deeply and thoroughly, deconstruct them: then the antilogo-
centric kingdom will be unveiled. (There is, however, no hope
for poor Sartre, unlike the three Germanic H’s.)
Existentialists see the end of man, his telos or goal, in his
finitude: his mortality. The absurdity of a life curtailed by
death provides the necessary occasion for heroic idealism,
Sartre suggests. If we face the meaninglessness of our lives,
apparent in the limits imposed by mortality, we can make
significance out of nothingness. On this point Sartre has been
swayed by Heidegger. Heidegger speaks in his early master-
work Being and Timeof Dasein’s anxiety before its own death,
a mood that spurs resolute decision making.
Derrida will have none of such angst-ridden bravado.
Rather, he values the contrasting aspect of Heidegger shown
in the later “Letter on Humanism.” In place of humanism’s
direction toward man (shown in Being and Timeas well as
in Sartre’s work), Heidegger now points us toward Being.
Heidegger explicitly criticizes Sartre, and implicitly his own
earlier work, in the “Letter.” He describes Being as the inde-
scribable factor that is always furthest away from man yet al-
ways near too, and strangely inaccessible. Being remains per-
manently different from beings, the various entities in the
world. It cannot be identified with any specific being, any per-
son or thing, although it is somehow present everywhere as an
“unobtrusive governance” (cited in Margins 131 ).
Heidegger, much to Derrida’s delight, proves especially
attentive to the connection between Being and language. “Lan-
guage,” Heidegger writes, “is the house of Being in which man
ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being,
guarding it” (cited in Margins 131 ). But Derrida also has a prob-
lem with Heidegger’s rhetoric on the question of Being, and
especially with his reliance on certain key metaphors. Heideg-
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 135