Propriety, Facticity, Normativity

1 Published in: Derrida Today 17, no. 2 (2024): 198–210. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2024.0340 Propriety, Facticity, Normativity David Liakos Abstract: In Donner le temps II, Derrida argues that Heidegger is a thinker of ‘propriety’, which suggests that Heidegger is committed to a metaphysical strategy of assigning essential characteristics to entities and to being. This essay interrogates this claim from Derrida’s reading in Donner le temps II of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Derrida on this issue, we will distinguish propriety from facticity. This investigation reveals that Heidegger conceives of Dasein as facing a range of possible commitments which can become determinate but are not determined. In turn, this conception of facticity provides the basis for Heidegger’s thinking of normativity, that is, a measure for success or failure which does not assign propriety to Dasein’s character, as Steven Crowell has argued. The essay concludes that Derrida’s critique of propriety and departure from phenomenology complicate the possibility of a viable deconstructive conception of normativity. Keywords: authenticity, Dasein, metaphysics, normativity, phenomenology Bio: David Liakos is a full-time faculty member in philosophy at Houston Community College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of New Mexico in 2019 and is the author of several journal articles and book chapters on hermeneutics and phenomenology. For 2023-2024, he is a principal investigator of a Teagle Foundation grant to develop a humanities curriculum based in ‘transformative texts’ at HCC. 2 Across Jacques Derrida’s critical writings on Martin Heidegger, several topics of philosophical interest emerge. Particularly prominent throughout Derrida’s confrontation with Heidegger, including in the recently published Donner le temps II, is the theme of ‘propriety’. What is at stake in calling Heidegger a thinker of ‘the proper’? On Derrida’s reading, the promise of Heidegger’s ‘deconstruction’ (Destruktion) of the history of ontology is to have shown the way beyond the reduction of intelligibility to metaphysical schemes. It is precisely this accomplishment on Heidegger’s part that renders his continued adherence to any boundary between the proper and the improper so problematic. As I will argue, Derrida’s claim suggests that Heidegger remains committed to a metaphysical strategy of assigning delimited and essential characteristics to being and to entities, including to Dasein. My aim in the present essay is to call into question this aspect of Derrida’s reading in Donner le temps II of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Derrida on this issue, we shall distinguish propriety from facticity. This investigation reveals that Heidegger conceives of Dasein as facing a range of possible commitments which can become determinate but are not determined. In turn, this account of facticity provides the basis for Heidegger’s thinking of normativity, that is, a measure for Dasein’s success or failure which does not assign propriety to Dasein’s character, as Steven Crowell has argued. My systematic goal is to suggest that the limitations of Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger in Donner le temps II reveal a challenge for Derrida’s deconstruction. Specifically, Derrida’s critique of Heideggerian propriety complicates and hinders his capacity to provide a viable conception of normativity. Derrida’s term ‘proper’ (propre) is based on Heidegger’s ‘eigen’, which makes authenticity or ownedness (Eigentlichkeit) a salient subject for this discussion. In ‘The Ends of Man’ from 1972, Derrida associates Heidegger’s thinking with propriety. According to Derrida, 3 Heidegger establishes ‘the co-belonging and co-propriety of the name of man and the name of Being’ (Derrida 1982, 133). Derrida defines Heideggerian propriety as involving an inseparable and fundamental proximity. It properly belongs to Dasein to have an understanding of being. Put another way, for Derrida, Heidegger conceives of an essential relation between Dasein and being. Although this interconnection is certainly not equivalent to metaphysical conceptions (since, as Derrida acknowledges, Heidegger deconstructs the history of ontology to arrive at an originary horizon), it perhaps borders on traditional metaphysical definitions of, for example, man as ‘rational animal’. Heidegger thus betrays what Derrida, in the first volume of Donner le temps, calls a ‘desire to accede to the property of the proper’ (Derrida 1992, 22). As scholars like Richard Rorty and Iain Thomson have observed, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s alleged lapse into metaphysics bears comparison with Heidegger’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche as the culmination of Western ontotheology (Rorty 1991, 