TOWARD AN ONTOLOGICAL ETHICS: DERRIDA’S READING OF HEIDEGGER AND LEVINAS

Abstract

The aim of this work is to examine a few aspects of Jacques Derrida’s reading of the philosophy of Heidegger and Levinas. Specifically, we intend to show that the criticism Derrida directs towards certain themes in Levinas’s thought at the same time contains a revaluation of Heidegger’s ontology as it was developed during the 1920s, before the so-called Kehre. What this triple hermeneutic comparison puts into play is the relationship between ethics and ontology. In critiquing the relationship between these two concepts in Levinas, Derrida seems to move closer to the way they are described and developed in both Being and Time and in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Finally, we will try to show how this reevaluation of ontology by Derrida determines his approach to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ethics, differently from Levinas’s, is an ethics of ontology.