Disharmonious Continuity - Berghahn Journals

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Critiquing Presence with Sartre and Derrida. GAVIN RAE. Abstract: The traditional interpretation of the Sartre-Derrida rela- tionship follows their own insistence ...
Disharmonious Continuity Critiquing Presence with Sartre and Derrida GAVIN RAE

Abstract: The traditional interpretation of the Sartre-Derrida relationship follows their own insistence that they are separated by a certain irreducible distance. Contemporary research has, however, questioned that assessment, mainly by reassessing the thought of Sartre to picture him as a precursor to poststructuralism/deconstruction. This article takes off from this stance to suggest that Sartre and Derrida are partners against a common enemy—ontological presence—but develop different paths to overcome it: Sartre affirming nothingness and Derrida affirming différance. While much work has been done on these concepts, they have rarely been used as the exclusive means through which to engage with the Sartre-Derrida relationship. Focusing on them reveals that while Sartrean nothingness and Derridean différance are oriented against ontological presence, the latter entails a radicalization of the former. Their relationship is not then one of opposition but rather one of disharmonious continuity. Keywords: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, ontology, presence

The relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida appears to be relatively straightforward, given that both sought to distance themselves from the style or mode of thinking of the other. For example, while Sartre, to my knowledge, never publically discussed Derrida, we get a glimpse of what he might have said from comments he makes about structuralism1 in a 1966 interview published in L’Arc, where he criticizes its rejection of what he considers essential: a certain emphasizing of the subject and approach to history, and a confrontation with traditional philosophy on its terms.2 Derrida offers a more extensive and nuanced, if not contradictory, assessment of Sartre that wavers between affirming Sartre’s position © UKSS and NASS doi:10.3167/ssi.2017.230205

Sartre Studies International Volume 23, Issue 2, 2017: 58–81 ISSN 1357-1559 (Print) • ISSN 1558-5476 (Online)

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over Edmund Husserl’s on the issue of the imagination in 1962’s The Origin of Geometry3 to critiquing Sartre’s humanism in 1968’s The Ends of Man and mockingly referring to “the ontophenomenologist of the liberation”4 who searches for a fundamental project that will provide “the ‘keys’ to the-man-and-the-complete-work”5 in 1974’s Glas. This ambiguous assessment continues in the little-known “Pocket-Size Interview” from 1978 in which Derrida criticizes Sartre for not being “a rigorous enough reader”6 of Husserl and Heidegger, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, but accepts that “it would be absurd for me to try to absolutely distance myself from Sartre.”7 Further, in the 1983 interview with Catherine David, “Unsealing (‘the Old New Language’),” Derrida claims that, although he is speaking from a position of love, he considers Sartre’s model of thinking to be “nefarious and catastrophic,”8 while in the 1996 article ‘“Dead Man Running’: Salut, Salut,” published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Les Temps Modernes, the journal that Sartre helped found, Derrida explains, “I have never been one of you” even though “I feel, and I know, that I have always been for and with Les Temps Modernes.”9 While these comments lend themselves to the conclusion that Sartre and Derrida sought to distinguish themselves from one another, contemporary scholarship has called that conclusion into question. In his biography of Derrida’s early career, Edward Baring notes that “Derrida aligned himself … with Sartre”10 just after World War II, before becoming “a ‘post-existentialist”’ in the 1950s and 1960s, albeit one that was only “one degree removed”11 from Sartre. On this telling, Sartre was a formative influence on Derrida, a connection confirmed by Leonard Lawler’s claim that “Sartre probably influenced Derrida’s early reading of Heidegger,”12 which, given Heidegger’s importance for Derrida,13 demonstrates the crucial, if implicit, role Sartre played in Derrida’s intellectual development. It also supports Tilottama Rajan’s conclusion that “phenomenology [i]s the site at which deconstruction first emerges,”14 insofar as “deconstruction is a transposition of phenomenological into linguistic models that retains the ontological concerns of the former.”15 This is perhaps one reason for Bruce Baugh’s claim that “despite Derrida’s explicit repudiation of Sartre, the similarities with Sartre are striking”16 to the extent that “Derrida’s différance has the same structure as Sartrean consciousness even if it does not have the same referent,”17 a position that lends credence to Steve Martinot’s assertion that “Derrida and Sartre [are] kindred souls, addressing what can surprisingly be seen as common themes.”18 Indeed, Martinot makes the stronger claim that “Sartre personally haunts the philo– 59 –

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sophical ground where the Derridean critique of metaphysics stakes its philosophical claim.”19 Numerous commentators have, then, sought to rethink the Sartre-Derrida relationship to show that the former was an important influence on the latter, which is not to say that they collapse Sartre and Derrida into one another. They implicitly follow Christina Howells’s affirmation of a ‘“new’ Sartre”20 who exists not in opposition to poststructuralism/deconstruction per se, as his poststructuralist critics tend to hold,21 but as a prefiguration of those “movements.” To illustrate her point, she notes that “the decentred subject, the rejection of metaphysics of presence, the critique of bourgeois humanism and individualism, the concept of the reader as producer of the text’s multiple meanings … are not the inventions of Lacan, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida”22 but are found in Sartre’s early so-called existentialist works of the 1930s and 1940s. If these themes are found in Sartre’s early works, what is Sartre’s role in the development of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought, and, indeed, how are we to understand and classify his own thinking? Nik Farrell Fox responds that it is a matter of seeing Sartre as being “situated in a transitional space that straddles the divide and creates a sometimes uneasy tension between a postmodern sense of despair, plurality, fragmentation and indeterminacy and a modernist longing for comprehension, meaning, construction and totality.”23 On this reading, Sartre is not a straightforward Cartesian modernist, as his poststructuralist/deconstructionist critics tend to affirm, but a thinker who instantiated a partial overcoming of the Cartesian subject and modernist notions of universal truth and totality that was subsequently taken up and extended by poststructuralist/ deconstructionist thinkers. This article24 takes off from this stance to suggest that Sartre and Derrida are not the opposites they tend to portray themselves as being, because they are engaged against a common enemy: ontological presence. While “presence” is a complicated term whose precise meaning differs for both thinkers and so will be worked out as we proceed, generally speaking, “it” refers to an understanding that (1) holds that entities present themselves in a particular way, namely one that allows an appraisal of them, which (2) is possible because the entity that presents itself is understood to form a totality, defined by clear boundaries that distinguish it from other things, with this (3) permitting a definitive answer to be reached about the entity. There is, in other words, nothing that escapes, alters, or is deferred from and by the entity. The entity simply is what is present/ed. – 60 –