96; Thomson 2011, 210-11). For Derrida, Heidegger, against his own best insights, makes determinative or essentialist claims about being and entities that render Heidegger’s approach uncomfortably close to metaphysics. To make this case, Derrida underscores moments in Heidegger’s writings when he draws firm demarcations between what belongs authentically or properly to Dasein versus what remains inauthentic or vulgarly improper. One important example of this gesture is Heidegger’s conception of the ‘facticity’ of Dasein in Being and Time: Dasein’s facticity…is essentially distinct from the factuality of something present-athand. Existent Dasein does not encounter itself as something present-at-hand within-theworld. But neither does the thrownness adhere to Dasein as an inaccessible characteristic which is of no importance to its existence. As something thrown, Dasein has been thrown 4 into existence. It exists as an entity which has to be as it is and as it can be. (Heidegger 1962, 321) I highlight this passage to provide initial motivation for Derrida’s thesis, but I will return to and clarify facticity to suggest some problems in Derrida’s argument. For now, it should be provisionally granted that facticity belongs properly to Dasein, while factuality belongs to present-at-hand entities such as (to borrow Heidegger’s own example) a mineral (Ibid., 82). With divisions like this, Heidegger distinguishes propriety from impropriety, as Derrida emphasizes: It is in this direction that we would have a few reservations to indicate regarding the most essential Heideggerian motifs, whether it is a matter there of determining what is originarily proper to Being, time, the gift, or of acceding to the most ‘originary’ gift. (Derrida 1992, 162) In general, Derrida finds eminently questionable Heidegger’s propensity for defining strict boundaries between the proper and the improper. Facticity follows this structure; it is inseparably proximate to Dasein while factuality belongs to other entities and so is improper to Dasein. Before challenging Derrida’s assessment, the development of his critique of Heideggerian propriety in Donner le temps II deserves investigation. There, Derrida underlines the central importance of propriety for his interpretation of Heidegger’s entire path of thinking: That truth, being, and thought have to do with the gift means that they have to do with keeping [la garde], with a keeping [une garde] which, in order not to be the possessive jealousy of having or the restricted economy of certain [déterminés] goods, nevertheless corresponds to an economy, to a sense of the proper, of dwelling, of the oikos, of the stay (Wesen, Eigentlichkeit, Ereignis, etc.) (Derrida 2021, 77) 5 As he does throughout Donner le temps II, Derrida suggests here that ‘a sense of the proper’, or a rigorous ‘keeping’ of boundaries, undergirds the logic of Heidegger’s work from the analytic of Dasein (‘Eigentlichkeit’) to the later being-historical thinking of the event (‘Ereignis’). My assessment of Derrida’s reading will focus on his interpretive claims that bear on Being and Time in particular.1 Two passages are of interest in this connection. In the first, Derrida underscores his conviction that the analytic of Dasein is committed to propriety: The value of the proper [valeur de propre] (eigen, Eigentlichkeit, etc.) comes here with much insistence, as in the whole book [Being and Time], to decide what Dasein should be – if it responds to the call and even the call of Unheimlichkeit. It is a question here of a propriation of expropriation, of a proper manner of relating to the improper [l’impropre] that we will have to follow for a long time and through numerous paths, numerous texts during this seminar (Ereignis, etc.). (Ibid., 45) Although Derrida emphasizes elsewhere how Heidegger establishes an ontological propriety belonging to being as such, Derrida argues here that propriety defines Dasein’s character as well. More precisely, Derrida makes clear that, on his reading, Heidegger’s idea of authenticity determines ‘what Dasein should be’. This claim will be the main site of my critique of Derrida’s analysis. Derrida also importantly enriches his interpretation of propriety in this passage with the formulation of ‘a proper manner of relating to the improper’ with reference to the analytic of Dasein. Even what lies outside the domain of propriety, namely, the improper, can still be properly related to by setting it on the other side of some purportedly rigorous boundary or demarcation. Derrida suggests that this logical implication of propriety implicitly governs 6 everything within the analytic of Dasein, including that which otherwise lies outside the domain of authenticity. But Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in Donner le temps II is admirably undogmatic. In another passage, he appears to moderate his critical interpretation: Nevertheless, the Heideggerian approach is not exactly that of a genealogy or historical de-sedimentation, like a descent toward the origin (non-etymological, perhaps) but the proper origin of all these concepts. It is not that, although it resembles it and is not quite exempt from it sometimes. (Ibid., 36) Derrida acknowledges that Heidegger’s position cannot be reduced to a search for ‘proper origins’. But Derrida remains in this passage concerned that Heidegger’s work dances dangerously close to the edge of such a strategy. By referencing ‘genealogy’, Derrida underscores Heidegger’s focus on discovering a proper origin, the real center of Dasein’s essence. For Derrida, such genealogical excavation is hindered by the fact that no such inquiry will ever find a pure or definitive origin but only various overlapping links or interconnections, what he elsewhere calls ‘a system of roots’ (Derrida 2012, 60). To search for the center or core of Dasein is an instance of Heidegger’s temptation to or nostalgia for metaphysics. Derrida suggests in Donner le temps II that Heidegger valorizes propriety by assigning determinative characteristics to Dasein. In other words, Heidegger makes claims about ‘what Dasein should be’ (Derrida 2021, 45). This fact betrays traces of metaphysical essentialism in Heidegger’s project. How should we assess Derrida’s critique of Heidegger? In a remarkable essay on Heidegger and love, Agamben attempts to call into question Derrida’s reading of propriety.2 In this connection, Agamben highlights the following passage from Being and Time: ‘Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of being is such that it is in “untruth”’ 7 (Heidegger 1962, 264, translation slightly modified). First of all and most of the time, Dasein tends toward inauthenticity. Denying itself the freedom that is possible for it to decide to achieve, Dasein lives a lie in its inauthentic existence. For Agamben, this claim indicates that Derrida’s evaluation of propriety is reductive to the extent that it overlooks the methodological importance of inauthenticity. Agamben explains this point in his commentary on the passage from Being and Time quoted earlier in this paragraph: At times, Heidegger seems to retreat from the radicality of this thesis, fighting against himself to maintain a primacy of the proper and the true. But an attentive analysis shows not only that the co-originarity of the proper and the improper is never disavowed, but even that several passages could be said to imply a primacy of the improper. (Agamben 1999, 197) Responding here to Derrida’s reading, Agamben argues that propriety is not always the most essential category in Heidegger’s analysis. Heidegger does at times suggest that Dasein flees ‘in the face of its authenticity’ into an inauthentic mode (Heidegger 1962, 229). But, as Agamben emphasizes, Heidegger also claims that Dasein may be inauthentic before it realizes its own inauthenticity and becomes authentic. For this reason, proper authenticity is not necessarily analytically favored or more fundamental than improper inauthenticity. Rather than one-sidedly elevating the proper, Agamben argues, Heidegger should be read as developing a ‘dialectic of the proper and the improper’ (Agamben 1999, 204). By living through its inauthentic existence, Dasein can make its impropriety its own. Derrida can rebut Agamben’s critique, however, by appealing to his formulation in Donner le temps II of ‘a proper manner of relating to the improper’ (Derrida 2021, 45; see also Agamben 1999, 202). Even if improper inauthenticity is at least as basic to the analytic of Dasein 8 as proper authenticity, Heidegger reserves pride of place for the movement out of inauthenticity into authenticity. In other words, Agamben’s point that inauthenticity can lead to authenticity unwittingly affirms Derrida’s thesis that Heidegger acknowledges the possibility of being properly improper. That is, the salience of inauthenticity is its potential to lead to authenticity. Any alleged priority of inauthenticity over authenticity shows that the most important aspect of inauthenticity remains how Dasein can properly relate to inauthenticity by using it as a springboard to authentic existence. Derrida could point out to Agamben that being improperly improper (in other words, inauthentic existence without ever achieving authenticity) occupies a lower position in the order of priority in Being and Time than becoming properly improper. Impropriety is inherently derivative. Because impropriety or inauthenticity always points toward or hints at the achievement of propriety or authenticity, propriety remains preeminent. Agamben’s objection helps clarify Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger but does not prove decisive as a critique of it. To raise further questions for Derrida’s account of propriety, I reintroduce facticity into the discussion. Facticity belongs to Dasein. Here, seemingly, Derrida’s emphasis on propriety is vindicated again. Recall, however, Heidegger’s definition of facticity: ‘As something thrown, Dasein has been thrown into existence. It exists as an entity which has to be as it is and as it can be’ (Heidegger 1962, 321). To be sure, this definition states that Dasein cannot be otherwise than factical; put another way, Dasein is properly factical. This point should be provisionally conceded to Derrida. But more needs to be said here. Heidegger suggests that we are ‘delivered over’ into situations that compel us to make sense of ourselves and our world in meaningful ways (Ibid., 174). On the basis of facticity, a rejoinder to Derrida’s characterization of propriety may now be formulated. When Heidegger claims that Dasein ‘has to be as it and as it can be’, he emphasizes 9 that Dasein is open to a range of possibilities that can become determinate but are not determined. My facticity belongs properly to me. I must be as I am, namely, a finite, embodied, mortal, social entity who has been thrown into some concrete situation. But a crucial caveat must be added: I also am as I can be. I may possess an intelligible world in a variety of possible ways. Agamben gives as examples of this aspect of facticity ‘the two fundamental guises or manners’ by which Dasein is open toward meaning, namely, hatred and love (Agamben 1999, 199). To give another set of phenomenological illustrations, I could authentically become a father, a scholar, a brother, a husband, an athlete, a friend. None of these possibilities is ‘proper’ to me, in the sense that I am neither destined to achieve nor not to achieve these possibilities. As John Haugeland puts this point, Dasein ‘can never be fixed or “finalized”’ (Haugeland 2013, 88). Even though Heidegger underscores how Dasein may authentically own itself in the face of its finitude rather than fall into inauthenticity, he neither specifies the existentiell contents of how Dasein ‘should’ unfold its projects nor does he claim that authenticity is Dasein’s essential destiny. Whether I love or hate remains open to me, with the qualification that I am influenced and shaped by thrownness and attunements outside my control. Far from a metaphysical claim with determinative content about the essence of Dasein, facticity refers to a formal category of its existence. When I choose to be some way, to comport myself meaningfully toward my world, that possibility becomes really determinate for me. If I authentically become a scholar, I freely identify with my choice to the extent that I acknowledge and embrace the fact that I have closed off other possible projects. In turn, I will face a range of possible futures that my choice entails (Heidegger 1962, 331). What I become in the future belongs to the factical self that I am but is never properly determined. Facticity does not refer, as would follow from Derrida’s analysis, to essential aspects of a fixed definition of ‘what Dasein 10 should be’ (Derrida 2021, 45). Facticity amounts, instead, to formal contexts of significance whose contents may in turn be partially chosen, enabled, and shaped by Dasein. I was never properly determined to achieve the possibility that I have chosen for my existence, even when I decide on it and authentically embody and identify with that possibility. Derrida’s account of propriety suggests that Heidegger conceives of a plane of determinative alternatives condemning us to finitude, our ‘proper’ fate that constitutes the archaeological center of our being. When applied to facticity, however, Derrida’s association of Dasein with propriety appears in a problematic light. Certainly, Derrida has independently valid philosophical grounds for problematizing Heidegger’s account of authenticity in the service of Derrida’s critique of metaphysics and interrogation of Heidegger’s politics. My point is that facticity refers to a delimited but rich and diverse range of possible personal commitments that possess as yet indeterminate but potentially achievable contents. In other words, facticity is not ‘proper’ in Derrida’s critical sense. The distinction between propriety and facticity points to the third term from the title of the present essay, namely, normativity. To begin investigating the relevance of normativity here, consider Agamben’s statement of facticity: ‘Dasein must rather itself be its “there”, be the “there” (Da) of Being’ (Agamben 1999, 189). But what is the source of this ‘must’? Why must Dasein be anything? The normative ‘must’ belonging to Dasein that Agamben detects is not any external demand or formulated rule for how to live or be. There is no determined way that Dasein necessarily has to follow. Even the ‘normal’ manner of doing things that Heidegger calls ‘das Man’ is (at least some of the time) only an option for Dasein, which it might eventually