If you want to learn how to play the piano...

You take lessons from Beethoven. Well, it turns out he is not available for lessons anymore. Thus, we turn to the next best thing--his students.

So it is with virtually everything. academia is especially prone to this kind of thinking. Who are the heirs of a teacher's thought? Tradition says that it is his best students. even the poor students still take something from the master. Look at Plato. He decided to not follow Socrates orders and write. Of course it was Nietzsche who said, "One repays the techer badly if one remains nothing but a pupil" but that advice is difficult to follow. Even in taking the advice you are taking the advice of the teacher. You will need to pull a Machiavelli and destroy the previous teacher so thoroughly that no one can even remember him (thanks Heidegger).

Regardless. I have been trying to track all the masters through my teachers. I can say that I am two degrees of separation from Derrida (via two people), two away from Levinas, three away from Heidegger, two away from Harold Bloom, two from de Man, three away from Heidegger, Althusser, Foucault, Blanchot and four away from Husserl.

Exciting, right? A little.