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In Being and Nothingness,25 Sartre famously describes a world wherein, through the category of being-in-itself, ontological presence exists and, indeed, is crucial to permit the nihilating withdrawal that brings forth the freedom of consciousness. In contrast, Derrida argues that there never actually is ontological presence. Presence is the consequence of a failure to recognize and understand that being is an effect of différance, which, in Voice and Phenomena, is described as the “ultra-transcendental concept of life.”26 That Sartre relies on nothingness and Derrida affirms différance has, of course, been noted in the literature, but, when comparing and contrasting their thinking, scholars have tended to either focus on another topic27 or discuss the nothingness-différance relationship in passing.28 In contrast, my contention is that Sartrean nothingness and Derridean différance are the central concepts of their respective thinking so that, if we want to understand what each is trying to say, show how each combats ontological presence, and is related to the other, we must bring them together through a close reading of these concepts. To do so, I first outline Sartre’s analyses of negativity, nothing, and nihilation in Being and Nothingness, before turning to Derrida’s conception of différance as laid out in the important early essay of the same name.29 This trajectory shows that Derrida holds that the overcoming of ontological presence that Sartre ties to nothingness manifested through the (pre-reflective) nihilating actions of consciousness is really an effect of a pre-individual movement called différance. With this, Derrida continues Sartre’s critique of presence but undercuts and so radicalizes Sartre’s solutions to the problem by showing that the autonomous agent that Sartre depends on is an effect of “prior” nonconsciousness differential structures and processes. By shifting the analysis from Sartre’s consciousness-dependent critique to the pre-consciousness structures and processes that generate subjectivity/consciousness and meaning, Derridean différance radicalizes Sartre’s mitigated, nothingness-based critique of ontological presence. It should be noted that in making this argument, I am not going to evaluate the validity of either position. Doing justice to such an endeavor would require far more space than can be devoted here and, indeed, depends on first correctly understanding their key concepts and the relationship between them. Thus, I explicitly take a more historical approach that focuses on clarifying the relationship between Sartre’s conception of nothingness and Derrida’s notion of différance to show that their relationship is one of disharmonious continuity—a conclusion that accords with and helps to explain Derrida’s comments on his ambiguous – 61 –

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relationship to his predecessor and demonstrates the often-ignored continuities that exist between Sartre and Derrida specifically and existentialism and poststructuralism/deconstruction more generally.

Sartre, Presence, and Nothingness Sartre starts Being and Nothingness by rejecting the old metaphysical dichotomies between essence and appearance and noumenon and phenomenon. Instead, he favors a more immanent understanding of being that focuses on the phenomenon as it appears and that is understood to be “absolutely indicative of itself.”30 There is no world behind the world of appearance; that which appears reveals itself as it is. This is not, of course, to say there is no transcendence; Sartre’s dual-level theory of consciousness ensures that he continues to affirm transcendence. Transcendence is, however, perceived within rather than from phenomenal being. The problem, of course, is, as Sartre recognizes, that this gives rise to the question of what the is inherent to this statement and, indeed, traditional conceptions of being, means. In other words, it raises the ontological question: what is being? Famously, Sartre suggests that being takes two forms: one conforming to a static, fixed understanding and the other defined by nothingness that, as a consequence, is always becoming. The first option is Sartre’s notion of being-in-itself, which, as Gregory McCulloch notes, “can be used to mean entity (as in ‘The world is fully of beings’), but Sartre most often uses it in the sense of way or mode or manner of being.”31 In other words, “being-in-itself” describes both the ontological characteristics defining nonconsciousness entities and the (inauthentic) mode of being that consciousness chooses to adopt when it takes itself to be an object defined by full presence or an essence. Importantly, for Sartre, both senses of being-in-itself are understood to be defined by the same ontological characteristic: “being is what it is.”32 This does, however, give rise to two issues: first, conflating the two senses of being-in-itself in this way is highly problematic because the latter option describes a mode of being that consciousness can adopt. Sartre’s most detailed discussion of the different ways in which this can occur takes place in his famous account of bad faith.33 As we will shortly see, consciousness is defined by a pre-reflective nihilating act of withdrawal from the presence of being-in-itself, meaning it never actually is the object, presence, or essence that it can take itself to be. – 62 –

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The second issue relates to the appropriateness of using “presence” to describe being. After all, Sartre warns that it is “impossible … to define being as a presence since absence too discloses being, since not to be there means still to be.”34 If being-in-itself is a form of being, and if being is revealed through both presence and absence, we cannot reduce being and, by extension, being-in-itself to presence. Sartre, however, is talking not of being-in-itself here but rather being. He is taking aim at what he understands to be Heidegger’s reraising of the question of the meaning of being. For Sartre, Heidegger’s notion of being describes a transcendent substance distinct from the entities that present themselves from it. In other words, Sartre interprets Heidegger’s ontological difference—the difference between being and beings—to signify the difference between being, thought in terms of presence or substance, and its different manifestations in object form.35 For Sartre, Heidegger’s inquiry into entities reveals the being, understood in terms of substance, “behind” them all. In contrast, Sartre’s phenomenological account rejects this twoworld approach: “the object does not hide being, but neither does it reveal being.” Rather, “being is simply the condition of revelation”36 and is revealed through its phenomenal forms. Rather than a hierarchical distinction between a transcendent substantial being that is manifested in different phenomenal entities, Sartre insists that being is expressed immanently through two forms: being-in-itself and being-for-itself.37 Presence defines one sense of the former but never the latter: even when consciousness adopts the mode of being of bad faith and so understands itself in terms of being-in-itself, it never actually is being-in-itself. Sartre’s comments on being-in-itself are relatively limited and, as he explains, “provisional”38 because a full elucidation of being-in-itself depends on the attributes given to it by consciousness’s interpretation. After all, “consciousness can always pass beyond the existent, not toward its being, but toward the meaning of this being.”39 Nevertheless, Sartre aims to outline the basic characteristics of being-in-itself. Thus, we learn that “being-in-itself is what it is.”40 This tautology is, however, far from clear and, indeed, becomes more complicated as Sartre tries to elucidate and defend it. We first learn that it cannot be thought in terms of passivity or activity. This, however, is somewhat complicated. It clearly is “passive” in a certain sense because the passive material of the world “can on no account act upon consciousness.”41 Sartre supports this by discussing the origins of being. Rather than emanating from a transcendent source, such as God, being “is its own support.”42 This might be understood to mean that being brings – 63 –

