Heidegger and the Place of Ethics: Being-with in the Crossing of Heidegger’s Thought 9781472546692, 9780826484970

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Abbreviations

WORKS BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER Gesamtausgabe (Frankfiirt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann) 3 4 13 15 19 20

Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929), 1991 Erlauterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung (1936-68), 1991 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1910-76), 1983 Seminare (1951-73), 1986 Platon: Sophistes (Winter Semester (WS) 1924/25), 1992 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Summer Semester (SS)

GA 24 GA 26 GA 29/30

Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie (SS 1927), 1975 Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (SS 1928), 1978 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt — Endlichkeit — Einsamkeit

GA GA GA GA GA GA GA GA GA GA GA

Hegels Phanomenologie des Geistes (WS 1930/31), 1980 Holderlins Hymnen 'Germanien' und 'Der Rhein' (WS 1934/35), 1980 Grundbegriffe (SS 1941), 1981 Holderlins Hymne 'Andenken' (WS 1941/42), 1982 Holderlins Hymne 'Der Ister' (SS 1942), 1984 Parmenides (WS 1942/43), 1982 Heraklit (SS 1943, SS 1944), 1979 Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936-8), 1989 Besinnung (1938-9), 1997 Geschichte des Seyns (1938^40), 1998 Bremer und Freiburger Vortrage (1949, 1957), 1994

GA GA GA GA GA GA

1925), 1979

(WS 1929/30), 1983 32 39 51 52 53 54 55 65 66 69 79

Other works BZ Der Begriff der Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989) DS 'Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten': Spiegel-Gesprach mit Martin Heidegger am 23 September 1966 in Der Spiegel No. 23, 31 May 1976 EM Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953) FD Die Frage Nach dem Ding (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1962) G Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1959) H Holzwege (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950) ID Identitat und Differenz (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1957)

viii N I N II SG S SZ TK US VA WHD W Z ZSD

Abbreviations Nietzsche: Enter Band (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1961) Nietzsche: Zweiter Band (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1961) Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1957) Schellings Abhandlung uber das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809) (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971) Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927, 1979) Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Gunther Neske, 1962) Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Gunther Neske, 1959) Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen: Gunther Neske, 1954) Was heijSt Denken? (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971) Wegmarken (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967) Zollikoner Seminare (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987) Zur Sache des Denkens (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969)

English translations of works by Martin Heidegger AWP 'The Age of the World Picture' {1938} in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (ed.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) BC Basic Concepts [1941} (GA 51) trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993) BDT 'Building Dwelling Thinking' {1951} in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) BPP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology {1927} (GA 24), trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982) BT Being and Time {1927}, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) CT The Concept of Time {1924}, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell 1992) CTP Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) {1936—8} (GA 65), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999) [Note: in references to Contributions to Philosophy I also cite the numbers I-VIII to refer to the parts into which the book is divided.} DL 'A Dialogue on Language' {1953^} in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) DT Discourse on Thinking {1955, 1944-5}, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freud (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1966) EC 'On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle's Physics B, I' {1939}, trans. Thomas Sheehan in William McNeill (ed.) Pathmarks, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) EG 'The Essence of Ground' {1928-9}, trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks

Abbreviations

EGT EHP EL ET FCM

FS

HCT

HI

HPS

7D IM IWM KPM L LH LP MFL N I N II N III

ix

Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (eds) (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975) Elucidations ofHolderlin's Poetry {1936-68} (GA 4), trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000) 'The Nature of Language' {1957-8} in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 'On the Essence of Truth' {1930}, trans. John Sallis, in Pathmarks Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World-Finitude-Solitude {1929-30} (GA 29/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995) Four Seminars: Le Thor 1966, 1968, 1969, Zahringen 1973, trans. Francois Raffoul and Andrew Mitchell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003) History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena {1925} (GA 20), trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985) Hblderlin's Hymn 'The Ister' {1942} (GA 53), trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996) Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit {1930—1} (GA 32), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988) Identity and Difference {1957}, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York, Evanston and London: Harper and Row, 1974) Introduction to Metaphysics {1935}, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 'Introduction to What is Metaphysics?' {1949}, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Pathmarks Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics {1929, 1973} (GA 3) trans. Richard Taft (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) 'Language' {1950} in Poetry, Language, Thought 'Letter on "Humanism"' {1946}, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and John Glenn Gray, in Pathmarks 'Language in the Poem' {1953} in On the Way To Language The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic {1928} (GA 26), trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) Nietzsche Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art {1936-7} (GA 43), trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) Nietzsche Volume 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same {1937, 1954} (GA 44), trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984) Nietzsche Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics {1939}, trans. David Farrell Krell, Joan Stambaugh and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987)

x N 7V OWA P

PLT PMD PWM PR PS QB QCT S SA

SR T Th TB W WCT WL WM WP

WPF WT

Abbreviations Nietzsche Volume 4: Nihilism, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982) 'The Origin of the Work of Art' [1935-6}, in Poetry, Language, Thought Parmenides {1942—3} (GA 54), trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) '... Poetically Man Dwells . . . ' {1951}, in Poetry, Language, Thought 'Postscript to What is Metaphysics?' {1943}, trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks The Principle of Reason {1955—6}, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991) Plato's Sophist {1924} (GA 19), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) 'On the Question of Being' {1955}, trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks 'The Question Concerning Technology' {1955} in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom {1936}, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985) 'The Self-Assertion of the German University' {1933}, trans. William S. Lewis, in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993) 'Science and Reflection' {1954}, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 'The Turning' {1949}, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 'The Thing' {1950}, in Poetry, Language, Thought On Time and Being {1969}, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) 'Words' {1958}, in On the Way to Language What is Called Thinking? {1951-2}, trans. John Glenn Gray and Fred Wieck (New York: Harper and Row, 1968) 'The Way to Language' {1959}, in On the Way to Language 'What is Metaphysics?' {1929}, trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks What is Philosophy? {195 5}, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958) {Since this is a bilingual edition, both English and German references to this work are to this edition} 'What are Poets for?' {1946}, in Poetry, Language, Thought What is a Thing? {1935-6} trans, by W. B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1967)

Abbreviations

Z

xi

Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters (1959—69/1947—71], ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askey (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001)

Many translations have been modified.

Preface Heidegger and Capitalism — Translations This book has two tasks: the first of these will be described in this Preface and has ostensibly nothing to do with being-with; the relation between this beingwith and the place of ethics in Heidegger's thought is our principal topic and will be described in the Introduction. The first and broader task, which points towards future work as yet incomplete, is the preparation of Heideggerian thought for an encounter with Marxism as the thought of capitalism. This task is carried out by reading Heidegger in such a way as to reveal an extraordinary coincidence between his own later thought and the ideological analysis of the Lacanian psychoanalytic thinker Slavoj Zizek.l The entire course of this reading is necessary if we are to render this assertion of coincidence a convincing one. In this way, the present work constitutes the first volume of a project that has three levels, each more abstract than the one before, three encounters which I hope to v stage in the near future: between Heidegger and Zizek, Heidegger and capitalism, and most fundamentally, Phenomenology and Materialism. For is it not a common criticism of phenomenology, and not simply from Marxists, that it remains an ideological discourse blind to the political and economic conditioning of the experience which it examines and is therefore quite impotent when it comes to a subversion of the global capitalist order? It is this criticism that must be probed by taking Heidegger's thought to its outermost limit, a limit at which, without the preparation carried out by this book, his work might become unrecognizable. It is to render this limit-position recognizably Heideggerian that I present the reading of Heidegger contained within the main body of this book, with regard to the role of being-with in Heidegger's ethics, which renders political a supposedly apolitical ethics of the thing. Heidegger's ignorance of the all-pervasive functioning of capital is seen to follow from his thought's inadequate relation to politics: even if one does not understand his trajectory to lead from Platonistic Nazism to apolitical retreat, whatever political thought the later Heidegger can be shown to voice is likely to be derided as a naive and ideological myth of a Volk being led to appropriate its essence, which resounds in its pure mother tongue, by the poet: Holderlin in the case of the Germans. In order to contradict this caricature, the understanding of later Heideggerian politics which this work approaches is one that takes Heideggerian deconstruction to be akin to a critique of ideology and a thought of the political body in terms of an ideological totality of power which remains unable to question the essence of this power and thus to relate to the conditions of its own genesis in the form of the singularities that inhabit it. The recovery of

Preface

xiii

being-with in Heidegger's later works is a necessary part of the preparation for this understanding. I shall return to this task in the conclusion of this work, but I have let it be known at the very beginning in order to orient the reader and to explain the intrusion of a certain amount of very basic Lacanian terminology which might otherwise strike the reader as baffling. For instance, a perplexed questioner might have asked why I describe Heidegger's 'world* as 'the symbolic order'. Because that is precisely what it is. This intrusion is intended to prepare the realization of just how close these two discourses may be brought, and thus to render a Heideggerian way of thinking more pliant to its possible relations with a thought apparently so distinct. It is also intended to make certain of Heidegger's concepts intelligible to those who remain outside the closed circle of Heideggerian terminology and thus to render Heideggerian thought accessible and perhaps even respectable to those who approach Heidegger from outside the discursive canon of 'Heideggerianism', most particularly those of a Marxist heritage. With regard to those translations which are more immanent to Heidegger's own discourse, I have in many cases altered the existing translations of Heidegger. As Karin de Boer points out,2 to begin from a Heidegger already translated, even from a fixed interpretation of the sense of the key German words of his thought, is to prejudice one's interpretation, since the very translations that one uses will express the interpretation that one is venturing, and therefore simply to adopt one of the many and various translations of Heideggerian terms already in existence is not always possible. One peril inexpertly negotiated by some translators, and one which is particularly tempting in the case of Heidegger because of his masterful use of diachronic and synchronic polysemy, is that of over-translation, by which I mean the attempt to solve the problem of reducing a polysemic word to a single signification by making explicit every one of its implicit significations. The term Ereignis is constantly subjected to such abuses. Discretion, the very matter at hand when one speaks of that 'being' which refuses to speak immediately for itself, dictates that these resonances should remain implicit. Discretion is required since the 'original' sense of a word is often not present in the 'word husk' itself — therefore absent from its dictionary 'etymology' — and so easily obscured by a derivative signification which will be the most apparent and the most immediately intelligible. To use a plurality of English words where only a single German word is employed is often to betray the combination of a single word with a multiplicity of silent resonances and the crucial historical relation of predominance between the one contemporary signification and the many other, and often older, meanings which this word contains. For this reason, there are words, particularly in Parts II and III of this work, which I have left untranslated, to allow them to stand out more clearly as technical terms of Heidegger's discourse possessed of this resonant quality and to avoid the dangers of an over-translation which would destroy the discreet echoes of the original if

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Heidegger and the Place of Ethics

there are no words in my vocabulary with similar capabilities to the German. Foremost among these words are Seyn, Ereignis, and Gestell. Another problem with certain translations is that even if an English counterpart for the German exists, this word may not retain certain connections with other words visibly present in the German. For example, in Part I, I often leave Rede and Gerede in German since the connection between them, crucial to my reading, is quite lost in the English translations of 'discourse' and 'idle talk', the latter in particular losing all of the discreet indicative qualities of the German word. If the English-speaking reader finds the amount of German within these pages to be alienating, my only response is to say that this is what Heidegger would have wanted, for us to be estranged from the self-evidence of the univocal meaning of the word which has become a mere medium of information exchange to be passed over as quickly as possible in the direction of the 'message'. This alienating experience forces us to look twice at the word, to dwell on it and on our alienation from its plurivocal possibilities that open up to us and begin to chime only with the lapse of time, a lapse in which thinking can occur. For a similar reason, Heidegger would today have insisted that his Greek be published in Greek without transliteration, refusing all concessions to such 'improvement' of a work's 'intelligibility', which is after all 'suicide for philosophy' (CTP, VIII, p. 307/GA 65, p. 435).

Introduction Being-with and the Place of Ethics In Contributions to Philosophy: Vom Ereignis, Heidegger distinguishes between the 'public title' of a work (Contributions to Philosophy) and its 'essential title' (Vom Ereignis). If it were not so presumptuous I would make the same distinction between Heidegger and the Place of Ethics and Being-with in the Crossing of Heidegger's Thought. It is not as if the public title can simply be dispensed with, since the nature of the book is expressed only in the relationship between what is most immediately visible and the possibilities that reside in the modest withdrawal of the essential, the relation between the place of ethics and beingwith. This is our topic, and the expression of this relation as it unfolds through what I shall call the 'crossing' (passage and erasure) of Heidegger's thought shall be our main task, a task preparatory to the broader task described in the Preface but none the less important in its own right. The question, then, is of ethics and its place today, a place that (as we shall see), as a result of the persistence of being-with in the thinking of being, develops a relation to politics quite different to that which may be found in Heidegger's early work, which allowed itself to be extended into a political engagement with Nazism in 1933 and 1934. Thus, we must begin with two questions: what is the place of ethics in Heidegger's thought; and of what relevance to this place is being-with? The answer to the first question is simple and quite unwavering throughout Heidegger's long trek: the place of ethics is the ontological difference. Ethics, in its most originary sense, means dwelling near to being, seeking it and responding to it. (We shall examine this later in the Introduction, with a view to deflecting its many critics.) The answer to the second question is 'everything', although this may not be obvious at first glance, particularly since being-with seems to play such a minor and quickly forgotten role in Heidegger's work as a whole. It is to correct such a misapprehension that this work sets itself, because in this way alone can Heidegger's understanding of the place of ethics properly be determined.

BEING-WITH Being-with is addressed by Heidegger in the most crucial way in Being and Time, the prime work of fundamental ontology and one governed by an understanding of being that does not in fact remain in place throughout Heidegger's work: that is the understanding of 'being' as the Sein of the ontological difference between being (Sein) and beings (Seiende). This understanding does not persist beyond the

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Heidegger and the Place of Ethics

'turn' in Heidegger's thought because there is a problem, if not a great many problems, with this understanding, as Heidegger himself came swiftly to realize. What I hope to show in Part I of this work is that it is being-with that may most strikingly bring these problems to light. The effect of this innocuous existentiale is thus to undermine fundamental ontology from within and initiate a crossingthrough of the understanding of being which governs it, a crossing-through which is at the same time a rewriting or reworking of just what 'being' means. In other words, being-with initiates the crossing of Heidegger's thought and demands that we embark on this passage which will leave behind the only apparently stable ground of the early thought of fundamental ontology. It is a signpost directing us towards the 'turn' in Heidegger's thought, a monumental upheaval in the thinking of being whose radicality and suddenness are still under-appreciated. Being-with refuses to be encompassed by the understanding of being in Heidegger's early work precisely because the 'with', as Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested, is not understood at this time to be fully co-original with being itself (Nancy 1996, p. 3). This 'with' shall be the togetherness of being and beings itself, and for this reason the existential structure of being-with demonstrates that the ontological difference fails to think the relation between being and beings and merely posits or presupposes their separateness. While this presupposition is, of course, an advance on metaphysics, which submerges being in beings, it does not go so far as to think the relation and therefore the intimacy of being and beings as Heidegger's later thought will. Here, the 'with' will occupy the very heart of Heidegger's thought as he comes to think precisely the event of the ontological difference, the splitting apart of being and beings and the way in which this event is the very process of manifestation itself, an event presupposed by every phenomenon. Heidegger's later thought is a thought of being with beings, of the very differentiation of the ontological difference which went «wthought in his early work. Part I demonstrates that being-with displays this crossing-through of Heidegger's early understanding of being by refusing to fit neatly within the twofold schema of inauthenticity and authenticity, the existential attitudes towards beings and being respectively, a dualism which the unthought positing of the ontological difference prevents from being properly understood. If the ontological difference is the place of ethics and the ontological difference is not fully thought through by Heidegger in his early work then the place of ethics must remain unfounded and require rethinking along with the rethinking of being that occurs in Heidegger's later work. If the later work enters into the way in which the difference between being and beings must differentiate itself before anything like 'a being' can manifest itself, a differentiation that differs across history, then this work answers the question of how a place for ethics might be allowed to emerge in today's technocapitalist world. The 'with' of being, the very crossing of being which marks the movement of its differentiation and the process of manifestation, the becoming-

Introduction

3

intelligible of beings to themselves, is the 'X' that marks the spot where ethics has been buried amid the welter of economic imperatives that characterize the contemporary world. Thus are being-with and the place of ethics connected at this stage in Heidegger's work, a connection traced in Part II of this work, entitled 'Crossing'. What is in question at this stage is the way in which the crossing of being is initiated. This occurs through an experience about which little in detail is said in Heidegger's later works, and that is the experience of death. The necessity of this death is what gives us hope that a being-with of human beings may still be found in later Heidegger and is not at all irrelevant to the opening of the place of ethics, despite appearances to the contrary. This is crucial to demonstrate since Heidegger's later ethics (the only ethics we may settle upon) is almost unanimously considered to lack a place for what Levinas calls I'Autrui and to focus its attention solely on tending to the 'thing' or the singular being in its singularity and this in turn is taken to render his (a)political thought dangerously unconcerned with human plurality, as Arendt was perhaps the first to suggest. Indeed, the thing is Heidegger's focus and ethics in later Heidegger is precisely an 'ethics of the thing', but the place of death in the origination of this ethics allows us to demonstrate in Part III that a certain human plurality or being-with must be a part of this origination and will need to be understood if the place of ethics, in its relation to politics, is properly to be determined. This understanding of the relation between ethics and politics, necessitated by the presence of a being-with of mortals in the crossing of being as the origination of the place of ethics, is described in Part III. Thus, Part I deals with the way in which being-with undermines the understanding of being that takes it to be one hah0 of the ontological difference and therefore necessitates the crossing out of this thinking of being (Sein). This crossing out is not a mere erasure but marks the fact that the difference between being and beings needs to be thought of as the movement that issues from a certain withdrawing centre (the crux of 'the matter') or, in other words, in its origination, an origination that Heidegger names with an older word for 'being': Seyn. Seyn is precisely the de/cision or rift between being and beings and is thus the place at which the two are intimate with one another. This rift takes place along the lines of the 'fourfold' (Gevieri) and is the cleaving which Heidegger names Ereignis, the event that exchanges being for beings as a whole and thus allows beings to present themselves in a certain way: the event of differentiation is thus the event of manifestation. That being (Sein) which is not a being should be thought of as a void or abyss within beings and thus as producing certain 'effects' within beings as a whole. The abyss of being is 'represented' within beings as a whole in the form of the singular being, a being which therefore exists as a stretch between beings as a whole and being itself and which Heidegger names 'the thing'. Seyn as the origin

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Heidegger and the Place of Ethics

of the split between being and beings may therefore be identified with this 'thing'. If the topic of Part I of this work is Sein, the topic of Part II is Seyn or its essence, the 'event' (Ereignis). Part I addresses the ontological difference as the place of ethics but finds this place to be ungrounded, unthought in its genesis, and thus unable to incorporate the 'with' of being-with. Part II, understanding Seyn in a historical way, thinks the genesis of the place of ethics and thus demonstrates (the need for) a place for ethics in light of today's anethical nihilism. The crossing of being initiated by being-with is here demonstrated to be what Heidegger names the 'fourfold', which describes the way in which the humble 'thing' gathers and organizes the entire world of which it is a part. Thus, if the place of ethics is the ontological difference then this place is centred upon the thing and amounts to an ethics of the thing. But this cannot be the end of the journey into ethics. For in a rethinking of being there must come a rethinking of the way in which grounding occurs, and Heidegger will insist that a ground cannot be a substantial foundation or ultimate fact requiring no explanation or reason beyond itself. Rather, every essence upholds and is upheld by a counter-essence or counter-part by which it defines itself and in a differentiation from which it receives its nature. To explain the essence of a thing in terms of the thing itself is ultimately non-explanatory and merely invites a regress that either continues indefinitely or eventually finds a substantial ground. The counter-essence of Ereignis, the manifestation of beings as a whole as they are at this point in history, is known as Gestell, the figuration that being assumes today as the call for its own occlusion in the form of the absolute predominance of the actual. Technology is the way in which this predominance of actuality can be achieved, since it allows us to fabricate and reproduce everything that is, which means to make everything actual and to blind ourselves to the fact that there is something which we cannot make. This counter-essence of being is the topic of Part III and the place in which Heidegger situates politics, which will thus be understood to be the counteressence of ethics. Here, in order to demonstrate the necessity and the nature of politics in Heidegger's later thought, we shall need to demonstrate the necessity of a being-with of mortals (human beings), a rethinking of the being-with of Part I in light of the rethinking of being undertaken in Part II. We shall show that the ethics of the thing is always situated within a certain political site by relating the 'mortals' to their counter-essence, which will relate this being-with to the thing that organizes the totality of beings in which it partakes. Beingwith becomes political when it is related (as it always shall be) to a particular historical totality. This totality is at this point in history manifest according to the dictates of Gestell, the essence of technology. This essence and the absolute preponderance of beings which it ordains mean that today politics governs the globe with a totality equal to that of technology. This leads Heidegger to assert that polities' realm is that of beings as a whole, and ethics, its essential counteressence, is that dwelling within the political whole which resists the totalizing

Introduction

5

determination of politics and responds to being as that space in which singularity can occur and thus subvert the totality. The two chapters of Part III, on being-with and politics, indicate the necessity of insisting upon the relevance of being-with to the place of ethics if this ethics' relation to politics is to be understood. For Heidegger, essence and counteressence always turn around a certain midpoint which is rent apart and thus opened to the light of manifestation by the splitting apart of the contraries. In Heidegger's thought, this fragile and always endangered midpoint at the heart of the relation between ethics and politics is the thing. Thus the fateful decision is made to assign ethics to being and politics to being's obliviation. In conclusion we shall ask whether this need be and indeed was Heidegger's last word on politics, a question that will lead us towards Zizek and a politics of being as the Real. We shall question the very balance of essence and counter-essence, which Heidegger at one point posits as the mutually needful relation of ethics and politics, the very allotment of roles to ethics and politics which appears to leave Heidegger very little to say about concrete political situations and events. Thus Part I concerns Sein, Part II Ereignis, and Part III its counter-essence, Gestell, the place at which the question of the relation between ethics and politics may be broached.

THE PLACE OF ETHICS Why is the place of ethics said to be the ontological difference? Heidegger gives voice to this thought throughout his oeuvre but for the sake of brevity let us mention just two instances, one from his 1928 lecture course, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (GA 26) and the other from the 'Letter on "Humanism"' to Jean Beaufret in 1946: {W}e need a special problematic which has for its proper theme beings as a whole. This new investigation resides in the essence of ontology itself and is the result of its turn-over (Umschlag), its metabole. I designate this set of questions metontology. And here also, in the domain of metontologicalexistential questioning, is the domain of the metaphysics of existence (here the question of an ethics may properly be raised for the first time). (MFL, p. 157/GA 26, p. 199) If the name 'ethics', in keeping with the basic meaning of the word ethos, should now say that ethics ponders the abode (Aufenthali) of the human being, then that thinking which thinks the truth of being as the primordial element (anfangliche Element) of the human being, as one who exists, is in itself originary ethics (urspriingliche Ethik). (LH, p. 271/W, p. 187)

6

Heidegger and the Place of Ethics

Thus we find the stage set: the place of ethics is the ontological difference in which being comes to light and thus relates to beings as a whole as their intelligibility, and the thinking of being that Heidegger undertakes and that dwells on being may therefore be identified with 'ethics'. Why should we follow Heidegger in his assertion that the place of ethics is the ontological difference? To answer this question is to delineate the reasons why Heidegger is so important for ethics as a discipline and why it is necessary to consider his work when attempting to understand what ethics means. We should follow Heidegger because every determination of the nature of ethics (in the sense of an imperative regarding how we should behave) has throughout the history of philosophy rested upon a foundation which it remains unable to think. It has thus been, in a certain way, ungrounded. Heidegger, in his deconstruction of the history of philosophy, may thus be understood to provide the ground for this ethics. His thought is a demonstration of the conditions which must already have been in place and which must have stayed outside the view of ethical thinkers in order for them to take up a position with regard to what ethics is. 'Originary ethics', then, is that which must be in place already in order for 'ethics' as we normally understand it to be described. Without thinking this originary ethics, any determination of the nature of ethics will remain an unfounded assertion. The place of this originary ethics, which must be in place for ethics to be possible, is the ontological difference. It is the necessity of one being amongst the totality of beings stretching outwards beyond this totality and reaching for being. It is this precondition and place of all ethics, necessarily unthought by those thinkers who posit theses on the nature of ethics, which Heidegger believes to be hinted at in the original word for 'ethics', the Greek ethos. Heidegger reads this at one stage in his work as deriving from the older Greek word ethos1 meaning 'dwelling'. 'Dwelling' in Heidegger's thought refers to a relation with being as that which allows beings as a whole to become intelligible to themselves due to a clearing or void place within the whole into which the light of understanding may shine and the whole begin to reflect on itself. It is precisely this 'being' or this 'clearing' which of necessity goes unthought in the history of philosophy (understood as a series of metaphysical positions that posit names for beings as a whole in the sense of naming what it means to be a being, what a being is 'as such'). As Heidegger continually points out, if one is to take up a position then one must first of all have a place in which to stand. Any enunciated statement requires a place from which to enunciate. Given that the statement attempts to determine beings as a whole and without exception, it is constitutively unable to take account of its own placement within this whole, its historical situatedness or 'thrownness', the very givenness of the whole, which constitutes an exception to its determination of this whole by providing something that cannot be understood from within this 'position*. Metaphysics cannot understand the inherence to the whole of perspectival presentation, otherwise it would fall apart. It is precisely this historical givenness of beings

Introduction

1

that Heidegger attempts to think with the word 'being'. It is 'being', or man's relation to 'being', that is the unfathomed ground of any statement made in the history of philosophy about the nature of ethics. For this reason, the thinking of being is a thinking of the place rather than the nature of ethics, a place to which these statements must remain blind. And it is for this reason, Heidegger's own extraordinary ability to see where metaphysics is blind, to see in the dark, that it is necessary to turn to Heidegger when asking the question of ethics. We may conclude that the place of ethics, from which all of its various historical natures come to be spoken, is the ontological difference. For Heidegger, therefore, what explains the different determinations of ethics across history is the differing relation between being and beings that determines the ages of this history. Today, in an age that Heidegger would understand to be characterized by the complete withdrawal of being and the complementary predominance of the actual, beings as a whole, entirely at the mercy of technology, ethics in any substantial sense must be understood to be absent, submerged in nihilism, subordinated rather to economics and the calculation of efficiency and maximal productivity. The absence of ethics today and the consequent need of a place for ethics amidst the false positivity of nihilism is our starting point. The occlusion of ethics does not indicate the need to posit a new nature for ethics which might be appropriate to the age of technology, an ethics of ..., but rather to think the very conditions of possibility for ethics' having a place in this technological actuality. And this is what Heidegger allows us to think and why it is necessary to turn to Heidegger if we are to think ethics today.

HEIDEGGER'S CRITICS An explanation of just what being means for later Heidegger, along with our explication of the nature of ethics and politics in light of this 'being', allows us to defuse many of the criticisms directed at Heidegger's understanding of both ethics and politics. We shall briefly enumerate those which may most directly be answered by the following exposition, although these and others will often be treated with a tactful silence, allowing Heidegger's words to unfold freely to their full breadth, a breadth that of itself often effortlessly surpasses and stifles the indignant cries of denigration and ridicule which it so frequently inspires. A brief acquaintance with the main targets of my reading of Heidegger should provide the reader with some preliminary orientation as they prepare to enter into the present work. Let us begin with Levinas. Levinas's critical response to Heidegger is to deny the equiprimordiality of being and ethics and to place a certain form of 'ethics' before ontology as its occluded precondition, understanding this ethics as a relation to otherness instantiated first and foremost in the relation to the other human being which Levinas finds to be absent from Heidegger's thought. My entire reading of

8

Heidegger and the Place of Ethics

Heidegger has been governed by a need to respond to Levinas's criticism, and this reading has allowed me to indicate a possible Heideggerian response to almost every feature of Levinas's criticism. Levinas's criticism of Heidegger's supposed 'prioritizing' of ontology is first of all stirred precisely by its subordination of the relation between self and other to a relation that is named 'being-with' and which by invoking 'being' neutralizes the asymmetry of a relation that can be accessed only from within that relation itself. Any view from outside, which means any view that encompasses this relation within a wider horizon, betrays the relation. The very widest horizon within which to encompass a being is that of 'being' itself and thus 'being' is precisely what prevents us from accessing the singularity of a being. This ontological view comes after the ethical relation between self and other when a third person has come upon the scene to view the two from outside and is forced, in addition to his ethical relation to each, to calculate his duties to both in comparison with each other, which means to situate the face-to-face relation within a horizon and at least partially to reduce its infinity to calculable proportions. But is being, in later Heidegger, a horizon that prevents us from relating to beings in their uniqueness? In fact, as Heidegger puts it most succinctly: 'being ... essentially prevails as what is singular (das Seyn ... west ah jenes Einzige)' (CTP, VIII, p. 302/GA 65, p. 429 - my emphasis). Being is the uniqueness of a being and this is precisely what Levinas means by 'otherness', the singularity of an entity before and beyond any wider horizon of meaning which might subsume it and render it comprehensible. And as this work hopes to show, the relation between human beings in the form of a face to face in which death and the god are present is, in Heidegger's own work, a necessary condition of being itself. As well as answering Levinas's criticisms of Heidegger's stance on ethics, this work was originally designed as a response to Arendt's implicit criticisms of Heidegger's stance on politics. If, as I hope to show, being is ultimately the thing itself, a being within the whole that spans the between of being and beings, then we shall perhaps be in a position to oppose the Arendtian criticism. Following Aristotle's understanding of the necessity ofdoxa to the political space, the space of praxis or the deeds and things which are scrutinized beneath the plural and incomplete gaze of the public in the agora, Arendt and her disciple Jacques Taminiaux have accused Heidegger's politics of 'Platonism' in the sense that it subordinates this doxa and the phrenetic sight of praxis to the theoretical. This amounts to the subordination of praxis to poiesis5 and phronesis to tecbne, the latter being the place from which Heidegger understands politics, along the lines of technology and its essence, Gestell. Heidegger is thus said to elide the human plurality and contingency inherent in the political space as he is by the Derridean understanding of politics as a necessarily pragmatic set of decisions with regard to contingent matters, which will inevitably fail to live up to the ethical imperative by which we are called.

Introduction

9

But our reading of the later Heidegger's politics shall show not only that a plurality of human beings is a condition of this space, but also the necessity of contingency in the guise of the thing that represents being in the space of beings as a whole, thereby engendering a 'short circuit' between ethics and politics in which we shall see that politics can perhaps live up to the ethical imperative of 'otherness'. To anticipate, the thing in later Heidegger amounts to a place-holder within beings as a whole that represents the nothing of being itself, distinguished as it is so utterly from beings. This thing is the very heart of politics since it organizes the totality over which politics governs, and crucially, the thing is constantly susceptible to change and therefore the form it will take cannot be predicted in advance: rather, an examination of the nature of the particular totality in which one finds oneself is necessary beforehand. In other words, which being is to become a 'thing' at any point is contingent, and our ethical and political attitudes must respond to this contingency. This thing is then precisely to pragma, the object of praxis rather than theoria, the way in which to comport towards it decided not by theory but by prudence (phronesis), a vision that judges each situation on its merits, without any a priori prejudgement. Thus in no way is phronesis either eclipsed in the political space or understood in a way that subordinates doxa to a more theoretical-ontological understanding, nor is politics placed on a 'lower' level than ethics in Heidegger's thought. It is indeed a matter of necessity that there should be a void in the totality, being (Seiri) within beings as a whole, but which being shall come to represent this void is a purely contingent matter. Heidegger's entire thought is in some sense an attempt to understand doxa or perspectivality as original to beings as a whole, a doxa that metaphysics, even Aristotle's, will not have assigned its true place. This thought takes Heidegger from the problematic of the facticity of each human's grasp on the whole to the thought of Ereignis as the very giving of the given (beings), a thought of the way in which situatedness works, how a position of enunciation is inherent to and elided by any enunciated statement. Let us go so far as to say that being is perspectivality, the way in which man's position on the whole is always included in the whole itself as described in the event of the appropriation (Er-eignis) of being and man. What is singularity if not perspectivality? The question we shall ask finally is whether it is right to say that Heidegger deems politics and technology to exclude precisely such perspectival differences and to concern only the totality as totality while ethics insists on perspectivality of all kinds. This is a thesis which we shall go along with to the very end, and here we shall see it to be troubled. So many of Heidegger's more scathing critics fail to realize the extent of the transformation that takes place in Heidegger's transition to his later work. This ignorance is the cause of much needless secondary literature but necessitates corrective work nonetheless in the form of an explication of the later work, which is often not fully understood by even its best commentators, particularly

10

Heidegger and the Place of Ethics

with regard to the political possibilities which we may be allowed to examine now that accounts have been more or less settled with regard to 'the Heidegger affair'. Those mistaken critics who are among the targets of my own reading are treated with silence if they do not operate on Heidegger's level, for I think it can be said that a prerequisite for understanding Heidegger is to give him the credit that he is a great thinker and that as a consequence his works require much more than a passing acquaintance or partial glance if they are properly to be engaged with. And this engagement is inevitable.

Chapter One

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

INTRODUCTION The notion of 'being-with' is described primarily in Heidegger's 1927 masterpiece, Being and Time. It is one of the 'existentiales' or necessary structures of Dasein's existence. The sole reason for Heidegger's describing the structure of existence is in order to understand the meaning of what is called being, which means that the analysis of Dasein's existence is carried out not for its own sake but for that of 'fundamental ontology'. Therefore, before we can examine the way in which being-with relates to the ontological difference as the place of ethics, we must be clear on precisely what 'fundamental ontology' is, and Dasein's place in relation to this task. Let us begin with the deceptively simple question: what is Dasein? It is man, but man understood in a very particular way, which is insofar as h understands being. This means that Dasein is the site at which being can manifest itself as the light of man's understanding. What does this mean? The reason for Dasein's being confined to man, which gives him his unique place in the totality of beings, is that each man has the possibility of relating to his own singularity, a uniqueness given to him by his own birth and death, which confine him to a single stretch that will never come again. We are finite and as a result potentially reflexive, riveted to our own being, turned back on ourselves in the flex of selfhood by the limits of death and birth. Since man is a part of beings as a whole, we may think of this finitude as a moment of negativity within beings as a whole, a moment that stimulates this whole to turn back on itself in the form of man's selfhood. This will amount to beings as a whole becoming apparent to themselves from a certain point and at a certain moment within this whole. The reflexive loop of man's selfhood is precisely Dasein. Dasein is the name for man's selfhood insofar as this loop circumscribes a clearing that being can illuminate. It is perfectly possible to live out one's entire life as a man without assuming this selfhood, to remain absorbed in the undifferentiated mass of beings. But without this moment of negativity within beings as a whole, there would be no 'self consciousness' on the part of

14

Being-with

beings: in other words there would be no such thing as 'being' (Sein). Being is at this stage understood by Heidegger to be the finite and thus perspectival openness of the whole to itself, its own horizonally limited intelligibility or selflightedness. And this openness occurs only to man, as the one who not only is born and dies but who has the possibility of comporting himself towards this birth and this death. This comportment is the reflexivity of selfhood. Man's selfhood, Dasein, is thus the point at which beings as a whole are lit up for themselves. This intelligibility, which depends upon a void occurring within the whole, is precisely 'being'. Being is thus quite inseparable from Dasein as the temporary and finite site of beings' intelligibility. Bluntly put, in early Heidegger, being is nothing beside the Da, the clearing (Lichtung) of the intelligibility of beings, which erupts in the Western tradition in a moment of wonder that beings should be at all. The wonder of the Greeks was amazement before the fact that beings as a whole should have 'opened' to us. And this of course is not some decision on the part of beings as a whole, but depends entirely on the arising of that wondrous entity, man. Being is founded upon man. Dasein is the selfhood of man. Selfhood is reflexivity. Reflexivity depends on finitude, which is guaranteed by our unique birth and death. The process of the formation of Dasein will be the concern of this chapter. Why? Because this will not only make clear Dasein's often forgotten dependence on birth, but also demonstrate the necessity of the actuality of birth and death. For there are two common prejudices with regard to Dasein's formation: one is that death is primarily important and the other is that this death is not the actual fact of death but the approach of an individual Dasein to this death as a possibility in the way of the existential motion of being-towards-death. This leads commentators to read Being and Time as a treatise on authenticity or the way in which Dasein leaves a state of inauthenticity and achieves authenticity by facing its own death, alone. If we are careful to understand Dasein in the sense I have outlined, as the reflexive self of man, which is the one site at which being can 'be', then we shall see that this reading cannot be correct. What is necessary for this reflexive movement even to be understood is an acknowledgement that birth and death are equally crucial to Dasein, and, more controversially, that this birth and this death are not operative in the formation of Dasein solely in the existential form of be'mg-towards-bitth and beitig-towards-death, but the unintelligible facts of man's birth and death must also be taken into account. The fact that Heidegger himself did not do so may be attributed to his understanding of being at the time, which confines it to Dasein's understanding of being (Seinsverstandnis) and thus to the site of his existence, as we shall see. This amounts to saying that Dasein is not an entity that can move from an inauthentic to an authentic state, but a process, the tearing open of a rent in the continuum of beings as a whole. Too often Dasein is misunderstood as a state, indeed as an entity, an individual man, while in fact it is the very process of individuation itself — the formation of an individual self-relating entity — and one which is always incomplete because Dasein is never exclusively being-

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

15

towards-death. If there were such a thing as an authentic Dasein then it would no longer be Dasein, for Dasein exists as the process which stretches between the authentic and the inauthentic, pulled towards its own death but also pulled in the other direction, towards a birth which is common to everyone and which amounts to our factual arrival in a particular world. Without these two vectors tugging at one another the tearing that is Dasein would not occur. Every tearing requires two contradictory vectors. Utterly inauthentic Dasein would not be Dasein, and nor would utterly authentic Dasein, since this entity would be dead. There is no such thing as authentic Dasein. Dasein is the process that relates and stretches apart the inauthentic and the authentic between birth and death. For this reason, being-towards-£/>ft& must equally be stressed. If Dasein is a process which does not always take place then there must be some explanation for why it begins, why it is that there exists this point within beings as a whole where being is allowed to enter and the whole to become intelligible to itself. Intelligibility presupposes meaning (Sinn) as 'that upon which something is projected' or 'that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself (BT, p. 193/5"Z, p. 151), and since meaning has this function of underlying, Heidegger can say that 'a "ground" becomes accessible only as meaning' (BT, p. 194/5Z, p. 152). We have already said that the explanation of why being should 'be' at all is to be found in the fact that there is an entity which relates reflexively to its own birth and death. Thus Heidegger can say that the ground of intelligibility is death: 'Authentic being-towards-death, which is to say ... the finitude of temporality (Endlichkeit der Zeitlichkeit), is the concealed ground (verborgene Grund) of the historically of Dasein (BT, p. 438/SZ, p. 386). Being is founded upon finitude, and in early Heidegger this finitude is always a certain entity's belonging, and that is the individual man. This is what Heidegger means when he tells us that the meaning of being is 'temporality' (Zeitlichkeii), and why I would prefer to translate 'Zeitlichkeit' with 'temporariness' or 'temporaeity'. It means that being is founded upon the presence within beings as a whole of a being which has only a temporary span. Once one knows about death one knows that one has but a single life to lead and thus the reflexive relation to the facts of birth and death introduces a site of singularity into beings as a whole: this singularity is precisely what being needs in order to show itself. And why? Because the whole can never be illuminated in its entirety since we are not a divinity who would remain without situation within the whole, but dwell temporally and spatially at a certain point within the whole, and for this reason intelligibility is always partial or horizonal. If it is horizonal then it must depend upon a certain distinguished site within the whole that would act as the orientating centre of this horizon. In other words, being depends upon the singularity of finite human being. Being is the horizonal intelligibility of beings as a whole or the world of the human being: in this way is being founded upon man.

16

Being-with

The finitude of man is donated to him by the brute facts of birth and death. These are precisely not the existential responses that man makes in relating to these brute facts by 'being-towards' birth and 'being-towards' death. It is with these responses that Dasein first emerges as the stretch between authenticity and inauthenticity, as the openness of the whole to itself. No, what we are speaking of is the blunt fact that birth and death happen to us, whether we respond to them or not. We are not yet speaking of Dasein, since Dasein is a process that need not form, but birth and death are facts whether we respond to them or not. What is crucial to our reading is thus the distinction, rarely made, between two forms of birth and two forms of death. One form is the actual fact and belongs to man, while the other is the existential response or relation to this fact and amounts to the process of individuation called Dasein. Each of us can and should die twice: once as man, and once as Dasein. It is only when man comports himself explicitly towards the facts of birth and death that he acquires a 'self. This self is called Dasein and the two existential responses which go to make up the very being of Dasein are called its 'inauthenticity' (Uneigentlichkeit) and its 'authenticity' (Eigentlichkeif) respectively. If Dasein cannot fully be explained without taking into account not only the existential response to the facts of birth and death but also the facts themselves, then in order to explain what is called Dasein and thus answer the question of being we shall need to read Being and Time not by forcing it to conform to a twopart interpretative schema comprised of inauthenticity and authenticity, with authenticity as the state in which being would be revealed and our question answered, but by forcing it (perhaps equally violently) into a/0#r-part schema, which would take account of the two forms of birth and death. Why is this reading important? Because it allows us to demonstrate the elements of Being and Time and fundamental ontology which are still, in Heidegger's later language, 'metaphysical'. In the way in which Heidegger makes claims that cannot be fitted into our four-part schema, Being and Time can be shown to remain founded upon certain unquestioned presuppositions which are metaphysical, and it can be revealed just what these presuppositions are. The presuppositions upon which the edifice of fundamental ontology is founded are the finitude of man and, more basically, the ontological difference itself. It is in Heidegger's own later works that these early prejudices will be acknowledged and countered. Thus, the four-part schema will lead us towards the necessity of this later work. Therefore, the four-part schema is necessary if we are to uncover precisely what is wrong with Being and Time and demonstrate the necessity of questioning its foundations and moving on to the later work in which Heidegger himself initiates this very questioning in the form of an investigation of the origin of the ontological difference, the particular way of understanding being upon which fundamental ontology rests. And what has being-with to do with this novel way of reading Being and Time? Quite simply, it is the element that above all refuses to fit into the two-part schema of authenticity and inauthenticity. Its very presence as an essential

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

17

component of Dasein's existence indicates this schema to be unworkable. Ultimately the understanding of being as one pole of the ontological difference leaves unexplained precisely the 'with' of being and beings itself. Normally, these structures of Dasein's being are described by Heidegger as having an inauthentic form and an authentic form, giving immense weight to the two-part reading which understands Being and Time to be a description of the way in which Dasein is generally submerged in anonymous inauthenticity and yet has the possibility, should it heroically face death, of becoming authentic, of winning its individuality and breaking free of the undifferentiated masses. But being-with is unique in not falling neatly into this division. The so-called 'authentic' form of being-with is marked by Heidegger with the word 'conscience' and thereby with the word 'friendship'. I shall demonstrate that this very description proves that Dasein is not an entity that exists in either an inauthentic or an authentic state, one to the exclusion of the other, but is rather a tearing process of individuation whose contradictory and complementary vectors may be designated as 'inauthentic' and 'authentic' and whose very stretching may be said to constitute 'existence' as 'standing-out' or, better, 'stretching-out' (ex-sistentia, ek-histemi). What these two vectors stretch towards are the actual facts of birth and death, which the stretching itself (Dasein) never achieves. The inauthentic vector slopes towards birth, which we shall describe as a state of 'indifference' or 'undifferentiatedness', while the authentic vector slopes towards death, which we shall describe as the 'ownmost' or 'most own'. It is through the relation between these four parts that 'Dasein' may be explained and the metaphysical presuppositions of Being and Time exposed. Let us now begin our reading by examining the way in which being-with has been interpreted in the past and how it should be read, ultimately - in its supposedly 'authentic' form — against Heidegger himself, and in such a way as to lead us to the crossing of the ontological difference itself. It is insofar as Heidegger does not fully think the togetherness of the two halves of this difference and posits thereby the absolute separateness of being that his work remains Platonistic in failing to think the chora or chorismos of Timaeus and in dreaming of the possibility of a theoretic access to a being (Seiri) untainted by iconic mimesis in beings. The ontological difference is precisely what comes to be questioned in Heidegger's later works, the ontological difference which Heidegger from the first designated as the place of ethics. If this ontological difference is rethought, then the place of ethics must also be rethought, and it is the innocuous existentiale of being-with that demonstrates this rethinking to be necessary.

INTERPRETATIONS OF BEING-WITH Let us now examine being-with as it has been read in the context of the two-part schema of inauthenticity and authenticity, in order to demonstrate the way in

18

Being-with

which the existentiale refuses to fit into this schema and thereby demonstrates it to be inadequate. We shall then demonstrate the way in which it ultimately comes to undermine the ontological difference itself which is incapable of allowing a 'with' that would be inherent to being itself. Most early understandings of being-with, particularly of the existentialist variety,2 understood it to be a feature only of Dasein's inauthentic state and to be left behind by authentic Dasein, which was thought heroically to face death, a matter in which we were supposed to be quite alone. This understanding of inauthentic being-with interprets it in fact as a present-at-hand 'intersubjectivity' or plurality of actual individuals, which simply does not exist when Dasein is understood in a way proper to it, on the basis of its incalculably timed death, in the face of which it is 'on its own'. The account of being-with is then taken to be little more than a placatory appendix to a description of what is ultimately a solipsistic ego or evidence that Heidegger fails to think the plurality inherent to Dasein.5 Naturally, this form of being-with is understood to have no 'authentic' partner since it involves understanding Dasein's being in a fallen or present-at-hand way, and fallenness, in the threefold characterization of Dasein's being, does not have a correlate. Dasein's being is composed of three vectors, which correspond to past, future, and present: thrownness (Geworfenheii), projection (Entwurf), and fallenness (yerfallenheit). These three vectors, which belong together on the basis of the way in which the three dimensions of time relate to one another, when taken together compose the loop of Dasein's self. Throw (Past)

Fall (Present) Figure 1.

Project (Future)

The threefold structure of Dasein's self

To understand inauthentic being-with as intersubjectivity is thus to understand it in a fallen manner as is the way of metaphysics which understands being solely as presence (Anwesenheit), presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), or actuality (Wirklichkeii), the mere fact of 'subsistence': 'a kind of being which is present-at-hand (namely ... subsistence \Bestanct\y (BT, p. 195/SZ, p. 153). This is to understand Dasein purely ontically, without care for the distinctive ontological status of Dasein in particular, which is to say, Dasein's being

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

19

ontological as the site of being's manifestation. It does not understand the full ontological — ramifications of Dasein's having the reflexive form of 'care' (Sorge). This is not inauthentic being-with. The second understanding of being-with aims as near to the mark as Heidegger will allow and realizes that the 'inauthentic' of the first form of being-with refers not to fallenness but to the vector of thrownness, or being-towards-birth, towards beings. If fallenness does not have a single partner, thrownness, on the other hand, does and indeed cannot exist without it. Its correlate is the projection of Dasein's understanding and these two vectors amount to Dasein's 'inauthenticity' and 'authenticity'. Thus, if being-with has an inauthentic form then there must also be an authentic form, and both of these forms will be possibilities of Dasein's peculiar way of being. The second reading improves on the first in terms of its understanding of the nature of inauthenticity and authenticity as the pair of thrownness and projection. Once inauthentic being-with is understood in terms of thrownness rather than fallenness, the way is open for the positing of an authentic form as the correlate of projection. In order to reach this authentic form we must first understand the inauthentic. How is the inauthentic form of being-with understood on this second reading? We can reach this understanding only by examining the two principal components of the common world of the ready-to-hand, the 'withworld' of significance (BT, p. 155/5Z, p. 118), since it is into this world that inauthentic Dasein is constantly thrown.

THE WORLD The two components of the world are the 'in-order-to' (Um-zu) and the 'for-thesake-of-which' (Worumwilleri) and inauthentic being-with is commonly understood along the lines of the former, instrumentality, in which the other man would presumably be treated as an instrument ready-to-hand whom other Daseins would turn towards the ends of their own wills. The authentic form of being-with taken to complement this instrumentalism is then understood to be the Kantian treatment of the other as an 'end in himself 7 The transition from inauthentic to authentic being-with is thus taken to be the shift from in-orderto to for-the-sake-of-which. What is wrong with this understanding is how much it grants to Heidegger, and that is the strict separation of the authentic and the inauthentic; inauthentic instrumentalism and authentic Kantianism. There is no exclusively inauthentic state of Dasein, any more than there is an exclusively authentic one, for Dasein is being-/»-the-world, and world is quite clearly both of the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of-which. Dasein's being will never be reducible to the status of the ready-to-hand or 'in-order-to', but neither will it ever exist exclusively as a 'finality' or 'for-the-sake-of-which', since it will always remain enmeshed in the symbolic order which is characterized by

20

Being-with

differential relations of significance and chains of instrumentality: 'With equal originarity the understanding projects Dasein's being both upon its for-the-sakeof-which and upon significance, as the worldhood of its current world' (BT, p. 185/SZ, p. 145). In thrownness, Dasein's projection of possibilities is thrown back onto significance as 'the structure of the world' (BT, p. 120/SZ, p. 87). This cannot mean that Dasein is understood as a tool turned to the ends of others but rather that it is involved in the world as a Dasein but in a way that submits to the differential relations of significance; and this can mean only that it is understood as the occupant of an anonymous place in the symbolic order. They will indeed be Dasein and therefore 'for-the-sake-of-which', but it will occupy a place that anyone could take and that is therefore bound up in a common scheme of significations. Thus, with regard to the others within this scheme: 'They are encountered from out of the world in which concernfully circumspective Dasein essentially dwells (in der das besorgend-umsichtige Dasein sich wesenhaft aufhalt)' (BT, p. 155/.SZ, p. 199); which amounts to saying that they are their place in the symbolic world, 'they are what they do (betreiberi)' (BT, p. 163/SZ, p. 126). The instrumentalist or ready-to-hand understanding of inauthentic beingwith is not Heidegger's. This being-with shall encompass the whole of significance and not just its ready-to-hand component. How could Dasein exist without being part of a world in which it is caught up in relations of differentiality? The symbolic world's differential structure is precisely one of instrumentality: everyone has their place in this apparently purposeful structure. If Dasein did not project itself on this detour through the common, if projection were not always thrown in this way then there would be no reflexive loop to form Dasein's self. In other words, there would be no self and therefore no 'Dasein' at all. Heidegger habitually expresses the motion of reflexing with the phrase urn gehen, and more specifically um es selbst gehen, being an issue for oneself: 'that the for-the-sake-of-which and significance are both disclosed in Dasein, means that Dasein is that entity which, as being-in-the-world, is an issue for itself (um es selbst geht)' (BT, p. 182/SZ, p. 143). Let us be clear: the tendency of authenticity may be identified with the forthe-sake-of-which, and inauthenticity may be identified with the in-order-to, both together comprising the structure of the significant world. Neither part of significance makes sense without the other: the whole world could not form a whole without some common element which all significations could ultimately turn towards. There is no authenticity without inauthenticity, and vice versa. Inauthentic being-with (which in fact may no longer be so named) is therefore not a temporary state in which Dasein is treated as a ready-to-hand 'tool', for he is always this, just as he is always somewhat in excess of instrumentality. The understanding's projection of Dasein-like possibilities is always diverted into the common world of significance, but Dasein cannot become anything other than Dasein.

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21

Have we not reached an impasse with the understandings of being-with that attempt to distribute it between inauthenticity and authenticity? Beyond the very first and most naive readings of being-with, which saw it to be restricted wholly to the inauthentic — since 'authentic Dasein' was an utterly isolated being in the throes of an unshareable death — we must correct those more recent and faithful interpretations that do recognize the presence of an authentic form in opposition to such readings. Why? Because even these readings mis-recognise the inauthentic form and therefore fail to understand the authentic form and its relationship with the inauthentic. Hence it will be necessary properly to articulate the first form of being-with (which is not 'inauthentic' but rather requires the title of 'indifferent') in order to move on to the problematic nature of the second (to which we must refuse the title 'authentic'). The first misunderstanding that must be cleared up with regard to the first reading, and which is perhaps caused by the great deal of time which Heidegger spends explicating this notion, is that the 'inauthentic' form of being-with is in fact the being-with that is described by the famous noun, das Man. The most profound problem with both readings of being-with is that they allow Heidegger too much. More specifically, they allow him the dichotomy of inauthenticity and authenticity and do not see the dependence of this dichotomy on something exterior to it; and they are prevented from doing so by the deepest and most unquestioned presupposition of their reading and of Heidegger's own early work, the ontological difference. There is clearly an extremely important difference between the absorbed status of everyday Dasein and Dasein in its 'proper' state, but it is crucial to understand that the fault-line of this difference does not run between inauthenticity and authenticity but rather between /»difference and difference, between a state that does not recognize its own absorption and a state that does, thereby — as far as possible — escaping it. 'Dasein' is the process of the differentiation of this indifference, an individuation of man that remains always incomplete and therefore trapped between the authentic and the inauthentic and always threatened by a re-immersion in the indifferent. What matters is to see that the distinction of crucial importance is not that which separates an inauthentic from an authentic state, but that which separates an absorbed state of indifference (which can exist alone) and a compound structure of inauthenticity and authenticity combined as two vectors of a single process, the process of Dasein as the selfhood of man and the circumscription of a clearing for being. In other words, what is understood as 'inauthentic' beingwith is in fact indifferent being-with and may not be described as 'inauthentic' at all for it involves both vectors of Dasein's being.

22

Being-with REDE AND GEREDE

In order to understand this, we must insist upon the distinction which will provide us with the four-part schema with which we are attempting to read Being and Time. To be Dasein, properly understood, is to be stretched between the authentic and the inauthentic or to be comprised of possibilities proper to oneself and possibilities proper to other beings. There is however a name that Heidegger gives to the state of a man who has not yet entered Dasein and who remains entirely immersed in the differential relations of the symbolic world, and that is 'indifference'. This entity has precisely not assumed his singularity, which is to say his selfhood, and may therefore be described as undifferentiated from all of the other entities (men) around him. For this reason he is called das Man, 'one', and not yet 'I myself, the reflexive repetitiveness of the individual self. This undifferentiated 'self is the self that we inhabit insofar as we dwell within the system of significations known as the world. When commentators seek the inauthentic being-with in das Man, what they are really seeking is the indifferent. Heidegger distinguishes the indifferent from the inauthentic quite explicitly, while relating both to everydayness (the subject of everydayness being das Man): more precisely, inauthenticity is a tendency towards indifference, towards its subject, but it does not reach indifference and remains quite distinct from it. 'But this capability-of-being (Seinkonneri), as one which is in each case mine, is free either for authenticity or for inauthenticity, or for a mode in which neither of these has been differentiated. In starting with average everydayness, our interpretation has heretofore been confined to the analysis of such existing as is either indifferent or inauthentic (die Analyse des indifferenten bzw. uneigentlichen Existierens}' (BT, pp. 275-6/SZ, p. 232). Dasein is inauthentic insofar as it cannot exist without the indifferent symbolic order and is never free of significance in which there are only common places in which to dwell. So what is this system of significance? What is world? Fundamentally, significance is constituted by possibilities. The symbolic order is made up not so much of present-at-hand actuality — materials, tools, humans — but rather of the possible uses that might be made of these things, the possible things one might do with them. The world is constituted by the routes which exist between things, directed towards the uses one might make of them, and the ends of such uses. This sense of 'pointing' (deuteri) is more evident in the German word for 'signifying', Bedeuten. Thus, signification is made up of a mesh of 'indicatings'. Dasein is the revelation of the world and this revelation is always significant. This means that meaning is always articulated into significations, and the way in which this jointing occurs is through 'discourse' (Rede).10 For this reason, Heidegger's use of discourse will prove crucial to our understanding of Being and Time and the problems that necessitate the turn away from it. This discursive jointing of intelligibility into significance takes place in two ways, which Heidegger names 'understanding' (Verstehen) and 'mood'

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

23

(Stimmung).l1 In Being and Time Heidegger considers both of these ways to be discursive. Discourse (Rede) allows phenomena to present themselves in significant form from out of a more general 'background' of intelligibility, through mood and understanding equally: 'The fundamental existentialia which constitute the being of the Da, the disclosedness of being-in-the-world, are state-of-mind and understanding' (BT, p. 203/SZ, p. 160). Why should mood be deemed equal to understanding in its revelatory capacity? Because being manifests itself only as a singular horizonally limited intelligibility of a portion of the whole. In other words, intelligibility presents itself only from a certain perspective. Dasein is always situated at a certain point within the whole, which restricts the intelligibility of this whole. This perspectival limitation means that the understanding of the intelligible must always be limited by a mood. As we shall see, this amounts to saying that the world of significance includes its own perspectivity. Understanding and mood, then, are characterized by Rede, which is the articulation of possibilities, the articulation of intelligibility into an entire world of significance, a 'discursivization' which is always at once both universal and singular, a common scheme centred upon a meaningless navel quite peculiar to the seer, meaningless in the sense that it marks the facticity of our being situated in a particular whole at the time and the place that we are. This facticity is the unintelligible condition of intelligibility, for significance needs its perspective. It is mood that reveals this factical placement, and understanding that reveals the possibilities that emanate from this fact and yet remain enchained to it as the vanishing point of Dasein's perspective. Mood reveals our singular situation within or outlook upon the whole of significance, which is the object of the understanding. Rede is the passage from meaning to its articulation in a system of significations, from Sinn to Bedeutungen. Heidegger distinguishes this Rede from Ge-rede.1 Rede is the way in which possibilities are divided up, the way meaning is articulated into signifiers to which Dasein may attach itself, the 'subject' and the symbolic order always arising simultaneously. When these possibilities are those which may be shared by absolutely anyone, in other words when they are exclusively worldly possibilities, the possibilities of possessing the present-athand or using the ready-to-hand, then Rede is stamped with the mark of the past tense (Ge-) and becomes Ge-rede. Ge-rede are those possibilities which are to be found in the world of significance without the singularity of perspectivity. In other words, they are for-the-sake-of-which's that anyone may share, the German prefix Ge- indicating both the past and commonality or 'gathering', since possibilities within the symbolic order are constitutively anonymous, mere subject-positions. It is of the very nature of significance that the places within it that are reserved for humans must be capable of being occupied by anyone. So we should distinguish between those possibilities presented to a singular perspectival outlook and those possibilities that are utterly common: the former are articulated in Rede, the latter in Gerede. What is crucial to recall is that these

24

Being-with

possibilities will not be distributed, as the Kantian reading thinks, between the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of-which, but rather both will be confined to the for-the-sake-of-which, the subject-positions which Dasein may occupy within the scheme of significance, and that pure possibility (Rede) never exists except in the concrete and symbolic form of common possibilities (Gerede), since meaning can only take the form of significations. For-the-sake-of-which's are the essentially common possibilities which the world offers. Every possibility that is significant is a common possibility, a possibility that we all share. It belongs not to me in my singularity but to that anonymous and neutral subject-position I take up as soon as I enter the symbolic order: 'One' or das Man. It is crucial to remember that there was never a time when I was not within this symbolic order, nor shall I ever leave it so long as I am Dasein, myself. The question will therefore be one of how to achieve individuality within the stifling commonality of the symbolic order. For Dasein is not an exception to this world but the very process of world-formation or discursivization, the arising of discourse or the articulation of meaning into significations, the fall of being to beings, the gesture by which intelligibility becomes 'conceptualized'. And we shall never be able to understand it in a way free from these always historical concepts, rooted as we are in our 'situation*. Gerede is translated into English as 'idle talk', a translation which has done nothing to further its understanding, implying that this jointure is unnecessary and irrelevant to 'proper' Dasein. Gerede amounts to the way in which the undifferentiated character of man within the Symbolic expresses and reinforces itself. It is the very articulation of meaning into significations that is executed by Dasein in the guise of das Man. 'Das Man itself articulates (artikuliert) the referential context (\ierweisungszusammenhang) of significance' (BT, p. 167/SZ, p. 129). Gerede is the way das Man articulates Dasein's possibilities, the way it 'dictates'13 what Dasein 'can-be'. Gerede is an articulation of the world which does not leave room for the singularity of individuals. It is indeed rooted in the singularity of an individual's factual position, as revealed in mood, but the response of Gerede is precisely to obscure this fact with possibilities. For this reason Heidegger describes the signifiers of this system as having lost all connection with 'reality', and symbolic positions are sought after solely for their own sake, a striving which engulfs all. This formation of a symbolic universe is a response to a factual singularity (founded upon death), which does not respond by way of an attempt to live up to this singularity but responds merely to the commonality of the fact by losing one's self in common possibilities or 'idle talk'. In other words, here 'words' have lost touch with the actual articulation of possibilities in the world: 'we already are listening only to what is said in the discourse as such' (BT, p. 212/ SZ, p. 168). One has precisely lost touch with the fact that any jointure of possibilities is not just an objective whole but inherently involves a certain singular distortion introduced by one's own singular facing of death. This is elided in das Man's articulation of Gerede: 'Das Man never dies'. And why?

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25

'because it can not die (es nicht sterben kann)' (BT, p. 477/SZ, p. 424). The subject-position you occupy in the symbolic order will outlive you: someone will take your place.

INDIFFERENT BEING-WITH The indifferent being-with that takes place when Dasein assumes the guise of das Man is precisely such a usurpation as follows from the fact that das Man is not owned, not singularized, but is rather (the occupant of) an anonymous subject-position: 'Gerede is the kind of being that belongs to being-with-oneanother itself (BT, p. 221/5Z, p. 177). In other words, it is the being-with of the world in which everyone is another since no true self has yet been formed: it is the being-with of others: '"the others" ... are those who proximally and for the most part "are there" (da sind) in everyday being-with-one-another' (BT, p. 164/SZ, p. 126). Since the world is articulated into essentially common possibilities, the relation between Daseins who occupy these positions can only be one of comparison and eventual substitution, as one calculates the difference between oneself and another in common terms and eventually usurps the other in their symbolic position. Heidegger's word for this relation of substitution and comparison is 'distantiality' (Abstandigkeif). By confining Dasein wholly to relations of significance, where signifiers are defined differentially — with regard to what they are to do and their ultimate purpose - one understands it within the context of a differential system, where each signifying identity is understood in relation to every other. How could one avoid understanding the other in terms of the 'distance' between oneself and this other? There is 'constant care as to the way one differs' (BT, p. 163/SZ, p. 126). Crucially, this is a distance which is not qualitative, but one which can be measured and calculated. What distantiality encourages is precisely the thrown limitation of Dasein's possibilities in the sense of confining these possibilities to the symbolic order in which it is born. The subject-positions of the world are precisely 'indifferent' to their occupant, and we shall be 'indifferent' or undifferentiated insofar as we make these possibilities the only ones that belong to our being. This indifference is precisely what we as men are born into, in our actual birth (berth), and the inauthentic comportment towards it in the thrown projection of possibilities is precisely being-towards-birth. To consider the only form of difference and thus of being-with to be that which exists between various subject-positions is to restrict Dasein to the indifferent articulation of intelligibility which is Gerede, in which no possibility is specifically tailored to the individual but each is defined precisely by its indifference with regard to who takes it up. Thus one can be said to 'reinforce' one's subjection to das Man's articulation: 'this distantiality which belongs to being-with, is such that Dasein, as everyday being-with-one-another,

26

Being-with

stands in subjection (Botmassigkeit) to others. It itself is not; its being has been taken away by the others' (BT, p. 164/SZ, p. 126). 'One belongs to the others oneself and enhances their power' (ibid). Since the possibilities that speak in and as Dasein in this state are those of Gerede, one can see the way in which the other is restricted by this being-with of interchangeability, limited to those possibilities which anyone could share, and in such a way as to increase the 'inconspicuous domination' of das Man in the sense of the thrown tendency to inhabit only those possibilities that are common. Indifferent being-with as the occupancy of indifferent places in significance is therefore characterized by 'representability'. 'Indisputably, the fact that one Dasein can be represented (Vertretbarkeit) by another belongs to its capabilitiesfor-being in being-with-one-another in the world' (BT, p. 283/SZ, p. 239); 'any other can represent (vertreten) them' (BT, p. 164/SZ, p. 126); 'representability is not only quite possible but is even constitutive for our being-with-one-another. Here one Dasein (das eine Dasein) can and must, within certain limits, "be" another Dasein (das andere "sein")' (BT, p. 283^/5Z, p. 239-40). We are another Dasein in the sense of taking his place once he has left it, the place with which he identified himself. For this reason Heidegger's explicit description of 'inauthentic' solicitude (Fursorge), the modification of Dasein's selfhood (care) insofar as being is always being-with, reads as follows: It can, as it were, take away 'care' from the other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in (einspringen) for him. This kind of solicitude takes over for the other that with which he is to concern himself. The other is thus thrown out of his own position (aus seiner Stelle geworferi) ... This kind of solicitude, which leaps in and takes away 'care', is to a large extent determinative for being-with-one-another, and pertains for the most part to our concern with the ready-to-hand. (BT, p. 158-9/SZ, p. 122) I suggest that we must understand this 'leaping' (Springen) as the throwing (Werferi) of projection (Entwerferi). Das Man will project or exist in only those possibilities which may be occupied by anyone, since these alone can be the objects of distantiality and representability, which amounts to the first form of being-with. Thus it takes away from the other their singularity, their self or Dasein. If the structure of selfhood is 'care' then this form of Fursorge, a modification of care, may be said to 'take away their "care" ("Sorge" abnehmende)'. Indifferent being-with (what has been called 'inauthentic being-with') is the relation of intersubstitutability between Daseins which might exchange places within the symbolic world. Being-with is therefore a motion, the motion of substitution as any number of anonymous others project the possibilities which constitute my symbolic identity and, with the extent of this projection, measure the distance between us and thereby reduce our difference to one that is measurable. Indifferent Dasein amounts to a 'subject-position' in the world of

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

27

significance: in other words, it consists of one's 'symbolic identity'. One is captured in one's identity entirely by significance, but this does not mean that one is reduced to the 'in-order-to' which would render the human being the object of Besorgen rather than Fursorge. We must be careful not to think this in the way of intersubjectivity, for when we speak of Dasein we are speaking of the openness of the whole world, which includes all of its components, self, others, and things. The openness of being, the world, indeed being itself, is the entirety of significance and that for the sake of which significance signifies. The manner in which this world is open is through the reflexivity of one entity, which creates a self-conscious fold in the entirety of 'substance', thus opening 'substance' to itself and making of it a 'subject'. What one is deprived of in this indifferent being-with is precisely something of one's own. One's very singularity is lost in the symbolic order. But it can never be lost altogether. One is not taken up into the symbolic order without remainder. This is what is forgotten by advocates of everydayness or full authenticity. As Dasein, one can escape neither one's singularity nor one's commonality. The whole is revealed only perspectivally.

