the revolutionary territory that Foucault had marked out. De-
spite his diffidence about expressing outright enthusiasm for
the student revolt of May, one senses that Derrida might not
have minded being cited along with Foucault and Nietzsche on
the students’ banners.
“The Ends of Man” is devoted in large part to Heidegger’s
“Letter on Humanism” of 1947 , his critique of Sartre. Sartre
had famously announced that “existentialism is a humanism.”
Heidegger, in a long, fascinating essay directed to his student
Jean Beaufret, who would later become Heidegger’s ambassa-
dor among the French intellectual classes, took Sartre to task
for his belief in “man,”l’homme.
Sartre understands man as an essence, with (as Derrida
puts it) “no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit”
(Margins 116 ). What Sartre relies on, according to Derrida, is
“nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God,
the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the
project constituting human-reality. [Sartre’s] atheism changes
nothing in this fundamental structure. The example of the
Sartrean project remarkably verifies Heidegger’s proposition
according to which ‘every humanism remains metaphysical,’
metaphysics being the other name of ontotheology” ( 116 ).
Derrida in “The Ends of Man” aligns Sartre’s bad hu-
manism with the “anthropologistic reading of Hegel, Husserl
and Heidegger” ( 117 ) prevalent in postwar French thought, no-
tably in Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology.Kojève’s
central point, his interpretation of the master-slave dialectic
in Hegel, invokes the existential angst of an individual con-
fronting death. Arguing against Kojève, Derrida wants to re-
claim these three thinkers, Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger, for
an antihumanist and antimetaphysical program, even though
their works are tied to humanism. We must read them more
134 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology