In reading Derrida's “The Ends of Man,” we enter the problem of reading itself. In this essay Derrida gives a reading of Heidegger's existential analytic in Being and Time, and he also reads Heidegger's own reading of his existential analytic in his “Letter on Humanism.” Both Heidegger and Derrida defend the existential analytic against Sartre's misreading, against his anthropologistic reduction of Heidegger's Being and Time. Derrida recalls, as Heidegger had recalled in his “Letter,” that according to the opening sections of Being and Time, “anthropology and humanism were not the milieu of his thought and the horizon of his questions. The ‘destruction’ of metaphysics or classical ontology was even directed against humanism” (M 118).

Yet after defending Heidegger against this “misreading,” a fact that in itself should prevent us from seeing Derrida's deconstructive readings as an opening up of texts to arbitrary interpretations, Derrida goes on to uncover a relève of humanism in Heidegger's work.