BEGINNING TO FACE UP TO SINGULARITY What provides us with our uniqueness, stifled by the symbolic order of 'the One', is death. It is in death that the representability which characterizes indifferent being-with can no longer be the case: 'this possibility of representing (Vertretungsmo'glicbkeit) breaks down completely if the issue is one of representing that possibility-of-being (Vertretung der Seinsmb'glichkeii) which makes up Dasein's coming-to-an-end' (BT, p. 284/SZ, p. 240). For this reason, 'being-with others will fail us when our ownmost capability-of-being is the issue' (BT, p. 308/5^, p. 263). One has to be absolutely clear that this refers only to indifferent beingwith, since it is perhaps this line above all which has caused readers to think that Dasein is ultimately solipsistic. It is true that Heidegger cannot truly think another form of being-with due to the restriction placed on him by the ontological difference, but we must show that it is precisely when facing death that being-with does not fail us, since here we are opened to the 'with' for the first time insofar as the death and birth which are invoked are the death and birth whose part in the process of being's manifestation Heidegger could not think at this stage of his work. Here we must bring to bear the crucial distinction between the existential being-towards-death upon which Heidegger puts such excessive emphasis, and the blunt fact of actual death. Heidegger's understanding of being will have forced him to make this emphasis, but it obscures the fact that actual death plays a more crucial role in the formation of Dasein. This actuality renders every death 'other' in the sense that it cannot be incorporated into a scheme of significance which I could call my own, or the 'same' to use Levinas's terms.

28

Being-with

In light of the importance we attribute to actual death, the importance of the death of the concrete other, Levinas's 'Autrui', becomes clearer. Why is this death more important than Heidegger is able to say in Being and Time? Because, as Heidegger himself says, this death is actual and cannot provide us with an understanding of what it means to die. This is crucial for two related reasons: because death is actual and has no meaning; and it is the very actuality of death that grounds its unintelligibility. Heidegger's understanding of being as pure intelligibility will have allowed him to understand death's importance solely in terms of the way in which it becomes appropriated in our existential response to it, but this serves to cover over the more primordial /^intelligibility or 'otherness' of death. Death is the limit of understanding's projection: it simply cannot be 'envisaged'. Or rather, in another sense, it can, and it stands precisely in a oneway relation of gazing at us, from a point at which we are quite unable to encompass it with our own look. Death has a face and is nothing but this blank and impersonal stare. For this reason alone can Heidegger speak of 'the eyes of death' (BT, p. 434/5Z, p. 383), the gaze with which the enigma stares out at us,19 defying us to comprehend a complete vista. This death cannot be taken up into our lives in a mournful sublimation, but must rather remain always outside, always excessive. Being-towards-death as facing the fact of actual death is described by Heidegger with the word Vorlaufen or 'anticipation'. The actual fact of death is the very origin of projection as such, and thus its consummation (BT, pp. 305— 7/SZ, pp. 261—2) because it presents Dasein with something that it can never actually be. Actual death is impossible for Dasein, which is why Heidegger tells us that being-towards-death amounts to being 'brought face to face20 with the absolute impossibility of existence' (BT, p. 299/SZ, p. 255 — my emphasis). The face to face is a form of disclosure that occurs throughout Heidegger's work, and always in relation to a fact. It is the manner of disclosure belonging to mood: 'Mood discloses not in the way of a looking at (Hinblickens auf) thrownness, but rather as a turning, towards or away (sondern ah An- undAbkehr)' (BT, p. 174/SZ, p. 135). Thus every attempt on the part of understanding to symbolize the Real of death fails, achieving only the projection of common possibilities. In other words, it is thrown back (geworfen) into understandings of death that approach it in a non-singular way, most obviously with images, precipitate realizations and projections of an afterlife (cf. BT, p. 307/SZ, p. 262), whatever influences the very way in which one's symbolic life is ordered, as an avoidance of this void and thus an organization around this void, designed effectively to repress it. Existential death always fails to reach actual death and is thus thrown back to become existential birth as the inauthentic vector of projection which faces birth or absolute indifference. Existence within the symbolic world therefore amounts to the repression of the Real of death, since the possible can never live up to the actual, the Symbolic can never exhaust the Real. We should never lose sight of

29

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

the fact that existential dying never actually dies, and since Heidegger's understanding of being confines it to the existential site of its clearing he is forced to reject the actual form of death from his consideration altogether: 'Dying is not an event (Begebenheit); it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially' (BT, p. 284/S-Z, p. 240). The same may be said of birth. Thrownness is the tethering of the cone of possibilities (as they swell into the future only to hit the solid wall of death and thus be sent hurtling back down to earth) to the stolid fact of one's birth: the return amounts to the way in which the limitation imposed by death is symbolically understood. Thrownness is thus a comportment towards actual birth, an absolutely past point which will always have preceded the formation of existence and which thus escapes its power of projection. Being-towards this birth is the way in which actual birth has a discursive presence and amounts to a restriction of what we 'can be*. It restricts us to a certain scheme of significance which no amount of 'individuality' can ever escape. No matter how wide the expanse of possibilities stretches our project is nevertheless a project that is already projected, already thrown by somebody else, from a certain spatiotemporal point in beings as a whole. Somebody else was born, it was not us, and it is this 'other' which we must somehow come to bear. Even though we can alter the possibilities that we have, we cannot alter the fact that we exist and the particular world into which and against which our projection must hollow out a space of possibilities that would be our 'own'.

Passage of time as repetition Present state of Dasein

Being-towardsbirth (thrownness)

Actual birth

Actual death

Being-towardsdeath (projection)

Fact Figure 2.

Existence

Fact

Dasein as an existential response to the facts of birth and death

30

Being-with

We are thrown precisely towards indifference, the common or nonindividuated in which being-with takes the form of distantiation and representability. We seem to have been left with very little room for what authentic being-with could be, and there is a very good reason for this: there is no authentic being-with.

AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY: UNDERSTANDING TO MOOD In order to understand this remark let us ask the question, still not raised sufficiently often, of what authenticity and inauthenticity are. Heidegger is quite clear: they are determinations of the understanding (Versteben); they are thus determinations of possibilities. 1 Dasein is composed of possibilities, some of which are appropriate to it, some of which are not. 'Dasein can, proximally and for the most part, understand itself in terms of its world. Or else understanding throws itself primarily into the for-the-sake-of-which; that is, Dasein exists as itself. Understanding is either authentic, arising out of one's own self as such, or inauthentic' (BT, p. 186/SZ, p. 146).22 By confining the existentiales, and not just being-with, to the pair of authenticity and inauthenticity, thereby occluding the actual facts of death and birth, Heidegger evinces a metaphysical prejudice which he himself identifies, that of eclipsing mood at the expense of understanding. Heidegger insists from the very start that 'understanding has a state of mind (Verstehen befindliches ist)' (BT, p. 184/SZ, p. 144), and to demonstrate that he is not particular, even at this stage, about using the term 'mood' interchangeably with 'state of mind', 'mood' being officially the ontic form in which 'state of mind' manifests itself, witness the following: 'A state of mind always has its understanding, even if it merely keeps it suppressed. Understanding always has its mood' (BT, p. 182/SZ, p. 142). Understanding projects possibilities which are either authentic or inauthentic. It remains within Ge-rede, the common articulation of possibilities. It thus remains and can only remain within significance, within the common and the Symbolic which reduces being-with to indifference. What the symbolic understanding of being-with misses out is precisely the singularity of the individual, which is not reducible to the subject-positions they adopt, a singularity inherent to and yet in excess of the symbolic order. And it is this singularity that is revealed in mood. If we understand being-with, or indeed any other existentiale, solely in its distribution between its authentic and inauthentic forms, then we are not fully understanding it, for, as Heidegger says quite clearly, understanding never presents itself without mood. The common world of significance is always disclosed from a certain singular perspective. It is the singularity of our situation within the whole of significance with which moods put us in touch. For what, after all, are moods? They are revelations, ways

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in which the Da shows itself23 and more precisely, what they reveal is not a possibility but an actuality, a fact: 'mood is an originary kind of being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition (Erkenneri) and volition (Wollen), and beyond their range of disclosure' (BT, p. 175/SZ, p. 136). Thus it reveals something that exceeds signification and one's capacity to be: one's factual situation within signification itself. A being-with that exceeds the dualism of authenticity and inauthenticity would therefore involve the response to a certain /^possibility. To understand being-with as an attitude to the other in terms of 'for-the-sake-of-which' is still to think the other in terms of significance, of their possibilities and power within the symbolic world. The introduction of moods will gradually lead us towards passivity as man's relation to the other, just as Heidegger came to understand our relation to being itself, which in his later work is understood to remain in excess of the Symbolic and to become in a sense identical with the nonanthropic Real, which is also the Impossible. If it is moods that reveal our singularity, then das Man must prohibit those moods which explicitly reveal this singularity and replace them with a mood of indifference (Gleichgiiltigkeit) (BT, p. 396/SZ, p. 345), which Heidegger tendentiously yet convincingly translates into 'dumb suffering' (dumpf Leiden) (BT, p. 422/SZ, p. 371). Those absorbed in indifference constantly feel this suffering as a veil that mutes the intensity of their lives. They console themselves that everyone suffers, that no-one is really happy with their lot, but that there may nevertheless be a messiah somewhere, and so they resign themselves to what cards 'fate' has dealt them. What they must remain constitutively unaware of is that this messiah is none other than death, for death alone could draw them out of their 'suffering'. (But they remain troubled by anxiety, which they misinterpret as stress, the inadequately stifled form of anxiety.) Any understanding of being-with within the confines of the problematic of inauthenticity and authenticity will restrict it to the understanding and hence to intelligibility, and therefore Levinas will have been right: being-with does reduce the Other to the Same. Being-with in fact demonstrates that such a narrow schema as 'authenticity-inauthenticity' is far too narrow ever to do justice to the as yet underdeveloped insights of Heidegger's work. Dasein does not unfold solely within the trammels of authenticity and inauthenticity, or (common) significance. What is necessary is to stretch Dasein beyond the confines of the understanding and towards the unintelligible, towards that which we touch in the attunement of mood. Only thus shall we reach Dasein 'proper' and the being-with that should be inherent to it. What we are suggesting is that despite Heidegger's naming the second form of being-with as 'authentic', this being-with in fact relates Dasein to the facts revealed in mood, which is equally essential to the disclosure of being and thus to Dasein. And if this is the case, if the second form of being-with extends Dasein beyond the Symbolic and towards singularity, then it will no longer be possible to call it 'authentic'.

32

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Before we proceed to this extension let us have before us Heidegger's two principal descriptions of 'authentic' solicitude (Fursorge), for they contain the seeds of the destruction of the ontological difference. These, along with the description of 'inauthentic' being-with, should be studied repeatedly and with meticulous care. The first description follows immediately after the description of /'^authentic solicitude and runs as follows: There is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead (vorausspringi) of him in his existentiell capability-of-being, not in order to take away his 'care' but rather to give it back to him properly as such for the first time (erst eigentlich ah solche zuriickzugeben). This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care — that is, to the existence of the other, not to a 'what' with which he is concerned; it helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it ... when they devote themselves to the same matter (Sache) in common, their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of. They thus become properly bound together (eigentliche Verbundenheit), and this makes possible the right relation to matters (die rechte Sachlichkeii), which frees the other in his freedom for himself. (BT, pp. 158-9/SZ, p. 122) Crucially, this solicitude rears its head again, and much later, in the discussion of Dasein's resoluteness, in other words when conscience has brought Dasein to the widest extent of its torn openness, the most complete formation of its self, which is precisely a point at which one is not authentic but stretched between birth and death to form an existential compound of inauthenticity and authenticity. This positioning is crucial if we are to understand just what the 'with' of being-with joins together and how it resides at the very heart of Dasein, which in a fundamental ontological framework eludes Heidegger but is anticipated in his understanding of 'conscience'. It is therefore a being-with that Heidegger can (only) gesture towards, in his description of this being-with as conscience: Dasein's resolute openness to its self is what first makes it possible to let those others who are-with (die mitseienden Anderen) 'be' in their ownmost capabilityof-being, and to co-disclose (mitzuerschliefieri) this capability in the solicitude which leaps ahead in such a way as to free (der vorspringend-befreienden Fursorge). When Dasein stands resolutely open it can become the 'conscience' of others (Das entschlossene Dasein kann zum 'Gewissen' der Anderen werden). (BT, p. 344/ SZ, p. 298) The consequences of these passages are quite incalculable for Being and Time. By attempting and failing to situate a 'with' at the heart of being's clearing they blast it apart and cause it to collapse in the direction of its ungrounded

Being-with and the Ontological Difference

33

foundation, a collapse that our questioning must follow. We shall see that this second form of being-with brings actuality and possibility together in the guise of death and birth and their existential response in a way that the ontological difference cannot allow, restricting Dasein as it does to the stretch between authenticity and inauthenticity. In this understanding, Dasein as the process of being's manifestation is restricted to the possible and the Symbolic, while the actual motivations and asymptotes of this process must be left outside of this discourse. But why should we think that there is a being-with that exceeds the dichotomy of authenticity-inauthenticity? Heidegger tells us in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, as fundamental ontology is on the brink of its radical rethinking, that mood is our very being-with: 'Mood is not some being that appears in the soul as an experience, but the way of our being-there-with-oneanother (das Wie unseres Niiteinander-Daseins)' (PCM, p. 66/GA 29/30, p. 100).26 It follows from what being-with of the second kind is said to be, conscience, since this conscience is Dasein's very openness to the excess of possibility, to actuality and the singularity of a peculiar finitude. It is the obtrusive presence of mood in its conscientious togetherness with understanding that points to Heidegger's burgeoning awareness of Dasein's access to this excess and that we must now examine if we are to understand the way in which being-with ultimately spans the gap between Dasein and its other in a way that a discourse on the understanding of being cannot allow but which a thinking of being eventually will. Both mood and understanding are ways in which discourse distributes itself, and since conscience, which Heidegger has here identified with the second form of being-with, is the most original form of discourse, being-with must amount to a relation of some kind between understanding and its mood, or the very process of discursivization itself which is a response to something that is not discursive, something actual beyond possibility, a being beyond being. This being-with will therefore lead us to cross the ontological difference itself, which at this stage is split apart solely by the understanding. We shall see that it is this togetherness of actuality and possibility, forbidden by the two-part schema enjoined by the ontological difference, which being-with as conscience will join together.

Chapter Two

Beyond Authenticity and Inauthenticity

MOODS Understanding projects possibilities. Possibilities are the places or routes within the differential scheme of signification which Dasein may occupy. Signification thus refers to the whole of beings in their intelligibility. In contrast to this, moods reveal the way in which understanding is 'thrown', bewildered in the face of facts over which it has no power. More specifically, they reveal most essentially our situation within beings as a whole, with respect to which we are powerless, 'the facticity of being delivered over' (BT, p. 174/SZ, p. 135 — italicized). This is to oppose the metaphysical understanding which claims to be capable of comprehending the whole in apparent indifference to its finitude which takes the form of a situation. Understanding 'never is' without mood, 'we are never free of moods' (BT, p. 175/5Z, p. 136). Heidegger will always have acknowledged this, and indeed conscience is precisely the mark of this 'with', but in his early work what he will not have been in a position to think is precisely how this togetherness works, how an actuality can interact with a possibility, how the ontological difference comes to be. What goes unthought in the voice of conscience will be thought only later as the voice of being (Seyri). One is, as Heidegger says, 'always already' in a mood, even when one is seemingly in a state of equanimity or 'indifference'. Indifference (Gleichgultigkeii), which can go along with busying oneself head over heels, must be sharply distinguished from equanimity (Gleichmui). This latter mood springs from resoluteness, which, in a moment of vision, looks at those situations which are possible in one's capability-of-being-a-whole as disclosed in our anticipation of death (BT, p. 396/SZ, p. 345). One will always have been in touch in some way with the 'enigma' upon which one's existence depends. Heidegger will understand this thrownness

Beyond Authenticity and Inauthenticity

35

towards enigma, a few years after Being and Time, as Dasein's ineluctable situation within the whole of beings.1 Since it reveals facts, which are not within the power of Dasein, mood is said to reveal in the mode of 'turning' (BT, p. 174/SZ, p. 135). We can either face facts or turn our backs and flee, but in both cases our turning discloses facts, inescapably so. If mood's addition to the revelation of the whole world of significance is ultimately our singularity, and if moods reveal facts, then we must ask which facts bestow this singularity upon us? The answer is the non-existential facts of our birth and death. Famously, anxiety turns us to face death, but Heidegger, showing greater balance than he will elsewhere, is careful to point out that anxiety never presents itself without a concomitant joy: 'Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized capability-of-being, there goes an unshakeable joy (gerustete Freude) in this possibility' (BT, p. 358/ SZ, p. 310). Anxiety is the mood that faces the fact of death, while joy is the mood that turns away from this abyss and faces the comforting maternal security of birth. Joy's 'unshakeability' alone proves authenticity to be impossible. Again, the fact that Heidegger mentions 'joy' only twice in Being and Time indicates the prevalent reading of Being and Time that privileges death and its possibility to have been encouraged by Heidegger: indeed it is a reading to which Heidegger himself had necessarily to fall victim. The most extreme of moods place Dasein in touch with the very sources of its singularity, its death and birth. Anxiety and joy reveal death and birth precisely in their unintelligible factuality, in other words they reveal these facts in a way quite other to that which reveals them in the guise of possibilities, Dasein's beingtowards death and birth: they reveal them in their very /^possibility. Moods are not inessential accidents that come upon a present-at-hand subject to disturb its pure tranquil beholding, but are equally and in their own way disclosive. They are an experience of otherness that takes this otherness into one's ambit without sublating it (as a naive reading of Hegelian Aufhebung would have it), 'a feeling of self in having a feeling for something' (BPP, p. 132/CzA 24, p. 187). More precisely, a mood, 'directly uncovers and makes accessible that which is felt . . . in the sense of a direct having-of-oneself (ibid.). In other words, a mood is a direct contact between myself and otherness, existential singularity facing enigma. Not only can that which mood discloses not be cognised, it cannot even be understood. Moods reveal our unchosen interpellation in a symbolic network of signifiers, and when this begins to stifle us we feel anxiety, the feeling that our symbolic identity does not touch upon the heart of our singularity. Precisely what moods reveal are the factual limits to intelligibility and they do so in a way that does not 'sublimate' these limits by taking them up in the form of possibilities. This is what understanding does, and if the significance within which understanding operates stands for the all-encompassing Symbolic, then moods are the ineliminable remainder which marks the occluded place of

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the Real. If possibilities are intelligible and are at least 'theoretically' within Dasein's power to be (Seinkonneri), then we may say that they are what Levinas describes as 'the Same' (le Meme). In this case, the factuality which moods reveal may be said to be that which is 'other' (I'Autre). Moods put us in touch with the very otherness of the other. Now that we have been introduced to what moods 'do', we must investigate the way in which they relate to the understanding, which is where authenticity and inauthenticity have been situated. In this way we shall see how the ineliminability of moods modifies the distribution of being-with between authenticity and inauthenticity and instigates the stretching-out of Dasein between authenticity and inauthenticity, which is the very opening of existence itself. We shall see that mood's relation to understanding, which comes about in conscience, is precisely the 'with' of being-with.

THE INCIPIENT FOURFOLD OF BEING AND TIME There can be no peaceful co-existence between understanding and mood, rather they must exist in a state of constant strife, the understanding dragging everything that is unintelligible or impossible back towards what is significant and possible, the mood resisting stubbornly and bending the trajectory of projection back towards the unintelligible opacity of the factual, which resists symbolization and thus stirs ever new symbolizations. What the understanding attempts to do is to 'possibilize' the actual which moods reveal: it makes possibilities out of actualities. Understanding is the eternal optimist: something can be done even in the face of the most intractable situation. The ultimate extremes of factuality are those unique facts which remain quite ineluctable and which exceed our power to choose altogether: birth and death. How does projective understanding react to this intolerable thrownness into a birth that is born to die? Understanding responds to the facts of birth and death with what I have called the 'existential response'. This means both a response that is existential in that it projects open possibilities and the very cracking open of existence itself. Since the facts of birth and death are unique in that they cannot fully be taken within the power of Dasein's ability to be or made into something which Dasein can project beyond, as if to some ulterior purpose of its life, it responds to these facts in the form of two asymptotic vectors that in fact form the very structure and limits of its being. These are the vectors of being-towards-death and being towards-birth or projection and thrownness, which amount to our authenticity and inauthenticity. It is in response to the facts of death and birth that authenticity and inauthenticity split apart and remain unified. Thus these two facts, revealed in mood, indicate authenticity and inauthenticity as a whole to constitute the nature of Dasein's being. In other words, the facts of birth and

37

Beyond Authenticity and Inauthenticity

death necessitate a relinquishment of the two-part schema within which Being and Time is normally confined. The four elements with which we propose to replace this schema comprise the compound of authenticity and inauthenticity together with the two facts of birth and death which draw these two vectors apart and thereby create them for the very first time. It is crucial to distinguish between two forms of birth and two forms of death, the actual facts and the existential response to these facts. We have seen the existential responses to take the form of inauthenticity and authenticity; Heidegger's names for factual birth and death are 'indifference' (Indifferenz) (BT, pp. 275-6/SZ, p. 232) and 'the most own' (das Eigenstdkekekekekk our schema encompasses the four elements of indifference, inauthenticity, authenticity, and the most-own: Indifferdkdkkkddkdkdkkdkdalladkdklsddkkddkslkdkdklsks kdkkdkdkdkkkd Indifference

Inauthenticity-Authenticity

Most own

Mood (Joy)

Understanding

Mood (Anxiety)

Figure 3.

Dasein

This fourfold schema allows us to describe the inner couple enclosed within the outer as a compound which is the very process of Dasein itself. It is the process of individuation which Being and Time attempts and fails to trace, hampered as it is by the strictures of the separation of being and beings demanded by the ontological difference. This process is the formation of a self and it is initiated by the primordial form of discourse, conscience, which means 'being-with'.

DASEIN AS A PROCESS What had been called 'inauthentic' being-with is in fact a being-with of those who remain undifferentiated or 'indifferent'. What true being-with will be, and what Heidegger gestures towards through the incorporation of moods and the identification of being-with and conscience as the original togetherness of mood and understanding, is precisely the process of Dasein's formation as the tug-ofwar between authenticity and inauthenticity and the actualities that exceed it. Being and Time is a treatise on the process of individuation, but it is only with the help of a fourfold schema that we can understand just how this process is initiated. It is precisely this latter clause that Heidegger neglected by failing to consider factuality as a part of being, factuality being situated rather in the position of being's meaning — the fact of human temporaeity — which leaves unexplained the way in which being is grounded upon this meaning, the process

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Being-with

of discursivization that takes place between meaning and significations, which Heidegger only begins to address in his invocation of 'conscience'. The emergence from indifference amounts to a tearing away of the self from the un-individuated, but since one never actually withdraws from undifferentiated actuality5 this tearing away will amount to an immanent rent in the fabric of das Man itself. The word Heidegger uses for this rending is 'Entrissen' which refers to the very tearing open of Dasein itself as a site of illumination within the benighted Sameness characterizing indifference. Its holding open, amidst the constant tendency of understanding to fall back into ignorance, is described by Heidegger as 'resoluteness', or 'resolutely holding open an openness' (Entschlossenheit). It is characterized by 'devotion' and will amount to the retention of an exemplary existential singularity. That this tearing away never amounts to a clean break explains Heidegger's specification of the tearing as a 'stretching' (Erstreckung) in 'the way in which Dasein stretches between birth and death (Erstreckung des Daseins zwischen Geburt und Tod)' (BT, p. 425/SZ, p. 373). Actuality is brittle; Dasein is pliant. What must be emphasized again and again is the fact that any process of stretching always tends towards at least two asymptotic points, two ends towards which it reaches out. If Dasein is constituted entirely of possibilities, then these asymptotes must be pure actualities, and it is these that must be taken into account in any understanding of being-with which prevents itself from being understood in terms of the simple dichotomy of authenticity and inauthenticity, which leaves their 'withness' unexplained. In order to correct the erroneous emphasis commonly placed on death in Heidegger, let us allow his invocation of birth to sound and resound. The second passage in particular is crucial for an understanding of the way in which Heidegger is attempting to conceive Dasein as a process. But death is only the 'end' of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein's totality is closed round. The other 'end', however, is the 'beginning', the 'birth'. Only that entity which is 'between' birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking. Accordingly the orientation of our analytic has so far remained 'one-sided' . . . Being-towardsthe-beginning remained unnoticed; but so too, and above all (my emphasis] has the way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and death. (BT, p. 425/SZ, p. 373) Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch 'of life' — one which is somehow present-at-hand - with the phases of its momentary actuality. It stretches its self along in such a way that its own being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along. The 'between' which relates to birth and death already lies in the being of Dasein. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein 'is' actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is 'surrounded' by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood

Beyond Authenticity and Inauthenticity

39

existentially (my emphasis}, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of being of something still outstanding, not yet present-athand but coming along. Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the 'ends' and their 'between' are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein's being as care. Thrownness [i.e. being-towards-birth] and that being-towards-death in which one either flees it or anticipates it, form a unity; and in this unity birth and death are 'connected' (hangen ... zusammeri) in a manner characteristic of Dasein. As care, Dasein is the 'between'. (BT, pp. 426-7/SZ, p. 374) To think of Dasein as alternating between two states, authenticity and inauthenticity, is to remain one-sided. Dasein is rather the stretch that opens a rent in the continuum of beings, a betweenness that allows it genuinely to be understood as being-witb. This would be the 'more originary' understanding of Dasein than that which describes its exclusively authentic existence, which Heidegger alludes to just once in Being and Time: 'Can Dasein be understood in a way that is more originary than in the projection of its authentic existence?' (BT, p. 424/SZ, p. 372 — my emphasis) Given that this question immediately precedes the passages on birth, the answer is quite certainly 'yes'. Since Dasein is this always unstable tearing it may be described as a process. Dasein is not a fully formed individual but a happening, a 'Gescheheri: 'The specific movement of Dasein's stretched-out stretching of its self we call its "happening" (Die spezifische Bewegtheit des erstreckten Sicherstreckens nennen wir das Geschehen des Daseins)' (BT, p. 427/SZ, p. 375). One's self is very far from being a subject, an unshakeable ground for beings as a whole but is rather an individual always in the process of becoming. What must constantly be borne in mind is the fact that Dasein is simply not the actuality of an individual man. It is defined precisely in opposition to this individual. It is the individual man stretched beyond himself towards the impossible poles of birth and death in such a way that his possibilities are projected towards death and this projection thrown back towards common significance to form the loop of his self in 'care'. In other words, Dasein exists between individuality (projection) and commonality (thrownness) and is not an individual but the always incomplete process of individuation. Dasein is formed in the between of indifference and isolation, sameness and difference. The very process of the formation of Dasein is spurred by conscience, the second form of being-with, and thus conscience and being-with in turn must embody a certain togetherness of possibility and actuality, existence and facts, if they are to explain the origination of the one in the other. The process of Dasein's stretching beyond the punctate man is understood by Heidegger as a repetition,7 since man as finite will already have been the site of being's possible manifestation: Dasein simply repeats manhood. It is in the

40

Being-with

repetition of a being that selfhood first arises. It is this novel repetition inherent to the folds of temporal existence as it bounces from impossibility to impossibility that shapes the undulation of history in early Heidegger (see Figure 2 on p. 29). History as a sequence of events and lulls is thus made possible by the repetition of man's actual birth and death in the existential form of 'Dasein'. The self (Dasein) is the origin of history, that moment within being which ensures the possibility of novelty. In other words, it is man's finitude, a finitude essential to beings as a whole, that creates a space in which a new organizing principle of the whole might emerge. 'Authentic being towards death, which is to say the finitude of temporality, is the concealed ground (verborgene Grund) of the historicality of Dasein' (BT, p. 438/SZ, p. 386). Only through repetition is there history. There must be a space of finitude within the totality and this totality must relate to this finitude in order for history to happen as a new world of signification is developed in order to symbolize and thus cope with the void of death. In other words, at this point in Heidegger's trajectory, history is grounded on man's finitude. Why are we straying into the realms of history in a treatise on being-with? Because it is at the point of 'historicization' that Heidegger broaches the political form of being-with, the 'nation' (Volk), and the relation between ethics and politics. It is also crucial to the 'turn', since Heidegger acknowledges that the two principal motivations for this turn were precisely history and politics and it is in 1|74 of Being and Time that these two are linked. History, initially understood to be founded on the individual Dasein, insofar as its individual temporality is understood in relation to beings (fallenness), later becomes identified with being itself (Seyri) as the historical variations of givenness. If history is understood to be external to being and to amount to its fall into the ontic as the symbolization of the void, then collective historical politics will suffer from the same falling relation with the ethics of the individual temporal Dasein. In other words, the relation between ethics and politics will be mimetic. The political will simply be modelled upon the ethical, its structures copied from the organization of the individual human being, a way which leads to 'the People' of totalitarianism. This is the essence of the early Heidegger's Platonic understanding of politics. What is necessary to a thinking of politics is to understand it in a way that differs from and yet is not unrelated to ethics. Since history is founded upon a repetition, it may be understood as destiny. History is destined to us because history is formed through the repetition which constitutes the self and makes of its actual singularity a novel set of possibilities in response to its powerlessness: If Dasein, by anticipation, lets death become powerful in itself, then, as free for death, Dasein understands itself in its own superior power (Ubermacht), the power of its finite freedom, so that in this freedom, which 'is' only in its

Beyond Authenticity and Inauthenticity

jds

having chosen to make such a choice, it can take over the powerlessness (Ohnmacht) of abandonment to its having done so. (BT, p. 436/SZ, p. 384) In other words, Dasein exists as a process, it dkdkdkdkkdkddkdkdkdkdkdk repetition, and what is repeated in this repetition is man's actual birth and death. These are repeated in such a way as to make of them existential possibilities. In this repetition, Dasein is shaped from out of the actuality of man. In this way one can see why this repetition is a 'fateful' one, because these facts are indeed the 'fate' of us all. The questionable move that Heidegger then makes is to render this 'fate' (Schicksal) the 'destiny' (Geschick) of a nation, shifting from the ethical to the political register, barely pausing to draw breath: But if fatddkdllslsldldldlslsllsldldldldldlddldldlslsdldldlls;aldldlldflflflllldldlldldlldldl in being-with with others, its happening is a with's happening (Mitgescheheri) and is determinative for it as destiny (Geschick). This is how we designate the happening of the community, of a nation. (BT, p. 436/SZ, p. 384) Thus in the space of two sentences, Nazism is licensed, and licensed precisely through an invocation of being-with passing without mediation from the ethical to the political. I shall argue that it is due to the unthought relation between being and beings as a whole, a relation marked in later Heidegger by the 'thing', that Heidegger is forced to understand being-with according to an identical logic at both the ethical and the political levels. This understanding of politics is clearly present in the rhetoric of Heidegger's political speeches of the early 1930s and it is just as clearly an embarrassment to and betrayal of what later becomes of his thought. What sense can it make for Heidegger to transfer the death of the individual to the level of the polls, which is characterized precisely by its endurance beyond the death of its members? This failure to differentiate ethics and politics makes it clear that Heidegger's thought of the ontological difference does not provide sufficient resources for thinking the originality of the 'with' to being. This would mean to think being as precisely the 'with' itself from which history wells, a point of differentiation more original than ethics and politics but joining them in an original intimacy rather than through the mimetic relation of 'falling'. In Heidegger's acknowledgement that it was precisely his traumatic political engagement and understanding of history that stirred the future windings of his thought do we not find his admission that the problem of being-with was precisely the motivation for the crossing of his thought? It is this problematic of the original 'with', the togetherness of authenticity and inauthenticity, which is broached in Heidegger's thought of conscience and which shall be brought out clearly by our violent imposition of a four-part reading of Being and Time. Conscience is the very process of the discursivization of the actual facts of birth and death in the sense that it is the call of these actualities and at the same time an existential response to them. This process is

42

Being-with

precisely the arising of Dasein itself, the opening of the ontological difference, which is thus foreshadowed in this crucial analysis. This is where the second kind of being-with has brought us, beyond the intelligible existential process of authenticity and inauthenticity to the question of how this existence is to be roused from out of indifference. This occurs through the intrusion of singularity, a startling encounter between two absolutely unintelligible facts, birth and death, the indifferent and the most own. What brings the stifling indifference of the Symbolic to light is precisely the fact of death, since death as absolutely our own simply cannot adequately be symbolized. Existence occurs when the stroke of death reaches into indifference. This is to say that singularity is premised not only upon death but upon death's relation to birth, which is the indifference of the ontic totality to the differentiation of being. From the full positivity and presence of the fallen understanding that remains absorbed in the actuality of das Man, thoroughly lacking in individuation and understanding itself wholly in terms of presence — possessions, and one's present position within a symbolic network — what is required is the intrusion of a negativity. A nothingness must be shown to man in order to bring to light the null basis of the positivity of the present-at-hand. This nothingness is death, which shows up the nothingness of birth, the two unchosennesses which bound and condition our presence and power. These are the two nothingnesses or 'negativities' with regard to which we must remain powerless and passive. They amount to that for which we are 'guilty' (schuldig). What calls us to our guilt and intrudes on our oblivious absorption in the positivity of indifference is the nagging voice of conscience (Gewissen). This indifference is precisely the state of 'consciencelessness' within which we have the impression of being good or evil, while these determinations are in fact secondary to the real question of our

existencdkdkdkdkkdkddkdkkdkdddddddddddkdkdkkdkdkdkkdksldkdkdkkdkddkd

without conscience. If conscience is the formation of Dasein in response to an actuality that remains outside it, and if Heidegger describes being-with as 'conscience', then in this problematic we witness Heidegger's inchoate attempt to render the 'with' crucial and originary to being itself. We shall thus devote some time to the nature of conscience, which, like being-with, is often misunderstood, in order to make clear that it is a voice that spans actuality and possibility and therefore the very ontological difference itself.

