Originally published as section 19 of his 1997 doctoral dissertation L'Inexistence divine, 'Being and Nothingness' engages Derrida in an early formulation of what Meillassoux would come to call the 'principle of factiality', the principle famously proclaiming the necessity of contingency. This early work defines the factial by rearticulating Heidegger's ontological difference between being and beings across necessity and contingency themselves. The factial is shown to operate according to a doubling in negation across a necessary nothingness, le n & eacute;ant, and the contingent nothing, le rien. 'Being and Nothingness' contrasts Hegel's subordination of the contingent nothing to necessary nothingness with Heidegger's subordination of necessary nothingness to the contingent nothing, and concludes with some fascinating reflections on Derrida's diff & eacute;rance, givenness and withdrawal. Meillassoux ultimately refuses both Heidegger and Derrida's conceptions of the ontological difference, accusing the latter of turning the ontological difference into merely one intra-ontic difference among others, produced by the movement of diff & eacute;rance.
This article contends that Derrida makes the wrong decision when radicalizing Heidegger's critique of the metaphysics or presence into a critique of identity tout court. Quite aside from the philosophical problems inherent in any rejection of classical identity (as noted from Aristotle forward), such a step also interprets the direction of Heideggerian philosophy incorrectly. When Heidegger says in Identity and Difference that identity requires mediation, this has much less in common with a Derridean critique of identity than with the Lacanian model of the split subject. Thus Lacan was also wrong when he claimed, during a dinner at the famous 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference, that Derrida had taken his critique of the self-identical subject from Lacan. In fact, the two critiques are altogether different. In closing, the article points to a harmful stylistic consequence of the Derridean notion of "play" as non-identity: namely, the overly hesitant and non-committal style that Derrida celebrates in Positions.
