Heidegger from Metaphysics to Thought

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title: Heidegger From Metaphysics to Thought SUNYSeries in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

author: Janicaud, Dominique.; Mattéi, Jean-FranÇcois.publisher: State University of New York Press

isbn10 | asin: 079142104Xprint isbn13: 9780791421048

ebook isbn13: 9780585056036language: English

subject Heidegger, Martin,--1889-1976.publication date: 1995

lcc: B3279.H49J28413 1995ebddc: 193

subject: Heidegger, Martin,--1889-1976.

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Heidegger from Metaphysics to Thought

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SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental PhilosophyDennis J. Schmidt, editor

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Heidegger From Metaphysics To Thought

byDominique Janicaud

andJean-François Mattéi

TRANSLATED BYMICHAEL GENDRE

State University of New York Press

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Published byState University of New York Press, Albany

© 1995 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No partof this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means includingelectronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the priorpermission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press,State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246

Production by Cathleen CollinsMarketing by Bernadette LaManna

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Janicaud, Dominique, 1937-and Mattéi, Jean-François, 1941-[Métaphysique à la limite. English]Heidegger from metaphysics to thought / by Dominique Janicaud andJean-François Mattéi: translated by Michael Gendre.p. cm.(SUNY series in contemporary continentalphilosophy)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0791421031. ISBN 079142104X (pbk.)1. Heidegger, Martin, 18891976. I. Mattéi, Jean-François.II. Title. III. Series.B3279.H49J28413 1994193dc20199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif9340583199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gif199ea59c3460e47144ba06b683445cbd.gifCIP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In memory of Jean Beaufret

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Contents

Translator's Preface ix

Acknowledgments xxvii

ForewordDominique Janicaud and Jean-François Mattéi

xxix

List of Abbreviations of Works Quoted xxxiii

1. Overcoming Metaphysics?Dominique Janicaud

1

2. HeideggerianaDominique Janicaud

15

3. The Heideggerian ChiasmusJean-François Mattéi

39

3.a. The Crossing of Paths 39

3.b. The Turn 61

3.c. The Lightning Flash 81

3.d. The Round 102

3.e. The Paths of the Cross 125

4. Metamorphosis of the UndecidableDominique Janicaud

151

5. Heidegger in New YorkDominique Janicaud

165

(1993) "Epilogue for Two Voices"Dominique Janicaud and Jean-François Mattéi

221

Notes 227

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Index 243

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Translator's Preface

Wege, nicht Werke (Paths, not works). The exergue put by Heidegger at the head of his collected writings couldwell have been the leading motto that Dominique Janicaud and Jean-François Mattéi decided to follow in thiscollection of essays, where they sought access to what in scholarly terms is (and still has to be) called theHeideggerian corpus. The reader of these essays will be challenged to decide whether these readingsor thesedelineations of pathsare conducted by the compass and according to the directions initiated and urged byHeidegger in his effort to think beyond metaphysics. He or she will be challenged to determine whether it ispossible to reenact the Heideggerian questioning within the ground where the thinker sought his owndeparturea ground that must be opened to questioning, rather than demolition, in order to rekindle the sense ofour belonging to the earth, sky, divine, human community, i.e., to the fourfold; in order also to reiterate thequestionleft pending by Heidggerof ethics and of the future of thought.

In this preface I would like to limit myself only to a second-degree delineationthat of the paths, or thecartography, that Janicaud and Mattéi were able to detect and through which they invite us to reador to followfor a while, at leasta great thinker of the twentieth century. "Heidegger bifrons," they write; i.e., Heideggerupon whom devolved two tasks: tracing the question of Being within the history of metaphysics that isparadoxically characterized by its forgetfulness and thinking beyond metaphysics, beyond the sedimentedtradition of the interpretation of Being as beingness, presence,

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substance, subject, absolute, eternal returnto name only a few of the guises under which metaphysics hasappeared in the history of metaphysics. And this task of thinking, this Zudenkendes, is such that without it wewould be caught in a terminal repetition (with or without deconstruction) of the same, i.e., a metaphysicalidentity that fails to be opened to the world (i.e., to Being) and to the fourfold.

Yet before trying to outline only a few of the signposts by which renewed attention can be paid to theHeideggerian landscape, it might be important for the reader of these essays to keep in view what these twocritics are not. They are not deconstructionists, they do not consider that the method of immersing oneself inthe playful activity of perverting the letter of texts in order to observe what will obtain concerning its spirit is amethod respectful of the Zudenkendes of fundamental thinking. They would rather claim that such a methodwould have been greeted by Heidegger as the method of the zu (nichts) denkendes. Hence once finds in theseessays allusions to Jacques Derrida and to the misconceptions of a Deleuze concerning the Kehre. In no waydoes deconstructionism's different approach open paths or take the Heideggerian paths seriously; in no waydoes it prepare a critical approach for the reader. Instead of that playful twisting of the letter of the texts inorder to prepareor provokethe escape of their spirit, these two critics have preferred a more faithful approach tothe Heideggerian corpus. And this corpus is not made of works, but of pathspaths leading up and paths leadingback downback down to what is still to be thought (our eyes being still raised and attuned to the dimension oftranscendence): the clearing, the fourfold, and the appropriating event. If Heidegger's philosophy only consistedof works (as clearly Heidegger claims it does not), these works could perhaps lend themselves to a demolitionenterprise. But if we must read Heidegger keeping in mind the requirement of the path or paths of thinking andthe specific openness to a landscape (rather than a closure within intertextuality), then crossing paths (notwords) with Heidegger will be deemed the most valuable tribute critics can pay. The paths of critical appraisaldelineated by Janicaud and Mattéi are thus tanta-

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mount to the clarification of the ways of a difficult thinker, a thinker to whom some respect is owedover andbeyond his failing (quite significant) in keeping with the political and the impossibility of articulating acommanding ethics upon his ontological questioning.

Janicaud's first two essays, "Overcoming Metaphysics?" and "Heideggeriana," both echo and pay tribute toHeidegger's "Ueberwindung der Metaphysik" (Overcoming Metaphysics). Janicaud shows that Heidegger hadwarned against the "hardly surpassable grotesque'' to which the interpretation of the world Destruktion hadalready lent itself. The method of the tabula rasa evident in Being and Time was then also connected with a"programmatic ardor" not dissimilar to Husserl's. Hence at the time of the major treatise, the Destruktion ofmetaphysics had to be interpreted as Abbau (taking down, dismantling) of those all too "banal and emptyrepresentations" and of the interrelatedness of the layers of the history of metaphysics, which all hide thefundamental question. But the meaning of this overcoming (and of the connected Abbau, as the sense ofDestruktion) is revealed finally in the interpretation of Being as Time, or as authentic temporality. Janicaudsuggests that the "violence" evident in the term Destruktion was necessary in order to reveal the unthought ofthe venerable texts of the tradition which always skirted, but ultimately eschewed, authentic temporality. Acertain transgression was at play, at workor rather I should say, under wayin the early Heidegger in order todelineate metaphysics. As Janicaud writes: "To transgress in order to delineate, will not this be the lesson of theovercoming?" (5).

Then Janicaud shows that this delineation is oriented toward another landscape which was the hidden negativeof the metaphysical layers of the history to (be) overcome. Yet this overcoming is not the simple sloughing off,the pushing out of one's way, of a tradition good for nothing. The tradition is not so much to be razed, asremembered. But this remembering is not akin to the articulation of a telos that overcomes an absolutesundering as in Hegel. This remembering is connected to the injunction of Being and is therefore to be experi-

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enced in a turning (Kehre) away from the sedimented, banal, and empty representations of metaphysics.Janicaud claims that one must seek Heidegger's complex attitude toward the metaphysical tradition in the lightof an experience of the nonmetaphysical terms. We are thus to forebear or endure this metaphysical traditionjust as it is said that we forebear or endure grief, failure, et cetera in and through time. Such a tradition,therefore, is not unbearable but becomes entirely appropriated by the one who has experienced, endured andforeborne it. As in the case of Dasein, which experiences grief and failure, every step beyond grief and failureis a step through and away from them, inasmuch as grief and failure are essential experiences. This forebearing,this endurance as the endurance of metaphysics within the thought of Being, is the German Verwindung. Thisendurance of metaphysics is freed from what it endures inasmuch as it encounters the simplicity of the "thereis" (es gibt), whose givenness comes even prior to temporalitysince such a time was still caught in the acribeiaof the description of a structural construct (Dasein's existentialia). For Janicaud the terms of the laterHeidegger (Heidegger II), especially as they appear in the last seminar On Time and Being, "correct theexaggerated amplitude of the expression 'to think Being without beings'" (11). Contrary to the vacuoussuspense, the free-floating status, in which many critics leave Ereignis, Janicaud recognizes that the''suspension" (12) of this new, necessary term in the path of "overcoming metaphysics" requires that we take itsmeasure, or its measuressince Heidegger had indicated in the Letter to Richardson that his new thinking is"manifold (mehrfältiges)" (xxiixxiii).

For Janicaud, Ereignisessential though it isis a stage manifesting itself as a clearing in the path of thethinkernot the terminal point at which Heidegger's path evaporates into thin air or northern mist, poeticallydressed to mask the absence of thought. Only at such a point can it be said that Heidegger is a matter forthought and presents us with a Zudenkendes.

Janicaud's second essay, "Heideggeriana," explores paths beyond metaphysics from a different perspective. Thestruc-

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ture of this essay in 28 sections pays homage to Heidegger's text, "Ueberwindung der Metaphysik," whileopening it up to further questioning. Since Janicaud has refused to cut the coinages of the later Heidegger fromthe path of thinking, 1 i.e., since he requires that the Zudenkendes of Ereignis (and the constellation of otherterms) be taken seriously and offered to a meditation and to a "measure" or "measures," it would be a completederogation of Heidegger's seriousness to evade the idea that the matters for thought in Heidegger II are outsideof a sending of Being, that they are outside of an epoch. Ereignis is hidden within the metaphysical epoch,within the (thoughtful, meditative, and measuring) suspension of the epoch, revealing it as what it is. In otherwords, Ereignis is within the lifting or suspending of the inauthentic time-out-side-of-time, i.e., the non-time,the inauthentic presence of the Gestell.

The proximity and relation between Ereignis and Gestell (for Being and for thought) is what Janicaud calls"contiguity." Janicaud faults Heidegger for not having sufficiently delineated the requirements of thisconnection, since the Gestell is not some Orwellian (or Nazi) totalitarian nightmare but makes unpredictableappeals to sense (2: iii). At the same time a presumption is rekindled by Janicaud, in that for him a questionmark must be maintained in the sudden juncture found between the fragility of Being and the enormity ofhistory (2: vi). This question mark, with the attending critical assessment of rationality as our allotment, whichwe cannot simply assign to the closure of metaphysics, leads Janicaud to an assessment of the dwelling of the"shepherds of Being" that we are, i.e., of authentic dwelling on the earth. This authentic dwelling reveals a pathof "dissidence" (2: xvi). By pointing out what he calls ''dated remarks" from "Ueberwindung der Metaphysik"(which are also present in other texts), Janicaud assesses that Heidegger was never able to conceive that thepolitical regime most suited to the technological era was in fact democracy (2: xix). From the perspective of aview which sees the Gestell from within the clearing of an Ereignis out-of-season yet inherent in the sendingof Being, the Heideggerian "will-not-to-will" is interpreted as the site of an originary

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mögen, an originary possibility, in which the enframing of absolute scientific rationality finds an absolute limitto its power. Janicaud's second essay concludes not on the "-not-to-will" (found problematic by many), but onthe original "willing-" of the formula, and interprets Jünger's "line" as an axis of fusion for man, truth, andwilling. If the second part of the formula wins out, then nothingness ensues and Being ceases giving itselffreely to humans, its shepherds. If the first part of the formula is still read as what initiates the meditativedwelling, then thinking is still open to an essential margin, a thought still moving and open to theunpredictable. Thus the final word is neither on the side of Being nor on the side of man.

Final words are perhaps hardest to come by in this collection of essays on the Heideggerian Wege. Janicaud hashis own way of leaving his dialogue "Heidegger in New York" unconcluded by imitating the unconcluded endof Plato's Critias. . . . In viewing or experiencing a work of art we always assume that the artist added one finaltouchwherever it might bethat sealed and concentrated the artwork in itself. But in Heidegger's thinking path,matters are different: What better way to invite others on its trails than to leave the last step of the itinerary ona sort of finality without end . . . on the mere signs of an expression without a given directing telos, . . . hencewhere other steps are possible . . . and yet not taken?

Jean-François Mattéi opens his investigation of Heidegger's paths by attempting a simile that may surprise thereader: it involves the peripatetic course of Socrates and Phaedrus, which leads both Athenians up the Ilisos andto a tree under whose shade they settle to conduct their inquiry. What do the Socratic experience of thought andthe Heideggerian one have in common? If we cannot see beyond the contents of Plato's dialogues, apparentlynot much. But inasmuch as both thinkers were hesitant to entrust themselves to final words, they have indeedmuch in common, not least of all the notion of the meanderings of paths, the encounter of ideas represented byname-bearers and made possible by places

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(Agathon's house in the Symposium or Hölderlin's hymn to dwelling). Mattéi attempts a cartography of theHeideggerian landscape by taking seriously the claim that Heidegger's corpus will be best thought of as a seriesof ways, rather than a row of books. But just as Janicaud sought to secure and measure through the "method"of the Gestell the ways of the possible, Mattéi is in the process of delineating a chiasmatic return to the simplein the texts of Heidegger. The reader may ask: Why should the simple be revealed through a chiasmus, thecrossing of two lines in the form of the letter X? Why should the simple be revealed in a symbolic structurethat presupposes the act of an originary graphe that no deconstructionism can ever impugn? Why should thereversal a b / b a, constitutive of the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus, be unequivocally present at the core offundamental thinking, inasmuch as this thinking is on the path to the nonmetaphysical?

To these questions, it seems to me that Mattéi has the most obvious answer: because thoughtinasmuch asmetaphysics is set apart from itis a path of return to the simple, and such a return to the simple can only occurby overcoming errancy, by trusting in a starnur ein Stern.

Hence Mattéi takes seriously the transcendence of the starry skies above us and therein detects a Sign.Although no claim to a Kantian legacy is made in our text, a genealogy is made in an earlier text, L'Etranger etle Simulacre. In Kantian fashion it connects the thought of an order of the world (that addresses man's thought)to the fact that we find freedom in ourselves: the lightalways present in the midst of the surrounding nightof themoral law. Cosmology, psychology, and theology are all dependent upon the transcendent irradiation of a verytenuous, yet irrepressible, sparkle of lightthe polar star around which the regularly sweeping spin of the entirevault is inscribed and without which the night would be thoughtless because it would be a sundering rather thana silent inscription within the cosmos.

Can it be suggested that Mattéi is investing an ontical imageladen with symbolismin the realm of ontology? Tothis question it seems that we have to answer yes and no. Yes

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and no, first, because beyond the possibility of having any theory (in the modern sense) about the universe,there has to be a prior orientation that continues to be verified in the consistency of the data taken into accountby the (ontical) discipline. But furthermore an essential dissymmetry seems to be revealed in the universe,allowing for the possibility of a cosmos: in the return of cyclical regularities the shining forth of the Same. Yesand no, second, because it is Heidegger himself who forces us to consider that his own thought with theinjunction "nur ein Stern" (Only one star) is conducted under the guidance of a star-like dimension. If this isindeed the case, as Mattéi claims, would it not be possible to find the star-like dimension in the textsthemselves? At the most radical ontological level there is inscribed a Pythagorean legacy: humans are groundedon the earth inasmuch as they greet the seasons and look up to the North starthe return of the Samelook up toan axis, Being, upon which the cosmos, the psyche, and the divine ones are rooted and around which thefourfold hinges?

Mattéi shows that the articulation of a return to the simple is presupposed in the underlying structure of the titleof Heidegger's book Being and Time which calls for the reversal "Time and Being." Without this reversal wewould have a mere tautology of the form A = non A, akin to the skillful constructions of German idealism. ForMattéi the escape from metaphysics can only be effective if metaphysics is set apart, as it is in paths of thinkingthat return to the simple. This setting-apart is "crucially" present in the chiasmatic articulation of such essentialHeideggerian texts as The Principle of Reason, with its famous chiasmus:

"Der Satz vom Grundder Grund des Satzes"

(The Principle of Reasonthe Reason of the Principle) whose formal structure is A B / B A or

The critical attention that Mattéi pays to this nonmetaphysical structure allows him to discover it in a greatmany other

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instances in Heidegger's texts, or I should say, ways and paths, his Wege.

Beyond dialectics and its flight away from the simple, fundamental thought is magnetically pulled into thepentadic polarity of its star-like dimension to experience the return (Kehre). This return is not the idiosyncrasyof Heidegger the Swabbian, a man who, for lack of a better project, indulged a song to his native land, theHeimat, and to the earth. This return must be experienced as a tearing away from the acribic (scientific)determinations of a linearand as such erringmethod or away from the spheres of the Hegelian Absolute. Thissetting-apart of metaphysics is coeval with claiming a site for a future appropriation of authentic thinking."Such is the profound meaning of the Heideggerian 'deconstruction' of philosophy, so profoundlymisunderstood since Section 6 of Being and Time: it is the return to the original site of metaphysics in order toappropriate it within its own limits and to prepare a new beginning. To the intense longing for the distantsucceeds the firm desire for the near" (54).

The profound misunderstanding of deconstructionismwhich amounts to turning the errancy of metaphysics intoa rhetoric of errancy, giving the new sophists carte blanche to fill grey volumes, where the past may be readonly under erasureis based upon the perversion of the Heideggerian chiasmus discovered by Mattéi.Deconstructionism's "childish pretension" to "demean history" (ibid.) is categorically denounced by Mattéi,whose earlier book on the foundation of philosophy and Plato, L'Etranger et le Simulacre, contained decisivecorrections of the intentional (mis)constructions of partial evidence which permit the acosmic thought of a newsophistry to set itself adrift in what it appropriately calls the errancy (the line of escape, "la ligne de fuite") ofits own differance.

Mattéi found the evidence of a cosmos revealed in a moment of vision in the texts of the nonmetaphysicalPlato and of Heidegger. Therein a matter arises for thought, it is a matter for crossed articulation, giving right tohigh and low, left and right, earth and sky, humans and the divinities. This matter of chiasmatic articulationclearlybefore any "the-

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sis" of metaphysicsis revealed at once, once the will of certainty is suspended within the metaphysical epoch.Therefore Mattéi interpreted the graph of the X-shape crossing (die Kreuzweise Durchstreichung [94]) againstany rhetorical or sophistical trick playing in the intertextuality of texts, as the site where the fourfold isrevealed, where the clearing and the appropriating event (Ereignis) emerge. This emergence is the reiterationof the original site of metaphysics, a site of which, however, the discipline metaphysics has lost sight since ithas now reached its completion in the Gestell. To rekindle the possibility of marveling in the face of the simple,our thinking must become attuned to the eternal within the present, attuned to what is revealed in the instant, inthe flash of lightning, and in what Mattéi calls the "storms of the originary." This figure of the chiasmus is thusthe least impugnable, nonnihilistic "archaic" path within which Being itself withdraws while revealing a site forpoetic saying. And this nonnihilistic archaic path in turn reveals the nature and the requirements of the paths offundamental thought, each of which leads to a vista, thus orienting our progress and countering the errancy of amodernity and post-modernity terminally caught in the dissemination of deconstruction.

In detailed analyses of many of the terms of the nonmetaphysical thinking of Heidegger and Plato (from thethemes of the "counterpoint" to that of the "open"), Mattéi shows that no conceptual mediation is required toexperience the living tensions that preceed the conceptual elaboration of metaphysics. Rather, the counterpointitself exudes the vibrant life that in Plato's texts animates the existential questioning of his interlocutors bySocrates. It punctuates Heidegger's ontological dismissal of nihilism "by sending the negation back to nihilismitself" (66). The counterpoint is thus the rhythm of Being thanks to which our kinship with the order andmeasure of the simple can be experienced. Consider also the term "the open." It does not functionmetaphysically as a Hegelian space of mediation for what is still to be disclosed, but rather reveals that Beingis givenness that takes place in the instant. Hence, the open is the source of every prephilosophical medi-

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ation, of every return to the source, and at the same time is itself "immediate" (135).

"Being as ground" means for Mattéi that Heidegger has to be taken seriously when he says that Being isGround, and that Being has no ground, no prior ground for being. Being is thus a mysteryon the one hand themost elusive revelation at the center of the cosmos and on the other hand the firm status, i.e., the firmlyarticulated connection of earth and light, humans and divinities present in some essential myths of Plato(Gorgias and Republic in particular) as well as in Hölderlin's poetry (12425). The abyss, therefore, holds noinfernal fascination in the interpretation that Mattéi givesas opposed to what we witness in the spacings (out) ofde(con)structed reason which has been sucked into errancy or, metaphorically and tautologically speaking, intothe abyss of intertextuality. Mattéi suggests a strong kinship between the nonmetaphysical sense of koinoniaand metron geometrikon (of the "cosmic" myths of Plato) and the appropriating event of Ereignis and the firmstatus of measure and order intrinsically present in the "in-between" (das Zwischen), "diametral measure"(Durchmessung), ''Dimension" (die Dimension), and also "difference" (Differenz).

In his fifth chapter Mattéi conducts an original confrontation of the Heideggerian Ereignis and the ChineseTao, both of which are absolutely untranslatable in the categories of conceptual thinking since both entail the"appropriation of the peace of silence" (131). Such revelations are also traceable in the Hermes/Eros of TheSymposium, whose exaiphnes (instantaneous fulguration) prefigures the nonmetaphysical gaze (Einblick in das,was its) and attunes love and thought within the harmony of the simple. It may be noted in passing that thischapter, perhaps more than the preceding ones, presents striking similarities with Ernst Cassirer's investigationof mythical thinking in The Philosophy of Symbolical Forms. 2 To be sure, Mattéi wrote this piece beforegiving critical attention to Cassirer's great work,3 but the conclusions he reached in 1983 on the HeideggerianGeviertnotwithstanding the Davos "disputation" between Heidegger and Cassirer echoed in Kant and theProblem of Metaphysicsagree to a

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significant degree with Cassirer's foundation of a theory of mythical forms, space, time and number. ForHeidegger would surely concur with Cassirer that what is at stake in nonmetaphysical and mythical thought isnot a specific content, but a specific orientation. "The fact that similar systems are found all over the worldshows that what we have is not an isolated offshoot of mythical thinking, but one of its typical andfundamental intuitionsnot a mere content of mythical thinking but one of its determining factors" (ThePhilosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1955, p. 87, note).

The world is always a threshold, a delimitation where chiasmatically the fourfold is brought to a juncturethrough the silent injunction of Being that withdraws. The thinking paths of Heidegger are thus intrinsicallyopen to the correspondences that Mattéi detects inasmuch as nonmetaphysical thinking firmly attunes Being toTime and firmly attunes the tenuous thought of Being to the cosmic adjoining of prephilosophical figures,without which dwelling and safekeeping are impossible for humans. When his journey in the Heideggerianlandscape comes to a close, Mattéi takes his leavehow could it be done more appropriately?by evoking thegestures of mortalsgreeting, praising, praying. . . . "As do children, in wonder, men stare at the night whosecourse has begunthe night that is, and remains, 'the stitcher of stars.'"

This collection of essaysorganized chiasmatically around Mattéi's five piecesthen lends Dominique Janicaud hisunique insights to explore two different sets of paths along the Heideggerian landscape. In the first of the lasttwo chapters, Janicaud's effort is one of critical appraisal of the undecidable character of metaphysics in thewake of the Heideggerian questioning of its unthought. The blossoming of the flowerthe revealing that it is, towhich we (cor)respond by showing and celebrating the flower in poetryis without why. Echoing Heidegger'sfamous text, Janicaud explores this "without why" and takes it to heart, protecting it from those detractors thataccuse Heidegger of

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fleeing into an abyss of mysticism. Janicaud grants that the word "undecidable" (unentscheibar) probably cameto Heidegger's attention as a result of Gödel's work. Although Gödel himself claimed to have in view only twoformal systems (on the one hand the one found in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and on theother hand the axiomatic system of Zermelo-Fraenkel), Heidegger expands the thematic of the undecidable tothe contemporary world as a whole, inasmuch as it is ruled by the Gestell, the completion of metaphysics.Janicaud points out that if Gödel's undecidable can be "demonstrated," this is far from being the case forHeidegger's. Rather, the word demonstration will have to gain a different meaning, since it is a delineation of"the essence of metaphysics" as such.

Contrary to Derrida's favorable sense of the undecidable, heidegger's sense as shown by Janicaud is entirelynegative and in no way should be confused with its deconstructed version. Having made this correction toavoid a slippage, Janicaud can point out that from the perspective of the overcoming of errancyi.e., theessentialthe foundation of metaphysics can become "capable of decision (entscheidungshaft) as decisive event(Ereignis) of the history of Being" (157). Viewed thus, the essential is no longer undecidable, but undecided(ibid.). What remains undecided is whether nihilism is a mere void (endlessly increasing without gaining thedignity of the Nothing), and whether the originary saying of poets and thinkers can measure up to the task offacing nihilism down. The signs of the proximity are only a matter for poetic saying and are a matter of the"crossing of gazes in the Crossing of the fourfold" (158). Citing Walter F. Ottoone of the few contemporariesfrom whom Heidegger drew inspirationJanicaud points out that an instant of revelation can allow venerablefigures to shine forth in spite of the fact that no temple was ever built to them. Such a decisive gazewhich, forJanicaud, is the seal of a genuine philosopheris also called the trait of allotment inasmuch as each time one is todecide where and how the divine shines forth, where and how humans can respond, where and how heaven andearth meet in their hierogamic unity. This allotment is the trait of

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the poet, the delineation of which his art is capable. The poet's unique mögen is a reserve settled against therule of nihilism and the wasteland of the technological world set in motion by the Cartesian method and againstthe metaphysical epoch. The uniqueness of Janicaud's voiceand I should say gazeis the fact that he insists thatthis reserve is a capacity for deciding where our allotted residence is and should be in its proper measure. Thiscapacity necessarily involves what he calls a certain "empathy with Being" (une intelligence de l'être) (163). Inlight of this empathy, Janicaud claims that we should aspire to maintain "the freshness of the possible" in themidst of all ontical decisions since ultimately every ontological decision is relayed by the possibility ofsymbolic (i.e., necessarily ontical) analogies where we do find living echoes of our "ultimate questions" (ibid.).

These ultimate questions are echoed indeed in the dialogue and the setting of Janicaud's "Heidegger in NewYork." How can the city that is the emblematic seal of the modern Gestell lend a space for a thinkingmeditation, apart from police sirens and the noise of screeching brakes, possibly from the cars of gangsters?The answer is that every genuine human questioning is a space of endurance, where the most profound depthsof human nature are to be tested.

For in New York, inasmuch as four friends have gathered in a sort of symposium where their divergingitineraries can be compared, a crossing is set where thought can collect itself. Perplexities and expectations,refusals and openings result from the crossing of these itineraries where Janicaud's empathy with Being allowshim to be attuned to one of the most reticent objections one could level against his views. They come, it seemsto me, from Sue, his first protagonist, whose acknowledged near mental collapse was noted by Hans-GeorgGadamer in the review he wrote for this collection of essays in Philosophische Rundschau (1985, 32: 2125). Itis hard to be insensitive to the plight of Sue, the young scientist who had meditated deeply on The Principle ofReason, but after a serious bout with depression could no longer experience the rose without why, or the rose inthe cross of the present to use Hegel's expression. But more than to her plight, one must be

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sensitive to the argument she brings forth, in particular her observation that the ontological experience is farfrom being simple (171). She also forces her audience to concede that, contrary to what Heidegger claimed,human language does contain something human (172). These (and other) objections force David to articulatethe suspicionnot only against his intensely critical friend or against the common run of Heideggerianscholasticism, but also against every probing reader of Heideggerthat "we consider wrongly Heidegger as a sortof monument blocking our view of the landscape" 175). When it is conceded that Heidegger's absent ethicsmight be a mixed blessing, Francis (17678) points out that he sees it as the site where "more fundamentalquestions" (176) are to be raised. But Joan, who has sensed the depths of the objections of her friend Sue,replies that in this discussion there is much ado about the unspeakable, perhaps hinting at Wittgenstein'ssuggestion that the unspeakable should be left to itself, an sich. But against such a view she points out thatsigns point to us, as much as we point signs to things in order to think at all. Thus, willing or nilling, we arealways assigned to the disclosing of the enigma of things (180).

This dialogue is too rich to be summarized and deserves one's patient exploration in order that one may becomesensitive to the various critical remarks made by its protagonists. For example, David talks about theHeideggerian "nominalization" (185) of Being and seems to be giving more ammunition to Sue's rejection ofthe "gloss" (187) and to the verdict that the articulation of the simple is mere "acrobatics" (190). A certainreinflection, a renewed tension within Heidegger is found by Francis and Joan (in 193). Francis rejects the"strategies of reversal or distancing'' (i.e., deconstructionism) and is thus led to affirm with greater decisivenessthat Heidegger's thought escapes any understanding by those who deny it a space of intimacy where meaning isgathered together, and who then throw it to the winds of textual dissemination. To which Joan concurs byobserving that the requirement of unification is proper to thought (while it would be fatal to the arts) and assuch constitutive of the relationship between the human being and Being.

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After Janicaud allows the sounds of New York to break the dialogue of the four participants (198), the questionof the value of Taoist noninterventionism is raised. Although Janicaud does not allow anyone to object toDavid's echo of the "internal truth and greatness" of National Socialism by raising the specter of Heidegger'shorrific silence on his own "engagement" (he takes up the issue in L'ombre de cette penséesee note 1, pp.22728), it is clear at this point in the argument that noninterventionism is the only path of resistance tonihilism. This resistance does not amount to severing thought from any future growth, as Sue still fears, forDavid rekindles the notion that "contiguity becomes dynamic if the will is reactivated" (212) apart from therequirements of the dominating (world) language. Even Manhattan is now felt by Sue in the final exchanges asa place which can, with its distant lighted buildings, render "sensible the capacity to take a distance'' (220), tocreate a reserve thanks to which thought is still alive, still open to time. Out of this reserve, an act of showing,a "monstration," will appropriate humans to the ultimate questions, and "correct monstrosity so as to make itakin to greatness" (ibid.). Hence Sue was also able in the end to dispel the dubious connection of truth andmonstrositywhich has become a stale staple of deconstructionism. But, if we are truly ones concerned withmonstration ("les montreurs que nous sommes"), we will have understood that all these are signsoracles spokenby men and women wherein the sense of our belonging to the simple of the fourfold is decided eachtimepointing to openness, givenness, and time, pointing to a future of thought, because some books, as well asthe ultimate journey of life, will always leave stones unturned, pages unwritten, words still pending. . . .

Such could be a presentation of Janicaud's and Mattéi's essays. The delineation of the nonmetaphysical thinkingof Heidegger emerges as an opening of paths and ways. Along these paths it is possible to experiencemetaphysical thinking in contrast to nonmetaphysical thinking and the probing of the history of Being. Againstthe playful word-games of

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deconstructionism, these essays attempt a monstration of the clearing that occurs when metaphysics isremembered and borne through (verwunden) in its truth, when a possibility for another gaze attuned to thefourfold and its crossings emerges in the endurance of the questioning. What also emerges is the sense thatmetaphysics came to its limit in Heidegger. In his philosophy it came to be considered anew and morefundamentally. A phenomenological hermeneutic, attuned to the ontological difference, remains the only pathby which humans may still encounter the simple. Taking one's bearings in the Heideggerian landscapeeven ifsome other fundamental criticism is necessary as Janicaud attempts in L'ombre de cette penséecould only takeplace if one is able to be guided by the star of Beingwithdrawing though it is(rather than the "stars" of theworld, as Mattéi puts it with discreet but firm irony) toward the clearing of aletheia. Such may be therequirements for a thinking still epochal, still to come, still in suspense, still reserved in Ereignis.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Professor Janicaud for asking Dennis Schmidt to entrust me with this translation for the SUNYseries in Continental Philosophy. Dominique Janicaud always made helpful suggestions, as it was sometimesnecessary to render various elliptical turns of the French into more explicit English expressions.

Professor Mattéi was also instrumental in clarifying some remaining difficulties and questions. To Anne Mattéi,his wife and a professor of English, is owed the expression "the night, stitcher of stars," perfectly matchedagainst the French ("la nuit couseuse d'étoiles") and the German ''die Näherin der Sterne" in Gelassenheit.

Even before proofreading by the authors took place, I relied upon the expertise and good judgment of MichaelPinholster of Boston College to edit much of this book. His knowledge of the sources was essential to retrievemany of the references in the English translations.

My thanks go also to The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal for allowing the reprint of DominiqueJanicaud's "Heidegger's Undecidable."

The French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) and the "Centre de recherche d'histoiredes idées" assisted this translation with a grant.

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Foreword

Dominique Janicaud and Jean-François Mattéi

Heidegger bifrons. What thinker of the twentieth century more than he followed the furrows of metaphysics,delineated its constitutive difference, measured its structure, reassigned it to unity? There is another aspect,found by many worrisome or inconsequential: the "destruction" of that tradition, the discovery that its rationalfoundation (Grund) is an abyss (Abgrund), that the enigma of Being is still unthought, and that our "salvation"is still as fragile as the quivering of speech on the verge of silence. A historian of thought reassures; a thinker isdisconcerting. On that limit, isn't he yet still a metaphysicianthe most original and powerful of our times? Inother words, didn't he bring metaphysics to its extreme limit, similar to an octopus that has emptied out its ink,so much so that every thing now plays out differently?

The limes is not at all a straight line drawn on a map. It is a path that can, either directly proceed between twofields, opening an access to them while delineating them, or surround and close a domain upon itself, as was thecase for the border of the Roman Empire. Both meanings are applicable to Heidegger, and we do not intend todisjoin them: we seek first a free encounter with metaphysics, better encompassed and mastered; and second anadvance into the inviolate or a path that leads beyond the acknowledged ways and perhaps beyond what can betraveled. It is true, as Jacques Derrida notices in Margins of Philosophy, that philosophical discourse "has

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always been intent on ensuring for itself the mastery of the limit." On this view, wouldn't Heidegger's thoughtbe a mere repetition, one perhaps involving genius but nonetheless much less remarkable than it first seemed?"In other words, does the limit, obliquely, and by surprise, always reserve one more blow to philosophicalknowledge?" This question, which Derrida raises in the most general terms, seems pertinent concerningHeidegger only if its terms have been slightly modified or shifted. The Heideggerian gaze indeed reserves, inits very fulgurating, a certain part of the oblique limus (another possible etymology for our question on the"limit"); but if such a gaze is surprising, it is also because of its refusal merely to contribute to the increase ofknowledge, because of its own way of suspending the quest for "more" and of allowing the advent of theAntecedent.

Indeed, Heidegger's thought is unique. Everyone is bound to grant the following: Every major thinker worthy ofthe name should be studied in terms of his irreducible specifics, if his originality is not for show. HoweverHeidegger, whatever the judgment that may be passed on his work by each reader, has not perhaps beenrecognized in his most demanding uniqueness. Hundreds, thousands of papers and books have been written onhim all over the world. In France, intellectuals have greeted him first as the grandfather of existentialism, thenas the godfather of structuralism. But today people talk a lot about difference, yet hardly have reread Identityand Difference; there is ample concern for the crisis in rationality, but people have hardly reread The Principleof Reason; alarms are sounded around the enormous dangers that technological civilization seems to pose andheap upon us because of its own movement, but one hardly takes into consideration The Question ConcerningTechnology. Is an illustrious example necessary? Ilya Prigogine, winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize for chemistry,disparages in Nouvelle Alliance (New Alliance) "Heidegger's more than dangerous theses" (p. 38). Afterdevoting exactly thirty-five lines of text (filled with very general quotes which, he claims, manifest Heidegger's"radical hostility" toward technological work as well as every "communicable knowledge"), he does not stoopto articulate any

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sort of refutation, but instead prefers to move on to the next critics, Bergier and Pauwels, who obviously werecontestants much easier to unmask.

If acknowledging Heidegger's singularity is to consist of bringing a great name under a classification, then thisis not our business. In this respect, praise is at least as dangerous as attack: against both sides we are on thedefensive because, in the background, we nurture no recuperating afterthought, no ideology. We don't evenintend to propose a new interpretation. More modestly, we suggest taking into accountby thinking themanewthe requirements of such a singularity which, beyond the invitation to a sobriety of language and rigor inreading the major texts of metaphysics, are centered around the will to unmask always better the unthought ofWestern metaphysics. Heidegger is therefore unique not only in his ambiguous bifrons situation vis-à-vismetaphysics, which he both announced and denounced, but also in the dynamic he creates by claiming overand over againfor example in What Is Called Thinking'?that "we do not think yet." Has anyone, at least in theWestern tradition, sacrificed so much to the task and work of thinking while claiming that just about the entirepath still needs to be traveled? Has anyone gone so far in his meditating quest while still calling for an evendeeper gathering recollection, as for the miraculous catch of a thinking still to come?

Such a requirement is all the more demanding as we are not attempting to repeat the Master, but instead toundergo the apprenticeship of what one of us has called "contiguity" and the experience of dizziness in the faceof the domination of the earth and its worrisome results. At the time when the numbers are growing of thosewho have doubts concerning the way taken by the Western world and seek another outcome in vain, it wouldbe paradoxical that in neglect one should overlook the smallest seed sown in the field of thought and, amongothers, the seed of the Heideggerian meditation.

In deciding to join our efforts, yet without confusing them, we produced the five following studies whileremaining

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aware, each one of us, of what brings us together and what differentiates us in encountering Heidegger'sliterally crucial challenge to "overcome" metaphysics.

Since the issue was to follow Heidegger to the most extreme limits of this thought, to push the questioning asfar as possible along with, or against, him and not to summarize the corpus nor to claim that we had finallyisolated its definitive quintessence, there was no reason to have a unified approach. On the contrary, as much aspossible the ways of access, the angles of attack were diversified. To an essay of traditionalinterpretationtraditional perhaps only by its form, since nothing is more contemporary than the reexamination ofthe figures of writing leading to the chiasmus as a central piecefour essays respond whose orientation is moretoward modernity (its metaphysical essence, its undecidable rationality, its possible both revealed andreserved), each of these four being also different from one another: two paper-like articles, a deliberatelyfragmented meditation, and a dialogue with four voices.

"Crossroads" punctuate the meditation on the Heideggerian chiasmus, and silences surround exchanges betweenthe four friends in New York, the capital and crossroads of the technological world. The questioningprecipitates, then suspends itself, as the gravity of night settles. Plato and Lao-Tse with their ancestral wisdomslip within the star-like emergence of our common perplexities. Unplanned encounters. . . .

We wish to be allowed to associate in the memory of Jean Beaufret all those who do not entirely despair ofthought and patiently attempt to delineate a path amidst what Holzwege names "the night of the world."

Dominique Janicaud and Jean-François Mattéi1983

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List and Abbreviations of the Works Quoted

BT=Being and Time, (Sein und Zeit) trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962.Also SZ.

BW=Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1976.

EB=Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965.

EB (RP)="Remembrance of the Poet," in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock, Chicago: Henry RegneryCompany, 1965.

EB (HEP)="Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry," in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock, Chicago:Henry Regnery Company, 1965.

EB (ET)="On the Essence of Truth," in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock, Chicago: Henry RegneryCompany, 1965.

EB (WM)="What is Metaphysics?" in Existence and Being, trans. Werner Brock, Chicago: Henry RegneryCompany, 1965.

EC=Essais et Conférences, trans. A. Préau, Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

EGT=Early Greek Thinking, trans. David F. Krell and Frank Capuzzi, New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

EP=The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

FD=Die Frage nach dem Ding, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962.

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G=Gelassenheit, Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. See "Discourse on Thinking," trans. John M. Anderson and E. HansFreund, New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

HD=Erlaüterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, Vierte, Erweiterte Auflage, 1971.

HS=Heraclitus Seminar (with Eugen Fink), trans. Charles H. Seiberg, Alabama: University of Alabama Press,1979.

HZ=Holzwege, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957.

ID=Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

ID (OTLCM)="The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics," in Identity and Difference, trans. JoanStambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

ID (PI) = "Principle of Identity," in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper andRow, 1969.

IM=Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

IUD=Identität und Differenz, Pfullingen: Neske, 1957.

KPM=Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

KM=Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929.

KTB="Kant's Thesis on Being," trans. E. Klein and William E. Pohl, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 4: 3,(Fall 1973), 733.

LH="Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers,1976.

LR="Letter to Richardson" in Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, William J. Richardson, TheHague: Nijhoff, 1964.

N 1=Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans, David F. Krell, New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

N 2=Nietzsche, vol 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David F. Krell, New York: Harper and Row,1984.

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N 4=Nietzsche, vol. 4, Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. David F. Krell, New York: Harper and Row,1982.

OWL=On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

PDT="Plato's Doctrine of Truth" in Philosophy of the 20th century, 3, William Barret and Henry D. Aiken ed.,New York: Random House, 1962, 25170.

PhB=On the Being and Conception of Physis in Aristotle's Physics (B2), in "Man and World," 9: 3, trans.Thomas J. Sheehan, (April 1976), 21970.

PLT=Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.PLT (BDT)=Building, Dwelling, Thinking

PLT (OWA)="Origin of the Work of Art."

PLT (T)="The Thing."

PR=Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Q=Questions, (1, 2, 3, 4), French translation of many lectures and texts by Heidegger, Paris: Gallimard, 1966-68.

QB=Question of Being, trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, New Haven: College and University Press.

QCT=Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Sch=Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

SG=Der Satz vom Grund, Pfullingen: Neske, 1957, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

SMT=Séminaire du Thor.

SMZa=Zähringen Seminar, in Questions 4.

SMZu=Zurich Seminar, French translation, F. Dédier, in Poésie, Paris: E. Belin, 1980.

SZ=Sein und Seit, see Being and Time.

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TB= On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

TB (EP)="End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking."

UL=Über die Linie, See "Question of Being."

VA=Vorträge und Aufsätze, 3rd ed. Pfullingen ed, Gunter Neske, 1954.

VAN 1, 2, 3=Vorträge und Aufsätze, 3rd ed. Pfullingen ed, Gunter Neske, 1967.

WBGM=The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics, trans. Walter Kaufnabb, in Existentialism fromDostoevsky to Sartre, Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1956.

WCT=What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

WM=Wegmarken, Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1978.

WP=What is Philosophy? trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde, New Haven: College and UniversityPress, 1956.

WT=What is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch, New York: University Press of America, 1985.

ZD=Zur Sache des Denkens, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969. See On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972.

ZS=Zur Seinsfrage, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1956; also in bilingual German-English edition: The Question ofBeing, trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, New Haven: College and University Press, 1958.

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1Overcoming Metaphysics?

Dominique Janicaud

Wer gross denkt, muss gross irren. 1

The project of overcoming metaphysics is not new. Can't we, as far back as the very birth of philosophy, detect thefirst attempts? No sooner was eon emmenai2 uncovered in Parmenides' poem than the sophists denied the veracityand the meaningfulness of any discourse on Being. Is not the history of philosophy one of overcomings that failed,of revolutions that rolled back soon thereafter? Metaphysics as "battlefield," such was the term chosen by Kant todescribe it in the first Preface to his great Critique. Will it not be tempting for some to conclude with an air ofvictory that philosophy as such is beyond overcoming [indépassable], not unlike the phoenixbecause, of all thedisciplines of knowledge, it is the only one taking as its essential topic the transcendence that inheres in, animates,and tears through being human?

Concerning the conceptsoriginating in various areas and of unequal worththat are circulated under the banner ofthe overcoming of metaphysics, it was appropriate, so it seemed to me, to approach the vast and complex questionsthey raise by tracing the Heideggerian itinerary. In it, three key wordswhich emerged in successionseem to answerthe same injunction: destruction (Destruktion), overcoming (Überwindung), and the untranslatable Verwinden. Asa mutation in




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the vocabulary, or, more profoundly, a migration within language, took place, did the goal remain unchanged? Inthe essay ''Overcoming Metaphysics" (Überwindung der Metaphysik), 3 Heidegger indicated that such a title wasonly "provisional" (VA, 71), a qualification not proposed previously concerning the "destruction," and no longermaintained later concerning Verwindung. What can we detect, in the curve or turn (Kehre) of the Heideggerianmethod, concerning the question of the relationship of this thought to the legacy of metaphysics?

Originally, "overcoming" was called "destruction." One need only be referred to Section 6 of Sein und Zeit, "TheTask of Destroying the History of Ontology," which Heidegger later noted had lent itself to a misunderstanding "ofinsuperable grotesqueness" (QB, 92). Any attempt at demolition that would always deal with the same materialswould be pointless. Just as pointless would be a thought fighting against metaphysics, and still clinging to it as itslast recourse. Could Heidegger have been a sorcerer's apprentice, merely a slipshod nihilist?

Making such an error may come as the result of not reading the section just mentioned and of falling prey to thespell of the word "destruction," which perhaps hasas I shall arguean unnecessarily provocative connotation. Whatdoes Heidegger say exactly? He shows that fallenness (Verfallen) into everydayness is the correlate of thedegradation of the authentic past within a hardened tradition. Because the individual understands himself at theoutset "proximally and for the most part" from his "most immediate and ordinary" mode of being, it is easier forhim to be satisfied with a conception both traditional and ordinary concerning an unquestioned origin. Criticizingthis conception seems a vacuous attempt, but in fact the criticism is extremely focussed. It "aims at 'today' and atthe prevalent ways of treating the history of ontology, whether it is headed towards doxography, towardsintellectual history, or towards a history of problems" (SZ, 2223; BT, 44). Names such as Diels, Dilthey, andHartmann immediately come to mind. Whether their




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approach to history is what they claim it to bethat is, scientificor remains philosophical, in any case placing itsorigin in a region next to others, located within beings, is surely convenient. So neutral a tradition is forgetful of,and covers up, the past that truly matters to us, the one that anticipates us on the backdrop of the future. Ahistorical study that deems it possible to be spared the task of a hermeneutics of historicality naively subscribes tothe current and ordinary approach, one that seems obvious at first. But precisely these are the kinds ofpresuppositions that must be put aside, especially in considering the greatest philosophers: Plato, Aristotle,Descartes, and Kant. Destruction, taken as a task, is the prior and necessary step before the foundation: the latter isthe analytic of Dasein in the horizon of temporality. There is a connection between the interpretation of Being asquestion and the reinterpretation of the Being of beings within its history.

We find in Heidegger at the time of Sein und Zeit the same programmatic fervor that animated Husserl. From thisperspective, destruction repeats the method of "tabula rasa," the elimination of naive or "worldly" conceptions.Founding is an open enterprise, one of conquest, implicating the totality of meaning, investing the totality of thephenomenal. The stakes, however, have changed, and the motto calling to ''the things themselves" no longer aimsat the same content. The focus of understanding is no longer the self-reflectedness of the cogito, the goal of theinquiry no longer the constitution of a sequence of apodictic certainties of the scientific type. Is it necessary tostress that the parallelism with Husserl had limits? Moreover, the difference between the two becomes abyssalwhen the reader realizes that his usual points of reference were removed, and that one and the same maelstrom hasunsettled notions cardinal in metaphysics, i.e., Being, time, and truth 4in the attempt to think them anew and toground them respectively in "presence," "anticipation," and "unconcealing."

In much later reassessments, Heidegger explained and justified the use of the word "destruction" in Sein und Zeit.Destruktion must be interpreted as Abbau, the taking-apart, or deconstruction, of "representations that have become




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banal and vacuous" (QB, 92) or, more radically, of the hidden confines that the various epochs of Being"whichoverlap each other in their succession" (ZD, 9)have collected one after another, or one in connection with the other.The final clarification came in the lecture "Time and Being"; it obviously goes further than the indication given inthe "Letter to Ernst Jünger." If the destruction only concerns terminally rigid representations, it is not superior toany return to the origins, and would satisfy a Bergsonian. In contrast, "Time and Being'' calls attention to the"epochality" of the history of Being, already pointed out in the final text of the Holzwege. 5 The destruction is seenas the negative side of a difficult process of anamnesis, as the rupture from the forgetfulness of Being, as themanifold probing that thought must perform in gaining access to each epoch and its configurationover and beyondtheir contemporaneous subsistance in our memory. Already in Being and Time there was both a superficial and adeep meaning of destruction: the criticism of Dilthey was of small importance in comparison with the debate withDescartes. In any case, destruction understood as Abbau has nothing in common with the taking apart of a systemby mechanical means; neither can it be strictly identified with the elaborate transfiguration proposed by JacquesDerrida under the concept of deconstructionwhich characterizes the neutral and quasi-formal operations of a literalsubversion. Heidegger's originality is rooted in his meditation on time and historicality: "Is it not true that thestruggle for Being at the outset unfolds in time's horizon?" (KM, 230). Outside of this moving ground, theovercoming of metaphysics, and its construction alike, float as empty slogans.

Yet before considering the second word proposed by Heidegger, we still have to ponder Sein und Zeit's call forwhat might be referred to as "the bloody contraption of Destruction."6 Why, then, this selection of a title soviolent, so imperious, for an approach that, in its very unfolding, and as early as the commentary of Section 6 ofSein und Zeit, seems positive and foundational? To be sure, the clarifications made by the author aim at minimizingor softening the excess, intended or not, of the word "destruction." Never-




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theless they cannot erase what this excess reveals: the violence that thought must bring to bear on the textsbe theyvenerable onesso as to force them to disclose what they nearly revealed or nearly evaded. Each time such anattempt is madebringing temporality face to face with the transcendental analytic, Dasein with the Cartesian rescogitans, aletheia as unconcealment with the Aristotelian ousiaeach time, it amounts to reading the great texts byopposing the flow of their properly metaphysical current, i.e., to reading them no longer with respect to beingness,but to Being, which is taken up as a question. Transgressing so as to delineatesuch might well be the lesson to belearned from this overcoming.

With the "overcoming" of metaphysics, Heidegger's continuation of the project of destruction unfolds in a mannerless partial and methodological, yet more fundamental and meditative. Twenty years after the publication of Seinund Zeit, Heidegger claimed that the treatise "set out" to prepare the "overcoming" (WBGM, 209) of metaphysics.Let us concede this. Yet, many years went by before Heidegger could appreciate the novelty of his own thoughtwith respect to metaphysics as a whole. And nothing assures us that he ever reached a formulation that satisfiedhim entirely.

It seems that the expression "overcoming of metaphysics" can be taken objectively or subjectively, in the sense ofa dual genitive. If the objective sense were originary, the overcoming would proceed from thought. It would consistin setting oneself against metaphysics, in rejecting it as an opinion, or else in dismissing it as a discipline nowobsoleteall superficial variations rejected by Heidegger. Could the overcoming of metaphysics be tantamount to amere pretention of thinking, even if the latter aims at surmounting thought's fixation on the Being of beings? Doesnot thinking run the risk of reiteratingin spite of itself and in a heightened fashionwhat it was trying to escape: thewill to will, and the unconditional rebellion of man in the face of Being? In its completion, does not metaphysicslead to the absolutizing of human action, under the guise of planetary technology? In this perspective,




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wouldn't the illusion of the overcoming of metaphysics stem from a constant displacement of human limits andtechnological records, whereby the increase of power is proved? At the same time, this overcoming could be aperfect alibi for laziness, because taking one's leave of philosophy is never so easy as when one has not beeninvolved with it in the first place.

One need not have a commanding knowledge of Heidegger's philosophy to concede that these hypotheses cannotbe retained, whatever their degree of validity or subtlety. At least, they had for us the methodological advantage ofleading in the right direction. The overcoming is not the unilateral act of the thinker, it originates in Being itself,insofar as Being still emerges for us as worthy of thought in this epoch where metaphysics has run out of reservesand possibilities. Beings have been considered from all angles by the rational and metaphysical animal that man is.What remains to seek out, if not the single grounding for every foundation of beings: the truth of Being? And yetthis truthreserved though it ismust also grant itself to humans. Everything else depends on this presumption, whichis complemented by another: the foundation of metaphysics, "experienced from within itself," (WBGM, 208, mod.)is to prepare the way for something different, something yet unsaid (Ungesagtes).

The thinker does not survey his time, as Hegel did; by revealing its unthought, he precedes it. What is indeedstriking in the fragmentary meditations of "Overcoming Metaphysics" is the oscillating gaze between the history ofphilosophy and the frantic dynamism of the world scene. The struggle for power that unravels before our very eyesis thought of as a consequence of the overcoming of metaphysics, and of the decline of the truth of beings. Notonly is metaphysics not a thing of the past, but more than ever it insists in the present. It has produced our time,and continues to determine it: "Even overcome, metaphysics does not disappear. It returns in another form andmaintains its supremacy" (VA, 72). Its setting-into-work within technology is the "world-becoming" of philosophy,a sense that Marx had not exactly anticipated. Heidegger interprets this completion as the self-overcoming ofmetaphysics in nihilism. Technology




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does not present itself as nihilistic, any more than metaphysics admits to being forgetful of Being. Yet, nihilism isthe only response that "completed metaphysics," when pressed, can possibly make to the ontological question. Thisshift conceals distress and nullifies what still is to be thought.