reject in favor of an authentically owned existence. In that sense, there is no propriety for how Dasein ‘must’ conduct its existence, that is, either authentically or inauthentically. It is true that Dasein must be open to and comport itself 11 toward being, but the fashion or guise in which it does so remains open for it to choose freely from within a finite range of personal possibilities. The distinctive achievement of Heidegger’s Being and Time is its transcendental phenomenology of Dasein as an entity whose own being is ‘an issue for it’ (Heidegger 1962, 32). This move directs philosophical inquiry toward a diverse range of determinable but as yet indeterminate contents for Dasein’s existence, thus preserving a rigorous methodological neutrality that avoids the pitfalls of metaphysical essentialism, theological conviction, or ideological rigidity (Crowell 2022). Derrida’s assignment of propriety to Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein occludes the still vital methodological promise of Being and Time, namely, a phenomenology of normative measure. As Crowell has shown in his account of the close link between phenomenology and normativity, Heideggerian facticity is normative in the sense that how Dasein comports itself meaningfully toward its world opens Dasein to standards of success or failure. As opposed to inert and brute facts about present-at-hand entities that Heidegger calls factuality, Dasein’s facticity is framed by a genuinely normative ground that matters meaningfully to it (Crowell 2013, 207). When Dasein freely chooses a possibility for being, Dasein can act for the sake of that end. Things will show up in the normative light of fulfilling a meaningful measure in some better or worse fashion. When I go to the gym to act for the sake of my fitness, for example, I am acting in light of a norm of success with which I identify as an athlete and as someone who cares about my health. Now, when I fail to go to the gym, I can hold myself accountable as failing to live up to a norm that I care about, while going to the gym regularly will prove to me my own success at measuring up to a standard (Ibid., 218-19, 222). It is important to recognize that, in this distinction between succeeding or failing by my own lights when it comes to fitness, there is no discursively formulated rule that I either follow or break. The goal of fitness is prominent 12 throughout our culture, and it would be easy to identify unreflectively and inauthentically with such an ideal. But for Crowell, Heidegger’s phenomenology of normativity shows how an authentic or owned existence means responding to an ideal that has its origin in the culture at large by taking it over and transforming it in my own way. I can orient myself toward what I recognize as what is best for me, not simply because this ideal represents what is ‘normally’ done but because I genuinely identify with and take over this goal. The norm of authentically caring about physical fitness is self-given, impossible to exhaust through determinate concepts or rules, and first-personal in the sense of belonging to my particular personal project. Agamben’s reconstruction of facticity and Crowell’s formulation of phenomenological normativity jointly challenge Derrida’s reading of propriety in Donner le temps II. Factical Dasein responds to normative conditions that are not determined. For Heidegger, Dasein ‘must take over being-a-ground’ by projecting itself into its possibilities (Heidegger 1962, 330, translation modified; see also Crowell 2013, 207-8). In other words, by authentically projecting myself into concrete personal commitments, I take over the thrown ground of my existence, which I had no responsibility in creating. That is, I can (paradoxically) make this ground my own by authentically conducting my projects. Dasein is thereby accountable to a measure for its own success or failure. There can be no essential command or proper demand here, either in terms of the existentiell identities that Dasein enacts in conducting its projects or in the existential terms of the modal distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity into which those projects might fall. Rather, there is only a range of possible commitments that Dasein can enact such that, when it settles upon one project or group of related projects, Dasein succeeds or fails by its own lights. These possibilities are determinable; I can take them up and authentically identify with them and project myself into them (or fail to do so). What these possibilities cannot be, however, are 13 determinative, absolute, or essential. When I freely choose to care about my fitness, I am now accountable to this self-set norm as a binding reason or ‘ground’. But there was no ‘proper’ necessity about my having invested myself in that project in the first place. Derrida’s suggestion that Heidegger cleaves to any