Heidegger, difference

'The order of Heidegger's thought is, however, regularly disoriented by an oblique movement which inscribes truth in the process of propriation. Although this process is as if magnetized by a valuation or an ineradicable preference for the proper-ty (propre), it all the more surely leads to this proper-ty's (propre) abyssal structure. In such a structure, which is a non-fundamental one, at once superficial and bottomless, still and always "flat," the proper-ty (propre) is literally sunk. Even as it is carried away of itself by its desire, it founders there in the waters of this its own desire, unencounterable - of itself. It passes into the other.' - Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles

Anyone who has had the misfortune lately of asking me what book I'm reading knows how I've been pouring over Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which are his lectures in 1927 on Being and Time. Throughout, as I'm now at the second part of the lectures which focus on time and temporality, I keep going back to this Derrida quote. Yes, yes, I can hear Reiman yelling at me, but Derrida has a way of bringing the smallest, evasive parts of Heidegger's complicated attempt at a fundamental ontology. Here, in his book on Nietzsche, Derrida hits at what, at least as I've found in Heidegger, is the (in)determinate nature of Da-sein. The way in which Da-sein is under all its ontic showing(s), bottomless yet determinably present underneath.

I've yet to do Heidegger's 'later work,' but even from Being and Time and his lectures, one has to wonder at the question of difference in fundamental ontology. Da-sein as being-in-the-world, presumably with other Da-sein(s). In Heidegger's attempt to abandon metaphysics, one has to ask the question of how there can be a fundamental being of humans without a metaphysics (Derrida targets this in his 'Note on a Note' essay in Margins). I need to read more Heidegger (which I'm delighted at the possibility of) before I can further comment, but I've been thinking about this in many Cure-listening nights wandering in East Jerusalem.

Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Trans: Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.