Beyond its self-overcoming, of which Nietzsche was the forerunner, metaphysics reveals its essence to thought,and is thus eventually overcome by it. The overcoming may indeed originate in metaphysics itself, but metaphysicsproves to be incapable of bringing it to fruition. Neither the subjective sense (self-overcoming), nor the objectivesense of the genitive provide the exclusive key to this still incomplete historical mutation, because the overcomingis nothing but the announcement, exposed to "many misunderstandings" (VA, 71), of a more originarytransformation, i.e., "the appropriating advent (Ereignis) in which Being itself is recovered (verwunden)" (ibid.).Since the overcoming of metaphysics is thought in light of the history of Being, and not in a superficial manner,this overcoming is "the forerunning sign of the initial remission (Verwindung) of the forgetfulness of Being" (VA,78). The overcoming of metaphysics as a task to accomplishcorresponding to the objective sense of thegenitiveappears then subordinated to the injunction of Being. That is why the turning (Kehre) of Heidegger'sthought attempts to correspond to "the turn within time." 7

Thus, metaphysics is less overcome than assigned to limits, it is less set aside than reminisced about in its truth.8Heidegger, who had given up the term "destruction," suggested the word "overcoming" only with caution; in hislecture on "Time and Being," he gave up the notion entirely: "Our task is to cease all overcoming" (TB, 24). Whydo we witness such stops and delays in the striving toward the essential? Why, along Heidegger's thinkingitinerary, do we encounter these three words, as one would hit upon gold apples which a new Hippomenes seems tothrow toward an invisible Atalanta? Before attempting to answer this question, it will be necessary to consider thenotion of Verwinden in light of the teaching of ''Time and Being."




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We just saw that for a long time Heidegger thought his relation to metaphysics in terms of Verwinden. What doesthis word evoke? How are we to interpret from this clue the trajectory he follows?

Did Heidegger try to forge a new word? To be sure, the substantive Verwindung, as a technical term today, has ameaning quite different from the one Heidegger assigned to it. The verb verwinden is in use in the vernacular.Sorrow, suffering, distress are, or are not, verwunden. Undoubtedly, the substitution of the prefix ver- for the prefixüber- aims at eliciting the idea of completion rather than tension. 9 The wrenching or sundering has just beenovercome. The metaphysical forgetfulness of Being is neither brushed aside, nor overcome dialectically. Itcontinues to rule, yet is not the ultimate frontier of thought: in the ownmost, a new recourse has been revealed.This recourse is reminiscence (Erinnerung),10 similar to Hegel's spiritual Aufhebung, except that memory is notenacted within absolute reflectedness and the necessity to which this recourse corresponds is not inscribed within atransparent circle of superior rationality.11 Neither is metaphysical man overcome (überwunden) in theNietzschean sense: the originary truth of Being requires him. Thus, it is no random declaration that proclaims in theNietzsche that the "need" originating in Being "does not experience the distress of want" (N 2, 482).

"Remission," "appropriation"these words in translation delineate the German Verwindung, but alone are notsufficient to give us access to the essential. Just as no analogy with metaphysical concepts is adequate, similarly nocommentary akin to paraphrase can dispell the incomprehensible obscurities, found offensive by many, ofHeidegger's thoughtso long as we have not characterized the ultimate point of reference of this thought in terms ofthe radical novelty it presupposes. Das Ereignis er-eignet, such is the formulation (N 2, 485) with a tautologicaltwistapparently introduced hastily and with no particular precautionof that novelty. Let us not translateimmediately: rushing for a parallel formula would bear no fruit. In such a statement with a repeated semantic unitastatement not apophantic and barely assertoricthe




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subject is no longer the Being of beings. No longer does the present have the privilege of determining the ground.The most difficult aspect of the attempt consists rather in naming once and for all what presence presupposes: theunity of temporality (or epochality) and Being, the primordial giving whose core is probed in the following lines:

In the sending of the destiny of Being, in the extending of time, there becomes manifest a dedication, adelivering over into what is their own, namely of Being as presence and of time as the realm of the open.What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is in their belonging together, we shall call:Ereignis, the event of Appropriation. Ereignis will be translated as Appropriation or event of Appropriation.(TB, 19)

Heidegger is perfectly aware of the difficulty in evoking what the current usage of Ereignis conceals, namely theemergence of a possibility ever more originary than any ontical event, more originary even than any ontologicalmanifestation: the breakthrough toward the prior source, from which Being itself in its epochs is to be thought.The difficulty is repeated because holding Being in view as "Ereignis" is not derived from the discovery of atranscendental structure or correlation, but announces itself as a sign heralding a new epoch. Such an irruption doesnot proceed from a decree made by thought, it emerges from what, up to the present, Being has reserved, and nowoffers. Thus it is the spirit of the times that is imposing this novelindeed unsettlingway of meditating on thejuncture of Being and the present moment of epochality, within which the unprecedented word burst out. In itthought is no longer assignedas in absolute idealismto wanting to enclose every decisive event, every effectivenesswithin its survey. The new meditation does not ratify history with a signature as absolute knowledge attempted todo. "Ereignis does contain possibilities of unconcealment which thinking cannot determine" (TB, 50, mod.). Theopen future precludes thought from closing upon itself, but not from tumbling into a blind race forward, whichwould happen




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if it forgot that the originary is concealed within such a future. Das Ereignis ereignet, what happens appropriates.At the end of the book Nietzsche, Heidegger was able to delineate the unthought of the history of Being; from nowon, in "Time and Being" in particular, Being in its (metaphysical) history is no longer the ultimate recourse, thepresence of the present is referred to destiny's sending.

Why does this acknowledgement take place outside of the traditionally chartered ways of philosophy? Why thismutation in language? But then we may just as well ask: Why are Giacometti's statues suddenly elongated, and sogripping? The seriousness of creation in every domain has requirements. They are more difficult to accept whenthey seem to question the meaningful character of discourse, and to confront understanding. A careful reading ofthe texts does not allow us to be entrenched within such an impression. Overcoming metaphysics never meant forHeidegger thinking without heeding the requirements of adequation; it never meant not reasoning, denying therealm of presence. He did not aspire to the madness that fascinated Artaud and Bataille. His enterprise is moresubtle, aiming not at the "impossible," but rather at responding to the injunction concerning possibilities yetreserved (thinking what adequation presupposes, what presence covers up, naming what up until then had receivedno name, unfolding the appropriation of the originary). Metaphysics thus finds itself invested in situ. It is indeed onits essence that one must meditate in order to understand its extent, and the transgression of the simplicity of the"there is" for the benefit of beings. But it is within the nearest proximity that what is to be thought is shelteredathought whose vocation is to liberate the tradition, and to connect it to its "essential still reserved anteriority" (seinnoch aufgespartes Gewesenes) (ID, 44). It is, however, necessary to concede that even in "Time and Being''Heidegger exposes himself to misunderstandings similar to the ones that affected first the understanding of the"destruction" and then the "overcoming" of metaphysics. "To think Being without beings means: to think Beingwithout regard to metaphysics. Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the




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intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself"(ZS, 25; BT, 24). Such a clarification attempts to be definitive. Thought must move forward, the question of itsrelation to metaphysics is only secondary. The obstacles, however, are undeniable: Is it literally possible to thinkBeing without beings? Is not Heidegger once more falling preyas he did in Sein und Zeitto a sort of radicalism thattakes him beyond what he was attempting to articulate? Likewise, are we at liberty "to leave metaphysics to itself"(ibid.), since it continues to determine our world and our existence under the form of planetary technology(following what Heidegger himself has shown), and since the thought of Ereignis admits that it turns back tometaphysics while stressing the necessity not to do so any longer?

Without minimizing these difficulties, we must in the attempt to understand them locate them at the outcome of anitinerary. The summary of the seminar on the lecture "Time and Being" corrects the exaggerated interpretation towhich the expression "thinking Being without beings" might have lent itself. This view "does not mean that therelation to beings is inessential to Being, that we should disregard this relation. Rather, it means that Being is not tobe thought in the manner of metaphysics" (TB, 33). In a similar fashion, ''leaving metaphysics to itself" (ibid., 24)is not an invitation addressed to merely anybodybut rather someone heeding the new thought of Ereignis. Insimpler language, the invitation is a self-critique of the attempts first at "destructing," then "overcoming,"metaphysics. The road travelled since Sein und Zeit extends amazingly far! True, the goal remained unchanged, inthat the task has always been and still remains that of thinking the truth of Being. However, in its implementation,the project is somehow founded on what it ultimately yields. It is necessary to start from "Heidegger I" tounderstand "Heidegger II," but "Heidegger I only becomes possible if it is contained in Heidegger II." Or, as is alsostated in the "Letter to Richardson," "the turning is at play in the question itself." 12




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It will certainly seem peremptory to claim that we have reached conclusionseven limited onesafter such a shortinquiry, and concerning such a complex theme. Yet we shall press the attempt, by observing first that the questionof overcoming metaphysics is no longer the ultimate perspective on Heidegger's later thinking. A new perspectiveunfolds, Ereignisoriginary givennesssimultaneously the forerunner and the encompassing, unnamed until now,whose conditions and implications still have to be explored.

This new perspectiveconcerning which there is no evidence that it has been properly accounted forprevents anyconceptual stabilization, or the formalization of a "plurivocal thought" (LR, xxiii). The question of the relation tometaphysics, therefore, has been transformed into one of actual disengagement from its site. In "destruction," inthe "overcoming,'' there echoed some sort of impatience, which has now disappeared. Is this not the sign that theremission of metaphysics is at work and must be pursued?

Undoubedly, in its domain beyond overcoming, metaphysics is not an area in which the thought of Ereignisflounders. But this thought, in turning to itself, faces the "darkness of the sending" 13 that cannot be delineated,over which no conceptual mastery can successfully be established, but which nevertheless it manages to name. Letus not evaluate the experiences of a pathfinder by the standards expected of a city-canvasser who deals with well-known territory.

Just as Paul Klee painted unlike anybody had ever painted before, Heidegger thought unlike anybody had everthought before. In both cases, a new light came to illumine the act of painting, or the task of thought.

Post-scriptumIt seems advisable to bring this clarification to an end, and at the same time attempt to assess what itleaves in suspension. What is in suspension is less the formal resolution of the aporia of the overcoming (whichwas never Heidegger's goal) than the descent into the reserved dimension of Ereignis. Formally, one can maintainat the same time that (1) metaphysics is overcome by Heidegger (because it has "given its all" [tout son possible]to the thought of Being), and




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that (2) it is recognized by Heidegger as beyond overcoming (because it cannot be suppressed, amended, or evensupplanted by anything that could found presence better than it did). Much more important is the shift from therevelation of the forgetfulness of Being to the appropriation of time. From now on the history of Being is thoughtin terms of Ereignis, and not the reverse. It is therefore far from obvious that the new conception should"determine an epoch," in the sense of "strokes of Being" (Prägungen des Seins) reverberating throughout Westernhistory. ''The history of Being is at an end," in that what is to be thought (das zu Denkende) is no longer shelteredin it. 14 Delineated, left to itself, metaphysics can remain in existence (bestehenbleiben15 ). It holds nothing inreserve. Yet we shall see at various points in the following essays that the question arises whether rational thinkingis to be, once and for all, released from every potential worthy of being thoughtas if the fate of rational thinkingwere sealed, and henceforth stood beyond the reach of time's givenness.




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2Heideggeriana

Dominique Janicaud

The following pages conform to the fragmented format of Heidegger's master piece, Überwindung der Metaphysik(VA 7199, or VAN 1, 6391, see "Overcoming Metaphysics," The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1973), and intersect with this major text more than oncein paragraphs of unequal length, inmeditative halts united by no demonstrative link. At issue is not an exercise in rewriting, in parody, or commentary.The theme is no longer solely, in spite of the initial connection, the aporia of "overcoming." In no way does thisnew text intend to compete with its principal reference, but freely it aims at something akin to a thinking encounter,on those points where a juncture emerges between Heidegger's work, the state of the world, and the future ofthought.

I

The "overcoming of metaphysics" endlessly gives rise to innumerable misunderstandings, if not misinterpretations.The principal misinterpretation consists in presupposing that in Heidegger there is an "way out" of themetaphysical, or




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else in locating the turn "beyond it" (as does Gilles Deleuze in Différence et Répétition (French, 90) as though itwere possible once and for all to turn the page on foundational thought and to make a tabula rasa of the past. Iadmit that I myself was fascinated by this mirage, and then clearly disappointed when Jean Beaufret told me at theend of the summer of 1968 that Heidegger had chosen the austere Difference Between the Systems of Fichte andSchelling as the theme of the Séminaire du Thor. "Overcoming" is only suggested "provisionally'' (behelfmässig),"to all intents and purposes to make itself understandable" (VA, 71). Misunderstandings had been anticipated.Instead of being brushed aside or toned down, they were led to multiply. Why? Certainly because of the extremedifficulty of an enterprise whose inner tension consists in allowing a "situation" to come to pass in which Beingnotthoughtis the protagonist. The true "overcoming" is not accomplished by thought itself by confronting a lifeless andcrippled onto-theology; it is metaphysics itself that overcomes itself in world technology. Formally, the shift fromobjective to subjective genitive allows us to understand the depth of this "Überwindung der Metaphysik."Furthermore, a careful reader is bound to notice that this "overcoming" takes place in situ, the transition inmetaphysics from Being-present to Being-essential. In the terms of Identity and Difference, the transition is fromthe onto-theological constitution (the dual foundation of Being and beings) to the difference as such; in the termsof The Principle of Reason, the transition takes place between one underscoring of the "great principle" to theothernamely, from the foundation of the totality of beings to the abyssal unity of Being and reason. . . . The gamecould be prolonged at will with supporting quotations in ready supply. The essential was written in a few words:the metaphysical overcoming is "the appropriating advent (Er-eignis) within which Being itself has overcome itself(verwunden)" (VA, 71).

Already this sentence reassigns the "overcoming" to Being itself. When the path of thought is named "Schrittzurück," it becomes even clearer that thought, by means of its step back, does nothing but respond to one moreretraction of Being.




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That metaphysics can be thought as unique "sending" exposes the new possibilitythat of a sending no longer(strictly) metaphysical. Is it sufficient to multiply corrections and references? Indeed, it is increasingly obvious thatthe "overcoming of metaphysics" has lost its hazy character, and should not be understood beyond the backdrop ofits contexts. Yet, should we not ponder why this tenacious misunderstanding keeps reappearing? Could notHeidegger have limited himself from the outset to the vocabulary of "appropriation" and ''situation"? Did he everpositively justify the call for "overcoming"? The wordsuggested and withdrawn at the end of "Time andBeing"retains a fascination, and its ambivalence reaches a climax in the invitation to "an overcoming of theovercoming." What is at stake, says Heidegger at the end of that lecture, is "to renounce overcoming" (ZD, 25),because the retrospective view on metaphysics still rules over this intentional glance. The task proposed ("thinkingBeing without beings"), however, always crowns the same impulse of thought. In order to move up frommetaphysics toward its hidden source, we have the gift-giving Ereignis, which is time's fourth dimension. The"overcoming" itself never ceases being invoked and reserved (similarly, Being is both required and crossed out).

II

To be sure, neither in Heidegger nor outside his thought is there a "solution" to this "difficulty." It is paramount tounderstand that this "overcoming" must always be accompanied with a question mark. Such ambiguous, andalmost taboo, punctuation ruffles presence and causes wonderment. The question mark is a tease to the reader: "Haseverything been thought in the foundation of Being within reason? Is it sufficient that Being be the Being ofbeingsuniversal and supreme being?" The misunderstanding resurfaces when, as soon as the "overcoming" loses itsbiting edge and unsettling virtue, once more it becomes a possible foundation. If one wants to harden thequestioning and cause the linguistic




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migration to congeal, one should just freeze Heidegger's thought into assertions and denials such as "Heideggerovercomes metaphysics," "Heidegger does not overcome metaphysics" (or: Heidegger escapes its closure; heremains prisoner to it, etc.). Each of these propositions has a share of truth and untruth. They all share a commonmisunderstanding of the preparatory, vitally questioning character of Heideggerian thought. For, this thought mustnever be severed from its pulse, the ever reiterated questioning, from the weakness it takes upon itselfin the face ofthe will to certainty of modern philosophy since Descartes.

III

When I suggest that rationality could take into view the language that has remained hidden to it up until now (or,conversely, that Heidegger's attempt reveals a clever empathy with Being [une intelligence de l'être], whichperhaps is not minimal), I presupposebut is this different from Heidegger?that the rational was entirely capturedneither by the metaphysics of certainty nor by technological computation, and that there remains somethingpossible on this side. After all, did not Heidegger acknowledge, "Being and reason: the same"? And could thedifference as such be thought without the jointure (Austrag) of Being and beings, of beings and Being? Perhaps,one should not transform the indisputable decline of the truth of Being, the undeniable and poignant planetaryerrancy into some simplistic unidirectional destiny. Might it perhaps be advisable to spell out the factors of powerand manipulation, yet not posit a direct connection between metaphysics (as such) and technology, so as to restoreBeing both to its simple frailty prior to thinking any link with world-history and its unforeseeable complicity withmeaning?

IV

Does Heidegger succeed in breaking out of the metaphysical field of correlative reciprocity between identity anddiffer-




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ence as it is presented in Hegel's Logic? As Identity and Difference shows with unsurpassed intensity, thepossibility of a step back from metaphysics is at stake in such a presupposition. Difference as such can be neitherreintegrated within speculative logic, nor even reidentified as difference in and for itself (in the sense of Hegel's"absolute difference"). From the principal misinterpretationmentioned earlierconcerning the "overcoming" ofmetaphysics, many people who forget the extreme difficulty of the attempt (underscored by Heidegger himself)take the Schritt zurück as something established, in that its outline has been sketched out. One juxtaposes themwhynot?two "world views." In Hegel, thought matures to self-identity by means of self-differentiation; in Heidegger,difference is always already proposed to thought as das zu-Denkende. These two formally coherent theses can faceeach other eternally, apparently with equivalent justification. But this amounts at the same time to forgetting theamazing character (both frail and exceptional) of the Heideggerian attempt and the solidness (as unshakable asgravity itself) of Hegel's reflexive and speculative reappropriation of the principle of identity.

First, indeed, one must not underestimate the enormous obstacle with which Heidegger is confronted (for that thematter of thought is struggle-ridden is no stylistic clause! [ID, 37]): How can we pose identity withoutdifferentiating, and difference without identifying? Nothing is easier to rebut than the universality of the dialecticalmethod. Yet Hegel has moments of invincibility when he struggles against what, since Bergson, has been called"the natural metaphysics of the human mind." If A is A, then it is not non-A. Identificationas the cornerstone ofthoughtresults from, and implies, differentiation. In turn, difference poses an identity, and is reflected negativity:"Difference in itself is self-related difference; as such, it is the negativity of itself, the difference not of an other,but of itself from itself; it is not itself, but its other. But that which is different from difference is identity." 1

It is appropriate to pause here, and consider this confluence, which is quite natural for metaphysics. Heideggerfinds it to harbor a looseness. Consider Hegel's proposition, Das Unterschiedene aber vom Unterschiede ist dieIdentität (what dif-




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fers from difference is identity). It says that difference never better differentiates from itself than when it identifiesitself as what it is also, namely identity. "Difference as thus unity of itself and identity, is in its own selfdeterminate difference" (SL, 418). Das Unterschiedene, the different, differentiates itself immediately, so as to besublated in the interplay of a negation, one that negates itself while coming to identity. Das Unterschiedene abervom Unterschiede ist die Identität means that at no time does Hegel suspend the logical movement. Why would hedo it? What would justify an exception? Heidegger holds the answer: Being.

We have already gone too far downstream in the logic of the essence, to a point where identity and differencebecome general determinations of reflection, where Being has already been subjected to the common rule. Let usmake our way upstream, to Being itself. It is concerning Being that Heidegger raises the question of the difference,for he does not intend to substitute a priori the ontological difference for difference in general. To think differenceas such amounts to thinking the different of difference (and of all other differences) in the case of the differencebetween Being and beingsspecifically in this case (that displays the transitive character of Being, which is notsimply the Being of beings, but is beings). In the dialectic of pure Being and Nothingness Hegel did not veil therole of difference. It plays a role at the outset, but in the mode of negating: "[Being] is pure indeterminateness andemptiness" (WL, 1: 66; SL, 82), i.e., the nothingness, which, on its side, is Ununterschiedenheit, non-differentiation. Immediately afterwards, difference intervenes as such, "in so far as one can invoke intuiting andthinking here" (WL, 1: 67; SL, 82, mod.). Indeed, there is a difference between intuiting something and intuitingnothing. Nothingness, undifferentiated as it is within itself, is thus differentiated thanks to the intuiting of an etwas.The ingenious hypothesis lies in this, that, for Hegel, difference is not properly speaking in or between Being andbeings, but introduces itself by means of intuitive (nonrepresentative) thinking, applied to one (or the other) withrespect to something else, which we know to be a being. Here Hegel himself formulates




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his own version of the ontological difference: the difference between Being-Nothingness and a being (etwas)inheres in thought itself: "Nothingness is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking" ("so ist (existiert) Nichts in unseremAnschauen oder Denken") (ibid.). The emphasis on the "in" is mine, as it marks how Hegel includes the ontologicaldifference within thought itself, namely within logic.

Such is the point to which we must always return. Is there an intrinsic precedence of Being that differentiatesdecisively the ontological difference as such from all others, and subsequently prevents its integration in thehomogeneous space of logical thought? Did Hegel sufficiently take into consideration the singularity of Being asdifference? His entire Logic, on the contrary, sets itself into motion by a refusal to (in subsequent terminology)privilege the singularity of ontology, which would take priority and precedence over founding any (general) logicof the Being of beings. Was he wrong? Certainly not. His metaphysics is oriented toward experience, it founds theBeing of beings, manifests the rationality of everything that is, according to the double insistence on theontological and theological characters of "logic." Heidegger acknowledges this fact: "Metaphysics corresponds toBeing as Logos, and is to this extent everywhere principally Logic, that thinks the Being of beings thus determinedby the different of the difference (vom Differenten der Differenz her): an onto-theology" (ID, 68).

It is therefore erroneous to claim that metaphysics (in this case Hegel's) does not think the ontological difference,also erroneous to take the Heideggerian overcoming of metaphysics as a "going beyond." The different of thedifference was named and identified by Hegel. Heidegger does not deny this claim at all, since, on the contrary, heacknowledges that "the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics originates in the unfolding of the Difference"(ID, 69).

What is the argument about? "Das Schwierige liegt in der Sprache" (The difficulty lies in language) (ID, 72), i.e.,in the metaphysical character of our languages, in the fragility of the sought perspective. Heidegger's conclusion isextremely mod-




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est: he takes a different stance from Hegel precisely by his refusal to add one more level to the edifice, by seekinga meditation on the site, and a return to what stands in priority. He himself answers our initial question negatively.No, he did not step out of the field of identification. What then did he do, except survey its borders and certify itstitles? With nothing here to "weigh or posit" (notwithstanding some Germanic stiffness!), his questioning hasaltered the light in which the landscape was bathed. Is this negligible?

V

"The overcoming is Über-lieferung (tra-dition, trans-mission) of metaphysics in its truth" (VA, 79). This keysentence concludes a very dense paragraph and brings light upon Heidegger's subsequent itinerary. Since theovercoming is "a precursor sign of the originary remission (Verwindung) of the forgetfulness of Being," it is notsurprising that the turn should veer toward the thought of Ereignis as suchwhere the constant retrospection towardmetaphysics has moved into the background. There will always remain the possibility, never excluded byHeidegger, of representing the breakthroughs to (and from) Ereignis from the perspective of metaphysics, as "over-elevation" of the latter.

Still, in order to conform to Heidegger's itinerary, it is necessary to assign thought to the task of investigating theunthought of metaphysics, to postulate that the unity of metaphysics is withheld in the unthought, and, mostimportantly, to expect that Being calls for appropriation. But what would happen to thought if it turned out thateach of these requirements were affected with a degree of uncertainty? Would it purely and simply return toprevious metaphysics? Not at all. Would it elaborate a new ultracritical metaphysics? Perhaps. But will this newthought still be metaphysical, if the will to truth has been shattered, if positive rationality is contradicted by theinsistent reiteration of the enigma of Being as bitterly salty as sea water?




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VI

Heidegger does not assign history to an absolute necessity in the Hegelian style. Furthermore, the history of Beingremains conditional upon questioning. In principle, thought no longer enunciates a thesis on Being; it detects theunthought, and points toward the enigma. However, the present (technological) world is the outcome ofmetaphysics; history is the history of errancy; metaphysics perpetuates the forgetfulness of Being. The linkbetween Being and the history of the world is claimed in Holzwege: "From the epoche of Being unravels theepochal essence of its sending of destiny, in which world history properly comes to pass" (Aus der Epoche desSeins kommt das epochale Wesen seines Geshickes, worin die eigentliche Welt-geschichte ist) (HZ, 311).

The step thus taken by Heidegger exceeds the distance taken from onto-theology. Whatever the status of such athought and its relation to metaphysics, the presumption is enormous. It presumes that a jointure may beestablished and enunciated between the frail simplicity of Being and the monumentality of history. Wouldn't it benecessary, at the very least, to assign a question mark on this suddenly revealed jointure?

VII

The interpreter of Heidegger encounters a difficulty similar to that of the interpreter of Wittgenstein: "He must, soto speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it" (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.54). It isimpossible to gather togetherdefinitively and synopticallythe discourse and the path: the latter must always leadfurther, and to greater depths, than the former. Yet Wittgenstein adds that the overcoming of his propositionsallows one to view the world correctly (richtig). Strictly speaking, this call is unsound (unsinnig): even this richtigshould be overcome! But, if it is sound (richting), what guarantee do we have that we reach the world correctly?Heidegger would have never




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proposed such a view. In him there is no such irony, akin to despair. He transforms language from within, in order,for example, not to have to say that aletheia is "correct." In the end, he does not reject the ladder: he makes it moreadaptable.

VIII

Let us not turn Heidegger into an item to be manipulated at will, as though one has some sort of knowledge of"what" one is talking about!

Since adequation as an archetype is rejected by Heidegger, the interpreter will only be able to articulate a correctinterpretation if he or she rejects the Heideggerian teaching on truth. To be in logical agreement with oneself, onemust make explicit one's rejection of that thought; but further one will not be able to go. In contrast, whoeverwants to think withor againstHeidegger must ask whether he or she stands within the same field of openness. Nolonger is there any pretension to think correctly. The question is rather, "Are we beginning to think. . . .?"

IX

One of the gravest misunderstandings on Heidegger is to believe that one can found anew the world, autonomy, anethical project, etc. Even if the language of this second foundation contained none of the terminology specific tothe meditation on the truth of Being, the attempt and its implementation would be closed upon themselves, like anideology. Critical sense would be lost. But would this be the most serious flaw? At the deepest level lies themisunderstanding that a thought of the metaphysical unthought, and of the origin-foundation, might play the role ofa constant, organizing, and sovereign center of reference.

The double consequence of this mistake is that Heidegger joins the ranks of philosophers (be it in the"postmetaphysical" era); but the extent of his step back from the tradition




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can no longer be assessed. The Heideggerian discourse functions in the mode of self-referencingto a point suchthat the clamor and confusion of the world no longer reach it, to a point where it is no longer capable of thinking.

X

Even if we do not accept to enter the so called positive, affirmative play of Derrida's differance, we witness the tipof the lancet ready to incise Being itself. Why does Being, crossed as it is in the "Letter to Ernst Jünger," 2 stillspeak, gesture, awaitas a jaded god that has imparted all its substance, yet somehow remains a subject of origin?Had Heidegger fully measured the risk of hypostasis to which his thought was frontally exposed? Isn't theinvocation of the metaphysical character of "Western languages" (ID, 72) too general an excuse, something like analibi?

XI

Without knowing nor presuming what might have been said by Nietzsche, we still must observe that many of theNietzschean followers react against the ethical outcome (which always remained in the background) of Sein undZeit. They see it as a quasi-religious call for authenticity in the face of Being-towards-Death, as some academicversion of the esprit de sérieux of Platonic-Christian metaphysics, as the reintroduction of asceticism, as yetanother excess of Germanic Gründlichkeitwhich multiplies the return upstream to the foundation and finallyembraces a reality stamped by the commonest of seals.

It cannot be denied that the criticism of the "they" has a clerical ring, as a result of the fact that the interest for thepresent world is struck by ontological "guilt" (a connotation that cannot be eliminated from fallenness, Verfallen).Although inevitable, "curiosity" is nevertheless branded as superficial in quasi-Pascalian terms. The path of''appropria-




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tion" (Eigentlichkeit) is open to the spirit of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), just as grace calls the sinner toconversion.

Yet, the picture is incomplete, and each and every post-Nietzschean sarcasm cannot be sustained to the end. Whereare the otherworldly realms? Where do we find a final salvation, and the "guarantees" offered for conversion?What refuge is there for "the last man" in destiny's moment, when the future gathers in itself the gift of the pastand extracts it from any present comfort?

XII

The strength of the Heideggerian interpretation of technology consists in showing its unity, in tracing itsmetaphysical genealogy, in tearing through the horizon and reaching to its immense powerswhich have partly cometo pass. Its weakness consists in presupposing that entering this essence will prepare a decisive reversal in almostHegelian fashionas though, after realizing that its greatness has been penetrated, technology allowed itself to betamed, or as though this awareness were dependent upon an ontological structure (to borrow again a Hegeliananalogy). But if nothing beckons us but an awaiting possible, perhaps one must concede that the possible ismanifested in a plurality of unassuming ways, and that no saving power ever completely emerges from the danger?

XIII

Why was it so difficult for the Heideggerian genealogy of technology to be understood? The principal reason isperhaps as follows. The thesis that planetary technology is the outcome of the completion of metaphysics seems allthe more abstract, since metaphysics itself remains indeterminate. One does not see how privileging beings isbound to bring about as specific




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a result as the methodological exploitation of nature on a positive and scientific basis.

Certain texts of Heidegger mark a continuity more than a rupture, and consequently warrant the concept of a quasi-linear trajectory from Plato to the era of planetary domination. We read: "The being of modern science, which inits European form has meanwhile become planetary, is nonetheless founded on the thought of the Greeks which,since Plato, has been called philosophy" (VA, 47). In other wordsand this concerns the next phaseChristiancertainty regarding salvation is thought as preparatory for certainty in the Cartesian and modern sense. The pointhere is neither the denial of the "truth" of this genealogy, nor the insistence on the pedagogical difficulty justpointed out. This difficulty originates in the "things themselves.'' It is not sufficient to say that it is a "truth," onemust also determine its precise status (N, 2, 426).

No oneexcept the most obtuse materialistwill contest that technological modernity was prepared at a distance by theGreek episteme, together with the Christian conception of an external nature subordinated to man, and that inaddition the soul's asceticism aiming at salvation was yet another element playing a role in the elaboration of themodern "Western" attitude. heidegger would be rather unremarkable if he merely repeated these ideasamong otherthings. But the cements the originality of these interpretations by conceiving of metaphysics as the sole and, so tospeak, leading allotment of beings [partage]: it is in light of the withdrawal of Being, not of an overdeterminedplurality of "factors," that the technological-scientific epoch is revealed for what it is.

In what has been evoked there remains a large missing element. It is precisely the final link, the essential pivot inthe Heideggerian history of metaphysics: the securing of truth as certainty, and of thought as representation.Without the cogito and the instituting of the subject-object correlation (more originarily, the subject-object-ivity),"access" to the technological-scientific era would remain strictly incomprehensible. Heidegger must be creditedwith the incomparable merit of showing that the cogito's dynamism prepares the most direct access to theemergence of Power. Vor-gestelltheit is a notion




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teeming with the technological Ge-stell. From the middle sections of "Overcoming of Metaphysics" (XIVXVIII) toNietzsche, by way of Holzwege ("The Age of World Picture"), the stamp of modernity is examined in specificdetail. The following passage from The Principle of Reason perfectly summarizes this elucidation: ''The fact thatBeing takes up the objectivity of objects in order to extend itself as such, but cloaks from us its own ontologicalessence, defines a new epoch of withdrawal. This epoch characterizes the intimate essence of the age we callModern Times" (SG, 99100).

Is everything perfectly clear, and must the inattentive reader simply be referred to other texts? The answer isnegative. If one stresses the unity of metaphysics, and if one presents modernity in the sense adopted earlier, as onesending among others, some misunderstanding necessarily emerges. It becomes impossible to comprehend whatseparates us with unmitigated finality from the other metaphysical (essentially, the Christian and the Greek)epochs.

One must not dissolve the philosophy of modernity into metaphysics in general. Modern technology cannot unfoldfrom the simple privileging of beings. The decisive point was the institution of the method, the invention ofuniversally rational and operational efficiency.

Nothing of what was called to attention here was underestimated by Heidegger. On the contrary, he is the one towhom we owe these discriminating remarks. For what reason, then, do we have to seek a clarification? Because ofthe possibility of a reading that would erroneously minimize the decisive rupture of modernity for the sake of theunity of metaphysics.

XIV

I intend to show that all other (nonmodern) metaphysics remain contemplative or "hermeneutic," while the methodonly leads to conquering science. In Bacon and Descartes, onto-theology matters less than the rational efficiency inwhich the Grund no longer founds absolutely, or "founds" only in order to transform the knowledge of the world,and




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the world itself. It is obviously not false, nor insignificant, to deconstruct [démonter] metaphysics from Plato toNietzsche, aiming at "the onto-theological constitution." There is nothing illegitimate either in considering theprinciple of reason in the same perspective, from the Greek logos to modern cybernetics. But (and this reserve,even given as mere nuance, is not without consequences) underscoring the insistence of the modern caesura allowsus to delineate the space in which the step backward is to take place. The Schritt zurück holds itself at a distance,most of all, from the unconditional primordial character of representation. In order to think, one must break awayfrom the "evidence" that objectifies every noetic correlate into an object of representation. 3 What Heideggerallows himself to deconstruct is, in essence, the metaphysics of representation. Such is the absolutely primordialprecondition to any deconstruction of the "metaphysics of presence" in general.

Marking this caesura also allows us to free up the playing field of non-technological-scientific, rational thinking.Such a thought, which, for example, reigned freely in the Medievals' theory of analogia, was not completelyeradicated by the method. It continues to haunt scientific thought as soon as the latter becomes speculative, and itstill lingers within our poems and dreams. Was rationality entirely subjugated to a metaphysics of scientific-technological domination, that has room solely for an entirely different thought (of Being) or an entirely differentpoetry? Taking a stance against the dichotomyin the process of solidifyingbetween metaphysics and the thought ofBeing, I submit that there remains a possible within the rational [un possible rationnel], that apportions itself tofields of intelligibility that are more open to the enigma of Being and to appearance as such than operativerationality is. This free play subsisting in the rational itself testifies to the possibility of articulating the contiguitybetween the currently dominating dimension of rationality (the scientific-technological constellation) and thereserved dimensions of language (to which the thought of Being points).4




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What is at issue, therefore, is no longer the deconstruction of metaphysics in general, butonce the exclusive andunconditional privileging of the complex of Method-Power has been disbandedthe task of reacquainting ourselveswith all the possible within thought, includingin contrast to Heideggerreacquainting ourselves with hermeneuticrationality. Perhaps one may see more clearly why this reacquainting implies the precondition of a refusal: everymonolithic tendency within metaphysics must be rejected, in order to allow the nondominating jointures ofrationality to reach us once more, and the thought of Being to become less bereft.

XV

To what extent is the Heideggerian refusal to initiate a dialogue with current society and the "real" problemscompatible with the search for a unified vista on Western history, now called planetary history?

Heidegger articulated his position very clearly regarding a possible "social significance of philosophy," for Germantelevision on his eightieth birthday: "If one wants to answer this question, one must first ask, 'What is society?' andon this topic one must assess that current society is nothing but the complete absolutization of modern subjectivity.In light of such a consideration, a philosophy that has surmounted the point of view of subjectivity can in no wayinitiate a dialogue." 5

Although this answer was formulated orally and improvised, it is faithful to the essential orientation of Heidegger'sentire work. Modern society rests on metaphysical presuppositions. Rather than a refusal of dialogue, there is inHeidegger the affirmation that every "dialogue" carried upon habitual bases does nothing but repeat themetaphysical or ideological representations that prevent thought from unfolding. Other things remaining equal,Heidegger's coup de force is comparable to a person struggling for recognition. Dialogue becomes possible onlywith the complete reversal of the social perspective: if only society would admit to internal limits in its




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philosophical character, this encounter of deaf participants would cease. But Heidegger was keenly aware that thisreversal was inconceivable in the foreseeable future: he himself showed that the era of technology brings modernmetaphysics to completion.

There are various consequences to such a trenchant opposition. On the side of society, there is the quasi-totalignorance of Heidegger's thought; on Heidegger's side, there is neither theory nor action. Thought is supposed tousher in an altogether different future. Far from minimizing the gap, Heidegger did everything possible to widen it.Those seeking at all costs a positive thinking of the political in his work (and stretching some mere tidbits intonothing more than light fare) should meditate on this incompatibility, beyond what is left untouched by planetaryerrancy. But this very incompatibility is in Heidegger himself what prevents the thought of Being from expressingepochality (for this possibility presupposes a jointure within Being itself, whose inner workings are removed fromus, and which Heidegger exposes and covers up at the same time). If planetary technology is a sending of Beingatrajectory delineated by the thinkerwhy does the way back (the inscription of the thinker within the epoch) have toremain hidden? Why is there such a definitive disjunction still unfulfilled between rationalitystill our apportionedallotmentand its "truth"?

XVI

"Invisible shepherds dwell beyond the wasteland of the devastated earth. . . ." (Die Hirten wohnen unsichtbar undausserhalb des Ödlands der verwüsteten Erde. . . .) (VA, 97). Such a possible translation would fail to conveyHeidegger's thought at a crucial moment. First, ausserhalb does not mean "beyond," but "outside." Second,stressing the adjective "invisible'' somewhat obscures the fact that the shepherds are already dwelling among usnow, albeit almost out of sight. One should translate literally: "Shepherdsthe inconspicu-




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ous onesdwell outside the wasteland of the devastated earth. . . ."

"Man is not the lord (Herr) of beings, man is the shepherd (Hirt) of Being" (LH, 221). The shepherds are thereforeall those who preserve the originary being of man, those who directly or indirectly institute "thinking and poeticdwelling." They dwell because they are the only ones still (or already) having the sense of what a world is,knowing the "hidden law of the earth," and able to maintain their mortality in the face of the duration of things."Invisible, unseen" would not be the right word, because Heidegger is not aiming at some transparency of sciencefiction, but only at the fact that the dominating world remains congealed in a conspicuous ignorance of their modeof being. These ''dwellers" do not inhabit the sphere of will-oriented activism.

A difficulty remains. How can those shepherds live outside of devastation, since the latter is universal? Nothingindicates that they escape the immense affliction that covers the entire earth, or that they are not seasoned indespair. They have overcome "the absence of despair" (Notlosigkeit) (VA, 90), which is "the most supreme andhidden dereliction." The wasteland does not have to be localized geographically (the cogito was already wasteland),but should be grasped now in its radical and universal powereven in the clean meticulousness of "natural" parks orthe amenities of an upper-middle-class home.

Those witnesses of Being remain outside the devastation because of the calm force issuing forth from the possible,while it is also true that they suffer as much asand more intimately thanothers. What Heidegger presents in outlinein this text is not the prophetic content of the green gospel [prophétisme pastoral], it is the path of dissidence.

Turning their backs on the pseudo-masters of the worldwho cause the wasteland to grownew individuals arise, andtheirs is a different thought.

XVII

No sooner were the previous lines written than I became aware of a possible misunderstanding. Someone couldobject,




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You had the audacity to compare your Herr Professorwho had inadvertently committed himself to a dreadfulcause, and was subsequently assigned to retirementwith real heroes and people, whose exceptional courage needsno proof, and who furthermore claim allegiance to human rights about which Heidegger never said a single word!

I have the audacity, indeed, to compare spiritual itineraries! Too often a connection has been attempted betweenthe itinerary and the inadequacies and deficiencies of the man in matters of ethics. I will conform to my rules forreading: I aspire to follow his thought to its finest point without granting it the right of autonomy, suitable only to aprivate individual, without validating the frequently sterile circle between "the man-and-the-work." Heidegger'sthought I find much more interesting than his life. It is possible that the lives of dissidentsperhaps for the most partunknownare more faithful to Heidegger's thought than Heidegger himself (although one should not discount thestature of his equanimity during many years of forced retirement from the public). In my view, the dwellingadvocated by Heidegger can be immediately inscribed in our experience by dint of a patient apprenticeship of one'sdifference. One should not rush to level thoughts and practices that are different, and the possibility ofdisagreement on how to interpret human rights must be acknowledged and left open, so as to keep the sharpness ofthe question as a crucial test. Otherwise, one would play into the hands of the shallowest versions of "realism."

XVIII

When we presently read the Heideggerian evocation of the devastation of the earth, we are no longer surprised.This devastation is scientifically attested to by a legion of facts, such as the chemical and thermal pollution (thedangerous increase of carbon dioxide released in the atmosphere), the extinction of entire species, the irreversibilityof contaminated sites around nuclear plants, etc. But can Heidegger be fully granted the foresight and anticipationof the ecological




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movement? Without denying him credit for some real foresight ("compensating" for the blindness displayed inpolitics), let us note that in his view devastation began extremely early, with the establishment of truth as certainty,i.e., with the advent of modernity, a moment that he understood with Hegel as one "in which absolute self-certitude becomes the principle of thought" (VA, 99). Descartes was viewed as the first step in the process ofdevastation. . . .

If "ontical" devastation was the only thing at issue, dating it with Descartes would be quasi-absurd (despite theemergence of capitalism in the eighteenth century, the exploitation of the New World, mechanical progress,deforestation, etc.). But something is suddenly sterilized by the cogito's certainty: the playing field of openness.Metaphysically, the wasteland expanded as soon as Descartes' bit of wax turned out to be nothing more than"extended, flexible, and changeable." If there was an earthly law, it undoubtedly has now been violated, theimpossible became possible from the time nature became res extensa. This was the philosophical explosionthreecenturies before the bombas Heidegger said in his Zurich seminar.

By aiming so high and so deep, Heidegger, in advance, strikes at the vanity of those discourses on the crisis ofcivilization, on the need for a new growth, etc.; he forces us also not to inflate the struggles and projects ofpolitical ecology, in spite of their relative merits. And yet, is it sufficient to draw a line between utilizing andtreasuring the earth? Do we have no choice but to revere in thought a prescription violated daily and throughout theworld by technologyuntil an "excess of distress" will force a new reversal?

To these questions there would be categorical answers if Heidegger had appropriated truth-certainty (to thedetriment of the coherence of his own thought), or if the call of, and for, Being demanded a sort of new faith withpromises of redemptionwhich never was explicitly the case.

XIX

"Action alone will not change the course of the world" (VA, 98). The lucidity of this estimation can be verified atmany




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levels. How many lives wasted to activism, how many individuals with enthusiasm and good will reabsorbed bythe "system," or shattered by a raison d'état or the reason of the Party! But more fundamentally, if the currentplanetary development was initially due to the metaphysical exacerbation of the will, how could activismwhich isits by-productremedy its own ailment?

On the other hand, it would be an illusion to believe that one can eliminate action in a world that is constitutionallyfit to accommodate it. By indicating that non-sense applies to "human action posited as the absolute" (VA, 99),Heidegger conceives of a type of action no longer imbued with self-sufficiency, but rather set within boundariesand illuminated by the ontological meditation? Some remarks from "The Overcoming of Metaphysics" come withso specific a date that they can be contrasted with radical objections that redirected, or can redirect, action. Takethe passage: "Increases of the masses are deliberately sought and planned, so that the opportunity will not belacking to claim ever greater 'vital space' for the great masses," which in turn will require ever greater humanmasses in proportion to its dimension (VA, 96). Beyond the obvious reference to the Nazi theory of "Lebensraum,''the will to unlimited expansion is repudiated; yet when Heidegger was writing these lines, the Nazi defeat couldalmost be predicted, but not the introduction within the political realm of projects aiming at limiting growth (indemographic or economic terms, or both).

More generally, Heidegger never positively sought a redirection of actiona possibility that in my view is not totallyexcluded by the texts (or if it is, it is an exclusion we would reject). The effort conducted here to avoid a dichotomybetween the various "language-worlds" (rational action on the one hand, thinking and poetic dwelling on the other)has already led us to the consideration of a clever empathy with Being [une intelligence de l'être]. We should notexclude rational dwelling. This point of contrast allows us to turn against Heidegger the very suspicion he heldagainst democracy: I am not convinced at all that the political regime most appropriate to the technological eramight not be precisely democracy. 6




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XX

Why would the openness to destiny and the will be mutually exclusive, if not as the result of a unilateral(fore)closure? Not every act of willing is a seal on such (fore)closure. When I aim at a particular goal, the entirehorizon of existence is not necessarily subordinated to it. Everyday lifeincluded in the technological worldpreservesshreds of willing that escape totalizing. What are we to make of men who like Solzhenitsyn refuse to compromisetheir ardent aspirations with a will-to-power? Even in the later Heidegger (see G, 32), the will-not-to-will remains.The will has neither vanished nor collapsed; it has relocated within its originary mögen, openness and availabilityto things.

What is taking place, then, within the will-to-will, that allows the disappearance of the sense of Being-alloted[partage] and the precipitation of errancy? The will-to-will "refuses every goal in itself" (VA, 89), it wills itselfalone, precisely because every external goalalthough bestowing poweris unworthy of it. It wills nothing exceptitself. Its essential feature is "the absence of goal" (die Ziel-losigkeit).

How does the will avoid subjectivism, pure artifice, and the fall into the trivial? It avoids none of the symptoms ofnihilism, nor nihilism itself. In order to understand the will's power and empire, one must not forget itsunconditional character (VA, 88), whose regulative principle is Richtigkeit (correctness). This correctness bears noton given propositions or experiences, but rather on willing itself.

It is impossible to determine what the will-to-will corresponds to merely by considering isolated examples orpsychosociological cases. As the ultimate form of achieved metaphysics, the will-to-will is inseparable fromhumankind's unlimited domination, "taken to be the original form" (VA, 87). If one seeks who "bears" such a will-to-will, the answer is humankind.

We come to witness the convergence and, ultimately, the overlapping of three figures: humankind, truth, and thewill. What Jünger calls the "line" is the axis along which these fig-




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ures fuse, and dissolve into nothingness. The acceleration of contemporary history is a race into the abyss.

In the face of this "anarchy of catastrophes," what is the meaning of the narrow and uncertain path followed byHeidegger? It has the indisputable merit of calling for an approach to the crossroads, where the path of modernityis to be decided. Has anyone ever despaired so much of the world, and put all his bets on (the thought of) Beinginthe hopes that a stumbling block will be enough to anchor against the apocalypse? Such hopes would perhaps beless gratuitous if they were less Manichean and if it were acknowledged that there still remains a margin of roomfor the human condition, truth, and willingi.e., for a thought still moving, and thus open to the unexpected. Putdifferently, these hopes would be less gratuitous, if it were acknowledged that there is no such thing as a lastwordeven on Being itself.




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3The Heideggerian Chiasmus or the Setting Apart of Philosophy

Jean-François Mattéi

We were walking on a forest path,we took a rest at a place from whicha smaller path proceededonly to lose itself further away.(QB, 4547)

1. The Crossing Of Paths

Earth is the building bearernourishing with its fruits,tending water and rock,plant and animal.(PLT, 178)

A Forest Path

Acknowledging uncertainty and risk in the enterprise is required of critics who venture their own footsteps in thewake of a thinker. Critics take their bearings on the threshold of multifold circles emerging among the textsbequeathed by a thinker, and stake that a search is to unveil the sign, reveal




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the major orientation inherent in the thinker's itinerary. Yet there is even more uncertainty and risk in the attempt tofollow an itinerary such as Heidegger's because it constantly proceeds under the threat of getting lost and regularlygives "the impression of casual arbitrariness" (PLT, 184, Postcript to "The Thing"). We have at our disposal noguide or guideline to lead the traveller outside the city and to entrust our rest to the shade of the tallest tree in theplain. Phaedrus probably had the impression of taking clues from mere fancy for the direction of his walk withSocrates, but discretely the latter had already steered their course toward the river. It is more difficult to walkupstream of the Illisos if one does not rely on natural and congenial signs, such as a brook, a tree, a tender green,or a chorus of cicadas.

Sheltered within its homeland, the Heideggerian itinerary is less generous in indications than Plato's inspiredprologues. As soon as the first hairpin turns have been reached, Heidegger is satisfied with committing himself tothe way of the paradox: He is a thinker who always dismissed writing in order to elevate speech, who denouncedthe failings of his own texts 1 and who, in the wake of the Phaedrus, did not hesitate to assert that "Socrates is thepurest thinker of the West, this is why he wrote nothing" (WCT, 17). Heidegger is a thinker who wrote but onebook, unfinished at that, while the rest of his considerable work consists in the transcription of lectures, seminars,talks, and exchangesall printed texts in which still lingers the echo of the spoken word. He is a man who traced afurrow slowly and tenaciously to delineate the domain of metaphysics within the realm of the written text. I wouldlike to determine the extent to which the path of Heideggerian writing turns out, at every step it takes, to beentangled within the writing of the path, such as this path is inscribed in full letters within the ownmost landscapeof thought. At issue here is not to give in to the futile method of inversion of propositions, which today is oftenresorted to in certain quarters. The reversal of the Heideggerian period is the permanent seal of a language beingexposed to the "sublime and dangerous game" (WCT, 119, mod.) of words,2 one that sketches out a space ofabsolutely original contours by




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means of crossed articulations. If one would follow the constraints of the unusual characteristics of a writing thatliterally turns one upside down, one will perhaps realize the extent to which such writing is linked to the task of"deconstruction" of the history of ontology and to which, at the same time, it prepares in covert fashion the path ofreturn for thought to a very different beginning. In writing tooa domain we shall have to enterthe gods are present.

I shall call "chiasmus" the figure of the reversal of a proposition whose members are contained within both theinitial proposition and the inverted one and produce a distinctive pattern of crossed overlapping. Limiting myself tothe part of Heidegger's work available in French in 1983, I was able to detect approximately 220 different cases ofsuch a stylistic practice, without prejudice for omissions inevitably involved in this type of inquiry. We must noteimmediately that, although we can understand without any difficulty what is revealed in speech when Heideggersays, "Being and time, time and Being name the relation that binds together both questions" (TB, 4), it is indeedwithin writing itself that the rhetorical effect is underscored by immediately offering to a seeing theirantisymmetrical character. The Letter on Humanism expressed the regret that the question raised by Jean Beaufretcannot become the topic of a "direct dialogue'' since, in writing, "thought easily loses its mobility." This Platonicdisapproval notwithstanding, Heideggerian thinking indefatigably attempts to "let the simplicity of its manifolddimensions rule" (LH, 195) within writing alone. Let us inquire into how Heidegger obviates the problems with theletter and allows us to discern the star-like dimension of thought through the crossing of terms calling andresponding to each other. We shall then be able to understand the unexpected sense of the statement, "The writtentext offers the salutary constraint for thoughtful apprehension through language" (ibid.).

The attempt to classify the various modalities of the Heideggerian chiasmus allows us to distinguish in the firstapproximation ten types of arrangement, each one playing a precise strategic role and delineating an itineraryonethat




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might seem arbitrary on first inspectionwithin specific periods:

1.We place first the ARTICULATION OF SYNTACTIC CROSSING of the proposition because of thequalitative and quantitative importance of chiasmuses. Often constructed as a double implication, itamounts to the purest model of the connection of Heideggerian terms, which the author himself callson occasion "coupling." Among the 65 cases I detected, one could cite the following imbricationtaken from the Nietzsche book: "The essence of truth is at the same time the truth of the essence"(Das Wesen der Wahrheit zugleich dies Wahrheit des Wesens ist) (also BW, ET, 140). Thereversibility of the formulation takes place each time at the decisive turn of an inquiry where theissue sometimes consists in a game of disorientation within multiple options. This figure is onewhich, whenever it is being used, reveals the Heideggerian ''little music" 3 whose style is nothing butcontrapuntal.

2.Heidegger himself opposed the ARTICULATION OF CROSSED PARATAXIS of a proposition tothe habitual syntactic order: it sheds light upon oppositions of words or sentences while allowingtheir mutual belonging to remain in the shadow. This is what happens concerning the arrangementimposed upon Fragment 6 of Parmenides,Chre to legein te noein t' eon emmenai, first distributed on four lines

Chre:to legein te noein t':eon:emmenai

then translated according to a disconcerting paratactic order to which Heidegger devotes a longcommentary, "Neeful: the saying, also thinking too: being: to be" (WCT, 182). Such peculiararchitecture hides the true chiasmus between beings and Being, which is opened up through the colonand displayed in full array later in the text under the form of the traditional imbrication: "In keepingwith that duplication a being has its way of being in Being and Being presists as the Being of abeing" (WCT, 221, mod.). We can count about forty propositions of this type whose typographicaldisposition




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revolves around a pivotthe colon separating the members of a sentence, or the hyphen which, on thecontrary, brings closer the elements under consideration. "The proposition of reasonthe reason of theproposition." (Der Satz vom Grundder Grund des Satzes) (PR, 14).

3.Akin to the preceding, the ARTICULATION OF THE PARTICIPLE or participation underscores thereciprocal accord of the Greek present participle eon, the model of the present participial form, andof the infinitive present, emmenai. The duplication "a being, Being" rules the entire second part of thelecture course, What Is Called Thinking?

4.The AMBIVALENT ARTICULATION, or underscoring, modifies the initial meaning of theproposition with respect to one or the other of its constitutive elements. A dozen examples of suchsudden changes in the underscoring can be found in Heidegger's work, first of all in the turn involvedin the enunciation of the Principle of Reason: "Nothing is without reason. Nothing is without reason"(PR, 40).

5.The CROSSED ALTERNATIVE presents two inverted questions that do not call for an immediateresponse while they give pause for reflection. Fifteen cases of this double question can be found inthe Heideggerian texts: "Has man read off the structure of the proposition from the structure of thethings? Or has he transferred the structure of the proposition into the thing?" (WT, 46). 4

6.Next there is the DOUBLE NEGATING, of which I could locate four instances. It shows theinsufficiency of two possible solutions, and forces the thinker facing this aporia to take a step back.The following is an example of crossed negating: "Time is not a product of man, man is not aproduct of time. Here there is no producing, no making" (Q4: 36).

