To Be or Not to Be at Home. Heidegger and Derrida reading Sophocles

Abstract

In the 1940s, Martin Heidegger held a series of lectures in which he interprets passages from Sophocles’ Antigone in order to understand the characterization of the human being as deinon, which Heidegger translates as unheimlich or “not at home.” This essential determination of the human being as a being which is constitutively not-at-home will be discussed in the first part of this paper. In the second part, I will discuss Jacques Derrida’s reading of another Sophoclean text, Oedipus at Colonus, in order to discuss the question of Oedipus’s foreignness. Heidegger’s and Derrida’s readings of Sophocles do have different approaches and methodologies, but considering the influence of Heidegger on Derrida’s thought, it is possible to find deep similarities, connections, and philosophically relevant divergences. This confrontation of the two readings concerning the question of being-at-home and foreignness will show that their approaches complement each other.