proper direction or essential decision about Dasein’s character is therefore questionable. The frame of facticity into which Dasein is thrown includes ontic limitations, it is true, such as biological mortality, embodiment, and sociality. And there is the inescapable ontological framework of authenticity versus inauthenticity that Derrida worries is excessively reductive or constricting insofar as it suggests some defined essence of Dasein as an entity which ‘must’ possess an understanding of being. If this is all Derrida means by ‘propriety’, then such a conception is, however, metaphysically minimal because factical Dasein is thereby open to a rich and as yet indeterminate diversity of normative possibilities. Derrida’s assignment of propriety to Heidegger’s phenomenology obscures this crucial methodological point. But this is not all that is at stake in the debate about propriety. Here a broader challenge for Derrida’s deconstructive project is thereby revealed. Where Heidegger’s phenomenology of facticity includes an account of normative grounding, Derrida does not provide a similarly plausible account of normativity. As evidence for this thesis, I turn to Derrida’s argument for the undecidability of meaning in his reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles: ‘there is no such thing either as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche’s text’ (Derrida 1979, 103). Explaining Nietzsche’s polysemic definition(s) of ‘woman’ and contestation of any unified concept of truth, Derrida writes: The hermeneutic project which postulates a true sense of the text is disqualified under this regime. Reading is freed from the horizon of the meaning or truth of being, liberated from the values of the product’s production or the present’s 14 presence. Whereupon the question of style is immediately unloosed as a question of writing. The question posed by the spurring-operation [opération-éperonnante] is more powerful than any content, thesis, or meaning. (Ibid., 107) To complicate Heidegger’s association of Nietzsche with ontotheology, Derrida problematizes truth as the norm for interpreting Nietzsche. In place of hermeneutic truth, Derrida elevates the notion of style in order to underscore the undecidability of any single meaning of Nietzsche’s texts. Rather than unified truth, interpretation discovers only a plurality of different styles with which Nietzsche clothes his texts. Derrida disavows hermeneutic truth in this context, suggesting that interpretive standards must be internal to particular acts of reading. Within the context of interpreting a text, I can succeed or fail in my engagement with that text on its own terms, that is, within the frame of Nietzsche’s given style. But these interpretive norms are not pre-given or objectively formulable. So far, any Heideggerian should affirm Derrida’s conception of interpretation, as I have argued elsewhere in my defense of a theory of interpretation along these phenomenological lines (Liakos 2022). More problematically, however, Derrida also provides a broadly aesthetic criterion for interpretation when he suggests that the ‘the question of style’, not hermeneutic truth, expresses the primary measure for hermeneutic success. Derrida’s account of style in Spurs supports his critique of Heidegger’s reductive reading of Nietzsche. But Derrida’s argument there is also in keeping with his more general hesitancy concerning the rigidity of Heidegger’s account of owning oneself, in contrast to which Derrida prefers the flexibility, fluidity, or mobility of interpretive style. Derrida’s strategy in Spurs involves appealing to an account of interpretive warrant that is less cogent than Heidegger’s phenomenology of normative measure, which provides a clear (even if not fully expressible) sense of binding success or failure within the terms of Dasein’s commitments and projects. My 15 diagnosis is that Derrida’s appeal to the norm of style (which lacks the bindingness and scope of phenomenological normativity) derives from the vacuum left behind by Derrida’s critique of what he calls ‘Heidegger’s transcendental-ontological gesture’ (Derrida 2021, 39; see also Senatore 2021, 239). In other words, Derrida’s objection to propriety in Donner le temps II entails a departure from Heidegger’s phenomenology. In turn, this commitment on Derrida’s part leaves a gap in his account of normativity that he struggles to fill with notions such as style. Derrida does not assert that all interpretive acts are governed by considerations of style. But style emerges in Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche as a replacement for the loss of the norm of facticity. At a certain point in formulating its interpretations, deconstruction must refer to some notion of normative warrant. In the name of contesting all proprieties via an ongoing deconstruction of seemingly coherent concepts, Derrida