CONSCIENCE CALLS Conscience is Heidegger's incipient thought of the differentiation of the ontological difference (Seyn). If being-with is conscience then 'being' and the 'with' are to become co-originary in Heidegger's later thought. Being will be

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that which ensures that every whole is an open one, that something will always elude the totality and open it onto an excessive element. The excess that Heidegger will introduce to the significant 'world' is, famously, the 'earth'.15 If world is understood, then the movement of the earth is felt. This excess is precisely the blind spot of metaphysics as Heidegger understands it and is accessed in mood. This blind spot is precisely a matter of situatedness, of 'roots'. In Being and Time, the human being is understood to be that entity which holds the place of being (in its 'understanding of being') and is thus the sole proprietor of this open wholeness. This is in spite of the fact that Heidegger's very invocation of mood has begun to point us towards the open wholeness of the world, the inherence of a singular distortion, of a limit to the world's intelligibility, inevitable given the situatedness of Dasein within signification. The finite openness of the world (being) is nevertheless still grounded in our finitude. Thus finitude alters the way in which beings appear (to us). What is it that testifies to this possibility of being a whole in a way proper to Dasein, which as we have seen means man insofar as he is open to those facts that exceed his power to be and thus render his wholeness 'open? Heidegger asks, 'can Dasein also exist properly as a whole (eigentlich ganz existieren)?' and he answers,'... a proper capability-of-being (eigentlkben Seinkimnens) is attested by conscience (BT, p. 27775Z, p. 234 - my emphasis). Dasein's wholeness must be constituted by an openness to its excess, which implies that there must be an excess, and conscience must therefore be what draws our attention to our dependence upon something that exceeds our power. Conscience is a call or rather a calling. It is a constant trope in Heidegger's thought that a call (Ruf) is a beckoning {Erwinken). More precisely, it is a beckoning made by something that withdraws from us, for when something withdraws this movement of withdrawal always directs us to follow it. The whirlpool tempts us into the abyss. The calling that is the beckoning of withdrawal invariably evokes our own 'calling' in the sense oddlsllslsllsdldldlslslslls Dasein is the existential stretch between authenticity and inauthenticity, a power to be, then what withdraws from Dasein? That over which it has no power. Actuality. Facts. Those facts that remain always in recession and can never be incorporated into the possible are the facts of birth and death. Birth and death forever withdraw from Dasein. When Dasein is there, they are not, and when they are there, Dasein is not (Epicurus). The name of the beckoning call of their withdrawal from our power is 'conscience'. Our response to conscience is what I have called the 'existential response' of being-towards-birth and being-towardse birth) exists for Dasein only in the form of 'an existentiell being-towards-deatti (BT, p. 277/SZ, p. 234).

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CONSCIENCE AS THE ORIGIN OF DISCOURSE Conscience is 'a primordial kind of discourse (Rede)' (BT, p. 342/SZ, p. 296). 'Discourse' or discursivization is an articulation of possibilities; but conscience is the beckoning of /^possibilities and so, if it is to be the production of possibilities and thus discourse then it must be concomitant with a response. If moods place us in touch with actuality and understanding projects possibilities on the basis of these actualities then in conscience we witness a short circuit between mood and understanding, and since these are the manners in which discourse occurs, conscience is in this sense the very origin of discourse as such. It is the translation of the Real into the Symbolic. Conscience itself is the very beckoning of actuality and is thus 'silent' and does not constitute any possibilities by itself. It will never be within man's power.15 But the response to conscience's silent beckoning will amount to the projection of possibilities and for this reason we can understand what Heidegger says in the pivotal ^[34 of Being and Time, on discourse: 'Hearing and silence (Horen und Schweigen) are possibilities belonging to discursive speech (redenden Sprecheri). In these phenomena the constitutive function of discourse for the existentiality of existence (Existenzialitdt der Existenz) becomes entirely plain for the first time' (BT, p. 204/5Z, p. 161). It is in conscience that silence and hearing are primordially linked together and it is only in their link, when silent actuality is translated into vocal possibility, that existence first comes to be. Conscience is thus the origin of existence. In this passage we witness perhaps the only instance of the word 'existentiality' in the entire book. The discussion of conscience is seen here quite clearly to be an attempted explanation of the process of discursivization, the articulation of meaning into significance and the way in which this signifying system produces a 'self, Dasein. The passages on conscience may therefore be read, with the licence of ^[34, as an explanation of the genesis of existence itself, which Heidegger elsewhere describes solely in its already constituted structures, the existentiales. Conscience is thus the original splitting apart of actuality and existence, the arising of a site for being (Dasein) within the undifferentiated mass of beings as a whole. By following the beckoning of conscience, projection is drawn towards a possibility which das Man cannot abide, simply because it cannot be actualized for Dasein, and this means to enter the symbolic network of common possibilities. 'Das Man never dies, because it can not die' (BT, p. 477ISZ, p. 424). This is the paradox of death it is nothing but an actuality, and the most undeniable actuality of our inescapable fate, and yet for each one of us it will never be actual, we shall never become it, and thus the only way in which it can enter our lives is through the peculiar organization of our possibilities. It is to this organization that Heidegger devotes the greater part of his attention, under the heading 'being-towards-death', which presents the misleading picture that actual death plays no role here. Conscience demonstrates that it does.

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In response to the anonymous event of death, which cannot be owned, one can choose one's own self, a singularity that amounts to a set of existential possibilities, a possible response to impossible actuality. The response to conscience, which never lives up to or attains the actuality herein called is, Heidegger tells us, a desiring. Dasein strives, desiring to hear the call, desiring conscience without ever being able to reach the nullities to which it beckons. Heidegger describes the proper response to conscience, one that 'understands' its 'meaning', as Gewissen-haben-wollen or desire for conscience: 'Understanding the appeal (Anrufverstehen) means wanting to have conscience (Gewissen-haben-wollen)' (BT, p. 334/SZ, p. 288). Existence is fundamentally desire. This is a desire to approach that which is beyond existence, the nullifying Real of the facts of birth and death. This desire takes the form of being-towards, a striving that lasts for as long as Dasein exists. One is passive with regard to these facts and therefore the only adequate response to them is the desire to be ever more in touch with this passivity. Thrown projection is the tendency of Dasein to translate what is actual into what is possible, into something which Dasein 'can-be'. Thrownness is precisely Dasein's passivity with regard to that which projection projects towards. In opposition to this tendency to reduce everything to sameness and significance, the desire for conscience desires contact with the other as other. Heidegger consistently describes Dasein's receptiveness to possibilities in terms of the sense of hearing and for this reason in terms of 'sound'. Gerede is noisy intrusive chatter1 but primordial discourse (Rede), conscience, silenced by das M.an, is silent (schweigen). It is silent because it will always be betrayed when it comes to be articulated in terms of possibilities that are common to everyone since the possibilities which it articulates are precisely singular ones. One must be careful to distinguish conscience from its existential response here: conscience, insofar as it is the beckoning of man towards his death, discourses in the mode of silencing (Schweigen), but conscience, insofar as it is the reflexive desire for conscience, in other words insofar as we respond to conscience, is discreet or reticent (verschwiegen) and traces out possibilities with its voice: 'Conscience discourses (redet) solely and constantly in the mode of silence (Schweigen). In this way it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned (das an- und aufgerufene Dasein), into the reticence (Verschwiegenheit) of itself (BT, p. 318/SZ, p. 273). Its self is precisely reticence or the evocation of possibilities in response to that which remains impossible. Ver-schwiegen-heit is, as it were, the more active form of bespeaking silence, a rendering discursive that constitutes the formation of the singular existential self. 'Dasein . . . is called back into the stillness of itself (Stille seiner selbst)' (BT, p. 343/SZ, p. 296), which means, 'into the reticence of its self tyerschwiegenheit seiner selbst)' (BT, p. 318/SZ, p. 273). Dasein is silence translated into words, actuality made to speak as possibility. The facts of birth and death belong to no-one, but our response to them can transform this anonymity into our singular belonging.

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Death comes to everyone the same. It would therefore seem to reduce us all to the same level of disgusting senescence, but what such resignation fails to see is that this threat of sameness calls upon us precisely to assume the burden of this anonymous fatality — 'one dies' — and to make a singular riposte, a call back, to repeat that which will happen anyway: 'The repetition makes a retort (erwidert) to the possibility of that existence which has-been-there (dagewesenen Existenz) . . . it is at the same time a disavowal (Widerruf, a call back) of that which in the "today" is working itself out as the "past"' (BT, p. 438/SZ, p. 386). The response to conscience projects a singular cluster of possibilities within the Symbolic in response to the impossibility of death: to make the impossible possible is Heidegger's definition of 'heroism'. One cannot be certain when the end will come and it is this incalculability that comes to the fore in the encouragement of the singular response in contrast to resignation. If being is founded upon man's finitude then this means that man's finitude is the meaning (Sinn) of being: 'a "ground" becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss (Abgrund) of meaninglessness' (BT, p. 194/SZ, p. 152). Man's death is precisely such an abyss. According to Heidegger, Sinn must always be translated into Bedeutung, which means that the senseless finitude of man must open up the Da of Sein. The unrepresentable finitude of man articulates (rederi) itself as the significance of a world, an intelligibility which is always viewed from a certain position within the whole. In other words, the facts of birth and death that ensure man's unreckonable finitude never exist without a certain discursive response. This response is the existential response or the understanding and desire of conscience. Understanding is always a matter of projecting possibilities. 'Dasein is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility' (BT, p. 183/SZ, p. 143) and '{t}he kind of being which Dasein has, as capability-of-being, lies existentially in understanding' (ibid.). To understand conscience is to make of our passivity a power, an ability that we can be: '(understanding is the being of such capability-of-being' (BT, p. 183/SZ, p. 144). The understanding of conscience is thus an empowering of ourselves in response to powerlessness.17 It is a repetition and an affirmation of our finitude. But why should we affirm this? At least because it will happen anyway and we are powerless to stop it and without its repetition our birth and death will have been identical to a billion others. The ethical response to such anonymity, and that means the response which allows being a clearing, is to make of our powerlessness a power, to enhance this powerlessness. Ethical existential response is a moment at which we decide to choose the unchosen nullity on which our existence depends, to hear more of our powerlessness. Dasein's most basic power is therefore the power to open itself to its own powerlessness. This is its most fundamental 'ethic' and it will resonate throughout the entire length of Heidegger's work. If ethics for Heidegger means to dwell in the nearness of being, then man must enjoy the power to respond to his own powerlessness.

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Our singularity is the empowerment of our powerlessness: the irony of Dasein is that its singularity must be expressed in general terms and betrayed symbolically. Our finitude, the source of our possible singularity, is a fact, and the transmogrification of this fact into possibilities is the very essence of our 'existential response' to the conscience that draws us towards these mysterious negativities. The certainty (Gewifiheif) of which conscience (Gewisseri) reminds us is that birth has happened and death will happen and we cannot rely on three score years and ten in which to project our lives irrespective of what we have been given. This is a certain uncertainty which we constantly forget in the temptation of the idle planning of 'idle talk', as das Man or that which never dies. In light of this forgetting we must constantly resolve to recall. All that is necessary in order to add to our certainty (that death will happen) a certain uncertainty (but we do not know when) is to join mood to the understanding, for it is this mood that conscience imposes upon us. More specifically, it opens us to the anxiety that faces up to absolute unintelligibility. Anxiety is caused by the suppression of singularity in the symbolic order and, as psycho-analysis concurs, anything can set it off: 'Anxiety can arise in the most innocuous of situations' (BT, p. 234/SZ, p. 189).1 In the anxiety for which conscience prepares us, 'Dasein opens itself to a constant threat arising out of its own Da' (BT, p. 310/5Z, p. 265). This threat is that the Da itself will close, and only an actuality, not an existentiality, could threaten this closure, only something in the face of which we are powerless, and thus, 'in this state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face (vor) with the "nothing" of the possible impossibility of its existence' (BT, p. 310/5Z, p. 266). Conscience is the way in which Dasein echoes death, inculcates its senselessness and makes sense of its beckoning, which would lead us into the abyss of senselessness. It is because conscience is nothing without its response that it is said to call both 'from me and yet from beyond me (BT, p. 320/5Z, p. 275). Birth and death are 'beyond me' and beckon in conscience but Dasein is the (existential) response to these facts, a response which thus comes 'from me'. Conscience is its own response and the originally repressed (death) is nothing besides its return (existential dying). Since death cannot enter the scheme of significance — 'das Man cannot die' — it draws us away from this significance. But one can never escape significance, so what sense does this drawing have? Withdrawing in Heidegger means precisely to 'withdraw into oneself and always to encounter there somebody that one did not expect to find. It is a withdrawing which is incomplete, that draws with it a certain element of that from which it withdraws, which then acts as a sign pointing into the withdrawing void (WCT, pp. 8—9/ WHD, pp. 5—6). In withdrawing from significance one excepts oneself from the world without moving outside of it, and one withdraws in response to that excess which refuses to be integrated into the Symbolic and thus stirs our understanding to make sense of this excess by projecting possibilities that

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attempt — by constant alteration — to capture and be true to our real singularity donated by death while remaining within common significance. Dasein does not exist without conscience any more than it can exist without being born to die, and therefore it is misleading to suggest that man can ever exist in blissful indifference without the singular intrusion of conscience. He cannot. What is repressed returns precisely because it is repressed, and since conscience is always already happening and is indeed concomitant with the very formation of one's 'self, any response to conscience which causes us symbolically to become who we are will always amount to a repetition. A metaphysical bias on the part of the ontological difference itself will have caused Heidegger to understand this repetition as a form of 'authenticity' or selfappropriation on the part of the individual human being which has given rise to the reading of Being and Time within the trammels of the two-part schema of inauthenticity and authenticity. But it is precisely this repetition which is necessary if we are to keep the reflexive loop of the self open. It causes this reflexivity constantly to modify itself, to avoid falling back into indifference. Man was already the negativity within beings as a whole that could allow them to manifest themselves and open 'being' as their very presentation, he was already characterized by disclosedness (Erschlossenheit); to repeat this self by remaining constantly open to the possibility of the collapse of this singular space is explicitly to seize upon this openness and to live it as one's very task, at an ever greater pitch of intensity and with an explicit willingness. This would be the ethical repetition of one's state and is called Entschlossenheit or 'resolute openness', a disclosedness that is constantly resolved upon. It is ultimately conscience that calls us to this repetition.

VORLAUFEN AND

ENTSCHLOSSENHEIT

Perhaps the most important place in which Heidegger begins to question the very foundation on which fundamental ontology is based is in Division Two, Chapter Three of Being and Time. Here Heidegger asks the question, 'How are these two phenomena of anticipation (Vorlaufen) and resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) to be brought together? ... What can death and the "concrete situation" of acting (Handeln) have in common?' (BT, p. 349/SZ, p. 302), which is precisely to ask how the discursivizing of conscience can happen. This questioning is also manifest at innumerable other points, for instance in the invocation of birth, of joy, the constant refrain of authenticity and inauthenticity as 'modifications' 9 dkskdkskkdsk and of course, most of all, the point around which all of these condense and which allows the others to form a coherent constellation: conscience or the second form of being-with. Here the relation between death and the opening of a crack in indifference is mooted, the cleft which conscience prises apart and wherein it dwells.

Beyonldldlldld

Vorlaufedkdkkdkdkdkdkkdkddkkdkdkdkkdkdkdkdkdkkdkdkddkdkdkkdkdkkdkdkdkdkdkkdkdkkddk the existential being-towards-death but that which stimulates it, the awaiting of the actual event of death which will always already have traumatized us and which will necessitate the rewriting of the very co-ordinates of the possible. One might say that 'anticipation', with its always disavowed etymology of'grasping', is in fact the perfect translation of what is intended here since we are speaking of the way in which an impossible fact is always prematurely grasped and brought within the possible. In asking after this anticipatory grasp, Heidegger is asking how the possible relates to the actual. 'Resoluteness does not withdraw from actuality (Wirklichkeit) but discovers first what is factically possible; and it does so by seizing upon it in whatever way is possible for it as its ownmost capability-ofbeing in das Man (BT, p. 346/SZ, p. 299)- And it is for this reason and not because of any 'decisionism' that Heidegger says, '{o}n what is it to resolve? Only the resolution itself can give the answer' (BT, p. 345/5Z, p. 298). Possibilities are for Heidegger always 'factical possibilities' (ibid.) and facts are always to become possibilities in repetition: 'anxiety brings one back to one's thrownness as something possible which can be repeated' (BT, p. 394/SZ, p. 343). Conscience, in other words, opens up the possibilities of the actual. The response to conscience which desires more conscience is a repetition. Conscience calls to us our singularity, and our existential response to this call is to repeat this singularity in a way that empowers us by allowing us to express the singularity of our lives in terms of the symbolic possibilities that we are. In other words, existence is a repetition, and a repetition which produces a difference. The vector of projection is thrust forwards until it meets the impossibility of death and is thus thrown back towards common significance. It is on the return vector that we see the Real of death undergoing its symbolization, the actual made possible. What is crucial to see is that the return of the vector returns to the same point, but in such a way that the vector has looped around or turned back upon itself. And this return is the reflexive loop of the 'self. The self is the process of the repetition of one's singularity. The self is Dasein. While insisting on the equal necessity of birth and death one must also be careful to distinguish them, inasmuch as one is for the most part sunk in indifference, which is to say in a projection of possibilities which is inauthentic in comporting itself solely towards birth. And death alone is that which can, when encountered, draw projection outside of this immanence in a 'vertical' direction, to begin the process of existential individuation which is the very formation of the Da. We are singular not in being born and dying, since everyone is born and dies; what can be singular is our response to these facts. We relate to actual birth and death passively, but this is a passivity which we must choose since it is our own and this ownership is inescapable. We are called to choose and appropriate it. We do not choose 'authenticity' but rather we choose to be these flexing vectors of the authentic-inauthentic compound rather

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than to remain in indifference. This 'rather than' indicates the sense of preference that is operative here: it is a 'choice'. Why are we forced to make a choice to be an individual rather than to remain in the comfortable state of oblivion? Precisely because we are individuals already. The choice is a forced choice, forced upon us by the urgency of death. A forced choice is one which has already been made for us and which we can only re-take. This is why Heidegger says that in this case we 'retake a choice (Nachholen einer Wahl)' (BT, p. 313/SZ, p. 268). We are singularities already, insofar as this singularity is donated to us by birth and death. But it is precisely these facts that the indifferent das Man must occlude if it is to constitute itself. So we must resist this occlusion. And we ask yet again: whence the force of this imperative? It issues from the facts that we are to die and we have been born. It is remarkable that Heidegger should have been accused of, and indeed fallen victim to, the privileging of the individual whose isolation occurs in the actual event of their death, when in fact the majority of Being and Time is dedicated to an analysis of everydayness, das Man, which knows no death at all and is concerned solely with the ambit of birth. And similarly it is remarkable that he is accused of ignoring the other when he attributes the most important form of death — factual death — solely to this other! Being-with as conscience is the process of symbolization that finds its pivot in the distinction within conscience between call and response, which means ultimately the originary joining of the fact and its symbolization, a symbolization that produces possibilities which are in some way peculiar to each of us. Conscience is thus the origin of the process of individuation which occurs in response to the anonymous and indifferent facts of birth and death. For this reason Heidegger can say: 'Death individualizes ... in such a manner that ... it makes Dasein, as being-with, have some understanding of the capability-ofbeing of others' (BT, p. 309/5Z, p. 264—my emphasis), precisely because Dasein's singularity can be expressed only in common terms. What Heidegger found himself unable to say in Being and Time was that moods are in fact the very origin of understanding in revealing the unintelligible fact which must be made intelligible by understanding. The only moment in Heidegger's early discourse which approaches this thought of discursivization is that of conscience and therefore being-with. The chapter of Being and Time concerned with the relation between anticipation and resolute openness effectively demonstrates Heidegger's incipient thinking of the relation between conscience and its existential response or between actuality and possibility. In other words, it broaches the topic of the ontological difference itself and points towards the need to rethink it. Insofar as being-with is conscience, it will do the same, as we have insisted. To ask how the inauthentic-authentic compound relates to the extremes of the indifferent and the most-own, or how being relates to its meaning, is to ask how a significant whole relates to the fact of its givenness and thus to question its factuality and givenness as such. It is to ask what happens when death as the

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most own intrudes upon indifference, as a stranger in the midst of the homely and the comfortable. Anxious joy relates us to this uncanny guest.

CONSCIENCE-ANXIETY-RESOLUTENESS If conscience is to draw indifference out into the form of the existential between of authenticity and inauthenticity then we must counter the misunderstanding that conscience leads us to authenticity alone. As we have stressed throughout and as we shall explore in the conclusion to this chapter, this misunderstanding could not have been avoided given that the site of being is in early Heidegger confined to man on the basis of his finitude and thus the relation to being understood to be a matter of Wf-appropriation. But what matters is to demonstrate that conscience is precisely an element within Heidegger's text which subverts this very understanding. In this section we shall examine the textual evidence that Heidegger did not understand conscience to be a call to authenticity and certain clues that indicate this understanding to be untenable. As discourse, conscience has both a mood and an understanding. The mood of conscience is broadly speaking the anxiety that opens us to nothingness, while the understanding is the desire for conscience, the translation of death (and birth) into existential possibilities. Conscience as the beckoning of death demands the response that we be ready for the revelation of death beyond understanding, which occurs by way of anxiety. Anxiety is the relation we have to singularity, occluded by our interchangeable symbolic identities. It therefore exists between the Real and the Symbolic, a response to the way in which the Real can present itself only within the Symbolic and a mark of the fact that, vice versa, the Symbolic is always a response to the Real: anxiety marks our uncanny dwelling between the two. It is crucial to notice that conscience is not simply anxious, which would mean that it called us to a state of utter isolation. Rather, conscience opens us to the possibility of anxiety. To respond to death in the projection of possibilities is to be prepared for an encounter with the actual fact which these projections both repress and indicate. This existential empowering amounts to our 'readiness for anxiety', which means not shirking it or lying prostrate before it but being prepared (BT, p. 343/SZ, p. 297). We can do nothing about anxiety but we can be prepared for it to happen and desire it. If conscience 'frees us' for anxiety in the way of opening the sway of our possibilities, and being-with is 'conscience', then we can understand why Heidegger uses this revealing construction in his description of the second form of being-with as what 'frees the other' for himself (BT, pp. 158—9/SZ, p. 122). This means that it opens up the possibility of a singular response to the anonymous facts of birth and death which conscience demands that we face up to. The first stage of this freeing is precisely the sharing of those moods that turn us towards the facts of birth and death: joy and anxiety. I understand the sharing

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of these two, the intermediary of anxiety and joy, to be love, a love which Heidegger specifies, perhaps without warrant, as philia or 'friendship'.23 But to experience these moods is not yet to formulate a significant and singular response. These moods, and precisely in their unusual combination, are merely a preparation for this. Anxiety attunes us not to singularity but to the source of singularity, the nullities of Dasein's finitude. Therefore, in order to reach the stage of anxiety one must first be opened to the fact that the symbolic order stifles our singularity, and this is the task of conscience. Conscience readies us for anxiety. With the understanding that creates possibilities and the mood that turns us towards the actuality which opens the sway of these possibilities we reach the state of 'resolute openness' (Entschlossenheit). For this reason, the anxiety for which conscience readies us is said not to be identical with resoluteness but rather to precede it and make it possible: 'But even though the present of anxiety is held on to, it does not as yet have the character of the moment of vision, which temporalizes itself in resolution. Anxiety merely brings one into the mood for a possible resolution (Entschlufly (BT, p. 394/SZ, p. 344), and even resoluteness is not authenticity but rather the balance between authenticity and inauthenticity, which unique 'mixture' amounts to Dasein's singular self. When Heidegger says, 'Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its being free for ... the authenticity of its being' (BT, p. 232/5"Z, p. 188) we should be careful to read this 'free'. Mood is never alone in its disclosure: understanding is required, and this is why the anxiety that precedes resoluteness and which opens up the possibility of authenticity does not take us all the way to the resolute revelation of being since this resoluteness is precisely an /Vresolute swaying between authenticity and inauthenticity (cf. BT, p. 345/5Z, p. 299). But this swing has been freed up and Dasein released from indifference, the leeway opened in the direction of the most-own and authenticity by anxiety, and hence Heidegger can say that, 'anxiety individualizes. This individualization ... makes manifest to it {man} that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its being' (BT, p. 235/ SZ, p. 191). In other words, none of conscience, anxiety, and resoluteness takes us to authenticity. Conscience calls us to heed the occlusion of our singularity within das Man. Anxiety brings us before the rent that is Dasein, the self that is the slash of authenticity/inauthenticity, 'the thin wall by which das Man is separated, as it were, from the uncanniness of its being' (BT, p. 323/SZ, p. 278), a self that is to be repeated in resolution. Conscience does not call us to authenticity but rather, by way of the mostown's being brought to bear on the indifferent, to anticipatory resoluteness (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit): it calls us to a double nullity and thus to the between of authenticity and inauthenticity. Therefore, '{t}he call of conscience ... does not hold before us some empty ideal of existence, but calls us forth into the situation' (BT, p. 347/SZ, p. 300 - my emphasis). It is not as if one could hearken to conscience and thereby immediately be able to describe oneself as an 'authentic man'. Not at all. Rather, hearing conscience

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merely prepares us for the prelude to our repetition which will open up Dasein, our selfhood. Conscience arises from the excessiveness of our finitude, the ultimate source of the singularity which is our singular response to the actual facts of death and birth. Mood and understanding relate to one another as conscience and our response to it. Conscience is nothing without its response. Conscience as the beckoning of the actual may thus be situated between the actual and the possible and thus between the outer elements of our fourfold schema (indifference, most-own) and the inner two (inauthenticity, authenticity), thus to guarantee their unity. CALL

CALL

Bith

Death Response

Response (inautheaticity

(inautheaticity

Nullity (Real)

Dasin (symblic)

Nullity (Real)

Figure 4. The action of conscience as the formation of Dasein

Because conscience is a short circuit between mood and understanding, it amounts to the very origin of discourse as the symbolic articulation of meaning into signification in response to the nullity within the whole which is thus the abyssal meaning or ground of being qua intelligibility. Thus, being-with as conscience amounts precisely to the withness of the compound (authenticityinauthenticity) and its extremes (indifference, most-own), accessed in understanding and moods respectively. It is thus quite clearly neither authentic nor inauthentic. It bridges the gap between actuality and possibility and concerns the formation of the singularity of the other, a singularity which comes about only in the conscientious response to conscience. This relationship between the actual facts of death and birth and their existential response, between actuality and possibility or between being as identical with its Da and the quite distinct fact of man's finitude upon which it is founded is a relationship of grounding that Heidegger does not and cannot think while remaining within fundamental ontology. Conscience builds a forbidden bridge between beings and that which is definitively not a being. This is the bridge of the 'with' in 'being-with'. How does Dasein as existence ever touch actual beings? What is their relation? That Being and Time does not answer these questions is marked by the enigmatic

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presence of a Tactical ideal' and 'ontic foundation' that can spur such a thing as 'existence': according to the strictures of fundamental ontology, these must remain mysterious interruptions. They indicate the obtrusion of the relation between being and beings as a whole that will remain problematic even in Heidegger's later attempts to render 'metontology', the problematic of beings as a whole, equiprimordial with ontology in 1928. All such devices will still fail to think the true 'simultaneity' of being and beings, since this is prevented by the deepest presupposition of Heidegger's early thought, the ontological difference itself that identifies being with its own Da and thus with intelligibility. In fact, there is a more original being (Seyri) which is the very process of the possible's actualization, a withdrawal into unintelligibility as the flipside of intelligible presence, an actualization that will have been foreshadowed in the analysis of conscience.

THE SECOND FORM OF BEING-WITH AS CONSCIENCE: THE OTHER'S DYING Although they foreclose death, the possibilities articulated by das Man are just as much a response to death as the possibilities articulated by conscience or the 'proper' form of being-with. The former cannot involve possibilities peculiar to each since the symbolic identities of man within this state are characterized by 'representability'. These possibilities therefore amount to a response to death in the form of possibilities that are potentially common to all. Das Man is in other words a relation to death that thinks of it precisely in terms of possibilities to the extent of altogether covering over the incalculability of the fact of death. What it remains closed to is not being-towards-death but rather the fact. Once this enters the scene, the first and indifferent form of being-with becomes impossible. Within Being and Time itself, Heidegger can assign this actual death only to the other, and yet we have seen that it is this actual death that conscience beckons us towards. For this reason, by Heidegger's own lights, conscience can involve us in being-with. Let us relate this understanding of conscience more precisely to the being-with that is said to be identical with it, albeit with the caution of quotation marks, which may be taken to indicate an uncertainty on Heidegger's part, necessitated by his understanding of being at the time. If the being-with of indifference is characterized above all by representability, then the being-with of Dasein must be distinguished from it. It must relate to the other in his singularity. But, as we have seen, this singularity is no simple punctate matter but is always one with a process of symbolization that leaves real remainders. This process of discursivization, the becoming of singularity in common significance, is precisely conscience. What stirs such a process? The actual facts of birth and death or the double nullity of man. Heidegger relegates the death of the other to an irrelevance as regards being simply because this death is actual and being is possible. Therefore it is our own death that opens us

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to this being since, for us, this death can never be actual and thus can be only as a possibility. But this reading is precisely what must be seen to be untenable in light of our understanding of conscience. Conscience demonstrates precisely the necessity of the actual to the formation of Dasein. Heidegger speaks of actual death at one and only one point in Being and Time, and this is when he speaks of the death of the other. Let us go into Heidegger's revealing descriptions of this death in order to demonstrate that conscientious being-with is precisely a relation to the actual fact of death (which Heidegger is here compelled to restrict to the other but which we do not) and thereby amounts to a relation between possibility and actuality that spans the ontological difference. Since one's response to conscience is a matter of projecting possibilities it is a response which can never be adequate, since that to which it attempts to be adequate is an actuality that will always remain other to possibilities, and therefore inappropriable by either myself or the other, to whom Heidegger must assign this actual death because his location of being in Dasein compels him to think it in terms of appropriation. We have seen that being-with is described by Heidegger as a relationship involving mood. If being-with involves mood then this means that it is a relation to an actuality. It relates most 'properly' to that actuality which is the other's death (and birth). The other is therefore not the concrete other of intersubjectivity but precisely the real or Levinassian other (I'Autre): ultimately being-with is a relation between singular possibilities, which are my own, and a nullity, which is neither mine nor yours. Should we say therefore that guilt is what obliges us to the second form of being-with rather than simply making it possible? Is this the sense in which conscience 'not only makes known that in an existentiell manner such authenticity is possible {i.e. never an actual state} but demands this of itself (BT, p. 311/SZ, p. 267). When Heidegger invokes a 'guilt' inherent to being-with, this can, I believe, be explained only in light of our reading of the second form of being-with as a relation of our Dasein as possibility to an actuality which will always exceed it, a singularity that cannot be appropriated by anyone and therefore remains 'null' (nichtig). Factically, however, any acting (Handeln) is necessarily 'conscienceless', not only because it may fail to avoid some factical moral indebtedness, but because, on the null basis of its null projection (aufdem nichtigen Grunde seines nichtigen Entwerfens\ it has, in being-with others, already become guilty towards them (an ihnen schuldig geworden isf). Thus one's desire-for-conscience becomes the taking over of that essential consciencelessness within which alone the existentiell possibility of being {Heidegger's emphasis} 'good' subsists. (BT, p. 334/SZ, p. 288 — my emphasis) We have seen that guilt is our attitude towards an unchoosable fact that defines our existence and thus can never be expiated. And yet here we find

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Heidegger making of guilt an essential relation to the other. Does this not point unequivocally to our relation with the factual birth and death that Heidegger will have assigned to the other and covered over with his hyperbolic stress on existential birth and death and in particular existential death as our own? Heidegger describes our guilt towards the other as follows: 'my being guilty for the other's becoming endangered in their existence, led astray, or even ruined' (BT, p. 327/SZ, p, 282). The other will die anyway and will already have been born, but what he risks missing as he remains sunk in indifference is the singularity of an existential response to these facts. It is indeed his very 'existence' that is endangered. What is crucial in this description of guilt is that it links Dasein explicitly to actuality. A relation to otherness is thus provided at Dasein's very heart, but this otherness is — mistakenly — allowed only to the other person. Heidegger thus attributes ownership to a fact which as such cannot be owned. At this stage Heidegger can only reverse the propriety of death and thus expropriate it, rather than being true to its ^propriety. We have been precise: birth and death are not our singularity but they are the source of this possible singularity. This relation to apropriety is the very meaning of being-with of the second kind, which therefore is not authentic but the very connection between Dasein's stretched-out existence and its outsides.

