- Bernard Henri Lévy, in his account of Sartre, expands on the no-
tion of the desire for self-coincidence, and outlines its necessary collapse:
“Ce sujet, d’abord, n’a plus d’interiorité. Il est cette chose qu’il vise. Celle-là. Il
est la visée meme de la chose, le fait de se jeter ou projeter vers elle. Mais
qu’il essaie de se reprendre, dit Sartre, qu’il essaie d’oublier un instant ces
choses pour coincider avec soi-meme, se mettre ‘au chaud, volets clos,’ dans
l’intimité d’une conscience qui ne serait plus que le lieu moite a partir
duquel se prepareraient les incursions prochaines, et alors il s’efface, se dis-
sout—Sartre dit ‘s’anéantit’” (Levy,Le siècle de Sartre[Paris: Grasset, 2000 ],
249 – 50 ). - For example, in Sartre’s well-known vignette of the voyeur caught
in the act, in Being and Nothingness( 1943 ). - Dermot Moran,Introduction to Phenomenology(London: Rout-
ledge, 2000 ), 436 – 51. - Quoted in Herbert Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement:
A Historical Introduction(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981 ), vol. 1 , 81 – 82. - Natalie Alexander, “The Hollow Deconstruction of Time,” in
William R. McKenna and J. Claude Evans, eds.,Derrida and Phenomenology
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995 ), 129. - David Wood, ed.,Derrida: A Critical Reader(London: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1989 ), 111.
Chapter 2
Writing and Difference andOf Grammatology
- Claude Lévi-Strauss,Tristes Tropiques, tr. John and Doreen
Weightman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1977 [ 1 st French ed. 1955 ]),
51 – 52. - Lévi-Strauss,Tristes Tropiques, 136.
3 .In Of Grammatology,Derrida produces something of a cartoon
Rousseau. He transforms a sophisticated thinker into a nostalgist yearning
for a world replete with innocent, fulfilling comforts, a place of perfect nur-
ture. As his friend de Man suggested in Blindness and Insight,Derrida cari-
catures Rousseau’s argument in order to get the better of him. As the
Rousseau scholar Jean Starobinski notes, for Rousseau language “evolves
into an antinature”: “It is man’s dangerous privilege to possess in his own
nature the powers by which he combats that nature and nature itself....
Reasoned argument becomes necessary if man is to recover the voice of na-
ture by means of a kind of interpretive archaeology. Man must devise
Notes to Pages 29 – 92 251