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Heidegger, Derrida, and the Aporia of Death

Rafael D. Pangilinan

Discipline: Literature, Philosophy

 

Abstract:

Jacques Derrida is now generally agreed—by both devotees and critics alike—to be one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. To put it simply, Jacques Derrida became not just one of the best-known names in contemporary philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, but something of a media phenomenon whose fame stretched far beyond the walls of the university.

This paper will not comprehensively thresh out the entire deconstructive project of Derrida via negotiating his more than 60 books translated into English, as well as his numerous essays and manuscripts in French that are still unavailable for English readership. Instead, it will concentrate on the expatiation of Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein’s death in Being and Time,1 which Derrida theorized as aporetic, through allusions to his Aporias and other related writings.