Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Derrida

ChrisD(RJ) chrisd at russiajournal.com
Sat Apr 6 02:45:47 PST 2002


On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, ChrisD(RJ) wrote:


> Sartre is a footnote to Heidegger

Mais non. Jean-Paul was maybe the greatest mid-20th century dialectician of them all, with sparkling contributions to the early civil rights/New Left/May 68 movements, one of the great writers of world-history. His psychobiography of Flaubert is just mind-boggling.


> Derrida is yet another footnote to Heidegger,

Derrida owes most of his conceptual content to Husserl's logical absolutism, a very different lineage than Heidegger's fundamental ontology.

- -- Dennis -----------------

I say:

As a phenomenologist, outside of some of the analyses of social situations, Sartre was in my opinion piss-poor. Yet another in a great line of French philosophers who take a German philosopher, Cartesianize him and empty him of any serious intellectual content.

Though his work on Genet was brilliant. Sartre was much better as a literary critic and playwrite than as a philosopher.

I think Derrida is Heideggerian through and through (see caveat above about French appropriations of German philosophers). The notion of the history of onto-theo-logy is late Heidegger through and through, and the "trace" owes everything to the idea of Das Nichts -- though JD would claim that the trace is prior to either presence of absence (though he wouldn't use the term "prior to" as it would imply a deconstructable relationship).

Chris Doss The Russia Journal



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