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itself into existence and so entails continuous self-perpetuating action. However, not only does Sartre warn that being “is neither passivity nor activity” because “both of these notions are human and designate human conduct or the instruments of human conduct,”43 but he also rejects the idea that being’s self-sufficiency means that it creates itself and is, therefore, active. Sartre discusses this most clearly in his rejection of the notion that being is immanence. On Sartre’s telling, “immanence in spite of all connection with the self is still that very slight withdrawal which can be realized—away from the self.” In contrast, being has no distance from itself and so “is not a connection with itself. It is itself.” But, if being is not passive, active, affirmative, negative, immanent or transcendent, what is it? Sartre responds, “It is an immanence which can not [sic] realize itself, an affirmation which can not affirm itself, an activity which can not act, because it is glued to itself[:] … being is in itself.”44 However, this formulation still contains a problem: the copula in the sentence is derivative of “being” and so depends on the meaning of being. But this is precisely what is being described through the statement. To say “being is” results in a tautology: being is what is being defined, but to define “being” requires the use of “is,” which only gets its meaning from that being defined: being. Sartre aims to overcome this issue by claiming that it “instructs us to the special meaning which must be given to the ‘is’ in the phrase, being is what it is.” Specifically, the “is” “designates the opacity of being-initself.”45 This opacity is due to not complexity but simplicity; beingin-itself “has no within which is opposed to a without and which is analogous to a judgment, a law, a consciousness of itself. The initself has nothing secret; it is solid (massif) … full positivity … and it exhausts itself in being.” Being-in-itself is pure presence and so is not tied to the “possible or impossible,” which depend on nothingness and so are “structure[s] of the for-itself.”46 Being-for-itself is a fundamentally different form of being: spontaneous, capable of altering itself, free, active, and, crucially, for our purposes, defined by Sartre as “being what it is not and not being what it is.”47 Put differently, being-for-itself is a type of being and so exists but, at the same time, is not simply that which appears; its being is always deferred. This is possible because being-for-itself is defined by nothingness, which makes possible and depends on a nihilating withdrawal from being-in-itself. As we will see, this anticipates Derrida’s claim that différance and, by extension, that which emanates from it, is deferred. It differs from Derrida by claiming that this deferment is the result of nothingness rather than difference. – 64 –

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To understand why this is so requires us to turn to his discussion of nothingness. When we do, we find that Sartre’s analysis is conceptually nuanced, insofar as it distinguishes between three entwined concepts: negation, nothing, and nihilation. Negation refers to the capacity to reflectively answer any question in the negative.48 Negation is, however, only a possibility for one type of being: human being.49 It is not a possibility for being-in-itself because this form of being only is what it is. Being-for-itself, on the other hand, is “what it is not and not … what it is.”50 The possibility that being-for-itself may respond negatively points to the conclusion that being-for-itself is, in some way, tied to non-being. Only this connection permits being-for-itself to respond to a question negatively. Thus, Sartre concludes that “the necessary condition for our saying not is that nonbeing be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.”51 The possibility of negation depends then on “the objective existence of non-being,”52 that is, nothingness. The discussion is not particularly clear or extended, but Sartre appears to be insisting that nothingness grounds the act of negation because, while negation turns something into nothing, nothingness “envelops the not within itself as its essential structure.”53 A condition of each act of negation is that it exists “within” and emanates from nothingness. It is only because there is nothingness that acts of negation are possible. It is important to note here that, following Heidegger, Sartre thinks of nothingness as entailing not the absence of being but rather a particular form of being—namely, one that does not conform to the being of thingness.54 It is, rather, no-thing. This allows Sartre to claim that “nothingness stands at the origin of the negative judgement because it is itself negation. It founds the negation as an act because it is the negation as being.”55 However, no sooner has Sartre claimed that nothingness entails a type of being than he appears to backtrack by claiming that nothingness is not a being but entails a particular modification of being that “lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm.”56 While this appears to solve one problem, it does so by creating another: if nothingness is “within” being, how can being be pure presence? It would appear to ensure that being is not pure being at all but rather something akin to a hollowed whole—being on the “outside” but nothing on the “inside.” This would, however, violate Sartre’s insistence that being is “full positivity.”57 To get around this, Sartre plays on two senses in which being can be said to be pure positivity: (1) being “in general” or being-as-such from where different manifestations of being (i.e., entities) emanate, and (2) a being defined in terms of – 65 –

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pure positivity. There is a reading of Sartre that conflates the two so that being-as-such is thought in terms of a homogenous bloc of pure positivity. For example, Thomas Sprigge argues that being-in-itself is “a plenitude of being with no definite character,”58 which brings Nik Farrell Fox to criticize Sartre for not differentiating between organic and nonorganic forms of nonconscious being.59 However, if this understanding were correct, Sartre’s claim that nothingness lies coiled within being would be nonsensical, because it would mean that being would be pure positivity yet contain non-being and so not be pure positivity. Overcoming this problem requires that we “tidy up” the laxities in Sartre’s presentation by recognizing that being-in-itself and being-for-itself are manifestations of being-as-such. Being-for-itself is defined by nothingness, lies within being (as-such), and is distinguished from another manifestation of being (as-such) called beingin-itself, which is defined by pure presence. Therefore, Sartre claims that nothingness, as non-being, comes to the world from the differentiation of being-as-such, and, as a manifestation of being, lies coiled within being (as-such). We should not, however, think that being (as-such) refers to a transcendent substance; for Sartre, it refers to “the ever-present foundation of the existent; it is everywhere in it and nowhere.”60 We might say that it is the basic phenomenon that becomes manifested, without ever being distinguished from, beingin-itself and being-for-itself. Derrida is highly critical of any recourse to the notion of “as,” particularly as it relates to being, claiming that it implicitly relies on a foundational presence against which the appearance of an entity is judged. This forgets or ignores the differential relations that subtend any concept. Thus, he explains that différance is “that which not only could never be appropriated in the as such of its name or its appearing, but also that which threatens the authority of the as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its essence.” 61 Indeed, in “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition,” he claims that “this small word, as, is then everywhere the name of the very issue, not to say the target of deconstruction.”62 This highlights a fundamental disagreement over the status and meaning of being and, indeed, the means to overcome presence: Sartrean ontology relies on a sense of being (as-such) that becomes manifested immanently through two forms with the nothingness of being-for-itself resulting from the nihilation of the presence of being-in-itself, while Derrida claims that we can only understand being through “its” differential relationship to “its” var– 66 –

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ious manifestations, with the consequence that being is an effect of what he calls différance. Having shown that negation entails a reflective response to a question with this reflective response emanating from a modification of nothingness, Sartre recognizes that nothingness must, therefore, in a sense be given. This gives rise to the following question: “if nothingness can be conceived neither outside of being, nor in terms of being, and if on the other hand, since it is non-being, it can not [sic] derive from itself the necessary force to ‘nihilate itself,’ where does nothingness come from?”63 Sartre responds that nothingness describes the ontological structure of a type of being, which results from a pre-reflective nihilating act whereby that being distinguishes itself from what it is not: being-in-itself. This, of course, gives rise to the problematic paradox that this being is and, at the same time, is not. While this paradox is, no doubt, meant to convey the mystery of this type of being, it is resolved when we remember that while the being is, in that it exists, nothingness (= is not) refers to a mode of being that being-for-itself can adopt. In other words, claiming that a being is defined by nothingness merely means that it both is and is not its particular mode of being. Thus, it is better to think of Sartrean nothingness not in terms of the lack or absence of being (as-such) but in terms of a form of being characterized by no-thingness opposed to another type of being characterized by the presence of thing-ness (i.e., being-in-itself). Claiming that a being both is and is not reveals that it is constituted by fissure or difference; it is, as Neil Levy puts it, “separated from itself by nothingness, and this nothingness … enables it to withdraw from the world of the in-itself and question it.”64 From this nihilating withdrawal to nothingness (= non-being), the being is then capable of choosing whether to offer a reflectively affirmative or negative judgment.65 But what is the being that is ontologically constituted by this nihilating withdrawal? Sartre, of course, answers that it is being-for-itself, meaning human consciousness.66 Consciousness’s nihilating withdrawal entails two aspects: first, a pre-reflective nihilating withdrawal from being-in-itself that brings being-for-itself to be. This is not, however, a one-time action. Being-for-itself must continue to affect the nihilating withdrawal from being-in-itself to be; this “preserves” the existence of being-for-itself. If being-foritself does not continuously affect this nihilating withdrawal, it becomes the pure presence of being-in-itself. Second, from this continuous nihilating withdrawal from the thing-ness of being-initself, Sartre concludes that being-for-itself is no-thing (= not being– 67 –

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in-itself) and so capable of making reflective judgments—an action that, as we saw, depends on the negation made possible by such a nihilating withdrawal. Sartre’s attempt to undermine presence, therefore, depends on a subtle and complicated analysis of nothingness. To understand how his affirmation of nothingness feeds into his critique of presence, we need to clarify the relationship between the presence of being-initself and the non-presence of being-for-itself. To do so, we must remember the dual sense of the meaning of being-in-itself: it both describes the ontological characteristics of a type of being distinct from being-for-itself and an (inauthentic) mode of being that beingfor-itself can adopt. In relation to the first sense—being-in-itself as the ontological characteristics of a type of being—Sartre’s attitude toward the presence it entails is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, being-for-itself is parasitical on the presence of being-in-itself with the consequence that the presence of the latter is simply accepted. On the other hand, Sartre’s analyses are always conducted from the perspective of being-for-itself and aim to show how the foritself overcomes the inertia and presence of the in-itself to express its fundamental freedom. Therefore, while he accepts the necessary existence of entities defined by presence, it is always an acceptance for the sake of the possibilities inherent to being-for-itself. This becomes clearer when we examine Sartre’s relationship to the second sense of being-in-itself: the idea that it describes a particular (inauthentic) mode of being that being-for-itself can adopt. When we turn to this sense, we find that Sartre is unequivocal: the entire critique undertaken in Being and Nothingness and later in Notebooks for an Ethics and Critique of Dialectical Reason targets those modes of being-for-itself that aim to adopt the being of being-in-itself. This is part of Sartre’s attempt to affirm the intrinsic becoming of being-foritself, which disrupts and breaks up the being of being-in-itself. Sartre’s critique of presence is, therefore, always conducted from the perspective of being-for-itself or human consciousness. It is from this privileging that Derrida will launch his critique.

Derrida, Presence, and Difference In the famous 1968 essay “The Ends of Man,” Derrida summarizes Sartre’s analysis as follows: Not only is existentialism a humanism, but the ground and horizon of what Sartre then called his “phenomenological ontology” (the subtitle of – 68 –

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Being and Nothingness) remains the unity of human-reality. To the extent that it describes the structures of human-reality, phenomenological ontology is a philosophical anthropology. Whatever the breaks marked by this Hegelian-Husserlian-Heideggerian anthropology as concerns the classical anthropologies, there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with what which, so naturally, links the we of the philosopher to “we men,” to the we in the horizon of humanity.67

Sartre’s project is, then, on Derrida’s telling, an anthropocentric anthropology and, as such, reduces reality to human reality. In so doing, Sartre simply takes over the tradition’s metaphysical anthropocentrism with the consequence that “although the theme of history is quite present … there is little practice of the history of concepts. For example, the history of the concept ‘man’ is never examined. Everything occurs as if the sign ‘man’ had no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit.”68 For Derrida, Sartre’s approach is not sufficiently radical in that it does not question the genesis of its concepts. Rather than break with the tradition as it professes to do, it simply reworks the tradition’s concepts within the logical framework of that same tradition. A more radical analysis is required that actually undermines and so breaks with the logical structures underpinning the tradition and, by extension, Sartre’s analysis. Derrida develops this through critiques of the Hegelian and Heideggerian logical structures underpinning Sartre’s thinking. In relation to the first, Derrida holds that Sartre’s Hegelian background and conceptual schema, even if different to Hegel’s, simply prevents him from breaking decisively with the tradition’s emphasis on totality and finality. There is, of course, the question of whether Hegel actually affirms totality and finality, but the French reception of Hegel, especially those derived from Alexandre Kojève’s reading, has always affirmed this.69 By taking over Hegel’s concepts, Derrida holds that Sartre is implicitly bound to the totalizing, singular conclusions that he, Derrida, understands Hegel to be affirming.70 Derrida also claims that this is compounded by Sartre’s Heideggerian heritage. Two aspects of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger are important here. First, contrary to Heidegger’s affirmation, Derrida claims that Heidegger does not break with the metaphysical tradition, because his analysis remains too humanistic and, indeed, continues to affirm the tradition’s emphasis on unity as manifested through his obsessive affirmation of the meaning of the question of being—a questioning that, for Derrida, is based on a “proper” and so singular questioning that will lead to a final, correct answer. Second, Derrida insists that Heidegger simply came to the wrong con– 69 –

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clusion from his analysis of the ontological difference. By claiming that entities can only be understood through an inquiry into their being, Heidegger concludes that this demonstrates the fundamental importance of being when, for Derrida, it actually reveals that being, insofar as it is only revealed through its difference to entities, depends on and emanates from difference. Difference—or, as he will come to write it for reasons that will be shortly outlined, différance—then, “in a certain and very strange way, [is] ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than the truth of being.”71 Heidegger is wrong to think that presence is overcome by thinking of/from being and its relationship to entities. Presence is overcome by looking to the relationality inherent to Heidegger’s ontological difference to start with and from difference. With this, Derrida establishes a different frame of reference for overcoming presence. There is a movement away from a focus on being and the subject that results from it, toward non- or pre-personal differential structures and the exploration of how these necessarily disrupt and undermine presence. Indeed, whereas Sartre privileges the non-presence of being-for itself but accepts that presence exists in the form of being-in-itself and, indeed, holds that it is the condition on which the nothingness of being-for-itself depends, Derrida is far more definitive in his critique, holding that the perception of presence is, in actuality, based on the failure to appreciate the “proper” nature of reality—that is, that any apparent presence of reality is actually an effect of différance. The question now becomes, what does Derrida mean by différance? The first thing to note is that différance is neither a “word nor a concept.” It is a relation, one that accompanies all presence but is itself never present. Indeed, while “it is read, or it is written, … it cannot be heard,”72 a position that, in privileging the written over the spoken, continues Derrida’s critique of logo-phonocentrism.73 The “a” of différance plays then a special role, insofar as “it” “is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb.”74 That it cannot be heard, spoken, or defined does not, however, mean that it does not exist, nor does it diminish its importance. Rather, it is that which is undefinable but also that which is most important. The reasoning for this will become clear as we proceed, but it is important to note that Derrida is following Ferdinard de Saussure who, in his famous Cours de linquistigue générale, explains: In language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Whether we take the signification or – 70 –

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the signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system. In a sign, what matters more than any idea or sound associated with it is what other signs surround it.75

Saussure emphasizes that sense emanates not from concepts but from the relations between concepts. The difference between them is crucial for their understanding. Derrida accepts Saussure’s basic point but criticizes Saussure for limiting its applicability to semantics. For Derrida, différance refers not only to the “play of differences within language but also [to] the relation of speech to language.”76 On Derrida’s reading, Saussure limits his account of the importance of difference to semantic meaning, whereas Derrida insists that it refers beyond the realm of semantics to be found “in” all spheres of existence. It is not enough then to point to difference as that which generates meaning; we must engage with the “play of difference”77 that subtends and generates meaning and entities. Derrida cannot, however, simply refer to “difference.” This risks turning “difference” into a singular category, one that generates all other concepts or entities. If this were the case, he would be in danger of reinstantiating the logic of ontotheology, albeit with a logic that privileges “difference” over “God,” “being,” or any other concept that has traditionally been taken to be foundational. However, “différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.” Différance is not an ontotheological concept, because while Derrida is aware that his descriptions will often “resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology,” he insists that différance cannot be thought in terms of (negative) theology, which has tended to rely on a singular entity to ground itself and so remains tied to ontology. Not only does différance not have “existence nor essence. It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent.”78 As that which gives rise to the presence-absence relation, différance cannot be defined by either. It “exceeds the alternative of presence and absence.”79 However, Derrida notes that as difference “is the condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign [it] is in itself a silent play” and “the difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the word.” Différance is never present and so never announces itself. – 71 –