ENTRISSEN: THE OPENING OF EXISTENCE AND BEING-WITH: TEARING APART THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE The (act that being-with is conscience demonstrates it to be the relation between actuality and possibility, the fact that anonymous singularity can be responded to, enacted or possibilized only in the form of common possibilities, gathered in us with an intensity that is unique. We witness this troublesome relation between actuality and possibility in Heidegger's text when he speaks of the dying other to whom we have seen guilt to adjoin us. This other is described as being 'torn' away from us, and we as 'be-reaved'. The German word for this process is Entrissen, tearing or rending. This will be the relation of being-with, and it is here that we shall finally be clear on the relation between being-with and the ontological difference, the place of ethics in Heidegger's thought. For the withness which being-with expresses bridges a gulf which the ontological difference forbids to be spanned, since it bridges the very ontological difference itself in the sense of laying out the planks that would enable us to cross it. First of all, Heidegger uses the term Entrissen to designate the very opening of the clearing of being, the opening of Dasein's self through the inauthenticity and authenticity of the understanding. Heidegger tells us that Dasein in its relation to its death, 'remains torn away from das Man (dem Man entrissen bleibt)' (BT, p. 3Q1ISZ, p. 263). In order to constitute a self we must remain in this state of

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rending precisely between indifference (das Man) and the most own (death). This is a condition of the manifestation of being. The tendency of thrownness is an ever-present threat to openness: 'understanding is . . . constantly torn away (Losreiflen) from authenticity and tears into (Hineinreifien) das Man (BT, p. 223/ SZ, p. 178). Rending is always an incomplete process that binds what is rent asunder just as much as it severs them. It is the opening of the ontological difference in the site of Dasein's understanding of being. The second use that Heidegger makes of the word Entrissen, crucially, is to link us to the dying other: Entrissen is the relation of be-reavement, in which we remain be-reft from the other after the fact of his death: 'The "deceased" ("Verstorbene"', the one who died) as distinct from he who is simply dead (Gestorbeneri), has been torn away (entrisseri) from those who have "remained behind", and is an object of "concern" in the way of funeral rites, interment, and the cult of graves' (BT, p. 282/SZ, p. 238). We should notice the apostrophes suspending 'concern' in this sentence. What do they mean? Concern is our relation to that which is ready-to-hand, and so the corpse can be neither presentat-hand nor Dasein, and yet because it was once Dasein it cannot entirely be reduced to a ready-to-hand object, as marked by the apostrophes. So the question must persist: if it is none of present-at-hand, ready-to-hand or Dasein, then what is it? Does it not mark precisely a Dasein which has exceeded existence and split apart as it was struck down by the very fact of death? Do those of us who survive not dwell alongside a Dasein which stretches between existence and an utterly unintelligible actuality, 'tarrying alongside in mourning and commemoration (Im trauernd-gedenkenden Verweilen bei ihm)' (BT, p. 282/SZ, p. 238)? As present-at-hand and yet at the same time Dasein, does the dead other's being not stretch between possibility and actuality, the Da of Sein and the actual fact that conditions this manifestation? In other words, does the empirical not here stretch up and touch the transcendental, thereby bringing it down to earth? Do not being and beings, possibility and actuality touch one another in the dead other? Does the other in the process of dying towards their actual death not present us with a form of being which the ontological difference cannot provide for? Does it not therefore demand that the ontological difference be questioned, and in the most profound way, which means with regard to its origination? The second form of being-with that relates to the actual death of the other deconstructs the ontological difference. Is this why Heidegger had to occlude it from his analysis? Because it would have shown up all too starkly the untenability of the presupposition upon which fundamental ontology rested? The corpse of the dead other fails to fit any of Heidegger's 'categories' of being. It is in fact a bridge between actuality and possibility, which subverts the ontological difference on which this categorization rests, since the ontological difference keeps possibility and actuality rigidly distinct in the form of being and beings, when in fact, as Heidegger realizes, this understanding of being and beings is a historically mediated one and thus the ontological difference itself must be questioned as to its genesis. This particular positing of difference must

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be understood in its differentiation, which is a historical one that changes the way in which being and beings are related to one another at different moments in history. Entrissen, or the dying of the other, is a word that joins being and beings together in a way intolerable to the pure positing of the ontological difference. Thus, what matters is not to find new ways to think the relation between being and beings, as Heidegger does throughout the 1920s, but to cross out the difference altogether and to begin again from the beginning. It will take Heidegger an entire decade after Being and Time to risk this leap of logic. If Heidegger identifies being with its own clearing and allows it to be founded upon man's distinct finitude, does he not end up restricting being to the way in which it appears to man? Can it be legitimate to allow the process of manifestation to rest on the albeit abyssal and unsure foundation of man? It is just such questions that the corpse of the other puts to us, since in demonstrating the process of senescence he brings to light a process of manifestation that runs from the possible to the actual. This is the purely animal process of Verenden, 'perishing', or rather the intermediate Ableben or 'demise' (BT, p. 291/SZ, p. 247), which must therefore gain a renewed importance, as Derrida rightly asserts (Derrida 1990, p. 30-42 et al.). What Derrida does not assert is that it does gain a renewed importance in Heidegger's later work, as the present work has set itself to show. Heidegger is blinded to the importance of actual death, and thus the span of being-towards-death and actual death in 'demise' is allowed only to the other at whose death we shall be present. If this alone is the place to which Heidegger restricts actual death, and if actual death has taken on an unusual significance for our reading, then do not Heidegger's descriptions of the death of the other take on a much greater import than first appears? If moods relate us to facts and factual death cannot concretely happen to us then might it not be the case that the experience of impending and actual bereavement can also provoke anxiety? Or is it perhaps the case that anxiety is a mood which on Heidegger's understanding is impossible actually to feel, as if it were the limit case of moods, and the encounter with the Real were rather a trauma beyond experience and the only way in which one could comport to factual death would be through fear, the relation, according to Heidegger, to an event that is impending, such as 'a storm, the rebuilding of the house, or the arrival of a friend' (BT, p. 294/SZ, p. 250)? Heidegger does indeed tells us that the loss of the other, the only access he allows Dasein to actual death, is something that we fear. '"That which is feared for" is one's being-with with the other who might be torn away from one ("Befiirchtet" ist dabei das Mitsein mit dem Anderen, der einem entrissen werden kb'nnte)' (BT, p. 181/SZ, p. 142).

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THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE AND THE MEANING OF BEING If death is described by Heidegger only insofar as it constitutes our access to being, then clearly the way in which Heidegger thinks being will circumscribe the way in which he understands death. According to the ontological difference, being must be rigidly distinguished from everything actual that is in being and must therefore be thought as pure possibility: 'Being is possibility' (CTP, VIII, p. 335/CzA 6j>, p. 475). This is clear simply from the fact that Heidegger locates being within the understanding of being, belonging — exclusively — to man, an understanding which Heidegger is quite clear does nothing except project possibilities. In other words, Being is quite inseparable from existence or the selfhood of man, upon which it is grounded. This ground gives us the answer to Heidegger's initial question: 'Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word "being" (was wir mit dem Wort "seiend" eigentlich meinen)? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of being (die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein)' (BT, p. 19/SZ, p. 1). To ask after being's meaning is to ask for that upon which being must be projected if it is to be understood. Heidegger's answer to this question is 'temporality'. And where is this temporality situated? It is precisely 'the temporality of the individual Dasein' (BT, p. 477/SZ, p. 425). This is a temporaeity guaranteed by death, and therefore, '{a}uthentic being-towardsdeath - which is to say that the finitude of temporality (Endlichkeit der Zeitlichkeii) - is the concealed ground (verborgene Grund) of the historicality of Dasein' (BT, p. 438/SZ, p. 386). As Heidegger says, 'a "ground" becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss (Abgrund) of meaninglessness' (BT, p. 194/SZ, p. 152 - my emphasis). An abyssal ground or meaning is precisely what man's finitude provides for being. It is abyssal in the sense that it remains asymptotic to the process of symbolic manifestation: it is never reached by Dasein's projection. In other words, the Real of death, which is the meaning of being, does not itself constitute apart of being. This is because Heidegger locates being in the understanding of being and thus in the appropriation of its meaning (temporaeity), and not in this meaning itself. Thus, death as an actual fact presented in conscience is submitted by Heidegger to the predominance of the existential response. Death is pure possibility only from the point of view of the Dasein for whom it can only ever be possible. What is only ever a virtual point for Dasein is an actual fact for man. It is precisely this actual fact which Heidegger speaks of when he invokes the locution, 'one dies . . . ' (BT, p. 297/SZ, p. 253), 'it happens . . . ' , das Man's repressive attitude towards death: in other words, it is precisely the anonymous cessation which comes to smother each and every one of us and which will define absolutely the limit of our existence. Heidegger says explicitly that in the other, death is accessed precisely as actual and as neither mine nor yours: '"Dying" is levelled off to an occurrence

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(Vorkommnis) which reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular (niemandem eigens zugehbrt)' (BT, p. 297/57, p. 253 - my emphasis). Since actual death relates to being solely insofar as it is appropriated by myself, Heidegger assigns it per se exclusively to the other man. The elision of the death of the other — which means the second form of being-with — brings to light the metaphysical prejudices of fundamental ontology, and for this reason we have exposited it here. The fact that Heidegger did not see this elision is a testimony to his understanding of being at the time, which came about through the mere positing of the ontological difference, which precluded Heidegger's thought from thinking the historical genesis of the distribution of being and beings between possibility and actuality. The actual is excluded from the essence of being, which is understood as the stretch of existential possibilities projected by Dasein on the basis of its own finitude. It is the actual fact of this finitude, which is therefore the distinct ground of being, that this chapter has brought to the fore by means of the four-part schema necessitated by the second form of beingwith which makes a relation to actual death in the guise of the death of the other originary to Dasein. While founding his entire understanding of being on human finitude, Heidegger forecloses this ground from the essence of being itself. He does this by distinguishing being (the intelligibility of significance) from its meaning (an individual human's temporaeity). He thus fundamentally restricts being to the space of human intelligibility which erupts in response to the unintelligible fact of finitude. In other words, being is confined to the Symbolic. It is taken to be founded upon the Real without including this Real and the way in which the Real and the Symbolic relate to one another is not truly understood. Man's finitude opens up a rent or carves out a hollow in beings as a whole: it is an intrusion of negativity into positivity, 'the abyss of being-a-self' (MFL, p. 182/GA 26, p. 234). The significant symbolic existence that man moulds in response to this traumatic void is being (Sein). This means that being is nothing besides its own Da, and thus Da and Sein are quite inseparable in Heidegger's thought at this stage. 'Being is inseparable from the understanding of being' (Levinas 1969, p. 45): Levinas is quite right in this. The meaning of being is indeed the singular temporaeity of an individual human being. If there were no man there would be no such thing as 'being'. Being is the symbolic translation of the Real of man's death and birth and is thus reduced to the level of human intelligibility, to the transcendental in a still-traditional sense which locates it within the human understanding. The process of world-formation or discursivization thus remains within the purview of an already constituted 'subject', in the form of Dasein's own 'conscience'. Heidegger would come to see that this testified to an unjustified humanism on his part and that the process of givenness has to be understood differently. Man's finitude reaches so deeply that it must amount to the finitude of the whole of being. The totality was never total: being must correspondingly be freed from its uni-directional founding in man's finitude and must itself assume the position of the Real that must withdraw

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from the symbolic totality of beings (including man) in order to allow this symbolic universe as such to form and metaphysics to determine it in its 'as such'. Being is not its own Da and singularity is not external to it and confined to the belonging of the human being. Rather, being is the impossible singularity of beings, a singularity instantiated in the inhuman 'thing'. 'Being' in the guise of Seyn with a y will be precisely the process whereby the Real 'becomes' symbolic, which will not be a one-way process. Being (Sein) will no longer be founded upon the finitude of a particular being (Seiende) (recall Heidegger's use of the words 'ontic foundation'). Founding will be thought as a mutual rather than a uni-directional relation, a relation of differentiation that unfolds from the midpoint of the stretch that relates the two terms of the difference, the point at which their differentiation begins and upon which they differ. The name for this unfolding of differentiation, which amounts to the very process of manifestation and therefore incorporates both of Sinn and Bedeutung, is Ereignis. Formerly, the midpoint was the self of man, emerging in the very process of discursivization (Rede) in human conscience. This withness will now occur across the face of the fourfold, in a face-to-face of world and earth, and more primordially, of man and god. In other words, it will occur as a process in which man is not central and not the factual and ahistorical ground upon which manifestation would depend. When Heidegger turns to the thinking of the differentiation of the ontological difference in 1936, when Ereignis becomes his 'guiding word' (LH, p. 241 n. 2/W, p. 148), being will no longer be founded upon human finitude and thus will not be situated within the individual human being's understanding and thus restricted to signification. This turn will occur as the result of an explicit acknowledgement of what was foreclosed in fundamental ontology, which foreclosure we have attempted to indicate in this chapter by way of a deconstruction of Heidegger's second form of being-with. Being-with as conscience marks the very bridging of the ontological difference between actuality and possibility and the restriction of actual death to the death of the other, demonstrating that what must occur in the later work is a rethinking of death on the basis of a rethinking of the difference. And it is precisely this rethinking that will allow the other to retain a place in the later work, when the focus of ethics turns to the inhuman being or the 'thing'. In other words, from an unjustified focus on 'existence' as the existential response to death, Heidegger will turn to the anonymous factual event of death, which will still be the testimony to being, and if ethics is a response to being then this ethics will begin with an attentiveness to death. Once being and beings are thought in their historical differentiation Heidegger will be able to think history, not as the varying significations of the univocal and ahistorical meaning of being, but rather as changes in the very difference between being and beings, different degrees to which the one prevails over the other, a predominance that will be the de/cision of Seyn. In other words, Heidegger will begin to think the difference rather than presuppose it.

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In fact, the very nature of factuality will be rethought, the givenness of the given shown to partake of an historical and asubjectal process of giving which calls on man without being grounded upon him. If temporality was the foundation upon which being rested, then later Heidegger will voice his dissatisfaction with such a brute fact as the ultimate of his quest, denouncing it as the most basic metaphysical stratum of his work. What his work shall come to think is therefore the very giving of the given as a historical process that changes radically across epochs to form a progression amounting to a nihilistic history in which the transcendental conditions of givenness (Seiri) are gradually replaced by beings as a whole (Seiende) and therefore the still deeper process of the splitting of the transcendental and the empirical (Seyri) is thrust ever deeper into oblivion. Thus the uni-directional founding of being upon man's finitude will be removed, for any such ultimate ground, even if it is abyssal, will be considered by Heidegger to amount to a metaphysical substantia, which is why 'temporality' will be replaced by a strifely balance between time and space in the 'time-playspace' (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) of Contributions to Philosophy. Fundamental ontology could not acknowledge that grounding is not a one-way process so long as it relied on the ontological difference, and for this reason Heidegger had to find a starting point for his thought other than that of the ontological difference. If one begins from the presupposition of the ontological difference one begins with a relation between being and beings already in place. This is a presupposition that philosophical questioning, or phenomenology, must bracket out. It is precisely this, the root cause of Heidegger's early misunderstanding, that will be questioned in the later work. Let us examine the relation between being and its meaning in order to edge closer to the turn.

BEING'S FOUNDATION UPON ITS MEANING (TEMPORALITY) In his early work Heidegger restricts 'being' to the intelligibility of beings, which is founded upon the finitude of man understood as 'temporaeity' (Zeitlichkeii). Temporaeity is thus the 'meaning' of being. This temporaeity is ultimately understood to be a primal fact, without explanation, an Urfaktum as Heidegger has it in The Metaphysical Foundations of The relation of founding exhibited here leaves unthought the presupposition of the foundation and the nature of founding itself. The finitude that grounds being as well as this finitude's belonging to the individual man is simply taken for granted. That this finitude constitutes a subjectal foundation is manifest in the way temporality temporalizes or in other words 'generates itself (sick zeitigt). This is the movement of the subiectum: auto-affection. Temporality does not depend on anything outside itsdkdkdkkkskskskksdkdkdklslslskfkfldldldlkdkkdkdlsllskddk the thinking of being at this stage of Heidegger's work remains infected with a substantial foundation ('foundationalism'), a unique foundation insofar as it is a

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negativity otherwise than beings, and one hardly to be found in the history of philosophy, but a foundation nevertheless. Heidegger understands his quest here as a search for the grounding meaning (Sinn) of being, a meaning that always articulates itself in signifiers (Bedeutungeri). He is thus compelled to understand being as intelligibility (yerstandlichkeitddkkdkdkkdkkdkdkdkdkkdkdkdkdkdkdldlddldlldldllddlldlddldldldl If metaphysics in each case constructs a system that attempts to assign a signification to beings as a whole, governed by a particular master signifier — the 'as such' of beings or their very 'name' — then what it forgets is that all signification presupposes a meaning, which invariably comes to be articulated in the form of signification. It is the attempt to isolate the meaning upon which metaphysics rests that constitutes fundamental ontology. Heidegger is therefore opposing metaphysics in seeking this meaning, but he remains metaphysical insofar as he separates this meaning from being itself and thus makes of it an ahistorical matter which only 'later' 'becomes' historical, and insofar as he locates it within a particular being (the human being) and thereby reduces being to anthropic intelligibility. In early Heidegger, it is man who spans the ontological difference. This is his 'ontico-ontologicaT privilege. He is the moment within beings as a whole that exceeds the whole and relates beings to being. For this reason the place of ethics centres upon man and his achieving the task of existence: ethics, broadly speaking, is therefore an 'ethics of authenticity'. 'Finitude' in early Heidegger is understood to be the source of the singularity of man, since it ensures that he has but one life to lead. This life is therefore his own, and thus finitude is understood to result mjemeinigkeit, the quality Dasein has of owning its own being in each case. But to own it is not yet to 'own up' to this ownership. It is therefore only when this Jemeinigkeit becomes appropriated that it becomes Eigentlichkeit or authenticity. Facticity is to be raised to an existential power on the part of man and thereby become his singularity, which he opens for himself in response to the anonymous negativity of his finitude. Strictly speaking, the human being which exists in indifference does not yet have a self. It is called das Man precisely because the mineness which belongs to it has not yet been appropriated, and for this reason, here, 'everyone is another and no one his self(Jeder ist der Andere und Keiner er selbst)' (BT, p. 165/SZ, p. 128 — my emphasis). Dasein is defined by two characteristics: the first is that it is always mine and therefore holds something back that cannot be revealed to a disinterested observer. As a consequence of this mineness, Dasein's being can be understood only as 'existence', which is its second characteristic. This means, broadly speaking, that what it is will be decided not on the basis of an essence that might be determinable from the outside and in advance but only by the way in which its mineness is related to and unfolded across the entire span of its life (BT, pp. 67—8/SZ, pp. 41—2). This existence is not 'essence' because it is singular rather than universal. It is the singular way in which Dasein conies to terms with its

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owning its own life (mineness) with no possibility of ever owning another. It has this one life because it dies. Death guarantees that it has no chance of choosing another life, or strictly speaking, death and birth together dictate this. For this reason, Heidegger says, '{i}n dying, it is indicated that death is ontologically constituted through mineness and existence' (BT, p. 284/SZ, p. 240 — my emphasis). As a result of the ineluctable facts of birth and death I find myself riveted to this one existence for the rest of my life, however long it may be: finitude makes us irreplaceable. Because Heidegger understands this finitude to be the property of the human being he cannot envisage the possibility that beings as a whole might themselves be understood as finite and beings within them as the subject of singularity. In other words, Heidegger thinks finitude or temporaeity, the meaning of being, as owned, when in truth it is not. Thus, being rests upon the urfactual foundation of human temporaeity, and therefore this finitude must be rethought. In other words, the ground of being must not merely be asserted, but the manner of its grounding must be investigated. It is for this reason that from 1934 onwards Heidegger introduces a notion of 'grounding' in which one finds two elements, an essence and a counter-essence, opposing and striving against one another across a neutral midpoint which amounts to the territory of their battle. The most famous of these relations of mutual grounding is that which takes place between the world of significance ('being' in early Heidegger) and the earth as that aspect of the world that escapes human intelligibility. But even before this, we witness the inceptual rethinking of factuality as ground in the years immediately following the publication of Being and Time in the alteration of Heidegger's understanding of the function of moods. Moods are precisely what put us in touch with inexplicable factuality, and the way in which they come increasingly to the fore, to predominate over understanding indicates Heidegger to be rethinking the relation between the actual and the possible, the relation of grounding. Let us schematically trace this change in order to lead us as far as Heidegger can go while beginning from the ontological difference which strictly defines what I mean by 'the early Heidegger'. Far from being a gradual matter, on my understanding only the preparation of the turn is gradual: the turn itself is radical and sudden, a 'leap' (Sprung), as enacted by what I am tempted to call Heidegger's true masterpiece, Contributions to Philosophy: From Ereignis (1936-8). The way to the U-turn (Kehre) in Heidegger's thought is opened up by his insistence on the foundation of being in finitude, which is revealed by the moods that metaphysics elides. And yet Heidegger did not at first go far enough in following the consequences of this finitude and did not sufficiently awaken moods from their slumber through the long reign of metaphysics. Being and Time was the alarm call, but moods were not yet seen with unbleared eyes, free from the disintegrating memory of the metaphysical dream.

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MOOD CHANGES In Being and Time moods reveal facts: more precisely, as indicated in their ontological correlate, Befindlichkdldldldldldlldlddldllddldldldldlddlddklddldlddldlldldldllddl in which it 'finds itself (sich befindet). They place it in touch with the fact of its singularity in various ways, according to how far this singularity is allowed to express itself in that Dasein's current symbolic position. What occurs later, as the gradual elision of the word Befindlddlldldldldlldldldldlldddldlldldlldldldlllllflldldddd that this 'mood' comes to be understood as transporting Dasein not so much to its own finitude as to the finitude of beings as a whole. This means first of all that it places man in touch with his situation within the whole, which will render the whole finite in the sense of being revealed only to the situated Dasein and thus within a certain horizon centred upon its locus. This transposition, along with the increasing importance that moods come to assume in Heidegger's thought between 1929 and 1938, is crucial since it marks the fact that Heidegger is attempting to remove the troublesome elements of his early thought, and most particularly the foundation of being upon the finitude of man with which moods (in his early understanding) put us in touch. Mood was taken to reveal the meaning of being and yet to require the understanding in order to appropriate this meaning and therefore to reach being itself. Given the situation of being within Dasein's capacity for understanding, mood had to reveal the finitude of man since this was the only entity possessed of an understanding that could appropriate this finitude and thus open a site for being. In the later work, as being is shifted beyond the understanding of man, finitude is disowned and moods therefore come to reveal the finitude of the totality itself m the sense of the impossibility of our occupying a stance outside of this totality, the inexorability of a singular perspective on the whole and the consequent necessity of the metaphysician's blindspot, which deconstruction is to point out. In this way, Heidegger begins to establish a full critical distance from metaphysics and its positing. For it is precisely the intelligibility of the whole that Heidegger finds metaphysics to assert,31 searching as it does for the name of beings as such as a whole (das Seiende als solche im Ganzeri), which Heidegger distinguishes from his own matter (Sache) by later calling the latter 'being itself (das Sein selbsf): In the end an essential distinction prevails between comprehending the whole of beings in themselves and finding oneself situated (Sichbefinden) in the midst of beings as a whole' (WM, p. 87 W, p. 7). This new description of moods is quite crucial, since it begins to apply the word Ganze, totality (totum) or whole (boloskkskskskdkdkkdkdkdkdkdkdddkdkdkdkdk Dasein, which in Being and Time was taken to be the sole proprietor of an 'open wholeness', a totality that opens onto an excess without incorporating it. If we were to describe the shift that occurs in the 1920s in preparation for the turn, it would be to say that Heidegger begins to understand the finitude of man more broadly as the finitude of beings as a whole.

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Moods place us in touch with precisely what metaphysics has always missed, and that is /^intelligibility, resulting from our factual positioning within that very whole at a certain place and time within a discursive tradition. Heidegger will later become more extreme and understand us to be situated within a certain distribution of the terms of the ontological difference itself. This unintelligibility, for the early Heidegger, takes the form of the very /actuality of the givenness of the intelligible whole of beings. In other words, even if the whole of beings is intelligible there is something about this whole that remains unintelligible, opaque to understanding, and that is the factual givenness of this whole. It is the fact that Dasein remains thrown without choice into a certain scheme of significance that moods put us in touch with. The moods that metaphysics depreciates as obstacles to the understanding in fact put us in touch with a feature of intelligibility that exceeds the grasp of the understanding, and this is the problematic that fascinated the early Heidegger: 'factuality' (Tatsachlichkeit) or, as it is understood in the case of Dasein, 'facticity' (Faktizitaf). Heidegger's own early emphasis on the understanding demonstrates his thinking of being to remain metaphysical in insisting on being's full identity with intelligibility. Actual death and birth lend Dasein its specific finitude, which amounts to its positioning within the world, which irremediably alters its perspective on that whole of common possibilities, since it cannot take up a position outside of it or assume that its position does not matter. This finitude of situation amounts to the singular distortion in one's own perspectival revelation of what is also revealed to everyone else who inhabits this world. This perspectivality introduces the inevitable factual blindspot that will besmirch any purportedly comprehensive survey of the whole. By rendering understanding and mood equal in their revelatory power and always concomitant with one another, Heidegger insists that Dasein reveals the whole in a manner that is in some way peculiar. It is because moods reveal to us that our revelation of the whole is always somehow anchored in our position that one is absolutely justified in using the word 'disposition' to translate Stimmung, although the German means something much more particular than the English 'disposition' and refers to the manifold degrees and kinds of 'feeling well disposed' and 'indisposed'. Thus, due to the limited use English makes of this 'disposedness' it is better perhaps to retain the more specifiable 'mood'. Moods do not colour our view on the whole, as if it would be possible in a pure understanding to reveal this whole without prejudice. This would be to think from the standpoint of the comprehensive intuition of an infinite being. When one begins from the non-metaphysical standpoint of original finitude one has to realize that there is no such thing as a whole without a certain singular twist. In other words, the distortion is inherent to the whole itself and what moods reveal is not a distortion that we must 'allow for' in our attempt to reach the pure objective whole, but the fact that any revelation of the whole will always be perspectivally distorted. One must begin not from man's finitude, but from

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original finitude. If finitude is truly original then one is to understand moods as putting us in touch with the finitude of the totality as such. Although Heidegger opposes metaphysics by placing moods on a par with understanding in their revelatory qualities, initially this continues to restrict being to the understanding and the Symbolic. But what Heidegger moves towards is the awareness that moods should be made prior to understanding as an access to the traumatic Real which metaphysics supplies with a signification. In other words, despite Heidegger's assertion that both understanding and mood are discursive, moods should be to an extent excluded from discursivity and the historicality that symbolic mediation brings with it. But the relation between the Real and the Symbolic changes over history: anxiety was assumed always to have been the mood that transports Dasein to its symbolically stifled finitude. But if the predominance of the Symbolic over the Real changes over time, then so must the moods that provide us with access to this Real within the Symbolic. Heidegger's early ahistoricism was in ignorance of what Lacoue-Labarthe above all insists upon and that is 'Darstellung. The immediate presentation of a thesis on being is exactly what Heidegger realized to be impossible as he came to think being as always already having withdrawn from the totality and therefore from man, as a />re-original withdrawal in whose wake the entire metaphysical tradition must exist in a constantly frustrated attempt to understand its own lossdkdkkdkdkdkddkdkkdkdddkskslskddkkdkkdkdkdkdkdkdkkddkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkdk abeyance. The early Heidegger presupposed that direct access to the Real was possible in moods, although this Real was exterior to being, while the later Heidegger realized that the Real could be accessed only through the effects and distortions it wreaks on the Symbolic, and that this Real was being itself and any attempt to circumscribe it with a 'meaning' was doomed to remain metaphysical. In other words, the question of Darstellung became inherent to the question of being.35 Thus, at one and the same time, with mood Heidegger goes both too far, in attempting to access the unmediated Real, and not far enough, in that he fails to think through the intertwining of mood and understanding. Moods should have been thought as providing a certain access to the Real in the Symbolic, as being beyond metaphysics' ken but not so far beyond that the access would be unmediated by the Symbolic. But no matter how far the early Heidegger alters the original functioning of moods, he still operates within the framework of the ontological difference, which prevents him from properly understanding their relation. Before the turn, being will always be assigned to the understanding (the Seinsverstandnis) while mood will be assigned to beings as a whole. We are still confined within the original distinction between being and beings (as a whole) that characterizes the ontological difference. Mood and understanding are linked in Being and Time by the voice of conscience and we here witness a stuttering and inchoate development of the original intimacy of the two, but this problematic is left undeveloped by Heidegger until the turn itself, when this voice will be

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rethought as the voice of being itself. Until that point, between being and beings there will remain a relation of falling, a depreciative Platonic mimesis, which is reflected in the a priori separation of understanding and mood. The problem of this separation troubles Heidegger, and leads him constantly to question the relation between the ontological and the ontic, as already symptomatized by the 'ontic foundation' of Being and Time and culminating in the brief appearance of the notion of 'metontology' in The Metaphysical foundations of Logic. Let us allow this last appearance to shine in full before immediately snuffing it out as in fact does Heidegger, realizing that this was as far as one could go if one began from the standpoint of a presupposed ontological difference, and that this was not far enough. Since being is there only insofar as beings are already there (im Da), fundamental ontology has in it the latent tendency towards a primordial, metaphysical transformation which becomes possible only when being is understood in its whole problematic. The intrinsic necessity for ontology to turn back to its point of origin can be clarified by reference to the primal phenomenon of human existence: the being 'man* understands being; understanding-of-being effects a distinction between being and beings; being is there only when Dasein understands being. In other words, the possibility that being is there in the understanding presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, and this in turn presupposes the factual extantness of nature. Right within the horizon of the problem of being, when posed radically, it appears that all this is visible and can become understood as being, only if a possible totality of beings is already there. As a result, we need a special problematic which has for its proper theme beings as a whole. This new investigation resides in the essence of ontology itself and is the result of its overturning (Umschlag), its metabole. I designate this set of questions metontology. And here also, in the domain of metontological-existentiell questioning, is the domain of the metaphysics of existence (here the question of an ethics may properly be raised for the first time). {...} To think being as the being of beings and to conceive the problem of being radically and universally means, at the same time, to make beings thematic in their totality in the light of ontology. (dksksssffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff pp. 199-200)36 Once being is understood outside the trammels of the ontological difference it can exceed man's property and encompass more than merely that which his understanding is capable of projecting. It can also encompass the impossible, which was formerly the immovable fact of man's finitude upon which it was founded. If being ceases to be intelligible then it is no longer founded upon a finitude that belongs to man and exceeds it, but rather itself amounts to the finitude of the whole, as the Real which withdraws from the Symbolic draws the

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world towards a vanishing point and thereby bestows upon it a certain historical perspective. This withdrawing point of finitude is no longer man, but man is the one who is drawn towards this withdrawing and who thereby testifies to this withdrawal in his symbolic response to being, his ethical dwelling.

TRANSITION What occurs as we move through Heidegger's oeuvre is that Sein becomes separated from Da, the Real from the Symbolic, first with the hyphen, which will mark the differentiation of time and space that explains being and beings' differentiation, and then separated altogether. Heidegger will no longer speak of 'Da-sein' but of the 'man' who is peripheral to the 'fourfold', which describes in a certain way the differentiation of being and beings. Heidegger realized that being and intelligibility should simply not be placed next to each other. But stages in Heidegger's development cannot be missed out if one is to understand the rhythm of his work as a whole. We must begin with the hyphen. Being becomes nothing but the hyphen or the 'with' of Da and Sein, and thus Heidegger's work becomes nothing if not a thinking of the way in which the Real and the Symbolic are related. Our obsession with 'being-with' is not arbitrary with respect to Heidegger's work since the thinking of being (Sein) itself becomes a thinking of the 'with' (Mit), Mitseyn. We shall come to ask whether the originality of the 'with' to being allows Heidegger to rethink the relation between ethics and politics along the faultlines of the rift of the ontological difference and indeed by his own lights to render thought coextensive with a certain ethics and politics. What Heidegger came to realize was that his thesis on being, the ontological difference, was historically determined and demonstrated the nihilistic history of being to have him in its clutches, albeit by the very fingertips, and if the ontological difference was determined by a history, then this history must be deeper than the ontological difference itself. Indeed, Heidegger names it with an older word for being: Seyn. With this word he attempts to think a more original 'being' as history, which would explain the way in which being can give and withdraw itself in varying ways throughout history. This thinking of being's history (Geschichte des Seym) is Heidegger's attempt to trace the genesis of the ontological difference, a genesis that I shall describe, with Heidegger, as a 'crossing'. This is the only way in which to avoid reducing being to a world of significance that is only founded upon the unintelligible fact of finitude, and conflating this fundamentally 'dark' clearing with the openness of the whole. 'Clearing' is rather a process whereby an open place is hollowed out, in which light and dark can play or the relief of a historical field of presence unfold itself like a map. This will ensure that man is no longer the privileged site of being's manifestation but rather the guardian of those other sites within beings as a

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whole at which being shows itself, sites for the moment of disclosure which Heidegger will call 'things'. Being is not founded upon anything, not even man's abyssal finitude; nor does it found. Sein is not founded upon Da, nor Da upon Sein. Being is not the Da but the mutually grounding play of time and space, the Real which opens the Da as the moment and site at which, in a single thing, being (Sein) becomes visible as that which organizes the way that the totality of beings appears to us. The thing marks the abyssal ground of the whole and instantiates being qua the Real which must withdraw if the Symbolic or the whole of beings is to constitute itself. Since the Real does not precede its symbolization we are speaking of being (Seyri) as the 'with', as Rede or the process of symbolization. In other words, being becomes the singular and thus withdrawn condition of the way in which intelligibility is presented to us. It encompasses the nonsymbolic Real, a Real concomitant with the process of symbolization as its remainder, an other beginning to the first in which we still live. This tracing of the genesis of the ontological difference, the place of ethics, therefore issues in an ethics of the thing, the thing being the placeholder of being itself within beings as a whole. Hence, ethics as nearness to being will be a Gelassenheit of the thing, allowing it to act as a precious and endangered marker of being. Ethics was formerly the demand for repetition which would keep the reflexive loop of the self open and thus ensure a site for being within beings, a matter — some said — of 'authenticity'. But the site of being is no longer located within man's property or selfhood but is removed to any finite being within the whole, and ethics amounts to the guarding of these sites, which man alone can carry out. Being-with, though it spurred our crossing, seems then to be discarded, excluded from the place of ethics. And if being-with is eradicated, then will not the possibilities of a complete and productive thinking of ethics and politics be lost to Heidegger's later work? No, because the role death continues to play in Heidegger's later thought will allow us to specify a being-with of those 'mortals' who are said to dwell around the fourfold thing. References to death in later Heidegger are so few and far between that one could be forgiven for thinking that its role is to a large extent depreciated in comparison with its centrality to Being and Time. It is for this reason that we have indicated the failed intimacy of being-with and death in Part I and begin Part II with an explication of the nature and role of death in the later work, as that which opens us to being in its forgottenness and thus opens a space for ethics in a time of consummate and concealed nihilism. This now anonymous event opens us to the actual in its actuality, and thus to the ontological difference. In Part III we shall make clear the way in which this allows Heidegger to unfold fully the being-with that results from this actuality of death in the guise of the being-with of mortals. The rethinking of being in later Heidegger allows him explicitly to acknowledge the aproprietdkkkdkdkdkkdkddkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkdkkddkdkkdkddkdkdkdkdkdkdk

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condition ofBeing and Times existential understanding. In Being and Time, death opened the difference between self and other, and man's later 'mortality' is still what binds us to the other, in the sense that each man shares a relation of singularity to this absolutely anonymous event, which distributes itself equally between all beings. And it is this relation to the thing that dies that will found an ethical and political being-together. The continued presence of death in Heidegger's work acts as a flag marking the place where we shall burrow in search of the forgotten other of being-with. It gives us hope that the place of ethics in Heidegger might yet involve beingwith. In fact, it shall involve two: one before it, and one after it; the first an ethical, the second a political being-with, and these two shall mutually ground one another around the midpoint of the thing. It is this midpoint to which we now turn, as our path-breaking crossing must begin again after the dead end of the ontological difference, blocked in its stride by the ever-conscientious friend. We strike out a winding path that wends towards the thing. This discussion of the very heart of ethics constitutes the central part of this book and the pivot around which it turns.

