Reading Heidegger after Derrida

Abstract

This essay attempts to broach the complex difference between Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, It focuses on the fundamental assumptions involved in the reading of Heidegger's Being and Time and Derrida's early "noted" attention to this text. Is Heidegger's early work essentially tainted by "the metaphysics of presence," as Derrida wishes to suggest? After sketching Derrida's interpretation, the author attempts to show how readers of Being and Time need not succumb to Derrida's criticism.