OFGRAMMATOLOGY 1215
retreat without which there would be no history of being which was completely historyand
history of being,Heidegger’s insistence on noting that being is produced as history only
through the logos, and is nothing outside of it, the difference between being and the
entity—all this clearly indicates that fundamentally nothing escapes the movement of the
signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is noth-
ing.This proposition of transgression, not yet integrated into a careful discourse, runs the
risk of formulating regression itself. One must therefore go by way ofthe question of being
as it is directed by Heidegger and by him alone, at and beyond onto-theology, in order to
reach the rigorous thought of that strange nondifference and in order to determine it cor-
rectly. Heidegger occasionally reminds us that “being,” as it is fixed in its general syntactic
and lexicological forms within linguistics and Western philosophy, is not a primary and
absolutely irreducible signified, that it is still rooted in a system of languages and an histor-
ically determined “significance,” although strangely privileged as the virtue of disclosure
and dissimulation; particularly when he invites us to meditate on the “privilege” of the
“third person singular of the present indicative” and the “infinitive.” Western metaphysics,
as the limitation of the sense of being within the field of presence, is produced as the dom-
ination of a linguistic form.* To question the origin of that domination does not amount to
hypostatizing a transcendental signified, but to a questioning of what constitutes our history
and what produced transcendentality itself. Heidegger brings it up also when in Zur
Seinsfrage,for the same reason, he lets the word “being” be read only if it is crossed out
(kreuzweise Durchstreichung). That mark of deletion is not, however, a “merely negative
symbol” (p. 31). That deletion is the final writing of an epoch. Under its strokes the pres-
ence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible. Is effaced while
still remaining legible, is destroyed while making visible the very idea of the sign. In as
much as it de-limits onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism, this last
writing is also the first writing.
To come to recognize, not within but on the horizon of the Heideggerian paths, and
yet in them, that the sense of being is not a transcendental or trans-epochal signified (even
if it was always dissimulated within the epoch) but already, in a truly unheard ofsense, a
determined signifying trace, is to affirm that within the decisive concept of ontico-ontolog-
ical difference,all is not to be thought at one go;entity and being, ontic and ontological,
“ontico-ontological,” are, in an original style,derivativewith regard to difference; and with
respect to what I shall later call differance,an economic concept designating the production
of differing/deferring. The ontico-ontological difference and its ground (Grund) in the
“transcendence of Dasein” (Vomn Wesen des Grundes,p. 16) are not absolutely originary.
Difference by itself would be more “originary,” but one would no longer be able to call it
*Introduction a la metaphysique,tr. fr. p. 103 [Introductionp. 92]. “All this points in the direction of
what we encountered when we characterized the Greek experience and interpretation of being. If we retain the
usual interpretation of being, the word ‘being’ takes its meaning from the unity and determinateness of the
horizon which guided our understanding. In short: we understand the verbal substantive ‘Sein’ through
the infinitive, which in turn is related to the ‘is’ and its diversity that we have described. The definite and par-
ticular verb form ‘is,’ the third person singular of the present indicative,has here a pre-eminent rank. We
understand ‘being’ not in regard to the ‘thou art,’ ‘you are,’ ‘I am,’ or ‘they would be,’ though all of these, just
as much as ‘is,’ represent verbal inflections of ‘to be.’...And involuntarily, almost as though nothing else
were possible, we explain the infinitive ‘to be’ to ourselves through the ‘is.’
“Accordingly, ‘being’ has the meaning indicated above, recalling the Greek view of the essence of
being, hence a determinateness which has not just dropped on us accidentally from somewhere but has domi-
nated our historical being-there since antiquity. At one stroke our search for the definition of the meaning of
the word ‘being’ becomes explicitly what it is, namely a reflection on the source of our hidden history.”
I should, of course, cite the entire analysis that concludes with these words.