7.The opposing game of permutations of the elements of a proposition closed within itself is whatcharacterizes a VICIOUS CIRCLE. Eight occurrences of this particular form of chiasmus can befound, including the following: "Affects are the forms of the will: the will is affect. This is termed'vicious circle'" (N 1: 44, mod.).

8.The DIALECTICAL PROPOSITIONto be sure exclusively in reference to Hegelexpressesspeculation. I detected six




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cases of this kind. "Let us revert the speculative proposition about the beginning ('The beginning isthe result')a reversal that is not only legitimate, but necessary. It takes the form, 'The result is thebeginning'" (ID, 53).

9. The CRITICAL REVERSAL is the procedure of refutation that cancels a proposition emanatingfrom common sense, the tradition, or the author himself. This counter-movement of inversion,present in over forty instances, stands as the most common figure in Heidegger, other than thecrossed articulation, which is the properly affirmative form of the chiasmus: "Accordingly, it isconsidered more appropriate to say: Language is in the service of thinking than that thinking, ascorrespondence, is in the service of language" (WP, 93).

10.Finally we set apart the CROSSING OF THE FOURFOLD, the purest form of the chiasmus, to bedistinguished from imbrication from which it emanates because of its strategic importance in someof Heidegger's greatest texts. It defines the mutual belonging of the four and can be found thirty-four times in the works under consideration: "The thing gathers. Gathering, it stays earth, sky, gods,and mortals" (Das Ding dingt. Digend verweilt es Erde und Himmel, die Göttlichen und dieSterblichen.) (PLT, 177, mod.).

The Shimmering of Writing

The stylistic procedure of the chiasmus is a well-known figure of classical rhetoric, named antimetabole,antimetathesis, or antimetalepsis in Greek. It consists in reverting the course of a given locution by allowing itselements to permutate each other, in order to produce two resulting propositions engaged in a face-to-face, whoseunexpected proximity causes interest or surprise. In his study on Les figures du discours (The Figures ofDiscourse) 5 Pierre Fontanier applied the following terms to what he calls "réversion": "Reversion causes thereturn upon themselveswith a different, and often contrary, meaningof the words, at least the most essential ones,of a proposition. One could consider it a particular kind




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of antithesis." Fontanier gave as an example Corneille's disillusioned verses on Richelieu:

He brought me too much good for me to say anything evil,He brought me too much evil for me to say anything good.

The Dictionnaire de linguistique (Dictionary of Linguistics) 6 by Georges Mounin offers a more rigorous definitionof antimetathesis: It is a "figure of words occurring when two statements or syntagmas are in a relation ofchiasmus through the position of two or more words repeated in the second (statement or syntagma)." The entry forchiasmus indicates that the latter involves "a cross-like distribution of the type A-B/B-A between the constitutiveelements of syntagmas that follow each other." Such a permutation of graphic units, whose arrangement mayconcern the phonematic level (vowel- and consonant- chiasmuses), manifests itself either in tautological form:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair (Macbeth, I, 1)

or in a more elegant form:

Your looks are sad, your cheer appalled (Henry VI, Pt. 1, I, 2).

As for the Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (Dictionary of Poetics and Rhetoric) by Henri Morier, itconsiders chiasmus to be the "figure consisting in the crossing of terms" so that from a parallel order A-B/A'-B'another order is produced, A-B/B'-A'. As for antimetabole, it is a "figure of axial symmetry consisting in therepetition of the same words, reproduced in reverse order." Henri Morier recalls the objurgation proferred byGrégoire de Tours, "Bend your head, proud Sicambre; worship what you burnt, burn what you worshipped,'' andespecially the perfect following one: "Ede ut vivas, nec vive ut edas" (Eat so that you live, don't live so that




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you eat), written on the lintel of Roman doors with a rigorous antisymmetry "E-V-V-N-V-V-E." 7

The very term chiasmus dates back to the Greek rhetorician Hermogen of Tarsis, who in his book Peri heureseosnames "chiasmos" the cross-like distributionhence the X symbolof a series of four members in which the firstcorresponds to the fourth and the second to the third. Such a permutation of middle and extreme terms is calledchiazomene periodos from chiazein, meaning to distribute in the form of chi.8 The word is to be found inPorphyry's Commentary on Aristotle's Categories.9

The inversion of natural symmetry, which reinforces the antithetical aspect of the terms, does not perform a mererhetorical function. Chiasmuses are often used polemically in literature to denounce an existing state of affairs byunfamiliar, or perhaps impertinent, figures that have the effect of shaking the solidity of language and,subsequently, reality, whose account language claims to give. For example, the "reversal between for and against"in Pascal bears testimony to his truly realistic picture of political relationships, as when he argues that "powerlessas they are to bring about what is just, men have brought about that the powerful be just."10 It is to be expectedthat such a process of reversal, which mercilessly turns an argument against its author or against the certainties ofcommon sense, has its origin in the rhetorical, eristic, and sophistic sources of philosophy. Similar to a mirror thatinstantaneously casts an image through the inversion of left and right with respect to the source of light, such arefutation entraps the opponent in its snare. It turns out to be all the more effective when the swiftness of theresponse is combined with the effect of antisymmetry, which carries disorientation into the thesis under attack.Aristotle turns Anaxagoras' proposition against him: "It is not because human beings have hands that they areintelligent; it is because they are intelligent that they have hands" (De partibus animalium, iv, x, 687a 7). As forPlato, besides the abundant effects of symmetry in his dialogues, he does not neglect antimetathesis. This allowshim, first, to denounce invalid conversions such as "it may happen that all courageous peo-




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ple are daring, while it is not the case that the daring are courageous" (Protagoras, 351a); second, to rediscover thenatural order between cause and effect. Euthyphro in particular presents an irresistible progression of chiasmuses:

It is not because one thing is seen that someone sees it, but just the oppositebecause someone sees it,therefore it is seen. It is not because it is led, that something leads it, but because something leads it,therefore it is led. Nor because it is carried, that something carries it, but because something carries it,therefore it is carried. . . . Whenever an effect occurs, or something is affected, it is not the thing affectedthat gives rise to the effect; no, there is a cause, and then comes the effect. Nor is it because a thing is actedon that there is an effect; no, there is a cause for what it undergoes, and then comes this effect. (10b-c)

For the sake of convenience it is possible to reduce the various forms of chiasmus in Heidegger to those essentialforms satisfying the opposed functions of imbrication and refutation. We shall first consider the second one, whoseend is solely polemical, before investigating the first, which is endowed with the positive role of highlighting thecontrasts specific to thought.

Generally speaking, a critical reversal is a refutation ad hominem that denounces the opponent's thesis by showingthat it is contrary to common sense or the natural order of things to which it unduly claims allegiance. It is well-known that this speculative method was used repeatedly by Marx, as when he projected upon Proudhon'sPhilosophy of Misery the corrected image of the Misery of Philosophy or when he assigned the "weapons of thecritique" to "the critique of weapons." This amounts to a simple sleight-of-hand that consists in shifting thegenitive around itself so as to transmute it into a nominative, and vice versa. The permutation thus obtainedbetween subject and predicate makes manifest the double play of the origin, and reveals the true source of theconflict between opposing forces: At issue is the question of what has claim over the power of the originand itsrankin




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the midst of language, whose goal has always been to establish such a power and rank. Reversing the oppositethesis, throwing it upside down by means of its own weapons, does not amount to merely destroying its logicalvalidity. In fact, by casting light upon the real origin of the question, it means that we take a stand on the ground ofontology. Marx denounces the inversion of social relations throughout history in the following terms: "If in theentire ideology men and their relationships appear to us as put upside down as in a dark room, such a phenomenonresults from the process of their historical life, absolutely as the reversal of objects on the retina results from directphysical conditions." 11

One must therefore redress ideologyfirst and foremost the eternal philosophy that was completed in Hegelianidealismthrough a "transformation" that reverts the inverted and virtual image of reality entrapped in the cameraobscura. Such will be the revolutionary method of critical reversal:

My dialectical method is different from the Hegelian method not only in its basis, but in fact is its opposite.. . . Although this quidproquo allowed Hegel to disfigure dialectic into mysticism, he is nevertheless the onewho, for the first time, exposed the entire movement. With him dialectic walks on its head; one only needsto put it back on its feet in order to discover it has quite a reasonable appearance.12

Modernity was soon to avail itself of this technique by mechanically reverting those formulas that embody themultiple dimensions of social life in order to gradually subvert the positions of the dominating power. Such adeliberately negative attitude is not without similarities with the sophistic break during the decline of the Greekcity. It is founded on three presuppositions. First, it admits that the manifestations of history can be reduced to aplay of formulas whose effectiveness can in no way resist the systematic practice of linguistic inversions. Second, itclaims that the injurious effect of the theses under attack comes from the fact that they themselves inverted thenatural course of things by imposing




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upon it some arbitrary violence. Finally, it postulates that the negation of these negations, or in political terms theviolence opposed to these forms of violence, only reaps its logical, ontological, but also ethical legitimacy byregaining access to an initial affirmation: thus the metaphysical postulates on alienated "human nature" or"primitive communism" that fell from grace in history allow the theoretician to keep the space open for a newbeginning.

Yet it cannot be claimed that the reversal specific to "the work of the negative" does not have specific limits. Thesecan be found first of all in the reality of what undergoes the inversion. Setting the Hegelian dialectic back on itsfeet because its head was upside down hardly makes any sense if it is true that dialecticas Pierre Boutang notedwith irony 13has neither head nor feet and, similar to Aristophanes spherical beings, cannot aspire to gain a verticalposition.14 Second, there are also limits to the work of the negative on the very level where this reversal takesplace. Let us consider Marx's famous assertion: "To be radical is to take the matter at issue from its root. But theroot for man is man himself." This is not a political sentence, Heidegger notices, but "a metaphysical sentence thatreceives its light from within the horizon of the reversal of Hegelian metaphysics by Feuerbach".15 Hence, theFeuerbachian reversal, followed by the Marxian one, completes the critique of religion by assigning man to thelocation of the absolute, but remains on the same level as a metaphysics, whose liquidation, nonetheless, it had setout to bring about. It thus verges on a nihilism all the more acute as it reveals itself completely blind to its specificrequirements.

Heidegger, therefore, used the notion of critical reversal vis-à-vis the tradition only with great caution, becausesuch a reversal is always caught within the nets of metaphysics and is unable to change dimensions, that is, tooperate the true reversal of thought. He does not hesitate to pass a harsh judgment on the Nietzschean project of"inversion of Platonism," a project too often reduced to "the procedure of standing all of Plato's statements on theirheads, as it were" (N 1, 200).16 It is not by multiplying the effects of this "constant inversion" whose practice isthreatened with becoming "conscious




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mania, if not indeed a breach of good taste" (N 1, 2930), that modernity will be able to come to grips with thetradition, whose only flaw was a defective foundation.

The Storms of the Originary

One of the main features distinguishing Heidegger's mode of thinking from the philosophical tradition is hisdeliberate refusal to initiate any polemic whatever. The matter of thought does not consist in thinking against, inbeing constrained to a movement of retreat or exasperation in front of what it opposes. Instead, to think is toproceed to the encounter of the "matter itself" (to pragma auto, Sophist, 218c). In his work, Heidegger constantlyputs a premium on turning as opposed to reversal, or in other words, he substitutes the more originary notion ofconversion for that of the inversion of metaphysics.

"The role of thinking is not that of an opponent. Thinking is thinking only when it pursues whatever speaks for amatter" (WCT, 354). The thinker does not ignore the existence of conflicts as he is himself in the process ofexhibiting the tensions that resist his own effort. Yet the conflictual dimension disappears behind the display ofcontrasts whose differences gain prominence within the very measure that brings them into closer proximity. Theintertwining of the Heideggerian sentence, more "speculary" than "speculative," is in no way dependent upon logicor dialectic. On this topic, the Sém-




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inaire du Thor stresses that "what is specific to dialectic is its playing of one term of a relation against the other inorder to provoke a reversal of the situation as it previously obtained between the terms" (Q 4, 205) 17 ." As it turnsout, the tensed coupling of contrasts in Heidegger is mostly indebted to Heraclitus, the thinker to whom thetradition incautiously attributes the dialectical method after Hegel claimed a Heraclitean legacy and projected hisown light upon that predecessor. As Heraclitus, indeedin whom Heidegger detects no "dialectic"Heidegger seeks tothink the unique and primordial presence within which "the winter storm and the harvest day cross each other" (Q4, 206)18 and in which the path of the Swabian peasant and the way of the thinker from Ephesus intersect.

We find support for this view first of all in certain fragments of Heraclitus, such as Fragment 62 on the intersectionbetween life and death that unfolds a perfect double chiasmus: "Immortals: mortals, mortals: immortals, for the lifeof these is the death of those and the life of those is the death of these" (athanatoi thnetoi, thnetoi athanatoi, zonteston ekeinon thanaton, ton de ekeinon bion tethneontes). The eighth and ninth sessions of the seminar held jointly byFink and Heidegger consider several times the meaning to be given to such a formula. Fink's prevailinginterpretation, which is accepted by Heidegger, states: "Thus we understand 'to live the death of humans' and 'to diethe life of gods' as a reciprocal, intertwining relationship of the self-understanding and understanding of Being ofgods and mortals" (HS, 101). Mortals and immortals are turned toward each other in "an intertwining relationship"(ibid.) that excludes the possibility for both realms to be considered in their singularity or even to be brought closerand juxtaposed from the outside. Humans and gods are imbricated in such a way that this "intertwiningrelationship" embodies the reciprocal relation that must be thought in its entire tension. There is an understandingbetween humans and gods, gods and humans, such that ''they themselves exist as their alternate andcounterrelationship" (ibid., 111). In his turn, Heidegger underscores "the reciprocal openness of gods and mortals"that corresponds to what he




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himself named "openness" (Offenständigkeit). More importantly, he determines this connection as a "mirroringfunction in reference to hen and panta" (ibid., 117). This is a reference to Fragment 64: "But thunder governs theworld" (ta de panta oiakizei Keraunos) where the lightning flash being the One is opposed to the totality ofseparate things. But ta panta remains enigmatic in its relation to ta onta of Fragment 7. Consequently, Heideggeraddresses another question to Fink, a question that stresses the chiasmus of ta panta and ta onta: ''Are ta pantasuch inasmuch as they are ta onta, or are ta onta such inasmuch as they are ta panta?" (ibid., 87). Comparable to abow streched to the breaking point, the mutual belonging of opposed terms crosses their domains in such a waythat thought can no longer escape what in Heideggerian fashion Fink calls "the crossing of intelligence by the godsand the humans of their ownmost being and of Being" (ibid., 117).

By the violent torsion it imposes upon thought, the chiasmus forces thought to attempt a return toward the unitythat calls for thinking. Unrelated to metaphysical inversion, the chiasmus bears witness to the unavoidablenecessity forcing Heidegger to take four paths toward the emergence of the origin. If the chiasmus is the figureappropriate to Heideggerian thought in its quest for the hile 19 in which it originates as its secret point of anchor, itis because this term alone evokes the appropriation of thought, which still remains to be thought. The uniqueproject of "thinking the unthought" of metaphysics imposes the unexpected countermovement of a reflection thatmoves upstream of the metaphysical tradition of philosophy. As a result of its peculiar turn, the chiasmus makesthe tension of the origin of questioning present. Heidegger attests to this during a remarkable opportunity, theDavos Colloquium in March 1929. The irreducible opposition that separates him from Ernst Cassirerone thatsubsequently took a bitter turnis not to be lifted in the polite dialogue that one expects. One first, rather dry,reversal marks Heidegger's refusal to follow Cassirer along the way of a philosophy aimed at "bringing light" upona liberal conception of the world. "Philosophy does not have as its task to




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supply a worldview, but it is rather the worldview that is the condition behind the act of philosophizing" (KPM,178; 2567, mod.). Immediately afterwards comes the imbrication. Within speech it exchanges the principles andramifications of the competing theses while holding them at a distance:

One could say that for Cassirer the terminus ad quem is the whole of philosophy of culture in the sense ofan elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness. For Cassirer, the terminus a quois utterly problematical. My position is the reverse: The terminus a quo is my central problematic, the one Idevelop. The question is: Is the terminus ad quem as clear for me? For me, this occurs not in the whole of aPhilosophy of culture, but rather in the question ti to on. (KPM, 180; 25960)

Dating back to his early work, therefore, Heidegger already attempted to impose the necessity of a conversiontoward the source in which the tradition originates. This conversion would apply to the metaphysical representationas well as to his own research still captive of the language of that tradition. The reversal of the chiasmus, whichties together the domain of metaphysics (the Being of beings) and the domain of the unthought of metaphysics (thebeings of Being), hardly offers any connection with the suppression and the lifting of dialectical antitheses.Consider the relationship between the human being (Dasein) and the Being of beings:

As soon as I thoughtfully say "man's nature," I have already said relatedness to Being. Likewise, as soon asI say thoughtfully: Being of beings, the relatedness to man's nature has been named. Each of the twomembers of the relation between man's nature and Being already implies the relation itself. (WCT, 79)

And to obviate any possible misunderstanding, Heidegger adds: "the situation under consideration here betweenman's nature and the Being of beings allows no dialectical maneu-




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vers in which one member of the relation is played off against the other" (ibid.). The nexus of Being and beings atthe outset manifests "the articulation of things that from themselves are turned toward each other, i.e., have thesame turn" (WCT, 209).

The dialectical methodfrom now on relegated to metaphysics in the dusk of an era where we proceed only withgreat caution as between a bear and a lionis now forsaken to make room for the path of genealogy. This path willnot attempt to overcome metaphysics, which, since its Platonic inception, asked repeatedly to move away from aworld of appearances for the sake of an ever inaccessible horizon. Neither does this path consider an "overcomingof the overcoming," or, in Kantian fashion, a "metaphysics of metaphysics." Such is the profound meaning of theHeideggerian "deconstruction" of philosophy, so profoundly misunderstood since Section 6 of Sein und Zeit: It isthe return toward the original site of metaphysics in order to appropriate it within its own limits and to prepare anew beginning. To the intense longing for the distant succeeds the firm desire for the near. "Thought does not gobeyond metaphysics by overcoming it, i.e., by climbing higher so as to bring it to completion, who knows where,but by climbing back down into the nearness of the near" (LH, 231, mod.). As for the interpretations of such anattempt in terms of a "demolition'' of metaphysics (an idea "terminally grotesque") (Q 1, 240) or (QB, 92) of a"denial of the tradition" ("a childish presumption" to "demean history") (OWL, 20) both fail in understanding thestep back that leads thought to the limes in the encounter of Being.

One critic, however, had sensed this issue. "Necessity of a return to ontology" was a work note written byMerleau-Ponty in preparing his last work, The Visible and the Invisible. 20 The great unfinished workcalled firstGenealogy of the True, then The Origin of Truthindeed draws explicitly upon the figure of the chiasmus in theattempt to enact "the revision of our ontology" (VI, 2223). The first part (the only one completed and whose lastand foremost fragment bears the title "The IntertwiningThe Chiasm") as




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well as numerous work notes seek an approach to the "double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangibleand of the tangible in the visible" (ibid., 134), what the author named the "texture" or the "flesh of the world." Thereversibility of the chiasmus, the ''ultimate notion" (ibid., 140) at which the thinker was aiming as if it were "acenter" (ibid., 145), assumes increasing importance as the manuscript progresses. In the foreward (of the French aswell as English editions), Claude Lefort, the editor of the text, notes appropriately that "fate seals the book onultimate truth" (ibid., xxix)." The complete sentence that evokes the chiasmus of philosophy and languageconcerning the views of Husserl and Valéry deserves to be quoted in its entirety: "What we have to understand isthat there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into asynthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility, which is the ultimate truth" (ibid., 155). However, Lefort fails topoint out that the same fate seals in similar fashion Merleau-Ponty's last work note two months before his death:"Worked-out matter/men: Chiasm" (ibid., 275, March 1961, MerleauPonty's emphasis).

This is indeed the essential sign of a thought that aspired to open itself to "intertwinings" and the "chiasmus," stillobscurely anticipated in the preparation of the manuscript as the reversibility of body and mind, of the "I" and theworld, of the perceiving and the perceived beings, of the visible and invisible, and also of language and time(November 1960 notes). Merleau-Ponty wanted to bring an end to the dualism and parallelism of classicalontology, especially in its Cartesian form. That "there is a body of the mind and a mind of the body and a chiasmbetween them" (ibid., 259), is a tenet that will lead to the new ontology of a being understood as the crossing of allthe dimensions of the world: "The chiasm truth of the pre-established harmonyMuch more exact than it: for it isbetween local-individualized facts, and the chiasm binds as obverse and reverse ensembles unified in advance inprocess of differentiation" (ibid., 262).

It is noteworthy that, although he was increasingly influenced by Heideggerian thought in his latest writings,




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Merleau-Ponty did not leave any indication of the origin of these "intertwinings" and did not confirm thatHeidegger was the insipiration behind the figure of the chiasmus. Whether or not he was conscious of it, this origincould not be questioned. In its desire to question "more primordially than metaphysics can" (LH, 230), theHeideggerian deconstruction would produce the work of a Penelope undoing at night the richly embroideredtapestry of history in order to prepare the possibility of tradition. For thought from now on turns back in its ownsteps toward the crossing of Being in order to appropriate the essence of metaphysics to the frame from which itoriginates. As a result of the requirement of origin called forth by the chiasmus, we are perhaps in the position offounding "the possibility of tradition" (Q 4, 287). Little concern, then, should be paid to the fact that thought nolonger has the title of ''philosophy," "because it will think more originally than metaphysicsa name identical withphilosophy" (LH, 242, mod.). In its ultimate simplicity, it retains the task of faithfully safekeeping Beingfreelyentrusted to itand of preparing the new possibility of founding.

The Sense of the Earth

A fertile soil is needed to gather the welcomed rain from the storms of the origin. If Nietzsche's thinking out-of-season claimed to have "the vigorous fragrance of a wheat field, on a summer's night," (OWL, 70) Heidegger's pathwould rather evoke the pregnant odor of the soaked earth, at dusk, after the early downpour. To the union of skyand earth, humans are invited as the celebrants already attending to the celebration of thought.

By following the steps of the thinker who abandons the familiar oak tree at the limit of the wood to penetrate everdeeper within the sinuous paths of speech, we are seeking "Heidegger's thesis on Being" which announces theimminence of a homeland. In our turn we want to appropriate thought in its essential truth within its own soil, byinterpreting the directing thesis of Heidegger according to the Greek




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sense of thesis, which means "settling within the open" (PLT, 61). We are going to imitate Heidegger's procedureas he proposed to imitate Kant's procedure, by considering the site (Ort) to which Being belongs. "The approachfollowed here consists in setting the appropriate texts in contrast so that they may shed light upon each other, thusallowing what cannot be expressed directly to appear nonetheless" (Q 2, 74). But did Heidegger ever expresshimself directly? The enigmatic aspect of his thought is in major part the result of the essential reticence andreserve he maintains in revealing what exceeds any type of publication. The "Zurich Seminar" is particularlyenlightening in this regard. Not only does Heidegger reveal his embarrassment, even his repugnance, in expressingthe bottom of his thought"I resist in the face of the necessity of saying what I still could perhaps say; I resistbecause in the present times this would immediately become an everyday commodity and would be defiled"butalso he stresses that he has subjected the unexpressed meaning of his thought to an essential ''measure ofprotection": "During my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching, I spoke only once or twice of my ownmost matterfor thought" (nur ein bis zweimal von meinen Sachen gesprochen) (SMZu, 54).

Let us try then, as Heidegger suggests in the same text, "to learn how to read" his work in order to discover itsleading thread, a new relationship to Beingas he himself sought to retrieve the Kantian thesis or Hölderlin'sintuition, in writings he investigates in spite of the absence of an expressly erected structure. It is perhaps sufficientto take a path through the Heideggerian texts, to ascend toward their highest sources in order to detect gradually ifnot the secret architecture of the work, at least the original site of a thought that holds itself deliberately apart fromphilosophy. No doubt, this setting-apart of philosophy was the only way to a safekeeping. Thus first we are boundto encounter the earth. Section 22 of Sein und Zeit, which treats of the privileged positions or places of the sun thatman uses everyday for heat and light, evokes the initial places. "[The sun's] places become accentuated 'indicators'of the regions which lie in them:" sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight. Here Heidegger is not seeking to




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"orient [himself] in thought" inasmuch as thought turns out to be already oriented, just as the involvements ofDasein are oriented by the "cardinal directions," or in German "the celestial regions'' (Himmelsgegenden). Theseregions are "determinative for Dasein itself with regards to its ownmost possibilities for Being in the world.Dasein, in its very Being, has this Being as an issue; and its concern discovers before hand those regions in whichsome involvement is decisive" (SZ, 104; BT, 137). Thus, what is born under the sky (der Himmel) is called theearth (die Erde). To think in authentic fashion is first of all keeping in oneself the sense of the earth, it is knowinghow to orient one's steps in the region wherein one lives, in spite of the familiarity that progressively invades theBeing of locations, thus veiling the phenomenon. Likewise, Socrates seemed a foreigner in need of a guide in hisnative city, yet he experienced what is closest to the human being. To think is perhaps something of the same orderas taking the path going back to "the celestial regions" and receiving those things that welcome us along the way.To think the world means first and foremost thinking the earth. . . .

Like Plato, Heidegger begins with the earth (aph' Hestias archesthai, Euthyphro, 3a) or, if one prefers, from thebeginning. He confronts the Earth, the goddess wherein everything resides and who alone guards the house of thegods. The first conflict of thoughtits open conflict allowing the clear display of the contrasts in Heidegger'swritingbecomes manifest in 1935 with The Origin of the Work of Art, in the struggle between earth and world. Thethinker sees in the earth the emergence of the tree and grass, of the eagle and the bull, of the work produced byhuman hands and of human beings who shape a work in order to found their dwelling on the earth. The earth iswhat carries and brings things into the world while withdrawing within itself. "The earth is essentially self-secluding" (PLT, 47); being impenetrable, it allows the world to rest upon it. Hesiod's "broadly bounded earth" isRest that gives Motion the ability to articulate the jointures of the world. Thus a Greek temple, that rests standingupon a rock, can open up a world and allow Truth to unfold according to one of its five modes: the production of awork, that is,




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"truth setting-itself-to-work" (ibid., 62). To the Rest of the earth, closed within its own safekeeping, is opposed theMovement of the world that opens a temple up to the historical space of its destiny. One can neither eliminate thepolemical nature within the empty conflict of foreign elements nor grasp the advent of "men, animals, plants, andthings" outside of the world opened up by the work in the image of the temple taking a firm stand on the earth. Incontrast, we will succeed in sensing what is at issue in work, man, earth, and world, "if we think all this in reversefashion,'' on the condition that all of this turns itself toward us: for "the mere reversal (Umkehren), done for its ownsake, yields nothing" (ibid., 43).

To the ordinary inverting of the propositionwhich grants no proximity to what is to be thought hereis opposed thereversal of the Heideggerian path. If we want to understand the common articulation of the earth, in the mystery ofthe emergence of what it holds in reserve, and of the world, which circumscribes the space of everything that isoffered, we must think their connection as much as their separation. After first evoking the earth by means of amere pair of peasant shoes, then the world, which sets up and orders things, Heidegger gradually brings earth andworld closer together in the advent of the work and finally puts forth the decisive question: "What connection isthere between the setting-up of a world and the letting-be of the earth within the work itself?" (ibid., 48). Broughtin through three preparatory steps concerning the world, the earth, and the difference that brings them closer toeach other, the answer reveals the secret alliance of the chiasmus: "The world grounds itself on the earth, and earthjuts through world" (ibid., 49). Two new chiasmuses come to reinforce the confrontation of the opposed parts thatleads them to the highest affirmation of their essence: "The earth cannot dispense with the Open of the world if it isto appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion. The world, again, cannot soar out of the earth's sight if. . . it is to ground itself on a resolute foundation" (ibid., 49). Such is the open site where the clearing andconcealing meet so as to let unfold the truth of the work of art. "Earth juts through the




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world and world grounds itself on the earth only so far as truth happens as the primal conflict between clearing andconcealing" (ibid., 55).

World opens when earth keeps safe its statute, that is, holds in the peace of concealment the things of the world;but in return, earth can only remain faithful to its essence if it takes the things back in itself in order to keep themsafe without jutting through the world. "In the strife the unity of world and earth is won" (ibid., 63), without everallowing a dialectical lifting of the antinomies evoked in the arching back to Heraclitus' Saying. "The Origin of theWork of Art" shows in Heidegger's work the very "system of the earth and sky," in the Greek sense of "systema,''which the following year was to take its ulterior characterization in the Schelling lecture course. From then on, theworld, or kosmos, is named systema ex ouranou kai ges or "jointure between sky and earth" (ein Gefüge ausHimmel und Erde) (Sch, 26).

Heidegger is beginning to experience the play of the contrasts of the world and, through them, the play of tensionsin thought. And this is owed to a system of propositions which, themselves, experience a tensing betweenthemselves and an arching between opposite terms that stand as many intertwined pillars. During the same periodthe first chiasmuses are being multiplied. First, in What is a Thing? (193536) according to a "mirror image"between essence of the thing and essence of the proposition (WT, 47), 21 as it is called by Heidegger. What is thusbeing built progressively through this building (bauen) of thought's dwelling is the house of Being with itscrossing of light and darkness, a crossing to which metaphysics is blind. What on this earth is to be the statutethefirm statuteof thoughtful (Denken) speech if not that of memory (Andenken), "the gathering of thought" (WCT, 3)on the unity that maintains it within the proximity of what is to be thought and thus leads it back up toward its ownsource? If faithful thought is a genealogy, it is hardly surprising that the genealogy of faithful thought shouldwitness its emergence in the intimate strife bringing forth the world: Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, who indeedis "in the myth the daughter of earth and sky" (WCT, 10, mod.), as we are reminded at the




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beginning of the lecture course "What Is Called Thinking?" Will this goddesswho was to become the mother of theMuses after being touched by Zeus's rayturn out to be faithful to her own lineage, and will she dare return to thecrossing of which she is the offspring?

Indifferent to the rectilinear paths of metaphysics, Heidegger resolutely engages himself on those earth paths thatdelight in getting lostbrieflywhenever a crossing of ways presents itself, and then on this path is led by a star,nothing else.

Let us follow him now along this rather singular path in order to detect among the texts how his solitary meditationshapes and turns.

2. The Turn

The sky is the vaulting path of the sun,the course of the changing moon,the wandering glitter of the stars,the year's seasons, and their turning.(PLT, 149, mod.)

The Step Back

In the realm of thought, as elsewhere, the first step is the most difficult to take. That is why we always hesitatebefore taking it, and are more prone to dallying with the comfortable than attempting a breakthrough by our ownefforts and clearing a way that will be ours. One must, however, run the risk of nonconformity when facing pastworks of thought: not aiming at what can no longer be seen ahead of us, we must rather turn around so as todistinguish what cannot yet be seen. The detour is the major risk to be taken by thought, leading it along thelongest path and causing it sometimes to take what is not even a way. How then is it possible to move forwardwithout a path? Where shall we find those indications and assurances upon which even the most adventuresomespirit relies? Perhaps one must raise one's eyes to the




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bright sky and follow the course of the sun, which from one solstice to the next goes through a point of conversionwhere it reverses its curve and starts a new celestial course. Faithful to his solar destiny, the thinker investigatesthe small and the great pathsespecially those that, after a sudden shift [écart], make a hairpin curve and movebackwardnotwithstanding this desire that always propels him forward.

One of the most singular traits of Heidegger's thought resides in the insistence with which he neglects the advanceof philosophy, while paying homage to itthus entrusting its destiny to a retrograde motion. The resolutely divergingorientations of the metaphysical approach and of the reversal leading toward its unthought origin are apprehendedclearly in Heidegger through the double analogy between the "step forward" and the "step backward." Let usconsider the determinant expression of Aristotelian physics andbeyond itmetaphysics: "For us, let us pose as aprinciple that the beings of nature, as a whole or in part, are set in motion; this is furthermore apparent throughinduction" (hemin d' hupokeistho ta phusei e panta e enia kinoumena einai; delon d' ek tes epagoges) (Physics, A2, 185a 12) (Ph B, 226). Heidegger interprets epagoge as the movement of leading (ago), as the mobility of thegaze that aims upward (epi) at the thing andbeyond itat its Being; it does not name the mere "induction" thattranscends the limits of immediate experience and draws a general property from a variety of facts. What it namesis the petitio principii, that is, the call for the principle. "Petere principium, in other words the aiming at thefoundation and founding, such is the sole and unique step of philosophy (der einzige Schritt der Philosophie), thestep that presses forward (der eröffnende Vorstross) and opens up the domain within which alone a science willsettle'' (ibid.). In contrast, when Heidegger spells out the conditions of his relationship to traditional philosophyduring a seminar on Hegel called "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics," he wrote: "For us, thecharacter of conversation with the earlier history of philosophy is no longer Aufhebung (absorption, elevation), butthe step back (Schritt zurück)" (ID, 49). Whereas Hegelian thought, and along with




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it Western thought as a whole, attempted to gain access to a domain where thought is collected together and raisedto a transcendent unity posited as metaphysical, as we already find before the invention of the term "metaphysics"in Plato's epekeina tes ousias (beyond the essence) (Republic, 509b), Heidegger's thought regresses "beyond such aline" toward the forgotten domain where the Being of truthand through it the metaphysical horizon in its entiretyisgiven to thought. In other words, the ''step back" takes some latitude vis-à-vis the beingthought over and over intwenty-four centuriesof metaphysics in order to question what has not yet been thought as such, not even by theGreeks: the difference between Being and beings. To be more precise, we should say: the difference between theBeing of beings and the being of Being. Nonetheless, what remains still unthought is the unity of the differencethat brings them together and distinguishes them in a peculiar interplay [jeu] that Heidegger calls here"conciliation" (Austrag). The conciliation of Being and beings, Heidegger writes, "not only holds the two apart, itholds them facing each other. What is held apart is held in the tension of conciliation in such a way that not onlydoes Being ground beings as their ground, but beings in their turn ground, cause Being in their way" (ID, 6869,mod.).

The notion of a crossed turning allows him to point to the connection between beings and Being, the advent ofBeing and the event of beings, in their movement of reciprocal exchange, of "reciprocal reflection" (ibid., 69). Thewheel spins endlessly, causing the gyration of Being around beings and of beings around Being, and reverts to theSame, that is, to the chiasmus of the two terms. Hence, we will not be surprised to witness the return of this figurein the same text, this time under the form of typographical underscoring: "We see that Being means always andeverywhere: the Being of beings. The genitive in this phrase is to be taken as genitus objectivus. Beings meansalways and everywhere the beings of Being; here the genitive is to be taken as a genitivus subjectivus" (ibid.,6162). 22 On both syntactic and ontological levels, the intertwining of the figure reveals itself to be perfect. It ishowever to be noted that the thought of conciliation was




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made possible through the seminar's approach by the attempt of a "step back," of which it was said several timesthat "our thinking, in a way, leads us away from what has been thought so far in philosophy" (ibid., 50), hence by asort of extraction from metaphysics. But this step also frees up "the matter of thinking. . . . Being thought in termsof difference'' (ibid., 63), and from that point forward it is free "to assume a proper position face to face with thedifference" (ibid., 64), namely the setting-apart [écart] of Being.

The desire to reach back toward the forgotten essence of metaphysics had inspired Heidegger since his oldest texts.The 1940 essay, "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (following the text of two lectures [193031 and 193334]), characterizesas "doctrine" (Lehre) what, in the words of the thinker, had remained latent. What is latent now requires a "pathother" than the traditional approach dealing with the reading of mere dialogues, one that will direct the analysistoward "that which in Plato's thought remained unformulated (ungesagte)" (PDT, 251, mod.). Similarly, theconclusion on the Kantian doctrine in What is a Thing? (193536) allows one to detect the openness of anotherdimension, between things and humans, "which reaches out beyond things and back behind man" (WT, 244). Inmore insistent fashion yet, "The Ontologico-historial determination of Nihilism" (194446) indicates that thought,which calls for Being, always lingers behind if one confronts its path and that of metaphysics, inasmuch as thought"first takes the decisive step back" (N 4, 225), the step of a return toward the house of Being.

The disconcerting paradox of retrograde motion, present again in the Contribution to the Question of Being and theSeminar on Time and Being, leads "the whole of Heidegger's course of thought" toward the initial "character ofreturn" or "the step back" (TB, 28). It owes its disconcerting quality to the fact that it alone enables one to beengaged in an encounter with metaphysics. Heidegger does not hesitate to make this claim to Professor Tezuka intheir conversation: "And ways of thinking hold within them that mysterious quality that we can walk them forwardand backward, that indeed only the back will lead us forward" (OWL, 12).




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Common sense does not discount such a procedure, since it evokes the necessity of stepping back in order to jumpsuccessfully. Thus we must take a leap into the question of Being. Just as the horizon recedes when one movestoward it, similarly the ground of thought retains its metaphysical character: one may proceed valiantly on the pathof the tradition and this path can only account for a space from which no portion escapes. Yet, is thisavenuewidened, leveled, and straightened-out so as to open up the horizon, and better exert its definitivedomination on the realstill a thinking path? Method has brought its harness to bear on the life of the world and hasenclosed it in the silent universe of discourse. No longer does the world speak to us. And, perhaps, we havenothing else to say in response. Unless the thinkermeditating on the ways of the tradition and seeking to penetrateeven further into them with the audacity (tolma) of the stranger who did not hesitate to raise his hand against thepaternal interdictionshould abruptly turn his back on what led him where he is, and attempt a breakthrough towardthis strange path whose meanderings always recede backward.

The Counterpoint of Metaphysics

Concerning the dialectical contest of hypotheses in the Parmenides whose threads are pulled with irony by themaster of Elea, Paul Friedländer uses the expression of "contrapuntal fugue." 23 The musical analogy is quite apt atconveying the Heideggerian approach to a writing that superimposes melodic lines in its polyphony, byintertwining and reverting metaphysics and the unthought of metaphysics, punctum contra punctum. This form of amirror fugue endlessly draws upon variations or imitations of the major thememetaphysicsand of a counter-themethe unthought of metaphysics. Such a fugue, however, does not seek to escape the patient path of thetradition; philosophy, as much as music, follows rules of composition that do not allow anyone but a few wildnotes or steps, a fact to which the Platonic dialogues bear witness. They are the daughters of Measure that know




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when to stress, without warning, the tempos of the movement over which this measure presides. The "step back"does not dismiss the quiet horizon of metaphysics; instead, it aims at giving it a site and at discovering the limitswithin which metaphysics may take place. If it is true that "metaphysics, qua metaphysics, is authentic nihilism" (N4, 205), the issue is not one of inverting its course, as though facing the challenge of moving upstream on a river,but of sending the negation of nihilism back to itself. One must merely turn away from it. "Merely"? Perhaps thematter is not merely so simple inasmuch as this movement, contrary (inversus) to the natural (rectus) movement ofmetaphysics, is still caught within the element from which it tries to disengage itself. The thought that retraces itssteps does not forsake metaphysics; it binds to it even more solidly, as a path meanders through the mountain thatcarries it before jumping, beyond the final turn, to the neighboring slope. From now on, Heidegger's thought runsthe risk of residing on a peak between Being and the Nothing, at the limit between shade and light, and ofentangling the being of nothingness and the nothingness of Being in the most intimate counterpoint. It is only atsuch a point, on the limit, that the thinker experiences "originary anxiety," which may affect every human being,but nonetheless reaches into the Dasein "whose ground is daring'' (BW, 108, mod.). Such an anxiety is not thecontrary of joy, and in no way opposed to the tranquil life of the person feeling it; it is foreign to the contradictionarising from a proofbut not from a testand maintains "a secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness ofcreative longing" (ibid., 108).

What is Metaphysics?whose importance is central for Heidegger himself as it is for understanding, ormisunderstanding, his workunveils the secret alliance between Being and the Nothing by disclosing their crossedrelationship. Four other modalities sustained by the chiasmus (the alternative, the critical reversal, the underscoring,and the imbrication) invert the encounter between shadow and light five different times, as the photographic imagederives its positivity from a negative in which it can accentuate variations in the contrast and change the values.




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1.Because thought, which is "thought of something (tinos)" (BW, WM, 99, mod.), a point that Platotaught us before logic did, must think toward nothingnesssince it is impossible to think what iswithout banishing outside of Being what is notit is threatened with sinking into confusion: 24 Assoon as it says something about this "nothingness" that it nevertheless rejects, it is forced to speakwithout saying anything. Such is at least the conclusion emerging from "logic" and preventing theunderstanding from falling into contradiction by raising the innocent question, "What is the nothing?"Instead of questioning into Being, the question is reversed into its contrary and thus reveals its ownnothingness. But at issue is the raising of the question, even the double question, to a level higherthan that of the understanding. First and foremost, it is appropriate to ask whether the nothing intowhich we are questioning has anything to do with the negation that precludes its being questionedatleast since Parmenides' famous injunction: ''No! you will not force the nothing into being!" Heideggerthen frees the alternative of the chiasmus so as to be able to elaborate correctly the question of Beingand the nothing: "Is the nothing given only because the 'not,' i.e., negation, is given? Or is it the otherway around? Are negation and the 'not' given only because the nothing is given?"25 (BW, WM, 99,Heidegger's emphasis). The mirroring effect is reinforced by the italics and turns out to bestylistically perfect: Nothingness-"no" (negation)/(negation) "no"/nothingness. The reversal of theantithesis allows us, as it usually does, to detect the true origin of the question by underscoring thesignificance of the second part of the alternative. Instead of stressing the logical negation, whichcharacterizes human understanding, Heidegger underscores the (onto-)logical negation, which heterms "the nothing." The nothing negates more radically than negation. Hence, the attempt to negatethe nothing turns out to be excludedthe nothing which in the experience of anxiety reveals itself to usas the internal vestige of Being. It is within Dasein itself that the operation of the nothing takes place.




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2.Consequently, the third part of the text, "Response to the Question," must bring about the criticalreversal of the traditional logical position by responding to the double crossed question of thenegation. It is impossible that the mere negation should bring out of itself, within its enunciation, botha "no" and a "not," since it is not given a thing that it may disqualify logically, i.e., a ''somethingdeniable" (BW, WM, 107). How could anything negatable be grasped as such by thought, if notbecause thought was already kindred to what it is to negatein the negatable entityand thus able tosuccessfully exclude? Finally, the "no" allowing to recognize by anticipation the "negatable" can onlybe revealed if the nothingunderstood as the origin of the act of negating that reaches into, andthoroughly affects, human beings although it does not originate in themis posited beyond everynegation. This gradual ascent (through the three conditions ruling over the nature of negation, bymeans of the emphatic rejection of the understanding, and leading us toward negation's originarysource) unravels the decisive answer manifested by the crossed reversal: "The 'not' does not originatethrough negation; rather negation is grounded in the not that springs from the nihilation of thenothing" (ibid. 107). Through this continuous sequence of spiraling movements, simple "logic" isthus subjected to the "turbulence of a more originary questioning" (ibid., 107), one that will spinwithin the abyss that is the very ground of metaphysics.

3.The 1943 "Afterword" attempts to dissipate the misunderstandings to which the lecture gave rise,while at the same time introducing on two occasions new modalities concerning the necessaryintertwining of metaphysics and the ascent toward its essence. The question "What is Metaphysics?"understood properly or improperlyindeed remains a question. One question. The underscoringinscribed in the writing itself is what orients our reflection toward Being, understood metaphysically,namely as the Being of beings. In contrast, the question "What is Metaphysics?" can no longer beconfused with the preceding one in spite of the identical formula-




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tion because this new question causes metaphysics to recede toward the origin of the questioningitself. Between the first and the fourth lines, the changed underscoring, which is almost insensible,nevertheless displaces the inquiry toward a different location, and forces us to read the sentence byinverting our reading and thinking habits, from right to left. The step back is stressed in sustainedfashion simultaneously by the turn that brings metaphysics toward the "what" of "what it is" and theuncanny presence of the afterword, which the author says represents "a more originary preface" forthe individual who "persists" in questioning. The rebound effect [choc en retour] of the postface onthe lecture, given fourteen years earlier, now transforms the latter into the preface that was neverwritten, and directly bears witness to the movement of conversion toward the origin of reflection.Such surprising exchanges between questions that are differently underscored from preface toafterword, prepare the last two chiasmuses reinforcing the counterpoint of metaphysics and itsessence:

4."It belongs to the truth of Being that Being can never unfold without beings, that a being never iswithout Being" (EB, WM, 354, mod.). The stylistic figure this time no longer indicates the movementof a return toward the original appropriation of metaphysics; it reveals the reciprocal articulation ofBeing and being within their fold. From then on, by virtue of a fold back toward the domain whereBeing and beings withdraw, human beings experience "the wonder of wonders," i.e., "that there arebeings" (ibid., 355, mod.).The question "What is Metaphysics?" is borne out of this probing in response to the call of Beingwhose pursuit remains a silent one. Yet we hear it enough for us to detect an ultimate chiasmusreversing thought's claim to posit itself as the origin of everything, a claim that succumbs toforgetfulness.

5."Being is not a product of thought. Instead, it is essential thought which is the advent of Being"(ibid., 356, mod.).




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From Foreign to Ownmost

At this point in our investigation it might be useful to inquire into whether Heidegger's writings give us anyexplicit sign of the turn taken by his thought, in order to clarify the rebound effect this turn has on the path towhich we have entrusted our steps. Such a frail indication existsthough granted with prudencein the shape of aletter that perhaps does not reveal everything, as if the thinker holds something back at the same time as theacknowledgment made there borders on a private admission. For the "Letter to Richardson" (April 1962) mentionsthe "turning" (die Kehre) as the "essence of the question" [la teneur de la question] that had been ruling overHeidegger's thought for ten years prior to 1947. Because so equivocal a term lends itself to possible mis-understandings, the "turning" to be adopted by a ''manifold thinking" (LR, xxiii) needs to be administered betweendifferent texts and different titles of the work. Thus the author refers us to the 1947 Letter on Humanism, in whichthe turn is mentioned "in my published writings" for the first time as well as, indirectly, in Sein und Zeit (1927).Let us inquire more closely into these mutual correspondences of one publication to the other in order to determinetheir common principle.




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The excerpt from the Letter on Humanism calls to mind that, at the time of the publication of Sein und Zeit, thethird and last section of the first part, Zeit und Sein, although already written, was not published, as was also thecase for the entire second part, a situation that amounted to making the extant work into a mere fragment.

"Hier kehrt sich das Ganze um" (It is at this point that everything is reversed) (LH, 208), says Heidegger somewhatabruptly, before evoking for the second time, more insistently, "the thought of the turn from Sein und Zeit to Zeitund Sein" (Das Denken der Kehre von ''Sein und Zeit" zu "Zeit und Sein"), whose lack of conclusion neverthelessallowed thought to reach the region which its original attempt could hardly reach. It is not without interest to noticethat the "turn" (Kehre) is no sooner mentioned than distinguished from the bad "reversal," that is, the purelynegative inversion of metaphysics:

By way of contrast, Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedesessence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning,which from Plato's time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But thereversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement (Aber die Umkehrung einesmetaphysischen Satzes bleibt ein metaphysischen Satz). With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of thetruth of Being. (LH, 208)

Heidegger stresses without ambiguity the incompatibility between the two approaches, one remaining caught withinthe language and ground of metaphysics while the other attempts a turn that is going to deflect the thinking of theworld foreign to metaphysics back toward its own residence named, in this text, "the house of Being" and, in anearlier one on Hölderlin's Return (Heimkunft), "homeland." But at the same time he indicates that the turning fromthe title Sein und Zeit sketches out a space of intertwining between four terms, taken two at a time. The Letter in itstotality amplifies the echo of the previous indications by multiplying the allu-




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sions to the house of Being and by weaving together these various forms of chiasmus (LH, 193, 199, 213, 236,237) in order to establish the definitive inability of metaphysical humanism to gain access to its own essence and tocall thought to the necessity of ascending to the originary clearing of Being.

There is a second, more evasive, indication in the Letter on Humanism, which lifts the veil on the turn from Seinund Zeit to Zeit und Sein, a blind spot in the unfinished book: Heidegger now calls to mind the 1930 Lecture on"The Essence of Truth." Let us note in passing that although this text already allows us to detect the thought of the"turning," the latter is then dismisseda dismissal hence that takes place seventeen years before the publication of theLetter on Humanism, and not a mere ten as it is claimed in the ''Letter to Richardson." The note was added in 1943to announce that the topic of the lecture involved a "turn (Kehre) in the questioning that brings about theovercoming of metaphysics" (BW, ET, 141, mod.). It is not difficult to find the signs of such a turnaround in the1930 lecture. A first chiasmus underscores differently the traditional definition of truth, veritas est adaequatio rei etintellectus, which indeed can be understood either as adaequatio intellectus ad rem or as adaequatio rei adintellectum (ibid, 120). Next Heidegger demands that thought be ready for a "transmutation" that immediatelybrings about the following discovery:

Freedom is the ground of the inner possibility of correctness only because it receives its own essence fromthe more original essence of uniquely essential truth. 26 (ibid., 127)

The mutual belonging of freedom and truth is involved with a new and more explicit intertwining. "Freedom . . . isthe essence of truth . . . only because freedom originates in the primordial essence of truth"27 (ibid., 137) is asentence that unfolds in two chiasmuses:27 "Then the ground of the intertwining of the essence of truth with thetruth of the essence reveals itself" (der Grund der Verflechtung des Wesens der Wahrheit mit der Wahrheit desWesens) (ibid., 137). Here the




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preceding figure leads to the articulation of the final paragraph of the text: "The present undertaking . . . helps us toconsider whether the question of the essence of truth must not be, at the same time and even first of all, thequestion concerning the truth of essence" 28 (ibid., 139). However, one could not claim that the references foundin the "Letter to Richardson" and in the Letter on Humanism are sufficient to grasp the essence of the turning.Concerning Sein und Zeit, the obvious allusion to the turning-around of the title leaves in the shadow the twofundamental chiasmuses that upset the traditional point of view on truth. Paragraph 44, entitled "Dasein,Disclosedness, and Truth," indeed reverts the usual thesis on the structure of truth: "Assertion is not the primary'locus' of truth. On the contrary, . . . the most primordial 'truth' is the 'locus' of assertion''29 (BT, 269). In analogousfashion, because the being of truth may not be separated from the Dasein that opens itself up to disclosedness,"Being (not entities) is something which 'there is' only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far and as longas Dasein is. Being and truth 'are' equiprimordially"30 (ibid., 272).

Sein und Zeit (1927) had already moved within the turn taking us outside of metaphysics, although that book wasforced to interrupt its itinerary. But is it not precisely an effect of the turning to have moved thought away from awork still too permeated with the tradition and abandoned such a work as an unfinished porticoerected on a distantand deserted land, still failing to open a grand avenue to the temple? Is Sein und Zeit the Propylaea of anarchitectural genius who left it to others to gain glory for a Parthenon?

It remains that the turning comes back obstinately in numerous other texts, each time allowing us to discover thefigure of chiasmus. Let us indicate the "curve" and "turning" of the 1936 lecture-course Schelling that reverts thechiasmus of truth enunciated in the 1930 lecture:

This question (into the truth of Beingder Wahrheit des Seyns) cannot . . . maintain itself for its own sake, itturns and is transformed into the question into the Being of




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truth (sie kehrt sich im in die Frage nach dem Seyn der Wahrheit und des Grundes). (Sch, 65, mod.)

The new intertwining of "Recollection in Metaphysics" (1941) is led back to the syntactic reversal of the 1930lecture:

Remembrance helps thought to recollect the truth of Being through the very fact that it allows one to thinkthe extent to which the essence of truth is at the same time the truth of the essence (das Wesen derWahrheit zugleich die Wahrheit des Wesens ist). 31

All the manifestations of the Heideggerian turning within various turns of phrase displacing the metaphysical pointof view on Beingnot in order to cancel it, but to show its essential insufficiency in the absence of apremetaphysical counterpointare thus oriented toward "the house of Being." Its original nature could in no way bereduced to a simple "excursion" of thought or a play of graphic inversion where writing, so to speak, splashesabout freely. Heidegger brings no rupture to pass in an itinerary that, as early as Sein und Zeit, remained faithful toits essential questioning. The ownmost of the turn is a turning toward the ownmost, in a flash, from the experienceof the foreign (unheimlich) understood as the ex-propriation of metaphysics. Reestablishing a dialogue withParmenides, for example, means granting the commemorating thought ''the possibility of a transformation ofdestiny" (die Möglichkeit einer Verwandlung des Geschickes) (EGT, 101) that would lead it into its properlocation, into "the place where the fold offers a residence (Heimat) for the presencing of what is present" (ibid.,99100, mod.). To this turn, which marks off the critical moment of the return, where the itinerary suddenly changesdirection and reverts its initial steps, we shall add no more, and we shall leave aside the lecture that bears its title.Let us only keep in mind the series of indications gathered in the last part of the "Letter to Richardson" that run therisk of being overlooked in favor of the curve from Being and Time to Time and Being. The rever-




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sals of the earlier texts are indeed reinforced at the end of the "Letter" by means of a climactic intensification of thechiasmuses coupling human beings and Being, Being and time, the clearing of Being and the presence of Being,finally "Heidegger I" and "Heidegger II,'' whose essential relationship requires in order to be understood to think"Heidegger II" starting from "Heidegger I," and "I" from "II" (LR, xxxxii).

