Time and exteriority

Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida

de John Protevi

Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida provides an in-depth look at a crucial issue in the history of metaphysics: the relation of time and space. Covering material from ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary European works, the author explains the conceptual presuppositions behind the readings of Aristotle on time by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, perhaps the two foremost continental philosophers of this century. Heidegger always pointed to Aristotle's Physics as the Grundbuch of Western philosophy, and he devoted special attention to Aristotle's treatise on time, which he declared set the outlines within which all future treatments of time worked. In the early Heidegger, however, time and space, temporality and spatiality, are not co-ordinate, and Time and Exteriority uses this subordination of space to time as its clue. Derrida, Heidegger's great contemporary interlocutor, has been similarly occupied with the question of time and space. Chapter 1 of Time and Exteriority explicates the implicit conceptual scheme of Derrida's writings on Husserl, an "economy of exteriority." For Derrida, then, time and space, temporality and exteriority, must be thought "economically," not in a relation of subordination, as in Heidegger. Chapter 2 examines the notion of exteriority at work in Aristotle's theory of change. The time chapters of the Physics receive special attention in the book, anticipating the readings of Heidegger and Derrida in highlighting time and exteriority. Chapter 3 reads "Ousia and Gramme," in which Derrida reads Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's determination of Hegel's theory of time. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to sustained readings of Heidegger's Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology in light of the economy of exteriority. The conclusion advances a reading of Aristotelian generation that provides a model for time/space that need not ignore or suppress the economy of exteriority.