One, Two, Four—Yet Where Is the Third? A Note on Derrida’s Geschlecht Series

Abstract

Derrida's Geschlecht series, along with the books Of Spirit and Aporias, constitutes his most sustained close-reading of Heidegger. Three essays of the four-part Geschlecht series have been published: the first, second, and fourth, these together comprising some 130 book pages. The third Geschlecht exists only as a thirty-three-page typescript prepared sometime before March 1985 and distributed to the speakers at a colloquium in Chicago organized by John Sallis. These thirty-three pages are among the 100 to 130 pages that Derrida by his own account devoted to Heidegger's Trakl essay of 1953 ("Die Sprache im Gedicht"); however provisional and fragmentary, the typescript tells us much about the themes that "magnetize" the entire Geschlecht series.