Rich Text Format (RTF) version here (for printing etc).
____________________________________________________________
An Approach to An Introduction to Metaphysics; on the desire of being.
____________________________________________________________
Introduction
"The essay is a judgement, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging."Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form.
This essay intends to interrogate an aspect of the texts of Martin Heidegger in the hope that such an interrogation of a particular aspect will open up some insight into the wider body of works that constitute the Heideggerian text and are the focus of trying to understand the meaning of this text. There is a desire to attempt a concerted totalisation of the meaning of Heidegger's work, but also a desire not to, perhaps even a knowledge that a totalisation is impossible, not least because the space required for such a task would far exceed what would be seen as reasonably acceptable in a thesis of this type. There is also, however, a question over whether such an attempt could ever succeed, in the sense of putting an 'end to interpretation', a question perhaps over the very principle and possibility of totalisation. Of course this then makes the term 'meaning' and any attempt to 'know what Heidegger means', taken here as a total and thus totalised meaning, inherently problematic in principle. As such this study takes its exergue from Lukacs'A . A further desire then is to draw attention to the attempt that is contained here. This is also needed, I believe, because at the heart of this essay is a situation which seems to teeter on the edge of paradox, undercutting me as I write.
The role of the question in Heidegger is fascinating, I believe, because it is set up in such a way that in order to begin to think it we simultaneously find ourselves drawn into it - our ability to even make a pretence of standing outside the 'object' under interrogation, in this instance 'the question', is troubled by the fact that it appears as questioning about the question of the question. We enter that realm where words seem peculiarly slippery[1] and a notion of almost vertiginous regression lurks at our shoulders, where it seems all too easy to succumb to the forgetfulness of inquiry. This situation merits me pointing to it, I believe, because the principal texts in question here also form the arena of debate over the nature and role of the 'turn' within Heidegger and I wish to ignore this whole issue, as far as this is possible without damaging doing unnecessary violence. It is almost inevitable that such violence as will be necessary will also be seen as ultimately self-destructive and this deliberate ignorance is possibly the most immediate danger I face. My principal defence would be, however, precisely that it is deliberate and as such the ignored (or 'bracketed') is, if not actually present in the essay, at least apparent on its horizon.
Another seeming ignorance would be to Derrida, most notably to the text Of Spirit and the surrounding debates and discussions[2], already alluded to . The first chapter of this essay deals explicitly with the area of Heidegger under discussion in Of Spirit, though it is perhaps discussed obliquely[3] in Derrida, the principal focus of Derrida's work being on another concept within Heidegger, that of Geist, Geistlich, Gesitlichkeit. In this first chapter I ignore this debate as far as possible in order to establish my own entrance into this area of Heidegger's work, an entrance that would lead me to a focus on Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida in the long term, but which has the issue of desire as its immediate concern. There is thus a sort of false beginning, where I feel compelled to acknowledge a body of work that surrounds my attempt and which I do not wish to fully engage as yet. With regard to both this issue and that of the kehre I feel, therefore, much like a navigator in dangerous waters, aware of icebergs around me but concerned to avoid them rather than crash inexperienced into their midst.
A brief word about the second part and the broader structure of this essay. Having pursued Heidegger and, increasingly unavoidably Derrida too, through the issue of interpretation I turn to Barthes. The notion of desire that I want to introduce in the second part, that I attempt to introduce despite the inevitable difficulties in using such a loaded term, stems from an attempt to re-read or understand the chase of interpretation. What will be called 'the interminability of interpretation' is fundamentally boring despite its seductive attraction. I would also argue that it is fundamentally incapable of allowing life to breathe in the text, though such a negative opinion is troublesome and too simplistically put in such a short space. The slant or bias though in the text is undoubtedly informed by a fundamental problem with the whole game of language in terms of its ability to express life and to 'touch us', perhaps to 'graze' us as, though that it does is not simply denied. Heidegger wants to claim the question does also. If the essay is troubled by the ability of language to graze us then it is inevitably troubled by this suggested ability of the question. It is for this reason, as a way to work on the trouble here, that the figure of desire is brought in, to attempt to get a grip, a point of purchase, on this troubling situation. It is probably most heavily informed by Roland Barthes work A Lover's Discourse[4] though 'Barthes' as a figure that exists as part of a wider corpus is avoided. A Lover's Discourse is the area from which certain conceptual structures of 'figures' and 'figuration' come, forming a form of 'methodology' in the second part. The desire there is to be able to read and it is with this desire that the essay moves towards a final set of figures, through Barthes and Nietzsche into the possibility of a 'new bibliography' represented, though not totalised by, the figure of Irigaray. She appears, as the only woman in the text - a not unimportant fact - as this indication of the further directions that could arise from the essay but which are not the 'point' of it in the sense of its content, rather perhaps the 'point' of it in the sense of a 'pointing to'.
Part One: On the priority of the question in Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics.
(1) The issues: between and
paradox.
In these first sections I want to establish the issues. I want to compare the beginnings of two of Heidegger's principal texts, Being and Time, (BT) the most central of all of Heidegger's work in the eyes of most who know of his thought, and The Introduction to Metaphysics, (ITM) one of a number of lecture courses Heideggers' published during his lifetime and which appears to be rising in stature as a site of investigation[5]. I want to show firstly that these beginnings are crucial to the movement of the respective thoughts contained in the texts, secondly that there is a difference between the two beginnings and thirdly suggest a certain necessity in the movement between the two texts. This issue of what is between the two texts will, I hope, take me onto other, possibly 'broader', issues towards the end of the essay. The 'between' here comes into this essay as its fulcrum, as the point toward which the first part moves and the second part departs. In many ways the essay could be described as focusing on this 'between'
That it is this 'between' that is the immediate focus is also perhaps the reason why the question of the 'turn' is deliberately ignored. Instead the second movement of this piece simply comes back to itself and will attempt to address the possible paradox that inherently exists, also touched upon in the introduction. This paradox is faced by any questioner when they turn the question back on itself. The paradox of the question is here another name for a situation that exists whenever we try to question the question. It seems, like many paradoxes, or perhaps the term aporia is more appropriate, that questioning as an activity at once separates itself, as though it is somehow distinct from an unquestioning attitude. Yet a continuity within existence also seems to be the case, such that questioning and un-questioning both share as part of the activity of Dasein. This situation exists at the heart of Heideger I believe, where the basis of 'everydayness' as the fundamental datum field for the initiation of investigation into Dasein seems to allow space for both the questioning and unquestioning whilst never really establishing any how, or why or even what in the distinctions between the two.
This essay revolves around this problem of the paradox of questioning, which can also be found in the problem of 'what approach should we take to Heidegger?' the question that 'prefigures' the title of this essay perhaps. There is, I will argue, a double approach in Heidegger's texts, a duplicitous movement that I feel it necessary to repeat here, whilst at the same time attempting to understand. A double approach to a double approach, an approach to an approach. "How are we to take An Introduction to Metaphysics?", this is the desire here...
Turning to Heidegger's 1953 text, the An Introduction to Metaphysics, originally a lecture course delivered in 1935, it can be seen that it opens with a question, with the question of the text it seems. This opening is particularly noteworthy, I would suggest, because of the fact that the title of the lecture course is 'Introduction'[6]. Almost our immediate reaction is one of caution, or perhaps should be, because there is little introduction to the introducing, little rhetorical perambulation, except perhaps in the fact that Heidegger himself calls the first nine pages of the text his 'preliminary remarks'. It would seem that these pages are somehow meant as 'prior' if we were to read 'preliminary' here too strictly, yet this would ignore Heidegger's' apparent 'self-commentary' at the conclusion of the 'preliminaries'. Let me go through this beginning in a little detail.
(2) The three aspects of the question.
I would suggest that a certain schematisation of the text is perhaps useful here. Taking the page numbers as guides I will begin my schema with the following divisions:
(1)'Preliminary' remarks on the priority of 'the question' (ITM, Pges 1-9);
(2)Remarks on the nature of philosophy with regard to 'the question' (Ibid, Pges 9-13);
(3)First etymological move (Ibid, Pges 13-17);
(4)Parenthetic remarks on title, aim and relation to BT (Ibid, Pges 17-19);
(5)Principal Argument - what asking/questioning means (Ibid, Pges 19-22).
On the basis of this schema I believe that we find Heidegger finishing section (1) with what I called just now a 'self-commentary'. Heidegger says, talking of the preceding pages of the section, that "we have not even begun to ask the question itself, but have digressed into a discussion about it. Such a digression is indispensable[7]" and he goes on to expand on this indispensability, indicating the radical disparity of the nature of the question he is investigating. This disparity precludes an ability to construct a "gradual transition" into the question. The question must simply be "presented". Having done so, however, he continues by saying "yet in introducing the question and speaking of it, we must not postpone, let alone forget, the questioning itself[8]". Here we can begin to see the discretion of the question, how it seemingly separates, becomes discrete in itself, self-contained, as though without origin or history, without a course up to it, without any 'introduction'. Despite Heidegger's 'historicism' in parts of BT, the question features as somehow 'beyond history'. Conclusions must not be drawn too quickly however and so we need to continue to explore the uses and meanings of 'questioning' in Heidegger's text.
We now have to, I believe, attempt to clarify the various senses in which the phrase 'the question' is being used in these opening pages. Firstly there is what I will refer to as 'the Question'. This is, for example, the opening sentence of ITM, "Why are there essents rather than nothing?[9]". Secondly, however, there is the question of the Question. Now it seems like this 'question of the Question' is what Heidegger is laying to one side with the conclusion to section (1), in his self-commentary. What would be laid aside here would be the issue of the status, which would be one way of taking what Heidegger calls "the priority" of the Question. Heidegger calls us back, though, not to the 'question of the Question' or to the Question itself but rather to the questioning, a word that implies an action or perhaps simply 'a process' if we wish to avoid prejudging the issues surrounding the notion of 'acts'. Such a process is, as a process, part of our existence, an aspect of our reality; it exists in some way in order to be described.
