SOURCE: Howells, Christina M. “Derrida and Sartre: Hegel's Death Knell.” In Continental Philosophy II: Derrida and Deconstruction, edited by Hugh J. Silverman, pp. 169-81. London: Routledge, 1989.

In the following essay, Howells discusses the textual interplay between the works of Hegel, Sartre, and Derrida—with Derrida attempting to refute Sartre, and both Derrida and Sartre attempting to refute Hegel.

Ils ne savent pas qu'en fait ils décapitent, pour ainsi dire, l'hydre.

(Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 118)

Derrida and Sartre spend much of their philosophical energy in a (vain?) attempt to decapitate the Hegelian hydra. Derrida also spends some time in occasional parricidal attacks on Sartre. Both see Hegel as a serious threat, but Sartre tends to confront it directly, through philosophical argument (albeit of a paradoxical and ‘continental’ variety), whereas Derrida's rebuttal is both more oblique and also more explicit. Both are well aware that the dialectic engulfs contradiction...