It is now possible to sense the truth of the strange saying that announces within the "event" of the turning thelightning of "Being (Seyn) as such" (ibid., xx). Being itself is the turning that, at any moment, is capable ofrelocating the essence of thought within the thought of the essence. In other words, Being "can only be thoughtfrom the turn," and offers human beings the dwelling within which "the essence of being human . . . finds itself athome" (LH, 204, mod.).

The Tropics of the Sky

Because of its suggestive expressiveness, the theme of the turn exposes thought to many misunderstandings. First,it gives rise to the supposition, raised in the very question addressed by Father Richardson, that "a turn," that is tosay a radical modification in the point of view that supposedly occurred in Heidegger's personal itinerary, could beconveniently located between the two periods of his work. The author of Sein und Zeit brings a correction to theexpression chosen by his correspondent by stressing the necessity of underscoring "the turn" (LR, xvi) of his ownthought. Second, it is doubtful that his own thought would be able by itself to reach within the essence of thequestion. Inasmuch as the project of the "deconstruction" of metaphysics tends to dismiss once and for all thesubjectivist starting point just like the humanist's perspective linked to the former, the occurrence of the "turn"could in no way be the product of the "human subject." It is consequently appropriate to distinguish the turning ofthe question, in its essence [teneur], and the curve of the thinker who "causes his gait to respond to the turn itself"(ibid., xviii). The curve is the event within




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thought, the turn is the advent of Being. Third, finally, the constant preoccupation with the turn in Heidegger'swork runs the risk of forsaking his sources and of breaking the continuity within the tradition, which the turnsought to reappropriate in a decisive fashion.

At this point an effort at clarification becomes necessary. It will allow us to acknowledge the three essentialdeterminations of the turn. Let us thus consider a turn, a simple turn that turns, let's say along the road over there.What can be said about it? It is no doubt insufficient to say, that the turn is where the road turns or that the turn isthe curved part of the road. For the road no more curves than the way turns. In order for a turn to be a true turnparticipating in the action of the mobile moving along a trajectory, there needs to be a turning motion. To reduce itto the motionless curve of the wayto the abstract schema of a drawingamounts to dismissing the many thousands ofsteps that for a long time cleared the way, came upon it back and forth, each time further delineating the curve.This view also amounts to ignoring the mobility of the mind that calculated the equation of the curve, the actionsof the hands that drew the plan, or the movement of the machines that modified the tilt of the ground when theengineers made it their object. Also, although the turn does not lead to a simple inflection of the initialdirectionrather it brings about a radical change of orientation as a tacking sailboat that no sooner has movedbeyond the most distant buoy, than it proceeds back toward the departure buoythis turn will force the mobile to gothrough the same positions, this time in the other direction. After going from A to B, the mobile now goes from Bto A. The reversibility of the chiasmus AB/BA is naturally set in motion as soon as a stressed curve causes themobile to retrace its initial path. Finally, the change of location of the mobile with respect to the angular point ofdeviation calls for another angular point around which the mobile is reassigned. The mobile is in no way able toprolong its trajectory ad infinitum without being subjected to forces that turn it away from its direction or send itback to its point of origination. For the turn to be truly a turn that maintains its grip, it must cause the thing itmoves to turn




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and spin so as to transform its uniform rectilinear movement into circular motion. It needs to amount to a circuit.The turn, is, after all, turning motion. We must perhaps think of the turn as the essential principle of the cyclesregulating the universe.

This is, anyhow, the meaning of the famous argument of the reciprocal compensation of contraries found in thePhaedo (70c72e). When Socrates and Cebes consider the ancient tradition for which life and death, death and lifeoriginate in "their contraries, and only on the part of their contrary" (70e), Plato does not restrict his exposition tohuman beings, but encompasses plants and animals, and then "anything that comes into being." For anything tocome into being, two inverted generations absolutely need to appear and cross each other between oppositesstretched out to their maximum: "One of these generations starts from one opposite to reach the other, the secondin turn goes in the opposite direction, from the latter to the former" (71ab), in such a way that there truly isreciprocal generation between each of the opposites toward the other. We will then be able to claim that, in thismotion of reversal in which opposites cross one another, "the living just as much come from the dead as the deadfrom the living" (tous zontas ek ton tethneoton gegonetai ouden hetton e tous tethneotas ek ton zonton, 72a). If thishypothesis were rejected, Socrates claims, i.e., if one did not agree that there is in the whole universe a perpetualcompensation of things between themselves "as though they underwent circular motion'' and if consequently onethought generation in terms of the pointed rectilinear line going from one opposite toward the other, or "ifgeneration did not turn around the opposite and did not make a turn (kampe)" (72b), then all things would havealready sunk into rest and indifference, and the world would have come to a stop.

The myth puts the purely logical argument of the Phaedo to the test of sky and earth by unveiling the pregnantforce of the turn in the revolutions of the sky (ouranos) or the world (kosmos) 32 as well as in human beings onthe earth. In Statesman, the stranger decides to start all over again (268d) by proceding along a new path in order toset the stalled discussion back in




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motion. In bringing together the three legends of Atreus/Thyestes, of the reign of Cronus, and of the sons of theEarth, the dialectician shows that they all derive from the same cause: the alternation of the cosmos that unfolds asa spinning wheelspinning at times in one direction (current cycle of Zeus), at times in the other (former cycle ofCronus). The general law of these contrary movements is in keeping with the "reversal produced in the journey ofthe celestial bodies and the sun" (271c), which takes place in either of these cycles. Plato applies the wordsmetabole or trope to this continuous motion of the revolutions of the worldthe most important concerning thechanges of direction that take place in the sky. Isn't the apparent journey of the sunstopping its course at thesolstices and changing direction on the tropics of the zodiacal circle, which is where its trajectory "turns"the modelof a turning motion directing the whole sky in its entirety? The stranger from Athens also shows in Epinomis thatin matters of astronomy and mathematics "we must observe the sun, its constant 'turnings' throughout the orbitproper to it'' (990b). But Heraclitus had already seen in the tropics the point of return in which the contrasts of theworldsimilar to the course of the sunexchange their reciprocal determinations (as in Fragment 31 that allows us todetect a chiasmus):

Tropics of fire: first the sea; from the sea, the [first] half earth and the [second] half burning wind; sea pourout from one end to the other, and it finds its measure according to the same reason as was earlier. 33

The turning of the sky subjects the paths of human beings on the earth to the same destiny and stretches in onetension the arch of each person's life. One only has to consider jointly the myth of the Statesman and the myth ofthe cave (Republic, 7) to the assured that the cavern is indeed the image of the world. This indication, furthermore,opens the long commentary Heidegger devotes to that notion in "Plato's Doctrine of Truth":




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The fire in the cave which burns about the cave-dwellers, is the "image" for the sun. The vault of the caverepresents the firmament. Under this vault assigned to the earth and bound to it, men are living. . . . In thiscavernous chamber, they feel "in the world" and "at home.'' (PDT, 254)

The Heideggerian reading appears all the more appropriate as it does not reduce the myth to the traditionalassociations of a higher and a lower world. Instead, the story gets its original meaning from the movementsnaturalor forced, specific to the locations under considerationof the "turns from the cave to the light of day and converselyfrom the latter to the cave" (ibid., 255, mod.). Since it is not possible here to follow the entirety of Heidegger'sanalyses or to consider the manifold meaning of the myth, I shall limit myself to indicate how the theme of the"turn" rules over both the Platonic vision of the human condition and the ambiguous reading that Heideggerconducts of the single text, where what remains unthought in Plato's doctrine is connected, in a sort of poeticjustice, with what remains unformulated in the very thought of his interpreter.

This myth is the account of the forced liberation of the prisoner suddenly torn away from his native bonds to thecave and progressively led from the initial absence of "education" (apaideusia) to the acquisition of paideia. First,one point deserves attention: In order for the transition from obscurity to light not to damage the eyesight of theprisoner, the latter must experience a slow habituation process, which nevertheless according to Heidegger requires"a change of direction" (Umwendung) and a "new orientation" (Eingewöhnung) (ibid., 256, mod.), not only of thebody, but also of the soul in its entirety. The Greek text is more polemical than Heidegger acknowledges. For itcontrasts the simple "sudden confrontation" (peristrophe)analogous to the play of a reversal of the shell between itsside of darkness and its side of light (Republic, 521c; Phaedo, 241b)with the true "conversion of the whole soul"(periagoge holes tes psyches), an expression that Heidegger translates as "the turning of the whole man




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around in his essence or nature" (das Geleit zur Umwendung des Ganzen Menschen in seinem Wesen) (ibid., 256).

Let us move in a jump to the term of the ascending process (epanodos, 521c): a second reversal, opposite of thefirst one, now turns the freed prisoner from the vision of what is most luminous in reality and forces him tocomplete his journey by "descending back" (katabas, 516e) toward his native region. A double movement ofconstraint (539e540a) thus rules over the totality of the myth and prevents the ascent, as well as the descent, to befixed in one unilateral direction. Similar to the image of generation in the Phaedo, the path leading from the caveto the freedom of light and from the freedom of light to the cave takes a turn so as to return each time to its placeof departure.

Although Heidegger interprets Plato's text with great faithfulness, it is nevertheless significant to note that he masksboth the distinction between these two forms of turnperistrophe/periagoge (reversal/conversion)and the turn thatbrings the prisoner back to the cave, i.e., the return toward mother earth, wherein the metaphysical liberation itselfis rooted. He prefers to consider the radical novelty of Plato's doctrine on truth with respect to Greek thought andthe "turning" (this time the word he uses is Wendung [PDT, 262, mod.]), involving the substitution of idea, theshape or form that has the capacity to shine forth, for aletheia, the unconcealment of beingsa substitution thatamounts to the emergence of metaphysics as a "gazing up to the 'ideas'" (ibid., 268).

Indeed, in the short foreword to this lecture, Heidegger announces that he is attempting to gain access to Plato's"doctrine" by returning to what remains latent in the words of the thinker. "What then remains unsaid is a turn inthe determination of the essence of truth" (ibid., 250). 34 Are we not in turn justified in applying this precept of theHeideggerian reading to Heidegger himself and in showing that the question of the turnwhich is one he did notinventis already found in the premetaphysical thought of Plato, even though Heidegger tries to open it up within anever more originary domain?




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3. The Lightning Flash

I remember an afternoon during myjourney in Aegina. Suddenly I saw asingle bolt of lightning, after which nomore followed. My thought was: ZeusHeidegger, Heraclitus, 5.

The Leap

Here, indeed, everything turns around.

The turn takes the thinking itinerary to the brink of the abyss and leaves it facing the void. Through a flash oflightning, Heidegger's proposition takes the jump, extracts the thought of representation from the firm ground thatso far had been holding it. Without a reason, it hurls this itinerary to the ground of the principle.

The thirteen sections of the Principle of Reason are symmetrically distributed around the central section (lecture 7),which recapitulates at the center of the work the five points already secured and under the influence of structure ofchiasmus. The reeling, zigzagging exchange between "principle" (Satz) and "reason" (Grund) is compounded byincessant changes in the underscoring of Grund ("ground,'' "earth," but also "reason") and Satz ("proposition,""principle," but also "leap"). At each new step we face a double bifurcation, although only the second one isexpressly represented as such (PR, 103): the bifurcation of Satz into principle/leap, the bifurcation of ratio intoGrund (ground)/Vernunft (reason).

In the first stage of the inquiry into the principle of reason, the turning causes the enigma to spring forth, Der Satzvom Grund ist ein Grundsatz (The principle of reason is a principle) (ibid., 8, mod.), although such an enigma isnot made more perceptible, especially in translation, where the echoes of Satz and Grund no longer cross eachother. The inquiry seeks to clarify the principle of reason and finds itself confronted with an alternative: Either theprinciple of reason, which states that everything that is has a reason, is itself without reason, and therefore escapesits own legislation; or the principle of reason has a reason and becomes, among all




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the reasons, the reason of reasons, which, in its turn, must require a reasonand thus it indefinitely regresses withinitself. It is necessary to find a source for the principle of reason that will not be subjected to it, if a circle is to beavoided: Der Satz vom Grund ist der Grund der Sätze. Der Satz vom Grund ist der Grund des Satzes (Thepropositionthe principleof reason is the reason of propositions. The proposition of reason is the reason of theproposition) (PR, 13, mod.).

For the third time Heidegger repeats the sentence, this time setting aside each of its members in order to make thereversal manifest:

Der Satz vom Grundder Grund des Satzes(The proposition of reasonthe reason of the proposition).

After discreetly replacing the ist (is) of the first formulation by a simple hyphen that plays the role of a pivot,Heidegger comments on the perfect figure of the chiasmus he composed:

Here something turns in on itself but does not close it. Here something coils in on itself, but does not closeitself, for it uncoils itself at the same time. Here is a coil, a living coil, like a snake. Here something catchesitself at its own end. Here is a beginning that is already completion. (PR, 14, mod.)

The transparent allusion to Zarathustra's ring and serpent must not hide from us the more original figure of thechiasmus, of the Greek X, whose four branches, so to speak, are laid flat; it is manifested under its traditional formin different locations.

Let us consider how the Heideggerian ring turns into a chiasmus. First, it is easy to detect two opposite points,according to the symmetry AA'/BB'




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Next, using our right hand we rotate the ring, which is flexible by definition, a quarter of a full turn from back tofront, while simultaneously rotating it with the left hand a quarter of a turn from front to back. Finally, we maketwo cuts at the points diametrically opposed to the crossing.

The chiasmus of the principle of reason can be represented under the form:

It is immediately clear that, in order to move from one branch to the next and state both formulas sequentially, onemust

leap

from one of the four summits of the reverted cross to the one opposed to it along the diagonal, from Grund toGrund, from Satz to Satz: Der Satz vom GRUNDder GRUND des Satzes. One must leap, over Being, into the heartof the crossing. Such a leap requires not only that the proposition (Satz) be twisted, as the torqued ring of a helix,but it also requires a change in the primitive underscoring of the "proposition" so that the word abruptly comes tomean "leap." What is at issue here is less a "play of figures" between Satz and Grund than a "word game''permitted in the German language (PR, 14). Whether we like it or not, we are caught in the midst of a "circularmovement." This movementmore that of a torqued ring than of a circleoperates an uninterrupted exchange prevent-




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ing thought from being fixed on one of the four temporary positions of the pro-position (Satz), and therefore fromsettling on any stable ground (Grund). The cross-figure of the chiasmus is the oblique manifestation of movement,of the encounter and exchange.

As a result of the attention we were paying to this strange circular structure, have we not postponed thinking theleap as leap? We should now turn to the caesurathe is or the hyphenwhich prevents the opposite members of thechiasmus from closing completely upon themselves and which paradoxically gathers them under its commonfigure. The greater our fascination for the specular reversal of the proposition, the greater our forgetfulnessconcerning where this reversal takes place. Now the Heideggerian leap"a leap that looks back" (PR, 75) that turnsthe sentence from right to left in order to gain access to the location of originaims at securing the approach toBeing, whose fundamental trait is one of union [trait d'union, i.e., hyphen, in French], although this unionwithdraws behind what it brings to unity.

The principle of reason indefatigably repeats that everything that is has a why, that every being has a reason forbeing, which amounts to claiming that "nothing is without a reason." The traditional formulation is, "Nihil est sineratione." We will not succeed in understanding it so long as we say what it is, while repeating a formulation thatsays nothing about reason. If, on the contrary, we are open to what it says, to the intonation of its utterance[parole], then in a flash of lightning the principle of reason shows its second underscoring, which lies deeper andis better hidden and more essential. It frees Beingwhich, all of a sudden, springs to our eyes.

NIHIL est SINE ratione/Nihil EST sine RATIONE NOTHING is WITHOUT reason/Nothing IS withoutREASON. (PR, 40)

Thanks to the crossing between "nothing" and "without," the crossing between "Being'' and "reason," thoughtapproaches the "critical zone" of Being (ibid., 45) and takes a




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look (er-blicken) at what, facing it, looks at it (anblickt) from its own location. Whereas the first underscoringstresses the connection between nothingness and absence, thereby leading the gaze toward a being, the secondunderscoring, in an oblique gaze, highlights the connection between reason and Being and orients thought towardthe paradoxical chiasmus between Being and the groundless ground that faces it. In the end, only Being is ofconcern to us on the grounds of a chiasmus thatonce moreseparates Being and ground:

Being and reason or ground belong together. Ground/reason receives its essence from its belonging togetherwith Being qua Being. Conversely, it is from the essence of ground that Being reigns qua Being from outof the essence of Being. Ground/reason and Being ("are") the same, but they are not interchangeable, whichthe difference between the two words suffices to evidence. Being in its essence "is" ground. ThereforeBeing can never first have a ground/reason which would supposedly ground it. (PR, 51, mod.)

Grund and Seinremain apart at a distance

which can be bridged only in a leap bythe Satz.

This leap is the instant change in the underscoring, one which does not derive the second underscoring from thefirst but transports thought by surprise into another region: that of groundless-being. Yet, in turn, "the leap intoBeing" is affected with the change in the underscoring of the principle and lends itself to the crossed expression:the principle is a leapthe leap is a principle.

The principle (Satz) of reason is not only a Satz as the supreme principle. It is a Satz in this privileged sensethat it is leap. 35 (PR, 53, mod.)




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Between proposition and reason, between the first and the second underscoring of the principle, between Being andground, between principle and leap, but also between beings and Being, that is to say between all these operationsof setting-apart [écarts] that leap to the eyes of the readers of Heidegger, we always witness the same figure of thereversal, the reversible music that once more stresses the Satz in a new, major mode, the mode of the musicalmovement. If the Satz is indeed the musical movement specific to Heidegger, it is then possible to say concerningthe "path we are following through the principle of reason" what Bettina von Arnim wrote by crossing the path ofthe thinker:

If one speaks of a movement (Satz) in music and how it is performed . . . and of the understanding withwhich it is treated, then the expressions should be reversed, and it must be said that the movement leads themusician, that the movement occurs, develops and is concentrated often enough till the spirit has completelyjoined itself with it. (PR, 89, mod.) 36

The leap of the chiasmus is the major theme inspiring Heidegger's musical movement, which leads him tointertwine its multiple counterpoints within a harmony from which one perceives the echo of the greatest thinkers.But it is never a thinker that makes the leap, rather it is the leap that makes the thinkerand suddenly reveals him tohimself.

The Abyss

Unfathomable is the abyss of a thought that is thrust into the gaping openness of nothingness, so as to free theadvent of Being! Abyssal is the glare emanating from a desire that plunges into the void in order to support itsobject! Enigmatic is the path of care that devastates its surrounding world in order to rediscover the limit of thefirst foundation!

When Heidegger turns toward the Being-already-here, beside him, in silence, he immediately feels the ground fail-




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ing under his steps: "Being means reasonreason means Being. Here everything goes in a circle. We become dizzyand our thought no longer finds an outcome" (PR, 126, mod.), he states in the 195556 lecture course on thePrinciple of Reason. Almost thirty years earlier, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger had felt asimilar uneasiness: "Beings are known to usbut what about Being? Are we not seized by vertigo if we try todetermine it, even if we should to determine it properly? Is Being not similar to the Nothing?" (KPM, 154, mod.)

The embarrassment is much older still, as is indicated by the Platonic epigram of Sein und Zeit retrieving thequestion into Being of the Sophist: "We thought before that we understood the term being (on), but now we havereached an impasse" (204a), the Stranger of Elea tells Theaetetus. Later on, he confesses to his younger companionthat the Sophist is a magician playing with words to produce illusions and infusing these words with a greatblazing glare: "In the midst of this perplexity, a still more obscure dizziness (skotodinia) assailed us" (264c).Although it is true today that we no longer feel the shaking of Being, we must nonetheless revive the ancientanxiety experienced by thought lest there be no ground to sustain its steps. We need only raise the fundamentalquestion of metaphysics, the first of all questions, "Why are there beings, rather than nothing?" (IM, 1) from theopening of the 1935 lecture course, An Introduction to Metaphysics, to feel the attraction of the "abyss'' (Ab-ground) and to experience the "leap" (Sprung). The leap into the abyss expresses nothing but the vertigo of Being,the innocent question in which "the little word: being," to use Kant's phrase, slips into the proposition, betweensubject and predicate, and calmly stares at us. At every moment we are under the gaze of Being, impelled to hearthe call of the abyss. What is the abyss? To this question the beginning of the answer lies in opening the fold oftheir common identity. Let us inquire further into the ground of Being, a ground that previously appeared to us asstanding apart from Being. No sooner does the ground set Being apart, than Being, "groundless," withdraws and nolonger is ruled by the "ground" and according to




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"reason" (Grund). Only beings are ruled by the "ground" and, consequently, "only a being 'is,'" while Being itself issingularly absent from the blind presence of the copula and "is not'' (PR, 51). What for us remains to do is tounfold completely the chiasmus by using the paratactic articulation that crosses the facing elements:

Being and Reason: the same. Being: the abyss (Sein und Grund: das Selbe. Sein: der Ab-grund) (ibid.).

Heidegger repeats this formulation seventeen times, whereby "Being" and "reason," "Being" and "abyss" exchangetheir determinations in order to reinforce their reciprocal belonging in the Same, on either side of the colon. Canthe accord of both propositions be thought now that "is" has withdrawn from the center to make room for theabyss? The formulation "Being and reason: the same" says in another mode what the second underscoring of theprinciple of reason only implied, "Nothing is without reason," without however equating reason and Being as beingdevoid of difference. As for the second part of the formulation, although it is not simply juxtaposed to thepreceding, it is being excluded by it more than it excludes it. Indeed to write "Being: the abyss" allows the "is" tosink between the two, and amounts to thinking Being as "without reason" or "groundless" (Ab-grund) preciselybecause "Being and reason: the same." The oscillations of thought between one underscoring and the other are sofretful and rapid that we can no longer "represent" the accord of the two propositions. Yet this accord is nothingdialectical. What remains to be thought is that Being "is" without reason, insofar as Being and reason: the same. Inother words, "Insofar as Being is the ground that grounds, and only insofar, it has no ground" (ibid., 111, mod.).

Being is ground, it does not have a ground.

Must it then be concluded that the Heideggerian leap precipitates thought into emptiness, as the pure void or, in thewords of the Stranger of the Sophist of Elea, as ouch on, a nothing, understood as "the opposite of Being"(tounantion tou ontos, Sophist, 258e)? Not at all, for Being is rather me on,




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non-being, in the sense that it reveals its necessary withdrawal when a being emerges, appears in its presence and,therefore, is. "The leap, however, far from allowing thought to sink into a groundless abyss in the sense of a totalvacuum, is what alone allows thought to conform to Being qua Being, i.e., to the truth of Being" (PR, 111, mod.).

Such is the pull up permitted by the leap that returns to a ground left behind without hope and expectation of evercoming back. "Where have we leapt? Perhaps into an abyss? No, rather onto some ground. Some? No, the ground,upon which we live and die" (WCT, 41, mod.).

The Heideggerian meditation on the abyss is therefore as old as his meditation on the earth. Its single concern is tothink abyssal Being on the model of the earth that carries the entire sky upon itself, that is, as center. In the 1929Davos conference, the radical project that aimed at conquering "a firm ground for the fundamental problem ofmetaphysics" (KPM, 180, mod.) by starting from the question of Being was expressed vigorously, notwithstandinga lingering Hegelian terminology. Some accents, however, allow us to detect this singular race toward the abyss:"The question of the possibility of ontology forces us to make the proper foundation into an abyss" (ibid., 180).Heidegger further clarifies his meaning by explaining the exclusive aim to which his thinking has been assigned:"For my part, I am anxious to establish this sense of Being in general as central" (ibid., 185). Was Heidegger IIunfaithful to the lessons of Heidegger I, a view that may arise if one holds the turning as an unbridgeable rupturein his thinking itinerary? Not at all, if we understand Being as the center of the abyss. To such a notion we are ledby the analogy of the vortex, the ring-shaped questioning that evolves into a spiral:

The proposition of reason is the reason of the proposition. We are caught in a vortex. Does it really sweepus in? . . . If we could immediately move into the vortex and especially its center, this would be useful andgratifying. For in the eye of a hurricane, as they say, calm is supposed to reign. (PR, 1819, mod.)




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The image of the vortex was already involved in Section 38 of Sein und Zeit, which dealt with the extraction fromauthenticity and the movement of fallenness within the "they" (das Man). But it takes on a different connotation,still linked to the irresistible pull away from our original ground, yet is able to bring us closer to the center, whichis the quiet being around which the round carouses. The 1946 lecture "What are Poets for?" (read in memory of thetwentieth anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke's death) is a thinking path directed once more toward the abyss. Itstresses that the term "abyss" originally means "the soil and ground toward which, because it is undermost, a thingtends downward'' (PLT, 92). In the celebrations given by Hesiod and Hölderlin, the abyss is not the nebulousconfusion and the indifferent melee of what indiscriminately sinks into sludge. The abyss is characterized inHöderlin's hymn to the Titans as "the one that holds . . . everything" (ibid.) and as one of the most extremecontraries of the world. Borne by maternal earth, the abyss is the open that gathers the totality of things. In it onecan detect the motionless and silent peak around which everything turns.

We were asking what the meaning of Being as abyss is. The chiasmus of the principle of reason has led us towarda center that escapes the frenzied violence affecting the branches and that remains at rest, sheltered behind ahyphen or a colon. The chiasmus holds the world in balance, and as "center" (die Mitte), draws a being towarditself in order to free the carousing round of its rings. The last chapter of the Principle of Reason can now open,rather than close, on the circles of a thinking itinerary that takes rounds around Being, ground, and play. Beauty,nature, and world enunciate the free play inherent in Being, as founding the circle of the beings that are caughtwithin its pull and to which, consequently, Being provides a standing. Such is the quiet center of the world: "It isbecause every being remains determined by Being, namely by the ground, that such a being itself always rests onreasons, i.e., is grounded" (PR, 109, mod.). If we are to follow Heidegger toward the abyss at the center of thefigure of the cross, we must add that Being is the abyss in order to deny thought the right to seek, in its ownground, the ultimate rea-




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son of Being. Being has no reason for being. Similar to Heraclitus' child moving pawns on a chess board, in itsinnocent and free sovereignty, Being dispenses its gifts.

Here everything is at play.

Crossing Out

When at the beginning of one of his most important texts a thinker interrupts his itinerary in order to evoke apersonal anecdote, one may presume that such a diversion is not without a secret intention. In the first pages of hishomage to Ernst Jünger, "Über "die Linie"" published in 1955 in the form of a letter to the great German writer,Heidegger reminds his correspondent of one of their oldest conversations as he is thinking about the essence ofnihilism:

In writing this, I recall some words we sharedat the end of the last decade. We were walking on a forestpath, we took a rest at a place from which a smaller path proceeded only to lose itself further away. At thattime, I encouraged you to publish a new edition of Worker, without any change. You gave your approvalonly with hesitation, for reasons less in keeping with the content of the




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book than with the appropriateness of a second edition. Our discussion on Worker stopped there. I myselfhad not gained enough concentration to expose with sufficient clarity in the discussion the reasons thatsupported my opinion. (QB, 4547)

This scene already announces, and illustrates, the conflict between cross and line. I am thinking not only of theforest path that always accompanied the thinker of the Feldweg and of the Holzwege, but also of the crossroads,which is the earthly manifestation of the chiasmus, briefly glimpsed through the small path crossing the trail beforelosing itself. If the dialogue between the two men, at the crossroads of individual paths and history, is brief, thefollow-up given by Heidegger in the shape of a letter was to intersect with Jünger's position on nihilism in order tosketch out the original figure of Being. It is on this figure that it is necessary to relocate nihilism. Everythingindeed in the text Über "die Linie" (About "the Line") deals with the issue of crossing and this constitutesHeidegger's response to Jünger's work dedicated to Heidegger, Über die Linie (Over the Line), which attempted tosummarize views on nihilism by determining its ultimate "line," its "meridian,'' or its "zero point." Jünger wasasking whether the modern world can reach, or even go beyond, the zero limit of nihilism. The Heideggerianreversal consists in the first place in modifying from top to bottom the title and the general meaning of Jünger'stext by simply adding quotation marks around "die Linie." Whereas Jünger understood "Über die Linie" in themetaphysical sense of a "beyond" of the line (trans lineam), and suggested going beyond it in its "topography,"Heidegger envisages the Being of nihilism more originally according to the "topology" that accomplishes the returnto the origin "about" the line (de linea). With the contrasts "about/over," "trans"/"de," "über"/"über" all playingwith the graphic presence of the quotation marks, we grasp a Heideggerian change in the underscoring thatprepares a chiasmus:




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Your assessment of the situation under the title trans lineam and my inquiry into the site de linea belong toeach other; the former implies the latter and the latter continues to refer to the former. (QB, 37)

The crossed articulation, "über"/"über" "situation"/"site" makes manifest such a reciprocal belonging of twoattempts to think nihilism, one in the mode of the step forward beyond the line, the other in the mode of the stepbackward before the line. Heidegger insists on the complementarity of both approaches, each one calling upon theother: "The one helps the other, and vice versa, regarding the extent and the clarity of the experience'' (QB, 41).The issue is not at all to refute Jünger, or to overturn his positions in addressing to him a text whose title wassubverted. Quite on the contrary, Jünger's metaphysical project is made possible by returning to a more originalquestion concerning the site of metaphysics, because the original questioning itself equally needs Jünger'smetaphysics as its very underpinning in order subsequently to make the leap into its "unthought."

What, then, is the only way to reflect on the troubling phenomenon of nihilism in order to discover its essence? Itconsists in taking the path that leads to the house of Being, by trying to bring to bear upon speech "requirementsother than the change of an old terminology for a new one" (QB, 73). Such a constraint once more draws upon achiasmus to stress the importance of the approach to be attempted:

But the question into the house (Wesen) of Being crumbles if it does not renounce the language ofmetaphysics, because metaphysical representation prevents thinking the question into the house (Wesen) ofBeing. (ibid.)

We will not be able to read such a sentence, which plays upon both registers "being/Being," or even to see thetypographical figure of the chiasmus underscored by the author's italics, so long as we attempt to understand itwithin the representative language of metaphysics. We must not, for example, view as accidental, tentative, orinessential the converging indica-




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tions given by Heidegger and his discreet insistence in using a procedure that manifests in written form "whatshould spring to the eyes." Isn't there, however, a risk? Heidegger takes hold of one of Jünger's positions, "Themoment the line is crossed will reveal to us a new direction to Being (Zuwendung des Seins)," and turns it aroundimmediately: "I would like to ask whether it is not on the contrary the new direction to Being that will only revealto us the appropriate moment for crossing the line. A question that seems only to revert your proposition" (QB,73). We already knew that the mechanical reversal of the proposition, its "inversion," is ''always a bad procedure."But the Heideggerian question only appears to fall under its own verdict. The inversion indeed risks masking thenecessity of the true reversal that is made apparent by the crossed articulations Heidegger multiplies throughout theremainder of the text. Thus a vast chiasmus emerges:

We say of 'Being itself' too little when, saying 'Being,' we leave Being-present aside from Being-humanand thus misunderstand that this Being of humans itself constitutes 'Being.' Of human beings also we saytoo little when, saying Being (not Being-human), we posit the human being apart for its own sake andrelate it to Being only after first positing it apart. (ibid., 75)

But is it sufficient simply to posit "Being" and "human being" face to face by presupposing that their essences aremutually co-belonging, if we objectify them once more in metaphysical language?

Suddenly, Heidegger launches a coup by positing "the space of nothingness" in order to break "the spell of thesame." He is then able to distribute Being within its topology thanks to the cross-like sign (kreuzweiseDurchstreichung) that lays bare Being's tearing-apart [écartellement]. A first intertwining prepares the decisivereversal: "If turning-towards belongs to Being" in such a way that the latter rests upon the former, then "'Being' isresolved within turning-towards" (QB, 81). By "turning towards," we must now understand the four regions of thefourfold opened up by means of the four




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branches of the crossing. In this fashion we may be able to understand that Being "has returned within its essenceand has resolved itself in it."

Consequently, it is only possible to write Being in the following form:

This "cross-like sign," as Heidegger calls it, fulfills both a negative and a positive function. (1) It cancels theobjectifying interpretation of "Being" that always views the latter "in face-to-face position that holds itself withinitself and then as only occasionally bestowed upon human beings." The determination that was proper in theCartesian relation subjectum-objectum is inadequate here. (2) It allows us, by virtue of the ''cross-like sign," toevoke "the four regions of the quadrant (die vier Gegenden des Gevierts)," and most importantlyI am adding theitalics"their coming-together at the location where the cross operates" (deren Versammlung im Ort derDurchkreuzung) (QB, 83).

Although Heidegger mentions ten times the oblique crossing-out of Being, he never questions into the crossing ofthe cross, the fifth dimension of the fourfold in its deepest, which is nothing else than , that is to say,nothingness. The center of the cross does not amount to nothing, if, in its fourfold split, it is nothingness.

It simply.

What is at issue is therefore less a question of crossing the line than returning to the crossing of two lines shapinginto a cross. We are now led, after taking a step back from the metaphysical line and alignment [lignée], to thinkthe cross of the meditation on . must necessarily be crossed because it stands at the crossroads of itsown paths; crucified, it disappears at the confluence between the four regions that it opens up, and allows the secretmeditation of the thinker to be set-apart from the world.

The graphic representation of the cross, at the center of a work whose title with its quotation marks retrospectivelymay be deemed to harbor irony, is not exceptional in Heidegger. The fourth section of the fourth part of An




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Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) that bears the title "Being and the Ought," sketches out the fourfold schema ofthe limitations of Being as they present themselves in the history of metaphysics (IM, 196).

The orderly arrangement of these four determinations of Being has its origin at the center of the cross, where thePlatonic ousia, "now a decisive" (ibid., 194) term for Being, evokes the status of the goddess Hestia (Cratylus,401c: essian/ousian/Hestia). The four tearings disjoin the unity of Being into a fourfold tearing [déchirure],without ever allowing a resorption of the chorismos. However the unity of Being emerges reinforced from thistearing-apart [écartellement], so that "Being [which the four sunderings] encircle, must itself be transformed into acircle surrounding and founding the totality of beings" (ibid., 204).

In another mode, the chiasmus of Being is to be found also in the lectures of "On the Way to Language," whereHeidegger sets out to manifest the original figure of what he names "directing speech" (Leitwort). On fouroccasions in the first two lectures he uses the paratactic articulation of colon and hyphen in order to present thefollowing alternating formulations: ''The essence of speech:the speech of the essence" (Das Wesen der Sprache:Die Sprache des Wesens) (OWL, 72, 76, 94). This is not an "artificially obtained reversal," "an empty reversal," but"a combination that addresses us." Then Heidegger introduces directing speech in the following way:

Das Wesen der Sprache:Die Sprache des Wesens.




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Speech and essence, essence and speech unfold their world with respect to the symbol of the colon. It is possible torender the chiasmus more clearly by highlighting the sign of the origin of directing speech:

It must be noted that Heidegger interprets the silent sign of the colon as a substitute for the "minuscule 'is'" that thelecture brings up again in its final page.

Two phrases held apart by a colon, each the inversion of the other. If the whole is to be a guide-word, thenthe colon must indicate that what precedes it opens into what follows it. Within the whole there plays adisclosure and a beckoning that point to something which we, coming from the first turn of phrase, do notsuspect in the second; for the second phrase is more than just a rearrangement of the words of the first.(OWL, 94)

The crossing of Being, the fourfold figure of the sundering of ousia, directing speech that alternates the twoformulations in order to unfold the multiple harmonies of speech and absence, always utter the journeyingcharacterat a crossroads of four pathsof this thought, a thought that no longer seeks to overcome metaphysics but togain access to its original sojourn.

As soon as one favors the setting-apart operation of the chiasmus and speech is ruled by it, all the paths of thoughtlead to Being.

The Chiasmus of the Sacred

No doubt it is now time to open a few insights into the cosmic function of the chiasmus, for its import is not indeedthe




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mere rhetorical operation to which it owes its name. Because the chiasmus is the place of encounter par excellence,it presents Heideggerian thought with the unique opportunity to commemorate the history from which it emergedand to reclaim the ground of its own tradition.

At the dusk of Greek thought we may imagine the poet, carried away on his cart with a burning axis spinningaround the axle-wheel, driving toward gates opening unto night or day, with "above a cross beam [and] below astone threshold." Near the gate with its heavy doors sits Dikè, the keeper of the sacred crossroads (Poem, Fragment1). Even though Dikè's orders may not be transgressed (one may not travel the path of non-Being), such a roadnonetheless crosses the hard path of Being, according to the very words of the goddess. In Parmenides, the firstencounter between Being and thought unfolds in the unity of noein and einai, while the destiny dispensed by Moiraaccords the fold of Being and beings. From that time onward for Heidegger, Western history is the "dispensation ofthe fold" (Das Geschick der Zwiefalt) (EGT, 97), to which the 1952 semester lecture course, What Is CalledThinking?, is almost entirely devoted in its attention to Parmenides' sentence: Chre to legein te noiein t' eonemmenai. The paratactic articulation imposed upon the Fragment: "Necessary: such as speech, thought too: abeing/Being'' following the same process of the colon, which holds "the essence of speech" and "the speech of theessence" at a distance, suggests considering their empty, yet decisive, location wherein eon and emmenai aretightly bound together in their duplicity. "For the saying speaks where there are no words, in the interval that theyleave open and that is designated by the colon" (WCT, 186, mod.).

Let us leave aside the Parmenidian articulation of a being/Being, more particularly the "participation" (metoche)according to which "a being has its being in Being, and Being persists as the Being of a being" (ibid., 221).Instead, let us turn, after a sort of leap, to the figure of the chiasmus that speaks most to the eyes. To borrowHeidegger's terms, it is required that such a figure "need to make a leap of vision"




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(ibid., 233) in order to free the power of the sacred contained within it. We must take the chiasmus literally.

In order to heed the advice, we must leap from Heidegger to Plato, who was the first thinker of the West and, like agood artisan, shaped the chiasmus by properly cutting and articulating its four branches and by animating it notwith the rhetorical movement of speech but with the revolution of the entire cosmos. It is well-known that thedemiurge of the Timaeus used harmonics to shape the soul of the world: First, he took "the indivisible substancethat always consists in the invariable," the eidos of the Same, and the "divisible substance that is in the bodies," theeidos of the Other. Then he mixed them together with an intermediary substance obtained from the previous twoaccording to a given proportion (35a) so as to obtain a series of harmonic numbers comparable to a sort of gaugeor scale that he sliced in two, lengthwise.

This entire compound he divided lengthwise into two parts which he joined together at the center like theletter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the pointopposite to their original meeting point, and, comprehending them then in a uniform revolution upon thesame axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. (36bc)

Let us not consider here how the exterior circle of the Same (equator) and the interior circle of the Other (ecliptic)with opposite movements rule over the movement of the fixed stars and planets. Instead, let us be reminded of thepsychogonic and cosmological function that associates the Platonic myth to the letter chi. Its task is one ofanimating the world harmonically by making it consonant with itself. 37 The most remarkable feature of this text isthat Plato uses the cross as a sign referring back to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs revealed by the god Thot, whoseimportance as the inventor of writing is reported in the Phaedrus. Originally, the letter chi belongs to the sacred. Inhis Commentary on the Timaeus, Proclus




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reveals the following concerning the constitution of the soul of the world:

Concerning the figure chi that resulted from the intersection (prosbolè) of both branches, it has a greatconcordance both with the universe and the soul. Indeed, as Porphyrus recounts, there was a similar sign inthe Egyptians where the chi was surrounded by a circle, that represented the symbol of the soul of theworld. 38

The symbol of the chiasmus can be found at the core of the myth of Er, in book 10 of the Republic, to evoke thecrossroads of the world where the souls gather for the last Judgment. The son of Armenios tells of his arrival in the"meadow" (ton leimona, 614c), this "remarkable location" (topon tina daimonion) "where there were two openingsside by side in the earth, and above and over against them in the heaven two others. . . . Judges were sitting in theinterval (metaxy) between these four, and after every judgment they bade the righteous journey to the right andupward through the heavens . . . and the unjust to take the road to the left and downward. . . .'' (614c). Thishierarchical location, which joins together earth and sky, opposes therefore the two roads on the right, alwaysbeneficial and ascending from the underworld to the meadow and from the meadow to the heavens and the tworoads on the left, always baleful, descending from paradise to the meadow and from the meadow to theunderworld. We must note with Proclus39 that the disposition of the four canyons prevents them from adopting thesymmetry left-left/right-right. Instead, they form the crossed branches of a chi articulating their juncture where thejudges sit.




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Proclus then points out the analogy between the chiasmuses of the Republic and those of the Timaeus: "The entirefigure of canyons that imitates the holes of snakes (cheias)" is perfectly adequate to the original nature of the soul."It is certain in any case that after the Demiurge of the Timaeus first divided the single right of harmonic numbersand made two rights out of it, he is said to have bound them together in their middle so as to form a letter chi,"having impressed at the heart of the essence" of the souls such figure as adequate to the soul. The reason is thatthe principal monad of the souls was composed of such chiasmuses, as the character designating it indicates.'' 40

Generally speaking, if one considers the totality of Plato's eschatological myths in order to propose the law of theircomposition, one will have to acknowledge the existence of a structure of chiasmus to designate the "demoniclocation" or "meadow" of the Republic (615e); or to designate the "meadow" (leimon) of the Gorgias (524a), "atthe crossroads from which two paths lead, one to the Isles of the Blessed, the other to Tartarus;" or that "certainplace" (tina topon, Pheado, 107d), in which originates the path to Hades "which contains many forkings andcrossroads" (108a); or the geography of the inferno still in the same dialogue, with its group of four rivers opposedpair to pair (Oceanus and Achero River, Pyriphlegeton and Cocytus, 112e), meandering in the underworld aroundAcherusian Lake, which is like the center of the underworld. Proclus is therefore justified in claiming in hisCommentary on the Republic that

three terms, 'demonic location,' 'crossroads,' and 'meadow,' designate the same location in the cosmos. Thedemonic location is in the middle of sky and earth, such that the crossroads and meadow are there too.Now, in the middle of these two, there is nothing but ether. . . . Consequently, demonic location, meadow,and crossroads are nothing but the middle (to meson) of the entire sky according to Plato. (ibid., 133, 110,7677)

The chiasmus is indeed the center of the world: its four branches bind together the microcosm (the soul) and the




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macrocosm (the universe) in order to ensure the correspondence of the totality. The primordial symbol of the Xinthe shape of the Greek cross, the reverted cross, or the cross of Saint Andrewimmediately expresses the perennityof a cosmic structure or archetype to which Platonic thought is probably not the only one in attesting.

Let us only mention, without special emphasis, that according to Olivier Beigbeder's Lexique des Symboles(Lexicon of Symbols) such a figure seems to originate in the primitive sign obtained by crossing both hands, whichproduces specially the Roman X, a symbol that represents the set of ten fingers. Two unexpected extensions of itare found in the arithmetic symbol for multiplication (x) and in the algebraic expression of the unknown, X.Heidegger was therefore well-inspired when, in mentioning the fourfold in Building, Dwelling, Thinking, he notedthat Western thought "represents the thing (das Ding) as an unknown X" (PLT, BDT, 153) since it is true that thething appears where the fourfold comes together.

Finally, a curious observation by Olivier Beigbeder may remind us of the legitimacy of the cross-like sign inHeidegger which, far from being reducible to a negative sign, rather anticipates the mystery of Being.

Let us consider a natural and quite elementary reflex: If we want to forcefully reject an inadequate term, wewill not draw merely one line across it, but two oblique ones that cross each other. 41

4. The Round

In the golden-blossoming treeprevail earth and sky,the divine ones and the mortals.Their unitary fourfold is the world."World" is no longer a word of metaphysics.(PLT, L, 201, mod.)




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The Ring of the World

A fine frame to a picture brings(Though from a brush illustrious)A charm strange and mysteriousSecluding it from other things.(Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, XL, A Phantom, trans. L.P. Shanks)

Should we now entrust poetic Saying with the true measure of the world in order to allow Heideggerian essentialspeech to resonate in us? With the advent of the fourfold (Das Geviert) it seems that a new threshold has beencrossed, beyond the limits of representation, with no possibility of return. We have entered the round of a thinkingthat intertwines the diverging paths of philosophy and poetry. When the things of the world are gathered togetherand accord their Being to the most simple speech, the clever distinctions of logic are perhaps not extremelymeaningfulblessed thinking finds its own way.

The frame (Rahmen) is what maintains the order of the world in its original connection and bestows it withsovereign equilibrium. The round is what animates the beauty of the world within the play of appearances andbestows rhythm upon them as a shared gift. No conflict exists between frame and round, circle and square, butthere is the intertwining of the same that weaves together according to an immutable jointure:

If the fourfold is the measure that gives humans their dwelling among things, it does not originate in a thinkingconstruction; the modalities of fabrication or constitution turn out to be radically inadequate to apprehend theessence of the Geviert. It is the free and originary disposition of the world that offers itself as world. Along hisprudent exploration of this figure of the totality, Heidegger allows the four-




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fold to come forth in several steps, according to the natural progression of thought that always originates in theearth.

As seen previously, the originary model of the fourfold refers back to the four "cardinal points" or "celestialregions" (Himmelsgegenden) of Section 22 of Sein und Zeitorient, south, occident, and midnightwhich assign the"locations'' (Gegenden) around which the things of daily use are given their space. "These celestial regions, whichneed not have any geographical meaning as yet, provide the 'whither' beforehand for every special way of givingform to the regions which places can occupy" (SZ, 103; BT, 137). Heidegger remains somewhat evasive, however,concerning the four major points of the cardinal crossing, whose traditional symbolism is mentioned nowhere inthis text, even though this reserve gives us an indication of the fundamental orientation of his thought.

It is eight years later, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," that Heidegger sketches for the first time the strugglebetween earth and world, the play [jeu] of the contrasts of the fourfold. To the keeping of the earth, named first, isopposed the "immensity of the sky," or the bright opening of the world. Less in the forefront are "the humans," and"the god" whose encounter is secured in the Greek temple (PLT, OWA, 42). The community of earth, sky, mortals,and god seems to be less inspired by the disposition of the cardinal points than by the distribution of Empedocleanelements. Set on a promontory, the temple brings out "the resplendence and the brightness of the stone, the grace ofthe sun," "the invisible space of the air," and "the surf of the sea water." The




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equipoise of the four elements and of the totality of living beings enables us to hear what the Greek word physissays in connection with the earth that harbors everything that is born (EGT, AF, 15). In the native harmony of theHeideggerian world, the earth is always what gives the fundamental note.

At the same time as he evokes the fifth Platonic element, the ether, in the 1936 Schelling lecture course, hementions kosmos "systema ex ouranou kai ges," the jointure of sky and earth (inneres Gefüge) (Sch, 26), thusconstituting the first coupling in the fourfold. Such a jointure is also named the "frame" (Rahmen). This notionshould not be understood, as in Baudelaire's poem, as "a limit applied upon beings from the outside," but as theinternal belonging of the four regions that come into connection. Also, the essay on ''Hölderlin and the Essence ofPoetry" from the same year (1936) mentions the second pair, starting from a deep meditation on the place of thepoet who inhabits the strange interval, "between the gods and mortals" (EB, HEP, 288, mod.). The following essayson Hölderlin, "As on a festival day" (1940) and "Remembrance" (1943), bear testimony to Hölderlin's fourfold,obvious particularly in the poem "Wie wenn am Feiertage." Each time these essays name one of the followingpairs: sky/earth, or sky/abyss; immortals/mortals, or God/human. "Remembrance," however, attempts to bringtogether both pairs within one series for the first time:

[Homecoming] is the schooling during which what is learnt is the free use of what the sons of the earthhave as the ownmostand that of which they have as the ownmost, the dwellers of the sky too can make use.(HD, 117)

The movement of the sentence itself does not call for a chiasmus, but allows us to think "the being toward oneanother of earth and sky as the site of the wedding feast of men and gods" (PLT, WPF, 93), as it is superblytermed in "What Are Poets For?" (1946). The process of crossed articulation, which is present in numerous texts ofthat time, does not yet affect the irreproachable symmetry of the four elements.




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The crystallization of the fourfold under the form of a rigorous chiasmus appears in 1949 in the four Brem lecturespresented collectively under the title Einblick in das, was ist (Insight into what is): Let us be reminded that only thefirst, Das Ding (The Thing) and the last, Die Kehre (The Turning), were published. The Thing, which in my viewis the most secretive and the most essential text of the Heideggerian work, imperceptibly brings each of the fourinto the crossing of the fourfold [quadrille] through the invocation of the most simple action, the pouring of waterinto a cup.

Let us allow the thing to stand on its own, this jug of water for example, and let us question what it is. Thephenomenological investigation into the thing begins with the meditation on the void to which the potter gives aface when he or she shapes the edges and the bottom of the base upon the wheel. Here too, everything begins withthe earth. First, the potter carefully selects the type of earth with which to prepare the clay, then works it and givesit a shape at the same time as that ceremonial "status" that permits the jug to "hold within itself as jug." The jug hasnow been put on the table, it can now pour the liquid the cup awaits. In the water the jug begins to pour therepasses the remembrance of the spring, born from the ''wedding of sky and earth." The fire of the sky and the foodfrom the earth are equally present in the wine that is poured. The first coupling is given: "In the jugness of the jugindwell earth and sky" (Im Wesen des Kruges weilen Erde und Himmel) (PLT, T, 172). What is poured out in thecup is a drink destined to quench the thirst, or to animate festivals. When the jug pours the drink, it silently callsfor mortals quenching their thirst, but also for the immortal gods accepting a libation. The gesture of offering to thegods makes manifest the gift of sacrifice.

Let us pay more attention to the dramatic rise that, for the first time in the Heideggerian work, was to tie the knotbinding the community of the four in the very pouring of the drink. The first two paragraphs introduce the earth(Erde) and the sky (Himmel), the mortals (die Sterblichen) and the divine ones (die Göttlichen) all separately fromone another, while the last paragraph evokes through a rigorous paral-




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lelism the series of crossed doublings in the sovereign gradation of five propositions and concludes with the adventof the fourfold.

1.Im Geschenk des Gusses, der ein Trunk ist, weilen nach ihrer Weise die Sterblichen (In the pouringthat offers a drink, it is according to their way that the mortals dwell).

2.Im Geschenk des Gusses, der ein Trunk ist, weilen nach ihrer Weise die Göttlichen, die das Geschenkdes Schenkens as das Geschenk der Spende zurückempfangen, (In the pouring that offers a drink, it isin their way that the divine ones dwell; they receive back, in the pouring of the libation, the gift theyhad made of its being poured out).The first pair is thus introduced according to the symmetry:

"pouring mortals / pouring divine ones" A B A B

3.Im Geschenk des Gusses weilen je verschieden die Sterblichen und die Göttlichen (In the pouring ofthe offered liquid, it is in different ways that the mortals and the divine ones dwell).

4.Im Geschenk des Gusses weilen Erde und Himmel (In the pouring of the offered liquid dwell theearth and the sky).A second symmetry puts the two pairs in parallel:

"pouring mortals, divine ones / pouring earth, sky" A B B' / A C C'

The four previous phases then unite their determinations in the fifth phase, which breaks all parallelsand forges the chiasmus of the four. Such is the harmonic reconciliation of the opposites in theallotment of the world.

5.Im Geschenk des Gusses weilen zumal Erde und Himmel, die Göttlichen und die Sterblichen. DieseVier gehören, von sich her einig, zusammen. Sie sind, allem Anwesende zuvorkommend, in eineinziges Geviert eingefaltet (Earth and sky dwell in the gift of the outpouring. In the gift of theoutpouring earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once. These four, at onebecause of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they areenfolded into a single fourfold) (PLT, T, 173).




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Brought in by the leitmotif, Im Geschenk des Gusses, which opens each of its series, the properly musicalcrescendo of the passage is remarkably constructed. From the pouring of the drink, which awakens the complicityof the beings connected by the sacrifice, the mortals move forward first to the encounter of the divine ones. Theyare both, however, separated by their different ways of dwelling within the very act of pouring the drink, somethingunderscored in the parallel construction of the two sentences: A-B/A-B'. The third sentence unites them within thesame sacrifice: A-B/B'. In the next proposition Heidegger introduces the regions of the world inhabited by thebeings present in the libation, always according to the parallel disposition distribution: Mortalsdivine ones/earthsky(B-B'/C-C'). But the reversal of the last sentence constitutes the originary chiasmus of the fourfold as it replacesthe symmetry mortals-divine ones and earth-sky, whose order has been reversed by the crossing mortalsdivineones/divine onesmortals according to the following schema: A-C C'/B B'.

In addition the decisive expression is reinforced by the use of the word zumal (together), itself strengthened in thelast sentence by the terms in ein einziges Geviert eingefaltet, the simplicity of a single fourfold.

From then on, all the mentions of the Geviert invariably originate from a circular movement of ascent toward whatis highest, followed by a descent toward the ground. Let us consider for example the approach adopted in TheThing, which is the most perfect. Starting in the earth through which its source flows, thought encounters theimmensity of the sky that bestows the goodness of rain. It articulates the chiasmus on this point by naming theinhabitants of the sky, the divine ones, before returning to the mortals, the children of the earth. Such is thegathering (in high German, Thing) allowed by the very Being of the "thing" (Ding).

In a magnificent page that allows echoes of Hölderlin's thought to resonate with the recollection of some quiteancient categories of philosophy, Heidegger exposes the primordial connection between:




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the earth that carries and nurtures those to whom she grants rest;

the sky, which sketches out the movement of the world with the courses of the sun and of the stars;

the divine ones, whose signs come to reveal to humans the identity of divinity;

and the mortals, who alone can take their death upon themselves and reveal an irreducible alterity.

By thus following the crossed intertwining of the four we have gradually entered the round of the Geviert, whereagain we encounter the ring of The Principle of Reason that endlessly comes back upon itself, yet never closes andis freed in its coiling motion.

The quadrate (Die Vierung) presences (west, unfolds) as the appropriating mirror-play of the betrothed,each to the other in simple oneness. The quadrate presences as the worlding of world. The mirror-play ofworld is the round dance of appropriating (der Reigen des Ereignens). Therefore, the round dance does notencompass the four like a hoop. The round dance is the ring that joins while it plays a mirroring. (PLT, T,180)

There will be no higher level than this enigma. If we know how to risk "the step backwards" (der Schritt zurück)from representative thought toward commemorative thought, we will be entering the correspondence (Entsprechen)where the most simple thingsthe jug and the bench, the bridge and the plowunveil their ontological structure withmodest ontic presence: the gathering within the ring of fellowship.

Dwelling

It is between 1950 and 1960 that ten or so texts came in the wake of The Thing to evoke the mirroring of thefourfold by ostensibly articulating the chiasmus: The Turn (1949), Speech (1950), and most of all Building,Dwelling, Thinking (1951), using entire passages from The Thing; allusions can be found




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in Poetically Man Dwells (1951), What is called Thinking? (1952), Serenity (1955); then a belated, yet sustained,echo can be heard in On the Way to Language (195758), Hebel, Friend of the House (1958), and Earth and Sky inHölderlin (1959); as for the text of the Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture "Time and Being" (1962), it onlymakes three brief allusions.

The totality of these texts suggests with great sobriety that the speaking of the fourfold is the only speech (logos)that knows how to gather the things of the world and to lead them toward the simplicity of their Being. As the purenomination of the earth and sky, of the divine ones and the mortals, it escapes every attempt of explanation on thepart of philosophy or science because it limits itselt to bearing witness to what is, in an altogether differentlanguage. Heidegger is probably the only contemporary thinker who speaks the world by keeping in memory thesecrete unity of the Greek kosmos, which designates order, radiance, and attire: The order is the communalpresence of contraries; radiance is the light of the sky; attire is the gold that makes the one wearing it shine forth.Whereas metaphysics and technology, which proceed from such a kosmos obscurely, are assigned to a measurelessuniverse through their concern for rationalization, the originary counterpoint of the fourfold remains obstinatelyfaithful to the measure of the world. Heidegger's thought is perhaps out-of-season because it is a thought ofmeasure, limit, and finitude in an epoch whento borrow Nietzsche's wordshuman beings have relinquished safehorizons and become inebriated with the infinite. As they are strangers to Apollonian equilibrium, modern times donot form a "world"; rather they show themselves to be "unworldly." "As today's thought ever more resolutely, evermore exclusively becomes calculus, it sets-into-work whatever is available to it, force and 'motivations,' in theattempt to calculate how the human being will soon settle the 'cosmos,' i.e., 'wordless cosmic space'" (OWL, 84).What, then, is the ethos of the human being in its truth? When Heidegger established in Building, Dwelling,Thinking, that "dwelling . . . is the basic characteristic of Being in keeping with which mortals exist" (PLT, BDT,160), and that therefore ''to be a human being means to be on




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the earth as mortal" (ibid., 147), he returns to, and deepens, the ancient approach of Sein und Zeit. Section 12 of thebook indeed introduces the existential concept of in-der-Welt-sein (Being-in-the-world) and shows that theGerman preposition "in" derives from the word "innan" (to dwell, to reside) and that the first person of the verb "tobe," "bin" (I am), is connected to the preposition ''bei" (next to, close to), so that "ich bin" means indeed "I dwell, Ireside." "'Being in' is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-worldas its essential state" (BT, 80; SZ, 54). One must therefore give full weight to Heidegger's proposition according towhich mortals are in the fourfold when they are dwelling. To detect in speech the "precinct of Being (templum),"as in What Are Poets For?, or as "the house of Being," as in The Letter on Humanism, in no way amounts toapproaching "Being" from the supposedly poetic image of the house; rather, "it is from the essence of Being,thought according to what it is, that one day we will be able to think what a 'house' is, and what 'dwelling' is" (LH,237). Now dwelling has the fundamental feature of what Heidegger names "das Schonen" (securing, heeding):Here we understand not so much the reserve employed to avoid being blunt with someone as the considerationwith which we treat beings in order simply to let them be what they are. The considerate attention of heeding andsecuring is the measured comportment that we adopt toward everything close to us, in the first place the things ofour environment. Dwelling for the mortals consists in the securing/heeding of the fourfold by allowing earth andsky, the divine ones and the mortals to return to their own Being, and in the safekeeping of the things that are whatthey are in the unity of the four.

Following Heidegger, let us consider the four modes of securing/heeding, so as to elicit the directing line and,through it, the essence of dwelling.

1.The mortals dwell when they heed the earth, i.e., when working they do not exploit it and allow it torest within itself. They allow it to remain what it is: the earth.




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2.The mortals dwell when they heed the sky, i.e., when confronting the world they do not upset themeasured rhythms of the movement of time. Thus they allow it to remain what it is: the sky.

3.The mortals dwell when they heed the divine ones, i.e., when awaiting signs from the holy, they donot turn their eyes away and do not fabricate idols in lieu of such signs. They allow them to remainwhat they are: the divine ones.

4.Finally, the mortals dwell when they heed the mortals, i.e., when safekeeping the power of death theydo not elude it and conduct their own being to a serene departure. They allow themselves to remainwhat they are, mortals.

On four occasions, the heeding by the mortals grants them a dwelling on the earth, under the sky, facing the divineones, along with the mortals. As we can see, dwelling heeds and secures the access of the four to the mortalsthrough the interplay of prepositions that manifest four forms of activity: "to save" the earth, upon which themortals rest; "to gather" the sky, under which they reside; "awaiting" the divine ones, in front of whom signsconfront them; "to lead'' mortals, with whom they live toward their authentic death. The four prepositions heed andsecure the gathering unity of the proximity of everything that comes in the world in a unique mode. More preciselystill, heeding the fourfold as liberation, welcoming, awaiting, and leadership, is what makes the dwelling ofmortals into the dwelling of Being: the learning of proximity. It is between these four modes of presence that manmust secure the location of his dwelling in order to remove the constant risks of uprootedness (Heimatlosigkeit)and resist the ravages of nihilism.

The fourfold modality of heeding-securing is the essential feature of the act of "dwelling" (das Wohnen) andresponds to each of the four traits of the fourfold itself, the measure of the earth, the measure of the sky, themeasure of the divine ones,




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and the measure of mortals. Here modalities and measures radically escape attempts at a rational explanationseeking to manageas seen previouslythe foundation of everything that is. Now, the fourfold and heeding-securingare comparable to the rose of Angelus Silesius that answers to no "why." The causal categories of representativethinking hit upon the quiet "it is thus" of the fourfold. Just like in order to happen at all, the blooming of the flowerdoes not need knowing the "reasons why" it is blooming, similarly the blooming of the fourfold has no need ofknowing the ''reasons why" there is blooming in order to come to bloom. Let us consider the four Aristotelianmodes of causality: the material cause, the formal cause, the final cause, and the efficient cause. The 1953 lectureon The Question Concerning Technology inquires into the origin of the unity of the four causes, which through thecourse of centuries led philosophy and science to impose the reign of the "quadruple mode" of production. Thesystem of the four causes certainly evokes the systema ex ouranou kai ges te kai anthropon kai theon of The Thing,on two accounts. First, on account of the unity and in the solidarity of the four causal determinations of the "act[for] which one claims responsibility" (Verschulden); and second, on account of the examples chosen to illustratethe process of production: a sacrificial silver chalice in one case, a jug that pours the drink into the cup in the other.One could not push the analogy any further. The four causes of the production are the modalities of themetaphysical unfolding "gathered" within the essence of the Gestell, the Enframing of modern technology whichthreatens to hide a more originary unveiling, that of the thing. In contrast, the counterpoint of the Gestell comes topass in the four allotments of the Geviert, which frees the truth of Being (TB, Sem, 51). What calls for thought stillis the obscure relationship between the Ge-viert and the Ge-stell, between the causality of the Cause and theheeding-securing of the Thing. What still calls for thinking is the measure that gathers the mortals on their way ofdwelling in the world in a quadruple way, and lets them come to be what they are in their ownmost.




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The Accord

Could it be that we ran out of possibilities concerning the requirement of the origin for thought after ascending tothe fourfold? This is not yet the case. To be sure, there is a great risk in conceiving of the fourfold as a universaland encompassing structure that would lock up the world of immediate experience by unifying its various aspectsafter the fact. We would then stand, with respect to the Geviert, as in front of any object of thought whatever,expressed though it may be in a different language. It would be subjected nonetheless to the same objectifying gazeof metaphysics that assigns things to the decrees of reason. Hence, for Heidegger, there is no higher level than thefourfold and yet the fourfold itself is not the measure of what comes to pass. Quite the contrary, the advent is themeasure of the fourfold. With Ereignis thought completes its radical movement of return toward the origin of whatis. The characteristic features of Ereignisa word I shall translate as "advent" or "appropriating event"wereelaborated according to the seminar on the Lecture "Time and Being" between 1936 and 1938 (TB, Sem, 43) oreven earlier if we are to believe an indication present in On the Way to Language. The author states, in a noteadded in 1959, that he has been using the word "Ereignis" in his manuscripts "for




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more than 25 years." Inasmuch as we can be sure of the exact years for the writings of these texts, this would takeus back to around 1934, at the time of the writing of The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), of the lecture course onSchelling (1936), of the first lecture courses on Nietzsche (193637), and of the first lectures on Hölderlin (1936). InHölderlin and the Essence of Poetry one finds for instance the following remark about language and the opening ofthe world: "Language is not a tool at [our] disposal, rather it is that event (Ereignis) which disposes of the supremepossibility of human existence" (EB, HEP, 27677).

Throughout his itinerary Heidegger thought Ereignis in originary fashion from the major meditation on Heraclitus.Consider the lecture "Logos" (1951) which comes as the result of the lecture courses on Heraclitus from 1944.Following Fragment 50 of the Greek thinker, Heidegger says, "if it is not mebut meaning (tou Logou)that youheard, it is wise then to state in the same sense (homologein): Everything is One." Heidegger seeks to think therelationship of things in their plurality to the unique singularity of the One. Hen Panta indicates the direction ofbelonging rendered possible by the Logos: it speaks the contrasting plays of the regions of the world that remainedtensed in the fire of their opposition. In order to highlight the confrontation of the manifold moving things, tapanta, and of the gathering unity, Hen, Heidegger first unfolds the chiasmus that is implicit in the sentence andthus makes it conform more "to the matter thought here, and likewise for the style of Heraclitean speech. HenPanta: One: All, All: One" (EGT, L, 69).

The duplication imposed on both Heraclitean terms put in presence by the colon of the paratactic articulationobviously underscores the cosmic function of the chiasmus. But the circularity of the assignation of the unity to thetotality, and of the totality to the unity, will be manifested in the second place by a new crossed disposition thatreveals at the same time the gathering essence of the Logos: "'Hen Panta' says what the Logos is. Logos says how'Hen Panta' essentially occurs. Both are the same" (ibid., 71). Thanks to the chiasmus, the gathering unity ofHeraclitean thought and of




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Heideggerian writing finds itself exposed in its unifying power, as well as in the allotment (Moira) over which itrules. Then, in the light emerging from this interpretation, the flash of lightning strikes, lightning that governs thetotality. By calling upon Fragment 64 "Ta de Panta oiakizei Keraunos"which he translates, "But all things(present), lightning governs them (by leading them to presence)"Heidegger unveils the instant irruption of Ereignis:

Lightning abruptly lays before us in an instant everything present in the light of its presencing. Thelightning named here steers. It brings all things forward to their designated, essential place. (EGT, L, 72)

It is at the center of the chiasmus, at the heart of the gathering unity of the fourfold, that the appropriation ofdestiny (Geschick) fulgurates: If the speech of the mortals comes out with the same meaning (homologein) as logos(meaning) of what is, i.e., conforms to the crossing of Hen Panta and Logos, then the unique lightning flash allowseach thing to be what it is in its ownmost. Fifteen years later, Eugen Fink was to borrow the Heideggerian analogy:

Just as lightning in the night momentarily flashes up and, in the brightness of the gleam, shows things intheir articulated outline, so lightning in a deeper sense brings to light the multiple things in their articulatedgathering. (HS, 5)

The lightning flash is the knot that gathers and pulls the fourfold within itself because its center, as is indicated inthe essay on "Earth and Sky of Hölderlin," is not one of the four: "The middlethus called because it is mediatingisneither the sky nor the earth, neither god nor mortal" (HD, 163). In connection with the hymn "As on a festivalday," Heidegger names it das Heilige (the holy, the sacred). In it we see the sacred flashing of Being that allowseach of the four to appear as it is (ereignen) under the gaze of the others. Of this fulgurating eventwhen everythingis silenced, as things show




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forth their outlines and are instantaneously gathered within unitywe can decline only the pure identity: dasEreignis ereignet (the lightning flash reveals everything in its ownmost). The 1962 lecture "Time and Being" (TB,EP, 24) repeats verbatim the proposition stated in 1941 in Recollection in Metaphysics.

Can we say nothing else but tautology? The 1957 lecture on The Principle of Identity allows us to get closer toEreignis. Once more Heidegger takes his clue from fragment 5 of Parmenides:

To gar auto noein estin te kai einai(The same is indeed thinking as well as Being).

so as to apprehend the co-belonging of thought and Being as identity. A first chiasmus detects the ambiguity of thesentence, which can be understood in two ways: "Being is determined by an identity as a characteristic of thatidentity. Later on, however, identity as it is thought of in metaphysics is represented as a characteristic of Being"(ID, PI, 28). What is really the case with this evasive identity of thinking and Being? If we interpret is as co-belonging, it is possible for us either to underscore the co-belonging of the two, i.e., the unique bond that bindsthem together, or to underscore their co-belonging, i.e., the openness that puts them in their presence. By dint ofthe change in the underscoring we are able to "apprehend this 'co-' starting from belonging instead of representingthe belonging from the unity of the 'co-'." Is this new chiasmus nothing more than a "futile and artificial play onwords" (ibid., 29)?

Quite the contrary. It allows us to set aside representative thought in one leap and to turn toward the originaryrelation of man and Being. It could be named co-belonging, constellation of Being and man, or trans-propriation.Through the leap we are thrown into the center of the chiasmus, where Ereignis fulgurates. "We must experiencesimply this owning in which man and Being are delivered over to each other; that is, we must enter into what wecall the event of co-propriation" (ibid., 36, mod.).




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Where have we been led? To the most simple thing to be offered to thoughtto the simple (das Einfache) and itsinexhaustible force that allows us to maintain the four in the unity of the fourfold, to the "co-propriation" (dasEreignis) that delivers to us what is nearest to usto the lightning bolt that reveals all-at-once that if Ereignis hasnothing to do with identity such as logic conceives it, identity on the other hand has everything in common withEreignis. Did not a brief and special allusion to Plato at the beginning of the lecture allow us to suspect it? In theSophist (254d) concerning the mutual encounter between "Being," "movement," and "rest," the stranger indicatesthat each of these differs from the others, and is "itself to itself selfsame'' (auto d'eauto tauton)and not merely"itself the same" (auto tauton). Since the dative eauto underscores that each of the kinds of Being is restored toitself, don't we have reason to believe that with Plato we have to think identity on a par with appropriation, and notappropriation on a par with identity? Ereignisa word deemed as untranslatable as the Greek logos or the ChineseTao according to the lecture bearing that very titleis the lightning bolt that safeguards the community of thethinking paths and the copropriation of the four. As gift and correspondence, it is the Same that accords Being and,because of such a feature, may be termed "sovereign accord"; at the same time, it holds together earth and sky,gods and mortals within the ring, it is firm hold. We could say that Ereignis firmly holds the accord most proper toBeing.

Therefore it might be useless to move upstream of Ereignis in order to find out what it is. "What is Ereignis?" is aquestion that is halted on the hurdle of its very possibility of accord. For it is necessary that Being first be grantedto us so that we may accord our question with Ereignis, which itself is originary accord. If we think of thesimplicity of Being as what gives us the world in an accord and accords us with it, then it is no longer Beingconceived as a supreme concept that determines the adventin the sense that Ereignis is this or thatbut the adventthat freely grants Being.




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Being would then be a mode of Ereignis, not Ereignis a mode of Being (Dann wäre das Sein eine Art desEreignisses und nicht das Ereignis eine Art des Seins). (TB, 21, mod.)

Once more Heidegger is careful when dealing with this "reversal" (Umkehrung): Here the chiasmus can no longerplay out since we have arrived at the central point where the four branches are crossed, at the simple point withoutdimension that sheds light without being itself part of the clearing. To be sure, there is no more precedence betweenBeing and Ereignis. Thought, watchful for givenness, only allows the same to come forth: Das Ereignis ereignet,the accord accords what is ownmost, which must be heard at the same time as "what is ownmost" and "what isownmost." Being and ownmost: accord.

The "'es gibt' das Sein" ('There is' Being) in the Letter on Humanism (LH, 214) already owes a legacy to the"'There is 'Being" of Sein und Zeit (SZ, 212) and proves the marvelous unity of a path that never deflected from itsown course. This unity is what accords thought with the peace of silence.

The only thing left is to listen to the simple murmur "Esdas Ereigniseignet" (OWL, 128) in the silent lightning ofEreignis within which we anticipate such an accord, "Being disappears within Ereignis" (TB, 22).

The Signs of the Gods

The Séminaire du Thor states that the finitude of Ereignis, which appropriates each of the four within the Ring ofthe world, can absolutely no longer be thought in Greek fashion. If Greek is still granted its privilege as the verylanguage of Being, it cannot reach into what expresses this new and very ancient saying that takes its leave of themetaphysical horizon in order to prepare the festival of thought. Yet Ereigniswhich accords a dwelling that harborsthe measure of the world with man and accords him in turn with such a




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dwellingreveals an eminently Greek feature, "the fact of being at home in authentic questioning" (N 1, 6). TheHeideggerian Ereignis is a veritable oikeiosis, with its double character of intimate liaison, conciliation, andappropriation, manifestation of the ownmost. Oikeioô means indeed to unite intimately, to appropriate, to bring toone's side. Thucydides speaks of Peloponnesian soldiers that "appropriated" the abandoned baggage of theopposing army (N 4, 128). Oikos designates the house, the dwelling, and at the same time everything that oneowns. The mortals have it as their own to dwell in the house of Being and to secure in their gesturesliberation,greeting, expectation, and leadershipthe proximity of the things of the world. But if dwelling is the mortals' way ofbeing on the earth, we anticipate that there is yet another way for the divine ones to be in the sky, it is themanifestation which the lecture Poetically Man Dwells briefly evokes concerning Hölderlin's God.

Let us consider the essential attributes of the fourfold. They are as follows:

1.The cross-like disposition of the earth and sky, of the divine ones and the mortals, insures theirmutual appropriation in the fourfold around their point of emergence, the Geschick (the sending ofdestiny), in which the chiasmus is being tied up.

2.Just as it is impossible to think the earth and the sky separatelyfor "on the earth" already means"under the sky"it is impossible to break up the union of the divine ones and mortals. The doublecoupling turns out to be indispensible for the unity of the world. "As on a festival day" reveals for usthe way in which the poet evokes this correspondence: ''The work of speech that emerges thus letsappear the reciprocal belonging of god and man. The hymn bears testimony to their reciprocalbelonging." 42

3.Within the chiasmus, or the fold, the unity of each region of the world forms a contrast with themultiplicity of the beings that dwell there (earthsky/divine onesmortals).




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4.If the dwelling of mortals is in keeping with the gestures that they display vis-à-vis the other three,the manifestation of the divine ones is dependent upon the coming of the signs that they address tothe mortals. Such signs, which are granted to them as the bread and the wine, the fruits from the skyand the earth, are offered to them by the divine ones.

Although Heidegger sheds light on the "transpropriation" leading each of the four to reflecting the Being of theothers in its own way, he broaches the description of the mirroring play only when dealing with the mortals.Building, Dwelling, Thinking shows that the mortals dwell on the mode of a fourfold heeding-securing concerningthe other three regions; but no text allows us to surmise the fourfold signification of the dwelling of the divine ones.Heidegger says little about the sky, especially when one considers the numerous texts evoking the homeland; yet,except for two things, he says even less concerning the gods. First, the divine ones give us signs by manifestingtheir presence in the sky; the signs come to the world, and the mortals must welcome them without ignoring theabsence of Meaning. Commenting on the call for speech that the gods make to humans according to Hölderlin,

. . . and the signs are,since time immemorial, the language of the gods,

Heidegger writes, "The establishment of Being is bound to the signs of the gods" (EB, EHP, 287). Second, thedivine ones are the messengers of the Divine, whose sacred power allows the god to appear, or else veils him. Inthe Heideggerian fourfold, the Divine withdraws and confides itself to the sacred, itself cleared by the light of thetruth of Being. Consequently, the Divine is no longer the measure of the human being. In Hölderlin's poem "InLovely Blue" we read:

. . . manNot unhappily measures himselfAgainst the godhead. Is God unknown?




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Is he manifest like the sky? This I tendTo believe. Such is man's measure.Full of merit, yet poetically, manDwells on this earth.

What is the measure for man evoked by the poet? It is neither God nor the sky. Heidegger answers: "The measureconsists in the way in which the god that remains unknown is, as such, manifested by the sky. . . . By themanifestation of the sky, the unknown god appears as unknown. This appearance is the measure against which manmeasures himself" (EC, 237).

Do we see in Hölderlin's fourfold of the earth, sky, humans and divine ones the unique origin of the HeideggerianGeviert? I shall not address here the issue of analogiesor differencesbetween Hölderlin's spiritual world andHeidegger's commemorative thought of Being. Beda Allemann has already addressed both topics in his masterfulanalyses. Instead, I would rather consider four essential aspects of this originary figure of destiny which Hölderlinnames in his "Remarks on Antigone" the "return to the homeland" (vaterländische Umkehr) which, in my view,oriented the Heideggerian meditation toward the figure of the chiasmus.

1.The paradox of the reversal is presented in the following words by Hölderlin to his friendBöhlendorff: "But what to us is ownmost, this must be learned just as what is foreign."

2.The antinomy of the two principles between which the reversal takes place is manifest in the intricateplay of contrasts: To the Empedoclean principle embodying the native tendency of the Greeks toleave the earth in order to encounter the fire of the sky corresponds the royal principle defining incontrast the cultural tendency of the Greeks to conquer what is most foreign to them. But thisopposition is now reversed in the modern world where we witness in Westerners a cultural pathos inaspiring toward the fire of the sky while their natural tendency leads them to return to the sobriety ofthe earth.

3.As an insurrection against the cultural tendency characterizing each of these worlds, the "return to thehomeland" is




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a reversal in all modes of representation that naturally manifests itself in the very writing of the poetthrough the figure of the chiasmus. Hölderlin thus enunciates its law: One must "turn THE DESIRETO LEAVE THIS WORLD FOR THE OTHER into A DESIRE TO LEAVE ANOTHER WORLDFOR THIS ONE." One could consider the Homburg "Philosophical Essays" in this perspective.There Hölderlin patiently tries to move closer to the ultimate and mysterious point, the caesura, atwhich reversals take place. Thus the "catastrophe''in the Greek sense of the alternation of poetic toneswithin the crossed distribution of lyric, tragic, and epic tonalitiesutilizes a semantic chiasmus andeven, on two occasions, a graph chiasmus.

4.The presence of this turn of expression whose crossing shows the evidence of the conflict betweenopposed worlds is not without relationship with the realm in which the reversal takes place. It isbetween sky and earth, in the free space where the mortals and the celestial beings come face to face,that the poet becomes aware of the homeland here at work. The return to the homeland has a cosmicdimension that may absolutely not be reduced to the measure of human speech, whether it be poetic(as in Hölderlin) or thinking (as in Heidegger).

It is thoughtfully, also, that man dwells on this earth. And the gods then grant signs to him that awaken his speech.If the Heideggerian fourfold is illuminated by the flashing-out of Ereignis and indeed is announced in Hölderlin'sfourfold, there still remains in its memory the more originary order of the Platonic fourfold. To the Platonicfourfold, which grants wisdom a dwelling measured against the gods, Hölderlin's fourfold responds by grantingthought a dwelling measured against man. Once more let us heed the revelation made by Socrates to Callicles:

Wise men, Callicles, say that the heavens and the earth, gods and men, are bound together by fellowshipand friendship, and order and temperance and justice, and for this reason they call the sum of things theorder of the




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world (kosmos), my friend, not the world of disorder and riot. (Gorgias, 507e508a)

It is less from Hölderlin's fourfold of the poems than from Plato's koinonia of the Gorgias that Heidegger's Geviertderives its profound genealogy. Both regions weave the tight bonds of the ontological correspondence sustainingthe order of the world. And just as the Geviert is brought about through the dispensation of the Geschick, the sacredDestiny that names the center of the four, the koinonia is born out of the secret tension of geometrical equalityheisotés he geometrike (Gorgias, 508a6)that links (synechein) the four divisions of the universe at the center of theworld. The old adage of the Pythagoreans saying "Between friends all things are in common," hints at the concordthat appropriates each of the four to itself, and gathers them together from within the four attributes of geometricalequality. In Plato, friendship, respect of order, moderation and justice all aim at securing-heeding the sky, the earth,the gods, and the mortals, just as the heedings (Schonen) of liberation, welcome, expectation, and leadership inHeidegger preserve the unity of the fourfold.

Is there measure on earth?There is none.

wrote the poet.

What did the Pythagoreans and Plato then mean by geometrical equality? "The measure of the earth," in spite of"the quite ridiculous name" that has been given to it (Epinomis, 990d), has "great power over gods and humans"(Gorgias, 508a67). Because it is the most beautiful of bonds uniting the body of the world to itself (Timaeus,31b32b), such an equality should rather bear names such as "ouranometry" or ''cosmometry." This divine measure,indeed the measure of all things (Laws, 4, 716c), is granted first rank in the hierarchy of the goods, as in Philebus,66a. The right measure of the metrion orders the intertwining of the earth and sky in the "divine" Plato. WhereasPlato, following a parallel disposition, generates the koinonia, from the sky and the godsnamed firstwhile keeping adistance vis-à-vis the earth and




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the humansnamed secondHeidegger evokes the gathering of the Geviert starting from the earth towards which themortals return after looking up to the heavens. It is therefore necessary to break the Platonic symmetry of the highand the low, of the gods and of the humans, in order to articulate the chiasmus of the regions of the world and theones dwelling therein. Moving from Plato to Heidegger, the change in the underscoring within the symbolic figureof the cosmic community now suspends the Divine from having the absolute power of being the measure of allthings. What the signs of the godsfrom which mortals today turn awayperhaps allow us to surmise, is the necessarywithdrawal of the Divine, which the mortals, nonetheless, must always keep within heeding-securing consideration.

5. The Paths Of The Cross

The mortals are humans. They arecalled "mortals" because they can die.(EC, 177)

The Vase and the Hub

Have we moved forward under the guidance of a thought whose oblique course and reversals seemed to hesitate intaking one single path, yet inevitably took us back to the juncture of Being? I did not attempt to privilege anysubsidiary feature of Heideggerian writing; instead, I sought to detect the trace of an untroubled and permanentproject in the midst of countless texts:

To think is to confine oneself toa single thought that one day standsstill like a star in the world's sky. (PLT, TP, 4)

The chiasmuswhich sets up a cross pattern within the paths of Heideggerian writingmay have been suggested to theSwabian thinker by the unsuspected forks of forest paths that finally end up in the midst of the uncharteredwoodland.




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More originally, the chiasmus evokes the crossed path of a world stretched along four cardinal orientations. Such isthe setting-apart of thought, which articulates the contrasts within Being in a unique shape with its relatingconstituentsthe earth, the sky, the gods, and the mortalsan articulation that, from Plato to Hölderlin and Heidegger,amounts indeed to a late interpretation.

To be sure, the symbolism of the cross is universally attested in the display of the figure of the universe. Mostcivilizations use the emblem of the cross to represent the indissoluble union of sky and earth disclosed at theintersection of the four cardinal points. Primitive orientation within terrestrial space rests upon the East-West axisplotted after the sun's course, whereas orientation in celestial time depends upon the position of the solar star, atnoon and midnight, on the North-South axis of the rotation of the world. This quadrangular disposition, evoked inSection 22 of Sein und Zeit, acknowledges the juncture of the "celestial" and "terrestrial" regions, or, in otherwords, accounts for the embodiment found in mythical thought of the ancient union, or hierogamy, of sky andearth. In the sky belong the figure of the circle engendered by the regular gyration of the fixed stars around thepolar star, the perfection of the caelum, the incorruptibility of its perfect form; in the earth belong the figure of thesquare that originates in the crossing of the cardinal lines, the halting of motion, the stability of the earth. Inaddition, to both belong the divine tools of the quadrant and the compass. The coupling of circle and cross, as wellas that of motion and rest, with respect to their common center, amounts to making manifest the union of spaceand time, of sky and earth by means of the cosmic symbol of the link, mediation, and foundation. Henceforth, thehigh and the low, the humans and the gods meet within the sacred crossroads of the myth.

To build? To dwell? To think? Among these themes, dwelling is not deemed worthy of being addressed bymythical speech only because it is already naturally in the world. In Book 1 of De Architectura, 43 Vitruvedescribes the immutable rite that in Roman life presided over the plotting of roads at the time of the foundation ofa city. After placing a marble slab with a bronze stiletto at the center of the city to deter-




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mine the shadow of the sun in the morning and in the afternoon, the architect used a compass to draw twointersecting circular arcs. He would thus determine the cardinal cross inscribed within the circle; from these fourpoints, he only had to draw circles of equivalent radius to obtain at their intersection the diagonals of an "oriented"square within that same circle. It seems quite likely that Rome, the urbs quadrata, was founded following thedelineation of the circular trench (mundus), as was the case moreover for the military camps oriented along theNorth-South axis (cardo) and the East-West thoroughfare (decumanus). On that central intersection of the town orcamp stood an altar. Inasmuch as the cardinal crossing expresses the perfect figure of the world, it imparts thedurable harmonies of the fourfold to art, myth, and religion. Four is the number of the terrestrial elements, of thehorizons and orients, of the cardinal virtues, of the limbs of the human body and their temperaments, of thesections of the city, of the churches ad quadratum, of the letters in the name of the first man ADAM (which are theinitials of the cardinal points in Hebrew), of the evangelists, and of the living individuals of the Apocalypse (the"tetramorphous"). If one now considers their origin, the four branches of the cross may be viewed as the expansionof a fifth element, or cardo (the hinge, the cardinal, or solstitial, point) from the unique intersection of these fourbranches. This fifth element is the origin of their crossing and, hence, of the world.

Hölderlin's poem "Earth and Sky" determines how the four regions of union (Gegenden des Verhältnisses)earth,sky, gods, mortalsmutually belong together in their middle (Mitte), which is the "intimacy" (Innigkeit) and the''destiny" (das Geschick) uniting the Four in their reciprocal unity.

Destiny takes back within itself the Four in its middle, it takes them within itself, gathers them in itsintimacy, causing them to penetrate each other; thus it begins with them. . . . As middle of the wholeappearance, destiny is the beginning that gathers everything. As great destiny that resonates, the Middle isgreat beginning. 44 (HD, 171)




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Inasmuch as Geschick, the "one first arrived" (ein erstes Kommen), casts forth what it holds in front of itself, theendless (un-endlich) belonging of the fourfold, or Geviert, it assumes the configuration of the sovereignequilibrium of the world, which Hölderlin's poem, "The Vatican," names

. . . trulytotal union, including the center(. . . wirklichGanzem Verhältnib, samt der Mitt). (HD, 163)

Here we cannot consider in detail the rich symbolism of the "center" whose echo we find in Heidegger, and,through its emanation, the symbolism of the pentadic figure. 45 It will be sufficient to ponder its role at the core ofthe crossing by considering traditional Chinese thought. For Chinese thought presents rather unexpected analogieswith the secret intuition of the Heideggerian path.

It is well-known that the Chinese system of cosmic correspondences is absolutely adverse to conceptual thinkingthat operates by means of abstract and general thoughts as we know them in the West. Such a thought, whichpertains to what the Western mind considers a prelogical or mythical mentality, is less concerned with explainingthe ordering of the world by reducing it to a system of formal and univocal concepts than with evoking the naturalrhythms of the universe by dint of a variety of concrete representations that have an immediately suggestive power.The contrasts present themselves in classificatory manner depending on the various kinds of signs, among whichnumerical symbols appear to be the most fundamental. In his classical work, La pensée chinoise (ChineseThought), Marcel Granet shows in greatest detail that, parallel with a classification system, on the basis of thenumber 6, a classification system on the basis of the number 5 (wou) regulates all the spaces and times of theworld. He also shows that by dint of such a classificatory system regulation can bear upon the differentiated set ofhuman activities: five regions of space, five periods of time, five celestial signs, five terrestrial elements, fivemusical notes, five




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human activities, five virtues, five sorts of duty, five kinds of happiness, etc. All arrangements are developedwithin this classificatory system in order to delineate a hierarchy of terms considered within a unified totality.These arrangements are set in place as a result of the central position of the number 5 in the midst of the series ofnumbers up to nine. Moreover, according to Jamblique, it was because of considerations' of that nature that thePythagoreans were led to detect in the number 5 the symbol of Justice in connection with Generation. 46 Theharmonious disposition of time and space is ruled over by the crossing device, which, as Marcel Granet shows,"allows one to divide the universe into four sections and to set upat the very center and with the emblematic valueof fivethe unit, the whole and the pivot of the whole as principle of any hierarchy."47 Thus the wou wei are thefive cardinal positions and the wou fang the five directions, that is, the four orients and the center that havearranged themselves in the shape of a square rule (fangsquare rule). Such an arrangement expresses the hierogamyof sky and earth: the square rule, and the square, are indeed the emblems of the earth, as well as the even number2; the odd number 3 is the symbol of the sky and circle; the earth (female) is yin; the sky, male, is yan. If weconsider the Treatise of the "Great Rule" (Hong Fan)indeed the oldest of the Chinese classics (fifth or fourthcentury B.C.), composed of nine sections that divide the totality of the elements (Hing) suitable for the order of theworldwe see that the central rubric, which concerns the Sovereign provider of the five kinds of happiness, proposesthe following system of correspondences:




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To the five elements (wou hing) correspond the five activities of the human being (gesture, speech, sight, hearing,and thought) and the five virtues (gravity, order, sapience, graciousness, and holiness) (PC, 308, ff.). Just as thenumber five is associated with the King (Huang Ki) and with the fundamental note of the pentatonic musical scale(Kong), the cross disposition (Ho t'u) illustrates the perfect correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm:four areas emanate from a center.

This totality has its symbol in the supreme category of Chinese thinking, Tao. The word means "path, way," just asthe word Hing, which is traditionally translated as "element." Marcel Granet shows that "a similar group of facts . .. determines the original images by which, with two words evoking the idea of path or way (Tao, Hing), theChinese designate the five cardinal items and the great principle of ordering and classification" (ibid., 260). What isat stake are the images of the ''pivot," of the "circulation" of beings that the pivot makes possible, such as they aremanifested in the instrument of divination. This instrument is made up of a square piece of wood (the earth) and ofa round one (the sky) both articulated around a common pivot or hub. Hence, the royal way of the Tao (Wang tao)evokes the axle-tree around which the crossing of the world gyrates. One cannot imagine the rotation of theuniverse around its axis (or axle-tree), or the reversal of two contrasting forcesthe bright yang and the obscure yin,following the invariable alternation of Hi ts'e: "Once yin, once yang, there is Tao"without making reference to theunit-pivot, which is neither yin nor yang, neither even nor odd (similar to the Pythagorean unit). It is so foreign toopposed determinations that it may claim similarity to nothingness. In Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tse compares the centerof the world to the axle-tree of a gigantic wheel or also to the empty space around which a vase is shaped:

We join spokes together in a wheel,but it is the center holethat makes the wagon move.We shape clay into a pot,




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but it is the emptiness insidethat holds whatever we want.(Tao Te Ching, tr. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 11) 48

In the vase and the axle-tree of the wheel (in Latin the word modiolus means both a small vase and an axle-tree)we detect two essential images used by Heidegger in What is a Thing? to illustrate the articulation of the fourfoldaround the Geschick, which is no thing of the earth, sky, gods, and mortals, yet maintains their global relationship(das Ganze Verhältnis) as the sacred source of their origin (das Heilige). Where Chinese thought talks aboutemptiness (Hiu)where the peace of the Tao resides, between earth and skyHeidegger mentions Ereignis, whereBeing itself comes to cancellation, as "they all belong together in the same, the play of stillness" (OWL, 106), astillness that is the appropriation of the peace of silence. Around the Tao and Ereignis a play of contrasts of theworld quietly comes to play, wherein "harmony" (Ho) or "simplicity" (die Einfalt) reveal the motif of the cross.

I would not risk such a surprising resemblance if on several occasions Heidegger himself had not pointed out theanalogy between his own thinking itinerary (Weg) and the Chinese Tao. Indeed, in "The Nature of Language"(1958) he wrote:

The word "way" probably is an ancient primary word that speaks to the reflective mind of man. The keyword in Lao Tse's poetic thinking is Tao, which "properly speaking" means way. But because we are proneto think of "way" superficially, as a stretch connecting two places, our word ''way" has all too rashly beenconsidered unfit to name what Tao says. Tao is then translated as reason, mind, raison, meaning, logos.(OWL, 92)

The concordance takes place even more deeply if we ponder the full import of this remark from The Principle ofIdentity:




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The word Ereignis thought in terms of the matter indicated . . . can no more be translated than the Greeklogos or the Chinese Tao. Ereignis does not mean here an event, an occurrence. It is now used as asingulare tantum. (ID, PI, 36, mod.)

Without stressing this correspondence any more, one which the German thinker himself finds befitting, we mayinterpret the cross-like disposition of the fourfold and the turn of the chiasmus as major signs of the Heideggeriandismissal of Western rationality. "Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought"(QCT, WN, 112). In Heidegger's view, one may even detect the implicit presence of the Chinese Ho in theharmonious accord of its contrasts in the Western radical rejection of "contraries" and "dialectical movement.''Perhaps it is indeed on the side of analogy, rather than identity, that we will have to search for the site of the"principles of thought" in order to fathom more deeply the secret play of their oppositions. One final indicationgiven by Heidegger vindicates such an attempt:

Lao-Tse says: "The one who knows his own light is hidden within obscurity." ("Principes de la pensée,"trans. Fédier, Arguments 20, Paris: Minuit, 1960)

The Analogy Demon

If authentic hearing is a speech that language addresses to us, only the one capable of hearing will perhaps be ableto speak. "Speaking . . . is a listening not while but before we are speaking" (OWL, 123). To be sure, this is themost striking feature of the Heideggerian meditation: speech speaks, and our response must bear witness (in all thesenses of the term) to a re-cognition, or the indication, of a return of thought to itself, or of a favor toward the signthat touched it. The human being originally belongs to speech, which appropriates each to himself or herself so thateach person's speech, "always an answering, remains forever relational (das




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Verhältnisartige)" (ibid., 135). We must understand that human speech is the essential correspondence with Being,which in the peace of silence brings it into accord with the frame of the world. In order to remain faithful to it, onemust forsake the ordinary representation of language. According to this representation, language is a mere functionof human subjects and, as an instrument always available to them, represents words in terms of abstract signs. Intruth, it is speech that speaks (die Sprache spricht) and permits us to discover the mystery of its origin in ordinaryspeech. Ordinary speech is the forgotten poem. "Logic" alone is not capable of bringing about the "corresponding"(entsprechen) between humans and Being and the settling of humans within analogy. If Heideggerian thoughtsometimes goes against our mental habits, it is because it elicits the forgotten memory of the myth. Faithful thoughtis memory (Andenken) that reminds us that the Titaness Mnèmosynè is the daughter of sky and earth. It is betweensky and earth that the myth unfolds the infinite play of its correspondences.

Myth means the telling word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and make appearboth the appearance andthat which has its essence in the appearance, its epiphany. (WCT, 10)

Therefore it is not surprising that Heidegger's language should find the means to evoke the most distant features ofmythical thought through the safekeeping of its immediately suggestive powers.

The text "Remembrance," devoted to a poem by Hölderlin bearing the same title, reveals in a brief commentary thedeep nature of speech and, inherent in it, the status of the poet. If poetic spirit is not at home at the beginning, andseeks to return to its homeland by pointing to the sky above the earth, then the openness made possible by speechis what grants "analogy, by which we like to be guided when we are to think anything real whatsoever" (HD, 91).49 Analogy is the original mode of thought. Hence, it is to poetry that credit should be given for the discovery ofthis interval, where the children of




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the earth come to encounter the dwellers of the heavens. This interval is named "In-between" (das Zwischen),"diametral measure" (Durchmessung Dimension), or also "Difference'' (Differenz), depending on the context. Allthese terms imply void or emptiness, as at the center of the wheel in Lao-Tse or also the sacred chaos ofHölderlin's poem, "Wie wenn am Fiertag," about which Heidegger writes:

Chaos means first the gaping, the abyss ajar, the Open that opens up first, in which everything sinks back.The abyss rejects every support for distinction and establishment. That is why for every experience dealingonly with the mediate, chaos seems to be the undifferentiated and consequently mere confusion. In thatsense "chaotic" has come to mean nothing but the derailing of what "Chaos" really means. Thought fromwithin nature (physis), chaos remains the gaping one from within which the Open opens in order to bestowits delineated presence to every distinction. (HD, 6263)

This passage brings to clarity the four essential properties of the Analogy of the world: (1) The interval measuredby the Saying of the poet and of the thinker is named "chaos," pure openness between earth and sky, gods andmortals, where the fourfold originates. (2) Interpreted in terms of blossoming and fruition (physis), not sinking andconfusion, chaos means "Difference" (Diaphora), that is to say, according to Speech, "the carrying out (phora) thatcarries through (dia) (der durchtragende Austrag)" (PLT, 202). The difference accords the distinction of the fourand their respective delimitation; such an accord (Ereignis) is the sacred. (3) Thinking chaos or difference is tothink the abyss of Being (Abgrund) of The Principle of Reason towards whose center the whirlwind attracts. Sucha center is calm, permeated with peace, just as the empty axle-tree of the wheel, from which the rotating motionoriginates, is motionless. In that sense, Heidegger, as Hölderlin before him, is justified in calling this "chaos" "firmstatus." Difference alone is what gives the world its firm status, inasmuch as each of the four is insofar as it differsfrom the others,




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to which, however, it is appropriated. (4) Understanding chaos as undifferentiated confusion, the pellmell of themelee, amounts to remaining prisoner to an experience that only deals with "mediation." In order to regaindistinction and firmness for that "status," speech must express the mediation of the world.

It is at this point that, thanks to the step back of the Differenz, Heideggerian analogy is radically separated from theHegelian logic and the sinking-down process of the Aufhebung within the mediating movement of the Absolute. Inthe wake of the entire history of metaphysics, Hegel is unable to think the difference from within the differenceitself. He allows no thought of the In-between of the advent of Being and emergence of beingsto express it still inmetaphysical termsno thought of the "conciliation" (Austrag), as "circling, [i.e.,] the circling of Being aroundbeings" (ID, OTLCM, 69) of chaos and the fourfold animated in a round of showing-forth (der Reigen desEreignens). The scattered features of the real could not possibly come to emergence without the mediation of theDifference, which in turn does not come out of any prior mediation. Just as Being, as ground, is itself groundlessprecisely because it founds beings, openness itself as mediation is im-mediate, precisely because it mediates thefour dimensions of the world.

The open mediates any relationship with respect to what is real. What is real merely consists in such arelationship, and thus is mediated. Thus mediated, it is only by dint of mediacy. Mediacy must be present ineverything. The Open itself, however, which to every encounter (abord) and to every reciprocity onlyoffers the space for their appropriation, can itself come from no other mediation. The Open itself isimmediate. (HD, WF, 61)

And Heidegger adds this demonian precision: "That is why no mediate, whether it be god or human being, can everimmediately reach the immediate."

One could define analogy in metaphysical terms as "immediate mediation" in opposition to the Hegelian concept,




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which is mediate mediation. In terms of poetry or myth, analogy cannot be defined, it is namedit is named"demon." Analogy, "lightning that mediates" (HD, 71) and accords the Open, wherein earth and sky, gods andmortals form a circle, is the Daimon, and that is the ownmost of thought. How could analogy be thought, if not in away and a measure most proper to it (the way and measure of Openness), if not analogically? To better grasp theanalogy of Beingsince this analogy is sought by individuals who want a guide for thinking the realone must firstinquire into the nature of love.

It is no longer the poet, but the priestess, who speaks. Let us put aside the cluster of analogies made in reference toHomer, which at the beginning of The Symposium foreshadow the mysteries of the dialogue. Let us only listen tothe correspondences evoked by Diotima: they reveal how the mediation of difference is at the heart of the cross-like figure.

The cosmic role of Eros originates precisely in the details of his genealogy. In conformity with his dual nature, theson of Poros (abundance) and Penia (indigence) is "barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the naked earth, indoorways, or in every street beneath the stars and heaven" (203d); he is a pathway (poros), an intermediarybetween ignorance and science. Such a great demon (daimon megas), therefore, is a philosopher, because he isunlike either the ignorant who imagines he has knowledge or the god that possesses itsince neither one botherswith the philosophical activity. Love is an initial tension of thought between ignorance and knowledge. But alsodevoid of wisdom, beauty, and goodness, Eros is an intermediary between god and mortal (metaxy theou te kaithnètou, 202e), his role consisting in being an "envoy and interpreter that plies between heaven and earth, flyingupward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and ordinances" (theois tapar' anthropon kai anthropois ta para theon).

Thus it is that the Platonic chiasmus of love has been tied up: Hence Diotima qualifies Eros as "the union thatunites the whole to itself" (to pan auto hauto xundedesthai). Similar to the judges of the end of the Gorgias seatedin the demonian location at the center of the cosmos, Eros is located




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midway between the divine and mortal realms, between ignorance and knowledge; he incarnates the cosmicfunction of mediation assigned to geometric equality, that of filling the emptiness that surfaces at the center of thefour dimensions. In line with the image from the Gorgias, the fourfold of Eros distinguishes two analogouscouples: (1) beings (gods and human beings), which the intermediary, "midway between the ones and the others"(en meso de on amphoteron), brings together to perfect fellowship; (2) their assigned residence, an assignationissued from fate (to the doublet heaven-earth of the Gorgias, corresponds the doublet knowledge-ignorance of theSymposium). In this case, too, Eros stands "midway" (sophias te au kai amathias en meso estin, 203e). By virtue ofhis demonian nature, the one holding the cosmic links of love inhabits the in-between, the crossroads of fourdivisions. Can Eros, who is always en meso, be different from Daimon Analogy, which ceaselessly fastens thebondcalled nodus perpetuus et copula mundi (the perpetual knot and copula of the world) by Marsile Ficin 50of thecosmos wherein Being gathers itself? Hermetic speech spells the status of humans and gods, of the heaven-dwellers and the children of the earth. But it also evokes what Heidegger names "the signs of the gods,'' "theordinances and the retribution of the sacrifices," according to the terms of the Symposiumthat which Plato calls "theprayers and sacrifices of humans" and Heidegger "the gestures of mortals" in What is a Thing?

Analogy itself requires that we not neglect correspondences between these two forms of daimonian thought: to besure, Plato's metaxy and Heidegger's mediation are not identical in terms of logical requirements; for thought,however, they are the same. Heidegger's Difference thus reveals itself as equally divided within the dis- and the -junction that it brings together, as is the case with Plato's daimon, whose residence always changes. This divisionamounts to the division between love and thought. The silent peace of analogy is bestowed where the worldgathers itself. Let us heed the Heraclitean saying, "ethos anthropo daimon" (the human being dwells in proximityof the daimon) (Frag. 119).




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Analogy is ethos, the residence wherein human beings are domiciled because Openness is the only measuring unitappropriate for thought.

The Clearing

Paths,Thinking paths; they proceed from themselves,They escape. When then will they begin the turn,Opening a vista on what? 51




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We have almost reached the end of our itinerary. One more turn, and we will reach the heartland of theHeideggerian landscape, which offers various visual lines of escape where our gaze can rest within the unity of afree and clear space. As clouds in the sky after a downpour suddenly allow the emergence of lovely blue,sometimes the trees of the forest make room for a simple clearing where light deposits a layer of golden vibration.All at once, the world is given to us:

In this turning, the clearing belonging to the essence of Being suddenly clears itself and lights up. Thissudden self-lighting is the lightning-flash. It brings itself into its own brightness, which it itself both bringsalong and brings in. (QCT, 44)

With the analogy of the "clearing"yet is it still an analogy in the sense of a relationship obtaining between a truemeaning and an image evoking it in concrete fashion?we reach within the Ur-Sache, the "original tenor" ofHeideggerian thought. It has abandoned the claim to elucidate the world in terms of causal connections ortranscendental relationships. Simply, it allows the thing to appear in its frailty, without keeping any reserve inback. This means that the Husserlian return "to the matters themselves" has been accomplished. After a few shortallusions to the clearingin the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) ("the illumination (Lichtung) of Being") or inAletheia (1943) ("Das Ereignis der Lichtung ist die Welt,'' "The event of the lighting is the world") (EGT, A, 118)itis in The Letter on Humanism (1946) that the Lichtung makes a decisive breakthrough. In a terminology still closeto that of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger suggests that Dasein's "ek-sistence", the Da-, holds itself within the openness ofthe Lichtung:

It means that only so long as the clearing of Being comes to pass does Being convey itself to man. But thefact that the Da, the clearing of the truth of Being itself, comes to pass is the dispensation of Being itself.This is the destiny of the clearing. (BW, LH, 216 mod. 52 )




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Subsequent texts tended to eliminate terms such as "Being," "ek-sistence," and "human being," as too prone toelicit objective representation. Instead they favor the simple openness, with the fountain of light that gives oursurrounding world the quiet radiance of its presence.

Being or abyss, clearing or nothingness? It is from the emptiness of openness that thought assigns questioning toitself as its future task, because philosophy has come to the terminal stage at which metaphysics has taken the formof world-technological domination. One single mission remains reserved for thought: to reveal the openness of thisLichtung wherein light (Licht) brings itself to the world of metaphysics. To Licht belongs the clearness of reasonwhere light imposes its evidence upon knowledge; Lichtung is the openness of thought, the clearing where theoriginal darkness still holds itself in reserve. In his lecture "The End of Philosophy," Heidegger refuses to identifyLicht and Lichtung. The clearing is not clearing of light, even though the torque within the terms [retournement]ensures their intimate connection.

Never is it light that first creates the openness of the Lichtung. Rather, light presupposes Lichtung. (TB, EP,65, mod.)

Openness is not reduced to the diffusion of light, but brings the truth of presence with itself. The summary of theseminar conducted after the lecture "On Time and Being" seeks to elucidate the "taking place" (es gibt) ofopenness. It also inquires into the "givingness" of that which gives Being, the German "es'' or the French "il" in theexpressions "es gibt" or "il y a." "There issome being." One can indeed understand the unfolding of Being thatsettles humankind in the presence of things according to two modes: first, metaphysical representation; second, thethought of openness. An abrupt change in the underscoring relating to the chiasmus of the two propositions freesthe ownmost essence of the Giftof Ereignis:




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1. Letting-presence: Letting-come-to-presence: what is present.2. Letting-presence: Letting-come-to-presence (that is thought in terms of appropriation). (TB, 37,

mod.)

In the first case, presence frees the being that is present; it immediately dallies within openness, and thus gives riseto metaphysical reflection. In the second case, it is the advent of presence as such, the letting-go of theadventdestinythat allows thought to gaze into the openness. Ereignis is the epiphany of Being in its clearing.Whereas philosophy since its Greek inception had thought the present of beings within an openness whosepresencing it failed to detect, similar to the ray of light streaking through a clearing, the thought of Lichtung returnswithin the possibility of light, which thought now envisages as nonwithdrawal. Aletheia, which the Greeks nevergrasped in its essence, is the perfect roundness of openness. Should not the task for thought be that of replacingSein und Zeit and the fold of being and time with the articulation between Lichtung und Anwesenheit (clearing andpresence)?

The "Letter to Richardson" had already answered that question by substituting "time and Being: according to theadvent of Being with the ultimate chiasmus.

[The process of] presenc-ing (Being) is inherent in the lighting-up of self-concealment (Time). [The]lighting-up of self-concealment (Time) brings forth the process of presenc-ing (Being). 53 (LR, XX)

This double and unique belonging of the accord is so simple that there is nothing more to say about it. The clearingis the emptiness that accords presence while withdrawing from the emergence of things present. But still to bethought is the lightning of the clearing: Does it take place only in the thought that withdraws from metaphysics?

The essay on Heraclitus, Logos, suggests that, once and only once in the history of Western thought, "for as short a




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moment as it takes for lightning to strike," speech shone through the light of Being,

once, when Heraclitus thought the logos as his guiding word, so as to think the Being of beings. But thelightning abruptly vanished. No one held onto its streak of light and what it illuminated. (EGK, L, 78)

Does not such a radiation indicate, however, the lighting proper to that light bathing some of the Platonicdialogues?

I shall not return to the Heideggerian interpretation of "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" and to the occultation that thelight originating from the Idea is deemed to have imposed on the initial essence of aletheia as unconcealing.Indeed, Heidegger acknowledges that "Plato attempts to think the relation of presencing to the present in themetaphor of light," and that "to be sure in this there is given a proximity to Heidegger." Yet, Plato and metaphysicsas a whole could not have thought the advent of light within opennessEreignisor presencing within theclearingLichtung. One could perhaps wonder whether Heidegger himself does not mask these two essential featuresof the Platonic vision of knowledge that may resemble clearing and lightning. First, we must bear in mind the twoturns taken by the prisoner in the cave, who in a flashexaiphnes (515c, 516e)is forced to turn his head toward thelight, then to descend from the upper world into the obscurity of the cave. The fulgurating of the instant is requiredeach time to underscore the reversal of the initial attitude; it is the sudden unveiling of another mode of reality.This fulguration also characterizes the way in which Diotima describes the brutal irruption of beauty at the end ofthe correct progression within those things relevant to love. "Whoever has been initiated so far in the mysteries oflove . . . will have the sudden revelation (exaiphnes, 210e) of a beauty whose nature is marvellous." Such is theinstant illumination of the Symposium in which the Being of beauty is suddenly and freely given with its silentface. An echo of such a rupture occurs three more times. At 212c, the ''sudden" arrival of another crowd ofrevellers underscores the impos-




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sibility of persisting in the contemplation of the beautiful; all of a sudden, the participants in the symposium arehurled back to earth. At 213c, we are made witness to Alcibiades' illumination in the unexpected presence ofSocrates. He too instantaneously turns around and takes a leap: "And when he turned around and saw who it was,he leaped out of his seat and cried: . . . 'The same old game of lying in wait and popping out at me when I leastexpect you (exaiphnes).'" Let us not forget that an abrupt interruption of the dialogue (exaiphnes, 223b) is causedby the belated arrival of a final crowd of revellers, which brings the dialogue to an end.

It is likely that Plato's exaiphnesa sort of jolt that surges throughout the Symposium, the Republic, the Parmenides,but also in the Cratylus (as when Socrates appears to Hermogenes as being "quite like a prophet suddenly inspiredand rendering oracles" [396, d]) and in the Theaetetus (when the young partner of the dialectician turns out to be"all of a sudden, every bit as wise as any other man and even as any god" [162 c])inspired the HeideggerianEreignis, albeit indirectly. One cannot deny that there is an analogy in that the Platonic notion fulfills the functionof according one thing or one being immediately to what it is in the ownmost. In the central digression of theseventh letter Plato himself expresses his own perplexity in front of the sudden event of the illumination of thesoul.

Philosophy, indeed, "is not like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period ofattendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when suddenly (exaiphnes), likea blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining." (341 c-d)

As for the return of the soul to life, or the turn-about of generations, it only takes place after the free choice of anew condition "in a location from where one can discern, extended from above throughout the heaven and theearth, a straight line like a pillar, most nearly resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer" (Republic, 10: 616b).This location evokes




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for us the Heideggerian Lichtung in which light is engaged in an internal dis-play (où la lumière vient jouer). Itresides at the center of the world, where the poet discerns

. . . the order of columns, a work Of total proportion, including the center, Radiant, 54

and thus detects that a new birth is about to come out of the flash emitted by the storm of the originary after thelast Judgment:

And after that they had fallen asleep and it was the middle of the night, there was a sound of thunder and aquaking of the earth, and they were suddenly wafted thence, one this way, one that, upward to their birth(eis ten genesin) like shooting stars. (Republic, 10:621b)

The flashing-out of lightning, which brings one into the world, is the eternal advent of Being in its clearingfromPlato to Heidegger. "Seeing into what is, this designation now names the disclosure that brings into its own that isthe coming to pass of the turning into Being. . . . this names the constellation in the essence of Being" (QCT, T,46).

The Gestures of Mortals

From the clearing during a cloudless night we may lift our eyes toward the skies and stare at the stars. Or could itbe that the stars stare at us?

Indeed, Heidegger's secretive thinking in its constant desire for the stars remains a seeing into what is, Einblick indas, was ist, which accords the four regions of the world with the instant (EREIGNIS/EXAIPHNES). "What ifappropriationno one knows when or howwere to become an insight (Ein-Blick) whose illuminating lightning flashenters into what is and what is taken to be?" (OWL, 133). At its finest peak, the




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heart of Being itselfbeyond which one cannot reachopens up the four paths of thought and unfolds the jointure ofthe chiasmus. Its simple and silent movement is what is most covert: only a few indications, intentionally left by aman who would take a step back in front of what he might say, 55 may be viewed as directions for the readers. Towit, in the seminar on "Time and Being," the strange following indications on the paths leading to Ereignis.Heidegger notes that he had already made mention of the advent

1. in the 1946 Letter on Humanism,2. in the four 1949 lectures "Seeing into What Is,"3. in the 1953 lecture on The Question Concerning Technology, and4. in the 1957 lecture on "The Principle of Identity."

It is probably no mere coincidence that Heidegger outlined the shape of the fourfold, the center of his thought, in aseries of four lectures given on the same day, 1 December 1949 at the Bremen Club, which he repeated withoutchange at Bühlerhöhe. Nor is it a mere coincidence that he limited "the paths leading to the advent" to four pathsfor which he claims a "reciprocal belonging." The frequency of fourfold partitions in Heidegger's work is the overt,obvious sign of the internal organization of Being [nervure de l'être] or the inner pulsation of Ereignis, which thewriting of the thinker expresses in the shape of the four branches of the chiasmus. But to make sense of numericalindications that first may seem negligible, we must grasp what flashes out at the center of the fourfold and allowseach thing to be what it is in its ownmost. It is well-known that the second and third Bremen lectures, ''DasGestell" and "Die Gefahr," were not published by the author. Why would have Heidegger kept apart two lecturesdirectly in keeping with the fourfold if not to direct our attention toward the enigma of their absence? Wasn't sucha clear cutting in the forest bound to affect trees of thought and cast a new light on the young shoots? Thoughtinsists on Being set apart. This proposition can be understood in two different ways:




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1. Thought insists on Being set apart;2. Thought insists on Being set apart.

The first underscoring assigns thought to the task of indicating the reciprocal co-belonging of the fourfold (earth,sky, gods, mortals) in order to safeguard the insistence of the question: the accord of the fourfold. In its constantinsistence and tenacity that binds it to being-set-apart, the thought of Being is consistent insistence [main-tenance].It insists on the question, on the question from which it derives its unity and, consequently, its consistency throughits binding force. The expression "to insist on being-set-apart" means here the perdurable feeling of fellowship thatkeeps thought in the surrounding presence of Being. Therefore at every step it takes, it shows that Being is whatmatters to it. Being is the insistence of thought, which by itself keeps its reserve and insists on Being-set-apart.

At this point, indeed, everything turns around. Because thought holds its distance from Being, Being itselfwhich isthe tenor of the questionis held set-apart, i.e., set-within-a-chiasmus. Called for by the consistent insistence of thequestion, the turning orients thought toward the crossing of long paths and their secret clearing. This time theexpression "to insist on Being-set-apart" evokes the distance thought maintains regarding Being, the restraint towhich it is assigned in its extreme distance from the near. In its relation with each region of the fourfold, thoughtenters openness and experiences the measure [la Dimension] within which it takes place. It thus holds itself apartfrom what set it under way, from the "is," i.e., that minuscule word that vanishes at the crossing of the world.

The question on Being sets thought apart of Ereignis that instantaneously appropriates man to the world andreveals his initial cut. The setting-apartwith the cross as its major symbolappears as the destiny (Geschick) of thosecalled "mortals." "As on a festival day" describes the experience of the poet in the following way: ''Omnipresenceholds in balance the opposition between extreme oppositesof the highest sky and the deepest abyss. What is thusheld mutually in




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balance remains at the same time held-apart in its distension" (HD, 53). At the center of the fourfold, the setting-apart brings about the advent of the sacred "in the tearing of the flash that is suffering" 56 (ibid., 75).

The sacred, das Heilige, is the first tearing of the world because it is the threshold between earth and sky, gods andmortals. The poet is aware of it since, on a winter evening, he wrote:

Pain turned the threshold to stone.

The threshold, in Heidegger's commentary, is "the root standing to uphold the entire door. It supports the middlewhere both the outside and inside interpenetrate each other. The threshold is the in-between."57 Penetrating thethreshold of the house, one traveler enters peacefully; with a hesitation, another stops and meditates. . . . On thethreshold leading to Agathon's house, Socrates makes a long pause and does not muster the decision to take thestep. Is it that he feared the master of the place might turn him into stone through a command of words worthy of aGorgias? Or does he, motionless, gather himself within himself, affected as he is by the fear of the demonianregarding the ultimate revelation he can anticipate, thus impelling him to reveal the strange nature of the one whosleeps on the threshold of doors and has access to the connection between sky and earth?

Pain turns the threshold into stone, and loveendlessly dying and rebornsuffers because it articulates the status of thesacred. In De antro nympharum Porphyry acknowledges that "a threshold is a sacred thing."58

Destined as much to gestures of love as of death, human beings experience the sacred pain of the path of life on itsway to the encounter with death. Absorbed within Ereignis, Being is absent from the crossing whose branches itnonetheless opens up. The slow itinerary in negative ontology taken by the Swabian thinker teaches only one thing,the withdrawal of Being. If it is true that Being is the jointure of the four, on this path the mortals will encounternothing at the crossroads of . Nothing, save the cross: already in the 1929 text




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"What is Metaphysics?" mention was made of the originary anxiety by which the human being is "snatched awayand left hanging," the human being called "the lieutenant of the nothing" (BW, WM, 108).

. . . walking into life's sunset, this man collects himself while returning to the path of his childhood. At the limits ofa forest growing in a parsimonious land, a familiar tree opens up to "the immensity of the sky." It presses its rootsinto the "darkness of the earth" and beckons him with a signal of recognition. Isn't Der Feldweg a text as limpid,and also as obscure, as Ereignis itself, the most radical setting-apart of philosophy? Here the four images inspiringthe Heideggerian chiasmus are fused in unique harmony around the simple. But to the one for whom existence,rather than writing, was the question, these are not mere images. . . .

1.The country path of the homeland. In the morning, it takes one away from the garden of the castleand silently leads the steps of the thinker to

2.the cross at the crossroads of time and eternity. At such a point the path runs toward the forest intowhich it leads and threatens to lose itself. On the border line, the path encounters

3.the tree, the "great oak tree," under which as a child he had come to study the writings of thinkers.Sometimes, the young son of the artisan had set out to collect the wood felled by lumber jacks and,with his brother, he enjoyed cutting out boats in the cork of oak trees. Did we sufficiently payattention to the murmur of the oak trees in Heidegger's writings? The tree, whose wood awakens thework of the hand, unfolds the columnn of Being in its truth. The tree, which is the tree of life for thethinker who roots the works of thought within the native land, is also the "tree of death," which thepeasant of the Black Forest will inhabit for his last journey. Keeper of the sacred, the tree revealsgenealogy by directing its thinking toward certain games of child-




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hood. How would it do it, if not by crossing branches and bringing together sky and earththe livingfigure of the chiasmus of the world?

4.Finally, there is the star, the star that shows the way. It is the gift of thought for the one who wrote,"To head toward a starthis only" (PLT, TP, 4) and endlessly sought to distinguish the accord of manand Being in "the constellation of truth" or in "the stellar course of the mystery" (BW, QCT, 315). 59

During that time, the limes still moves forward with a thoughtful gait, goes through fields, skirts free clearings, orplays in the low meadows of Ehnried. He too is able to experience the crossing of seasons, when along his way"the winter storm and the harvest day cross each other, the vitalizing turbulence of spring and the peaceful declineof the fall meet."60

Everything becomes serene within the unique harmony of this land whose path, fraught with contrasts, has crosseda threshold: "The serenity of knowledge is a gate opening toward eternity. Its doors turn open on hinges forged oneday by a shrewd artisan by taking into account the enigmas of existence." Such is the thinking itinerary that mustbe met with approval, as a child accepts with untroubled confidence the discreet care of the mother, or the farmerthe heavy rain of the sky. To the gift of Being and its generous releasement corresponds the self-effacement of thethinker who names what is by withdrawing in front of it.

At dusk the path returns to the garden of the castle; "it glows feebly in the light from the stars." From now on, it isa star that keeps watch over the mortals and thus watches them.

The monument on the grave of Martin Heidegger, the son of the Messkirch barrel maker, offers only one sign toour eyesa small star. The paths of the cross, this star written at the core of earth and speech, does not allow thoughtto lose itself, over there, among the 'stars' of the world. Instead, the path leads thought back within its limitsthrough some forest paths, whereby mortals, born from earth, return to earth. . . .




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. . . Three men, one from Crete and two foreigners, decide to offer prayers in the temple of the god following thelong path leading from Knossos to the residence of Zeus. . . . Such were the first steps taken by philosophy, onebright morning, some twenty five centuries ago. . . .

. . . Three men come back today at the dusk of thought, on a country path leading them toward the dwelling ofhumans. The path led them also far into the night. Like children, in wonder, they stare at the night whose coursehas begun. The night is, and remains, "the stitcher of stars." 61




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4Metamorphosis of the Undecidable

Dominique Janicaud

You know the saying: 'the trembling of a branch against the sky is more important than Hitler'. 1

The loss of the gods is the state of undecidability regarding God and the gods.2

In our century replete with massacres and despair, an old man sits in his garden, gazing at a rose stirred by a lightbreeze. This man has lived through the undoubtedly most tragic events humanity has known; both the will to powerand total nihilism have solicited his thinking. Yet in the waning hours of his life, he appears content to find himselfnearly akin to the gardener Vallier who was so dear to Cézanne. He

Translated by Brian Benoît in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 1988 13:1, 12540.Having no apologetic intent, my short paper will nonetheless oppose a host of detractors with the following: ifit is worthwhile to study certain Heideggerian texts closely, this is due to their giving rise to the thought of theundecidable, or, more precisely, to a delimitation of the fundamentally undecidable character of rationality inthe era of technology. It is not certain that contemporary positivity is truly better off ignoring this thoughtwhich is tied to the Heideggerian conviction of the completion of metaphysics, even if, for its part, theHeideggerian stance exposes itself to the questioning and critical anxiety that it has itself aroused.




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whose Being and Time had made a radical critique of everydayness now recognizes in this very everydayness aquality on which he invites us to dwell: "The everyday experience of things in the wide sense neither objectifiesnor brings to representation." 3 There is no need to inscribe the flower into the field of coordination of its physico-chemical properties, or to make it the theme of our representations. "Given over, in a quiet diction, to the brilliantpink of the rose," I may think it and name it, and thus, without yielding to the the domination of the scientific-technical mode of thought, keep myself from bringing it to representation and from objectifying it.

A shrug from the heirs of the Vienna Circle and from many others: trite pastimes or inner mysticism, facileirrationalism or an alibi for political resignation? It seems that the crowd of positive minds is not lacking inarguments in favor of "dropping" Heidegger and his rose, as squarely as Angelus Silesius and his (which is"without why"), and Heraclitus and his cryptic physisin brief, all those archaicized references and regressiveincantations. Of course, certain members of that throng are not unaware that Heideggerian thought accuses themmore or less directly of fleeing before thought, but they have no use for a meditation bereft of formal (operationalor experimental) guarantees, affording, consequently, no resource of efficacy in this world entirely given over tothe increase of powerfor which knowledge is also, and perhaps above all, responsible.

<><><><><><><><><><><>

"Undecidable": it is possible that the word unentscheidbar came to Heidegger by way of discussions concerningGödel's theorem and reflections on the internal limits of mathematical formalism. But we must, on this point,proceed with extreme precision so as not to invite this seductive parallel.

According to Gödel, it only makes sense to speak of the undecidable with regard to propositions through whichone aims at formalizing a mathematical system.4 In a system of this type, a proposition is undecidable if it isneither derivable nor refutable. As in the liar's paradox, one deals here with a "discourse" which is neither simplytrue nor strictly false,




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without, however, falling prey to contradiction. The undecidable thus leads neither to a sort of indifference to truth-value nor to an uncertainty: Gödel no more abandons himself to doubt than the theory of relativity does torelativism. To know that it is impossible to formalize the noncontradiction of a formal system, and, moreover, toknow this in the very terms of that system and in accordance with its hypotheses represent, on the contrary,considerable refinements of logical-mathematical rationality. After all, the undecidable in Gödel's sense of the termis demonstrated. 5

Strictly speaking, the Heideggerian occurrence of the term has nothing to do with this formal field, nor with itsapplications. Yet Heidegger proposes a coherent thematization of the undecidable in the contemporary world. Whatis undecidable and in what sense? It is not the logical status of a proposition. Nor is the impossible "decision"imputed to an implicit epistemological subject. What has become undecidable, according to Heidegger, is the"essence" of truth in its relation to historicity. For the metaphysics that is coming to an end, what remainsundecidable is metaphysics' relation to that originary unfolding.

Of the worldwide competition for the acquisition of scientific, technical, military, and economic potential,Heidegger writes: "This struggle . . . is undecidable in its essence, for there is nothing to decide, since it remainsshut out from all differentiating discernment, from the difference (between Being and beings). . . ."6 This massivediagnosis of the worldwide "situation" in the era of technology forces us to retrace the philosophical origins of thisdead-end: the essence of technology is not revealed by technology itself. In its busy-ness the Ge-stell can onlyocclude its origin ever more. This retracing has nothing to do with a choice among ideologies or "world-views."Precisely, what Heidegger means to show is that there is fundamentally nothing to decide when one is thrown toand fro between rationalism and irrationalism, subjectivism and objectivism, optimism and pessimism, activismand mysticism, etc. Of course, these pairs of opposites suggest a certain content to our subjective representations,perhaps to our phantasms, and to our drives. But throughout




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Heidegger's work these alternatives are presented as so many ways for humanity to be locked within theundecidable. As the consumer facing the "non-choice" between two identical detergents which differ by their labelsonly, modern man is exposed to incessant "reversals from pro to con" (there is no doubt that, for Heidegger,revolution itself is such a phenomenon), in which, ontologically, no veritable way out, no road, no access to what isoriginary is given.

Modern man, being purely "reactive," has nothing to decide regarding the essential. He is given over to "theabsence of destiny." In the epoch of the absence of allotment, the undecidable is das Ungeschickliche. "The will towill hardens everything into which is bereft of destiny. The consequence of which is the undestinal." 7 That is whythe nihilistic "crossing" of the "line'' throws us into the greatest of dangers: namely, the danger that, owing to theexclusive preeminence of the organization and exploitation of all beings, nothing can ever be decided any more.For the time being, according to the apt expression at the end of Nietzsche, we are "at the edge of the time of theundecided."8

Why has our time become so remote from all decision? Because the "decision" has already been made. At thedawn of the modern age, man rose to the rank of true reality.9 Through the cogito a sort of insurrection of managainst Being took place. In this sense, this uprising of subjectivity into the will to certaintywhich Heideggercompares in the Zürich seminar to a proto-atomic explosionwas a "decision." This is very explicitly formulated byHeidegger in Nietzsche: the cogito consists in the fact that "my representation as the repraesentatio giving themeasure decides over the presence of every represented thing."10 The modern age is a sending, a destiny(Geschick), of Being. It is thus Being which has "decided" the essence of man. The individual Descartes respondedto a (new) injunction of Being, in putting himself forth as the subject of representation, and as the bearer of thewill to truth. At this epochal instant, the decisive event (Ereignis) occurred. We are the heirs of that eventwithinthe undecidable.




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To what extent this "decision" is removed from the psychological sphere of the will, from the deliberations of asubject, can unexpectedly be displayed by another comparison with Gödel. Indeed, despite the differences, theelement common to the Gödelian and Heideggerian undecidables is that neither one denotes the powerlessness orthe perplexities of a subject. The theorem clearly exposes a situation that is altogether objective: it exhibits alogical structure. On the other hand, it must now be patent that, for his part, Heidegger reveals a structure whereinthe subject, despite appearances, plays an equally small role 11 as (perhaps an even smaller role than) in Gödel'sstructure. For the sake of convenience we shall call Heidegger's structure ontological-destinal.

Can one go so far as to envision a positive comparison between these two undecidablesas if both disciplines,mathematical logic and philosophy, attested to the same crisis of rationality? Heidegger was always one to refusesuch a perspective. No more in the case of the undecidable than in that of relativity or of the principle ofindeterminancy, did he consider a possible evolution of rational positivity toward the thought of Being, norconversely did he envisage that the thought of Being could take advantage of the "new scientific spirit." Even if itis an ontological and not a purely rational decision that has shut modern man into the arena where he is struggling,rationality offers no decisive recourse, since it rather contributes to overshadowing historicity, or to relyingexclusively on the chance of some new system of factors, or on the sole virtues of scientific-technical "progress."According to Heidegger, man, being as he is given over to the undecidable, literally turns in a circle: "Everywhereman, excluded from the truth of Being, circles about himself as animal rationale.''12 The undecidable is the vertigothat reveals its own vanity to the humanity which is "certain" of itself.

It finally becomes obvious that even if Heidegger does not claim that decision of any subject (despite his retainingthe theme of "resolute decision,"13 which stems from Being and Time and to which we will return), i.e., even if helimits himself to revealing an ontological-historical "structure," he claims neither to emit an objective judgmentabout it, nor to




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content himself with showing "that which is"without further ado. He attempts to think that which is to be thought,and to respond to the injunction of Being in order to safeguard its truth. In this endeavor, the undecidable is on theside of forgetfulness and utter errancy: whence its "unfavorable" connotation, unlike the Derridean undecidable, asimulacrum which both lives in and disorganizes philosophical discourse, without ever saying anything beyond thiswork of of deconstruction carried out mainly by way of binary exclusions. 14 Is there not, for Heidegger, a"beyond" what is undecidable? But how is this beyond thinkable if our undecidable predicament is preciselycharacterized as a being shut into insurmountable positions which the forward march of positive rationality onlycontributes to harden?

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We have now reached the boundary (limes) at which Heidegger could have stayed. There, one gains a certainleeway in relation to metaphysics; one contents oneself with a retrospective look over the "landscape" of the West;one exhibits the forgetting of the ontological difference, and how this forgetting both hides and shifts within theonto-theological constitution. Many follow him to this point and credit him with having stepped back to acondition more radical than Kant's "metaphysics of metaphysics." But no excess, pleasethe Schritt zurück (stepback) should have stopped there!

Heidegger's deepest originality lies inlike it or nothis having crossed over this boundary. "Here it is not a matter ofthe psychology of philosophers but solely one of the history of Being. . . . What happens in the history of Being?No-thing happens, das Ereignis er-eignet.15

This quotation by no means takes us away from the theme of the undecidable, nor from the following newquestion: how do we break out of this circle which appears to be constitutively insurmountable? The answer is tobe found in the remainder of the previous citation from the end of Nietzsche and is stated in the terms of ourquestioning: the initial differentiation is not an act which we are able to impose upon




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Being. And I quote: "The metaphysical differentiationthis always means the differentiation articulating and bearingall metaphysicsmust itself first be experienced in its beginning, so that metaphysics as event (Ereignis) of thehistory of Being becomes capable of decision (entscheidungshaft)." 16

The move back into the foundation of metaphysics, in freeing the hidden truth of metaphysics, renders possible anew "event," that is, the coming of the light of that which is unthought in metaphysics. The essential is then nolonger undecidable but undecided: Does the preeminence that has until now been granted to beings uproot allquestioning, or will the disclosure of the Being's withholding happen?17 The time of the undecided is also that ofthe span (Frist)18 in which faithful thinking will have to exercise its endurance. Such thinking recollects thehistory of Being, and opens itself to the incipiency withheld until now.

In order to understand this differentiation wherein thought reappropriates a sending for itself, it is necessary tointroduce a distinction not explicitly made by Heidegger, namely, that between the state of the world and thoughtitself.19 Thought is the guide to the possible. It remains undecided whether the thought of Being will be epochal,whether das Abend-ländische will really come to pass with this god capable of "saving" us.20 But Heidegger doesnot doubt that thought itself has already taken its bearings, that it has rediscovered a path, and therefore a"decision."

Thus is undone the contradiction that some are inclined to see between the ascertainment of the undecidable andthe sudden appearance of a "decision" to the sole "advantage" of Heidegger. We live in world where theundecidable predominates and where at the same time the first hint of a possible "decision" presents itself tothought. Will this "decision" be granted to humanity, and, if so, under which historical figure and when? Theinterview given to Der Spiegel is full of reticence about the future, but categorically affirms the presentpowerlessness of technological man: "Technology in its essence is something that man does not master.''21

The reign of the undecidable thus has a poignant sort of evidencealso called nihilism (where the void augmentswith-




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out acceding to the dignity of no-thing-ness). Our sole recourse: the incipient speech of thinkers and poets. InHeidegger, this amounts to a gaze that encounters the illumination of Ereignis.

The Ereignis is er-äugnis, catching sight of: "No change happens without a heralding escort. But how does theescort draw near if the Ereignis does not light up, Ereignis which calling upon and needing the human being, takeshim into heed, i.e., into sight, and in this sight brings the mortals on the path of a building that thinks and poetizes?" 22

To the will to certitude that only ends up in the undecidable, there is thus radically opposed the poetic or thinkinggaze within which lights up the instant-epoch: "We only arrive into the proximity of the destinal by the suddennessof the instant of recollection."23 This suddenness of the Augenblick responds to the signs of Being (die Winke desSeins).24 That which Being itself heralds is the crossing of gazes in the Crossing of the fourfold: the gods are themessengers of the Divinity and give off signs.25 In the end, the secret of Being is given only to a wink (Wink).The wink does not lay out the real with the clarity and distinction of the Cartesian intuitus. The distinction betweenthe play of evidence (the modern strategy of truth) and the "evidence" of the play of Being amounts to a differencein the manner of regarding and being regarded. In Descartes, it is a matter of embracing with the gaze in order tomaster: "one cannot possess any science save through the gaze of the mind or through deduction."26 TheHeideggerian glance heeds the signs of the enigma.27 In order to apprehend its singularity, there is undoubtedly nobetter guide than these few lines by Walter F. Ottoone of the rare contemporaries of his in whom Heidegger foundinspirationabout the gaze which the Greeks of Homer's time directed towards the divine: ''For what would bereligious, if not man's being seized by his gazing into the depths of Being? Depth here speaks to the spirit that is litup. An instant can let some venerable figures shine for which no temple was ever built."28

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In choosing to contrast two types of gazesi.e., intuition leading to the undecidable and the "decided" glance ofBeing (Heidegger's "extra eye")we have not merely sought to illustrate one more facet of the thinker's originality.His originality is a recognized fact. In the domain of thought, however, originality is not everything, or nearlyeverything as in literature. We also wanted to suggest how intimate and radical the Heideggerian questioning ofmetaphysics is: it is not a mere critical step back, but an appropriation of the unthought fundament, an opening tothe unsaid. A third intention has guided us in this paper, which must now be stated: we would like to throw intorelief and into question the dual, if not dichotomous, structure underlying Heidegger's thoughtor, more precisely,the hardening of a tension into a dichotomy.

The truth is that Heidegger never gave up Entschlossenheit (resoluteness or resolute decision). His thoughtremained until the end one of decision (Entscheidung), of allotment, of marking off difference. Hence thefigurative sense of the verb "scheiden".* To decideand for once Latin and English are in strict agreement withGermanis literally to break, to split, to remove by cutting. Of course, Heidegger's thought did not remain strictlycentered on "resolute decision" as it is understood in Being and Time. As man's appropriate response to his finiteand mortal condition's calling upon him, Entschlossenheit is not a decision among others, but, more accurately, it isthe opening to any possible (ontic) decision, thanks to Dasein's availability for its own "potentiality for being(Seinkönnen)." 29 This resoluteness, albeit carried out in "destinal instantaneity,'' is open to the recapitulation ofthe originary possibilities of Dasein: "Resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own self."30 , Incontrast to the inau-

Note: At this point of the original text, the author does not use the German verb scheiden, but rather theFrench verb trancher. The latter has many senses and Janicaud plays on them at various points. Into hisplay he also pulls the noun tranchant. Since no English verb quite seems to bring with it that particulararray of meanings, we decided, with the author's consent, to use here the German verb which trancher ismeant to render, and to translate its other occurrences (both conjugated and nominalized) in accordancewith the sense they have in their respective contexts of use. (Brian Benoît)




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thenticity of the They "which evades choice" 31 and loses itself in pursuit of a present adorned with the lures ofwhat is modern,32 the spirit of decision manifests itself as freedom aiming at the renouncement constituted by anydeterminate decision to come, i.e., as freedom suited to the demands of an existential situation.

In carrying out the turning which directs his meditation more to the essential being of truth (or to the truth ofBeing) than to the "place" of appearance of this truth (Da-sein), Heidegger "deanthropologizes" this thoughtwithout in fact giving up the Entschlossenheit, the openness of resoluteness (henceforth breaking with theabandonment to metaphysics or technology, both destinal determinations of inauthenticity), and its conjoining theinstantaneous and the destinal.33 The Entschlossenheit has not disappeared: it has been shifted from Dasein toBeing itself. From now on "decision" (in the sense of rending, splitting, dividing) occurs within Being: there is abreak between Being as Ge-stell and Being as the Ereignis of ''that which saves." The "gaze" of the Ereignis mustrend the night of the world. In the "era of the undecided," a new allotment, an intimate (perhaps cathartic)separation is being prepared within Being. This separation, is, of course, not lacking in eschatological connotations(scheiden may mean "to reach its end"): the new allotment is the eschaton, the Abend-ländische in the propersense, the coming of what is saved. A "decision" is waiting for us at the end of history: "What is Greek, what is atdawn, is the great beginning which can come to be."34

Following Heidegger along this road of ever more radical questioning, oriented towards and by the ontologicalenigma, we cannot not wonder about the character of the disjunction between the rational undecidable and the"decision" of Being. This clear-cut distinction still seems to echo the duality of authenticity and inauthenticitywherein "resolute decision" was first inscribed: "The fundamental possibilities of existence, the authenticity andinauthenticity of Da-sein, are ontologically grounded in possible temporalizations of temporality."35 Let usemphasize that this remains true in the late Heidegger's thoughtsave that the temporalizations take on




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an "epochal" dimension: "From the epoch of Being comes the epochal essence of its destiny, in which the properworld history consists. Each time when Being withholds itself in its destiny, there suddenly and unforeseeablyarises a world." 36

Now, the knot of the topic of "decision" has precisely already been cut by Heidegger in a sense that gives rise to adifficulty, for it presupposes that one can be on both sides of the "decision" at the same time. We are on this side ofthe decision inasmuch as we are dominated by the imperatives of the metaphysico-technical world andconsequently left to the undecidable. But via Heidegger's thought we are already beyond the decision: as themouthpiece of Being, this thought claims to escape the undecidable in uttering the "destinal." To be sure, this bondis not a rational and absolute necessity of the Hegelian sort. However, what is already decided by Heidegger (andwhat carries him beyond the undecidable) is that Being institutes epochs. It instituted an epoch in Greece, in theChristian Middle Ages, and in modernity: today it gives itself in global technology and holds in reserve an epochwhere a-letheia itself may manifest itself in its essential withholding.

Even if this epochal character of Being is neither purely rational, nor absolute, nor dialectical, nor organicallyarticulated, it nonetheless attests to a certain type of necessity, which at times is quite explicitly formulated. Thus,in "Overcoming Metaphysics," the future appears already decided: "Before Being itself can come about in itsinitial truth, Being as will must (muss) be broken, and the world overturned."37 Taken literally, this text states thatan imperious necessity inscribed within Being itself condemns humanity to suffer devastation until that momentwhen the Ereignis comes to pass.

In more recent writings, Heidegger is more cautious: "No one can know whether, when, where, and how this stepof thought will unfold itself into a proper (needed in the Ereignis) road, a path, or a construction of paths."38However, even in this passage, what remains undecided is the human response to Being, not the message itself.That Being holds




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itself in reserve as Ereignis is already decided: Being-that-is-no-thing is always destined to us and may institute anepoch.

The state of the world thus remains undecided, but not the thought which, not content with deconstructingmetaphysics and pondering the ontological enigma, directly gives voice to Being and its epochal "decision." Thedual structure that bifurcates into that which is appropriated (Eigentlichkeit) and that which is unappropriated(Uneigentlichkeit) was maintained, but it was extended to the scale of the world and history. Henceforth, the"inauthentic" is no longer merely the "vulgar" existence of Dasein . . . it is, instead, the planetary errancy in itsmassiveness to which stands opposed only the tenuousness of the thought of Being, which, however, harbors this''necessity": "The essence of technology must (muss) harbor within itself the full extent of that which saves." 39The hyperbolic gap between the rational undecidable and the thought "decided" (by Being) reappears at the veryheart of technology in the dizzying manner in which "danger" and "that which saves" nearly graze each other wheneach is thought in such close proximity to the other.

The question that Heideggerian thought unwittingly forces us to raise thus concerns the nature of the bond betweenBeing-that-is-no-thing and its historical destiny. Because this bond is both affirmed and withdrawn (Being-that-is-no-thing playing the role of a quasi-principle in history, while its sole identifiable trait is withdrawal), thought isalready decided (by this bond) in favor of "that which saves" (whose granting, at least, is a sure thing), but is at thesame time given over, within the interval of the "time of the undecidable," to the dominant undecidablesat the riskof having nothing to oppose directly to these undecidables.

The situation of Heideggerian thought thus turns out to be more complex than it initially seemed: it is confrontationbetween rational undecidability and the thought of the ontological "decision." In fact, this thought does not itselfstay free of the undecidable. On the one hand, this is so because it is literally unable to respond categorically to thequestion: "will the thought of Being institute an epoch?" Heidegger's thought only indicates that it is so able. Onthe other hand,




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this is so, because in its effectuation it only opposes the undecidable terms of the present world by equallydismissing them, 40 and thereby forbids itself access to any further articulation of the understanding of the present(just as it forbids itself a methodological reelaboration, since all method is metaphysical). This thinking lets theontological difference, to which it continuously refers, cut through its own domain (its metalanguage is attained byway of the prevelence of that referent).

In proposing a reading of Heidegger animated by a dynamic examination of the contiguity between the dominatingand what is held back, the rational and the enigmatic,41 we do not intend to erase the cutting decisiveness ofHeidegger's differentiation, but to relate it to the joining which an empathy with Being renders possiblejust as, onthe side of the manipulation of beings, we envision subtler rational treatments than technological manipulations andideological alternatives. Heidegger himself has shown in Identity and Difference that the return to difference assuch must not occlude access to the settlement (Austrag) between Being and beings, which until now had been theprivilege of the metaphysical Logos.42 Yet until the end he sought to think Being "without retrospective regard forthe relation of Being to beings."43 Was that his last word on the subject and must all thought hang from theextreme appropriation of the Ereignis? As for us, we have decided in favor of a negative answeran answermaintaining the consideration due to the relation between Being and beings, keeping up the exchanges between the"freshness of the eventful"44 and the ontic decisions that point to the ontological difference, and bringing theundecidable into the vicinity of, rather than removing it from, the ultimate questions: Will history be decided? WillBeing institute an epoch, in its truth? Will we ever take leave of the undecidable?




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5Heidegger in New York

Dominique Janicaud

Introduction To The Dialogue

Everywhere people constantly praise dialogue. But the praise more often disguises the wish to avoid doinganything further. Is it any different in philosophy? Since Plato, the art of the dialogue has been widely acclaimedand its virtues extolledalbeit from a distance. Consider the scene of modern philosophy. Authors nowadays get allthe more recognition as they own a few specific ideas. In order to lay a claim to originality, an author hardly needsto cultivate dialogue. Book after book, he just has to secure his one theme and to shield his thesesin the same wayfarmers and investors set out to capitalize on the yield of their land and portfolio. The reading public will beimpressed by some amount of repetition, which they deem acceptable if the literary style of the writer comes withthe necessary flourish. The same public would acclaim the faithfulness of the authornow a literary celebrityto hisown views. Sartre elevated this sort of sublime stubbornness to a caricature, even in his texts of self-criticism.

Should a philosopher confess his perplexity, his doubts, even his despair, he becomes a nuisance. He is found to bedis-




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concerting by the reading public and is then discountedunless in the mean time he has found a system for thepresentation of his views and a strategy for dealing with their uniqueness.

First Heidegger experienced the glory bestowed upon a great "systematic" author after the publication of Sein undZeit, and then the solitude of one endlessly raising his single question. He wrote two dialogues (with the Japanesescholar in "On the Way to Language" and the so-called "Discourse on a Country Path''), but never used its genreas a way to shield himself. Yet his use of the dialogue is indicative of something.

The following pages are an attempt to echo his willingness to choose the uncertainty of dialogue. Triggered byHeidegger's questioning thought, this meditation turns toward its source and exposes it to the wild winds that sweepacross today's landscape, assuming always that "questioning is the piety of thought," providing it be pursued to theend.

Hence "Heidegger in New York" was not written in order to pay homage to a literary genre or style. Instead Iintended to reveal a situation of aporia that I wished not to submerge in dogmatism or unilateral views. When athought as complex as Heidegger's is at stake in a debate, how could one be content with ready-made formulas andperemptory statements?

In spite of the inescapable distinctiveness sustaining each exchange, I never sought to tilt the balance in favor ofany one of the participants. The issue was not to make sure that a certain view won over others. Instead, it was thatattention be paid to the questions, and that thought be stimulated.

As for the title and background of this essay, they are neither fortuitous nor a concession to realism. Practicallynothing is to be taken literally as mere assertion. I use irony, antiphrasis, and (shall I say provocative)displacements of views. If there are deficiencies in this text, I, the author, take them upon myself. Likewise, I amaware that I had to create a gap between on the one hand a nonacademic, lively discussion (dealing both with whatis revealed and what is hidden) and on the other hand an initiation to an increasingly technical debate between"specialists." But there is no attempt to




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force anything upon the "intentions" of the participants (if they have any). Such a procedure would remove the zestof the dialogue and deprive it of its most legitimate stimulant, curiosity.

David, Francis, Joan and Sue in a Manhattan apartment.

SUE:

All four of us now sit in a circle around an invisible fire. We agreed that first we should begin with a moment ofsilence because silence is possible even in the noisiest anthill on earth. The noise of the City, this island ofManhattan, becomes a merely low-level background noise as soon as one takes some distance from its sources. . . .

So here I am now, charged with breaking this silencein a most difficult way, the way perhaps most alien to whatgoes on in this metropolis of world business, crime, and dance. For here meditation does not find its worldheadquarters. You invited me to speak first and asked that I bring together my perplexities and my rejections.Because I had said I was tired of a Heidegger shrouded in obscure, magical, and ritualistic formulas or hiddenbehind a critical dissemination only of interest to specialists, you urged me to give my objections a systematiccharacterthat so far I had been reluctant to give. Now I am discovering that my reservations had a sort ofcombativeness, as though some sort of interior rebellion had finally to break out against a thought that solongliterallypossessed me.

The fact that Marx's thought guided so many people up until recently and that for centuries Plato was the light andhope, had nothing to do with the subtlety found in the criticisms of Feuerbach nor Plato's literary skill or dialecticalrefinement. History, which basically is violent and forgetful, only retains those powerful inspirations that mark itscourse and sometimes modify it. Is Heidegger's thought capable of holding humankind under its sway forcenturies? In more concrete terms, could we grant him the characteristic he himself assigned to Meister Eckhart: amaster for thought and for life?




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Now you know that I answer this question in the negative. Yet Joan is one who can testify to how difficult it wasfor me for several years. For at first, I thought that with Heidegger I understood in one fell swoop the unity ofWestern history, and the origin of the nihilistic errancy of the modern worldthe increasingly fatal neglect[détournement] of the nearness of Being. I had learned to free myself of objectifying thought and of anymetaphysical thesis on the world. Availability to things and openness to the mystery were my favorite mottos. Iexpected that great poets and the transformation of my own life by the potential for thought and poetry would bringabout an increased capacity for wonderment and dwelling. Removed as I was from the ideological jumble of theintellectuals and also from the mediocrity of the media, how could I possibly deny that I did learn a lot fromHeidegger, that my will and my concentration were purified in the process, that a quasi-miraculous relaxation hadindeed taken place within me?

The other side of the coin soon became apparent. I took less and less interest in my work in scientific research andin the everyday preoccupations of the lab. I hardly could find justification for continuing on with it, except that thecondition of modern alienation must be lived from the inside. The research project that once had me captivated,was no longer inspiring. From that point on, I viewed it as the necessary continuation of the technological setting-to-work, as the inevitable completion of metaphysics. No longer did I put faith in it. No longer did I feel that thisline of activity ranked above the rest: it was all merely a combining, a measuring, a predicting, a waiting forreactions to take place, a modifying of hypotheses, a changing of dosages, and the assessing of the yield ofexperiments. In such meticulous work and in such strictly conditioned reflections, nothing was offered tomeditation. Evenings and vacations became islands of happiness and retreats from such a life. Time and again, Imeditated on Heraclitus and read The Principle of Reason, whose "rose without why" used to fascinate me. Myeyes and ears were being stripped of veils. All the clamor of American cities became intolerable to methe noise,the density of the popu-




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lation, the hustle and bustle, the vulgarity. I would not go out much: some friends like Joan made it possible for meto remain in touch with the world outside of my professional environment.

I shall not dwell on this collapse of my mental universe: it was too painful an experience. In short it took placeduring the course of a vacation. Intentionally, I went to Maine alone, precisely at a time when all the conditionslacking in my day-to-day work turned out to be met there: I had all the time in the world to meditate and thatsummer was just perfect to take long walks. Such a way of being, wasn't it authentic dwelling? I was open to thepossible, but also to a void. In such a state of mindproviding me with meditative recollection [recueuillement] andenabling me to heed the silent call of BeingI felt things regidifying and myself being rejected into a grippingsolitude. Whatever approach I took to convince myself that anxiety is formative and purifies one forfreedomdirectly in the wake of Sein und Zeitstill in the end there blew around me a wind of indifference, thatassailed me with disjointed and increasingly kaleidoscopic sensations. Then, nothing could reach my heart or myintelligence. From Being, I had expected everything, and nothingness was delivered. I did not know how to resignmyself to this. I wondered whether Heidegger himself had experienced such a state and known the kind of impassein which I found myself. To what conclusions was I led by this experience? In the most empirical fashion, I willmove upstream from result to cause. The result is a thought without ethics that leaves us helpless by requesting thatwe encounter the simple in this now exceedingly complicated world. Paradoxically, while Heidegger's effort is toallow humankind to dwell within finitude, the point he reaches takes us away from that goal. His exclusive questfor a prior sitethe phenomenal character of beings in its point of origin, the originary self-givenness oftemporalitydoes nothing but lead thought to its conditions of possibility, to the detriment of simply onticarticulations and comportments. There is a delusion in authenticity experienced in the embrace of hypostatizedBeing or of one's own-most possibilities-for-Being; there is delusion in authentic




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language and its talk of a radical foundation with no return to things and other fellow human beings. The quest forthe antecedent [Préalable] is no dwelling space because it takes us away from anything akin to a human world. Yetrecall that Sein und Zeit begins with the analysis of the complex contextures that make up the natural and socialenvironment, our habits and projects, etc. The famous "Turn" was therefore nothing more than a stylistic exerciseon the presuppositions of an investigationone indeed that I found worthy of consideration primarily because of itsquestioning attitude, but for me ultimately not satisfactory in dealing with its professed aim, which is the clearingof a way that would allow mortals to dwell on the earth.

I will give you an example of a neglect by Heidegger, now patent in the field of ethics and politics. In 1969, whenhe was eighty years old, Heidegger acquiesced to an interview with Richard Wisser for German television. To thequestion "Do you think that there is a social mission of philosophy?" he answered: "If one is to answer thisquestion, one must ask 'What is society?' and meditate on the fact that the current society is nothing but theabsolutization of modern subjectivity taken to its limits and that, from such a location, a dialogue can never beestablished with a philosophy that has overcome the perspective of subjectivity." In other words, the response wasentirely negative, and the refusal of the dialogue and the dismissal of the present context were as total as possible.The thinker closes himself up within this forbidding ''overcoming of subjectivity" (which, moreover, he must bringto pass through his own subjectivity). What does he refer us to? Could it be to the antecedent of the Socraticquestioning "What is . . .?" Yet Plato returned toward the world of men and to them he proposed a model. In ourcase, there is no clarification as to what results are yielded by this search upstream toward the origin of society. Infact, no other practical effect comes to the fore except the comfortable and prudent disengagement already pointedout. Could one possibly tell the political prisoner, the oppressed individual, or even the average citizen caught ineveryday difficulties: "First ask yourself, What is society"? You wouldn't dare face their




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laughter. For myself, without any further controversy, I wonder whether contemporary society is nothing but theabsolutization of subjectivity in the modern sense. I am afraid Heidegger confused the foundation of this societywith its complex and living development. And even if he were right concerning the nature of our technologicalcivilization, why would a dialogue be impossible with the "thought of Being"? This alleged impossibility raisesquestions all the more, since I don't see at all how anybody could totally eschew the objective attempt to acquiresome distance, lest that person tumble into mental alienation.

Without considering the political aspect of the question which has already caused so many polemics and which, itseems to me, can be cleared up in light of these observations, I note the fact of a failure concerning ethics. Movingupstream to the cause of this failure (acknowledged to some extent, as indeed it was) might seem peremptory. Inorder to think, one sometimes has to be daring. I am taking a leap, as I find debatable this claim by Heidegger thatthe thought of Being in its truth is the most simple, the most originary, and the nearest onewhen in fact it is themost elaborate of all, the most derivative, and the highest. In its principles as well as in its results, I detect anextreme internal conflict between the stated intention and what comes to pass in actuality. Nothing is moredifferent than the simplicity of the gaze that alights upon a green meadow and the purity of the inspection thatreveals Being. The latter is given to us at the end of a long apprenticeship, or, if you want, of a phenomenologythat can be mastered only in the wake of a strenuous effort. But one can object that Heidegger does not confusesimple Being with abstract Beingthat of metaphysics. I respond that he cannot prevent those two meanings fromoverlapping and even from getting muddled within each other. Even if we were seeking Being solely and purely,we would do well not to think that it is offered as directly as Heidegger pretends after covering over the conditionsof the approach. I don't want to deny the possibility of an ontological experience through an analysis of semantics.I only contest its simplicity. "Being is predicated in many ways." Heidegger is well-inspired to bring the focus




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upon this penetrating remark of Aristotle. Yet, why does he not take more heed of it?

FRANCIS:

Certainly I will not question the fact that you went through a crisis and will not discuss it. Yet, there are manyreaders of Nietzsche who find themselves troubled and alienated by revelations that others find stimulating andpromising. It's the same thing in the case of Heidegger's thought. My experience is the opposite of yours. I will notdelve into it but I would like to hightenforgive me for being so outspokenthe manner and the object of the dialoguein order to conform to the requirements made by Heidegger; for he thought that a master thinker is left unscathedby the throng of his champions and opponents.

SUE:

The allusion to my experience also had a philosophical reason. In contrast to the Master, I do not think thatlanguage is no human thing. Every ontological experience is refracted through a given sensibility and a specificlinguistic background. To dehumanize it amounts to abstracting from the concrete. That way, thought ends upshrivelling.

FRANCIS:

First, I can't let pass your presentation of, and commentary on, Heidegger's reply to Wisser and German television.I recall this exchange very vividly. You skipped over the beginning of Heidegger's response. He said: "No! In thatsense, one cannot speak of a social mission of philosophy!" In what sense, then? Well, in the perspective of thejournalist who would have philosophy directly participate in the reorientation of the objectives and restructuring ofthe factual data of today's society. Immediately afterwards, Heidegger showed that the very idea oftransformationwhich Marx takes as his focus in his Theses on Feuerbachpresupposes a representation of thetotality of the world, namely, a philosophy, namely, the modern metaphysics overcome by Heidegger. In light ofthis point, his refusal to raise the question at the level expected by the journalist was perfectly justified. It did not




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amount to a wholesale refusal of the dialogue; it was merely the refusal of a superficial dialogue that would haverequired that Heidegger's thought be radically altered by the hoisting upon it of a perspective foreign to it. If insteadone were to question the limits of our conception of society and of the project of transformation of the world,perhaps our comportments would be changed in unpredictable ways. The thinker is no social worker: he canwithstand laughter, or the tears of the ill-fated individuals, because he is not sheltered from the present wasteland.He never pretended to be. The desire to reduce at all costs the differences between the thinker, the politician, thetechnocrat, and the political activist amounts to a levelling off process resulting from the blind technologizationgoing on in all areas of reality. From the point of view of the technological world, Heidegger is devalued becausehe provides no technological answer and because he refuses the normative character of efficiency. This point ofview is so overwhelming that we have to struggle constantly against its intrusion. I am disappointed that yousuddenly gave in to the dominant conditioning by refusing to hear the courageous and novel demands made by athought not afraid of isolation from the masses. In addition, Heidegger can hardly be said to repudiate dialogue,since in The Letter on Humanism he called for a "productive dialogue" with Marxism. But did anyone heed thatcall?

DAVID:

Nonetheless, Sue's remark is correct, there is no ethics in Heidegger. A philosophical ethics means that a questionis raised like Kant's on the conditions and the rules under which action becomes morally valid. Heidegger'sapproach was never legislative nor rule-oriented in the sense just mentioned; instead, it is questioning through andthrough. And the question it raises is not, What must I do? but rather, What possible meaning does a project ofethics have? It is a meditation on ethicsethics at the second level only.

SUE:

Or rather an illustration of the step back toward the conditions of possibility. Since Hegel was already justified inhis




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verdict on dualism and formalism concerning Kantian ethics, what should we say of the Heideggerian non-ethicsthat dismisses an interest in the course of the world by fixating itself on the mere word of ethics, and a few key (orsupposedly key) words.

JOAN:

The theme of a thoughtful and poetic dwelling is no fixation. It opens up an inquiry, and invites us to enrich ourexperienceprimarily within languageof unsuspected and so far hidden reserves. Kant, that's over. What matters isthe openness to the future and the preparation of new ways. Heidegger, among other thinkers, contributes to thistask.

SUE:

I don't agree. When a man willfully causes another to suffer, it is not sufficient that I feel upset or outraged.Philosophy has a role to play in order to make me understand the immorality of offensive acts. Kant remains astimely as the evil upon which he bears judgment. As for Heidegger, he asks of poetry what his own thought wasprecisely incapable of securinga specific and meaningful sense of dwelling.

DAVID:

Your verdict seems very harsh. Why should we interpret solely in negative terms the fact that in Heidegger there isno thematic and rule-oriented ethics? In the vast and manifold domain of experience, there must be more than oneformula to apply. In order to hit upon a style of life, one must have tried several styles of thought. I would agreewith Joan on this point.

FRANCIS:

The element we still find absent in Heidegger is the missing part he resolutely sought to escape; for he wanted togive an entirely new version of what had been accomplished by Kant and others. He was successful in that he didnot produce yet another metaphysical ethics or reissue a new system of ethics. He invited us to think anew the veryjointures essential in a new way of dwelling. How could this project be implemented all at once, since it refuses theconvenience and the traps of established formulas?




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SUE:

Still, one would have to demonstrate that these formulas can no longer be used. And one would have to give thenew dwelling broader content and consistency.

FRANCIS:

One does not have to demonstrate a mutation from one historical time to another. A new form of existence doesnot come about gradually as one fills up a bottle.

DAVID:

You are both trapped in a polemic on the topic of Heidegger's work instead of pondering "what is still to bethought," to use his terms. We erroneously consider Heidegger a sort of monument blocking our view of thelandscape. This is all too often the case in the current way of doing philosophy! One quotes, or refutes, names andtitles with mere formulasand one thinks that this practice hightens the level of questioning.

JOAN:

Not at all, David, our samll session is less conventional than you suggest. We decided to move forward as fellowexplorers sharing in the same goaljust as migrating birds who make a compact before the flightso that ourconfiguration would reveal in Heidegger precisely those difficulties that people always more or less manage toavoid. His work is monumental by the sheer dimensions of its production, but this is not what should impress us.Nor should we be impressed by the mass of the secondary literature, which so often is verbose. If we end up withsome antagonistic positions, the stakes are worth it. Already, this is the case. We agree on the absence of athematic and rule-oriented ethics in Heidegger, but . . .

DAVID:

. . . one side over here, Sue, thinks it's a catastrophe and the other, Francis, a blessing.

SUE:

I think it's ruinous to call for a new way of dwelling on our miserable earth while hiding behind formulas such as"We are not thinking yet," "Language speaks," or ''We must heed the silent call of Being," etc. It is ruinous to thosewho invest at




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least some confidence in the first suggestion and are left resourceless.

FRANCIS:

"The one thinking great thoughts must err greatly." If you deem this saying to be an alibi, I have nothing further toadd and the discussion is useless. In America, people always want to test a thought for practical results: that isexactly what you are doing, Sue. Consider Nietzsche, or even Kant: I am not sure either would help you betterhandle the modern predicament. Yet, without them, we would be less clear-sighted.

The practical rebellions (revolutionary activism, monastic retreats, and hippie creativity) have the advantage ofbeing tangible: people adopt a new schedule, a new uniform, a new hairstyle. But this advantage has a drawback: Ifthe person were to experience another crisis, nothing but darkness is at hand. What can they turn to? Anorganization of people? And the comfort, the enduring complicity, and the certainties shared by all? I claim thatnothing of the sort is possible when one has to think really and to the end. This sharing of ours, experienced heretoday, presupposes hours of solitary meditation; and it will send us back to the same solitude and silence, if it doesnot collapse entirely.

Heidegger's greatness consisted in his attempt to think, and to cause us to do so also. This, precisely becausethinking is out of season. And there is a comportment and an endurance that are specific to this very experience.

Still, I accept the ground that you choose, Sue, namely the absence of a thematic ethics. I view it as preparing usfor more fundamental questions. Your words veiled, or slanted, the innovative depths of Heidegger. I will takewhat you said on simplicity as the sign of it.

