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6 More Metaphysical than Metaphysics: An Investigation of “Violence and Metaphysics” We now enter the most crucial period in the development of Derrida’s early thinking, the mid-sixties.1 Four things seem to happen during this period. First, Derrida deepens his understanding of the dialectic between phenomenology and ontology with which he closed both the 1962 Introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” and the 1954 Le Problème de la genèse; in particular, he understands more fully the implications of his discovery of écriture. The problem of language, indeed the problem of the sign, becomes more intense. Second, there is an investigation of Levinas’s writings up to approximately 1963.2 In this investigation Derrida discovers that Levinas’s thought “calls us to depart from the Greek site”(ED 122/82), the site which is the source of the thought of both Husserl and Heidegger, of both phenomenology and ontology (ED 120/81). When Derrida adopts the Levinasian experience of the other as outside of Greek philosophy, both phenomenology and ontology, in a sense, come to an end in Derrida’s thinking. All of Levinas’s questions to Husserl and Heidegger become Derrida’s questions. But third, Derrida adopts Levinas’s thought of the other within the structure of the dialectic between phenomenology and ontology. Derrida substitutes Levinas’s thought of the other for the human existence, the surging forth of naked factuality, wild singularity, the Being as history of both Le Problème de la genèse and the Introduction: in other words, the experience of the other, which Levinas calls metaphysics , replaces what Derrida had called in his earlier Husserl books “ontology ,” “ontology in a non-Husserlian sense,” that is, it replaces Heideggerian ontology.3 This replacement pushes ontology over onto the other side of the dialectic with phenomenology. There is now a dialectic between what Levinas calls “metaphysics,” where metaphysics holds the side of non-presence, transcendence, and genesis, and onto-phenomenology, where onto-phenomenology—“violence”—holds the side of presence, im- manence, and structure. The result of this new dialectic—Derrida’s terminology now is going to be “system” or “economy” (ED 117/79, 163/110–111, 226/152)—is a critique of Levinas from the onto-phenomenological side of the dialectic. But fourth, at the same time as Derrida is investigating Levinas’s thought of the other, he is investigating Heidegger’s thought of being. In this simultaneous investigation, Derrida discovers that Heidegger ’s thought of being pursues the origin of philosophy, Greek philosophy , in his investigations of pre-Platonistic thinkers; this origin is the same that is not identity but difference. This realization transforms the dialectic between metaphysics and onto-phenomenology into a dialectic between alterity and difference, between Levinas’s thought of God and Heidegger ’s thought of being. Although quickly after 1967 Derrida will start to question Heidegger, and ¤rst of all from a Nietzschean standpoint,4 this complicated “dialectic” de¤nes Derrida’s later thought;5 it de¤nes deconstruction . Originally published in 1964 in Revue de métaphysique et de morale , “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” represents Derrida’s ¤rst attempt to “amalgamate”—in a sort of alchemical or magical relation (cf. MP 141/119)—the non-Greek genetic thought of the transcendence of the other with the Greek structuralist thought of the immanence of the same (which is not identity but difference ). It is the ¤rst deconstruction. Because deconstruction consists in this amalgamation, we can say—appropriating the idea of an “upping of the ante”—that deconstruction is “more metaphysical” than Levinas’s metaphysics . We shall return to this “amalgamation” in Part IV, Chapter 8. We must say therefore that Derrida’s own thinking begins with “Violence and Metaphysics”: deconstruction begins when phenomenology and ontology come to an end.6 Unlike “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” which has an unrivaled privilege in regard to a speci¤c phase of Derrida’s thinking, his interpretation of Husserl,7 “Violence and Metaphysics” has an unrivaled privilege in regard to the general development of Derrida’s thought. No serious investigation of Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl can avoid this essay. 1 It is clear that the idea of deconstruction is on the horizon in “Violence and Metaphysics” since Derrida uses the word “destruction” a number of times.8 The word “destruction” however—more than the word “deconstruction ,” which does not occur in “Violence and Metaphysics,” not 146 Derrida and Husserl [3.22...

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