184 Derrida 1963–1983
Ronse: And Speech and Phenomena?
Derrida: I forgot. It is perhaps the essay which I like most.
Doubtless I could have bound it as a long note to one or
the other of the other two works. [.. .] But in a classical
philosophical architecture, Speech... would come fi rst
[.. .].^49Even more than Husserl, Heidegger had become for Derrida the
essential philosopher, the one with whom he would continue to
argue. In his interview in Les Lettres françaises, he explained that he
felt towards him an ‘extreme ambivalence’, a ‘vexed admiration’:^50
What I have attempted to do would not have been possible
without the opening of Heidegger’s question. [.. .] But despite
this debt to Heidegger’s thought, or rather because of it, I
attempt to locate in Heidegger’s text – which, no more than
any other, is not homogeneous, continuous, everywhere equal
to the greatest force and to all the consequences of its questions- the signs of a belonging to metaphysics, or to what he calls
ontotheology.^51
From a concrete point of view, it was at this period that there
began a to-and-fro relation between Heidegger and Derrida that
would continue for several years. Pierre Aubenque – an alumnus
of Normale Sup, a great Aristotle specialist, mentioned fl atter-
ingly by Derrida in Of Grammatology – was at the time teaching in
Hamburg. He needed to invite Heidegger to dinner, and the latter
told him he was keen to fi nd out about the most up-to-date French
philosophy; he seemed to take a particular interest in structuralism.
‘I won’t fail to sing your praises.. .’, Aubenque informed Derrida.^52
In a note in his recent work Do We Need to Deconstruct
Metaphysics?, Pierre Aubenque mentions this conversation. On the
evening they met, in the last days of 1967, Heidegger showed con-
siderable curiosity about Derrida’s work. Though he was usually so
ready to vaunt the philosophical merits of the German language, he
had even agreed to pay close attention to the subtleties of a concept
that was deeply embedded in French:
He seemed especially interested in the theme of ‘diff érance’, and
we spent a long time trying to translate this term into German.
We couldn’t. The two meanings of the French word ‘diff érer’
are expressed in German by two terms: verschieden sein (to
be diff erent) and verschieben (to defer, to postpone). In spite
of a vague homophony, these words have two diff erent roots.
Derrida’s play on words is possible only in Latin (where the
verb diff erre has two meanings) and in the Romance languages.