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This is not because différance is nothing; différance is not defined by being or nothing, “it” is that which makes the difference between being and nothingness possible. This is one of the difficulties Derrrida has in describing the term: because it is that which generates the meaning of concepts, “it” cannot be defined conceptually. Rather, the non-presence of difference “happily suggests that … we must be permitted to refer to an order which no longer belongs to sensibility.”80 This is not because of action on the part of an agent; it is the fundamental aspect of the structure of difference “itself.” Up to this point, however, Derrida has been defining différance negatively. As he notes, “we have had to delineate that différance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form; and we will be led to delineate also everything that it is not.”81 From a Sartrean perspective, this appears to confirm his privileging of negativity/nothingness. If Derrida can only describe différance negatively, its meaning must depend on the negative that Sartre privileges. Derrida disagrees, as he claims that différance is not caught up in the economy of the relationship between being and nothing, whereby nothing remains opposed to being and so is always defined from and tied to being. Différance is that which “exists” outside of the being-nothing relation because it “founds” this relation. Consequently, différance is not, but this is not because it is opposed to being; it is “prior” to the being-nothing economy. As such, différance cannot be described by categories such as being, non-being, thing, no-thing and so on, because these categories are effects of différance and so cannot turn in on themselves to reveal that which grounds them, especially as those foundations do not present themselves. While Sartrean nothingness is tied to being by virtue of its dependence on the pre-reflective nihilating withdrawal from beingin-itself that defines and creates the nothingness of consciousness, Derridean différance claims to describe the relationship between Sartrean nothingness (= consciousness) and being that makes possible the designation of both. Crucially, différance is not opposed to the being-nothing economy; différance subtends this economy. Derrida is aware that thinking this is an “uneasy and uncomfortable”82 task, but, for him, Sartre’s affirmation of nothingness remains at the level of ontology and does not think the logical relations that generate the categories of ontology. To say that nothingness disrupts being is to ignore the question of what distinguishes and binds nothingness to being to allow for its disruption. Rather than focus on ontological categories, such as being and nothingness, Derrida claims that the relations that – 72 –

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bind (and generate) ontological categories must be privileged. This does not establish a binary opposition between ontological categories and the relations subtending and binding them. This would place différance within the restricted economy of a binary opposition and, by extension, realm of ontology. Différance is defined neither by ontological categories nor by its difference/opposition to them; différance describes the differential relations that (1) distinguish ontological categories, and (2) generate the meaning of those categories. Différance is not then an ontological category, but this not should not be understood in terms of ontology—that is, as a category defined by the absence of being. Différance describes the differential logic that gives rises to and continues to define the relations between ontological categories. To clarify this further, Derrida notes that différance is always differential and differentiating. This insight is behind “the difference marked in the ‘differ( )nce’ between the e and the a,”83 “difference” and “différance.” This does not point to a “third,” mediating term between “difference” and “différance” but reveals the structure of differential relations themselves: they are always differentiated and differentiating—a movement that is intrinsic to différance rather than that which is generated from a position external to “it.” That Derrida is trying to describe the differential relations that generate concepts means that he cannot call it “difference,” a concept that has tended to exist in distinction to “identity” and so depend for its meaning on the “difference” between “difference” and “identity.” To highlight that he is speaking of a relation, not a concept, and that this relation is never static but always differentiating, Derrida coins the term différance. As that which makes relations between concepts possible, différance does not become manifest and so “cannot be exposed”84 because “one can expose only that which at a certain moment can become present, manifest, that which can be shown, presented as something present, a present-being in its truth, in the truth of a present or the presence of the present.”85 Only its effects are presented and, even then, their meaning is always deferred. Developing this, Derrida turns to the etymology of différance, explaining that it is composed of two aspects: a temporal aspect linked to deferment, which ensures that its meaning is always reserved and continuously put off until later, and a spatial aspect linked to differentiation that ensures that “it” is not identical with itself or anything else, cannot be discerned, and is always other.86 Because différance is perpetual and because “it” is that from which signification emanates, Derrida – 73 –

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concludes that “différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.” Différance is the source of opposition and signification, but because origin has traditionally implied foundation, which is, of course, denied by the deferred differentiation of différance, Derrida insists that “the name ‘origins’ no longer suits it.”87 This further distances Derrida from Sartre’s affirmation of nothingness, which is tied to a focal point from and around which it emanates: namely, human consciousness. Derrida, in contrast, holds that différance cannot be located in a source, including one defined by nothingness, and exists prior to any form of consciousness. Différance is that from which being and nothing emanate, without this point of emanation being a point or an origin. It could, of course, be objected that différance must be, in some way, tied to consciousness because it cannot be thought and identified unless it passes through consciousness. As such, it cannot be held to be divorced from consciousness in the way that Derrida intends. Derrida does not take up this issue, but one response would be to insist that such an interpretation conflates the act of disclosing différance through consciousness with an intimate constitutive bond between the two. Just because différance must pass through consciousness to be articulated does not mean that it is constitutively tied to consciousness. For Derrida, différance occurs regardless of whether consciousness exists, and/or recognizes, and affirms it. Thus, différance can be revealed through consciousness, but it is not tied or limited to consciousness in the same way that Sartre ties and limits nothingness to consciousness. Derrida is clearly walking a very thin line here, but his overall point is to emphasize that entities do not emanate from a particular act of consciousness nor from categories traditionally associated with being. They emanate from a becoming that, by virtue of the nature of that becoming, does not and cannot be thought from a point of origin. For this reason, he explains: We will designate as différance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted “historically” as a weave of differences. “Is constituted,” “is produced,” “is created,” “movement,” “historically” etc., necessarily being understood beyond the metaphysical language in which they are retained, along with all their implications.88

Contrary to Sartre’s privileging of human consciousness as that which breaks up presence, Derrida claims that this privileging relies on, but never inquires into, a prior relational logic: différance. Grounding différance in an agent would reinforce the anthropocen– 74 –

