> 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