We thus see that very early in the text there are at least three aspects to the notion of the question. There is the first sentence, the Question. Then there is the text about this sentence, the question about the Question. Finally there is the notion of questioning, a notion that could be said to reside in the text but which surpasses this formal structure and is what is pointed to by the text. This third term escapes words and can possibly best be understood, though with a necessary violence that must be noted, as related in some way to the concept of experience within Heidegger's works, a point I will come back to. I want to place four words in a position of importance now as understanding these words is a further desire of this text; they are - between, paradox, question and experience.
(3)The presented question.
Look back to ITM and its beginning. At once, rather than being gradually brought into and up to a subject, we are into it, we are immediately into metaphysics. The Question itself is immediately metaphysics. Any introduction, in Heidegger's terms, cannot thus be understood as a preparatory sketching out of terms or debates. If we extend the problem over the discrete nature of the Question to the nature of metaphysics, tentatively and solely for the purposes of investigation, we may perhaps find that the 'break' that the question appears to offer also appears in talking of metaphysics. In a negative sense a certain wariness of such discrete entities, of such origins without origins, is in part a resistance to merely accepting, to allowing arguments and understanding to be taken over by mysticism, an 'allowing ourselves to be led by the text' that fails to bring forth the thought in a reading. Perhaps positively, however, we can understand Heidegger's use of the concept of 'introduction' rather as a way into, an intro-duction, a route into metaphysics. This in turn, if it is possible, may give us a way to defend Heidegger's notion of the question from problems surrounding it with regard to the paradox of the question sketched above.
A presented Question begins the text. A present to us, a gift perhaps, that is simply 'there' initially. The text immediately takes us into metaphysics with the presented question, or at least this is what it attempts I would suggest. This first movement in ITM echoes strongly the first move in the lecture What is Metaphysics? (WIM). Here in WIM Heidegger begins by suggesting that the question of the title, 'what is metaphysics?', "awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics."[10] Such a discussion about metaphysics would, however, tend to suggest either a metaphysically neutral point from which to engage in this discussion or a presupposed metaphysical standpoint from which the discussion is carried out. It is this problem that motivates the movement in both WIM and ITM forming a structural echo between the two texts and such an echo is part of the evidence for the direct connection I would argue exists between the two texts, with WIM providing us with a preliminary of the move, more complex than simply the one surrounding the question of beginning, that Heidegger attempts more fully in ITM.
Quite what is this 'problem'? We could describe it as the problem of hermeneutics, of the nature of a philosophy which, like Heideggers', wants to use a 'pre-knowledge' to inform 'knowledge'[11]. "The old difficulty which man can never overcome returns, that only in the process can we gain that which must already be gained for this process."[12] Beginning with such a claim, such a point of departure, entails that the beginning is crucial. The way we take a text is not simple and already determined as correct, there is not one way although the way we take the text is crucially important, not just for interpretation but thinking in general - for Heidegger "the lasting element in thinking is the way"[13]. The way we begin in our process of taking a text is as important as the way the text begins. The idea of the "gateway"[14] that Heidegger brings in elsewhere can perhaps help here in that it provides us with an image of a place which we enter, a spatial metaphor perhaps but which despite its limits is partially helpful in clarifying the centrality of the beginning. As in any space, we enter as foreigners, as outsiders, being outside the text, the writing and the thinking it attempts to embody. Perhaps over time such places may become more familiar, but the process of entry still takes place with each return visit.
The need to return in order to deepen our familiarity - or perhaps even exacerbate our unfamiliarity - is very important for Heidegger. The difficulty noted above, of having to have for the process what is gained by the process, is one that is interpreted; it "means" that "the first attempt of following along with the movement of Being demands of itself a repetition". This demand for repetition is itself seen by Heidegger as a remaining "in the motion of questioning"[15]. Such a situation is generalised. "As with every actual interpretation of a work of thought, it is true here that it is not the opinion which a thinker ends up with that is decisive, nor the version in which he gives his opinion. Decisive is rather the movement of questioning that alone lets what is true come into the open"[16]. Thus we have, right at the heart of Heidegger, a certain stance, a certain 'way of speaking', which involves us in a situation where to respect the author and the text we are almost forced not to judge Of course, as we move through the text we judge - we agree, we find it obscure or illuminating, we respond. The response, and thus the responsibility, that Heidegger calls for, however, is one that refuses its ending - there is thus a tension between the responsibility of response, which tends to presuppose a judgement upon which the response is based, and the responsibility to forestall any closed judgement[17]. The necessary 'tension' in our responsibility is the notion of the question in Heidegger.
I want to briefly explore this claim with regard to a defence of the priority of the question from the paradox of questioning. 'The necessary tension in our responsibility is the notion of the question in Heidegger'. Rather a bold claim and one that ought to be immediately caveated, perhaps, if we are to be, as a writer, responsible in our text. The idea here, however, would be less to add the almost certainly necessary caveats than to attempt to see if it 'works' in any way. First I want to try and break down the problem that I am referring to as a 'paradox of the question'. The priority of the question is asserted. Yet the assertion is not itself a question, but rather a 'fact', a starting point or a beginning. We can either accept it, and then use this acceptance as a base from which we 'work' on any issues or we can challenge it. Problematically, however, the assertion, when questioned, seems to confirm itself - how can we question the priority of the question without conceding (or accepting, or using) the priority of the question? It seems that the 'fact' is always capable of slipping behind any activity of questioning, saying to us 'well, you need me just to get started' - as though this priority is not one of hierarchy but of necessity. The priority of the question is thus, truly, a priori[18]. Yet the problem I want to niggle away at is the 'fact' that the priority of the question seems to demand a questioning of this priority, which is both possible and impossible because of the 'necessity' of the priority of the question.
So how, then, could the claim that 'the necessary tension in our responsibility is the notion of the question in Heidegger' help defend against the paradox of questioning. The simple skeleton outline would go something as follows I believe. We take on board a certain responsibility to the text and to the meaning of the text as soon as we take on board a reading which we continue. That is, as soon as we take the text seriously and don't just 'pass over it in silence' we take on the duty of responsibility. This 'taking on' could perhaps be fleshed out with some sort of ethical notion or Communitarian notion of 'rights entailing duties', perhaps even a Levinasian notion of the primacy of the ethical could play a role, but that is not the issue for me here. My claim is simply that to read is to entail a response and that the right we have to read texts entails a duty to respond to those texts, and not, perhaps, to our prejudices, to our 'ideas' of the text or to the fashions of the day.
The tension in our responsibility comes from a refusal to stop reading the text. We do not respond after reading but the reading and responding come together; to read is to respond and to respond is to read. The response is thus a process that forestalls foreclosure - it keeps us, or places us, in a situation in which we engage and this engagement is essentially the place or the situation in which we question. Thus the question is not a means to an end, an intention or a formal structure but rather a situation, a way of being and as a way of being its principal feature is that it is experienced. We experience the tension in our responsibility in the same way we experience the notion of the question, with uncertainty, openness, possibility, tension and desire. (Crucially it is this last word, 'desire', that I think is most troubling.) In terms of a 'defence' against the paradox of questioning the claim would be something like, the notion of paradox at work is positive not negative and, relating to the etymology perhaps of para and doxa, this notion of paradox is 'thought that attempts to go against common sense' and explores the extra-ordinary 'inverted world' of reason[19].
Returning to this essay I ask myself again 'Why should the beginning of the text prove such an issue?' There is the role of the beginning as a 'gateway' that I have just been discussing, which is subject to numerous problems as to how we get a key to the gate, how we ever 'gain access' to a text that seems to keep as part of its content an ability to always absent itself from us, problems I will return to later. It is possible, however, to perceive the first few pages on the priority of the question (section 1) and on the nature of philosophy with regard to the question (section 2) as nothing more than a scene-setting for the substantive work of the text and whilst accepting the notion of 'gateway' the image or metaphor shifts slightly in that this is an open gate through which any can walk. It establishes the ground from which Heidegger will work. In playing such a role, however, such a 'scene-setting' would still have fundamental consequences for the remainder of the work, the conclusions or directions of that work being curtailed and limited by the initial validity of this first move. In Derrida's analysis of Husserl, for example, we find just such a focus on an initial "portentous distinction" [20]. Whether such a distinction is present in Heidegger's beginning is a question I will come back to but the essential point of the determinative role of the beginning structuring the movement of the text is the one I want to focus on here. So I will return to ITM and attempt to clarify this beginning as a concrete example.
(4) Reconstruction.
Such a structure of the importance of the entrance, a very 'architectural' model perhaps, seems to be implicit in the way Heidegger places the Question in question - 'why are there essents rather than nothing?' - in a privileged position. The argument can be reconstructed along the following lines, though this reconstruction takes ITM as part of a wider corpus. It is in the earlier BT where Heidegger states that "The entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term Dasein" [21]. Such a definition holds an ambiguity in the possession of the possibility of inquiry - does inquiry belong to Being or to the being that is Dasein? Is questioning contingent upon Dasein? Perhaps more pertinently we could ask, is Dasein contingent upon questioning? Whilst no doubt both important and interesting any development of these questions appears dependent on the development of the question of questioning, the implications of which will feed back into these possibly less abstract issues.