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Chapter Three

Death as the Origin of Ethics The oncological difference is the place of ethics. The metaphysical prejudices involved in Heidegger's early understanding of this place have been demonstrated by the second form of being-with, understood as it is in the form of conscience, spanning actuality and possibility and thereby crossing over the ontological difference itself. As a relation to the singularity of the other, being-with has brought into sharp relief Heidegger's restriction of singularity to my own existence, ultimately indicating him to understand being in terms of intelligibility. The fact that Heidegger attempted to isolate a 'meaning' for being that was distinct from being itself proves that he understood being as the Symbolic rather than the Real of this foundation and therefore to be founded uni-directionally on the primal and ahistorical fact that man is temporary. The abyss of finitude which carves out a hollow in beings as a whole and allows this whole to reflect on itself was situated within the human being and this restricted being to intelligibility as an openness that was anchored in man as its organizing centre and ground. This is not to think the ontological difference but to presuppose it, and to pose it on the basis of the supposedly unthinkable fact of man's finitude, distributing being and beings between possibility and actuality without thinking the process of actualization. In other words, it is to fail. It is to fail to think the way in which a negativity within the whole is crucial if this whole is to manifest itself in the light of being, which comes to fill this hole. In other words, the ontological difference is not thought in its genesis or origin, a more original 'being', an origin which is split or rather which is the point at which the two of being and beings split, a split which Heidegger names a 'de/cision' (Entscheidung),1 a decision called 'Seyn'. For this reason Heidegger describes his later relation to the ontological difference as follows: Now what becomes of the differentiation of being(s) and being (aus der Unterscheidung von Seiendem und Seyn )? Now we grasp this differentiation as the merely metaphysical — and thus already misinterpreted (mifideuteteri) — foreground of a de/cision which is being itself (Vordergrund einer Ent-scheidung, die das Seyn selbst ist). (CTP, VIII, p. 334/GA 63, p. 474)

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For this reason, a question based on the presupposition of the ontological difference remains incomplete: The question of being ... would have grasped nothing of what is most question-worthy about it (ihrem eigenen Fragwurdigsten) if it had not immediately driven onwards towards the question concerning the origin of the 'ontological difference' (Ursprung der 'ontologischen Differenz'). (CTP, VIII, p. 327/GA 65, p. 465) This origin is the very differentiation of the difference, and the way in which it occurs is through the de/cision of a more original 'being', Seyn, whose essence is therefore the very event of this differentiation, Ereignis: The understanding of being (Seinsverstandnis) moves within the differentiation of beingness and a being, without as yet Validating' the origin of the differentiation from within the de/cisive essence of being (ohne schon den Ursprung der Unterscheidung aus dem Entscheidungswerew des Seyns zur 'Geltung'). (CTP, VIII, p. 320/GA 65, p. 45 5)3 Thus, the ontological difference must be left behind, leapt over, a leap that leaps back over what has issued from the differentiations of this difference throughout history, to the origin (Ur-sprung) reached only by such a leap (Sprung). Only from its point of origin can the ontological difference be thought in the way that its two terms differentiate themselves in different ways throughout history. Thus, 'the task is not to surpass (iibersteigen) beings (transcendence) but rather to leap over this difference (Unterschied) and thus over transcendence and to inquire inceptually (anfanglich) into being (Seyn) and truth' (CTP, IV, p. 177/GA 65, pp. 250-1). Seyn as the ontological differentiation, the historical de/cision on the relative predominance of beings over being, is what goes unthought in the history of the West. It is the exchange between withdrawal and giving which determines an historical scene. For reasons that will become clear, this Seyn, as the peculiar and historically varying form of being and beings' withness, may be described as a crossing: both a passage (U her gang) in which we must currently be engaged out of nihilism and metaphysics; and a striking-through (Durchstreichung) of beings as a whole, which in its varying stages will trace the recollection of the memory of being within the overwhelming predomination of beings as a whole. 'Being' (Sein) as the intelligibility of this whole is crossed-through and intelligibility thereby anchored to a point within the whole which remains unintelligible, thereby introducing a perspectival distortion into any outlook upon the whole, a perspective whose lines meet at the vanishing point of the very centre of the cross, which we shall identify as the 'thing' described by the 'fourfold'. To represent being by means of the 'ontological difference' is to remain metaphysical and to think being ahistorically as the intelligibility of beings

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as a whole. It is to fail to think the historical event of clearing which must puncture beings as a whole if this openness is to occur. This clearing within beings is marked by the cross struck through being (Seiri), and to traverse this cross is to trace out the always historical opening of the ontological difference as it is settled throughout the various 'epochs' of its history. Since the ontological difference is the place of ethics, to traverse this crossing is to describe the origination of ethics and to mark a place for ethics in an age when (the cross of) being is forgotten. This crossing is the bridge that joins being and beings in simultaneity. Seyn is thus the very 'withness' of being and beings, a withness therefore which has not yet fully been thought: the intimacy of being and beings has been left unexplained. They have been distinguished by the assertion of the ontological difference, which is thus the first and necessary stage in recalling being from its oblivious submersion in beings, but they have not yet been brought back together. Heidegger's later thought therefore comes to supplement the thought of the ontological difference with a thinking of the 'with' and we are thus compelled to examine this thought if we are to understand how an ontological difference can be restored in today's oblivion, a relation to being, in other words, that will be related by the 'with' to the contemporary configuration of beings as a whole. In other words, we must cross being if we are to find a place for ethics today. We are still thinking being-with, but in the form of Seyn. Part III of this work will be necessary in order to show how this 'with' relates to the withness of men in a way that is both ethical and political, in tune with timeless being while acutely aware that this being is nothing besides the void that organizes contemporary actuality. This will be achieved by specifying the cross of being as the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Part II of this work thinks the essence of Seyn, Ereignis. But no essence can be thought without its co#»/er-essence, even the essence of being (Ereignis). The counter-essence of Ereignis is Geste/l, the essence of technology. And in Heidegger, technology as the manufacturing of beings as a whole and politics as the governance of the manufacturable whole are intimately linked. To reach the proper balance between essence and counter-essence — our ultimate aim — it is necessary first to explain the way in which 'being' works in later Heidegger, the nature of the 'with' that being is. The place of ethics, if it is not to remain an unjustified presupposition ('perhaps there is no place for ethics today'), must be thought in its very origination. The site of ethics in early Heidegger was man in his repetitively assumed finitude, since this temporaeity was the foundation of being and ethics is nearness to being. But today man has been decentred and swept up in the circulation of energy and the stocking up of resources, to the point at which it is impossible to attribute to him this centrality. If this is the case, then we must say that Heidegger was wrong in his assertion that the place of ethics was man and that the difference between being and beings was spanned in the stretch of his existence alone. Rather, we shall see that this place may be centred on any

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being, which Heidegger shall denominate as 'the moment-site* (Augenblicksstatte) or 'the thing' (Ding) as described by the operation of the time-space and the fourfold respectively. The thing is precisely what becomes of the ontological difference in its crossing through, it is being and beings joined for once in simultaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) (CTP, I, p. 10/GA 65, p. 13), a simultaneity which precisely forbids explanation through a single primal ground and requires rather a differing or counter-essencing balance through which it might be understood. Temporality as the ground of being no longer generates itself (sich zeitigt), for generation is always a matter of simultaneity or mutual upholding: in other words, it is a matter of differentiation. If being is no longer founded upon an ahistorical fact — man's temporaeity — then we find the later Heidegger thinking being not in terms of man's being drawn into the abyss of his own finitude in order to appropriate it, but as the void which withdraws from the totality of beings in other ways and at other places. It is indeed the very extent of this withdrawal, decided upon by Seyn, that dictates the way in which beings as a whole appear throughout history. Seyn is Heidegger's word for the historical way in which being and beings differentiate themselves from one another: its essence is Ereignis. The event of being's withdrawal (Ereignis) is precisely the gift of beings as a whole to man, and thus being in its varying withdrawal is itself history, or rather, Seyn as the ontological differentiation is, in the form of Seynsgeschichte, the very source of history. Seyn is precisely 'truth' as a-letheia, and therefore we may say that Seyn is the truth of Sein. According to Heidegger, being is now at its utmost withdrawal, and beings utterly predominate in the form of actuality. If this is the case, then there is no such thing as the ontological difference today. It has collapsed, and ethics with it, if ethics is the nearness of a being to being or the crossing of the ontological difference. If this difference is to be the place at which an ethics might be formed then we must demonstrate the way in which its occlusion could come to our attention, and indeed how it did come to Heidegger's attention. The nihilism characteristic of today is not a bleak and cold staring into the nothingness of universal values, but the very avoidance of the void, the losing of oneself in pure positivity. From the point of view of the positivity of beings, being is 'nothing'. And to overcome nihilism and find a place for ethics today it is necessary to draw man's attention to the void that his reality covers over. It is necessary, in other words, to trace the origination of the ontological difference between void and positivity (beings as a whole in the form of actuality). And the way in which the void first shows itself is in that event which first questioned the early Heidegger's thinking of the ontological difference and with which we must begin our tracing of the origination of this difference: death. But it will be a different kind of death that things die today, different to that of 1927. This death will be an actual death, an anonymity, since being is no longer the property of man. As the mark or shelter of being, death will therefore no longer

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need to be my own. It is just such a factual death that we saw to be involved in the second form of being-with, which questioned the ontological difference itself. Death crossed out (of) the 'Sein of fundamental ontology and demanded that we think finitude as a cross placed over the whole of beings to indicate a negativity within positivity. This finitude will be the finitude of the whole as such, a finitude that will alter the way in which we understand and speak about this whole's historical intelligibility. The question is how this finitude comes about: how does negativity relate to positivity, being to beings? This is Heidegger's later question. His response to it is demonstrated in this Part and amounts to a directive regarding how one is to think on the basis of a finitude absolutely originally understood, rather than merely on the basis of our own (which leads to an ethics of 'authenticity'). And since this finitude is the crossing of the whole, a crossing that is the origination of the ontological difference, this will amount to a description of how ethics can be possible, an ethics without standards or archetypes (eide) and even without authenticity as the self-appropriation of man and his polls. An ethics of the void or the Real. If being must be recalled today, when its withdrawal has been obliviated by overwhelming positivity, then in order to make room for ethics, death must be experienced and held onto since at the present time the cross of being has become invisible and death alone can reveal this invisibility. Let us first of all describe how the cross of being became invisible, by telling the nihilistic story of being.

THE HISTORY OF BEING The beginning of the history of being, the Anfang, is not a chronological point. It is something which is in the process of begin-ing throughout this history, gripping it (fangeri) and defining it as a unified totality. This constant beginning is the withdrawal or retreat (Entziehung) of being (Sein) from the totality of beings, which amounts to the process of 'clearing' necessary for the totality to present itself. This withdrawal is later Heidegger's way of describing the ontological difference: being 'refuses' to be counted as a being and consequently 'withdraws' from beings as a whole. Why does Heidegger use the word 'withdrawal', which suggests a movement over time? Precisely because the manner in which being and beings are differentiated changes over time, as does the relative predominance of beings over being. Being's withdrawal from beings ensures a certain predominance of beings as a whole over this withdrawing being, which means that the withdrawal of being is the giving of the whole of beings in its wake. In order not to reify it, we must say that being is this wake or this refusal of itself, this absence which nevertheless leaves something in its place. The whole of Western history is in the grip of this beginning and indeed this grip defines it as Western history. This means that Western history remains

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in the wake of being, forever unable to catch up with it, render it present, and hold it in its hands as we would a being, so today it has given up. Western history in each of its metaphysical positions is an ever renewed attempt to symbolize this original traumatic loss, a loss, it should be noted, of something we never possessed: being never was a being, it was never not withdrawn. This symbolization amounts to providing a univocal term for the whole of beings. These terms are the fantasies that bestow totality upon beings while occluding the fact that something always withdraws from this determination. That which withdraws is the very determination itself. If beings are denned as actuality then we may ask: is actuality itself actual? Metaphysics answers 'ydddldldlddddddl and thus tacitly supports a thesis of essential sameness, a relation of resemblance between a being and its essence, grounded and ground, or simply, a being and being which begins with the Platonic mimesis of copy and original. Deconstruction intends to pick out the moments of exception to these universal determinations, the blind spots of each metaphysical position, which must be occluded in order for a coherent metaphysical position to form. Although this withdrawal remains a constant feature of Western history — being is never a being — it does not remain at a constant degree. Rather, the history of the West amounts to the unfolding of this withdrawal as the eradication of all traces of the first time it was forgotten, in Greece, in the glories of the systems of Plato and Aristotle, so glorious that they disguise the fact that in them an original withdrawal conceals itself, a withdrawal upon which their radiance is premised. It is this covering over that is forgotten in the later philosophy that unfolds on the basis of this Platonico-Aristotelianism. Being withdraws, but this withdrawal, as we have seen, gives something in exchange, and the name for this de/cision between withdrawal and giving, the ways in which the exchange takes place over history, is Seyn. And while being remains withdrawn, always already having abandoned us, the historical decision that dictates the relation between this withdrawal and the givenness of beings is forgotten. This progressive historical forgottenness (Vergessenheii) takes place, then, on the basis of a constant ^historical abandonment (Verlassenheit). It amounts to the way in which the given (beings) conies to the fore while the process of its giving (being) becomes submerged. This is why Heidegger writes Seinsverlassenheit and Seynsvergessenheit. Thus, on top of the withdrawal of Sein comes the forgottenness of Seyn. Seyn is the progressively erased mark within beings that something like being must have withdrawn in order for them to constitute themselves. It is the steadily forgotten navel that marks the foreclosed process of their origination. We lose being {Sein) through our forgetting of Seyn or rather through its own obliviation. We forget the withdrawal and focus solely on that which it has given us. We receive the gift but forget to thank. We forget the decision that cuts an unsuturable gash between being and beings, the slash called Seyn, the umbilical cut. A forgetting of the negativity that characterizes totality allows one to posit the very wholeness of the whole, and this is precisely what

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metaphysics, forgetful of finitude and origination, carries out, positing fantasmatic figures or 'names' for being, which cover over the fact that wholeness can never be complete. History is what actually happens or the way in which totalities are formed at particular points and places through fantasmatic constructs. But we must ask what makes this actual history possible, because every openness, every globe of light requires its clearing, a void in which to shine. This void is Sein. The gesture of being's withdrawing is precisely that of the hollowing or thinning out of the whole, which carves out a clearing (Lichtung) within beings, a moment of finitude in which a negativity broaches the positivity of the whole and the whole is allowed to reflect on and become light to itself. A clearing thins itself out from the thickets of the forest of densely populated beings as a whole. We might say that being 'clears off. This hollowing out of beings as a whole is what Heidegger means by being's constant abandonment of beings, its consistent refusal to be a being. Thus it is through an exception to the totality, or the wowtotality of the totality, that something like light is allowed to enter beings, allowing them to become intelligible within the clearing. Heidegger insists that clearing and openness must be distinguished (cf. Krell 1986, p. 92) and this is precisely what Heidegger did not do in his early work, where he identifies Da and Lichtung. Clearing is a participle, at least partly a verb, while openness is only a noun. Clearing is the formation of the void of being while openness is the void itself, in which beings present themselves as a totality, filling in and thereby covering over the void. The gift of the open is the compensation offered by being in exchange for its primordial clearing (off). Sein is the void of the totality, while Seyn is the trace of this Sein within the totality of beings (Seiende). Although we shall come to explain this more fully in Chapter Five, this means that Seyn must always be instantiated in and as a certain being within the whole, a privileged yet 'humble' being that Heidegger names 'the thing'. It is the genesis of the whole, the conditions for its constitution that are obliviated, and yet they remain marked by the senseless singularity of the thing, which masks the void of the origin by its refusal to be unitarily determined, even if only for a short while. The thing is that being which covers over the void of being while at the same time holding its place within the whole, distinguished from the rest of beings by not entirely effacing the dimension of withdrawal, a dimension instantiated in the being in the form of 'earth' and 'god'. The thing is thus Seyn as the trace of the erasure of the withdrawal which is sought out by Heidegger's deconstructive readings of metaphysical positions, 'deconstructive' in the sense of demonstrating those moments within the totality that undermine it as a totality by excepting themselves from the unitary trait that defines that totality as a totality. Today, this unifying trait of 'beingness' is named by Heidegger as 'technicizability' or 'makeability', and it is precisely those singular and fragile beings called 'things' which technology is by definition unable to make, this inability marking its own blind spot. We shall return to this.

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The way in which the whole is hollowed out and thought drawn into thinking by this negativity within being is deemed by Heidegger a 'call' (Ruf), which, as we have seen, means the beckoning gesture made by a withdrawal. A void 'calls' in the sense that it demands constantly new symbolic presentations because it simply cannot share any positive trait with other beings and therefore 'fit in' to a totality: indeed, it has no positive traits at all. But without this void in the midst of positivity there would be no symbolization and no totality since there would be no exceptional point around which the whole could organize and orientate itself. Symbolizations require a trauma to set them in motion. The changes in the Seyn-thing that both covers over and marks the elided condition of possibility of the totality (Seiri) constitute events in being-history. Why such changes occur is precisely a 'mystery' to us, they elude thought, and what is often missed in readings of Heidegger's being-history is that the reason these changes are mysterious to us is that they are contingent. According to Heidegger, the withdrawal of being has never been thought in the history of philosophy. Although it could convincingly be argued that both Hegel and Lacan will have thought precisely this withdrawal, let us see why Heidegger thinks that it is today and only today (save perhaps for the moment at which Holderlin poetized in his psychotic refusal of the prevalent metaphysical symbolizations of his own day) that this clearing and the process of giving which it entails can be thought. If Seyn is that which becomes obliviated within the history of metaphysics and this Seyn is Heidegger's description of the way in which a withdrawal (being) can give (beings), then what goes unthought in metaphysics is precisely the way in which a withdrawal can give or an abyss ground. Ground in the history of metaphysics has always been thought as substantial ground, a ground more present, more in being than that which it grounds: precisely a god. What metaphysics does not think is a ground that would be less in being, in fact quite abyssal when viewed from the perspective of beings as a whole. This process of abyssal grounding is Seyn, whose essence is Ereignis, the exchange in which being gives beings in its stead, which is ultimately understood in terms of the relation and difference between time and space (Chapter Five). The forgetting of the abyssal nature of ground, the whole's dependence on a cleared void of another order to the ontic, is manifest in the historical fact that being comes to be thought in ever more positive ways and is thus brought closer and closer to the status of a being. Transcendence is more and more devalued, a process that culminates in Heidegger's Nietzsche, for whom being and beings become identified in the pure positivity of value-positing immanent life without need of transcendence, which it sees as an invention on the part of immanence for the sake of the growth in power of certain forms of life. Thus, 'being' is understood merely as a 'vapour', an evaporation or emaciation of immanent beings themselves whose mysterious ungraspable swirlings captivate those unable to tolerate the totality of immanence and who consequently turn their misty gazes to the heavens in search of redemption. With the Nietzschean

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assertion of the totality of immanence the way is paved for the rampancy of technology and the full availability of actuality for exploitation, which means actualization. Technology, as Heidegger understands it, is the means used by immanence to promulgate itself to the »th degree. It is only in its absolute stifling that the void of being can be heard to cry out. This cry is known as being's 'distress' (Not). It is precisely this distress that is felt today amidst the supposedly increasing global prosperity brought about by the spread of liberal democracy and wealth-generating post-industrial capitalism. Being's distress is felt in the characteristic intimation on the part of the sensitive that 'something is missing'. According to Heidegger, only the purest positivity can, in its denial of negativity, allow this negativity to speak from its eclipse: a well-known Heideggerian logic according to which we begin to notice something for itself only when it fails to work. What is uniquely promising about Nietzsche is that the destruction of the ontotheological god of transcendence and the abolition of a transcendent void through the affirmation of immanent positivity can point us in two directions. One towards the abolition of all negativity, anything beyond immanent beings as a whole themselves; and the other towards the realization that if there is to be a void at all then it must be an immanent void which metaphysics has misunderstood as a transcendent void, masked with an excelling positivity, god: this is the ontotheological god of metaphysics, the god who is 'dead'.7 According to Heidegger, Nietzsche and the thinkers of pure immanence take the former direction and thus arrive at a more subtle kind of nihilism than that which Nietzsche recognized in Platonic metaphysics as turning away from immanence towards the transcendent void. Nietzsche's own nihilism is simply the avoidance of the void, the refusal to think the void that must be immanent within beings themselves. What Nietzsche determines as nihilism, the absence of universal values, the lack of an ought consequent upon the voiding of the transcendent realm, is the absence of a Platonic ethics. To move beyond this and even beyond an ethics of trueness to immanence and the moulding of a life without any transcendent standard, it would be necessary to acknowledge the void within immanence itself as an ineradicable element of beings as a whole. To be nihilistic is to look for transcendence and to find none, when the nihil is rather within immanence itself; not an illusion projected by life-forms within this immanence but more real than actuality itself. Philosophy as a series of theses on beings as a whole is over (cf. NIV, p. 183/N //, p. 241) since there is now no 'as such', just an ever-growing whole defined solely by its totality, a constant exploitation of what-is in the way of forcing it to yield up its actuality or energeia, as energy. Beings are present only to the extent that they have an effect or effectivity (Wirklichkeit, actuality). What matters to this exploitation is that the void be constantly covered over. If something fails or dies, if a negativity appears within positivity, then whatever has failed must be renewed, replaced or repeated identically in an infinitesimally short space of time in order to retain the constancy of actuality. Thus every being must be

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'makeable', and this is why Heidegger defines the essence of technology in 1936 as Machenschaft, or having the capacity to make all beings reconstructable. The constancy of presence achieved through technology's ability to repeat beings identically is thus the consummation of metaphysics' understanding of being as pure presence (eidos), which has hitherto been only partially represented in the iconic instances of this essence's appearance. Now, the khorismos has been bridged and being brought down to earth since the ideal of full presence can today for the first time actually be achieved by technology's ability to repeat identically. This is why Heidegger says that metaphysics today is at the stage of its completion and in this completion takes the form of science and technology. Whatever ends, technology can repeat; whatever withdraws from appearance into darkness, science can illuminate or technology banish; thus, all negativity is exiled from beings. For this reason Heidegger describes the most essential essence of technology as follows: 'the essence of modern technology — the steadily rotating recurrence of the same' (WCT, p. \QfylWHD, p. 47) and, '{w}hat else is the essence of modern power-driven machinery (modernen Kraftmaschine) than one offshoot (Ausformung) of the eternal return of the same?' (N //, p. 233/VA, p. 122) 'Virtual reality' is actuality with all the gaps closed up, constant presence, an identical repetition of the so called 'real world' in which we may be reborn an infinity of times and everything brought before us, made immediately present by the Internet, which has ensnared the entire surface of the globe and the universe. 'Die Technik' in German refers not only to technology but also to technique and engineering, and 'technology' for Heidegger amounts to this making in the way of pre-ordained techniques: for this is what has become of poiesis — whose arete is techne — or production as bringing essence to appearance in beings through the foresight of techne. Once the process of revelation itself (poiesis, Seyri) as the configuration of withdrawing and giving has vanished, all that remains are techniques of reproduction and representation, framings and orderings of beings in the most efficient way possible: 'Machination and constant presence: poiesis-techne (CTP, II, pp. 75/GA 6.5, pp. 107). All that remains now that the void has been closed off is the ordering of beings in such a way as to maximize their potential resourcefulness (technology), which demands that we know everything about them, about their properties and possibilities (science) in order that there be nothing unpredictable or incalculable about them. Both of these amount to an actualization or effectualization, ruled by the technological goad and the scientific probe. What fails to be noticed in the overwhelming enthusiasm of actualization is the fact that science and technology depend upon this exclusion of the unpredictable, upon a certain withdrawal from the whole of beings on which they operate. Thus what goes unnoticed and is systematically occluded is the fact that science and technology are both a response to the way in which beings as a whole are currently given to us. What is unique about science and technology is their utter denial of anything beyond the given: 'beyond beings, there is

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nothing' as Heidegger recognized to be science's credo in 1929? In explicitly denying all notions of 'being' apart from beings, science and technology in fact show themselves to be a certain form of revelation of that which is, a revelation which denies its own revelatoriness and thus its own historicality: being has never been, earlier times did not have our power of enlightenment, and now that we have this ability we should use it, unconditionally. By denying being, 'technology itself prevents (verhinderi) any experience of its essence' (WPF, p. 117/HW, p. 295). And 'what is modern technology? It too is a revealing (Entbergeri)' (QCT, p. 14/TK, p. 14). This revealing is precisely an 'actualization'. We have described this as the constant renewal of actuality in the attempt to cover up the fact of negativity as such. In order to avoid the nihilism of full positivity, this positivity must be shown to be premised upon a withdrawal into negativity, on a call that beckons it to reveal the whole of beings in the way of actualization. The supposedly 'positive' or even 'positivist' denial of negativity (being) must be shown up in all its negativity, which is to trace the historical process of the crossing-out of being upon which techno-science tacitly depends. If the void that allows the whole to be revealed is being itself and the difference between this void and the whole is the place of ethics, then to show up technology's concealed negativity is to begin to mark out a place for ethics in the midst of nihilism. And it is here that death finds a place. Death presents technology (the means by which the actualization of the whole of beings takes place) with an event that points towards something in excess of the actual, something that cannot be made effective or profitable, something aneconomic. Death is an event that ensures that an entity cannot be repeated identically since it is the very source of that entity's singularity. It thus introduces a hitch into calculation, a negativity into the constancy of presence. Death introduces a cross into actuality. The crossing or traversal of this cross is precisely the concern of Heidegger's later work, which may therefore be understood to be a search for a place for ethics within contemporary actuality. And because the experience of death initiates the crossing of being we must insist upon this experience as crucial to Heidegger's later work in order to show how ethics can begin. This stage of the cross will be our concern in this chapter, while the subsequent chapters of Part II will investigate this cross's development into the abyss of grounds presupposed by technology in its revelation of beings which occurs through the introduction of a certain questioning into the selfassertive whole (Chapter Four); and finally this cross will be shown to be the fourfold 'thing' that holds the place of this abyssal void within beings as a whole, that point which escapes a totalizing grasp and thus organizes the whole that surrounds it, the mark within beings of being as void and thus the instantiation of Seyn as the cut between being and beings. This 'thing' will be the ultimate object of Heidegger's ethical attention, a thing in need of saying in the way of fostering and tending to its contingency and singularity, an act which precisely draws attention to those moments within the whole that escape technological

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reproduction, even if only for a while (Chapter Five). The thing holds the place of the void due to the logic of essence and counter-essence, which stipulates that being cannot simply refuse itself but must hesitate in this refusal and give some small part of itself in return. The three stages of the crossing traced out by these chapters may be represented by the following three diagrams: Beings as a whole

Death

Seifi

Man__

Earth

World

God Sevn

Figure 5-

So deeply is negativity concealed by technology that the preparation for its revelation is a long drawn-out one. Death is needed first of all to awaken what Heidegger calls 'need' or 'distress' (Nat). Heidegger describes this as 'the distress of the lack of need' (Not der Notlosigkeit). I propose that we understand this distress as the gesture made by being as a result of its utmost stifling. In the absolute predominance of the actual it is the noise that being nonetheless emits through death: it is the cry of its distress at being stifled. Death awakens us to the way in which technology systematically occludes all negativity, by presenting it with an insistent disturbance, indeed a shattering experience of irrecuperable negativity. Once this stifling has been heard, the possibility can be intimated that this negativity which hereby makes itself known might be crucial to technology: this is to say, the possibility that this nothing is being dkdkdkdkkddkkdkdkdkkddkkdkdkdkdkd technology depends. The positive sound of what has been stifled is named by Heidegger the Anklang, appeal or echo of being.10 This is the positive form of what cries in distress, the unsmothered void which can speak wherever we do not avoid death. It results from the fact that death's intrusion of negativity causes us to question the self-assertion of positivity, which claims no need of ground beyond itself. This questioning therefore demonstrates the abyss of grounds, which undermines technology itself and which may subsequently speak as the echo of being as it withdraws from positivity. Echo is the noise of the 'call', the temptation to follow the beckoning of the withdrawal. We need to see that the withdrawal of being, which technology denies, is in fact a condition of the very positivity of the totality which is now technological.

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The nothingness of being must be seen to be our ground. Absence of grounds cannot be taken for granted. We need to ask the question to which death alone can bring us: how can it be that 'nothing' grounds us? What about this 'nothing? What Heidegger's later thought risks is taking technology at its word and thinking being not as transcendent but as immanent to beings, as a void within them that is represented by a being, the singular being known as the thing. Thus he risks identification with the nihilism of positivity. It is indeed precisely technology in its full adequation of essence and appearance in actuality that allows us to rethink what being can mean: 'It is technology itself that makes the demand on us that we think in a different sense what is usually understood by "essence"' (QCT, p. 30/VA, p. 38).n With Nietzsche's 'death of god' we are prevented from thinking 'being' either as a transcendent being or as an immanent (actual) being. Technology is unique in that its ahistorical denial of being replicates the prehistorical withdrawal of being from beings as a whole. Through its similarity to the truth (the intimacy of being and beings) technology reflects in its gleaming carapace its own flipside, the beginning (the withdrawal of being). In a sense, technology's ahistorical denial evinces an even more precise mirroring in that the original withdrawal is itself ahistorical or rather pre-historical as a constant that occurs throughout history. Thus technology closes off all possibilities of thinking and responding to being, except the most proper, and that is as withdrawal (Sein) and what today ordains its occlusion (Seyri). What distinguishes the two, technological denial and Heideggerian crossing, is a mindfulness (Besinnung) or attention to the 'nothing', a questioning of technology's assertion that its operation depends on 'nothing'. And what initiates this questioning, as the criticality characteristic of an ethical stance, is death. Death as an intrusion of negativity must be excluded by technology. It is the ultimate worry from which all others stem, and for precisely this reason it must be repressed. The stresses of the maximization of actuality, of the inhuman demand for 'efficiency' and 'productivity', are quite enough for human beings without worrying about negativity and how it might 'feel' at its suppression! Stress fills the aching void of distress. There is no ground, no transcendent ideal, there is only 'this life' and the striving for personal gain and satisfaction, and that is difficult enough. In demanding this pursuit, therapeutic technology today achieves the stifling of real distress in a tranquillized boredom, the boredom of curiosity, which demands the forever new, always beings, always positivities (CTP, II, p. 1Q9/GA 65, p. 157). The constant satisfaction of our own needs blinds us to the fact that the real need is not our own. If it did not, then the question might arise, almost unintelligible to us today, 'What is man to do, if in truth the need is a need of being itself?' (N IV, pp. 245-6/N //, p. 392 — my emphasis)

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Death is the way in which thinking can begin today, in opposition to the docile boredom of stress and its therapeutic relief, and how such a book as Contributions to Philosophy could have been written. For this reason, Krell is right to insist that death is the Grunderfahntng or fundamental experience that stirs Heidegger's thought from beginning to end (Krell 1986, p. 9).12 This is why Being and Time remains a necessary step along the way to being,13 for it is not incidental that here we find Heidegger's most sustained engagement with death. Let us therefore examine the way in which — in later Heidegger - death stirs us to awaken the distress of being, the protest of the nothingness of grounds at its stifling beneath the positivity of beings. 'Distress' is a form of anxiety, but this time on the part of being, the gesture of the occluded void.

