Abstract

“If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealment which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being – the ways which have guided us ever since.” […Diese Aufgabe verstehen wir als die am Leitfaden der Seinsfrage sich vollziehende Destruktion des überlieferten Bestandes der antiken Ontologie auf die ursprünglichen Erfahrungen…] Being and Time has it that the “hardened tradition” of the “history of ontology” is to be made subject to a “destruction” which would return us to the “original experiences” which at the outset allowed the nature of Being to come forth. In the context of an unprecedented appropriation of the word deconstruction – now set to work as unambiguous signifier in all fields of culture from architecture (= wacky) to politics (=new New Labour) – this paper will interrogate the extent to which deconstruction was never anything other than Heidegger’s Destruktion. Does the deployment of Derrida’s word intend to return us to “those primordial experiences”? To what extent is the “de” of deconstruction a negative prefix? Is deconstruction a radical questioning of Destruktion?