As to the reconstruction. Whilst the attempt to talk about metaphysics is possibly part of the context that lies behind the beginning of ITM, Heidegger's first move is still to attempt to justify the question he wants to address as the 'most important', as the "first of all questions" and in this attempt we find Heidegger attempting to re-orient such first philosophy. We can suggest that, despite what we have noted about the responsibility to the text, the attempt to justify in this specific context the priority of the question, rather than to simply assert it or 'present' it, enables an assessment to be made as to this justification since it is in some degree 'isolatable'. Of course, such an assessment does not directly counter the claim of the priority of the question, merely the justification of this claim, but in doing so we may find our way to a greater understanding of such a claim.
From what I have said so far, the first major focus of attention in ITM, in any approach to ITM, is the issue of beginnings. As part of his initial moves to justify the priority of the analysis about to be given in ITM Heidegger employs two strategies; an existential and a logical. In the first of these strategies, the existential, an account is given which introduces a distinction that seems to be working something like that between truth and error, reality and illusion. The question for me here would be something like, does this distinction play a similar role in the development of Heidegger's thoughts in ITM to the distinction in the sign that Derrida hunts down at the beginning of Husserl's work, as referred to above? I would thus suggest that a second major focus of attention is also broached within the first paragraph of ITM in the distinction used to distinguish what constitutes a proper "encounter" with the Question 'why are there essents rather than nothing?'. "Many men never encounter this question, if by encounter we mean not merely to hear and read about it as an interrogative formulation but to ask the question, that is, to bring it about, to raise it, to feel its inevitability[22]". To encounter is defined as an asking of the question that is at once an entrance into the full reality of the question rather than stopping at its formal structure. The encounter is not with a question as an "interrogative formulation" but with it as a particular experiential event, though the term 'experience' may be better replaced by 'existential'.
It is only in entering into the question that we really hear it as a question, hence the importance of the 'gateway' as an immediate implication of such a stance. Two other implications seem to follow. Aside from the notions around the concept of beginning, there is some form of a concept of reality/falsity at work as I have mentioned - and I use what seems like an asymmetrical pair here deliberately. There is a way to experience the reality of the question grounded on the question as exhibiting an existential state. This 'existential experience' of the question - and it is around this phrase that the ambivalence over whether to use the term experience or existential touched on above centres - which could be called an existential situation if we felt the term 'experience' to be too loaded with figures of subjectivity, is the full reality of the question for Heidegger and surpasses in its depth and breadth the 'formal' question configured in a particular linguistic structure[23]. To talk of 'correctness' with regard to the question would miss the existentiality of the question that Heidegger is positing in his structural conception of the question. This structural conception places the question, fundamentally, in a place where it is a particular form of existence, a particular 'experience' or situation - and I will use the term existential situation from now on in order to avoid the possible problems with the term 'experience'. This touches now upon the second implication of this principal thesis about the question with which Heidegger begins ITM. Opening with the Question the text immediately establishes a path away from the Question and towards considerations of existence, or rather, away from a way of answering or approaching the Question towards another approach to the question which takes it, primarily, as an existential situation rather than a linguistic structure.
Objecting to this reading it may be argued that Heidegger is simply making a point about the question that involves noting the aspect of asking involved in any question and which, if ignored, renders the question as something quoted, something mentioned, rather than something used. This distinction of mentioning and using seems to me to be at least an adequate description of the distinction Heidegger is using yet also fails to grasp the intensely existential underpinnings Heidegger is concerned to focus on. To 'use' the question would still seem to imply some sort of notion of citation. It would be as though a subject were faced with a toolbox, the resources of language, from which a particular instrument was selected for a purpose that lay beyond that instrument and resided solely in the subject. The mention/use distinction, whilst informative as a way of clarifying the distinction Heidegger is attempting, is useful primarily because in its limits it can show the possibility Heidegger is pursuing of a fundamentally intertwined relationship between Dasein and language that prevents any simple or responsible conception of a subject using language for supposedly extra-linguistic intentions. For Heidegger it is not that we, as subjects, use the question in properly encountering it but rather that in properly encountering the question we find ourselves within it[24]. Rather than the subject pre-existing with a horizon of intentionality within which the question is a tool or instrument, the question, if encountered properly, forms the horizon. This horizon can arise from the moods Heidegger goes on to outline and thus the entrance into the existential situation can be constituted by shifting into the question or by realising the arrival of the question. We can find ourselves questioning or pursue an attempt to enter the horizon of the question, but in either case a certain horizonal situation, an existential moment or event, is posited as the 'place' of the question.
I believe this emphasis on the existential can be seen when, in only the second paragraph, Heidegger universalises the experience of the question through his analysis of moods, the 'Befindlichkeit Stimmung' that are also found so prominently in BT. Three moods in particular are elucidated: despair, rejoicing and boredom. The first two, despair and rejoicing, seem to indicate the 'extremities' of our moods, this 'extremity' providing perhaps their raison d'etre as the fundamental moods, as thus existentially important for their ontologically revelatory power. Despair, when things lose all weight and all meaning slips away into obscurity (unconcealedness) and rejoicing, when the weight of the moment "transfigures" reality into a confusing immediacy of presence. Then comes boredom, "when we are equally removed from despair and joy" and "no longer care whether anything is or is not[25].
The first two moods seem intuitively to have some validity in the role in which Heidegger appears to place them: utter blackness and overwhelming light, both obscuring meaning through an intensity of the moment that refuses to be ignored. With boredom, however, the situation as described is open to question. Simply put, if we 'no longer care' whether anything exists or not, why should we be concerned with the Question of 'why are there essents rather than nothing?'. This is what Heidegger wants to say when he states that "the question is upon us in boredom". That we are concerned with the difference in this mood of absolute indifference appears either absurd or simply contradictory.
It is with the notion of boredom that we may be able to find some further clarity as to Heidegger's conception of the question, of the Question. In boredom we are outside care, the structure of Dasein Heidegger outlines in BT, in the sense that 'we don't care'. This 'outside' is not, however, like a separate plane or paradigm of existence, it is not discrete from being 'inside' care in the sense of caring. This is because although we don't care about things we are care, that is, we exist as care - although we don't care about ... when in the mood of boredom, we cannot but care. Boredom as an absence betrays a presence of temporalising temporality that is Dasein but it also reveals a meaning, a mineness of meaning in our distance from everydayness and its 'meaning' for 'Das Mann'. The unquestioned acceptance of things. As bored we are distanced and in the distance we are absent. In this absence of the meaning of Das Mann we bring a mineness to the 'why'. We feel absent and thus the meaning of presence presses in.
Heidegger's analysis of the question shifts back on the second page of ITM from giving an account of the existential event or encounter as he calls it to the issue of the priority of the Question which began that account. "It is the first question in another sense..." he declares. The initial moves in the text sketched out a priority of the question on the basis of its existential status in our lives and this next move returns to the questions of priority but from a linguistic-logical standpoint now, though to sharply separate the two 'aspects' of Heidegger's opening would be false. There is a double-step, a doubled priority, a double approach or way that Heidegger wishes to hold out for us, but in both approaches it is the meaning of the question that matters. To understand the question means to see its meaning for us, I would suggest.
It is this almost hidden 'what does it mean for us?' which enables Heidegger, I believe, to get the notion of the encounter with the question off the ground in the first place. The fact that the Question has a meaning enables any reduction of the question to its terms alone, standing as 'mere' words, to be rejected as limited in its scope for understanding. We can examine the words and Heidegger does with 'Being', but also there is more than words here, or rather there is one word that is highly troubling: why. Heidegger himself seems to indicate that any attempt to simply expand and bring to light the intricacies of each unit of the sentence fails when it reaches its beginning. This is a beginning that is both the textual start of the sentence (and indeed of the whole text that is ITM) and the metaphysical breadth and 'priority' in the 'systems' hierarchy. System is here highly troubling and is perhaps what is replaced with 'way', although notions of priority and systematicity seem hard to disentangle. The beginning also relates to the intention of the question but also, beyond its form and intention, there is the very origin of the question; we can summarise this aim at the beginning perhaps with the question 'what calls forth the question?' Here 'meaning' goes beyond simply linguistic contexts and thrusts towards value, towards existence and the very meaning of meaning and it is here, beyond the question, that we can locate desire I believe.
It is also the issue of meaning that characterises the three moods and enables boredom to stand as revealing an encounter with the question. To be bored is to not care and so seemingly not to care about the question, yet at the same time the meaning of boredom for us opens us to an encounter with the meaning of Being that is at the heart of the question and it is this encounter with the meaning of Being that is at the base of the question taken in the sense of something we encounter, that is, existentially.
Again: meaning can here be explicated in deeper, broader contexts[26]. Each situation of boredom can be described and its context given, its meaning derived, but this establishes things like 'bored by', 'bored about', 'bored in'; in other words, relations of Dasein to the world, perhaps modes or ways of being-in-the-world. However 'bored ...' aims deeper, it aims to suggest a fundamental baseline, almost analogous to Platonic forms perhaps, such that this fundamental mood is what the relations of modes of being-in-the-world described in the relational forms derive from. This ontologically revelatory aspect of existence appears to allow access to the care of the entity that is Dasein. Such 'Befindlichkeit Stimmung' are vital evidence for Heidegger is seems, perhaps related to the importance he places on the German impersonal[27].
