In a quasi-Nietzschean gesture, Derrida here presents Heidegger’s history of Being a self-totalizing movement. Since such history assigns us the task of protecting Being in their jointure or unconcealment, it traps itself in the barter economy against the dis-jointure and for the origin before such dis-jointure, as perhaps a messianic return. In Nietzsche’s words, it seems to be Derrida’s position, that Heidegger’s history of Being is caught in a slave morality that only responds to something external, namely the dis-jointure, and thereby misses the authentic possibility of bringing into history something beyond the system of economy, something completely new.
If an origin exists before dis-jointure and assigns us the historical task of return, Derrida’s position, then, is to deconstruct such unifying historiography by removing origin from the horizon.
Thus, Dis-jointure for Derrida is not something that happens, even necessarily, after the origin, but there is no origin before such happening of dis-jointure. In other words, dis-jointure is the origin; it is not simply that which has always already happened, that which constitutes world history, as Heidegger said, but such happening at the same time admits nothing prior, thereby preventing the narrative of messianic return.
Although dis-jointure is considered by both thinkers to be something that defines history as such, for Heidegger, it plays the role of something to be overcome. For Derrida, on the other hand, dis-jointure is not something given in history but, as acts of dis-joining, the very happening of all historical events. It is only in this way history opens up, and events that happen in history can be regarded not as responses, not as the eternal return of the same, but as the opening up of radically new beginnings and possibilities.
Specters of Marx was originally a lecture series given in response to the collapse of Soviet
communism in 1989 and the discourse of the ‘end of history’ which tries to render Marxism obsolete. In the lecture, Derrida insightfully identified the mourning of the communist enterprise as, just like any mourning, a proper ritual of forgetting. Therefore, Derrida takes his move and immaterializes Marx and Marxism as specters that keep on returning.
Such a move, one should observe, is, of course, a political move. The denial of unifying teleology in history is a strategy to protect Marxism as still a virtual possibility. Derrida’s deconstructive response of ‘dis-jointure as origin’ to the ‘end of history,’ to Hegel, Marx, and even finally, Heidegger’s eschatology opens up a space of possibilities. History becomes something that belongs to no unique subject or substance, whether it be real or ideal, God or otherwise. Derrida himself explains: …Permit me to recall very briefly that a certain deconstructive procedure, at least the one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the outset in putting into question the onto-theo but also archeo-teleological concept of history—in Hegel, Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show that this onto- theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity—not a new history or still less a “new historicism,” but another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise : as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems, and insist on it, moreover, as the very indestructibility of the “it is necessary.” This is the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political (SM 93- 94).
Derrida’s demonstration of his own program clearly tries to distance itself from the earlier philosophers of history in terms of bringing in the conditions of the possibility of alternative beginnings, historicities, and, therefore, futures. Perhaps his position regarding history is indeed different, but his gesture comes very close to many of those who came before, especially Heidegger.
Heidegger’s rendering of the dis-jointure, namely the event of metaphysics, encapsulates all those who came before him, and his overcoming consists of precisely this jointure of Being, protecting it in unconcealment. Derrida, on the other hand, frames dis-jointure immanent to historical events, that every occurrence is necessarily a dissemination, a disjoining. In this way, Derrida opens up a new form of history and historicity, which set him apart from the thinkers of teleological history. Nonetheless, his program of deconstruction came out to be similarly an overcoming of history and, at the same time, an event in history.
Whether history is teleological (Heidegger) or aleatory (Derrida), the underlying motives of both programs are the same. We might venture to say that both philosophers, as philosophers, are looking to actualize their philosophical effect in some larger realms, specifically the political.
Philosophy, for them, is never something transcendental to reality but immanent and all the more related.
Heidegger identifies the historicality of Dasein as destiny and thereby departs onto his own destiny of overcoming metaphysics. Derrida fought for the originary différance and committed himself to its dissemination. In whichever ways history and historicity have been conceived, for both thinkers, an element of ‘life’ can be identified as the movement within (historiciz- ed ) but also beyond (historiciz- ing ) history. This notion of life, to use Nietzsche’s phrase again, is valued no less than history, and serving history is only necessary when history, in turn, serves life. In Derrida and Heidegger’s framing of history, be it eschatological or hauntological, the subtext of both is the same: an operation of the making of history beyond pure and simple knowing. We might say both philosophers are tempted to move beyond philosophy––an area concerning truth––and it is precisely this political, perhaps ethical move that relates these two radically contrasting thinkers.