6 - Traces and Ashes

Summary

While Hegel served as our touchstone through Part II, Nietzsche, read through the lenses of Heidegger, serves as our touchstone for Part III. Both Derrida and Deleuze will cite Nietzsche as the figure whose thinking carries us beyond Hegelian difference, and both will explicitly read him against and beyond Heidegger. According to Derrida, Heidegger regards Nietzsche, ‘with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician’. Given that their respective understandings of Hegel's contribution to the philosophy of difference were divergent, we can expect that the ways in which Derrida and Deleuze understand Nietzsche to liberate difference from Hegelian trappings will be different also. Nevertheless, both recognise a certain Nietzscheanism as the inspiration for a non-Hegelian conception of difference. An analysis of these Nietzschean strains of thought thus cannot but assist us in our investigation – here the distinction between Derrida and Deleuze fully emerges.

As we saw in Chapter 3, according to Derrida, though Heidegger rightly characterises the history of metaphysics in ontotheological terms, he nevertheless remains trapped in the very tradition from which he seeks escape. Thus:

Now, among these holds, the ultimate determination of difference as the ontico-ontological difference – however necessary and decisive this phase must be – still seems to me, in a strange way, to be in the grasp of metaphysics. Perhaps then, moving along lines that would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian [my emphasis], by going to the end of this thought of the truth of Being, we would have to become open to a differance that is no longer determined, in the language of the West, as the difference between Being and beings.

Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 5, Derrida on one occasion explicitly defines differance as a Nietzschean invention: ‘Thus, differance is the name we might give to the “active,” moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system [my emphasis] of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science.’