inoculates himself against Heideggerian facticity. His resistance to facticity means, however, that Derrida does not adequately conceptualize normativity. This problem is underscored by the fact that, when he intends to criticize Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, Derrida is temporarily compelled to adopt an aestheticizing approach to interpretation that elevates style over truth. Earlier, I highlighted the fact that Derrida’s discussion of propriety includes a reference to ‘genealogy’. But far from an archaeology of the proper essence of Dasein, Heidegger’s phenomenology uncovers what is first-personally meaningful and binding without being determinative. If phenomenology is an inherently normative enterprise, revealing the accountability of factical Dasein to self-set standards or success or failure, then Derrida’s distance from phenomenology signals his troubled relation to a thinking of normativity. Facticity is not only, as Derrida implies, a set of limits or demands that signals our essential and ‘proper’ finitude. Facticity is also an opening onto rich normative possibilities. 16 Normativity has emerged as a prominent theme across contemporary philosophy and deconstruction has begun directly to theorize the issue (Fritsch 2021, 71; Mercier 2022, 16). In Derrida’s own work, however, including in his confrontation with Heidegger in Donner le temps II, the conflation of propriety with facticity is a stumbling block for a viable conception of normativity. Heideggerian facticity includes a normative measure for success or failure without being ‘proper’. Deconstruction today might respond to the Heideggerian transcendental phenomenology of normative measure. The convergence of propriety, facticity, and normativity points toward this opportunity for deconstructive research.3 References Agamben, Giorgio (1999), ‘The Passion of Facticity’, in Daniel Heller-Roazen (ed. and trans.), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, pp. 185-204. Crowell, Steven (2013), Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Cambridge University Press. Crowell, Steven (2022), ‘Methodological Atheism: An Essay in the Second-Person Phenomenology of Commitment’, in Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Ilpo Hirvonen (ed.), Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity: Norms, Goals, and Values, Routledge, pp. 43-65. Derrida, Jacques (1979), Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1982), ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, pp. 109-36. Derrida, Jacques (1992), Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (2012), ‘Foreword, Volume 4: Lévi-Strauss in the Eighteenth Century’, trans. Cécile Malaspina and Peter Hallward, in Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (ed.), Concept and Form, Volume One: Selections from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Verso, p. 60. Derrida, Jacques (2021), Donner le temps II, Laura Odello, Peter Szendy, and Rodrigo Therezo (ed.), Éditions du Seuil. 17 Fritsch, Matthias (2021), ‘On the Sources of Critique in Heidegger and Derrida’, Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 4: 2, pp. 63-88. Haugeland, John (2013), Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger, Joseph Rouse (ed.), Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row. Liakos, David (2022), ‘The Recovery of the Fundamental Hermeneutic Problem: Application and Normativity’, in Cynthia R. Nielsen and Greg Lynch (ed.), Gadamer’s Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary, Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 165-85. Mercier, Thomas Clément (2022), ‘“The Force of the Event”: Performative Failures and Queer Repetitions in Austin, Butler, and Derrida’, Síntesis. Revista de Filosofía 5: 1, pp. 1-34. Rorty, Richard (1991), ‘Deconstruction and Circumvention’, in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, pp. 85-106. Senatore, Mauro (2021), ‘The Question of Regionalism: Derrida’s Early Reading of Heidegger’, Epoché 26: 1, pp. 231-50. Thomson, Iain (2011), Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Cambridge University Press. Endnotes 1 For Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s later thinking in Donner le temps II, see Ian Alexander Moore’s contribution to this special issue. 2 Although Agamben’s essay does not quote from Donner le temps II, his text contains numerous allusions to Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger and makes clear contact with the analysis of propriety contained in Donner le temps II. 3 I would like to thank Michael Portal and Adam R. Rosenthal for organizing the ‘Given Time in Three Times’ conference at Texas A&M University in 2021 and for their comments on this text. Ian Alexander Moore also commented on an earlier draft. Finally, Marcel Lebow provided indispensable help with translating passages from Derrida’s Donner le temps II.