DEATH AND DISTRESS In the indifference of pure positivity the totality of actuality remains quite unquestioned. The ground or reasons for the whole's being revealed as a process of insatiable actualization are not sought because they are not deemed necessary. The fact that the whole requires a process of revelation is occluded by technology by way of a constant replenishment of self-standing actuality. Questioning is precisely that gesture which undermines whatever claims to be its own ground, justification or explanation. Questioning does not accept the simple assertion at face value. It is as questioning that Contributions to Philosophy speaks. It bespeaks not the distress but the appeal (Anklang) of being in its abandonment. In other words, it speaks only when the stifled void has been unblocked and become visible as the immanent abyss (Ab-grund) that is being itself. In other words, the appeal can sound only when distress has been allowed to speak. It is a question rarely asked, but how can this distress sound and Heidegger's thought begin? This is a question that precedes and conditions Contributions to Philosophy and so we cannot expect it to be answered there. We have seen that, '[distress (Not) ... animates [the] crossing as an access to what is to come (den Ubergang ... ah den Zu-gang auf das Kunftige befeuert) (CTP, II, pp. 78—9/GA 65, p. 112) in the sense that distress is necessary for the question of the origination of the ontological difference to be initiated and its crossing traversed. But must not distress first have been awakened? Heidegger himself admits this necessity: 'This distress does not first need help but must first of all itself become helping. But this distress must still be experienced (Aber diese Not mufi doch erfahren werden)' (CTP, I, p. 19/GA 65, pp. 25—6 — my emphasis). Heidegger even determines this awakening and experiencing as one part of philosophy's 'task' (Aufgabe) (CTP, I, p. 8/GA 65, p. 11). Preliminary to the transition or crossing that Contributions to Philosophy traces, philosophy is precisely the stirring and the sustenance of distress: 'The distress of needlessness (Not der Notlosigkeit). First of all to let this resound (anklingen)' (CTP, II, p. 75/ GA 65, p. 107).14 This is philosophy's own 'necessity' (Notwendigkeit) in the

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sense that the necessary condition of questioning as such is that 'it should not eliminate that distress but must rather persevere in it and ground it' (CTP, I, p. 32/G.A 65, p. 45).15 If questioning refuses to accept a positivity at face value then this means that one can question only when something in excess of positivity has been revealed. When distress has cried out, the appeal of being may be heard and Contributions to Philosophy written. But how is distress to be awakened and experienced? Heidegger first of all names the type of entity that awakens distress: it is the questioning entity, in 'the epoch of the total lack of questioning' (CTP, II, p. 76/ GA 65, p. 108), those who are dis-turbed by the most acute distress (CTP, VI, pp. 218-9/GA 65, pp. 397-8). 'It is only through questioners that the truth of being (Seyri) becomes a distress' (CTP, I, p. 10/GA 65, p. 12). But as we have seen, questioning is not without its preconditions. Questioners question only on the basis of an experience of something beyond positivity. Today, this means that they must have experienced death. Death alone, as the presentation of a void within actuality itself, can demonstrate to us the way in which positivity stifles the void. Following the death of god, death cannot incline us towards a transcendent realm and must therefore lead us to a void within immanence itself. Thus, when we face the anonymous fact of death we are brought to realize that the void is what is closed out by contemporary actuality. This stifling of the void is the Notlosigkeit of today, the absolute lack of breaks in the continuity of the totality, and the noise of this stifling is precisely the Not belonging to Notlosigkeit. Death awakens us to this Not. It is crucial to insist on death if ethics is not to be restricted to those who can discern the traces of withdrawal in the texts of pre-Socratic Greece: 'The enactment (Vollzug) of being-towards-death is a duty (Pflicht) only for thinkers of the other beginning. However, every essential human being among those creating in the future can know of it (wisseri)' (CTP, IV, p. 200/GA 65, p. 1 285). Heidegger is now in possession of a way of thinking being that will allow him to understand death as an anonymous fact which belongs to no-one, an understanding to which Part I of this work has brought us, since the site of being is no longer man's appropriated self-belonging. 'Death' can now signify any instance of negativity: 'As the shrine of the nothing, death is the shelter of being (Gebirg des Seins)' (Th, p. 179/V.A, p. 171 - my emphasis). As the sole shrine to the nothing, death alone can stir distress as the protest of the void at the overbearing of the whole. Technology's attitude to death is therefore that of John Donne: 'Death, thou shalt die!' Or, as Heidegger more prosaically has it: 'The self-assertion of technological objectification is the constant negation of death (Das Sichdurchsetzen der technischen Vergegenstandlichung ist die standige Negation des Todes)' (WPF, p. 125/HW, p. 299). Cryogenic freezing and the immortalization of man as a set of actual patterns in the form of the genome are just two manifestations of the

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way in which technology steers us away from the abyss of death by minimizing its power. Every facet of man's being is to be 'actual', determinable in advance: possibilities are not allowed to constitute a part of his being. It is this 'constant negation' that ensures the continuation of Notlosigkeit. This constant negation is precisely the neurotic insistence of technology on the instant renewal and replacement of anything that wastes away or dies. It is for this reason that Heidegger says: 'it is precisely [machine-powered technology} and it alone (sie alleiri) that is the disturbing thing (das Beunrithigende), that moves us to ask the question concerning technology as such (das uns bewegt, nach "der" Technik zufragen)' (QCT, pp. 13—14/VA, p. 17). This does not contradict our assertion that death stirs distress, since technology's closing out of the void is the precondition of distress, which is nothing but the protest of the void as it is suffocated in the total positivity which technology bolsters. Technology dictates that the only way in which to experience this distress is through death, the very last outpost of negativity in which it can find shelter. If negativity were not so instantly and repeatedly stifled, then it would not be necessary to dwell so insistently upon death. For this reason, Heidegger tells us that in the technological era specifically, being 'irrupts in a singular uncanniness (bricht in einer einzigen Unheimlichkeif)' (QB, p. 313/W, p. 242). This means both that the time of technology is a privileged time, perhaps the only time in history at which being could be revealed to us as withdrawal or void, and the time in which being can show itself only in the form of a 'thing', and that what ensures the singularity of beings today is the fact that they will die and be but once only, despite technology. Death is for technology merely an inconvenient disruption of production. It is something with which technology attempts to reckon. The aneconomy of Auschwitz is perhaps the starkest example of the failure of an attempt to make of death an utterly efficient extermination, a death that would leave no trace of its occurrence, a death that would not exceed the positive fact of its actuality. This is how I would understand Heidegger's location of the Shoah within the essence of technology,17 as an expression of technology's cruel relation to death, in its need to make of it a quick and unobtrusive liquidation.18 This is why we have been rendered 'technicized animals' (cf. CTP, I, p. 68/GA 65, p. 98 — my emphasis), animals, one recalls, being those who lack death as such. But death refuses its reduction: it is described in Contributions to Philosophy as 'the highest and most extreme testimony of being (das hochste und auflerste Zeugnis des Seym)' (CTP, IV, p. 200/GA 65, p. 284; CTP, IV, p. 165IGA 65, p. 230). And for this reason Heidegger can invoke 'sacrifice' as part of our ethical task: 'The highest form of pain (Die hochste Gestalt des Schmerzes) is dying one's death as a sacrifice on the part of human being for the preservation of the truth of being (der das Menschsein opfert fur die Wahrung der Wahrbeit des Seins). This sacrifice is the purest experience of the voice of being' (P, p. 167IGA 54, pp. 249-50). Pain is the rift (L, p. 204/US, p. 27), the riving open of the difference, Seyn. To die one's death in a way that does not blind itself to this death and what

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it means for our lives is to counter the obliviation of being, and thus to begin ethics. In an exceptionally curious passage of Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger joins together joy and mourning and describes them as preserving the hint of god, while suggesting that being (Seyn) opens only to those who hold death in mind in the form of 'mourning': How this hint [of the last god} is preserved (bewahrt) as hint in restrained reticence (in der verhaltenen Verschwiegenheit), and how such preserving always resides in taking one's departure and arriving, particularly in mourning and in joy (in der Trauer und in der Freude), in that attunement to ground of the restrained (Grundstimmung der Verhaltenen) to whom alone the cleavage of being (Seyn) opens and closes. (CTP, VI, p. 280/GA 65, p. 400) This joy should be related to the joy of Being and Time where it indicated the inauthentic attitude that turned away from singularity and immersed itself in beings, and for joy death was indeed something that happened only to other people, others whose death would be mourned. Only here joy does not turn away from death but is precisely an attitude which turns towards it, in recalling the lost joy that was shared with the one mourned. Mourning is that moment in actuality in which one does not attempt to minimize the intrusion of death. I would argue that if Heidegger had had the Freudian distinction at his command he would have replaced 'mourning' with 'melancholy' here,20 as an attitude to death that does not attempt to assign a meaning to it and thus develop symbolic co-ordinates that would allow us to 'cope', but rather holds on to death as a moment of sheer trauma, a Real which cannot be fully captured within any symbolic interpretation. Only in this way can death act as an access to a negativity within beings as a whole and thus awaken distress. Anything less than a melancholic obsession with death would recuperate it for the services of actualization. The cleaving of Seyn between the withdrawal of being and the giving of beings will always already have happened and yet it is something that must always be recalled, particularly today when the exchange has been utterly forgotten. It can be related to only by memory, Gedenken. Even in Being and Time, mourning is related inseparably to such memory: 'tarrying alongside in mourning and commemoration (Im trauernd-gedenkenden Verweilen bei ihm)' (BT, p. 282/SZ, p. 238).21 This is a memory which will never have been perception, because that which is recollected was never actually present. With the introduction of the mood of joy we are brought to the way in which Heidegger marks the fact that death is that which initiates the crossing of the ontological difference as the place of ethics, stirring being's distress at its forgottenness. We should recall from Part I that mood puts us in touch with factuality, and given that factuality or the givenness of the whole is no longer taken for granted in later Heidegger, but is rather thought as the historically

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variant decision of Seyn, moods, if they are to relate to being, will follow a certain progressive sequence of change as being undergoes different stages of its obliviation or erasure from memory. We shall examine this sequence of moods in order to justify further our assertion that death stands at the origin of ethics and to demonstrate how it relates to the later stages in the development of ethics outlined in Chapters Four and Five of this work. We have seen that joy has been brought into relation with death, marking the elision of death's ownership in the later Heideggerian problematic. We should recall that the mood we found to relate to factual death in Chapter Two was fear (Furcht). The mood that attunes us to death in Contributions to Philosophy is indeed no longer 'authentic' anxiety, but terror (Erschrecken).

THE FOUR MOODS OF CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY To begin with, let us make clear the broad alignment between these moods and the chapters of Part II of this work. Erschrecken, or terror, is addressed in this chapter on death; Verhaltenheit, or restraint, in Chapter Four on questioning; and Scheit, or awe, in Chapter Five on saying. That there is a fourth mood, Ent-setzen, or horror, indicates the necessity of a move beyond Contributions to Philosophy and this Part of the present work, which concern the essence of Seyn. Why is this move necessary? Because essence always has its counter-essence, and we must not leave this out of consideration. What shall largely be deferred in this Part is a discussion of the counter-essence of Ereignis, which is Gestell or the essence of technology, the counter-essence of Seyn, which is power, and the counter-essence of ethics, which is politics. These induce 'horror' in us, and this mood will concern us only in the transition from Part II and in Part III as the 'return' of the essence of being to beings as a whole. The English translation of Contributions to Philosophy translates Erschrecken as 'startled dismay', but let us remain with the more simple 'terror'. Heidegger describes the experience of this mood as follows: 'what has long been familiar turns out to be estranging (das bislang Gelaufige ah das Befremdliche ... sich erweist)' (CTP, I, p. 11IGA 65, p. 15). Crucially for our argument, such alienation is said by Heidegger to be the result of an experience of death. 'What is most unaccustomed or extraordinary (das Ungewohnlichste) in all of what-is opens up (eroffnet sich) in death's extraordinariness (das Ungewdhnlichkeit) and singularity (Einzigkeit), namely being itself, which prevails upon us essentially as that which alienates (ah Befremdung west)' (CTP, IV, p. 199/GA 65, p. 283). [I}n the uncircumventable ordinariness (das unumgangliche Gewb'hnlichkeit) of beings, being is the most extraordinary (das Ungewb'hnlichste); and this estranging (Befremdung) 0 is not a manner of its appearing but is rather being itself.

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In the domain of the grounding of its truth, i.e. in Da-sein, the uniqueness of death corresponds to the extraordinariness of being (Der Ungewohnlichkeit des Seyns entspricht im Grundungsbereich seiner Wahrbeit, d.b. im Da-sein, die Einzigkeit des Todes). (CTP, IV, p. 163/GA 65, p. 230) Death is quite inhabitual to our common habitation of the world as the perpetual motion of actualizing. Heidegger even acknowledges the presence of Schrecken in Being and Time as precisely the response to an event that suddenly breaks in upon our dwelling: 'If something threatening breaks in suddenly upon concernful being-in-the-world ... fear becomes shock (Schrecken)' (BT, p. 181/ SZ, p. 142). This is what death has become, an anonymous threat to everything in the world, a negativity that menaces the positive whole. Erschrecken is precisely an attunement to the way in which negativity, in the form of death, is closed out in the utter predominance of beings. Heidegger's word for our relation to an occluded negativity is ahnen, intimation or inkling. Thus, Erschrecken is said precisely to intimate, as is Verhaltenheit, the primary attunement of Contributions to Philosophy, which arises after distress has been awakened and the appeal of being sounded (CTP, I, p. 11/GA 65, p. 14).22 Since Erschrecken puts us in touch with the occlusion of being beneath the welter of beings, it is said to be the other beginning's equivalent to the first beginning's thaumadzein (CTP, I, p. 11/GA 65, p. 15). The wonder that beings are has been replaced by the terror that being is smothered by beings. Only something as violent as a traumatic shock can open us to the way in which technology stifles negativity. One feels terror before the break in positivity, which technology simply cannot account for since it denies the possibility that totality needs anything beyond itself: it cannot think the immanent void that allows its positivity to presence. Death changes over history and this is what dying can be today, when there is no hope of an afterlife, nor of direct access to transcendence in erotic fusion (as death has been from Plato to Bataille). Death can merely demonstrate the brute fact that technology utterly denies all withdrawal and thus disavows the being upon which it depends. But this is at least a start, a first step on the road to ethics as a way in which we might cope with life amidst technological actuality and yet respond to the most fundamental call which resounds as silence in the deafening roar of machine-technology. The disposition to terror must necessarily be in place before Contributions to Philosophy and the crossing of the ontological difference take place. As we have seen, this is because Contributions to Philosophy speaks from out of the appeal of being, not its distress, which appeal is thus put into words in the attempt to awaken in us an attunement to being's own peculiar reticence, an attunement which will be described as Verhaltenheit. The following passage begins the plane of Contributions to Philosophy entitled 'Appeal'. 'The appeal (Anklang) of the essential prevailing of being (Seyn) out of the abandonment {withdrawal] of being through the needful distress (notigende Not) of the forgottenness of being

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(Seyn)' (CTP, II, p. 75/GA 65, p. 107 — my emphasis). In other words, being cannot appeal unless its distress has been awakened from out of the utmost obliviation of being. And, with the aid of the conjunction of moods in Contributions to Philosophy, I argue that it is death that stirs this distress. The connection between distress (Not) and death's terror (Erschreckeri) is illustrated perfectly in the following passage:

•

But from where does future philosophy receive its need and distress (Nor)? Must it not itself awaken this distress (Not) - inceptually (anfangentf)? This distress is something other than the troubles and concerns which always haunt only some corner or other of installed (verfestigten) beings and their 'truth'. This distress, on the other hand, cannot be eliminated - although it can be denied — by the cheerfulness of a supposed delight in the 'wonders' of 'beings'. As ground for the necessity (Notwendigkeif)) of philosophy, this distress (Not) is experienced by terror (Erschrecken) in the jubilation (Jubel) of belonging to being, which as hinting shifts the abandonment of being (Sein) into the open (ins Offene). (CTP, I, p. 69/GA 65, p. 99 - my emphases)

Terror hints in that it brings withdrawal or abandonment out of its forgottenness and into the open, by means of death. It is the terrifying part of the celebration of our being inherently drawn to being in that it attunes us to the absolute predominance of beings, which stifle that to which we are existentially drawn. Why is it only death that can demonstrate the stifling of the void and attune us to being's distress? Because 'a being is never sufficient for letting being (Seyn) even be intimated' (CTP, VIII, p. 335/GA 65, p. 476). To begin from a being in the attempt to determine being is to attempt a metaphysical transcendence that will end up determining 'essence' on the basis of its 'appearance'. This is Uberstieg (transcendence), rather than the Ubergang (crossing) which is painstakingly traced out in Contributions to Philosophy and which demonstrates the true 'simultaneity' of being and beings in the differentiation of Seyn. Being does not transcend beings but is immanent to them. Even Being and Time made this mistake, or at least risked seeming to do so (CTP, IV, p. 177/GA 65, pp. 2501). Heidegger's attempt in Being and Time was more essentially incomplete than even he realized in that it focused exclusively on being's withdrawal or difference from beings, represented as 'the ontological difference'. The giving quality of this withdrawal or the balance between withdrawal and giving was not recognized there, and this is why Heidegger introduces the older word for being (Seyn) to describe his attempt to balance these two in his later work. If being cannot be divined from any being, then what is left? Precisely nothing. 'In the other beginning a being can no longer supply the measure for being' (CTP, IV, p. 175/GA 65, p. 248).24 Being can be intimated only from its equal, the nothing, which is incommensurable with anything actual, 'the overflow or excess (Ubermafj) of pure refusal (reinen Verweigerung)' (CTP, IV, p.

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173/GA 65, p. 245 - italicized; CTP, IV, p. 176/GA 65, p. 249). This refusal is being's withdrawal, its refusal to be a being. It is this pure refusal without giving, this void in beings, that death puts us in touch with. The nothing exceeds the measure of the actual. It cannot be calculated or reckoned with any more than it can be manufactured or machined. It cannot be part of 'the gigantic' (das Riesenhafte), which is Heidegger's determination of a whole that experiences no limit to calculability and thus thinks solely in terms of quantity, to the extent that this quantity becomes a quality to be pursued for its own sake. The incalculable is thus denied the status of 'a being'. Because the gigantic never knows (kennf) what overflows (iiberfluf) — the inexhaustible unexhausted (das un-erschb'pfliche Unerschb'pfte) [i.e. what can never be used as a resource and so used up] — therefore what is simple must be refused to it (das Einfache versagt bleiben).' (CTP, II, p. 96/GA 65, p. 137) Being itself is 'that which withdraws from all estimation (Schatzung)' (CTP, IV, p. 176/GA 65, p. 249). In other words it dictates that there be a moment in which calculative thought or reckoning must come to an end. If a being cannot provide the measure for being, then what could be the measure of that which cannot be measured? Heidegger gives the answer: 'Death is the as yet unthought standard of measure for the immeasurable (Mafigabe des Unermefilicben)' (PR, p. 112/SG, p. 187 - my emphasis).26

DISTRESS TO QUESTIONING, THROUGH RESTRAINT AND AWE This chapter has established that distress at the stifling of being's withdrawal is experienced in terror, and that this terror is precisely our response to the fact of death. In order to lead into the next chapter and the next stage in the development of ethics, let us anticipate the way in which the attunement to being develops out of this terror. Thus, refusing to close our eyes to death and adopting a stance of melancholic attachment to the dying is the first stage in the development of an ethics and the first inscription of the cross of being. Death introduces a negativity into beings as a whole and thus opens us to its stifling. Restraint (Verhaltenheit), the probing questioning attunement of Contributions to Philosophy itself, is one possible attitude towards this stifling, a reserved response which does not overreact either in the way of technology's closing out of this negativity or of turning this negativity against technology itself and eradicating it. Technology and being mutually depend on one another. Questioning is the response to death's negativity which is alive to the possibility that technology's stifling of negativity is necessary to being, that it expresses something essential and is not a merely epiphenomenal exclusion. Thus questioning turns its attention to the 'nothing' of grounds that technology asserts for itself.

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Terror attunes us to pure refusal, the void insofar as it is stifled by the overwhelming presence of beings as a whole. The questioning mood of restraint attunes us to this Stirling's link with the technological whole of beings, in the sense that it thinks this negativity as the whole's very ground. In other words, restraint opens to the possibility that death might show us not just nothing, but being. One is prepared for the insight that this withdrawal is itself what gives the whole, a refusal that hesitates and thereby gives itself away. He who hesitates is lost. Thus, restraint opens up the possibility of awe (Scheu), which attunes us to the way in which '{t}he nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of being (Scbleier des Seins)' (PWM, p. 258/W, p. 107). Restraint is said in Contributions to Philosophy to open us to the possibility that refusal might also be a gift: it is 'preparedness for refusal as gifting (Schenkung)' (CTP, I, p. \2IGA 65, p. 15). It prepares us for the thought that the abyss revealed in terror might ground In other words, it opens us to the possibility that the withdrawal of being might amount to its 'sending'.27 In other words, awe attunes us to hesitation, the counter-essence of refusal. Restraint is thus a response to terror, which itself opens the way to awe. As we shall see, restraint characterizes the stage of ethics known as Gelassenheit, which both assents to and withdraws from technology, holding itself at a sufficient distance from the assertion of positivity to be open to the possibility that the withdrawal evinced in death might in fact be the very condition of possibility for positivity itself. It thus hesitates before accepting the factuality of facts 'as a given' and begins to question totalities in search of those moments in which their totality is undermined. Restraint is said to preserve the hints (Winke) of what terror has intimated (CTP, VI, p. 280/GA 65, p. 400). Once withdrawal is determined as a condition of the gift of the whole, restraint becomes awe, which shies away from making a being of being. This is what awe intimates, and it is the stage of the overcoming of nihilism, in that nothingness is understood not as annihilation but as the condition of possibility of the gift. Thus awe is described as the attunement closest to the leap (Sprung) which is the leap into Seyn as Ereignis, the explanation of how it is that abyss can ground, how the exchange can take place between being and beings (CTP, IV, p. 161/GA 65, p. 227). Thus it amounts to 'nearness to the distant, which hints' (CTP, I, p. 12/GA 65, p. 16). As we shall see, what is distant and what hints is the god. It is what initiates the beckoning (Erwinken) of being as that which refuses itself (versagen), a refusal which is an eloquent one, a saying (Sage), and which may thus be said to hesitate (zogern) (CTP, V, p. 265/GA 65, p. 380).28 We shall return to this god. Heidegger is quite explicit in connecting the shock or terror of death with the awe felt in the face of the nothing as the veil of being: 'the shock (Schrecken) of disclosing being's abandonment and at the same time the awe before the pealing Ereignis (anklingenden Ereignis)' (CTP, VI, p. 211IGA 65, p. 396 - my emphasis). Restraint is elided here because it is the midpoint of the two moods in the sense that it responds to the former while preparing for the latter. Restraint is the

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between of terror and awe (CTP, I, p. 12/GA 65, p. 15), both of which are said to be 'guiding moods' of the second plane of Contributions to Philosophy, 'Appeal' (ibid.). One cannot intimate the appeal of Ereignis from out of being's abandonment without these two moods being in place. 'Shock (Schrecken) and awe (Scheu) together first let the appeal be enacted in thinking (denkerisch vollzieheri)' (CTP, VI, p. 211IGA 65, p. 396). Death breaks through the encrusted sediment which has obliviated all trace of being's withdrawal. Awe lets us understand this withdrawal as the gift of beings as a whole. Only with terror at withdrawal and awe at the gift can the full balance of Ereignis be reached. It is restraint that joins the second and third planes of Contributions to Philosophy, Appeal and Zu-spiel, the latter being the place at which Heidegger describes the relation of play (Spiel) that exists between withdrawal and giving, and is therefore attuned by awe. Restraint should be our attitude to the unintelligibility of Contributions to Philosophy 2 itself, which merely brings out and holds before us the hints of being as 'boulders of the quarry' (CTP, VIII, p. 297IGA 65, p. 421). The moods of Contributions to Philosophy may be presented graphically as in Figure 6. By way of anticipation I include Ent-setzen which throws us back to Terror \Erschrecken)

Voic

Restraint (Verhahenhe.it)

Abyss oi ground

Awe iScheu)

Abyss fhat grounds

Horror (Entsetzeri) Man

Earth

World

God

Abyss grounding as thing

Figure 6. The four moods of Contributions to Philosophy

beings in the novel form of the thing. The first three moods clearly map onto the stages of the cross of being that we are describing. Terror corresponds to pure refusal, restraint to refusal, and awe to hesitance; horror corresponds to hesitant refusal, which amounts to the full essence of Ereignis. The horrific counter-essence of this Ereignis will be the subject of Part III of this work: here we describe how the essence of being 'grounds' 'in practice' in the form of the singular thing that 'bears' and 'gives birth to' an entire world. This chapter has described the first of the four moods outlined above together with the death that arouses it. Once the nothing enshrined in death is recognized as directing us towards the abyssal ground for beings as a whole that technology denies, this whole will be subjected to questioning which undermines a totality in its pure factual self-

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assertion and seeks those points within it that hint at the moment at which its assertion is rendered void by those beings that resist a totalizing determination. The first stage and the precondition for ethics in the technological age is thus an experience of death, a demand that we set up a shrine to the nothing in the anonymous fact of death, which we are to hold constantly before us in joyful melancholy. Death opens us to the danger of technology in the sense of its incompleteness and deception. Here is a negativity it can do nothing about. Melancholy rather than mourning attunes us to the meaninglessness commonly experienced in the face of death, a meaninglessness that by way of questioning can come to infect the whole of what-is. Death puts the question: what is the point of this circuitry of energy, information and capital? To what end does it flow? The question is surely the very beginning of an ethics that can be accommodated within and remain critical towards the technological age.

Chapter Four

Questioning, Void Death has brought us to question the self-sustaining subjectal circuit of energy, information and capital that is achieved by way of technology. The ever-greater growth of the positive totality of beings through Technik has been called into question by the intrusion of negativity that is death. This death has shown, through the terror that it can evoke, the suppression of negativity that technology carries out. The response to this terror which will allow being to echo out of its distress is restraint (Verhaltenheit). This hesitance with respect to negativity prepares us to understand being's own hesitance, its withdrawal as necessary in order for the whole of beings to present themselves in the way that they do. This restraint towards negativity, which refrains from smothering it yet again with positivity, is precisely the initial stance of thinking or ethics proper, the second stage in its formation overall: it is constituted by questioning. In other words, in a restrained response to distress, questioning refuses merely to accept the factuality of what-is as a given, simply because this facade has been revealed to be a sham: it excludes a negativity that death has shown us to be the case. Questioning undermines the confident self-assertion of facts and burrows after the grounds of these facts. To demonstrate the tenuous character of a totality, it attempts to open up an abyss beneath the totality, which will be the clearing in which any position must first of all place itself. The whole has become co-extensive with objective 'facts and acts' (CTP, VII, p. 311/GA 65, p. 442) and questioning is the refusal to accept these facts at face value, and thus it prepares for the possibility that we might one day have access to the process of the given's very giving, the historical constitution of the accrued sediment that is the actual. The presence of a question means that the whole has acknowledged that it does not fully grasp itself and does not provide its own ground. It is not simply because we are finite that the whole is given to us in this way: since we are part of the whole itself, this finitude may be said to belong to the whole. The totality of beings is itself incomplete, finite, and therefore puts itself into question 2 when a negativity intrudes upon it. Questioning is the way in which man and the whole of beings taken together get drawn into the abyss. This abyss is the abyss of the totality's own grounds. It is the motion by which the whole moves unto the place where grounds should be

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but are not. Questioning, in other words, is our initial approach to being. Questioning is the form that thinking takes at the second stage in the development of an ethics. 'Thinking' is identical with ethics in Heidegger's thought, since '{tjhinking accomplishes the relation of being to the essence of the human being' (LH, p. 2V)IW, p. 145). Thus what counts as 'thinking' is anything which does not remain oblivious to the void or simply, as Levinas might say, to the excess of the totality, 'infinity'. Thus, Heidegger's is not an 'intellectualist' ethics in any sense. Questioning is precisely to institute an 'ontological difference' in the totality, which allows something that is not of the order of the thing but is literally 'nothing'.3 It thus places the cross instituted by death squarely over the whole of beings, as a question mark with regard to their apparent self-grounding. Questioning is the whole's awareness of its own finitude, of the fact that positivity or actuality might not be able to expand indefinitely further through the technological forcing of what-is to yield up its resources in the form of energy. It does not remain blind to death but rather permeates the whole with deathliness. This restrained questioning is the proper response to the terror that corresponds with distress. It is the allowance that allows being to come and the totality of beings to open to that which exceeds them. For this reason the stance of restraint and questioning may be deemed one ofSeinlassen — usually translated as 'letting-be', but let us say 'allowing being to enter' - or Gelassenbeit, the 'yes' and the 'no' to technology, which admits its necessity while probing the limits of its expansion and capability: We can use (benutzen) technical objects, and yet with the correct (sachgerechten) use also hold ourselves free of them (freihalten) )so that we may let go of them at any time . . . I would name this bearing (Haltting) towards the technicized world of a 'yes' and a 'no', by an old word: releasement towards things (die Gelassenbeit zu den Dingen). (DT, p. ">4IG, p. 24-5)4

EN-GROUNDING This questioning, which opens the totality to the void, is called by Heidegger 'engrounding' (Ergrundung) (CTP, V, p. 216/GA 65, p. 307). The word has at least two senses that must be brought out. The dictionary translates this word as 'fathoming', 'getting to the bottom of something' or travelling in the direction of its reasons or grounds (Grande) in thought and deed. It is thus the movement towards the abyss in the sense that if we need to seek after grounds we cannot yet have found these grounds, and therefore there must be an abyss where grounds should be. The second, more literal meaning is brought out by separating the prefix of the word with a hyphen, Er-grundung. This is the action that thinking applies to the totality of beings: it ew-grounds or gives the totality grounds for the first time. It allows it the possibility of grounds that are not of the same

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order as beings themselves, which would make the whole self-grounding and capable of being understood purely 'horizontally' in terms of causation. But questioning does not yet find these grounds. This would be the stage of awe at which withdrawal is seen to condition the revelation of the positive whole. This would be the stage at which abyss grounds and 'Abgrund becomes 'A^-grund'. As yet, ethics as questioning is merely to open up the abyss of being where grounds might one day come to be. Because ground is futural in this way, the stance of questioning is one which awaits and prepares. It cannot bring down the god to haunt the shrine but it can make hale the stone. Since the totality will already have had a ground, but one which has been occluded by the utter predominance of beings, this en-grounding is determined by Heidegger as a 'repetition' (CTP, V, p. 216/GA 65, p. 307). Since this abyssal ground is covered over, the repetition amounts to the bringing to light of these grounds for the first time. When beings have become utterly stable and constant (Bestand) in their self-identity, questioning pulls the whole asunder between its actual identity and its abyssal grounds. This is what Heidegger means when he determines ground as abyss. Essence for Heidegger is always different in kind to that of which it is the essence. If it were not, then it would at the very least be entirely non-explanatory since it would itself stand in need of explanation. We would then be embroiled either in an infinite regress of grounds or in a feeble recourse to a founding subiectum. Repetition of ground thus re-introduces otherness to the being and this is why it may be identified with an ethics of Seinlassen. 'Ground' or 'reason' (Grund) is understood by technological thought in the way of a 'cause' (Ursache) or that thing from which another issues: it is precisely the causa efficient or just another entity of precisely the same order as that which it causes, an actual order. The principle of reason (Satz vom Grund) indeed governs all, but with the occlusion of being as of another order to the actual the weil ('because') of Weilen (essential whiling) has become the 'be-cause' of efficient causality (PR, p. 127ISG, pp. 207—8). The idea of verticality and depth has been lost in favour of the reckoning form of reason, whose sole criterion for being is efficiency. This is what Heidegger means by the circular phrase he introduces to characterize the present age: will to will. In other words, there is no ground or reason of any order other than that which actually is, and that is will, which as Heidegger says in his lectures on Nietzsche is always the will to expand itself, to accrue an ever greater power of willing. But why does will will? Because it wills. Here, there is no 'why'. Constant production and consumption satisfy one another and see no need for a ground or measure beyond the actual process itself. Technology as the means of production thus denies its own ground (being). In pursuing the abyss, questioning opens up the ambiguity of this denial. Technology, as Heidegger understands it, is a response to the death of god. This means that with the death of transcendence the only imperative that seems to remain for the immanent whole is the expansion of immanence, the plugging of any gaps in the continuity of the whole, in order to obliterate the void and

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reassure itself that the void of transcendence was wholly of its own making and that it must therefore be capable of populating it with its own self-posited values of efficiency and productivity. But this is not the only response to the void: stirred by the negativity of death, questioning takes into account the death of transcendence, and rather than covering up this negativity it assigns it to its proper plane, which is not transcendent to the positive whole but rather immanent to it. It is the void upon which the whole depends, the Real within the Symbolic. Technology denies a being (Sein) transcendent to beings, and questioning agrees. It does not ask after an onto-theological god exterior to the whole that would explain it causally, but rather seeks the immanent void which must be in place in order for the whole to present itself in the way that it does. In other words, the cross of negativity delineates an incipient site for ethics within the technicized whole. It does not call us to a removal from this whole, as if in retreat to a rural apoliticality far from the city and its incessant technicization: ethics cannot be of 'alternative lifestyles' or even of total revolution since this would inevitably amount merely to a response to the status quo and remain on a territory whose nature would already have been decided upon by its 'enemy', and enter into a dispute that would be conducted solely on its terms. What is demanded is an interrogative attitude that acknowledges its situation within technology and the impossibility of its total destruction, since the scars that the wound of man has engraved upon nature will never altogether heal, and ethics must acknowledge this. The attempt to eliminate every trace of one's human effects, while admirable, cannot entirely succeed. What is necessary is to respond to the technicized whole in which one finds oneself and to repeat precisely the gesture that technology makes in its denial of transcendent negativity, an otherness which would transcend the whole, and by repeating it to bring it to light in the way that it should be understood, which is to say not as an imperative to pure positivity but as an imperative to turn towards the immanent void necessary to any totality. To repeat technology's gesture of actualization is to show it up as a. revelation and thus as occurring in response to a call which exceeds it, which is otherwise than technological: this will be the call of being as Gestell. This repetition of the technological nature of the whole will be the repetition of engrounding, which opens up an infinitesimal yet abyssal distance between the thinker's questioning and technology's assertion. What is occluded from the technological totality, as from all totalities, is its origin or the vertical process of its constitution. The whole is to be sure a grid of ever-expanding energy, but how did it come to be revealed in this way? What needed to withdraw in order for the whole to present itself as energy reserve? What had to be excluded? The answer is clear: everything that was not of the order of actuality, energy and the will. That which Heidegger calls 'the nothing' or 'abyss' and which we have called 'void' is precisely that element which must withdraw in order for beings to present themselves as a whole in a certain way,

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because it can by definition never be present. It is thus the occluded origin of a totality's historical formation. The ethics of questioning must turn towards the immanent void of the totality of beings and thus open this totality onto its excess. Technology is unique in denying the transcendent excess and for this reason we can understand what Heidegger means when he tells us that the ethical stance of questioning is precisely to 'go along with' the operation of technology, to take it at its word and thus to draw the most extreme conclusions of its denial of transcendent being.

