Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question

I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes. These are the first words of Jacques Derrida’s lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism-of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger’s Nazism in particular. It is also politics of spirit which at the time people thought-they still want to today-to oppose to the inhuman.

Derrida’s ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism… . . This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts. -David Hoy, London Review of Books

Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit… . Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style. -David Farrell Krell, Research in Phenomenology

The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive. -Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review