Derrida and the Problem of History 1964-1965

Abstract

One can only praise the patience and care of Thomas Dutoit, Marguerite Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington for deciphering the hand-written lectures that Jacques Derrida delivered at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in late 1964 and early 1965. The publication of Heidegger: The Question of Being and History gives us an extended examination of the problem of history prior to Of Grammatology (1967). Despite its opening dismissal of “the classical categories of history,” Derrida would later insist that Of Grammatology was “a history book through and through.” Derrida’s most celebrated work argues that neither speech nor nature can be taken as an a-historical essence because to register itself as natural it must be supplemented by the cultural, the conventional and the historical. At the same time, this supplement cannot be taken as a historical determination. Derrida’s “history book” evokes fluid terms such as the trace and differance to account for a new history of metaphysical concepts that cannot be reduced to a customary historicism.