The Debt of Inheritance Revisited: Heidegger's Mortgage, Derrida's Appraisal

This essay revisits the question of inheritance, legacy and handing-down (das Erbe) as it is developed in Heidegger's Being and Time. A careful reading especially of paragraphs 6 and 72–74 allows us to consider whether Heidegger's notion of inheritance might not be far more resistant to modes of premature closure—such as its apparent exclusion of das Erbe from the workings of Destruktion—than readers often have perceived it to be. In a second step, the discussion of Heidegger's inheritance opens onto some of Derrida's fundamental reflections on the mortgage of inheritance, in which Heidegger is never far away, even when his work is not the ostensibly primary topic of analysis. If Derrida suggests that certain difficulties ‘never disappear from Heidegger's discourse’ and that they ‘bring the consequences of a serious mortgage to weigh upon the whole of his thought’, the legacies of this Heideggerean inheritance call for perpetual reappraisal.