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trism that Derrida rejects. Consequently, he notes that “one comes to posit presence—and specifically consciousness, the being beside itself of consciousness—no longer as the absolutely central form of being but as a ‘determination’ and as an ‘effect.”’89 Importantly, différance is perpetual. The relationship generated by différance is not a thing but a continual process of “self-”division that is “internal” to the structure of différance itself. This is “the very enigma of différance … which divides its concept by means of a strange cleavage.”90 We do, however, have to understand the nature of this “self”-division in a particular way. It cannot, for example, be understood through an active-passive matrix. This would instantiate différance within a binary opposition (active vs. passive) that would reinscribe it within a restricted economy. Différance is that which comes logically and not temporally “prior” to the being-nothing relationship specifically and binary oppositions generally with the consequence that it cannot be understood in opposition to anything or in terms of an oppositional logic such as that which underpins the being-nothing and active-passive relationships. Interestingly, and in a similar way to Sartre’s insistence that nothingness has political importance, Derrida also claims that différance is inherently political in that “différance … governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom.”91 Again, this is the consequence not of a subjective decision or action but of the prepersonal, deferral-differentiation structure inherent to différance. There are, at least, two ways in which différance undermines political authority. First, différance challenges authoritarian claims to truth by showing that that which is understood to be universal and ahistoric is, in fact, historical, altering, and contestable. Second, différance subverts the monolithic political and social structures on which authority rests by showing that these are composed of moving relations that are, therefore, unstable, subject to alteration, and so contestable. Derrida will obviously develop the political aspects of his thinking in later texts, but it is interesting to note that the political intent behind his writings is evident in this early text. With this, he seems to agree with Sartre that the philosophical disruption of presence has political importance, although they disagree on what disrupts presence and what the political implications are of that disruption.92

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Concluding Remarks While Sartre and Derrida provide radically different philosophical and political responses to the issue of how to overcome presence, we should not think that they are diametrically opposed to one another: Sartrean nothingness and Derridean différance share the common goal of overcoming any privileging of ontological presence, are perceived to be the producers of ultimate meaning, are structured around the notion of deferring, and affirm differentiation over unity. That they share these structural similarities points to the conclusion that they are orientated toward the same path via different routes. Specifically, Sartrean nothingness and Derridean différance emanate from the attempt to respond to Heidegger’s privileging of the question of the meaning of being. Sartre, for example, develops his account of nothingness from a particular ontology and, therefore, continues Heidegger’s privileging of ontology. Similarly, Derrida develops his notion of différance and, by extension, his critique of Sartrean nothingness from and through a critique of Heidegger’s privileging of ontology. Linked to this, Sartre and Derrida agree that presence must be combatted. Sartre, however, accepts that a form of ontological presence (being-in-itself) is necessary to permit the nonpresence and hence freedom of being-for-itself, while Derrida rejects ontological presence in all forms. This brings him to affirm différance and reinforces his critique of Heideggerian ontology. Only a turn to différance, understood as pre-personal deferred differential/ting relations, can remove any last vestiges of ontological presence from our understanding. By shifting the analysis from Sartre’s consciousness-centric position to the differential relations that are understood to generate consciousness and meaning, Derridean différance entails not a departure from Sartre’s critique of presence per se but a radicalization of it. This, in turn, feeds into a disagreement over what disrupts presence: for Sartre, it is the pre-reflective nihilating withdrawal of consciousness with the consequence that the disruption of presence is constitutively tied to and results from (pre-reflective) acts of consciousness. He also seems to accept that ontological presence exists, in that it is a category of being independent of human activity, and, indeed, must necessarily exist if human consciousness is to be able to affect the nihilating withdrawal from being that allows it to be. Derridean différance, on the other hand, claims to be explicitly pre-personal with the consequence that the disruption of presence is not located in consciousness or the human subject. It occurs regardless – 76 –

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of whether humans affirm it. Indeed, it seems that, for Derrida, the notion of ontological presence only arises from the misunderstandings of individuals and, in particular, from a privileging of ontology. Pace Sartre, presence is not a necessary ontological category but an epistemological error that results when individuals mistakenly privilege being “over” the differential relations that subtend and generate “it.” Ultimately, this reveals that Sartre and Derrida appraise the Heideggerian project differently: Sartre, by virtue of explicitly intending to offer an ontology, aims to continue the Heideggerian project, albeit under a different guise and toward a different end, while Derrida aims to depart from Heidegger’s project by developing the notion of différance from a critique of Heidegger’s ontological difference. Thus, the Sartre-Derrida, nothingness-différance relationship, is intimately linked to and, indeed, emanates from a common question regarding the status and role of ontology within thought and, in particular, how to respond to Heidegger’s affirmation of the meaning of being. It therefore brings us to reexamine the status of ontology and, indeed, the role that the question of the meaning of being plays and should play within thought. Understanding that Derrida relates to Sartre’s critique of ontological presence in this way shows that their relationship is not one of opposition but of disharmonious continuity, accords with Derrida’s comments on his ambiguous relationship to his predecessor, and demonstrates the often-ignored continuities that exist between Sartre and Derrida specifically and existentialism and poststructuralism/deconstruction more generally.

Acknowledgments This article forms part of the activities for the Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project “Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics,” co-funded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement 600371; the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013-40258); the Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI-15-17); and Banco Santander. More information about the research project can be found at https://sovereigntyandlaw.wordpress.com.

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GAVIN RAE is Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. He specializes in post-Kantian philosophy with an emphasis on sociopolitical philosophy, ethics, and theories of subjectivity. He is the author of The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and is the coeditor, with Emma Ingala, of Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2017).

Notes 1.

There is, of course, substantial debate regarding the relationship between “structuralism,” “poststructuralism,” and “deconstruction,” but, for the sake of simplicity, I will use the terms interchangeably. For an approach that explicitly seeks to distinguish between them, see Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); and for one that collapses them into “structuralism,” see Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume 2: The SignSets, 1967–Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Jean-Paul Sartre Répond,” L’Arc 30 (1966): 87–96. 3. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 125n141. 4. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 28. 5. Ibid., 29. 6. Jacques Derrida, Freddy Tellez, and Bruno Mazzoldi, “The Pocket-Size Interview,” trans. Tupac Cruz, Critical Horizons 33, no. 2 (2007): 362–388 (365). 7. Ibid., 364–365. 8. Jacques Derrida, “Unsealing (‘The Old New Language),” in Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 115–131 (122). 9. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Dead Man Running’: Salut, Salut,” in Negotiations, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 257–292 (258). All emphases in the quotations in this article are in the original texts. 10. Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2. 11. Ibid., 48. 12. Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 48.

