ger speaks of man as the shepherd of Being. He invokes the
house of Being, as well as the revelation of Being, its coming to
light. Heidegger implies that Being and man are proper to each
other, that they belong together. But, Derrida asks, “is not this
security of the near what is trembling today, that is, the co-
belonging and co-propriety of the name of man and the name
of Being, such as this co-propriety inhabits, and is inhabited
by, the language of the West, such as it is buried in its oikono-
mia, such as it is inscribed and forgotten according to the
history of metaphysics, and such as it is awakened also by the
destruction of ontotheology?... This trembling,” Derrida
concludes, “which can only come from a certain outside—was
already requisite within the very structure that it solicits” ( 133 ).
The house that metaphysics built is shaking, if not collapsing;
all our cherished ideas of the human have been questioned.
And the shaking comes from within, from metaphysics itself.
But, as Derrida admits, the “trembling” of traditional
ideas also comes from a “certain outside,” not just within the
erudite texts of philosophers. The radicals of the sixties, in
France as well as America, proclaimed their challenge to what
Derrida calls “the language of the West” and amplified it to an
earsplitting volume. Throwing out books and traditions in
favor of chemically induced ecstasy, sexual release, and free ex-
pression, these liberated spirits could scarcely have cared about
rereading Heidegger.
Derrida gestures only hesitantly toward that “certain
outside,” the history of his day. For a phrase or two toward the
end of “The Ends of Man,” he does try to rouse himself to a
concern with “military and economic violence.” In the last two
pages of his essay, he borrows ideas from none other than Fou-
cault. Derrida makes the familiar Foucauldian point con-
cerning “the force and efficiency of the system that regu-
136 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology