Hope Against "Heideggerian Hope"

Once again: is there a passage beyond differance?

Derrida names one mode of this attempted passage in the 1968 essay "Differance." The perpetrator in this case is Heidegger. Derrida is always reading Heidegger, but in the texts of this period (cf.Of Grammatology, 1969), Heidegger plays a specific role. Heidegger is the one - along with Nietzsche and Freud - who has come closest to deconstruction: by challenging the (metaphysical) assumptions of the Western tradition; all the while remaining within its "circle." Heidegger's - and Nietzsche's and Freud's - attempts, however, are not rigorous enough. There are moments when he falls prey to these very assumptions. One such moment, one such attempt to escape the play of differance takes place, according to Derrida, in his "The Anaximander Fragment." Here Heidegger seems to be doing exactly what Derrida is doing in the "Differance" essay, attempting to name, as a word and a concept, what is unnamable and what is "neither a name nor a concept." Differance, is the (non-)word that Derrida comes up with. But he is clear that "differance" too is subject to differance - it too functions within an infinite chain of substitutions. He says early on in the essay that "the efficacity of the thematic of differance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself if not to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed" (p.7). "Differance" the concept/word is not sufficient to the fact of differance, but no word/concept is or will be. This is the great Heideggerian mistake, the "Heideggerian hope" that Derrida derides. Without going into the specifics of Heidegger's reading of the Anaximander fragment (which I have not read), it is enough to point out Heidegger's misguided daring:

"...in order to name the essential nature of Being, language would have to find a single word, the unique word. From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word addressed to Being is. Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and everywhere throughout langauge" (p. 52, quoted in Derrida, p.27).

One could easily replace every instance of "Being" with "differance" and you would find a trace of Derrida's argument. That is, until the point when the non-impossibility of such an arrival is affirmed. This is the "Heideggerian hope" that must be abandoned, according to Derrida. To the Kantian question "what may I hope?" Derrida answers: "you cannot."

I too would question any "Heideggerian hope" (e.g. Heidegger's own hope in the German nation). However, I will wonder, indeed hope, that differance do not preclude another hope.