Critique, Style and Responsibility: Derrida’s Indirect Response to Heidegger

Heidegger and Derrida explicitly locate the heart of their thinking in its development, movement or pathway, rather than in its positive results or conclusions. This also means that their relation cannot simply be construed as an opposition of philosophical positions, though deconstruction has often been construed in opposition to hermeneutics or phenomenology. Derrida’s 1964-65 seminar on Heidegger opens with this problem of a ‘destruction’ of metaphysics that cannot be a ‘refutation’. How must we then understand Derrida’s ‘critical’ relation to Heidegger?
I will show in two ways that Derrida maintains a structural ambiguity with respect to Heidegger. (1) Firstly, in Derrida’s Éperons. Les styles de Nietzsche, Derrida defines his own work in opposition to Heidegger’s ‘onto-hermeneutics’ but equally stresses the potential of Heidegger’s Ereignis to disrupt the ‘hermeneutic circle’. Derrida performs this undecidability through the enactment of a Nietzschean ‘plurality of styles’.
(2) Secondly, in De l’esprit Derrida criticizes Heidegger for avoiding certain themes (gender, politics, race, animality, the body) but stresses that this cannot simply be avoided. Instead, in this unavoidable avoidance Derrida finds an ‘affirmation’ that grounds his notion of ‘responsibility’. Derrida’s indirectness must thus be understood as the attempt to assume the highest intellectual responsibility.