Except that to read Heidegger in this way appears to suggest he is engaged in a process of establishing a philosophical therapy, some sort of psychological theory of 'Dasein', a model through which we can see ourselves. Perhaps it only needs formulating in such terms for the danger of violence towards Heideggers' text to come to the fore: the tone in ITM, as well as in large sections in BT, would be so radically opposed to such a reading as to suggest that there are two Heideggers[28]. The constant attempt by Heidegger to 'maintain' BT, however, suggests that there is as much likelihood of a misinterpretation of BT by us if we were to read it in a psychologistic way as there is of a self-mis-interpretation by Heidegger. It then behoves us I would suggest, on the basis of the arguments about a responsibility to the text, to search for other ways of seeing the role of BT, why there is the use of moods, why 'everydayness' is there, why such a 'psychologistic' or 'psychological' reading is both possible and a possible mistake.
(5) Bridging.
Let me try here to recapitulate and look ahead slightly. I have attempted to show that Heidegger wants to go beyond the Question in the question of the Question, to step back[29] to the beyond that is revealed by this question. Such an attempt to get behind the back of appearance is not, though, to go away from appearance but to see through it, the ambivalence in the tone here refusing any simple dichotomy of appearance/reality since the reality is in the appearance. We see through the appearance as we see through our eyes, to a beyond. Quite what such a beyond may be is here left undetermined, though the indications are that it will be akin to the 'originary Being' Heidegger talks of.
The problem in attempting to get a handle on this is itself related to the problem of how to see through a text, a problem that is intimately connected to what I will call the interminability of interpretation, an unoriginal phrase which could be cited from many sources perhaps but which allows both a notion of boredom and thus mood to enter into our thought as well as a notion of an absence of terminus. Essentially the discussion just given has the status of interpretation yet such a status is incapable of fixity, of providing a grounding, in the way the 'fact' of the "vague average understanding of Being"[30] 'grounds' the existential analytic of Dasein. The interminability of interpretation prevents understanding and yet exhibits such understanding: we cannot start to understand from the basis of interpretation yet only interpretation can allow us to understand. The beyond here, then, is what I want to eventually begin to 'question', a beyond that in some way may be able to originate the interminability of interpretation, not in the sense of beginning it but rather in the sense of maintaining its movement. First, however, I want to explore the interminability of interpretation.
(6) Another beginning
Despite the focus in the preceding sections being primarily on ITM I want to now turn to the beginning of BT, a text that precedes ITM by nearly a decade and which also begins with the question, although this time in quite a different way. If the beginning of ITM is, if anything, slightly slow and tends to 'go round the houses' indicating a desire to somehow remain with the question, in BT the alternative tendency occurs.
In BT and in ITM the openings focus on the role of the question. The paths from the openings and thus the openings themselves alter, diverge and are distinguishable. In BT we move from the question to the questioner and the renowned "existential analytic of Dasein", a move based upon the definition of Dasein as "this entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of its possibilities"[31]. In BT there is a move from the questioning of Being through the fulcrum point of the question, to the questioner. In ITM this move towards a particular 'essent' is it seems held at bay as Heidegger attempts to keep to the question itself. It is almost as though there is a braking process going on where the text is deliberately restrained and maintained in a certain area of investigation, where movement of the argument is folded back upon itself and doesn't move away from its starting point as quickly as it does in BT, thus making the movement an issue itself.
Similar features remain in Heidegger's analysis though, such as the role of moods, the Befindlichkeit Stimmung of BT. These soon drop back in ITM as the focus shifts back to the 'fundamental question'. The analysis, both in BT and ITM, wants a focus, indeed deliberately focuses tighter and tighter on an object of investigation but in BT this 'object' is Dasein whereas in ITM the attempt is to make this object the word 'Being'. The argument that Being can only be approached via being is altered in its effect in ITM as the being, the essent, that is the route to Being is no longer an essent as such but rather an event or a situation, the point of the question. The point of the question, plainly ambiguous in connotation, can be taken here in its ambiguity as both the 'spatial' point at which we stand when questioning, though any notion of spatiality is inherently problematic bringing with it as it does notions of a subject of the space, as well as the purpose and desire of the question. A third layer of ambiguous significance to the 'point' of the question can be brought out if we let the point become a pointing and see the place of the question as somehow directing us towards an understanding, as pointing towards meaning. This third level of ambiguity connects back to the whole notion of a beginning and 'an entrance' touched upon above and suggests an understanding of the role of the question as determining a certain path of thought which takes us towards a particular shape or form of understanding.
I want to try to clarify these differences with specific comparisons. The argument in BT begins, like ITM, with a question but in each case there is a difference. So we have a first point of comparison. The 'question of the meaning of Being' is the leading edge of BT and thrusts the work towards the "fundamental ontology"[32] Heidegger wants to develop. The major difference with ITM is not just that the question is formulated differently - though the entrance into the question of the notion of lack that occurs in ITM with the addition of the phrase "rather than nothing at all"[33] is important. The major difference seems to be, and caution is deserving here, that in ITM the investigation moves towards language[34] and in BT towards a particular essent with 'ontological priority', namely Dasein[35].
Two passages will perhaps indicate the radical disparity in the directions each text takes. I place them one after the another to stand in their difference and serve, not so much as evidence, as an indication of the way the argument that follows begins. The first passage is from BT;
"By indicating Dasein's ontico-ontological priority in this provisional way [the preceding section 3 of BT] we have grounded our demonstration that the question of Being is ontico-ontologically distinctive. But when we analysed the structure of this question as such (Section 2), we came up against a distinctive way in which this entity functions in the very formulation of that question. Dasein then revealed itself as that entity which must first be worked out in an ontologically adequate manner, if the inquiry is to become a transparent one. But now is has been shown that the ontological analytic of Dasein in general is what makes up fundamental ontology, so that Dasein functions as that entity which in principle is to be interrogated beforehand as to its Being."[36]
In passing I will note the features I want to bring attention to. It is clear that Dasein is the focus of the enquiry - it is "that entity which in principle is to be interrogated". The emphasis in the text is Heideggers and brings attention to the way in which interrogation works for him, something he has broached in Section 2. I want to emphasise both that it is Dasein and that this is a question of principle, of first principles in fact since that is what Heidegger is making an argument for[37]. I also want to note the structure he summarises here, one of priorities of the sort 'in order to, then...' in a way which links to the phrase 'fundamental ontology' and the notion of 'first principles' to suggest, perhaps justifiably, that Heideggers' BT intends to be a 'system', a grounding for philosophy based on arguments around conditions of possibility. It is precisely this problematic that is located around the 'kehre' and which, at this point, reveals the weakness of this essay in having to ignore this debate. This weakness is particularly pronounced in that I want to suggest that an awareness by Heidegger of the problems of such 'first principles' and its disappearance from his later work is in part the understanding we get from an approach to ITM and possibly part of the motivation behind the text itself. Finally, for the moment, the notion of 'transparency'[38] which is absolutely central to Heideggers' notion of how we approach a question also tends towards a dynamic of completion and seems infected with the 'quest for certitude' of the major rationalists of the Enlightenment and which remained in Husserls' work, partly in the notion of certainty he employed and partly in the way in which he envisaged phenomenology as being a science. This notion of transparency will also disappear as the 'alethiology'[39] Heidegger is developing develops and folds back over his own work. These are initial indications of the differences in the texts I want to focus on quite hard. For now though let me turn to the passage in ITM and cite this, again quite a long passage;
"But the emptiness of the word 'being', the total disappearance of its appellative force, is not merely a particular instance of the general exhaustion of language; rather, the destroyed relation to being as such is the actual reason for the general misrelation to language.
The organisations for the purification of the language against its progressive barbarization are deserving of respect. But such efforts merely demonstrate all the more clearly that we no longer know what is at stake in language. Because the destiny of language is grounded in a nations' relation to being, the question of being will involve us deeply in the question of language. It is more than an outward accident that now, as we prepare to set forth, in all its implication, the fact of the evaporation of being, we find ourselves compelled to take linguistic considerations as our starting point."[40]
Again a few brief comments before moving on in this argument. The first point is the shift from Dasein to "linguistic considerations" which now come to the fore. The structure has shifted as well and whilst a notion of something being revealed is still in place the notion of 'conditions of possibility' is less apparent, the 'in order to, then..' structure I referred to in the first passage less noticeable than a notion of 'this shows us also...'. This shift is indicative, I believe, of the sort of increasing emphasis placed on the role of alethiea suggested in calling it a developing alethiology, a term which suggests a wider 'contextualisation' of Heidegger's work within a certain way of thinking rather than simply a 'renewed' or 'reorganised' notion of truth as it is often seen, particularly on the basis of BT. With the seeming exit of Dasein from centre stage the 'human' has not itself departed; it is replaced now with a political tone, a tone which speaks of nation and purity and which is, undoubtedly, part of the problematic that surrounds the issues of Heideggers' political involvement with National Socialism. This last point, touched on by Derrida in Of Spirit and in much of the literature around Heidegger in contemporary philosophy, is one that is perhaps most capable of impinging on our readings of Heidegger when it comes to ITM. Parts of ITM heave under the weight of a rhetoric that is bold in its insertion of philosophy into the world, but frightening precisely because of its insertion into a situation so many abhor with knee-jerk 'common-sense'. The issue is one I avoid here because it is essentially marginal to the concerns of this specific essay, but it is an issue that again behoves recognition, even in its absence.
In both cases I am focusing on quite small sections of the overall texts, a point I want to re-emphasise since this focus on the beginnings - even if it is in this case on the end of the beginnings - is inherently prone to attack in that its limited scope may force broader considerations out the window. This is particularly problematic for me as I want to suggest a disparity in precisely the broad movements of the texts and the thoughts, whilst only really concentrating on these short passages. This problem aside, again, the two passages at the end of the first chapter in each work work well, I believe, in showing the distinctions being drawn and the differences in direction. In each case these final two or three paragraphs act as they do in many texts as a sort of 'summary bridge' between one section and another, a situation that occurs regularly in BT, and as such can perhaps be useful in crudely 'representing' the sections they summarise.
Having given such summary comments I want to go back into what is 'summarised' and explore the arguments from a slightly more 'rigorous' stance, breaking them down slightly to try to increasingly bring out their differences and repetitions. Turning back to BT the argument I believe is (i) that the question of Being is distinguished as "ontico-ontologically distinctive" - it has a 'priority', (ii) that analysis of this question as a question ("as such") reveals the particular relationship of the questioner, Dasein, to "the very formulation of that question". The first section of this argument is worth comparing to that in ITM, an indication of which has already been given.
The argument about the priority of the question in BT has two strands, two 'component parts', although these are undoubtedly schematic, meant to indicate what is in the text and a reading of it, not be the text or replace it by standing in for it. Part A is the following; (i) the question of the meaning of Being has been forgotten, (ii) yet this question is prior to all questions regarding beings (this difference based on the ontological difference) and that (iii) therefore the question of the meaning of Being is ontologically prior. Linked to part A, part B of the argument goes as follows; (i) a vague average understanding of Being is a fact, (ii) such an understanding is that of Dasein because of the structure of questions (Section 2, BT) (iii) thus Dasein has 'ontological knowledge', or rather what Heidegger calls a "pre-ontological understanding of Being"[41], and it is 'always already' there (iv) thus 'ontically' the question of the meaning of Being has a priority. Part A is I would suggest a parallel of the 'logico-linguistic' argument I touched on above in the discussion about 'what does it (the Question, the question) mean for us?'. Part B is roughly parallel to the 'existential' argument I touched on above that opens up issues of an entrance into the question. It is around this last point in the argument that a crucial move is introduced by Heidegger when he talks of the question as an "event"[42].
(7) The advent of the event.
The structure of the argument about the priority of the question in ITM is noticeably different to that in BT as the above discussion in Sections 1 - 6 of this essay should by now have begun to make apparent. The two forms of argument in BT are replaced by the two forms in ITM, or rather altered since in both cases the two forms could be said to be existential and logico-linguistic. Altered being intended in its suggestion both of 'adjustment' in the sense in which one might 'edit' a text that is being written. Does the meaning change in the editing? Obviously this must be the case, but the principal desire in the editing rather than in the writing could perhaps be said to be expressivity, the readability of the text being uppermost. Thus at this point the Other, the reader, begins to enter and the text 'doubles': it begins to fold up into itself, as it attempts to hold a meaning, to hold itself; and it folds out, as it attempts to express or press out of its presence a meaning. Surrounding us here would be questions or understandings regarding the possibility or otherwise of the 'work', problems perhaps avoided by the strategy of adopting 'ways not works'[43] though this only forces the problem back onto the issues of avoidance[44]. Moreover the alterity of the additional also enables the between to arise, what is between the writing of access to Being through essent or event. "The intimacy of world and thing is present in the seperation of the between; it is present in the dif-ference"[45].
In ITM the arguments focus much more heavily on the event of the question and this aspect is fed back into the rest of the structure. Heidegger says that "if the question is asked and if the act of questioning is really carried out the content and object of the question react inevitably on the act of questioning. Accordingly this questioning is not just any occurrence but a privileged happening that we call an event"[46]. In this quote the notion of 'reality' has come into play and the pair - reality/falsity - that I touched on earlier in relation to the notion of encounter[47] is visible again. Here we also see the definition of event, this privileged occurrence. We also see the explicit replacement of a privileged entity with an event. In BT Heidegger is beginning his analysis by asking after an entity, a being - he asks "In which entities is the meaning of Being to take its departure? Is the starting-point optional, or does some particular entity have priority when we come to work out the question of Being? Which entity shall we take for our example and in what sense does it have priority?"[48].
Interestingly it is worth noting that whilst apparently a shift that precludes coherency, the two moves can in fact be made compatible quite easily. Despite Heidegger asking whether the starting point is optional in BT and then, seemingly, saying no with the focus on Dasein, a position that would then have to be said to have reversed in ITM, this 'optionality' refers to an entity. The shift is not from one entity to another but from an entity to an event. Such a shift is both immediately compatible with BT in that the analysis can be said to have shifted to another horizon, as well as opening up other, possibly more profound questions, as to why this change of horizon takes place.
Also interestingly, a motivation for the shift away from the description of his work as 'fundamental ontology' is given by Heidegger in ITM and in this he points to the need to shift away from the 'essent', the being as entity. He says, after describing the 'traditional' meaning for ontology as being related to hierarchic organisations and systems of categories, that "we can also take the word 'ontology' in the 'broadest sense', "without reference to ontological directions or tendencies"(cf. Sein und Zeit, p.11, top[49]). In this case 'ontology' signifies the endeavour to make being manifest itself, and to do so by way of the question 'how does it stand with being' (and not only with the essent as such)[50] (my emphasis). He continues, after bringing in this broad sense of Being, by saying "since thus far this question has not even been heard, let alone echoed; since it has been expressly rejected by the various schools of academic philosophy, which strive for an 'ontology' in the traditional sense, it may be preferable to dispense in the future with the terms 'ontology' and 'ontological'. Two modes of questioning which, as we now see clearly, are worlds apart, should not bear the same name."[51] Here the threat of disrupting a reading of BT can be seen.
(8) The interminability of interpretation.
So far I have been attempting to give a reading of Heidegger. The aim, albeit in a limited way, is to suggest a problem in reading that I have so far touched upon with the phrase 'the interminability of interpretation'. Essentially the problem is this: at what point can we stop? It would seem that we finalise our interpretation when we understand, that this somehow consummates our enterprise. Yet the notion of reading applies to the interpretation itself as read and thus a dangerous regress appears based around a problem of evaluating the interpretation. The evaluation itself is subject to interpretation. Whilst in practice limits are found on a possibly pragmatic basis there is an analogous movement of the reflexivity, the folding back upon itself, of the 'why' in the movement of interpretation, one that is brought out perhaps by the disruptive strategies of readers such as Derrida.
It is not that Heidegger has moved from a position of the essent as entrance to Being to that of event as entrance, but that rather the role of the entrance is itself brought to the fore by the alterity of the essent/event pairing. In particular, in the 'pair' of possibilities, of which the event appears as the more prominent in ITM, there is also brought into the very entrance to Being the notion of the between, the slash that has informed Heidegger and his concepts since the Ontological Difference. The disruptive re-reading of BT on the basis of Heidegger's re-saying of what he has said both suggests a deeper or broader dynamic in Heidegger's work, what is behind the re-saying, and a rigorous systematicity in that we should integrate the parts into a whole greater than the sum of these parts.
Derrida refers to such a disruptive re-reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit, most noticeably in the long footnote, number five, that relates to Chapter nine of his text[52]. Here Derrida asks us to "pause for a moment: to dream of what the Heideggerian corpus would look like when, with all the application and consistency required, the operations prescribed by him, at one moment or another would indeed have been carried out" and declares that such rigour, such rendering of a rigor mortis on the Heideggerian body, would "not only be simply 'without spirit', but a figure of evil. The perverse reading of Heidegger." Derrida's comments suggest an inability to render such rigour to Heidegger as is thought to be needed by 'consistency', in other words by a 'system'. The thrust here in Derrida is to emphasise the essentially anti-systematic life of the Heideggerian corpus, a situation that renders any attempt at interpretation even more complex since interpretation often presupposes a notion of 'truth' and the 'reality' of the text that is to be interpreted. Baudrillard, for example, argues this point in his essay On Seduction where the 'seductive' nature of texts is hailed and where he declares that "every interpretive discourse (discours de sens) wants to get beyond appearances; this is its illusion and fraud."[53] Whether Baudrillard is correct in generalising the notion of interpretation, or of attempting to 're-order' this notion with a 'generalisation' of the 'traditional' meaning of interpretation and opposing it to the seductive form of interpretation, is a moot point for this essay. The danger of the desire of interpretation is worth noting though and one Baudrillard points to clearly.
This danger of the interpretive stance, of the desire of interpretation, is exacerbated by Heidegger when his very words aim at holding back closure. It is precisely such openness that Heidegger points to with talk of questioning the question. The structure brought out in the "why the why" phrase Heidegger uses[54] recoils not just on itself in the event but also on the 'why' that is not asked but given in any interpretation. We can hear the 'why the why' in a number of combinations which manipulate the sense of 'why' as either giving or halting explanation. The 'why' forms a slash on which we can balance. We ask why, to give a why, to ask why.
It strikes me the that it is appropriate to ask 'how should we hear the question?' Such a question itself seems a little like it could be the desire motivating much of Heidegger's discussion of the question in ITM, but this way of formulating things has major problems. To start with the whole notion of 'how should we...' tends to imply some sort of normative attitude, suggesting that Heidegger's argument is one that attempts to give us the 'correct' way to view the nature of the question, of questioning. Such an attempt would plainly be itself subject to the question of 'why?' and in the course of attempting to justify itself would go through the process of putting forward a reason which then in turn is subjected to the 'why?'. This process, based upon an attempt to put each reason into a propositional form, lends itself to attack by the problem of propositional regress, that is, that every proposition needs a further proposition to ground it. Indeed such a 'rigorous' and in many ways linear approach would tend to go against the very spirit of Heidegger's work, as well as showing a profound misunderstanding of his texts.
In the process outlined above the argument would be linear, I would suggest, because it follows a certain line of movement; it goes from a starting point of a statement, through the question 'why?', to the reason, which in turn begins the process again and so on ad infinitum. The line expands either until an unanswerable 'why? is reached or until the 'why? is satisfied. This infinite regress is in essence the process at work in the interminability of interpretation. How could we satisfy the why? What is it that the why demands or desires that needs to be brought out to sate it?
(9) Sating interpretation with desire.
Interpretation desires revelation. Baudrillard, for example, suggests that this is endemically dangerous because such revelation appears based upon a hierarchical opposition between appearance/reality, with reality the superior form that lies 'behind' appearance. The Hegelian attack on the form/content distinction that underlies the role of the 'speculative proposition'[55] in his logic as well as the notion of 'aletheia' within Heidegger, whilst not identical in any way, both share a dynamic that tends towards dissolving any 'appearance/reality' distinctions, or at least makes such distinctions highly problematic. Heidegger's notion of revelation implicitly posits a lack, a deferral of consummation that lies at the heart of the concealed/unconcealed dynamic. Such deferral is tied to desire. The revelation occurs through something, something is brought to light, out into the light.. Thus interpretation is a bringing forth rather than a grasping, the ungraspable 'reality' being precisely the appearance of the interpretation - it's 'coming to appear' and its surface, through which it achieves effect.
Should the process of interpretation be continued forever ? This is what seems to suggest itself. The event and the essent are both read as ways of access to Being but the access is gained for Dasein (BT) or 'nation' (ITM) although not in any 'humanistic' way: Indeed an elitism and a notion akin to that of the Platonic 'philosopher kings'[56] perhaps comes through. But these would be philosopher kings with a difference since the 'knowledge' that would be gained would, because of the interminability of interpretation, never be terminable itself, never totalisable and thus never finished, never consummated. Such an attitude is precisely what Heidegger points to when he speaks of having learnt to learn[57], a principle that echoes strongly the Socratic notion of wisdom. Striving, journeying, erfahren[58] and way. Again, a certain set of words, perhaps, rather than a single word, all aiming to form a view, a horizon and a place that can be entered. The suggestion that follows from this is that perhaps the way of BT is not thrown out but continued along becoming the way of ITM. Separating each text thus leads to a confusion of discreteness whilst bringing both back into a unity suggested with the term 'way' allows the metaphorical image of ongoing editing, of a continued writing and thus continued thinking, or continuing thought, to arise in front of us. A difference and a unity in the differentiation. There also follows, I suggest, the necessity for a multiplicity of paths as part of the way, that is, of multiple interpretations, a holding of all in question, which in itself produces the way.
This process of thought, however, once again prioritises the question as necessary. The desire to question though is what I want to suggest is at the basis of questioning and thus this necessity of questioning would form itself as a necessity of the desire to question, a desire that cannot be consummated, a desire that is desire in itself, not for anything. To be a desire that is not a 'desire for' would here be analogous to exactly the same sort of definition that Heidegger makes with regard to boredom and yet, unlike the issue of boredom, what is revealed is not time or temporalising temporality so much as 'man', that peculiar delineation from 'animal' that lends itself to so much philosophy, that lends itself to notions of spirit[59].
(10) For the depth of desire.
So far I have let the term desire slip into the text without elucidating it, in part to allow it to begin to form through the text. The question of what role desire is playing here, though, now needs to be addressed explicitly and in part as the bridge to the second part. The problematic is twofold I believe, though centred around an analogous difficulty. The first problem seems to me to be the necessity of the question, its priority. Quite how this priority works is troubling because of the nature of the paradox of questioning, as though it is beyond questioning because of its nature and thus forms itself into a necessity through such existence as beyond itself. Yet questioning seems inherently connected to unquestioning as part of existence, something I mentioned briefly at the beginning of the essay, and this 'fact', which would itself need chapters and essays, is both troubled by and troubling to the priority of the question. The second issue is the notion of the interminability of interpretation, of quite how it could ever end and if it couldn't then why should it continue? Something without terminus begins to become something without point unless we rapidly move to re-work our understanding of the practice. It seems insufficient to merely accept that interpretation exists, not least because of the inability to defend such practices, an inability which would strike right to the heart of Heidegger rendering his Rectoral Address and the discussions around the role of philosophy, thought and the university little more than willfull and volountaristic.
Thus the issue, I believe, should strike at the heart of the practice of philosophy, both as a discipline in the academy and as 'thought', with implications for human culture that would be highly dangerous as a certain pragmatic lack of necessity in the whole business of culture (lack of any use or any need) becomes 'apparent'. Such a lack of use is acknowledged explicitly by Heidegger and he offers a nod to the value of thought in its effects on us[60]. This is insufficient though, rendering the defence of philosophy as itself nothing more than perhaps a pragmatic issue - maybe something else such as 'discipline' could provide better effects. If no reasons can be found for questioning then why question? This seems to be the tone of the question 'why why?' that is both brought out and simultaneously forgotten in Heideggers text. Perhaps a dictatorial, paternalistic fascism that restrains thought is better than a liberal pluralism that encourages why's?
With the notion of 'better' of course an ethical rather than an ontological tint is given to the discussion. The aim of desire is thus to fulfil a way of getting at the better, albeit in a very limited form here, by providing a way of entering the whole discussion that places the notion of asking 'why' in the centre of an embodied existence rather than in the centre of a rationalistic mind-centred discussion that attempts to be self-enclosed and self-determining. Desire is then a figure[61] of embodiment that I want to suggest should be introduced if a notion of better is to be sustainable. It would aim, eventually, in many years study, to bridge the ontology/ethics divide. As such it inevitably fails both here and perhaps always. Yet such failure doesn't render the desire invalid, nor does it render the desire non-existent - the desire maintains movement, maintains the attempt.
Yet to sketch such a figure would be to immediately exit philosophy. As something which would implicitly be beyond philosophy the best that is left is to 'discuss', a word that deadens in the academic intonation of the essay: 'discuss ...x, y, z'. It would involve a process of writing and as such is perhaps approachable from within philosophy through such discussions of writing. It will not, I am sure, allow itself to be brought inside though. It would end up back in the web of interpretation, of propositions, of axioms, principle, and concepts such that the very desire of desire would be lost as the desire of interpretation replaced it. Inevitably, however, the attempt to discuss it has been broached and it is a term that plays a bewildering role in a lot of philosophy and thus the implicit quotation marks needed to 'use' it here are now acknowledged, even though this is, in the end, futile[62]. So we break for part two.
Part two; On the priority of desire in the promise of the question.
(1) Initial suggestions
There is always a promise in philosophy, a love of the promise. The promise is perhaps even the very seat of philosophy, its heart and the motivation for the love it professes. This is not just because of its exemplarity as a performative, but at the very heart of the words. I promise, you promise, he/she promises, they promise, it promises. This impersonal locates the promise as promise, somehow simultaneously removes the promise from itself. The conjugation distorts in the transition from the personal to the impersonal. Like a genetic aberration the impersonal disrupts the genus.
Nietzsche calls to us to "dare to make promises"[63] and almost promises us the promise of the promise (the impersonal of the personal), the law of law-obedience. Does a promise presuppose responsibility? In the moment of the promise there is 'a taking responsibility for' the future, for the unknown, for what I can't take responsibility for it would seem. If I knew the future, however, I couldn't promise merely state. It would be historical almost. There is a fundamental difference between 'I promise' and 'I guarantee', more than merely the difference between an 'ought' and an 'is'.
'I promise' and 'I guarantee', one is my responsibility the other I should be responsible with, the promise is responsibility, a guarantee of response it seems. Yet the responsibility of response needs the failure of alternatives to the expected - the promise contains the possibility of being broken and it is this which enables it to be kept, somehow. Thus in attempting to read Heidegger, to read the question, a certain promise of response is or was suggested and yet is now, in some ways, to be broken. I can respond in many ways, with many aspects of my body; intellect, passion, love, desire. Responses to Heidegger often appear to absolve themselves of the body and refuse the promise in only giving of the intellect. Perhaps an impossible situation, but the possibility of giving back the body in the response is one that has been broached by, amongst others possibly less prominent, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and perhaps even Jacques Derrida. Yet to respond with 'many aspects of my body' is far too complex, involves far too many mediums; artistic, poetic, intellectual and possibly even spiritual. Tendencies to orthodoxy seem bound up with any such attempt, tendencies to 'follow', to 'respond to Heideggers call' in the sense of 'falling in behind'. Such response is blatantly a failed promise of response, clearly apparent to Heidegger himself when he declares that "philosophy is essentially untimely because it is one of those few things that can never find an immediate echo in the present. When such an echo seems to occur, when a philosophy becomes fashionable, either it is no real philosophy or it has been misinterpreted and misused for ephemeral and extraneous purposes."[64] Both those named 'Heideggerians' and those named 'Derrideans' spring to mind as the phrase 'when a philosophy becomes fashionable' glides by our eyes.
So perhaps I should ask again, how should we hear the question? At first sight this hearing points, perhaps, to tone, to ambiguity, to emphasis and contextual wakes of meaning that flow along in the path of the drift of words. The attempt to hear it slows the pace, attempts to read slowly the text[65], suggests a cacophony of noise through which we need to carefully distinguish the intonations and incantations of the word. Such a slowing down, though, perhaps forgets, in its focusing on the 'event', on its desire to delineate and define the 'event', that the event happens. Maybe we should hear the question as impassioned, as an event, as full of desire, and life, and spirit. Heidegger wants to, desires to desperately it seems, and Derrida pulls at his body in an attempt to instil life once more into decaying words, but there is a brake at work, an entropic tendency towards the system that draws Heidegger back, a discipline called philosophy which follows him as if it were his shadow despite all his attempts to jump over it. Perhaps therefore it is not the tone we need to hear in the question but the desire in the text. This is what I want to suggest.
Moreover I said at the beginning of this essay that the between formed the fulcrum of this essay, that the first part moved toward it and the second departed from it. As we go through the difference in the beginnings of BT and ITM I would suggest we go towards the between of the essent/event, the between perhaps of the ontological difference itself of beings/Being, the slash. It would seem, therefore, that the first part should have dealt with one 'side' and the second the other. Except that the between is not between beings and Being, or between essent and event but is itself, between between. Insidious, like the infinite fractal image or the Mandelbrot sponge whose surface area decreases to nothing whilst the volume increases to infinity, the between slides between everything. Most importantly the between is the embodiment of maintained desire, the never ending desire that is always between its origin and its telos, its arousal and consummation. So in hearing the desire in the text I want to suggest we can begin to hear the between - not any 'what' that is between but this gap itself, a gap Heidegger undoubtedly heard.
(2) Du sage Zusage.
The German is irrelevant really, except the play fails slightly in 'the pledge', an archaism of a time of honour when it meant more than the name of a popular spray polish. 'Mortgage' fails to get the flavour of the air here, smells different in its sense. Zusage means 'promise or consent' my German/English dictionary tells me, though we all know the weakness of dictionaries as a basis for understanding language. Imagine trying to enter a foreign land armed only with a dictionary; aside from the plain inconvenience and time spent looking up words, that is providing we can understand the accent, the impossibility of any proximity to the language is important philosophically. When reading Heidegger or any attempt to understand or work on the same 'areas' Heidegger worked on, even inadequately, a caesura occurs with regard to language. Not only would I have to interpret the text but the language also. Of course such work is valuable and infinitely necessary; as the game progresses we need to develop a nose for the air we work in and this can only be done through intimacy, the same way the smell of the lover is only accessible fully in intimacy at which point it goes beyond mere sense to sensuality. The promise, however, is something shared even in its difference, something that philosophy gives in its language, one that forms itself from languages. Since it forms from languages, from sayings and sayers, I will turn to other words again.
Critchley points to the role of the zusage within Derrida's reading of Heidegger. The zusage, or pledge, is put forward as perhaps prior to questioning, on the basis of the prior givenness of language. Critchley's Derrida argues that "prior to the putting of questions to language ... it is clear that language has already been granted"[66] and that "the liberty and choice of the questioning attitude are subordinated to a prior responsibility"[67]. It is then on the back of this move to go behind the priority of the question to the prior priority of the response based upon the zusage of language that the move to the ethical is possible and opened by deconstruction. "Prior to all questioning, deconstruction opens a dimension of responsibility - grant, pledge, prayer, demand, call, Saying - that precedes ontology and which puts me into relation with the Other"[68].
The argument here, be it Critchley's or Derrida, that is not the issue for me in this essay, is that there is a rapid inversion of the freedom of the question into a prior responsibility to language and the Other to which language itself is a response. A certain hierarchy of the Levinasian ethical movement is posited, I would suggest, though this is an assertion that would need much further work and constitute too much of a digression. Yet this assertion enables me to locate where I think the movement against the question that Critchley sketches is coming from, a background of a Levinasian debate which wants to return the 'ontic' to the 'ontological', to use Heideggerian terms[69].
Critchley wants to locate the question of the question on what I would describe as an epistemic plane and its weakness, and that of deconstruction, lies here according to his account. The question of the question is a de-constructive double reading for Critchley, and the positive dynamic behind such double reading - its openness to alterity, thus breaching the ethical - goes a long way to 'redeem' Heidegger, and the presupposed need to re-read Heidegger seems premised itself on some lack in the original reading, a lack that appears, or perhaps doesn't appear but always lurks in the wings of Critchleys argument, in the beyond. The redemption offered by deconstructive readings however is limited in that it fails to let us 'know' why we made a decision and thus, supposedly, shows that we will face the same situation with future decisions, thus rendering any attempt to make rational decisions, decisions upon a rational ground, impossible. It is this problem that exists in principle for Critchley with regard to deconstructive readings that explains the statement that such readings leave one in a situation where "I can no longer ground my political decisions upon some ontological basis or eidos, or upon a set of a priori principles or procedures"[70].
Critchley rapidly inverts the freedom of the question [71] into a prior responsibility to language and via this to the Other to which language itself is a response. This is a situation he describes in such a way as to propose what is almost a conjoining of Levinas and Heidegger, rather than an opposition, a conjoining that works the later Heidegger back into the earlier through the lens of Levinanisan 'ethics'. Response....this notion presupposes the other, but as an individual the ability not to respond must have an ontological basis in a relationship to 'Others', note the plural, that can at heart be passive. To move away from this is to place ourselves in a horizon within which a 'move' can be understood, presupposing as it does two places and thus a diremption from the One (das Mann). Does seperation come after union? Is our aim permanent re-union? Does union with Being come before seperation, and disclosedness after such diremption, thus language is not the origin, not the Other the origin, but Being as union? Of course this all takes us far too far into 'Levinasian' interpretation, which is not useful.
What we want to experience is more of the promise. Critchley's account of accounts of responsibility and response based upon the pledge, the promise of the zusage, rely on both others or the Other, as something to which we respond and to which we have responsibility because of the promise, and on a further notion that underlies this and draws it out, brings forth the movement that is inhered in response. The movement is, I suggest, based on meaning and meaning here rests on desire. Yet how could the response rest on meaning? It seems that perhaps this is in danger of suggesting a 'telos' to response, a purpose and goal, all of which moves away from the fundamental sense of responsibility. I want to turn here to attempt to try and outline a sketch of an account about what is promised, what is promise, what is the promise a promise of...which is itself promise. What then can we understand by promise?
(3) The promising figure.
The figure of Barthes lover. This is a promising figure, promising to respond to. What is promised, for example, in Barthes A Lover's Discourse (LD)? Experience, event, remembrance of the figure; all could be said to be the promise of the figure in LD but all the figures promise is promise. "It is the very principle of this discourse (and of the text which represents it) that its figures cannot be classified: organised, hierarchised, arranged with a view to an end (a settlement): there are no first figures, no last figure"[72]. We say of something that it has promise, that it holds promise, that it is promising, often saying little more than the articulation of an expectation, generally contingent upon context. Yet the expectancy itself that is promised in promise is intensely sensual. We sense the promise, it excites, it removes us or prevents us from falling into boredom: the promise offers no promise to the bored but the absence is not of the promise itself. That still remains. The absence is in desire, an absence that can only occur on the basis of desire being that in which the absence stands. Perverting Heidegger we may say that 'we stand in desire'.
Barthes figures work because they stand in desire. What is offered, proffered and thus promised in the figure is our standing in desire. We see, through the figure, how we are, ways of being that could be said to show Being but only with the coldness the ivory of the academy welcomes and which is hostile to the way of being offered from which it arises. It fails to figure if Barthes text is not felt to figure, if it is not experienced: "Figures take shape insofar as we can recognise, in passing discourse, something that has been read, heard, felt. The figure is outlined (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or a tale). A figure is established if at least someone can say: 'That's so true! I recognise that scene of language'. For certain operations of their art, linguists make use of a vague entity which they call linguistic feeling; in order to constitute figures, we require neither more nor less than this guide: amorous feeling"[73]. The experience goes before the interpretation but the experience is not a representation of the experienced, a memory, though such aspects of life must be reintegrated not removed. The experience is our standing in desire. It gives us our standing, how things stand with us, with our being. 'How does it stand with Being?' Heidegger wants to ask and here the suggestion would be in response, 'in desire'. Plainly this needs further explanation, its entrance though elicits response in this calling for further explanation.
So what of Heidegger? How does it stand with Heideger? With philosophy? What is promised in philosophy is not figures but thoughts, not the thoughts of the other but the thought that is ours placed in front of us before we even formulate it. When we read something, despite all our attempts to stand outside, to break down and re-order, the primary promise is of the thought. Thomas Nagel says in the preface to Mortal Questions that "philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary"[74].
Belief of course is always questionable or else it is faith, a position from which we exclude the question and the experience of the question. "One who holds to such faith can in a way participate in the asking of our question, but he cannot really question without ceasing to be a believer and taking all the consequences of such a step. He will only be able to act 'as if...'"[75]. Heidegger plainly would tend towards a disagreement with Nagel, but both point to a common basis at the centre of philosophy, that of the purity of meaning, of this desire, of the movement that makes it more than a game - an 'as if...', 'consistency' - and yet 'more than' on the basis of what? Its 'spirit' Heidegger may well suggest, in the way that he suggests the 'spirit' of poetry is superior to that of science[76]. Of course the problem of the better here, explicitly posed by Heidegger, implies value, evaluation., as Derrida rightly points to, I believe; "rather than a value, spirit seems to designate, beyond [a 'spatialisation' I have taken in part from this site] a deconstruction, the very resource [and we can see here the same process as in the quote from Barthes where he has replaced what is here attempting to be named with spirit with 'amorous feeling'] for any deconstruction and the possibility of any evaluation"[77]. The common thread is this 'resource', this beyond, this desire. How though does any of this make it possible to say something like 'it stands with Being in desire' as we suggested above? I have attempted to show that interpretation or more precisely the interminability of interpretation 'stands with Being in desire' and now want to take another example located around texts and move from the reader to the writer. In this case the example explicitly shifts onto this text and the distance of this text from its 'subject' will hopefully be reduced and philosophy begin[78].
(4) An attempt at self-validation.
At a certain point it almost seems like the validation of my words is needed for a validation of myself to occur. The desire in the text is to be understood. I have a desire to be understood. My text has a desire to be understood. This 'understanding' however is itself in need of being understood. I want the other to see through my eyes.