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Disharmonious Continuity 13. On Heidegger’s influence on Derrida, see Gavin Rae, “Authoritarian and Anthropocentric: Examining Derrida’s Critique of Heidegger,” Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 16, no. 1 (2015): 27–51. 14. Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders, xii. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Bruce Baugh, ‘“Hello, Goodbye’: Derrida and Sartre’s Legacy,” Sartre Studies International 5, no. 2 (1999): 61–74 (69). 17. Ibid., 63. 18. Steve Martinot, Forms in the Abyss: A Philosophical Bridge between Sartre and Derrida (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 20. 19. Ibid., 27. 20. Christina Howells, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–9 (1). See also Nik Farrell Fox, The New Sartre: Explorations in Postmodernism (London: Continuum, 2003), 2. 21. On the poststructuralist reception of Sartre and subsequent alterations to it, see Philip R. Wood, “Derrida Éngage and Poststructuralist Sartre: A Redefinition of Shifts in Recent French Philosophy,” Modern Language Notes 104, no. 4 (1989): 861–879. 22. Howells, “Introduction,” 2. 23. Farrell Fox, New Sartre, 4. 24. I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être el le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). References will be to Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003). 26. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawler (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 13. 27. For example, Bruce Baugh (“Sartre, Derrida, and Commitment: The Case of Algeria,” Sartre Studies International 9, no. 2 [2003]: 40–54) and Jane Hiddlestone (“Dialectic or Dissemination? Anti-colonial Critique in Sartre and Derrida,” Sartre Studies International 12, no. 1 [2006]: 33–49) compare both thinkers through their stances on colonialism without discussing the relationship between Sartrean nothingness and Derridean différance, while Holger Zaborowski (“On Freedom and Responsibility: Remarks on Sartre, Levinas and Derrida,” Heythrop Journal 41, no. 1 [2000]: 47–65) focuses on the concepts “freedom” and “responsibility” but fails to realize that, in the case of Sartre, both depend on the nihilating withdrawal that allows consciousness to be free, while for Derrida, ethical responsibility is tied to the deference inherent to différance with the consequence that a discussion of the former depends on and leads to the latter. 28. For example, Christina Howells (“Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” in Howells, Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 318–352) mentions it but focuses on the similarities between the Sartrean self and Derridean différance. Steve Martinot (Forms of the Abyss, 29–37) discusses the relationship in more detail but does so to develop an account of homology from it, while Bruce Baugh (French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism [London: Routledge, 2003], 140–142) appears to depend on it when critically engaging with Derrida’s claims regarding the roles that stability, totality and lack, essence, and humanism play in Sartre’s thinking, but never actually provides a detailed analysis of the differences/similarities between the two concepts. – 79 –

Gavin Rae 29. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27. 30. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 2. 31. Gregory McCulloch, Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes (Routledge: London, 1994), 3. 32. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 21. 33. Ibid., 70–94. For a detailed discussion of Sartre’s notion of bad faith, see Gavin Rae, Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), chap. 2. 34. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 5. 35. For a critique of this position and detailed engagement with Heidegger’s thought, see Gavin Rae, Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 36. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 5 (this and the preceding quotation). 37. Ibid., 19. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 18. 40. Ibid., 21. 41. Ibid., 19. 42. Ibid., 21. 43. Ibid., 20. 44. Ibid., 21 (this and the preceding two quotations). 45. Ibid. (this and the preceding quotation). 46. Ibid., 22 (this and the preceding two quotations). 47. Ibid., 21. 48. Ibid., 29. 49. Ibid., 31. 50. Ibid., 21. 51. Ibid., 35. 52. Ibid., 29. 53. Ibid., 42. 54. For an extended discussion of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s views on nothingness, including the former’s influence on the latter’s, see Gavin Rae, “Much Ado about Nothing: The Bergsonian and Heideggerian Roots of Sartre’s Conception of Nothingness,” Human Studies 39, no. 2 (2016): 249–268. 55. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 42. 56. Ibid., 41. 57. Ibid., 22. 58. Thomas Sprigge, Theories of Existence (London: Penguin, 1984), 135. 59. Farrell Fox, New Sartre, 45–46. 60. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 18. 61. Derrida, “Différance,” 25–26, in Margins of Philosophy, 3–27. 62. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition (thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” 53–54, in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24–57. 63. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 46. 64. Neil Levy, Sartre (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), 32. 65. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 47. 66. Ibid., 48. – 80 –

Disharmonious Continuity 67. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 111–136 (115–116). 68. Ibid., 116. 69. On the role that Kojève plays in introducing Hegel into post–World War II French philosophy and the differences between Sartre’s and Kojevé readings of Hegel, see Baugh, French Hegel, 1–2 and 98–100, respectively. 70. This (mis)reading ultimately leads Steve Martinot to explain that “Derrida’s critique of metaphysics… sees Sartre’s own critique of metaphysics as still metaphysical, and [so] renders Sartre’s thinking catastrophic for him. Derrida’s critique has engendered for itself what it then discovers.” Forms in the Abyss, 19. 71. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, 3–27 (22). 72. Ibid., 3 (this and the preceding quotation). 73. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), esp. part I, chap. 1. 74. Derrida, “Différance,” 4. 75. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linquistigue générale (Paris: Editions Payot, 1972), 166, trans. Roy Harris as Course in General Linguistics (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), 118. 76. Derrida, “Différance,” 15. 77. Ibid., 5 78. Ibid., 6 (this and the preceding quotations in this paragraph). 79. Ibid., 20. 80. Ibid., 5 (this and the preceding quotations in this paragraph). 81. Ibid., 6. 82. Ibid., 12. 83. Ibid., 5. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 5–6. 86. Ibid., 8. 87. Ibid., 11 (this and the preceding quotation). 88. Ibid., 12. 89. Ibid., 16. 90. Ibid., 1. 91. Ibid., 21–22. 92. Space constraints mean that I cannot develop their respective theories here, but general overviews of their approaches to politics are found in William L. McBride, Sartre’s Political Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) and Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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