GOING ALONG WITH TECHNOLOGY Technicized animals say 'being is nothing to us' and questioners agree. In the doubling of this agreement the statement is heard again and in repetition it resounds in a new way: "being is the nothing to us', which is to say that being is not of the order of the being. It is the nothing that must be nothing in order for beings to present themselves as constant and complete presence. For this reason it is necessary to repeat technology's denial in order to demonstrate it to be the occlusion that is necessary at any stage in history for a totality of beings to form itself. If something is denied, there must be a need for it to be denied or a reason for this occlusion. Otherwise, why make the denial? This is the question that restraint makes of death. Death introduced us to technology's stifling of the void; questioning asks technology why it committed this murder. The answer is that denial is necessary in order for the denier to constitute its own identity. The questioning of the whole which repeats its denial of being is precisely what is enacted by Contributions to Philosophy, where it is described as the repetition of a crossing that is already taking place between the first and the other beginnings, the metaphysical understanding of being as a higher actuality and the rethinking of essence which we have already seen technology to demand. This repetition does not leave technology's denial unchanged, but rather 'brings the crossing into the openness (Offene) of history and grounds (jbegriindet) the crossing as perhaps a lengthy dwelling (Aufenthali)' (CTP, I, p. 3/GA 65, p. 4). It is technology's very crossing out of being that we must dwell on, for we already dwell in it. As shall become clearer when we begin to understand the withdrawal of being as the giving of the whole, this crossing (Ubergang) is identical to the tracing out that occurs as the crossing through (Durchstreichung) of being (QB, p. 310/\f, p. 239),5 but only when it is repeated. The doubling of the cross traces out the origination of the crossing and this is the task of thinking as the search for the place of ethics. In light of its peculiar crossing, technology is ambiguous: not merely dangerous, but also potentially salvific, and it is crucial to bear in mind that it shall always harbour this ambivalence (QCT, p. 26—8/VA, p. 30—2). For this reason, Heidegger invokes the word 'hope' (verhoffen) when speaking of technology (QCT, p. 33/VA, p. 37). Hope requires the possibility of an

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alternative if it is to exist. The barring of being which technology institutes is the sign that marks the crossroads between the devastation of all notions of 'essence' and the rethinking of essence that today may be seen to be necessary. Both ways of a crossroads need one another in order for the cross to form. The rethinking of essence that Heidegger initiates could not take place without the utmost denial of essence that takes place in technology. We cannot choose the one without giving thanks to the other: what matters is the de/cision, which is called Seyn and which is always split between itself and its counter-essence, to which Part III of this work therefore of necessity turns its attention. By fully adequating appearance and essence in the way that it maintains a total constancy of beings through repetition, technology bridges the gap between beings and being. But this deprives being of its distinctness from beings and thus renders the distinction unnecessary. Technology is thus led to deny a fixed essence to things which would in fact prevent their modification (which technology engineers, to the end of efficiency and actuality). The manipulability of what-is at the hands of technology is an expression of the fact that an unchanging eidos can never have been and was rather an illusion brought about by man's inchoate grasp of the tools which defined him as human from the very start and the material upon which they are now brought to bear. An essence would be something that technology could not make, and there is nothing it cannot make. But this is to think essence as essentia, quidditas, the answer to the question quid est ... ? or ti estin ... ? In the light of technological revelation, this question today finds no answer, and the only conclusion to be drawn seems to be that essence was always an illusion, one brought about by the limited perspective of man's perception. Essentia is thus reduced to existentia or the quod, the mere fact of a being's existence, written with the existential quantifier (Ex). If essentia refers to the generic qualities of a type of being, and if it is this form of 'essence' that technology destroys, then we should go along with this destruction,7 and this is Heidegger's first imperative. Only thus shall we become attuned to the true sense of this destruction. Only by travelling this road shall we glimpse what is to be found at the end of it: which will be another thinking of 'essence' as the flipside of technology's closing out of being as transcendent to beings as a whole. We should be clear that this attunement is a possibility belonging to technology. If technology were not in place we could not question in the way that we do. This amounts to saying that being cannot be understood apart from its historical manifestations, but neither is it exhausted in such manifestations. To go along with this destructive attitude of technology is precisely to undermine technology in its subjectal self-assertion, and in this case to undermine means to demonstrate that beings as a whole are not as self-sufficient as technology likes to think. Now we are in a position to understand Heidegger when he says that to hasten or consummate the destructive tendency of technology is to undermine it, that technology sways essentially between its own

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indefinite installation and the self-destruction of its tyranny. The denial of being becomes the prohibition of representing being as belonging to the same order as beings. Thus, Heidegger explicitly recommends us to 'unconditionally actualize this spirit {of technology} so that we simultaneously come to know the essence of its truth' (HI, p. 53/GA 53, p. 66). This will demonstrate the way in which technology is itself a manner of revealing the whole and is premised upon an exclusion, a void which it does not think (cf. QCT, pp. 12—16/VA, pp. 16—20). Thus we might understand Heidegger's assertion that 'in the most extreme withdrawal of being thinking first brings the essence of being into view' (PR, p. 56/SG, p. 101 - my emphasis) and his instructions in Contributions to Philosophy to 'accomplish (bringen)' a crossing of being that is already taking place (CTP, III, p. 122/GA 65, p. llletal.). What we are attempting to understand here is the way in which technology and being cannot be detached from one another, and if ethics is nearness to being then ethics will exist as a response to technology which admits its inevitability. In his later understanding of technology, Heidegger came to see that man had moved beyond the 'Cartesian' position of primary subject or ground of the whole — as it had been even in Being and Time — and was becoming swept up in the selfsteering processes of production and consumption or the energy exchange and growth characteristic of technology. In other words, man was becoming just one more resource for the processes of increasingly self-steering technology and it was becoming clear that the real subject was the whole itself, which was coming more and more to deny anything outside of itself by expanding in an effort to consume the entire universe. Thus technology arrives at 'cybernetics' as the mimicry of natural systems by artificial ones in the sense of forming selforganizing and thus self-regulating totalities understood by Heidegger to result from the artificial steerability of all processes at the behest of man, which becomes auto-mdbilhy, the self-steering and uncanny self-sustaining of processes ignited by man but unfolding quite independently in the way of the universe of the watch-maker god. This is another way in which technology is unique, in what it does to man, who has since Descartes taken over the position of the inconcussable support for the whole of what-is. Heidegger tells us that being's truth 'will be given over to man when he has overcome himself as subject, and that means when he no longer represents (wrstellen) that which is as an object' (AWP, p. 154/HW, p. 104)8 and technology makes possible this overcoming by decentring man and allowing the systems which he has built to carry on without him, no longer needing even to be grounded within him. Technology prevents the representation of essence, which sets upon the thing and grips it with a conceptualizing and thus humanizing grasp (Ti>, p. 181/VA, p. 174; OWA, pp. 32-3/H\^, pp. 21-2 et al.) and thereby opens up the possibility that essence should be thought non-representatively. Since representation always involves a relation of resemblance between thought and what it thinks, this will allow us to think being as of an entirely different order to

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actuality. Technology stifles the non-actual in its denial of being, but this has the exceptional advantage of preventing us from thinking 'being' in an actual way and allows us to think it as a void within actuality itself. By denying that there is any longer or ever truthfully was a name for the whole, technology allows us to think being in a way other than this name for the 'being-ness' peculiar to each epoch (eieios, entelecheia, ens creatum, etc.). Technology extends the reach of the actual whole without limit in its striving after energy resources and if we think this to its extreme, 'consummating' its tendency, we shall become aware of the limitlessness of the whole and the fact that nothing borders it: if the whole universe is then viewed as an energy resource and there is nothing left to be fuelled by this energy except the very process of resourcing itself, we are surely led to ask the question why there should be energy here at all? What do we need it for? What is its purpose? 'How come'? Thus we are brought to enquire after being beyond the actual, as the withdrawing call that dictates that beings be revealed in this fashion. Questioning is the second stage in the development of an ethical stance, a stage that we must pass through in order to become properly ethical for any stretch of our existence. Heidegger translates 'ethos' with the word 'dwelling' (Wobnen, Aufenthalten), thereby allowing us to hear in it the trace of the older word 'ethos' which retains a trace of something that was never thought but needed to be in place and to withdraw into the background in order for all future significations of the word 'ethics' to accrue, and this is man's dwelling near to being. Questioning and therefore ethics is not some theoretical activity carried out by scholars alone, as I have insisted, but a basic way of dwelling or living', as the everyday translation of Wohnen would have it, that is a possibility for each one of us. Thinking is "the highest activity' (LH, p. 239/W, p. 145) or 'authentic activity' (eigentliche Handelri) (T, p. 40/TK, p. 40). Why? Because it is not a mere participation in an activity or process that is occurring without our impetus and could occur without us. It is authentic in that it brings to light that foreclosure upon which every activity rests. For this reason, when Heidegger issues his rare ethical imperatives which suggest that we 'do nothing', it is rather the form of action known as praxis that we should refrain from. This action is solely the business and the busyness of actualization, an action already occurring as the calculative operation that characterizes technological activity. Proper acting is, as we have seen, not a withdrawal from such a technological expansion of actuality — such a thing would be both impossible and undesirable from the point of view of being — but rather a repetition or continuation of this praxis which takes it to its logical conclusion: this extreme will make it clear that such will to will, ultimately for its own sake, rests upon nothing, is carried out for no ultimate purpose and so skirts an abyss to which it must blind itself, a blinding which is itself the revelatory process of actualization. It is not in opposition to praxis but through its very repetition that Heidegger comes to think action as poiesis. If 'thinking' means precisely this form of activity that by repeating praxis renders

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it poietic then we can in no way accuse Heidegger of a Platonic theoreticism, and the following imperative becomes much more interesting: 'before considering the question that is seemingly always the most immediate and the most urgent, What should we do? (Was sollen wir tun?) we {should] ponder this: How must we think? (Wie miissen wir denken?)' (T, p. 40/TK, p. 40) This is not an example of the traditionally philosophical prioritization of theoria over praxis, the former working out the rules that govern the latter and constituting our foresight of the essence which praxis in working on unformed material must bring to appearance. If thinking is questioning then it is a form of dwelling and thus of original acting which stands open to the abyss upon which action for its own sake is obliviously based. The action that is demanded by the technological age, which encourages praxis and nothing else, and the action to which Heidegger urges us is a form of action that is otherwise than practical. In many ways this ars vivendi, as has been recognized since Socrates' 'melete thanatou is an ars moriendi.11 It is the gradual learning of what death means, of what it means to die and how deeply this finitude extends. In early Heidegger, death was thought as the property of man. Later Heidegger came to see this moment of finitude as the finitude inherent to the whole itself and finally as a finitude which characterizes every being insofar as it is a being. Questioning, the second stage in the development of ethics, is the second stage in man's assumption of mortality. It maps the negativity demonstrated by death onto the cross of denial, which technology inscribes over beings as a whole in order to expand this whole indefinitely, stretching this whole to its absurd limits and with every creak rendering the cross more manifest as a. founding exclusion. This increased gaping makes of technology's denial an abyss. It indicates both its dependence on this denial and the absence which this denial indicates. Questioning is 'active renunciation' which 'takes refusal into the clearing' (CTP, VIII, p. 315/CzA 65, p. 447). Thus questioning draws us into refusal, but not yet to its hesitance, and only the two together constitute the essence of Ereignis. To take refusal into the clearing can, I think, mean only to link this refusal of being to the manifestation of being, to demonstrate the dependence of beings as a whole on (the foreclosure of) an abyssal void. Questioning thus opens to the withdrawal of being, but not yet to its essence, which is precisely Ereignis as the event of the differentiation of being and beings, which means not just to withdrawal but equally to giving. Heidegger goes one stage further than merely thinking the transcendental process of giving as belonging to an order distinct from that of the given; he understands this process of giving (being) to 'hesitate' and leave a mark within the totality of the given, a sign pointing beyond the totality. The void of being is precisely something that cannot appear as a being, but, in order to dictate the manner in which the whole of beings reveal themselves, this void needs to assume a form in which it can, as it were, 'influence' the organization of the whole. It needs to take the form of a being, the 'thing'. This is why Heidegger links the following curious phrases together: The immeasurability (Unmafi) of

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the mere being (nur Seienden), the non-being of the whole (Unseienden im Ganzen — the being that refuses totalization), and the rareness of being (Seltenheit des Seins)' (CTP, VI, p. 281/GA 65, p. 400). UnmajS is a word that Heidegger formerly applied to man's death: its application to the 'mere being' indicates that this death may now be understood as what comes to any being insofar as it is singular. Thus, Heidegger exceeds the mere thinking of Sein in its withdrawal and thinks Seyn as the way in which withdrawal gives and must therefore take the form of some being which is both within the whole and yet exceeds this whole in order to span the difference between being and beings. It will exceed the whole by refusing the unitary trait that determines the whole as whole. Questioning is a dwelling that 'hopes' in the sense that it prepares for the revelation of withdrawal as a manner of grounding: it hopes that the whole might one day 'leap' into its own abyss and thus come to understand not just that this abyss is the absence of ground but the way in which grounding occurs around an abyss. The preparation of questioning cannot force this leap but it is necessary if the leap is ever to occur. In answer to the foremost question of practical philosophy, 'what should we do?' Heidegger answers, in the guise of the teacher of the 'Conversation on a country path', '[w}e should do nothing, but wait (Wir sollen nichts tun sondern warten)' (DT, p. 62/G, p. 37). This imperative is to be situated at the second stage in the development of ethics, which questions. Here, in questioning, we undermine the totality of the whole by gently probing entities to see if, for a time, they might escape the totalizing determination — reproducibility - imposed on them. We are thus waiting for one among these entities to come to stand for the void of being and thus assume the status of a 'thing', a contingent being that acts as the navel of the totality, marking its foreclosed relation to its origin, which is disavowed in the umbilical cut (Seyn). We cannot say which object will come to stand for the void and thus become 'the thing', for it remains concealed in the future, unknowable and unpredictable: 'in the course of Western thought . . . the thing is represented as an unknown X' (BDT, p. 153/VA, p. 148): 'X' signifies the unknown other of Utopian hope, which always involves the possibility that it may never come. Gelassenheit towards the thing is the second stage of ethics within the technological age, but it is not, as is popularly believed, the last. It is an attitude to Sein as withdrawal but not yet to Seyn as the giving of withdrawal or the thing which will hold the place of this void within the totality. Gelassenheit comports itself towards the thing in the sense of the necessity of a place-holder for the structural void of being, but it does not yet ethically respond to the particular thing in its contingency and singularity. Questioning, then, has its limits. It cannot think how it is that the abyss grounds', it knows only that the abyss is our ground. The way in which the clearing is temporo-spatial and the way in which the cross placed over the whole in questioning may be identified with 'the fourfold' remain beyond it.

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Questioning stares into the abyss opened up by death, the refusal or withdrawal of being, but an abyss from out of which being can speak with the 'voice' (Stimme) to which the mood (Stimmung) of awe might attune us, in the Anklang to which we might become attuned through questioning. This is a question that questions so thoroughly that it forgets itself as questioning and becomes attuned to what calls it to think in the first place (Seyn or the difference) and responds to this grant that is to be said (the Zusage) and exhausts itself in its 1 utter - and unquestioning - devotion to such saying (Sageri): 1 Reflection is needed as a responding (Entsprechen) ) that obliviates itself in the clarity of ceaseless questioning away at the inexhaustibility (Unerschopfliche) of that which is worthy of questioning - of that from out of which, in the moment properly its own (geeigneten Augenblick), responding loses the character of questioning and becomes a simple saying (einfachen Sagen). (SR, p. 182/VA, p. 66)13 By turning us towards the abyss, questioning allows us to hear the dumb leaden silence of technology on the topic of being as the silence proper to being. It is a preparation that allows us to learn to hear the saying (Sagen) of the grant (Zusage) that we shall come to see is the necessary flipside of the refusal (Versagung) of being (EL, p. 71/US, p. 175). Today, this silence can be voiced only as the silence of technology when it comes to being. It is a silence for which grief prepares us in its wordless tears, melancholically refracting death into an ungatherable non-significance, the terror over which rouses us from our absorption in the world of significant beings. Thus ethics enters a new stage, or acknowledges another of its facets, that of 'saying', to which we turn in the following chapter. Questioning is an attitude to the whole in that it attempts to indicate to the whole its dependence on a void or abyss, by probing its totalizing edifice for cracks that might open onto the abyss, crumbling beings which, through their very fragility, might hold the place of the void of being within the whole of beings, for this void is always, miraculously, represented within the totality itself by some contingent and precious being which Heidegger calls 'the thing', a singular being that refuses for a time to be engulfed, and refuses precisely by crumbling, resisting through its very fragility or powerlessness. The void approached in questioning is structural in that it is the foreclosure that is necessary for any totality to form itself; while the thing, responded to in saying, is a contingent place-holder of the void, the historically variable way in which the abyss 'grounds' or organizes the whole. Being is 'nothing besides the being' in the sense that it is the nothing that resides alongside the being which holds its place. This is the thing which spans the ontological difference, folding itself pliantly1 between, marking the foreclosed place of being. It grounds the whole in the sense of providing us with a reason for its organization, since all must be organized around this senseless little piece of the Real which refuses the unitary

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trait that would define the totality as a totality. Since it cannot be incorporated into the totality, the totality must arrange itself so as to accommodate this singularity, naturally with a view to its ultimate incorporation and thus destruction, but the void is structural, and even though a particular thing may and always will be destroyed, the possibility remains open that another thing will arrive to take its place. The thing as the ground of the whole is precisely what is described in Heidegger's notion of the fourfold and is therefore what becomes of the cross of being which marks the differentiation of the ontological difference and the origination of the place of ethics. We thus reach the final stage of the ethics of the thing, which we might call an 'ethics of the Real". The description of the thing as a fourfold gathering demonstrates how it can be that, as Heidegger tells us, the thing 'bears' the whole world or gives birth to that world in the way that its parts are distributed, as the temple organizes the entire space of Greek existence in the polls. The fourfold thing is the topic of the third stage in the crossing of the cross, the concern of the 'topology of being' (Topologie des Seyns) (PLT, p. \2IGA 13, p- 84) which responds to being's topoi in things and thereby demonstrates how withdrawal can give and organize a whole, for it does so only in the form of the thing which excepts itself from the totality. Heidegger's works on language tell us that language speaks from out of the difference, the interstice of beings as a whole, a rent which pulls the totality towards the immanent void of being. The thing is this interstice and it is to this that our speaking must respond, this pain to which we must give voice. Speaking does not take place with the tongue {lingua) but is more originally a 'saying' (Sagen), which should be understood to be any form of dwelling that is responsive to the singularity of the thing with which it dwells. It is the thought that responds to the inspiration of being, that draws its own breath and sustenance from being itself and thereby tends it through speaking. It is drawn into the withdrawing-drawing or drafting-call of being in the configuration of its current withdrawal. In other words, dwelling near to the origin, as the wellspring of presence itself, sways according to the draft of this springing, in order to find the words and deeds that might be adequate to both the hardened crust which forms the stable identity of the entity and the unfolding gathering process of their upsurge into presence. The 'sense' of being, unlike its 'meaning', is the way in which being breezes into beings and sets them aflurry, vibrating in their temporary sway, the shine and vivacity of their colours. Being speaks only when the void of being takes on the positive consistency of the thing: this and this alone is what may be said. The void beckons, but the thing speaks. We are moving from attunement to the withdrawal of being in restraint, to an awareness of the hesitance of this withdrawal, the sense that the nothing is merely the veil of being or the veiledness of the fact that withdrawal gives, a matter to which awe attunes us. In moving from Chapter Four to Chapter Five we are therefore moving from restraint to awe, or from questioning to saying, and from Sein to Seyn, and Seyn is always instantiated in the thing that is said.

Chapter Five

Saying, Thing The essence of Seyn is Ereignis, and the essence of Ereignis is not merely refusal but hesitant refusal (die zogernde Versagung) (CTP, I, p. 12/GA 65, p. 15 et passim). It is precisely the differentiation of being and beings and therefore it cannot simply be the gesture of withdrawal that characterizes the Sein of the ontological difference; rather, it must also involve the gesture of giving. Questioning drew us only into the movement of withdrawing: it was merely a Seinsfrage. Questioning indicates that every totality treads upon a void, in particular the greatest totality of them all, which is beings as a whole as the subject of metaphysical positions. This positing reaches its apogee in today's very reality, technology, which is the consummation of metaphysics in the sense that constant presence achieves itself here in instantaneous repetition and renewal. That this is achieved means that being, which is of a distinct order to actual beings, is utterly concealed and the void lost in the pure positing of positivity. Ereignis, if it is the essence of being, must explain not only the withdrawal of being but also the way in which this withdrawal gives, the way in which the abyss grounds. What does the withdrawal of being give? Precisely beings as a whole in the way that they are organized and present themselves. How can being do this? How can being touch beings in this way? The only way for it to do this is by having some form of presence within beings as a whole, and this means that something that is itself a being must represent the void for all of the other entities within the totality. This entity will span the very ontological difference itself and may therefore be deemed an instance of Seyn, whose essence is Ereignis and whose instantiation of the togetherness of withdrawal and giving will be understood in terms of the togetherness of the time-space (Zeit-Raum), and ultimately the relation between the two motions of Entriickung and Beriickung, enrapturing and captivation. A configuration of time-space 'is' only in the form of its instantiation at a certain time and in a certain place, in what Heidegger calls a 'moment-site' (Augenblicksstatte): 'moment' being an instance of time, and 'site' being an instance of space. This moment-site that instantiates the configuration of time-space will capture the way in which a particular withdrawal of being organizes the whole of

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beings in its wake. Why? Because the moment-site is precisely what Heidegger calls 'the thing' (das Ding), and the thing gathers (dingen) and so 'bears' or 'gives birth' (gebaren) to the whole world (L, p. 2QO/US, p. 22): this means that the thing organizes this world, for 'world' (kosmos) is denned precisely by its being an organized totality in the sense that it is joined together (ftigen) or governed by dike as Heidegger understands it.1 The way in which the part relates to and supports the whole is described in Heidegger's vocabulary by the fourfold (Geviert). The elements of the fourfold are precisely that which the gathering thing is said to gather or fold into a unity. The fourfold is thus a description of the thing, but it is also and more importantly a description of the way in which the thing is folded into a world and manages through this very folding to organize this world as a whole. For this reason the whole of the fourfold is described as 'the world' (Th, p. 179/VA, p. 172). Heidegger's descriptions of certain instances of gathering are clearly descriptions of singular things, such as the bridge, the vine, the jug, the temple. In order to achieve a preliminary sense of how such things could organize a world, one should think first of all of Heidegger's early examples of the Greek temple (OWA pp. 41-5/HW, pp. 30-2)2 and the hearth, which organizes the living space of the house.3 In the age of technology it is less obvious what these things might be, since the homogeneity of space and time necessary for the calculative reckoning of beings and the maximization of their energy yield systematically occludes such privileged sites. Thus the fourfold is precisely the third stage of the crossing, which was introduced by death at the very first stage in the development of an ethics in the age of nihilism. It is precisely the ultimate differentiation of being and beings in the sense of Seyn. The cross introduced by death and applied to the whole in questioning turns out to be precisely the thing in the sense of a being that relates to the whole of beings, whose unobtrusive influence extends over the entirety of what-is and which may therefore be deemed 'Seyn', the origin of the difference between being and beings. It is from out of the difference between thing and world that speaking speaks (L, p. 190/t/S, p. 12). The void itself is silent, but its placeholder speaks, albeit reticently, shyly, for the thing in itself is nothing grand. Quite the reverse: it is a senseless and contingent piece of matter. The difference between the placeholder of being and the whole, a difference which is stretched out as the fourfold cross itself, is precisely Seyn. Therefore, the speaking of this difference that bespeaks the thing as it entwines its world is ultimately the voice of being, and it is this to which we must respond in our ethics of Saying: not merely in language, but in our very dwelling within the world, a dwelling in the world precisely which does not remain oblivious to the relevance of such simple things to this dizzying technological whole, however implausible this may seem. This saying in response to being is precisely the third stage in our ethics and truly an ethics of the thing. For Seyn is nothing but the singularity of the being that is singular

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and thus finds its instance in the thing, the site for the moment — being's moment. What matters here is to act in a way that responds to the manner in which singular beings temporarily exist in a unifying fit with their world and neither to immortalize these things nor to tear them out of their world. Once again, we should recall the scope of the words 'being' and 'thing' in Heidegger's terminology, which can encompass anything at all that is, be it a building, mountain range, animal, deed, or text. As we have said, the thing marks the void, and it does so by resisting whatever trait unifies the totality in which it partakes. It is in this way 'senseless' or 'useless' from the perspective of the totality, and for this reason the totality will ultimately desire its destruction, which will mean either its integration or its expulsion. The resistance of totalizing determination amounts precisely to the thing's singularity or uniqueness. The thing must therefore be that which is only once — 'ein je Weilige (Th, pp. 181—2/VA, p. 173) - and it is neither a traditional matter that should be held onto in the face of technological modernization nor something that could be blithely exported to another totality and institute the same organization as it did previously: 'torn out of their own native sphere . . . placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world' (OWA, p. 40/HW, p. 30). Thus the ethics of the thing calls for a constant watchfulness and precisely for the changes that take place within the totality itself: the developments of science and technology if we are thinking in terms of beings as a whole. Through this watchfulness alone can we know precisely what the singularity of the thing will need to amount to and when it has come to outlive itself, which would mean when its subversive possibilities have become commonplace, generally in the way of being taken up into the cycle of technological reproduction. What characterizes these contingent objects that arise uncertainly and successively to hold the place of the void is that they are not permanent or easily captured by a calculating attitude and so not automatically capable of reproduction (one thinks of Walter Benjamin and the destruction of aura as being very close to Heidegger on this point). This impermanence and fragility is what necessitates the fact that the place of the void must be held by a succession of entities. Precisely for this reason the thing must be 'nimble' and 'lightweight' (leicht) (Th, p. 180/VA, p. 173), ever ready to adapt to the changing situation by crumbling, precisely by remaining fragile in the face of an ossifying and sedimentary totality, in order to ensure that a void be left within whatever totality arises to consume it and thus to leave room for another thing that might take its place. In other words, the thing is the moment of fragility in the whole which refuses the totality, and when an epochal change in the totality takes place the thing does not harden itself and persist through the change but allows itself to die and to die within the new configuration and thus to demonstrate a moment of negativity or void within this new constellation, however complete it may seem. The dead thing comes to represent a lack in the renewed symbolic universe, a

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demand that a new thing come — if possible — to take its place. In the face of homogenizing technology such things are few and far between and require constant watchfulness if they are to be glimpsed when 'all of a sudden, presumably' they arise: for, 'things are also compliant and modest (ring und gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere of equal value (gleicb gultigen)' (Th, p. 182/VA, p. 175). The ontological difference between being and beings is a historically varying prevailing of the one over the other according to the de/cision ofSeyn. Therefore, the thing that instantiates Seyn will continually change, arising when the thing of the previous totality has decayed amidst the new symbolic co-ordinates of a renewed world, when a void has been left within the new totality in which it might take up its temporary sojourn. Heidegger's name for this little piece of the Real is Kleinod, the small and precious jewel (EHP, p. 198/GA 4, p. 174) and it is important to recall here how broad a range of signification this 'thing' has: Inconspicuously compliant is the thing (Ring ist das Ding): the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plough. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way. Things, each thinging from time to time (je weilig) in its own way, are heron and roe, deer, horse and bull. Things, each thinging and each staying in its own way, are mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross. (Th, p. 182/VA, p. 175) In order to broaden a somewhat rustic impression we should recall the range of the German 'das Seiende within which Heidegger identifies, in particular, 'thinking, poetizing, building, leading (fiihrend), sacrificing, suffering, celebrating (jubelnd)' (CTP, V, p. 213/GA 65, p. 302), and crucially, we should bear in mind Heidegger's earlier determination of an event of truth in 'The Origin of the Work of Art': One essential way in which truth establishes itself in the beings it has opened up is truth setting itself into work. Another way in which truth occurs (west) is the act that founds a political state (staatgrundende Tat). Still another way in which truth comes to shine forth is the nearness of that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most of all. Still another way in which truth grounds itself is the essential sacrifice. Still another way in which truth becomes is the thinker's questioning. (OWA, pp. 61—2/HW, p. 50) The correct attitude to these entities is one that holds onto them without clinging and is described by Heidegger with the word hegen or fostering: 'Here and now and in little things (im Geringen), that we may foster (hegen) the saving power in its increase' (QCT, p. 33/VA, p. 37). Hegen is perhaps related to the English word 'to hug' and implies a non-possessive love that is prepared to

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release the thing when it has outlived itself, when fostering would be a sheer nostalgia. The fact that a succession of fragile beings must hold the place of the void and become lost in the cycle of reproduction is the meaning of beings' sacrifice 'for the sake of being (Seyn)' (CTP, IV, p. 163/GA 65, p. 230). This is how I think we should understand Heidegger's repeated invocation of 'sacrifice' throughout his oeuvre? Beings are to lay themselves down because the historical configuration of presence is always liable to change and therefore there is no single enduring being which could stand as the constant organizing factor of the whole for all time. Responsiveness to the thing and its temporaeity, to the changes within the whole that necessitate new things, amounts to the third stage of our ethics, and although questioning can turn any totality towards its occluded abyss it is not guaranteed that it will be able to find a foothold within that totality in the sense of a void in need of a being that will hold its place. It may not be able to find the Seyn which holds the place of Sein. For this reason, Heidegger identifies this rethought form of ethics as not fully within man's power to bring about. He cannot respond to being if the pain of the difference has not scarred him, if loss has not bereaved him. We cannot force the revelation of things and make something that is singular, thereby forcing a being to become a 'thing' that would represent the void of being (cf. BDT, p. 151/VA, pp. 145-6; Th, p. 174AM, pp. 166 a seq.). The giving half of the exchange of Ereignis between withdrawal and giving 'never succeeds by a merely human impetus (Antrieb)' (CTP, VIII, p. 320/GA 65, p. 455), 'Ereignis cannot be forced to suit thinking (das Ereignis, ist nicht denkmafiig zu erzwingen)' (CTP, IV, pp. 166-7IGA 65, p. 235). For this reason, Heidegger speaks of this stage of ethics as follows: Ethics (Moral)) as a mere doctrine and imperative (Forderung) is helpless unless man first comes to have a different fundamental relation to being (Grundverbaltnis zum Sein) - unless man of his mm accord, so far as in him lies, begins at last to hold his essence open for once to the essential relation to being (Beziige zum Sein), no matter whether being specifically addresses itself to man (sich ihm eigens zusprichi), or whether it still lets him be speechless because he is painless (spracblos, weil schmerzlos sein Idftf). (WCT, p. 89/WHD, p. 34 my emphasis)7 Thus we see that ethics in a sense more original than that of a concrete imperative is a matter of dwelling in a way that is open to the possibility of the thing, even though it is not within our power to bring this thing about. The thing is the subject of saying, of speaking, which is why in the passage just quoted Heidegger accords to being the power to allow us speech, as it bestows upon us the pain that is the splitting of the humble being between being and beings, one of being's interstices, the pain of the threshold joining the homely

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interior of the house with the cold indifference of the outside world, the pain of the fragile and contingent thing having to bear the entire structure of the historical world, with the strain of the keystone attesting to the abyssal grounding of the totality upon utter contingency. This dizzying pain is what we are called to endure in the final stage of Heideggerian ethics. Should such a contingent being show itself in the specific singularity that sets it at odds with the world in which it partakes, should we reach this stage of responsive 'saying' with the arrival of a new 'thing', then the question for ethics will be as follows: whether in every relation to a being we take over that self-concealing (Sichverbergung), and thus the hesitant refusal (zogemde Versagung) ... and own ourselves over to it (uber-eignen) ... [whether] we effect, produce, create, protect (behiiten), and in each case let a being be actual according to the call that belongs to it (dafi wir das je^weilige Seiende nock dm ihm gehorigen Geheifi erwirken). (CTP, V, p. 244/GA 65, pp. 348-9) Which is to say, 'we must know (wissen) and be bound (halten) by the way in which truth shelters itself within the being (die Bergung der Wahrheit in das Seiende)' (CTP, VII, p. 290/GA 65, p. 413) or, as Heidegger audaciously has it, 'to anticipate each everyday experience (jeder alltdglicbm Erfahrung) and include within it what Heraclitus says in Fragment 54'8 (EHP, p. 203/GA 4, p. 179). This suggests how we are to understand the following call: 'the task remains: to repeat beings from out of the truth of being (Die Wiederbringen des Seienden aus der Wahrheit des Seyns)' (CTP, I, p. BIGA 65, p. 11), to 're-create them (CTP, VII, p. 293/GA 65, p. 417 et al.). It is at this point in Heidegger's thinking that he begins to rethink a movement in the thinking of being that he formerly condemned as 'metaphysical', and this is the overstepping of beings through 'transcendence' or the thinking of being which begins from beings. It is this risk of transcendence which Heidegger finally wagers in his work after Contributions to Philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s with its lovingly sculpted depictions of singular entities, already practised as early as 1934 in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' with its unforgettable description of the way in which the entire world of the peasant may be read from the folds and creases of his shoes. In the lapidary pebbles of his late work, no longer the toil-marked quarry boulders of Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger's attention is frequently directed towards the 'thing' as the place-holder of being, a focus that, along with the counter-essence of Ereignis, is not fully recognized in Contributions to Philosophy itself. But the former at least is foreshadowed by Heidegger, as the following passage bears witness: 'The contrary way (Gegenweg),/r