>Heidegger and Derrida who refused the possibility, by a
> destruction of ontology, and an endless deferral of specification.
> They did not historicise the subject, but abolish it altogether.
Doug and Dennis ask 'Where? How?'
Heidegger bemoaned the fact that such concepts as 'the ego cogito of Descartes, the subject, the "I", reason, spirit, person' 'have served as the primary guides' but 'remain uninterrogated' (Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p44). 'But the Self of everydayness is the "they"', meaning that individual rights belong to the corruption of mass society (Being and Time, 296). Under the heading 'The Destruction of Ontology', Heidegger says this: 'if the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition', he means rationalist philosophy, 'must be loosened up ... dissolved'. 'We are to destroy the traditional content of ... ontology'. (Being and Time, p44)
Derrida, too, makes it clear that elevating difference does not mean putting greater store by subjectivity. On the contrary, the deconstruction must go further, dissolving the subject. He writes 'What differs? Who differs? What is différance?....if we accepted this form of the question, in its meaning and its syntax ("What is? "Who is?" "What is that?"), we would have to conclude that différance has been derived, has happened, is to be mastered and governed on the basis of the point of a present being as a Subject a who.' (A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991, p65.)
He reiterates the point in an attack on anti-fascism (just as bad as fascism, apparently): 'opposition to racism, totalitarianism, to Nazism, to fascism' that is undertaken 'in the name of the spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axiomatic - for example, that of democracy or "human rights" - which directly or not comes back to this metaphysics of Subjectivity.' The meaning of this passage is that facism and democracy are as bad as each other, because both [sic] elevate the Subject. But fascism does not elevate the subject, it suppresses the collective subject of democracy under the fuhrer-worship - it is bad faith to elide them; and indicative of Derrida's project that he isolates just that component, subjectivity, as problematic that the fascists, too wished to suppress in the name of order and discipline. (Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Chicago: University Press, 1991, p40).
Here Derrida echoes Heidegger's evasion of responsibility for fascism, when he argues, post-denazification, that he had mistaken fascism for the escape from the 'endless etcetera of indifference' that is modern life, when it was in fact, just a higher order of the same thing.
That is what Derrida saw in Heidegger, a project of dismantling the canon of rational philosophy. It is quite wrong to see that as an historicisation. There is no project of reconstruction. It is only an obscurantist and irrationalistic project.