Jeffrey Gower

This article rehearses Derrida’s articulation in Theory and Practice of an analogy between Althusser’s and Heidegger’s treatments of the theory/practice pair. The analogy motivates a question about what remains for thinking and acting in the wake of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, when the traditional sovereignty of theory over practice becomes untenable. In the seminar, Derrida develops a line of inquiry about the edge distinguishing theory from practice, which philosophy would presumably over?low as it ceases to merely interpret the world and begins to change it. The article shows how Derrida’s analogy between Marxist philosophy and Heideggerian thinking exposes some pitfalls of any attempt to definitively escape prescientific philosophy or metaphysics while also opening up the possibility of allying Heidegger’s destruction of technological humanism and retrieval of an originary ethics with the Marxian imperative to change the world.

The article retraces three important steps along the path of Derrida’s Heidegger interpretation in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Readings of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Introduction to Metaphysics, and “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics” complement and further develop Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger, which revolves around the term “Walten” and its role in the world-formation that makes community possible. The analysis of what Derrida calls the hyper-sovereignty of Walten reveals an ethico-political ambiguity in Heidegger’s texts. On the one hand, this hyper-sovereignty registers as a super-sovereign violence that founds theological-political world-constructs through the exclusion of those deemed other. On the other hand, like différance it serves as the condition of impossibility of a common world. Following Derrida’s provocation, I develop this second sense to argue that the dissolution of the common world entails an ethical imperative to carry the other with whom one has nothing in common.