Transcendental-Empirical Difference In Derrida’s Heidegger: The Question of Being and History

Abstract

Derrida thus argues that Heidegger’s destruction is not annihilation or demolition but in fact repetition because it reproduces the structure of the metaphysical idealism it tries to negate. Derrida thus argues there is no difference between Hegel’s transcendental Widelugung and Heidegger’s Destruction because both repeat the structure of metaphysics by negating and thus affirming by repeating its negated structure as a negative. In place these negations of the transcendental and the empirical reproduce the structure of metaphysics entirely when they negate and thus affirm the structure of metaphysics as constitutive of both transcendental and empirical, it is the side they privilege that differs- idealism or empiricism but which repeats metaphysics in the same ontological structure- as the repetition of the transcendental in the empirical, or iterability.