The theme of simplicity is present and important in Heidegger's work. Simplicity concerning what? Being itself orthe thought faithful to it. "The simple preserves the enigma of what remains or what is great." Everyone shouldknow how to appreciate what is revealed and hidden by such a thought, a thought on the very verge of silence. Yetthis is not the case in the era of technology. Heidegger is not surprised by the situation. The "Conversation on aCountry Path"




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assessed that the man of technology only listens to the clamor of machines and loses sight of the simple which isnow confused with undifferentiated uniformity. Consequently, says Heidegger, the "quiet force" of the simple hasvanished. The simplicity concerning the enigma of Being cannot be demonstrated. No one raises an eyebrow if apoet like Paul Eluard mentions it. Yet some find it scandalous that a thinker should be captivated by it. The reasonis that for him the simplicity of the enigma is no literary theme, but that upon which one has to meditate and in themidst of which one must learn to dwell.

His attention to the simple should not be equated with a reductive fascination. There are two reasons: On the onehand, this simple does not have the schematic unity of a concept, but points to what is reserved in terms ofpossibilities and freedom for our mortal being. On the other hand, Heidegger does not equate all of our thought, inits full extension, with this simplicity. In contrast, he shows that the simplicity of the thought of Being is "strange"and even "uncognizable" for us inasmuch as we attempt to give ourselves representations of everythingand ofBeing in particular, as if this were a mere scientific or technological object. The fact that the surroundingatmosphere leads us to adopt representational thinking and its mode of objectifying must not absolve us frompressing the critical and compelling question in another way, which consists precisely in ceasing to despise theprior conditions [le préalable] of rational mastery. Heidegger's ultimate merit is that he introduced the simplicity ofBeing into the field of meditation of Western thought which, since Plato, had run aground in the quest for anabsolute foundation.

The Indian yogi can stay hours on end sitting in the same positionin a state of inner reflection. Western man, notesMichaux, does not know how to stop. Heidegger comes to the forefront with an injunction that might amount tothis: "Listen! Look! Nothing richer could be offered to meditation than the wonder of being right here. What youare unable to discern where you stand, you will never be able to find either in ideas, representations, or thetechnological whirlpool." He




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does not require that we dwell within the simple, only that we maintain an access open to it.

JOAN:

Does he not condemn himself to a sort of useless repetition, on the theme that Western thought was flawed andfailed to recognize the simplicity of Being? Let me clarify the point. It is not Heidegger alone who is going tochange the course of an entire era. He says himself that we cannot prevent ourselves from objectifying beings. Theonly option is to remain quiet, instead of indulging in some dull preaching.

DAVID:

Already Bergson had said that philosophy had to think what is infinitely simple and unspeakable.

JOAN:

Yes, the unspeakable, again, about which he spoke and wrote. The contradiction is that one claims that somethingevoked in speech is unspeakable.

FRANCIS:

How can this tension be avoided once we do not content ourselves with a Spinozistic or Hegelian discourse thatonly aims at thinking the knowable and saying what is already known? Heidegger does not preach. He tries toenrich thought by opening it to something that it had neglected up till now. I don't believe that the alternative"either scientific discourse or silence" reminiscent of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus should be viewed as the necplus ultra in the relation of language to Being.

DAVID:

I grant you that. But what you said before is incorrect. Western thought did not wait for Heidegger to have thesense of the unspeakable. Bergson has already been mentioned. Think of Nietzsche, Schelling, the esoterictradition, Christian mysticism. . . .

SUE:

Precisely: I now find Heidegger's pretension exorbitant; it gives the impression that between Heraclitus and himselfnothing ensued but the forgetfulness of Being.




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FRANCIS:

He never said that.

SUE:

But he behaved as though it were the case.

JOAN:

Besides, even Plato had the sense of something unspeakable in front of the beautiful and of the good. And the callto myth. . . .

FRANCIS:

All the examples you just gave are metaphysical in Heidegger's sense. He is the first one who does not place theunspeakable in the place of the transcendent, but acknowledges it concerning the elementary ontologicalexperience. What is new is the convergence between the overcoming of metaphysics and the attunement to thesimple.

DAVID:

You are probably right on this point. There is a new conjunction, one that must be defined.

SUE:

You are forgetting the poets, who, in any case, give utterance to the unspeakable, if they really are poets!Heidegger has a lot to say about them, but always as the philosopher that he is, inescapably.

FRANCIS:

We all admit that the experience of the simple is indispensable. Our disagreement concerns the procedures, moreprecisely the intermediary region of language within which philosophy stops operating in a vacuum, defines itsborders, finally accepts to attune itself to things and to inquire into the limits of expression. Heidegger experiencedin succession the drive to conceptual self-satisfaction, and then impatience with respect to an upcomingconclusion: a more modest, more reserved, and more enveloping thought issued forth. . . .

JOAN:

This thought is indeed decoupled from scientific continuity. . . . But did it manage to attune us to things and otherhuman beings? By directly evoking the barren enigma of Being, Heidegger shares, as it turns out, the fate ofWesterners.




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Westerners are detached from the concrete, removed from the sensible after the conceptual work, and goadedtoward the futurethe only untouched land that remains. To be sure, something new emerges, the enigma no longerhas a face. In its anonymity, it throws us into the void, from all sides. God is dead, but we haven't killed theenigma.

FRANCIS:

What about the divine ones?

SUE:

They are more abstract than Rilke's Angel, and so anemic that I see no thunder nor laughter ever quickening theminto life.

FRANCIS:

Well, at least with them possibilities loom within our deserted sky.

DAVID:

But why should we always privilege the simple as the sign of the enigma?

SUE:

I was thinking about that too. The complexities of Mendeleev's periodic classification or of the genetic code seemto me in no way less worthy of admiration and wonder in the face of the cosmic enigma than a century-old treealong the trial winding through the damp hills of Ehnried. Also think of the crystal formations in rocks, of theiridescence of a tourmaline rose. . . .

JOAN:

Inseparable from the simple, these signs would remain nonexistent if they had not been awakened from theireternal slumber by the unconcealing comportment that is proper to us humans who unveil beings [les montreursque nous sommes].

SUE:

Hence Heidegger is not as opposed to humanism as he leads us to believe. If things are reduced to mere beings,much too




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little attention is paid to them, isn't it? To what level of abstraction haven't they already been reduced?

FRANCIS:

The thing reduced to a being is a liability that comes with metaphysics. Neither the age-old tree nor the waterfall,nor the table or the statue can be reduced to beings "pure and simple," as we can see both in "Heidegger I" and"Heidegger II.''

SUE:

In any case, there is no thought of beings and for beings in Heidegger.

DAVID:

Yet, as early as Sein und Zeit, Dasein is in-situation because it is privy to the readiness-to-hand of things(Zuhandenheit) which is more originary than their well-known and delineated presence (Vorhandenheit). Thingspoint toward something, or they contain a specific character of handiness, they constitute my "surroundings." Theynever have the neutrality of the pure and simple objects of my cognition. Let us not connect Heideggereven"Heidegger I"with Cartesian philosophy, from which he liberated us!

SUE:

Yet what characterizes the nobility and the ownmost of humansas he clearly indicated in The Letter onHumanismis the ontological difference: humans are nothing in the ontic realm of beings, not even mere animals.Heidegger showed so little concern for beings in that text!

FRANCIS:

How could we dismiss the difference he proclaims there? Furthermore, the Heideggerian redefinition of the humanbeing takes its distance only with respect to animaland thinglycharacters reduced to beingness. In the lecture on"The Thing," as in many other texts and passages, it is in the light of the world as such, of the "floating intimacy"of the fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals), that he attempts a patient approach to things and other fellowmortals, in their contour and density. In Heidegger you said that there is no thought of beings and for beings. Well,for a good reason! A




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thought of beings and for beings, that's metaphysics. Cézanne painted a tree and a boulder, not one being amongothers. This is what Heidegger admires.

JOAN:

Yes, metaphysics teaches us how to speculate on beings, how to manipulate concepts and objects. Things, in theirtruth and harshness, are reduced to a vapor and are emptied of their singularity and link with the cosmic enigma.

DAVID:

The cosmic enigma? I doubt the expression is in Heidegger. He simply talks about the enigma or the secret,Geheimnis. The cosmos would be something too ontic. . . .

FRANCIS:

At the end of the commentary in the form of a dialogue in Gelassenheit, the three friends wonder in the face of thenight, "the stitcher of stars," and of the depths of the zenith.

DAVID:

But this is only to better detect the expectation of nearness.

JOAN:

That is to say, of Being.

SUE:

In conclusion, the cosmos is too distant. Heidegger comes back to the human being.

FRANCIS:

No, to Being.

SUE:

Being is only such for human beings.

FRANCIS:

But Being, neither projected, willed, nor fabricated by the latter.

JOAN:

Is Being offered directly from within itself?

DAVID:

Not at all, Being withdraws.




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FRANCIS:

It is offered while sheltering itself.

SUE:

In the same fashion as the hidden God.

FRANCIS:

This is just a comparison, Being is not God.

SUE:

I know. It is nothing being, it is not a being; it is not a genus; it even escapes defining. Yet, it is an omnipresent-absent. Forgive me for mounting another attack: If Being were offered as simply as Heidegger claims, we wouldnever have so much trouble approaching it.

FRANCIS:

Being is not an entity.

JOAN:

Is it not the primordial fact?

DAVID:

I'd rather say it is the primordial relation: This "there is," which predates everything, can be attested without doubt.

SUE:

How can we not always trespass this moving antecedent limit? How can we not always fix it retrospectively assomething that is?

FRANCIS:

The metaphysical gaze on Being is conducted precisely from beings. The Being of metaphysics is the Being ofbeings. What Heidegger inquires about is the truth of Being itself.

SUE:

Can there be a truth of Being? I am tempted to believe that the metaphysical understanding of Being as the Beingof beings is inevitable, irreducible, and cannot be overcomebut can be metamorphosed only by the maturing of therationality unfolding in the midst of scientific-technological progress.




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FRANCIS:

Why should the future of thought be sterilized? Why should the access to man be closed off as a result of his"progress" which thus cuts him off from anything that should concern himthe antecedent [Préalable]? "Becomewhat you are," this is Nietzsche's injunction. Likewise, in Heidegger, one reaches Being's simplicity (in its truth)only after freeing oneself from metaphysical representations. It is because of this arbitrary postulate that youpreclude any access to a relation to Being more originary than the one allowed in the metaphysical-scientificpursuit. To me, you seem to confuse the empirical and transcendental levels. One has to journey to Beingjust asone has to become what one is. The actual journey does not destroy what made it possible, namely the fact thatBeing calls upon us, awaits us, and always already is antecedently present.

SUE:

The distinction between the empirical and the transcendental is not surmounted by Heidegger, even in his lastphase where the role of the a priori is taken by the Lichtung. This point I grant you. As for Being itself, how willyou deny its ambiguity, with which Heidegger never tires of playing?

FRANCIS:

This is a rich and profound ambiguity inherited from the history of metaphysics. Hence the work of destruction andreinterpretation of this tradition. You confuse the simplicity of essential Being with the naivete of immediateBeing. This is a monumental error. . . .

SUE:

. . . one that Heidegger does nothing to clarify. He leaves the reader floundering.

FRANCIS:

Not the reader who reads him carefully.

DAVID:

Let me interrupt this fierce contest in which you are trapped. I would like to make a challenge that might be moredifficult to dismiss. My criticism aims at the very legitimacy involved in substantializing Being as metaphysicsused to




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do. When Heidegger is forced to show what in Being remains irreducible to beings, he uses a tautological formulawhich stresses the form (and the verbal intensity) of the statement and on occasion reinforces it by archaic turns:Das Sein ist, istet, west, Being is, "selfs," unfolds essentially. Being differs from all beings precisely in what it is.As such it offers no ground, is not enclosed either in a name or in a definition, it does not play the role of a subject.Being: the inextinguishable vigor of this present participial traverses every thing, tolerates the inflection in beingconjugated, but not the reduction in being substantialized or personalized. Being at the outset takes us beyond anysubsistence: "Every sending of Being is already consummated in it."

This irreducible difference (irreducible by virtue of principles) is one difficult, but essential, to understand; it isendlessly covered up and muddled by the nominalization process in which Heidegger engages Being, a back-and-forth process that addresses it now as subject, now as object. Is this a negligible nuance? It should be neglected nomore than the ontological difference itself. Denials and corrections do not suffice. No matter how often herepeatedly denies that Being is hypostatized neither into a principle nor a substance, the grammatical practicetestifies to the contrary, or at least leads us in the direction of a hypostasis. Being, once named, becomes a subject,a substantive, hence precisely what characterizes beings from Plato to Nietzsche.

Such a tendency is still reinforced by the pronominal expressions in which Being is not only the active origin ofthe movement, but duplicates and reflects itself. For example, "Being has already destined itself to thought." Thereis a new inflection in a metaphor such as "the call of, Being."

JOAN:

Can anyone be surprised that some people aspiring to a theological revival should find suggestions that suit them?

DAVID:

This is not quite the issue. What bothers me is that in Heidegger himself there was a misunderstanding. Thedifference is shown and covered up almost simultaneously.




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FRANCIS:

The French poet Saint John-Perse wrote, "And the Emissary betrays us the very instant the message is delivered".1

DAVID:

And exalted hopes failed to be fulfilled: this self-proclaimed unprecedented style of philosophy actually prolongs,and the metaphysical mode that its author has detected and overcomeor is it all mere semblance?

FRANCIS:

You exaggerate. Being does not end upeverat the level (situation) of beings.

DAVID:

It ends up again in the position of a condition of possibility for beings, which was always that of metaphysicalBeing. Heidegger cannot eschew a new founding.

The way in which he names Being destroys its nearness, thematizes the imponderable, sterilizes creativity,displaces and isolates being in a single location (at best: the antecedent, the primordial), whereas one shoulddisplay Being in the process of animating every manifestation.

FRANCIS:

Heidegger himself insisted on the utterly intrinsically metaphysical character of Western languages, a point thatrenders the project of thinking ever more fragile and uncertain.

DAVID:

He made us especially sensitive to the role of language and the nuances of essential human speech. He too must beexposed to this sort of criticism.

FRANCIS:

I grant that this criticism does not spare him totally. Yet such a criticism is conceivable only in the wake of whathe brought to the forefront himself.

JOAN:

If that weren't the case, this wouldn't be internal criticismdesirable criticism.




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SUE:

I regret to say, you are deep in a gloss of the author! Focusing on Being or "Being," what difference does it make?Limiting oneself to thisbe it verb or nounis so constricting!

FRANCIS:

Because Being reserves itself, it is to beings that we are unreservedly delivered. The withdrawal of Being and thegivenness of beings are one and the same movement.

JOAN:

If Being is withheld anyway, what do we "profit" by urging that thought be faithful to it?

FRANCIS:

Reserve and appearances don't line up like a balance sheet. The wish to extricate Being from its withdrawing wasyet another characteristic of metaphysics in its various sendings. The present "benefit" for thought is to let thewithdrawal be, including the metaphysical withdrawal from the withdrawal.

JOAN:

But aren't the other forms of authenticity, the poetic and the ethical, equally frail in the thought of Being andmetaphysical thoughtand perhaps more so in the former?

FRANCIS:

Very likely so. There is a frailty of Being on the margins.

DAVID:

Since Plato, there is also a metaphysical poetry whose greatness Heidegger acknowledges on occasion (e.g., onRilke in "What Are Poets For?").

FRANCIS:

This proves that he does not enclose the poetic exploration within a field that has been delimited in advance.

SUE:

The illusion consists in the belief that a radically new epoch can begin, and be founded; and that anonmetaphysical thought will be able to prepare the way to this epoch. Heidegger stresses to the extreme thenonmetaphysical char-




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acter of the site he uncovers. For although his thoughts concerning, say, language, are not metaphysical in the strictsense, they would be literally unthinkable if, implicitly or explicitly, they were not related to metaphysics.

FRANCIS:

He does not seek to overcome metaphysics, but to open it to its completion and to liberate what was unthought byit.

SUE:

But why is it so frequently necessary in the criticism of a thesis to object that it "remains metaphysical"? Whyallow us to surmise that a site absolutely no longer metaphysical can be reached when his professed aim is thatthought be no longer quite so metaphysical?

DAVID:

If you are able to make such a distinction, is this not a sign that speaks in favor of Heidegger's thought? It is fromwithin his thought that you found something to fend off an error of interpretation.

SUE:

Still, the fact remains that Heidegger did nothing to repress the enticement of a thought of a completely differentkind. On the contrary, he gives rise to, and keeps alive, such a hope which, in my view, is a fallacy. For thequestion should be raised whether metaphysics in the sense of Heidegger, namely the thought of the beingness ofbeings, is not a mere form of destinal sending among others, or whether it contains a possibility so fundamentalthat its unavoidable and unsurmountable character is to be acknowledged. Let us note that in the five destinalsendings distinguished in the text on Anaximander, only the first and the last ones are not completely metaphysical.The Greek sending is not yet metaphysical; and the Abend-Ländlischethe Western one in the proper senseno longerso. But Greece was the place of the constitution of metaphysics; and the liberation of the own-most of Westernthought as such remains at issue. According to Heidegger's own acknowledgement in the single text




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where he took the riskwith quite a bit of cautionto think history in its totality, humankind never completely escapesmetaphysics.

FRANCIS:

Western humankind, at least.

SUE:

What obtains concerning the East and other civilizations is only suggested.

FRANCIS:

Yet in very insistent manner.

SUE:

I maintainto borrow a simile from the stock marketthat Heidegger invests his entire thinking capital in the slimmestof possibilities. Perhaps he should have stuck to his point of view in Sein und Zeit, in which the "fallenness" ofunderstanding in metaphysics seemed to parallel the unavoidable fallenness of Dasein in everydayness. He wrotethat "the ordinary representation of time has a natural justification." At that time he acknowledged that there is a"natural metaphysics," 2 an acknowledgement whose unsurpassable clarity was veiled in his subsequent meditationon the overcoming of metaphysics and the epochality of Being.

DAVID:

It is certain that the existentialia of Sein und Zeit were still universalstill metaphysicalcategories. The force ofmetaphysics consists precisely in securing points of reference that are homogeneous, fixed, even certain. By takingleave of this safety and universality, Heidegger could not ignore that what he proposed was not exclusive of otherviews, other ways, other constitutive configurations. That is why one must not contrast the dominating dimensionof metaphysical logos with one reserved dimension, but instead with the various reserved dimensions of language.The plurality of the possible will enrich the all too certain uniformity of the present reality.




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FRANCIS:

For this different thought Heidegger never claimed the characteristics and guarantees of certainty. The emergenceof this new thought is subjected to two prior conditions: the most essential one is "the turning of time" inHölderlin's sense; the second is that human beings should stand in readiness. The "turning" in Heideggerian thoughtintends no more than the all-very-human anticipation of a possible shift in the jointure between world and humanbeings. It hopes to let a new articulating motion be discovered in our encounter with the possible.

SUE:

Such incipient beginnings are inchoate and cannot sustain an entire epoch!

FRANCIS:

The same obstacle always emerges when we mention the possible! Why should one always deny that thought canunravel what so far has remained hidden to the West's will-to-truth? Sue, you are concerned for the frailty ofpoetic authenticity. Without taking a risk, without seeking the openness to the delicate fabric of Being [membrurede l'être], you will do nothing but repeat worn-out propositions and approaches. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.We have to face Heidegger's challenge to achieve an approach to the more secret co-belonging of beings andBeing, a certain liberation of our gaze on, and encounter with, things and other human beings.

SUE:

What does this mean concretely? Heidegger was shrewd: he wrote Being crossed out, he changed the spelling ofthe word, and hinted at a more authentic future. So many acrobatics to deliver nearness to us! At the risk of beingcharged with pragmatism, once more I ask the question of the ontological dwelling: What is particularly relevant indwelling according to the Heideggerian experience of Being?

FRANCIS:

I believe this can be established starting from a point that we have completely overlooked so far: thereinterpretation of




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Being in terms of time and from the new approach to time itself. There is one thing that Heidegger never tires ofstressing from one end of his work to the other, namely, that the truth of Being is revealed in time. Not in thequantitative time of clocks or in the fleeting time that our psychic apparatus tries, always in vain, to stabilize. Notin the present alone, which inflicts its tyranny upon the representation of timefrom Aristotle to us. Time is the ec-stasisextraction and givenness. The abyssal future intrinsically reveals its own lack, the presence of the present, thepresent absence of the past.

A temporal being is what we arenot only in the instant, but also in our belonging to the origin. This belongingendures, as language itself, as the constellation being-human. To be truly means to endure, to abide (währen,weilen). Forsaken as they are in the fleeting character of time, human beings nevertheless can rely upon thethinking, and poetic, word that shelters and authenticates their temporal existence in intimate connection to things,

Forests spreadBrooks plungeRocks persistMist diffusesMeadows waitSprings wellWinds dwellBlessing muses. (PLT, 14)

If time escapes us, it is not only in the way sand does through our fingers. Time is the escape from duration, thetearing [arrachement] process that leaves us in the presence of the near. It unceasingly brings to happenstance thatwhich precisely happens in us: Ereignis, the nondatable even, the appropriation that lights itself up and withholdsitself. . . .

JOAN:

. . . it's a duration that does not snowball, but instead always refers us to the surprising elemental nature [pauvreté]of givenness itself.




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DAVID:

How is it that time, which is the truth of Being, is the givenness of the ownmost, while it also reveals the uncannyand anxiety-laden enigma?

SUE:

Yes, how can one explain that?

FRANCIS:

Time does not always grant the ownmost: Time reserves the ownmost essentially. It pertains to us to deserve it.The poet and the thinker invite us to be worthy of it.

Heidegger's goal is indicated in the last two verses of the poem called Dank,

To say Aletheia as LichtungThe disclosedness of whatwhile withdrawingis givenness. 3

SUE:

Use plain English, please!

FRANCIS:

The issue is that of saying more originally what in the tradition was conceived as truth. In the depths of the Greekword aletheia, first of all there is nothing like adequation or homogeneity. There is just what is heard in the wordLichtung, the clearing of nonwithdrawal, or the reserve that flashes out. Oras suggested by the last versethedisclosedness of givenness that withdraws and eludes our grasp.

The truth of Being is time, as I stated. Time is givenness. But such a givenness is not revealed to us as a thing. Itwithdraws from within the core of what bestows its presence upon us. Is this clearer?

DAVID:

Concerning this site to which Heidegger pointswhich he calls Ereignis, Lichtung, depending on whether one termis more telling than the otherthere is always a presupposition for which he cannot (or does not want to) account,which he




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never exposes as such. It is precisely the one concerning a central space of appropriation in which meaning wouldbe gathered. I am tempted to detect in this observationand I am not the only one to have keyed in on such acluethe reiteration of the metaphysical logos in its eternal site: the self-givenness of meaning by means of whichthis logos (whether or not it has its culmination in God) reserves within itself what may be said and written. Onealways presupposes the unity of sovereign meaning, be it in subtly displaced terms. It is no longer reason or God: itis Being, or rather time, Ereignis, around which thought now forms a constellation. There is a new uniqueness, anew intimacy.

FRANCIS:

What is ownmost in Ereignis does not have the imperial unity of the present.

JOAN:

David, would you presuppose the opposite of appropriation: dispersion and absence of meaning?

DAVID:

No, or only provisionally, as a center of referenceor else as a critical strategy.

SUE:

How can one not presuppose something? At least signs. . . .

FRANCIS:

I am afraid that you are making the discourse, or the text, into a preamble analogous to the one you criticized inHeidegger. All the strategies of reversal or demarcation have a center. Can such a center of reference, which is notalways admitted as such, be freed of all Western metaphysics as one claims?

DAVID:

One gains a new space of free encounter [espace de jeu] with respect to Heidegger.

JOAN:

What is a freely encountering thought [pensée jouant] that avoids legitimization?




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DAVID:

A thought that is searching.

FRANCIS:

My answer is: One instance of completed nihilism, if it claimed to stand in the place of philosophy.

SUE:

Who knows?

FRANCIS:

The space of intimacy and gathering of meaning that you criticized in Heidegger has nothing to do with afoundation, in the sense of a special metaphysics. In terms still influenced by modern philosophy, this place wouldamount to the minimal condition of possibility for the focal organization of experience. Does this amount toreiterating the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical? Perhaps, but it is not thought from agivenness that is more radical than the correlation between apperception and its a priori forms, more originary toothan the threefold of time. According to ''Time and Being," time is a fourfold. The primary dimension is that ofgivenness, the clearing reserve of the gift that bestows proximity. If one renounces taking this prior givenness intoconsideration, doesn't this amount to forsaking thought as such?

JOAN:

I believe, indeed, that in the meandering of language, humans must feel out various ways before finding an accessto some meaning. In terms of the plastic arts, even Miro's protoplasm or Michaux's "Grimacing Universe" are suchan access, they are question-answers. The field of thought requires unification in a way that would be fatal to thearts. Heidegger preserves this unity while removing it from the imperialism of the conceptual. He calls thoughtlostin metaphysics or clouded in partial formalizationsback to itself. He testifies to a requirement that remains valid.This requirement is constitutive of the relationship between humans and Being. It requires that speech speak, thatexchange take place in the nonlocal space of language, that signs bearing the ontological




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enigma come to emergence. Neither univocity, uniqueness, or security is required.

SUE:

Which one is the true Heideggeryours, always open and daring, or the one who reiterates the ownmost ofmetaphysics?

FRANCIS:

Your question is not formulated properly. Metaphysics, indeed, did not think one theme, which is what Heideggerreveals under the cipher of appropriation, or Ereignis.

DAVID:

Of course, there is no true Heidegger. That is what he himself brought to the forefront.

FRANCIS:

If the regress toward a foundation shattered the exclusiveness of the traditional privileges of reason, humans fromnow on build on "the floating realm" 4 of speech.

JOAN:

For Heidegger, this foundation is reappropriated within its destination. Such is the new agreement that many peopledo not accept, or do not discern.

FRANCIS:

What they do not discern is the difference between the Heideggerian ownmost and the metaphysical appropriations.

DAVID:

Perhaps in part because the Heideggerian clarifications on the overcoming of metaphysics only displaced thedifficulty: Heidegger never completely explained his method.

FRANCIS:

What I want to say concerning the ownmost will perhaps prepare the way to what you want to say. The ownmostin metaphysics is organized with reference to the presence of a present, it reappropriates a total presence, anabsolute parousia. As the source and end of meaning, it keeps nothing in reserve outside, everything is assigned toa location and unified. In contrast, the Heideggerian ownmost is open to the ec-




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stases of time, it is governed by the clearing reserve of aletheia, affected by the frailty of the word that carries it.

JOAN:

In short, are you rejecting the equation Being = ownmost = presence?

FRANCIS:

I am not rejecting it because of metaphysics. I am saying that it is a misinterpretation, or misunderstanding, toapply this equation to the Heideggerian quest as it is applied to Aristotle or Hegel, because in fact it is Heideggerhimself who taught us to disjoin ownmost and presence. Heidegger does not fall back into metaphysics on accountof the fact that he developed a thematic of the ownmost and that Being continues to haunt him. One mustunderstand the truth of Being and the appropriating even in the sense given to the terms by Heidegger, and notpretend to minimize the novelty of his insights.

SUE:

Perhaps he made the mistake of remaining too close to metaphysics and its vocabulary. Isn't it forgivable to take ahomonym for a synonym, such as "truth," "Being," "essence,'' etc., which are concepts and words sanctioned byvery noble and ancient uses?

JOAN:

Unless Heidegger's depth consisted precisely in doing this work at close range to metaphysics, instead of takingupon himself the alluring mantle of a drifter.

SUE:

Yet the theme of the overcoming of metaphysics was not invented by recent interpreters. It was a title given byHeidegger himself to one of his essays. And I could also produce an abundance of quotes in which he sternlydemarcates his stance from that of metaphysics and also applies the word überwinden to it. Furthermore, didn't hespeak of a Wandel des Fragens to describe his own itinerary?




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FRANCIS:

Wandel means modification or change, not drift. Überwinden, as you know, is to be taken in the sense ofverwinden. At stake is the question of taking metaphysics upon oneself, and not leaving it aside.

SUE:

This does not really convince me. When Heidegger says very clearly, in the latest texts, "I no longer use such andsuch a term in its metaphysical sense," again I say that every reader in good faith has the impression that he isgaining some absolutely new ground. And yet, this is not true. Isn't there some double dealing?

FRANCIS:

What I am claiming is this. By regressing toward the foundation of metaphysics and by experiencing it within hisitinerary, Heidegger presupposed that another, unnamed element was being liberated. His bet was that metaphysicsis something other than metaphysics itself.

JOAN:

There is indeed an ambivalence: the foundation itself can be either the principle in the sense of the origin-logos, orthe bottomless ground, the stance that gathers together the world-at-play.

SUE:

For Heidegger, it is always Being that speaks, Being that is at play. Isn't this a much too mechanical reversal ofmodern metaphysical humanism, literally the alibi thought gives itself?

FRANCIS:

It would be an alibi if, thereby, human beings were at leisure not to hear, not to work, andmost importantlynot toquestion.

DAVID:

I find myself in agreement with Francis to the following extent: One must not confuse in Heidegger the diagnosticand




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the programme. The diagnostic concerns his entire critical reinterpretation of the history of metaphysics. Theprogramme brings forth the invitation to build a new thought and to respond to the injunctions of "what is to bethought."

Thought's presence to itself as the system of truth is broken. Thought becomes a wide open field in which thethinker is always on the way, awaiting, listening.

JOAN:

Did you mean that judging Heidegger on the "results" in the Hegelian sense would be as inadequate as assigning asystematic framework to Nietzsche and in advance ignoring his subsequent denials and internal ruptures?

SUE:

This is precisely the problem with the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche!

FRANCIS:

This is a new bait for discord and I refuse to rise to it! I concede that one may be irritated by the way Heideggerpracticed what you would probably call the dogmatism of questioning. But the double dealing of which you accusehim is the life supporting his work. A discrepancy is involved in exhibiting the unthought alongsideright upagainstmetaphysics with a violence which, to this point, was monopolized by metaphysics. There is a will taking astance against the will of parousia so as to unmask the nonwilling involved in the releasement-toward-things. Hisis a thought that struggles on several fronts, and especially on that of destiny.

The sounds of sirens, at their highest pitch, rip through the space of what is heard. Their echoes ricochet and dieon the glass and steel of buildings. Immensity is intimated. Silence returns

DAVID:

The conjunction of our efforts would be in vain if it only aimed at giving us a general representation of the work ofthe thinker named Heidegger. What will a thoughtful person of good will get from his work? We are not here toanswer this




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question, but to locate the work in the perspective of the tasks that tomorrow will be forced upon thoughtifhumankind, in the future, escapes production-oriented slavery or destruction.

Contrasted with the mastery of the method that summarizes and symbolizes the dynamic meaning of themetaphysical-scientific-technological dimension in the modern sense, stands the calm reserve of the way. Is this areal opposition? I was wrong to use the word "contrast," I should have spoken of distinction in the midst ofrelationship, a regress to what is more originary. It is impossible to compare them with one another, these two. Acomparison suggested in "The Nature of Language" will perhaps help us: method and way are like the flow and thesource of a "great hidden stream" [OWL, 92]. And the paragraph of which I am thinking ends with this enigmaticsentence: ''All is way."

Every speech is a way: this is what poetic and thoughtful Saying teaches us. The building of projects, rules, andproofs is only possible because language reveals the world to us. It is from the way originating in symbolizationthat the epistemic world-language established its networks.

There are no exact connections if the mother speech is not possible.

That which scientists and the advocates of method look down upon, the way, is the prior orientation, without whichthey are nothing and would have nothing to share. This is as true today as it always was.

Our own fire is like those sparks of lightincipient meaningshaved off by flintstones in a night without memory. It isalways back to these that we turn in our inquiry.

JOAN:

Is this really Heidegger's way that you are extolling?

DAVID:

According to him, it was already Lao-Tse's, if one hears in Tao what is inexpressible.

SUE:

Why not disseminated in the seventy-seven possible meanings of the word Tao?




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FRANCIS:

The poetic and thoughtful experience of language as such animates every scientific-technological codification. Atthe source, there is always "speaking speech": this is what Heidegger had in mind.

DAVID:

I hadn't finished with what I wanted to say. What is left unaddressed by Heidegger is the possible relation between"method" and "way." We know and we see that they are different and diverging. However, we come in contactwith both. Both have currency and are being offered, even though their experiences are combined with difficulty oreven for the most part exclude each other. Must it be that human language will remain dislocated and its partsyearning for each other at a distance like wriggling sections of a cut-up worm?

SUE:

It seems to me that we look to you for the question.

DAVID:

An interpretation consists in saying: "Let us move upstream from downstream, from the method to the way. Let usstruggle to claim the rights, and to illustrate the distinction, of a poetic and meditative thought over against theinvasion of strictly calculative reflection. For rational certainty let us substitute openness to the enigma."

This tempting interpretation, which is faithful to the letter, in my view sterilizes thought and leads directly to themisunderstandings that first separated us. I know that Heidegger never urged choosing way against method. Yet,his tendency to consider scientific-technological thought from the outside and always as derivative from essentialthought, can only lead us to neglect epistemic procedures. What are science and technology if their movement isderived from a bygone impetus? Pure and simple repetitions and applications that are doomed to dwindle out ofexistence. Will the dominating (language) world pass by us as an abandoned, adrift continent? Precisely because itis conceived as exclusive, we see instead the dominating (language) world condemned to an endlessly reactivatedexpansionwhose rare thinkers and poets will




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have to endure greater and greater suffering. To which situation, the serene availability of Gelassenheit will onlyrespond by a Wou-Wei, a sort of Taoist nonintervention that leaves the technological destiny of the world to itsunfolding, while awaiting the improbable reversal of the times.

SUE:

This is indeed the attitude that I identified and criticized. I am eager to hear the other interpretation, but I am afraidthat it will be scarcely "orthodox"!

DAVID:

The issue is to respond to the essential tasks of thought and life, this is what you urged yourself. We are dying ofso many orthodoxies. . . . The other interpretation could be formulated as follows. While we remain receptive to thepoetic and meditative sources of language, let us not cut ourselves off from any possibility of a return upstream.Instead, let us explore the areas of contact between the two dimensions. Without cancelling their differences, let usattempt to learn something about their cohabitation and even, perhaps, about the unexpected overlappings of thoseextraneous (language) worlds. Let us not move forward by dint of opposing or substituting past views.

JOAN:

This is more a programme than an interpretation.

FRANCIS:

One that I sense fraught with the danger of eclecticism.

DAVID:

It is not ruled out for an interpretation to open up perspectives to our freedom, which so badly lacks choices. As forthe second reproach, it will be cleared by the examples I am going to give.

FRANCIS:

There are, in any case, texts that almost vindicate you. I am thinking of the end of "The Question ConcerningTechnology," in which the saving power grows from the danger itself and in which the two starstechnology and




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thoughtmove past each other. In "The Turning" the question is raised, "Can we see the in-flashing of Being in theepoch of enframing [la portée de la technique]?"

SUE:

Indeed. But even in those texts, Heidegger maintains the specificity of heterogeneous spheres, such as the authenticand the inauthentic in Sein und Zeit. . . .

FRANCIS:

Authenticity and inauthenticity (since by an irony of fate these words have become the translation for eigentlichand uneigentlich) are adjoining possibilities in the human being, not "spheres." Their condition is that freedombelong to each individual.

SUE:

. . . so as to allow that the truth of Being always be granted, and ultimately proceed without regard for what unfoldsin the technological world.

DAVID:

. . . without regard for the operations of its total and factual unfolding, but with regard for the technological worlditself, since the latter is the inevitable sending of Being. Let us not forgetpainful though this may bethat in AnIntroduction to Metaphysics he credits National Socialism (and similarly Communism and Americanism in theposthumous interview with Der Spiegel) with contributing to the encounter of planetary technology by humanbeings.

FRANCIS:

In this interview Heidegger indicates clearly that these "doctrines" only went halfway in the unveiling of theessence of technology.

JOAN:

By a sort of phenomenological compromise of which the technological world itself might be capable? Is this theutmost it can do?

FRANCIS:




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Heidegger acknowledges that the technological world can, and must, experience its powers, explore and thematizeplanetary innovation and the rigor of its will-to-self-mobilization; yet, revelation is always incumbent uponBeingnot upon human beings, taken either as individuals or as the massesand must not be confused with aHegelian increasing self-reflection.

DAVID:

And yet, since metaphysical "humanism" is itself a sending of Being, why could it not be part of preparing a truththat is reserved at its own depths? It takes this part by means of a refinement on the method that no longer wouldbe reducible either to cybernetically planned thought or to the poetic and meditative thought on the truth of Being.This would be a "method of contiguity," if we may adopt this qualification for the sake of simplicity; it wouldexploit the resources of two opposed (language) worlds, it would bring about encounters and crossings into thecommon space wherein the two dimensions are contiguous with one another.

We read in Lao-Tse,

And even though the next country is so closethat people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barkingthey are content to die of old agewithout ever having gone to see it 5

Those two "countries"in my free (it goes without saying) adaptationare the dominating world-language(metaphysical-scientific-technological rationality) and the reserved (world) languagethe poetic and meditativedimension called "way to language." To be sure, one can understand easily why these two dimensions can divergeto the point of isolating and ignoring one another. This is precisely what happens in the current situation of theworld, in which meditative and calculative thoughts proceed, each on its own trajectory. But, before examining thestate of the corresponding world, let us




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focus on the modes of thought and language, namely what I have been calling "(world) language."

SUE:

Perhaps you were wrong to establish a symmetry between the two (language) worlds. It does not exist inHeidegger. In your distinction, what stands to pass judgment is the present situation of the world (something Iagree with). Ontologically, the world-language that you take to be dominating is derived in Heidegger's vieweventhough this derivation is destinally necessary, or at least inevitable.

FRANCIS:

Yes, language, which is the "house of Being," is the topology drafted by the signs of poetry and thought.

DAVID:

I would perhaps make myself better understood by pointing out, first, that I do not seek to establish a symmetrybetween these two (language) worlds. It would be pointless to draw up artificial windows whose fictitious existencerests on the inadequate understanding of the character specific to each dimension. Second, I will give at least oneexample that will illustratefrom one dimension to the otherone sense for this "crowing of the rooster and barking ofthe dogs." I have in mind some type of logical work that may perhaps underscoreless in the operations themselvesthan in the perspectives that they open for the philosophical spiritan emerging down side or cost of formalization.Consider Gödel's limitation theorems that assert that the noncontradiction, or truth, of a system cannot beformalized within that system. In these recent, yet already classic, works, we have a rationality that tests its ownconstitutive limits and discovers a horizon of undecidability usually covered up in its actual functioning. Withoutleaving the most rigorous ground, results have been presented that also force us to break with a metaphysicalrationality totally settled within self-referentiated truth and with a reductive and "reductionist" logical positivism.From the strictly scientific point of view, it seems to me nothing more can be added.




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SUE:

Fortunately so!

DAVID:

My philosophical hypothesis consists in asking only, Doesn't this new rationality experience its own unthought?Dosn't it propose the example of a (world) language which, instead of pushing its own operations to a point ofautocracy, delineates its own borders and, consequently, is not inclined to dismiss other languages?

FRANCIS:

This is true unless the inclusion of the undecidable in the field of logic leads to the opposite result, namely togiving rationality the comforting impression that it has no need of anything outside of itself in order to think itsown limits.

DAVID:

I only noted one possible contrasting distinction. Contiguity is obviously more compact in metaphysical rationality.What else does Heidegger do in his famous interpretations of Kant or Nietzsche, if not disengage from the core ofthe metaphysical expressions an unthought that always remains the intimate of metaphysics? Those interpretationsmilitate against the contiguity between the thought of the Being of beings and the thought of the truth of Beingacontiguity which both thoughts point to, but cover up. Conversely, the Verwindung that he attempts for the benefitof metaphysics reveals that thought cannot be pure reception of Being without assuming at the same time thehistorical charge of a metaphysical world-language. Every production is poietical and poetic in its origin.Heidegger said it himself in his text on method and the way. What would a scientific investigation be, withoutsymbolic or metaphorical support? I am not speaking only of scientific research which, even in the mostprocedure-conscious laboratories, must occasionally allow the imagination to take flight with combinatorypossibilities in order to articulate or spell out an entirely new configuration, albeit mathematically. But everydemonstration, every methodical procedure appears against the backdrop of a prior showing and the scientificproject delineates itself against an existential givenness.




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FRANCIS:

If this origin is not acknowledged, doesn't it amount to being cancelled?

DAVID:

But can someone prove to me that there is a point in the scientific itinerary at which this re-monstrationa showingthat goes back to the prior showingwould cause the "chains of reason" to break?

JOAN:

I would be more convinced if you showed us that, in encountering experience, a minimum of calculativeobjectification is almost inevitably involved in the poetic and meditative experience.

DAVID:

Precisely, the symmetrical reversal is not justifiable although everything can be objectified. We could declare itnecessary that the arm of objectificatione.g., of the lumberjackbe a measured one, but this does not entail itsimpossibility or its complete absence: Some calculus is involved in verse, in general rhythm; computation isinherent in every sort of music; structural relations obtain between colors and forms in every kind of pictorial art. .. .

JOAN:

You also announced an application of the same method to "the present situation of the world," as you called it.Such an attempt seems to me even more difficult to conduct than the first one. How will the reserved dimensionsbe inscribed in this (language) world whose dominating character excludes them constitutionally?

DAVID:

They are inscribed under a form that Heidegger refused to analyze precisely because, in his view, it was tooexposed to his opponents' method. He proposed nothing but outlines and sketches to validate the objective ofsociopolitical insertion by those taking upon themselves the requirements of thought; he was content with merelyinvoking a distinction




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between the dominating situation and some individuals bearing witness to another possible situation. The thinkerrefused to let the question be raised in the terms, and language, of the current society. Hence Heidegger's rejection,previously noted in his response to Wisser.

FRANCIS:

What else would you suggest?

DAVID:

We might consider the conditional translation of Heidegger's requirements into the dominating world. Concerningthe thinker for example, can or should he give society some representation of what is nonrepresentable? Can he beanything but a sign of contradiction? If society pays increasingly less attention to his role, does the thinker have toaccept or accentuate such a distance, should he protest it, or alternatively select masks for himselfas did a thinkerwith Zarathustra?

FRANCIS:

You run the risk of reconstituting a strategy of the will for a special individual, which is what in principleHeidegger did not allow for himself.

JOAN:

Yet he should have raised the question, Can there be a strategy of nonwilling willed by the thinker?

DAVID:

There is more to my "programme": Given that dialogue can take place at some point in time, I will have toestablish whether the thinker, in the sense that is most faithful to the Heideggerian requirements, can expand hisown thematic by translating it in, and against, the logic and language of the other dimension.

JOAN:

For instance!?

DAVID:

To what extent does the faithfulness to the ontological difference and to the enigma of Being entail the obligationof an




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ethical attestation? To what degree is the task of thought connected to the cause of civil freedom? For the benefitof thought itself isn't there information and encouragement to be derived from those people who choose a solitaryway (or other nontraditional action) whereby the dominating dimension is questioned?

SUE:

At last you make an attempt to respond to the pressing questions I raised at the beginning! To what extent thisendeavor will remain faithful to Heidegger's thought, I don't know. In his work I have to take note only of the totalabsence of all the themes you mentioned, in particular civil freedom. Doesn't remedying his silence amount tometamorphosing his thought?

FRANCIS:

Civil freedom is nothing but the ontic adjustment of "Being-with."

JOAN:

And it seems that Heidegger makes it dependent upon a call more fundamental than any adjustment ofintersubjectivitythe capacity to subordinate the individual to a destinal injunction.

SUE:

Consequently, those specifics by means of which an ethos worthy of the name must be articulated, are extremelyneglected.

FRANCIS:

This issue, it seems to me, could be clarified by a passage from Gelassenheit where Heidegger says that it isnecessary to say at the same time "yes" and "no" to modern technology. On the side of the "yes," I only have toconsider my daily use of those commodities made available to me by "progress," electricity for example; on theside of the "no'' is my refusal to be completely affected by the current conditioning, my nonparticipation in theproject of the global system.




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DAVID:

If we transpose the coexistence of a "yes" and a "no" to the properly ethical-political domain, what we have is this:The "yes" means the acceptance of social rules and of everything else that guarantees for me the possibility ofexperiencing openness; the "no'' means the rejection by me of what is merely formal legalism and voluntaristactivism.

SUE:

You extrapolate before reaching sufficiently specific results.

DAVID:

I don't claim to mask the audacity, or frailty, of my extrapolations. I take responsibility for them while alsoclaiming that they are worked out on the basis of Heidegger's questioning. Consider, in particular, the coexistenceof the "yes" and of the "no," which instigates that space of contiguity. There is an ambiguitybetween thedominating dimension and the reserved onewhich I resolutely take upon myself.

JOAN:

You mean that the "no" cannot be total without destroying itself. One can never escape technology. This wouldmean being excluded from any sending of Being and preclude acknowledging what is epochal in technology.

DAVID:

Yes. One may wish to escape the allotment of the West, the Geschick. But one would condemn oneself to endlesssundering since nothing could be found in the reserved dimension that could be substituted for the dominating one.The dominating dimension only comes to pass because the truth of Being is reserved.

FRANCIS:

The forgetfulness of Being originates in the fact that Being is forgetfulness: Jean Beaufret brings our attention tothis point in his text of homage to Lacan.




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SUE:

Isn't there in this Heideggerian acceptance of Western destiny a feature that remains profoundly Hegelian? Isn'tthere the same recognition of the Spirit of the world, without which I am condemned to the role of a "beautifulsoul"?

FRANCIS:

With a difference, though. The Spirit of the world in the Heideggerian sense is not reducible to its present figure(the objectivity of the State or even the speculative knowledge currently completed), but it is constituted only bythe withdrawal of an appropriating givenness that remains sheltered.

JOAN:

Couldn't we say that my "yes" and my "no" reflect the allotment of the "yes-no" within Being?

SUE:

We are drifting away from the specific articulations to which we were led thanks to David.

DAVID:

The detour is useful. We saw that the coexistence of "yes" and "no" results from the caesura of Being.Consequently, it can no longer be articulated without relapsing into the purely human and metaphysical sphere, i.e.,the dominating dimension forsaken by the truth of Being.

JOAN:

There remains a difficulty concerning the point of application of the "yes" and the "no." Let us go back to the verytext of Gelassenheit. . . .

FRANCIS:

. . . which is nothing more than a speech made to the peasants of Messkirch. . . .

JOAN:

. . . you said that our "yes" can only be applied to the inevitable, daily, somewhat superficial use of technology,since in fact we discovered a "yes" that is more fundamental for technology, which we conceived as a sending ofBeing. It is more fundamental because it explains the impossibility of a




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total "no." Is there, conversely, a superficial and a fundamental "no"?

FRANCIS:

The "no" is necessarily, from the outset, more fundamental, since it implies the distance taken from the daily use oftechnological objects and from the voluntarist economy sustaining such a use.

SUE:

I take pity on our plight. We are back in the midst of Scholasticism!

DAVID:

Maybe not so. The analysis has just showed that the "yes" that Joan called "superficial"the acceptance of thedominating dimension in its phenomenal character and factual operationsis founded upon a more decisive "no" (therefusal of total technologization), which itself renders possible the openness to destiny and the essence oftechnology.

FRANCIS:

The "no" (as in nonwilling) mediates ethical endurance. Isn't this the articulation you were looking for?

SUE:

I don't see how much progress we have made concerning the question of civil freedom. If the essential mediationbetween the dominating dimension and the reserved one turns out to be the will-not-to-will (with nothing else),again I have a case, the site of ontic articulations is empty. Metaphysics and technology are left to themselves. Thisis a catastrophic attitude of resignation, very close to that of a hippie dropout, but without the practical impact ofdropping out because the individual would obviously abide by external social rules.

DAVID:

My interpretation is different. One arrives at the attitude of resignation that you mention when one considerscontiguity in a purely static fashion. This is the first interpretation we secured a while ago, serenity (Gelassenheit)being the pure and simple withdrawal from the dominating world. I don't




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deny that Heidegger was particularly tempted by that direction, especially at the end of his life.

SUE:

This is a euphemism!

DAVID:

Don't I have the rightand perhaps even the obligationto propose another interpretation, one in which contiguitybecomes dynamic?

SUE:

On the condition that you take it upon yourself.

FRANCIS:

Absolutely!

JOAN:

Let David continue.

DAVID:

Contiguity becomes dynamic if willing is activated within the dominating spherenot as an automatic agreementwith everything that is supposed to happen by itself (as though the automatic character of the world had snowballedand swept away all decision-making centers), but in order to exemplify the safeguarding, or the promotion, of whatis free and open amidst rationalization itself.

JOAN:

It is a sort of gamble on the possibility of working from within rationality, and of exploring its limits (including itstechnological form). This would prevent the auto-nomy of subjectivity from being totally fixated upon itsdomination over beings and intoxicated with its own operations; likewise this procedure would allow subjectivityto come to pass as an ad-vent in the destinal casting of the dice [jeu destinal] and to increase its possibilities.

DAVID:

If you like.

SUE:

I still don't see what all this is going to mean for civil freedom.




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DAVID:

One will be able to translate the requirements of ontological openness in terms of the dominating (language) world.The notion of civil freedom will then be asserted as the form of legal organization least unfavorable to questioningbecause of the space of freedom offered to each individual.

SUE:

What you call dynamic contiguity consists in inaugurating a network of translations between (world) languages andthe (language) worlds? Incidentally, what is the difference between the two formulations?

DAVID:

Translation entails the respect for the specificity of the languages involved, but also the acceptance of a certain lossof the original meaning, and some residue.

JOAN:

And at times the impossibility of translating?

DAVID:

Yes. On the other hand, between (world) language and (language) world I see the following difference. With(world) language, we are located at the inaugural moment when language has not yet settled into its institution; in(language) world, in contrast, we decipher language in the wake of its institution.

FRANCIS:

What advantage is there in this distinction?

DAVID:

That of refining the understanding of, and approach to, a differentiated link between language ("the house ofBeing") and the unfolding of the world (the figure of beings in their totality).

JOAN:

Does this interpretation-programme coincide with the call to Being, in Heidegger's sense?

DAVID:

Why not, if it tries to respond to what is still to be thought?




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FRANCIS:

Is this not a revivaland an artificial one at thatof metaphysical rationality?

JOAN:

For you, is any distance, taken from the dominating (language) world, liable to be recuperated by metaphysics if itis not held in check by the Heideggerian radicalism? Is translation always treason?

SUE:

This is a discouraging perspective, one implicitly acknowledged by the master.

FRANCIS:

Don't put words in his mouth, don't expatiate on his silence. He always sought to place himself beyond optimismand pessimism.

JOAN:

Yet under his pen especially we find a severe assessment of the course of the current world. "Invisible shepherdsdwell beyond the wastelands of the devastated earth." 6

DAVID:

The examination of the current world situationand of its capacity for respect of, and appeal to, the reserveddimensions of nature or artturns out to be negative; it even leads to despair when, in things, we look specifically totheir living immediacy. Landscapes and equilibriums are being destroyed, the splendid and singular ornamentationthat so many peoples had made part and parcel of their festivals and even of their daily existence are fastdisappearing. Today's human beings are uni-formedboth in their ideas and clothing, in their lifestyle and in somany other "details"by a levelling-off process that spreads irresistibly throughout the planet. This fact was stressedby Heidegger. But among the achievements of the modern language-world, consider (although this is not the mostcharacteristic realization of the technological world) the fact that the books of Melville or Proust have becomeavailable in paperback editions and can be read by




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anybody, even in poverty. Most typical are the examples of new materials being introduced, or of operationalprocedures in the plastic arts, architecture, and music, which all originate in technology. Recall Olivier Messiaen'sglorification of Martenot waves, Pierre Henry's transmutation of door noises, of sighs, and so many other "noises,"or Varese giving musical consecration to the sirens of this city apparently in irreverent manner. Hegel had alreadydetected that the human being's divorce from the sensible realm was but the other side of a rebirth in the properlyspiritual sphere. There is something inexorable in the idea of the springs of progress and in this inflexible thrustthecruel spotlight cast upon a recalcitrant humankind only partly unaware of the stakes. We can very much doubt thathumankind now deserves to be proclaimed the winner in this gigantic metamorphosis, that human beings are nolonger torn by apprehension, and that, thanks to rationalization, they are on the way to finding access to thesupreme figure of the divine. Yet should we for ever remain closed off to the new possibilities entailed by, orreserved in, the movement of technological transformation and its productions? The Heideggerian responsedismisses such a despair and awaits Being flashing out from the depths of the essence of technology. Thereremains, however, the task of translating this expectation, of finding a contour and consistency for it. In order toshow what a thing made by human hands is, Heidegger chose a patiently crafted artifact, a jug. It is not a mobilesculpture, a ready made à la Duchamp, nor a collage; neither is it anything whatsoever that gives evidence of beingaffected by industrial production (be it only partially), nor a thing cloned by means of modern materials orproduction methods. I don't claim that he was wrong (an improper and inopportune accusation in any case), butonly that the example chosen does not help us with the task of listening to, anticipating, and resolutely exploringmodern rationalitya task already conceded as necessary. Will the "saving power"which, somehow, is secreted bythe worldever be revealed if our glance is attracted only to a jug, a beautiful




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ewer, or Achilles' shield, and solely in the light shining forth from the Homeric gods?

JOAN:

Or if the saving power is postponed to a future so distant as to become totally abstract.

FRANCIS:

Yet is it necessary to push signs so forcibly for the sake of modernity?

SUE:

Scientific verification is not amenable to force either. Now, is there a saving power? We will be granted a loftierfreedom when we put aside the religious models still hovering around Heidegger. To be sure, the beautiful Greekforms can no longer answer all our questions. But in any case, it is not out of the depths of the technological worldthat the flashing out of Being will come to pass. It will come out of the ideal of knowledge itself and thepossibilities opened up by unfettered research. Such possibilities are always transcendent, and must guide theworld's fateful journey.

