The Heidegger/Deleuze affiliation is a rhizomatic crisscross of ontological, aesthetic and political paths. Both restore philosophy to ontology, re-positing the inceptive question of the relation of being and thinking by conceptualizing difference at the heart of being, identify a double movement of Being, propose theories of the event, and posit a people-to-come. Though their lexical and procedural similarities are alluring, Deleuze maintains that Heidegger’s ontological difference is too fixed, his conception of Being too formally and categorically bound to the powers of representation and that Heidegger introduced a necessary shame into philosophy. In this paper, I treat theirs as an encounter of provocation and productivity, attending to this relationship where it is articulated most extensively. Through the analysis of concepts such as the fold, difference, and event, I develop the political and ethical complications of Deleuze’s thought.

In the reading of Heidegger presented in Aporias, Derrida thematizes a number of issues that are central to his work, early and late: temporality (waiting), undecidability (the im-possible), and humanism (animality). Here, we examine the oddly neglected Heideggerian context of these Derridian questions in Sein und Zeit. We propose to examine the textual articulation of Derrida’s argument, attempting to draw attention to neglected aspects and unseen consequences in that reading. We will ask how these consequences, in the final analysis, complicate Derrida’s larger argument. Our aim is not to subvert the latter, but rather to unfold the tensions that it contains and the difficulties that it quietly negotiates.