Being and Nothingness

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 néant, 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 différance, 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 différance.