(BCDU)
In Sein und Zeit ( §§54–55 ), Heidegger centers his analysis of the Gewissen on the common expression “the voice of conscience.” Contrary to the “metaphor of the tribunal,” it is supposed to refer to an originary characteristic of Dasein: interpellation, the “call” ( Ruf, Anruf ) to responsibility ( Schuld ), to “being oneself” ( Selbstsein ). Such a voice by which “Dasein calls to itself” is always already of the order of discourse ( Rede ), even though it is essentially quiet or speaks only by keeping silent, that is, it determines no task or duty ( Pflicht ). This description is thus opposed term-for-term to Kant’s definitions. Neither Gewissheit nor Bewusstsein plays any role in it. They are concepts basically foreign to Heidegger’s thought, which reserves them for the description of the metaphysical moment of subjectivity that was opened up historically by Cartesianism and culminates in Hegel. It is hard to imagine that this phenomenology did not play a role in the way Jacques Derrida “deconstructed” the Husserlian conception of consciousness, in a chapter entitled “The Voice That Keeps Silence,” writing, for example, that “it is this universality that ensures that, structurally and by right, no consciousness is possible without the voice. The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universality, as con-sciousness [con-science]” ( La voix et le phénomène, 89 ). Thus Derrida plays in French on the etymology and connotations of a German concept, but at the same time he diverts them and to some extent can authorize criticism of them. His “con-sciousness” ( which he writes as Coste did when translating Locke ) is a Bewusstsein haunted by the Heideggerian analytic of Gewissen, which makes the certainties of phenomenological experience vacillate in a special Ungewissheit. We might quote partly similar remarks from Paul Ricœur’s Soi-même comme un autre ( 1990 ).