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The Original Motivation: Defend the Derridean Faith This book, I hope, will at least be the keystone of a genuine work of philosophy that I shall produce some day. Over the time that I wrote this book,1 I slowly realized that Heidegger’s attempt in Being and Time to reopen the question of being is the de¤ning event of twentieth-century philosophy .2 What I ¤nally realized is that, when Heidegger re-opens the question of being, he de¤nes being itself as a question: the question of being is the being of the question.3 In the Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger of course did not have in mind the kind of question that is posed in school, where the teacher, knowing the answer to the question in advance, relinquishes the students of all responsibility for thinking.A genuine question has two characteristics. On the one hand,a genuine question demands to be left open, even left without a response; a genuine question must be a quest. This openness is why the question can account for the universality of being. On the other hand, a genuine question demands to be closed off, even answered once and for all; a genuine question must be able to be ¤nished . This closure is why the question can account for the determination of being. A question therefore is fundamentally differentiated between openness and closure, between irresponsibility and responsibility. Difference therefore de¤nes the being of the question. The idea that difference de¤nes the being of the question allowed me to think about, in a new way, what I would call the great French philosophers of the sixties. It seems to me that Heidegger’s being of the question comes into Merleau-Ponty as the ontology of interrogation found in The Visible and the Invisible. Yet because Merleau-Ponty left this book un-¤nished when he died in 1961, there is an ambiguity in his thought that derives from the experience of language, or, more precisely, from the experience of sense. This ambiguity, this point of divergence, opens up what I would call the two major strains of French thought. On the one hand, it seems to me that the being of the question comes through Merleau-Ponty, either directly or indirectly, into Levinas and then Derrida.4 Due to a pri- ority of the experience of the other (transcendence), Levinas and then Derrida transform the question into the promise and thereby transform what Heidegger called ontology into “religion”(the relation of alterity and faith). But, on the other hand, it seems to me that the being of the question comes through Merleau-Ponty, again either directly or indirectly, into Deleuze and Foucault. Due to a priority of the experience of force (immanence ), Deleuze and Foucault transform the question into the problem and thereby transform what Heidegger called ontology into “epistemology” (the relation of power and knowledge). If we return to Merleau-Ponty, we can see that, within his own appropriation of Heideggerian ontology, he is divided between the probable sources of the difference between the promise and the problem: Husserl’s concept of intentionality and Bergson’s concept of duration. But it is just as probable that Merleau-Ponty uni¤es them in the concept of life: Husserl’s Erlebnis and Bergson’s élan vital. Coining a word, we might call this whole ¤eld of philosophy “lifeism.” But we might just as well call it “mnemonics”; life and memory are inseparable. In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty, echoing Heidegger, speaks of “the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory.”5 In its widest scope, this book attempts to reconstruct and re®ect upon the Derridean transformation of Heideggerian ontology. Thus it concerns itself with the new form of thinking that Derrida calls deconstruction.6 The newness of this thinking consists in its difference from what Derrida calls “the metaphysics of presence.” We must start with precise de¤nitions . Presence, for Derrida, consists in (a) the distance of what is over and against (object and form, what is iterable), what we could call “objective presence,” (b) the proximity of the self to itself in its acts (subject and intuition or content), what we could call “subjective presence,” and then (c) the uni¤cation of these two species of presence, that is, presence...

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