JOAN:

Now you have adopted an ethics of knowledge. I did not suspect you would move so much away from Heidegger.

SUE:

Light years away!

DAVID:

When you mentioned Marx at the beginning, I thought you were going to seize upon the originality of defending acause with no appealless now than everfor the young in America.

SUE:

It was only an observation concerning Marx's influence during the previous century, not a judgment of value.Marxism no longer offers anything that can influence and attract the intellectual elite of this countrybut perhaps theaspiration to a more fraternal society (even there, on such a ground, it has no monopoly). In Marxism wecontemplate the enlargement of individual subjectivity to the level of the intersubjec-




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tivity of the masses, the collectivization of the cult of labor and production, the replacement of the oppression ofthe bourgeois state and corporations by that of the Party and its bureaucracy. I see no liberation in all of that, butthe reinforcement of activism and productivism, the incapacity to break away from the myth of linear progress aswell as from the gregarious instinct. I see human beings being closed off within a so-called scientific system thatdoes nothing but reactivate, as Jacques Monod showed, the metaphysical and fetishist "old alliance," thanks towhich they desperately attempt to propose a total meaning for the phenomena.

JOAN:

. . . the break from cosmic life and the singular requirements for creativity.

FRANCIS:

Yet, should I call attention to the fact that Heidegger was not so categorical when he considered a "productivedialogue" with Marxism?

SUE:

His formula was empty, and he did nothing to give it a content.

FRANCIS:

Not at all. It was the invitationwhich I believe is still necessaryto think the foundations of Marx's thought in theperspective of the history of Being.

JOAN:

If we don't do this, if we don't return from the militant's stance to the thinking attempt to redirect action, we allowthe immense hope of emancipation for modern humankind to capsize and be transformed into its most hideouscounterfeit. This is the reason why I remain somewhat affected by Heidegger's thought, prompted as I am (albeitwith a sort of critical passion) by the possibilities it has opened, attracted as I am by the reappropriations and relaysthat David suggested. The interest contained in such perspectives is that, beyond glossing or paraphrasing, theyinvite us to ask of Heideggerian thought some questions it left open. It is therefore too early to




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judge, but not too late perhaps to think: Heidegger's thought can, and must, find relays.

SUE:

What David urges presupposed two requirements. First, that the reserved dimensions of language be acknowledgedand respected as suchand this is a position to which Heidegger leans; second, that metaphysical rationality (in thewide sense) be credited with a possibility of renewaland this is a point that Heidegger does not admit, but to whichI subscribe. It is decisive for the future of thinking that rationality not be seized upon solely by technology,especially since the thesis least justified by Heidegger himself concerns the ultimate completion, and setting-into-work, of metaphysics in the Gestell.

FRANCIS:

He often stresses that there is no future for philosophical activity, since it is reduced to verbiage if it does notacknowledge our forced choice between the cybernetic exploitation (or the specialized scientific methods that aremodifications of it) and the mutation into a thought completely different. What David urges is to dismiss thealternativeyou are right on this, Sue. But I will not take the advice: what is proposed is not radically different, inHeidegger's sense.

DAVID:

Keep in mind that, according to him, this difference can be nothing but destinal sending. In any case he onlyheralds it. I personally believe that philosophical thought here and now can achieve more without reiteratingmetaphysics in the way we knew it from Plato to Nietzsche.

FRANCIS:

The openings you're attempting are justifiable only if they answer a request formulated by Heidegger himself onseveral occasions: that his thinking effort be prolonged by keeping only in view the charge of the essentialquestions (e.g., the profound link between time and Being or between metaphysics and technology). We run therisk, however, of missing the most specific feature of Heideggerian thought. In our haste, the assigning of tasks toourselves will take precedence




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over heedful expectation [l'écoute et l'attente]. Heidegger suspended the activity of willing, took a step back frommetaphysical rationality, and made us privy to the jointure giving experience its secret richness and to the slow andirresistible wave of time that bears us and becomes our destiny. As much as the essential must be thought andrethought, agitation over this major breakthrough of the spirit is indecent. If we inherit from Heidegger his capacityfor withdrawal and gathering, we will become able to measure up not to him, but to what is still to be thoughtnowas always, now more than ever. As Eckhart progressed from God to divine being, likewise Heidegger ascendedfrom Being to Ereignis with the fearless virility of a hero within silence, both the master of common discourse anda witness bearing testimony to the inexpressible spark. A master who, before the greatness of what he discovered,bows and steps aside. . . .

Imperceptibly, darkness has fallen upon the huge mass of the neighborhood blocks and, in the apartment, almostprevents the friends seeing each other. It is hard to read the sign on the opposite brick wall reading ''Dover Hotel."The varying intensity and density of the skyscrapers' lighted structures compose cubic galaxies upon which the gazecomes and goes as over the surface of a screen without edges. Faces are lost, volumes dissolved. The Seagram andLever Buildingsthe Orion and Arcturus galaxies. Inserted between the impeccably glistening massesdivinities whichPythagoras, the golden-thighed Sage, might have worshippedthe lunar disk is what seems nonreal.

DAVID:

Were we faithful to the law of dialogue?

SUE:

Is there such a law?

FRANCIS:

There was a dialogue.

DAVID:

I was thinking of the kings of Atlantis who, when darkness had come down and the sacrificial victim cooled,wearing




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beautiful deep blue robes, sat both in judgement and as judgedready to engrave the sentence on golden tables.

JOAN:

Why do you think that?

DAVID:

We sacrificed something of ourselves around a great thought. In today's anti-Atlantis where gold is a merecommodity on the stock exchange, during a night when gangs and police roam the streets, didn't we in spite of theodds against it express our perplexities, elevate our disagreements, and deepen our expectations? Ourcircleunexpectedly ennobled by the darkness of the nightexperienced both the profaning of an idol and thecomplicity of lovers.

SUE:

But is the night here the "stitcher of stars"? 7

FRANCIS:

It is still the night.

DAVID:

At least for those who, like us, were able to turn away, for a while, from action and the realities of the world ofbusiness.

JOAN:

If it were sufficient to shut down the light. . . .

SUE:

Manhattan renders sensible the capacity to take a distance: this power corrects monstrosity so as to make it akin togreatness.

FRANCIS:

But for a few people only. In the era of the masses, how can stellar friendliness and enmity be safeguarded?

DAVID:

On condition that one not shut the book (how else do things end in real life?), when one reads that after calling thegods together, Zeus told them:8

" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."




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Epilogue for Two Voices

Dominique JanicaudJean-François Mattéi

D.J.:

It's already been ten years since we left open these essays devoted to the Heideggerian experience of thinking. Toend this collection with an unfinished dialogue, to us, seemed and was meant to be indicative. We wanted neitherto erase, nor to harmonize artificially, our differences or our diverging paths. But with time's distance it seemsadvisable to make a few additional points and to give a new impetus to the dialogue between these two paths,without ceasing to invite the critical mind of the reader in our wake.

Our encounter, and our crossings, on Heidegger were not sought after intentionally. What allowed this crossedresearch workbe it under the form of these "collages"was the commonality of a meditation on the destiny ofmetaphysics and on the question Heidegger was the only one to raise: the possibility of the reassignation ofmetaphysics to its unthought site. This site had been characterized in the seminar to "On Time and Being" asfollows: "the concealment which belongs to metaphysics as its limit must belong to appropriation itself" (TB, SS,41).

Heidegger clearly designates the very limit of metaphysics. It is the Verbergung that, in its ownmost, behind themetaphysical fixations of Being as presence, thought must ultimately gather together. To what extent is this"sheltering" thinkable and sayable? To the extent that it is already




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detectable in metaphysics brought to its limit. As it is not reduced to ontical withdrawal, it only emerges where thedestinal putting-into-play of metaphysics are at issue. Such a putting-into-play is what Heidegger calls "Ereignis,"which unquestionably becomes the most daring, and decisive, presupposition of his ultimate thinking. What wasstill sought in Sein und Zeit is indeed offered in the word Ereignis. Yet, it remains that we must gain access tothinking such a term without forcing it. By moving along with the very stealing-away of Ereignis, we wanted toput the standing "strokes" or "formations" (Prägungen) of metaphysics to the test. Even if one denies the ownmostand any appropriation of the Western allotment in order to reach beyond Heidegger, one can maintain the projectof working around a moving limit where concepts are endlessly deconstructed and constructed anew. In thisprocess, however, one loses access to such a Verbergung, without which the ownmost is an empty word. Ourcommon project in this collection of essays was to highlight a critical distancing without relinquishing this access.That is why the night, which provides the metaphor for Verbergung, comes to encompass both the "Heideggerianchiasmus" and the dialogue "Heidegger in New York.''

J.-F.M:

Such a night protected both our approaches, which, it seems to me, are at the same time opposed andcomplementary. Indeed, how could one think this "overcoming of metaphysics" without attempting to articulatetogether Verwinden and Schritt zurück, which from "Heidegger I" to "Heidegger II" remain intimately linked? Youinterpreted Heidegger's thought from the experience of contiguity as the learning and experiencing of the limitbetween metaphysical rationality and the thought of Being. For myself I was especially sensitive to the vertigo ofgroundless Being, which the experience of the "chiasmus" reveals. With David in "Heidegger in New York" (201),you were speaking of a "return downstream" in order to better seize upon the modernity of the rational and thepossibles it still contains. I attempted a "return upstream" toward this abyss of the absence of reason (Ab-grund),which is not mere nothingness, but the givenness of Being itself.




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D.J.:

After rereading your text on the Heideggerian chiasmus, I still ask myself a question. If it is true that the inversionof a metaphysical proposition pure and simple turns out to be "a bad procedure" in the attempt to do away withmetaphysics because it remains caught in the trap of the metaphysical proposition understood as a "principle"(Satz), is it sufficient to detect a "good principle"the ''chiasmus"which under one single form gathers the differentarticulations of the reversal, the crossing with pentadic structures implicit or explicit in Heidegger's text? The"overcoming of metaphysics" would then amount to reassigning it to a forgotten ontical siteone analogous to thecosmic archetype in Plato's Gorgias enabling you to speak of "the sovereign equilibrium of the world" (128),within which humans are deemed to dwell for ever.

J.-F.M:

Everything will depend on what reading will be made of the "world" in Heidegger. The Geviert is this "sheltering"specific to the event that you mentioned yourself and, I agree, could in no way be erected as a principle, except inthe perspective of a metaphysics of subsisting presence, hence of a rationaland on this account "ontic"ground. Butwhen in "The Thing" Heidegger wrote, "this appropriating mirror-play of the simple onefold of earth and sky,divinities and mortals, we call the world" (PLT, T, 179), at no time was he thinking this Geviert in terms of anontical or formal structure. The world is not the "ground" of all things; instead, its "grounding" continues in thetemporal act of the givenness of Being. Consequently, Heidegger was able to cross it in a double movementone thatcloses the access to a "metaphysical" understanding of Being and, at the same time, opens the path of the fourfoldwrapped in the coiling ring (Ring). Such is the cross, not of metaphysics, but of the world itself.

D.J.:

Should the acknowledgement of the importance of the chiasmus lead to a key structure and a cosmic symbol? IfEreignis is exposed to the "night of the world," the reason is that nothing guarantees us a "quiet center" as you callit (90). Here we run




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the risk of losing the Heideggerian meaning of an a-topical difference that singularizes Dasein (amidst whichBeing is not representable) and the suspending of the epoch of technology open to errancy. Finally, must the sacredbe interpreted in light of "serenity" (Gelassenheit) when Heidegger so clearly stresses the absence of God (GottesFehl) that today is our allotment?

J.-F.M:

The absence of God may be our allotment, but it is nonetheless true that "the divine ones" (die Göttlichen) dwell(weilen) together (zumal) with the "mortals" (die Sterblichen), jointly with "earth and sky" (Erde und Himmel), inthe simplicity of what Heidegger calls unambiguously "a unique fourfold" (ein einziges Geviert). The 1949lectures, the 1955 talk on ''Serenity" see ("Conversation on a Country Path" in Discourse on Thinking) or the prior194445 dialogue "In order to serve as commentary to 'Serenity'" endlessly return to this "equanimity" in the face ofthings and on "the spirit open to the secret"which together prepare a "new rootedness." Why should we interpretthe world solely in terms of "errancy" and what pertains only to the mode of being of the era of technology? Whyshould we put aside "serenity," which Heidegger stresses can be thought neither as ontical or ontological in itsrelation to the "free extending" (die freie Weite) of the Geviert?

What separates us here, and at the same time brings us closer in the same access to Heideggerian speech, is inkeeping with the orientation of the "overcoming of metaphysics." You are fearful lest I reinscribe thought in apreestablished frame, in some arche premetaphysics, and thus close meditating thought back upon itself. Thoughtwould then cease to weave itself in the language of living modernity and would fail to recognize that empathy withBeing remains an open and available possibility. As David says in your dialogue, there is a fundamental"presupposition" in Heidegger, that of "a central space of appropriation where Meaning gathers itself" (193). Formyself, I underscore the radicalness of this referential center that is thought as Abgrund or Geschick, without beingconcerned about its status as a presupposi-




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tionwhich is no more onerous than the opposite presupposition that meaning is nonexistent and that we are doomedto errancy. For metaphysics to be thought, it is necessary indeed that there be one presupposition, or oneantecedent, as the ultimate limit of metaphysics. Heidegger's "other thinking" rests upon this originary experienceof thought, which can be neither experienced, nor rejected, from a metaphysical point of view because such anexperience leads to the primordial openness where metaphysical rationality has its site. At no time does thispreclude the continuing fathoming and underscoring of the undecidables in Heidegger's text, and beyond it, inmodernity itself.

D.J.:

Indeed, I didand I stillpresuppose empathy with Being, by which I mean not the givenness of a pure difference, butits incessant and ingenious reinscription within a language field open to the possible. I confess that ten years agothe call to the fundamental and the dichotomy between "calculative thought" and "meditating thought" prompted astrong resistance on my part, perhaps even live opposition. Sue's voice represents this resistance, mostly from thepoint of view of ethics and politics.

J.-F.M:

It is true that Sue deliberately breaks away from the thought of Being that for her delivers "nothing exceptnothingness" (169) at a time when Francis puts the stakes on a "radicalism" that would allow him to entrust himselfto the simple and to the "'floating intimacy' of the fourfold'' (181). On the other side, in more discreet fashion Joanseeks an access "to meaning" through the play of the world (194), while David moderates Heidegger's foundingexigency. But thus little by little, by dint of the interplay of your four characters sitting around an invisible fire onenight in ManhattanDavid, Joan, Sue, and Francisyou accept what you named earlier "the crossing of gazes in theCrossing of the fourfold" (158). Likewise, the crossing of our own pathsdownstream or upstreamin my view is inkeeping with the image of a contrapuntal figure evoked by Heidegger in The Principle of Reason, a figure at




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play between Being, reason, the principle, and the leap (Satz), as the "musical movement leading the musician," toborrow Bettina von Arnim's image quoted by Heidegger (PR, 89, mod.). I agree with you concerning the possibilityof detecting one major topic in our authormetaphysicswhich must be understood equally as the advent of therational subject of representation and as a counter-subject, the unthought of metaphysics, that our experience stillfinds in its way. Heidegger bifrons, we wrote in the first line of the preface, and still with this we would agree,whatever the emphasis you might bring to bear on the musical sentence of metaphysics or, myself, on itscounterpoint.

D.J.:

None of us would deny the singular force of Heidegger's ontological radicalism, and especially the irreducibility ofhis stubborn questioning that is now a landmark of Western thought, either regarding the question of the destiny ofmetaphysics or the anticipation of Ereignis. On this note, there is no regret that our paths intersect withoutconfusing, and then diverge.

J.-F.M:

Perhaps this is even the indication of the double accord always heard in the Heideggerian sentence: the finalaccord of the Logos that gathers the plurality of meaning in the unity of a single foundation, and the first accord ofthe Geviert, that accords the opening of the things themselves within the pure givenness of the world. In theexperience of thought everyone will recognize which accord is his own.




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Notes

Notes To Translator's Preface

1. Two critical approaches are possible. First, a diacritical approach attuned to the hermeneutics of ontology. Inthis approach, the nonmetaphysical terms allow us to gain greater access to the matter for thought. Since we grantthat Heideger is a great philosopher, the new terms he crafted must be given a hearingwhich is what these essays"for two voices" and from different approaches attempt to do. Janicaud and Mattéi give careful attention toHeidegger's demand formulated in the "Letter to Richardson" for a reverse diachrony (understanding "Heidegger I"from "Heidegger II'') so as to gain access to the complexity of the landscape of fundamental thinking. Second, onemay conduct a diacritical approach attuned to the sophistical and highly objectionable insertion in the text of AnIntroduction to Metaphysics (late after the war and without any word whatsoever on the Holocaust) of the all-too-famous "internal truth and greatness" of National Socialisman insertion devised, among other things, by Heideggerto put a screen over his serious absence of judgment in political matters. This second approach is investigated byJanicaud in L'ombre de cette pensée (A shadow over one's thought) and is indebted to Hannah Arendt's assessmentthat the Kehre came to full articulation in the second part of his debate with Nietzsche's will-to-power. In thisdebate the remnant of a metaphysical will-to-will, of an Entschlossenheit widened to the Dasein of a people, wasstripped of its (bogus) political echoes and gave way to will-not-to-will, itself paving the way for the meditation onGelassenheit. In this




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approach a special chronology (recreated by the philosophical critic turned in part detective) attaches to theword Kehre and prevents the critical reader to pay exclusive attention to the demand for the reverse diachronyrequested in the "Letter to Richardson."

2. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1955. See in particular Part II, "Myth as a Form of Intuition. Structure and Articulation of theWorld of Time and Space in the Mythical Consciousness", pp. 71151.

3. See "Les modes de pensée philosophique" in Histoire des Moeurs, Volume 2, Paris: Gallimard, Collection "LaPléiade," 1990. There Mattéi shows that Cassirer preceded Heidegger concerning a critical attention devoted to thefour-fold schema of the world. Yet it is clear by the sources used in our text (written in 1983) that Mattéi was notinfluenced by Cassirer's views. Nonetheless, his reading of the Geviert is in significant agreement with Cassirer'sstudy of the stucture and articulation of world of time and space in mythical thinking.

Notes To Chapter One

1. The one thinking great things must err greatly.

2. being (eon); Being (emmenai).

3. See VA, 7199; "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking."

4. See SZ, Section 44.

5. See HZ, 31011.

6. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, CIX, "La Destruction."

7. See Jean Beaufret, Heidegger et le "Virage du Temps" (Madrid: Destin, 1971), numbers 2123, 3341.

8. "The overcoming is the Über-lieferung of metaphysics in its truth" (VA, 79).

9. As the substitution of de linea for trans lineam in the text of homage to Ernst Jünger, QB, 36.

10. See "Die Erinnerung in die Metaphysik," N 2, 48190.

11. The recollection internalizing metaphysics is called a "necessary epoch in the history of Being," N 2, 481.




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12. Ibid., xix, 185. One of the most indicative texts concerning Heidegger's turn is the note that closes The Essenceof Truth (Section 9). The first paragraph of this section was added by Heidegger in 1954 (WW, 26). Whereas thesecond paragraph mentions the overcoming (Überwindung) of metaphysics, the 1954 text indicates that thefundamental feature of Being is the "sheltering that lightens" (lichtendes Bergen) and that "the answer to thequestion of the essence of truth is the saying of a turning within the history of Being (Seyn)" (BW, ET, 140). It istherefore this turn itself (not as a mere personal act by Heidegger, but as destiny's sign) that delineatesmetaphysics.

13. See the end of Vorspiel, René Char (Paris: "L'Herne," 1971), 184.

14. See ZS, 44; TB, 41.

15. ZS, 45; TB, 42.

Notes To Chapter Two

1. Hegel, Wissenshaft der Logik, ed. Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1934), 2: 33; hereafter cited as WL. The Science ofLogic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990), 417; hereafter cited asSL.

2. See QB.

3. As Heidegger shows eloquently in a little-known text "Einige Hinweise . . ." in Phänomenolgie und Theologie(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1970), 4243.

4. See "L'apprentissage de la contigüité," in Critique (JuneJuly 1976), 66476; and "Savoir philosophique et penséeméditante," in Revue de l'enseignement philosophique (FebruaryMarch 1977), 114. Reprinted in À nouveau laphilosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 12234.

5. Martin Heidegger im Gespräch, herausgegeben von Richard Wisser (Freiburg/Müchen: Karl Alber, 1970), 68. Adiscussion of this response of Heidegger to Wisser is taken up in the first exchanges of "Heidegger in New York."




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6. Der Spiegel: Spiegel Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger am 23 September 1966. Published in Der Spiegel 23. (May31, 1976), p. 206.

Notes To Chapter Three

1. Concerning the "complete text of the entirely transcribed lecture course" given in the 1935 summer at theUniversity of Freiburg-in-Brisgau, Heidegger writes: "The spoken word no longer speaks in the printed one"(Foreword to IM). The preface to his Nietzsche, a book using the 193640 lecture courses and digressions frombetween 1940 to 1946, cautions the reader: "For all that, the written and printed text lacks the advantages of oralpresentation" (N 1, xvi).

2. "This floudering in commonness is part of the sublime and dangerous game and gamble in which, by the natureof language, we are the stakes. Is it playing with words when we attempt to give heed to this game of language andhear what language really says when it speaks" (WCT, 119, mod.).

3. Allusion to an expression used by Louis-Ferdinand Céline to define the specific stylistic characteristics of awriter.

4. "Hat der Mensch der Bau des Satzes am Bau des Dinges abgelesen, oder hat er den Bau des Satzes in did DingeHineinverlegt?" (Die Frage nach dem Ding, 35).

5. Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1968).

6. Georges Mounin, Dictionnaire de la linguistique (Paris: P.U.F., 1974).

7. Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (Paris: P.U.F., 1961).

8. Hermogenes Tarseni, Opera (Leipzig: Rabe Teubner, 1913), Peri euresos, Delta, 3, Peri periodou, 156, 15; 157,18.

9. Porphyrii Isagoge et in Artistotelis Categorias Commentarium (Berolini, 1887), Xiazontos, 79, 6.

10. Pascal, Pensées, Brunschwicg ed., number 299; Lafuma ed., number 192.




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11. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishing, 1970), 47, mod.

12. Marx Engels Reader, 3012, mod.

13. Pierre Boutang, Ontologie du secret (Paris: P.U.F., 1973), 355.

14. G. W. F. Hegel, Berliner Schriften (Hamburg: Hoffmeister, 1956), 9. "Philosophy is like the universe, round initself."

15. Seminaire de Zähringen, in Q 4, 331.

16. See also N 1, 188. "The result is the following proposition, which would apply to Plato, although couched inNietzsche's manner of speech: truth is worth more than art. Nietzsche says, on the contrary: art is worth more thantruth." In 187071, Nietzsche wrote, "My philosophy is an inverted Platonism" (Kröner ed., 10:190). See N 1, 154.

17. See also "Hegel et les Grecs" concerning the "mirroring play" of Hegelian dialectic which is the "reign ofantithesis," and the Heraclitus lecture course.

18. The Séminaire du Thor also connects the "country path" (Q 3, 1314) to the Heraclitean belonging of thecontraries.

19. English word, from the Latin word hilum. The Latin word nihil (nothing) is the contradiction of ne hilum.Hilum is the scar left on the tegument of a seed after the rupture of the funicule, e.g., the hilum of the feva. Hencenihil (ne hilum) mean the "absence of link" connecting the seed to its origin, the loss of origin, i.e., nothingness.[Trans.]

20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 219; trans Alphonso Lingis(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Hereafter cited as VI.

21. "Sind das Wesen des Dinges und das Wesen des Satzes nur deshalb spiegelbildich gebaut."

22. The circle of genitivus objectivus returns in Les Principes de la pensée with the double stress, meaning either"principles of thought" or "principles for thought" (Arguments, 1960, 20:31).

23. Paul Friedländer, Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 203.




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24. Ibid., 102; also see SZ, Section 33, 159; 201. "What establishes the unity of this 'together'? As Plato knew, thisunity lies in the fact that the logos is always logos tinos." See The Sophist, 262e.

25. "Gibt es das Nichts nur, wiel es das Nicht, d.h. die Verneinung gibt? Oder liegt es umgekehrt? Gibt es dieVerneinung und das Nicht nur, weil es das Nichts gibt:" (Was ist Metaphysik?, 28).

26. "Die Freiheit ist nur deshalb der Grund der inneren Möglichkeit der Richtigkeit, weil sie ihr eigenes Wesen ausdem ursprünglicheren Wesen der einsig wesentlichen Wahrheit empfängt" (Was ist Metaphysik?, 14).

27. "Die Freiheit . . . is das Wesen der Wahrheit . . . nur deshalb, weil die Freiheit selbst dem anfänglichen Wesender Wahrheit enstammt" (Was ist Metaphysik?, 23).

28. ". . . ob die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit nicht zugleich und zuerst die Frage nach der Wahrheit desWesens sein muss" (Was ist Metaphysik?, 25).

29. "Nicht dies Aussage ist der primäre 'ort' der Wahrheit, sondern umgekehrt. . . . Die ursprünglichste 'Wahrheit'is der 'ort' der Aussage" (SZ, 226).

30. "Seinnicht Seindes'gibt es' nur, sofern Wahrheit ist. Und sie ist nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist. Sein undWahrheit 'sind' gleichursprünglich" (SZ, 230).

31. See "Recollection in Metaphysics," in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambauch, New York: Harper andRow, 1973, 75, modified. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we can still point out to the Not (need, or urgency) ofa "turning" (N, 2: 172) and the "turning of urgency" (ibid., 207 modified). In "What Are Poets For?'' Heideggerstates that "a turn still remains open for this destitute time . . . only if the world turns about fundamentally" (PLT,92). In ". . . Poetically Man Dwells. . . ." Heidegger evokes "a turning point in our unpoetic dwelling [as]something we may expect to happen only if we remain heedful of the poetic" (ibid., 228). In "Building, Dwelling,Thinking" Heidegger talks of the "reversal of this relation of dominance," originally held by language and nowtaken by man, that leads him toward what is "alien" (ibid., 146). In the Epilogue (A Letter to a Young Student) to"The




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Thing" Heidegger states: "Everything depends on the step back, fraught with error, into the thoughtfulreflection that attends the turnabout of the oblivion of Being, the turnabout that is prefigured in the destiny ofBeing" (ibid., 185).

32. Timaeus, 28b: "Considering the whole heaven, or the world, whether called by this or by any other moreappropriate name. . . ." Epinomis, 977b, names it "Olympus." All three characterizations are Pythagorean in origin.

33. "Pyros tropai; proton thalassa, thalasses de to men hemisu ge, to de hemisu prester; thalassa diacheetai kaimetreetai eis ton auton logon hokoios proton hen." In J. Bollack, H. Wismann, Héraclite ou la séparation (Paris:Editions de minuit, 1972), Fragment 31. See also Plato, Republic, 8: 546a; and Epinomis, 990b.

34. "Was da ungesagt bleibt, ist eine Wendung in der Bestimmung des Wesens der Wahrheit" (Platons Lehre vonder Wahrheit, [Bern: Francke, 1947], 5).

35. "Der Satz vom Grund is wint 'Satz' in dem ausgezeichneten Sinne, dass er ein Sprung ist" (SG, 96).

36. Bettina von Armin, Correspondance de Goethe et d'une enfant, Oeuvres complètes, 3: 168.

37. Another occurence of the letter chi is to be found in Plato's Cratylus, 414c1, concerning the letter o insertedbetween a chi and a nu (metaxu tou chei) in the free etymology of techne.

38. Proclus, Commentaire sur le Timée, trad. A.-J. Festugière, 5 vol. (Paris: Vrin, 196668), 3: 247, 1721, 291.Proclus identifies chi with the soul and the cyclical structure of the pentad (3: 236, 15, 281; 3: 255, 25256, 15,299).

39. Proclus, Commentaire sur la République, trad. A.-J. Festugière, 3 vol. (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 3: 140 27141, 14,8586. See the commentary by Festugière on the "vis-à-vis" of the four openings, understood "not as two longparallel vertical tubes, but as the four branches of a chi" (note 1, p. 186).

40. Ibid., 143, 1726, 8889.

41. Oliver Beigbeder, Lexique des Symboles (Paris: Zodiaque, 1969), 160.




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42. "Das so entspringende Word-Werk lässt das Zussamengechören des Gottes und des Menschens erscheinen"(HD, 69).

43. Vitruve, De architectura (Paris: Belles Lettres), 1970.

44. "Dask Geschick holt die Vier in sein Mitte zu sich ein, nimmt sie and sich, fägnt sie an die Innigkeit. . . . Als dieMitte des ganzen Verhältnisses ist das Geshick der alles versammelnde An-fang. Die Mitte is als das tönendegrosse Anfang" (Ah, 223).

45. For a study of this figure in Plato's thought, see my work, L'Etranger et le Simulacre, Essai sur la fondation del'ontologie platonicienne (The Stranger and the Simulacrum, Essay on the Foundation of Platonic Ontology) (Paris:P.U.F., collection "Epiméthée," 1983).

46. Iamblicus, In Nic. arith., 16, where he states that the number 5 was called "Nemesis" by the Pythagoreans. SeeA. Delatte, Esai sur la politique pythagoricienne (Essay on Pythagorean Politics) (Paris: E. Champion, 1922),6869. In his Comm. Rep., Proclus writes, "The pentad is the sacred symbol of justice, as the only dividing (in equalparts) number of those numbers from 1 to 9" (13: 5354 in 2: 161; see 13: 22, 1011, in 2: 126). At the same time,five is the number for Aphrodite, Pente Gamos, because it unites the first even, feminine, self-dividing number (2)and the first odd, masculine, dissymetical, and complete number (3) and, for the Pythagoreans, is a unit neithereven nor odd.

47. M. Granet, La pensée chinoise (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1934; new edition: Paris: Albin Michel, 1968),237. Hereafter cited as PC.

48. Granet indicates on the other hand that Chuang Tse interprets the Tao as the unity of all the contrasts from theanalogy of the "sun's cart." "One benefits from the neutral and sovereign observatory which is neither from the thisnor the that, but one where the this and the that can only be united." Granet adds, "Such is the point of view of thecenter of the ring, where the nullity [vanité] of the (apparently) diametrical oppositions" (ibid., 430, Granet'semphasis).

49. Das wird nach der Entsprachung, an deren Leitseil man gern alles Wirkliche denkt. . . .




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50. Marsile Ficin, Sur la Banquet de Platon ou De l'Amour, trad. R. Marcel (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1956), 3:3,165.

51. Heidegger, Pensivement, in "Cahiers de l'Herne" René Char, 1971).

52. This translation reflects the modification made by the author from the French éclaircie to clairière. [Trans.]

53. "Anwesen (Sein) gehört in die Lichtung des Sichverbergens (Zeit). Lichtung des Sichverbringens (Zeit) erbringtAnwesen (Sein)" (p. xxi).

54. Hölderlin, "The Vatican," in Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1984), 205.

55. SemZu, 54, "an interpretation of texts to protect a way that could, I think, become the preparation for somethingelse in a different place."

56. in die Entschiederheit des Strahls, die ein Leider ist.

57. Georg Trakl, "A Winter Evening."

58. Porphyry, De antro nympharum, § 27.

59. Heidegger evokes the "stellar course of the mystery," in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. WilliamLovitt, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977, 33. Also the Principle of Reason mentions the "stellar friendship" ofthe five thinkers of German Idealism (Liebniz, Kand, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling), PR, 11:88 modified; 14950.

60. Der Feldweg, 40; Q 3:1314.

61. Discourse on Thinking, translation of Gelassenheit, by J. M. Anderson and E. H. Freund, New York: Harperand Row, 1966, 8990, mod.

Notes To Chapter Four

1. André Malraux, Les chênes qu'on abat . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 193: "Vous connaissez la phrase: 'Lefrémissement d'une branche sur le ciel est plus important que Hitler'."

2. Martin Heidegger, HW (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1957), "Die Ziet des Weltbildes," 70: "Die Entgötterungist




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der Zustand der Entscheidungslosigkeit über den Gott und die Götter." (Editor's translation).

3. Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1978), "Phänomenolgie und Theologie," p. 73:"Die alltägliche Erfahrung der Dinge im weiteren Sinne ist weder objektivierend noch eine Vergegenständlichung."(Editor's translation) Hereinafter referred to as WM.

4. At the very beginning of his famous paper, Gödel states that his undecidability results hold of formal systems, inparticular of two very specific formal systems, namely, the axiomatic system of Russell and Whitehead's PrincipiaMathematica and that of Zermelo and Fraenkel: see Kurt Gödel, "Über formal unenthscheidbare Sätze derPrincipia mathematica und verwandter Systeme I," Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38 (1931), 173.

For the English, see ed. Jean van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic,18791931 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981; 4th printing): Kurt Gödel, "On formallyUndecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I," 596597.

5. For this entire paragraph, see Jean Ladrière, "Les limites de la formalisation," Logique et connaissancescientifique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 316324.

6. Martin Heidegger, VA, (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1954), "Überwindung der Metaphysik," 90: "Dieser Kampf istnotwendig planetarisch und als solcher in sienem Wesen unentscheidbar, weil er nichts zu entscheiden hat, da ervon aller Unterschiedung, vom Unterschied (des Seins zum Seienden), und damit von der Wahr-heitausgeschlossen bleibt und durch die eigene Kraft ins Ungeschickliche hinausgedrängt wird: in dieSeinsverlassenheit." (Editor's translation).

7. VA, "Überwindung der Metaphysik," 80: "Der Wille zum Willen verhärtet alles in das Geschicklose. DessenFolge ist das Ungeschichtliche" (editor's translation).

8. Martin Heidegger N2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 472: "am Rande der Frist der Unentschiedenheit. . . ." (Editor'stranslation)




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9. N 2, 472: "reisst der Mensch den Rang des eigentlich Wirklichen an sich. . . ." (Editor's translation)

10. Ibid., 162: "dass mein Vorstellen als die massgebende re-presentatio über die Praesenz jedes Vorgestellten. . . ."(Editor's translation)

11. The field of contemporary logic, whether it likes it or not, inevitably presupposes transcendental subjectivity asa metaphysical foundation. This authority does not hold sway over "decision" as Heidegger understands it.

12. WM. "Brief über den Humanismus," p. 338: "Überall kreist der Mensch, ausgestossen aus der Wahrheit desSeins, um sich selbst als das animal rationale." (Editor's translation)

13. Whereas in Being and Time, the decision was Dasein's, the Entschlossenheit in the later works centers on theavailability of the thinker for thought.

14. See Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), 5859.

15. N 2, 485: "Hier ist nicht die Rede von der Psychologie der Philosophen, sondern nur von der Geschichte desSeins. . . . Was geschieht in der Geschichte des Seins? . . . Nichts geschieht, das Ereignis er-eignet." (Editor'stranslation)

16. Ibid., 489: "Dagegen muss die metaphysisched.h. stets: die alle Metaphysik fugend-tragendeUnterscheidungselbst erst in ihrem Anfang erfahren werden, damit die Metapphysik als Ereignis der Geschichte des Seinsentscheidungshaft wird. . . ." (Editor's translation)

17. See ibid., 471.

18. Ibid., 490.

19. This distinction is sometimes sketched out: see Martin Heidegger, "Nur noch ein gott kann uns retten," DerSpiegel 23 (May 31, 1976), 209: "Heidegger: Wenn ich kurz und vielleicht etwas massiv, aber aus langerBresinnung antworten darf: Die Philosophie wird keine unmittelbare Veränderung des jetzigen Weltzustandesbewirken Können. Dies gilt nicht nur von der Philosophie, sondern von allem bloss menschlichen Sinnen undTrachten. Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten."

Editor's translation: "Heidegger: If I may answer briefly and somewhat Massively, but after much pondering:philosophy will not be able to effect any immediate transformation of the




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present state of the world. This holds not only of philosophy, but of any merely human thought and wish. Onlya god can save us."

See also Martin Heidegger, ID, 71: "Niemand kann wissen, ob und wann and wo und wie dieser Schritt desDenkens zu einem eigentlichen (im Ereignis gebrauchten) Weg und Gang und Wegebau sich entfaltet."

Editor's translation: "No one can know whether, when, where, and how this step of thought will unfold itselfinto a proper (needed in the Ereignis) road, passage, or construction of paths."

20. See HZ, "Der Spruch des Anaximander," 310; and Der Spiegel 23 (May 31, 1976), 209.

21. Der Spiegel 23 (May 31, 1976), 206: "Die Technik in ihrem Wesen ist etwas, was der Mensch von sich ausnicht bewältigt." (Editor's translation)

22. VA, "Überwindung der Metaphysik," 99: "Kein Wandel kommt ohne vorausweisendes Geleit. Wie aber nahtein Geleit, wenn nicht das Ereignis sich lichtet, das rufend, brauchend das Menschenwesen er-äugnet, d.h. er-blicktund im Erblicken Sterbliche auf den Weg des denkenden, dichtenden Bauens bringt?" See ID, 28.

23. ID, 65: "In die Nähe des Geschicklichen gelangen wir nur durch die Jähe des Augenblickes eines Andenkens."(Editor's translation)

24. N, 2:383.

25. See VA, "Bauen Wohnen Denken," 150: "winkenden Boten der Gottheit."

26. René Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l'esprit en la recherche de la vérité, translated inaccordance with the Cartesian vocabulary, and supplemented with conceptual notes, by Jean-Luc Marion, and withmathematical notes by Pierre Costabel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 11: "on ne peut posséder aucunescience, sinon par regard de l'esprit ou par déduction" (my emphasis). This assertion occurs in Rule IV.

27. For the evocation of this confrontation between gazes, see Martin Heidegger. Die Technik und die Kehre(Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), 45.




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28. Walter F. Otto, Die Götter Griechenlands (Frankfurt am Main: Schulte-Bulmke, 1956), 164: "Denn was wärereligiös, wenn nicht die Ergriffenheit des Menschen bei einem Blick in die Tiefen des Seins? Und hier spricht dieTiefe zu dem erleuchteten Geiste. Ein Augenblick kann anbetungs-würdige Gestalten aufglänzen lassen, denen nieein Tempel gebaut worden ist." (Editor's translation)

29. Martin Heidegger, SZ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979), 62: 307.

Editor's remark: all English translations of quotations from Being and Time are taken from Joan Stambaugh'sunpublished translation of the work.

30. Ibid., 75: 391: "Die Entschlossenheit konstituiert die Treue der Existenz zum eigenen Selbst."

31. Ibid.: "Das Man weicht der Wahl aus."

32. Ibid.: "Die uneigentlich geschichtliche Existenz dagegen sucht . . . das Moderne."

33. Heidegger himself invites us to interpret "Heidegger II" only on the basis of a meditation on the contributionsof "Heidegger I": see Heidegger's preface to William Richardson, Heidegger Through Phenomenology to Thought(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), xxiii.

34. Martin Heidegger, "Hölderlins Erde und Himmel." Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 11 (19581960), 35: "Das Griechenlandaber, das Morgenländische, ist der möglicherweise kommende grosse Anfang." (Editor's translation)

35. SZ, 61: 304: "Die Grundmöglichkeiten der Existenz, Eigentlichkeit und Uneigenlichkeit des Daseins, gründenontologisch in möglichen Zeitungen der Zeitlichkeit."

36. HZ, "Der Spruch des Anaximander," 311: "Aus der Epoche des Seins kommt das epochale Wesen seinesGeschickes, worin die eigenliche Weltgeschichte ist. Jedesmal wenn das Sein in seinem Geschick an sich hält,ereignet sich jäh und unversehens Welt." (Editor's translation)

37. VA, "Überwindung der Metaphysik," 73: "Ehe das Sein sich in seiner anfänglichen Wahrheit ereignen kann,muss das Sein als der Wille gebrochen, muss die Welt zum Einsturz . . . werden" (my emphasis). (Editor'stranslation)




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38. This citation is taken from ID: see note 19. In the Spiegel article we find another formulation, p. 209: "Spiegel:. . . Meinen Sie, dass wir den Gott herbeidenken können? Heidegger: Wir können ihn nicht herbeidenken, wirvermögen höchstens die Bereitschaft der Erwartung zu weken."

Editor's translation: "Spiegel: Do you mean that we are able to think this god in such a way as to call it forth?Heidegger: We are not able to call it forth by way of thought. We are, at best, able to awaken the preparednessto await it."

39. VA, "Die Frage nach der Technik," 36: "Dann muss vielmehr gerade das Wesen der Technik das Wachstum desRettenden in sich bergen" (my emphasis) (Editor's translation)

40. For example, Americanism and communism (and even National Socialism) are on a par in that they areideologies equally incapable of thinking the essence of technology. See the Spiegel article 206: "Spiegel: Sicherwürden Sie auch die kommunistische Bewegung da einordnen? Heidegger: Ja, unbedingt, als von derplanetarischen Technik bestimmt. Speigel: Auch den Amerikanismus? Heidegger: Auch dieses würde ich sagen."

Editor's translation: "Spiegel: You would certainly also include the communist movement in that? Heidegger: Yes,by all means, as it is determined by planetary technology. Spiegel: Americanism as well? Heidegger: I would saythat too."

41. See my earlier papers: "L'apprentissage de la contiguïté," Critique 349350 (1976), 664676: and "Savoirphilosophique et pensée méditante," Revue de l'enseignement philosophique (FebruaryMarch, 1977), 114.

42. ID, 69: "Weil das Denken der Metaphysik in die als solche ungedachte Differenz eingelassen bleibt, ist dieMetaphysik aus der einigenden Einheit des Austrags her einheitlich zumal Ontologie und Theologie."

Editor's translation: "Since metaphysics remains embedded in the difference which is unthought as such, it isundividedly both ontology and theology out of the unifying unity of the settlement." Janicaud uses arrangement torender Austrag, Hence our use of "settlement."




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This same passage is translated as follows by Joan Stambaugh: Martin Heidegger, ID, translated, with anintroduction, by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 72: "Because the thinking ofmetaphysics remains involved in the difference which as such is unthought, metaphysics is both ontology andtheology in a unified way, by virtue of the unifying unity of perdurance."

43. Martin Heidegger. ZD, "Zeit und Sein," 25: "ohne Rücksicht auf die Beziehung des Seins zum Seienden."(Editor's translation)

44. This expression is borrowed from Julien Gracq, En lisant, en écrivant (Paris: José Corti. 1981), 197 and 207.The French phrase is fraîcheur de l'éventuel. The word éventuel indicates the Ereignis.

Notes To Chapter Five

1. Saint-John Perse, Vents, Oeuvre poétique, Paris: Gallimard, 1953, 1: 361.

2. Sein und Zeit, 426; Being and Time, 478; see also Section 11.

3. "Dank," in Cahier de l'Herne devoted to René Char (Paris, 1971): Sagen die Aletheia als: Die Lichtung: Dieentbergung der sich entziehenden Befugnis.

4. See "Der Satz der Identität," the first lecture of Identität und Differenz, Pfullingen: Neske, 1957, 30.

5. Tao te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), chapter 80.

6. VA, 97.

7. "Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit," Gelassenheit, 73.

8. Allusion to the speech Zeus was to deliver to the ten kings of Atlantis at the end of the unfinished Critias.




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Index

A

Americanism, 202, 240

analogia, 29, 132-38

Anaxagoras, 46

Anaximander, 188

Angelus Silesius, 152

Arendt, Hannah, 227

Aristophanes, 49

Aristotle, 3, 5, 171, 172, 191

De partibus animalium, 46

Artaud, Antonin, 10

Atlantis, 220

Atreus, 78

B

Bacon, Francis, 28

Bataille, Georges, 10

Baudelaire, Charles, The Flowers of Evil, 4, 103, 228

Beaufret, Jean, xxxii, 41, 209, 228

Beigdeber, Olivier, Lexique des symboles, 102, 233

Bergier, xxx

Bergson, Henri, 178

Böhlendorff, 122

Boutang, Pierre, Ontologie du secret, 49, 231

C

Callicles, 123

Cassirer, Ernst, 52-53

The Philosophy of Symbolical Forms, xix, xx, 228

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Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 230

Cézanne, Paul, 151, 182

Char, René, 229

Christianity, 25, 178

Communism, 202, 240

Contiguity, xxxi, 203, 205, 212, 213, 229, 240

Corneille, Pierre, 45

Cronus, 78

D

Deleuze, Gilles, x

Différence et Répétition, 16

Derrida, Jacques, x, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxx, 4, 25, 156

Margins of Philosophy, xxix

Positions, 237

Descartes, René, 3, 4, 28, 154, 158, 181

Cartesian method, xxii, 199, 200, 205

cogito, 3, 27, 30, 32, 34, 154

Regulae, 238

res cogitans, 5

res extensa, 34

Diels, 2

Dikè, 98

Dilthey, 2, 4

Duchamp, Marcel, 215

E

Eluard, Paul, 177

Empedocles, 122

ethics (Kantian, commanding), 173, 174

F

Feuerbach, 49, 167

Fichte, 235

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Ficin, Marsile, 137, 235

Fink, Eugen, 51-52

Fontanier, Pierre, 44, 45, 230

Friedländer, Paul, Plato, 65, 231

G

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xxii

Giacometti, 10

Gödel, xxi, 152, 153, 155, 204, 236

Gorgias, 147

Gracq, Julien, En lisant, en écrivant, 241

Granet, Marcel, La pensée chinoise, 128-30, 234

Grégoire de Tours, 45

H

Hartmann, Nicolai, 2

Hegel, G. W. F., xviii, xxii, 16, 19, 22, 26, 34, 48, 51, 135, 161, 173, 178, 198, 210, 215, 229, 231, 235

Hegel, Logic, 20-21

Heidegger, BT, 73, 155, 159, 237. See also SZ

BW, WM, 11, 66-69, 148, 149, 249

Der Feldweg, 148, 166, 176, 224, 235

Die Frage nach dem Ding, 230. See also WT

Die Technik und die Kehre, 239

EB, 105, 115, 121

EC, 122, 125

EGT, 74, 98, 105, 115, 116, 139, 142, 188

ET, 42. See also BW, 11, 72, 73, 249

G, xxvii, 36, 182, 201, 208, 210, 211, 227, 241

HD, 105, 116, 120, 127, 128, 133-37, 147, 234

Höderlins Erde und Himmel, 239

HS, 51, 52, 81, 116, 231

HZ, xxxii, 23, 28, 31, 50, 228, 235, 238, 239

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ID, xxx, 10, 16, 19, 21, 25, 44, 62-4, 117, 131, 132, 135, 163, 238, 240, 241

IM, 87, 96, 139, 202, 227

Interview with Der Spiegel, 157, 202, 230, 237, 238, 240

Interview with German Television, 30, 170, 229. See also Wisser, Richard

KM, 4

KPM, xix, 87, 89

''Les Principes de la pensée," 63, 132, 231

LH, 32, 41, 42, 54, 56, 71, 72, 75, 111, 119, 139, 145, 173, 181

LR, xii, 11, 12, 70, 72-75, 141, 181, 227, 228, 239

N, 8, 10, 27, 28, 43, 49, 50, 64, 66, 91, 115, 120, 154, 156, 157, 184, 198, 228, 230-32, 236-38

OWL, 54, 56, 58, 64, 79, 96, 97, 110, 114, 119, 131-33, 144, 166, 199

PDT, 64, 78-80, 142

"Pensivement," 138, 235

Phänomenologie und Theologie, 29, 229, 236

PhB, 62

PLT, 39, 40, 44, 57-61, 90, 102, 104-110, 114, 120, 121, 125, 134, 149, 181, 187, 191, 223, 232, 233

PR, xvi, xxii, xxx, 16, 28, 43, 81-91, 109, 111, 134, 152, 168, 225, 226, 235

Q, 43, 51, 54, 56, 57, 231, 235

QB, 2, 4, 8, 39, 54, 64, 92-95, 228, 229

QCT, xxx, 132, 139, 144, 145, 201, 202, 235, 238

Sch, 60, 73, 74, 115

SemT, 50, 51, 119, 231

SemZu, 34, 57, 154, 235

SG, 28, 85, 233

SZ, 2-5, 11, 13, 25, 54, 57, 58, 70-75, 87, 90, 104, 111, 119, 126, 139, 141, 155, 159, 166, 169, 170, 181, 189,202, 222, 228, 229, 232, 239, 241




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TB, 7, 9, 10, 11, 41, 64, 71, 72, 74, 110, 113, 114, 117, 119, 138, 140, 141, 194, 221

The End of Philosophy, 232

VA, 2, 6, 7, 15, 16, 22, 27, 31, 32, 34-36, 153, 228, 236, 238-41

WBGM, 5, 6

WCT, xxxi, 40, 42, 43, 50, 53, 54, 60, 61, 89, 98, 110, 133, 230

Wegmarken, 236, 237

What is Metaphysics?, 67, 72, 73, 232

WP, 93

WT, 43, 60, 64, 137

ZD 4, 17, 241

Henry, Pierre, 215

Heraclitus, 51, 78, 115, 141, 168, 178, 231, 233

Hermogen of Tarsis, 46, 230

Hesiod, 58, 90

hile, hilum, 231

Hitler, 151, 235

Hölderlin, Friedrich, xv, xix, 57, 71, 90, 108, 115, 122, 123, 126, 144, 146, 190, 235

"In Lovely Blue . . .," 121

"The Titans," 90

"The Vatican," 128

See also Heidegger, HD

Homer, 158, 216

Husserl, Edmund, xi, 3, 55

I

Iamblicus, 234

J

Janicaud, Dominique, 229, 240, 241,

L'Ombre de cette pensée (A Shadow over One's Thought), xxiv, xxv, 227

Jünger, Ernst, xiv, 25, 36

"Über die Linie," 91-94

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K

Kant, Immanuel, xv, 3, 54, 57, 64, 156, 173, 174, 176, 205, 235

Klee, Paul, 12

koinonia, 124

L

Lacan, Jacques, 209

Ladrière, Jean, 236

Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching, 130, 131, 134, 199, 201, 203

See also "Tao"

Lefort, Claude, 55

Leibniz, 235

M

Malraux, André, 235

Martenot, 215

Marx, Karl, Misery of Philosophy, 47-8, 167, 173, 216, 217, 230

The German Ideology, 231

Theses on Feuerbach, 172

Mattéi, Jean-François, L'Etranger et le Simulacre (On the Stranger and the Simulacrum in Plato), xv, xvii, 234

"Les modes de pensée philosophique," 228

Medievals, 29

Meister Eckhart, 167, 219

Melville, Herman, 214

Mendeleev, 180

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, 54-56, 231

Messiaen, Olivier, 215

Michaux, 177, 194

Miro, 194

Mnemosyne, 60

Monod, Jacques, 217

Morier, Henri, 45, 230

Mounin, Georges, 45, 230

Muses, 61

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N

Nazism, xiii, xxiv, 35, 202, 240

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25, 26, 29, 56, 82, 110, 115, 172, 176, 178, 184, 185, 198, 205, 218, 227

Apollo, 110

Zarathustra, 82

O

Orwell, xii

Otto, Walter F., Die Götter Griechenlands, xxi, 158, 239

P

Parmenides, 1, 42, 65, 67, 74, 98

Parthenon, 73

Pascal, Blaise, 25, 46, 230




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Page 246

Pauwels, xxx

Plato, xviii, 3, 25, 27, 29, 41, 67, 125, 126, 165, 167, 170, 177, 179, 185, 187, 218

Agathon, xv, 147

Catylus, 96, 143, 233,

Cebes, 77

Critias, xiv, 220, 241

Epinomis, 78, 124, 233

Euthyphro, 47, 50, 58

Gorgias, xix, 100, 101, 114, 123, 124, 136, 137

Laws, 70, 124

Menexenus, 50

Parmenides, 91

Phaedo, 70, 77, 79, 80, 100, 101

Phaedrus, xiv, 40, 99

Philebus, 124

Protagoras, 47

Republic, xix, 63, 78, 79, 100, 101, 138, 142, 143, 144, 233

Seventh Letter, 143

Socrates, 40, 58, 123

Sophist, 50, 87, 88, 91, 114, 118, 232

Statesman, 77, 78

Symposium, xv, xix, 136-38, 142, 143, 147

Thaetetus, 143

Timaeus, 77, 99, 100, 124, 233

Porphyry, Commentaries on Aristotle's Categories, 46, 230

De antro nympharum, 147, 235

Prigogine, Ilya, Nouvelle alliance, xxx

Proclus, Commentary on the Republic, 99, 100, 101, 233

Commentary on Timaeus, 233

Proudhon, 47

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Proust, Marcel, 214

Pythagoras, xvi, 124, 129, 130, 219, 234

R

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 180, 187

Rome, 127

Russell, Bertrand, xxi, 152, 236

S

Saint John-Perse, Vents, 186, 241

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 165

Schelling, 178, 235

Shakespeare, Henry VI, 45;

Macbeth, 45

Solzhenitsyn, 36

Spinoza, Baruch, 178

T

Tao, 118, 201, 234, 241. See also Lao Tse

Thot, 99

Thucidydes, 120

Thyestes, 78

Trakl, Georg, 235

U

Unsaid, unspeakable (Das Ungesagtes), 6, 178, 179

V

Valéry, Paul, 55

Vallier, 151

Vienna Circle, 152

Vitruve, De architectura, 126, 234

von Armin, Bettina, 233

W

Whitehead, Alfred North, xxi, 152, 236

Wisser, Richard, 170, 172, 207, 229. See also Heidegger, Interview with German Television

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xxiii, Tractatus, 23, 178

Y

yogi (Indian), 177

Z

Zermelo-Fraenkel, xxi, 152, 236

Zeus, 61, 78, 150, 220

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