In dialogue a successful moment comes when the moment of communion takes place. At that point the phrase 'I know what you mean' takes on its simple presence as a point of contact and in this point of contact the communion, understanding, takes place. Of course, the moment passes. Most easily if we begin to ask why. How is it I understand you? What is it I have understood? Here the question takes the dialogue and rips its heart out, displacing the communion and replacing it with possession. This seems to leave us at once in a situation where a recourse to reason is lost and we are bereft of anything other than an intuitionistic leap, a phenomenon of communion that simply occurs yet is itself inexplicable. Such a suggestion divorces the moment of communion from its historical and situational embeddedness within a social life which it presupposes. Without the inter-relationship of the I and the Other - or, rather, of I and the Other, - the moment of communion is incomprehensible. The moment of communion relates and connects, it is the moment of connection, the point of pain, and is thus a transcendental moment (of necessity). It appears as a transcendence of I into a situation of We. As such, however, it would (of necessity) be one-sided - it is the transcendence of I toward the Other - and yet this asymmetrical transcendence would be (of necessity) unconsummable. For communion to exist, for it to be consummated, it must, it seems, appear as union - the term communion posited as it suggests this union of community, such a community comprising at least two, though why should it be limited to no more?
As a moment, a fleeting transience, it is always past. It always 'happened', it is always a lost exchange which, when looked at, is immediately lost. As a lovers joining sight is lost in silence, so communion is inexpressible - this gives it the character that could enable it to be dismissed as merely intuitionistic mysticism. As past, as happened, as memory, however, the moment can be situated, providing that its discrete character as a moment is not held to but rather disrupted by placing it or allowing it to come to us as past, as this temporalised beyond-us. As past communion can be reconstructed in order to attempt to bridge the gap of its absolute uniqueness in a categorisation. As unique the communion is inexpressible, but as it is (of necessity) communal the shared character of the point enables some purchase to be had in developing it as a concept, thus as expressible to others, precisely because it is in its original uniqueness a shared event, precisely because it is a communion.
Blanchot quotes Nietzsche as saying "there is nothing more banal than death" [79] and in so doing attempts to grasps the experience of death. "Thus in voluntary death it is still extreme passivity that we perceive"[80]. I want to note here in using this passage that the passivity of the suicide, the grasping of death, the taking death seriously that engenders the suicide, is precisely what is gone against in the act of the martyr. The withdrawal of suicide is an act that aims at no more acts, whilst the martyr thrusts their act forward, holding themselves out into the Nothing, (the passage from Heidegger here laces in here[81]) holding it out into the future with a faith akin to the priest holding the crucifix out in the face of the horror of evil. "The imbecile gasped dumbstruck at the Englishman: an extremely silly expression darted across his handsome face. Something like an absurd joy began to open his mouth, he crossed his arms over his naked chest and finally gazed at us with ecstatic eyes. 'Martyrdom...' he uttered in a voice that was suddenly feeble and yet tore out like a sob. 'Martyrdom...'. A bizarre hope of purification had come to the wretch, illuminating his eyes"[82]. It is in this last line that a certain fluidity arises and we are drawn into the passion, perhaps, of the story, of the sexual debauchery of the narrator and Simone; yet in this scene of sacrilegious and orgiastic brutality we find a certain ambiguity entering into the situation, a certain futility of the Bacchanalian violence brought into relief by the 'purity' of meaning .
The very purity of experience that is aimed at in the violent exercise of desire that the central characters enact is lost in the climactic moment of this pursuit. Perhaps we can see a structural echo of the revelation of interpretation discussed above (Part One, section 9) in the act of sex itself where the life of desire separates quite commonly into the pre- and post-orgasm states, a situation that is suggested less by 'experience' or anecdotal evidence than by the very role of the orgasm within the procreative act of sex. In its ambiguous role as procreative and pleasurable in the man the orgasm is both the goal and the end of sex, thus creating a paradoxical situation whereby when a man achieves the 'state' of sexual activity - the orgasm - he also finishes; the moment is transitory. Overcoming such a failure to grasp the moment, principally by extension of the experience over time, is what is aimed at in more complex forms of sexual activity, from the fetishistic to the ritualistic. Desire must be diverted, always, from the point of release as termination, except that this proves too simplistic and so instead strategies of resistance and maintenance open to mutate the state of sex from the orgasm to those situations outside the pre/post orgasm states - which tend towards enclosing both sides as far as possible in the most 'desirable' situations of increasing complexification. This is here a metaphor for the move to thought through complexity with the light of understanding as orgasm, peaking before it passes, dissipates. Complexification of textual works thus increases as the game deepens maybe and this is a way to begin to grasp the interminability of writers such as Derrida.
(5) The strategy of interpretation 'against' the appearance of desire.
Maybe now, towards the end of this essay, it is time to begin to start placing things in an oppositional position to allow the possible play of their difference and the between to come out in this appearance. This is a bit false though since it is the between here that is what I wanted to think desire as, as well as the beyond, the place of the promise. This 'place of the promise', the promise of promise, is, I would suggest, or suggest I agree with, the 'yes-saying' prior to the yes/no pair; the root thrust, giving origin; the maintaining presence of this 'spirit' of the paired; the differentiation, the difference, the dif-ference, the differance. Like Heidegger's use, or rather, unassuming assumption, of the word 'spirit' the 'oppositional stance' is no longer avoided in order to be avoided, a preliminary avoiding that could only be hidden at the beginning of the essay in order to begin This is to follow Derrida's reading, where "something which the word 'spirit' still names between quotation marks thus allows itself to be salvaged"[83] in a situation where Derrida says of Heidegger's use of the word 'spirit' that "he avoids it in no longer avoiding it"[84]. A yes saying is thus suggested as rising from the no-saying. Curiously this could be an inversion of the originary yes-saying priority, except life itself seems to mitigate against a belief in a prior no-saying of Being. This seems to be one of those 'beliefs' Nagel talks of that, despite the coherency of the oppositional arguments, still maintains itself stubbornly in your mind.
Such a maintenance is itself, however, a yes-saying , a yes-saying prior to any yes/no pairing that the coherency would want to regiment our beliefs into, any sort of 'categorisation' of the sort that Barthes denies is possible with the figure[85]. Thus the yes-saying is figured in. The against here is thus between this second figure and the first figure of the essay, that of interpretation. The against is thus a doubling, a pair of figures, the Lover and the Interpreter. I want to turn to Barthes again for some help in drawing these figures into the text.
Barthes text A Lover's Discourse is a selection of what he calls 'fragments of discourse' and in that this essay is a 'fragment' of a wider discourse I have referred to and attempted to make present enough so that it feels like a certain method can be said to be shared, then at least an attempt to share is going on, thus an attempt to read responsibly. This is as near as possible to a definition of the methodology here maybe. The text is organised through an "absolutely insignificant order ... nonetheless tempered"[86], in order to attempt to remove giving the appearance in the text of the presentation of a " 'philosophy of love' where we must look for no more than its affirmation"[87]. It is this issue of affirmation that I want to bring to the foreground now.
First of all another note from the beginning of Barthes' work. The order of the fragments as a deliberate randomness is connected now with the internal working of each fragment which divides into the fragment, its title and the 'precis' at the start of each fragment. Barthes says here that "what reads as the heading of each figure is not its definition but its argument. Argumentum: 'exposition, account, summary, plot outline, invented narrative'; I should add: instrument of distancing, signboard a la Brecht."[88]. With this reason in mind I turn to the fragment that is itself called 'affirmation', "The intractable. Affirmation, against and in spite of everything, the subject affirms love as a value"[89]. Here the yes-saying comes through as affirmation and the affirmative is, I hope, connected thus, as a figure, with the figure of desire I have attempted to introduce. Critically, this attempt to weave a figure out of a variety of texts and thoughts appears now as a sort of attempt at recombination rather than criticism, though the recombined itself hopefully develops a contrast with other figures that have been and could be drawn. This weave also, inexorably, comes back to the site that can be seen through texts such as Barthes and which is also implicit in Heidegger's ITM as a central point of background. This site being that of Nietszche.
The step, for example, through Barthes text and back to Nietzsche can be seen in precisely this section on affirmation. Number 3 in the fragment reads "In the Christian West, until today, all strength passes through the Interpreter [this figure I hope can be seen as a way of taking the problems that surround the first part of the essay], as a type (in Nietzschean terms, the Judaic High Priest). But the strength of love cannot be shifted, be put into the hands of the Interpreter; it remains here, on the level of language, enchanted, intractable. Here the type is not the Priest, it is the Lover"[90]. The critique of the Interpreter is here offered in the affirmation of its limits, these limits being the yes-saying, the figure of the Lover, the intractable, the space of evaluation and desire. Plainly with the explicit re-entry of Nietzsche into the essay the notion of the will and of desire will have to be clarified and I will turn to that shortly in attempting to clarify how these figures of the Interpreter and the Lover stand 'against' each other through a reading of the third essay of Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morals. First, however, I want to note the connection through Nietzsche to the Heideggerian text ITM.
At a critical point in the beginning of the first chapter of ITM Heidegger references Nietzsche and the essay of 1873, On the truth and falsity in their ultra-moral sense[91]. In fact what he references it seems is the small 'story' of the infinitesimal insignificance of man, half a paragraph or so with which Nietzsche begins the work, a sketch of a situation he is going to work on, if not 'critique', and a story that is itself referenced obliquely in OGM[92]. This work by Nietzsche forms some sort of focus for both Heidegger and Derrida, with White Mythologies and the surrounding debates taking succour in part from Nietzsche[93]. Here the issues of metaphor, of the debate that Gasche for example locates as around the 'analogy of being'[94], comes into focus, a debate which could be understood as close to the issue of the relation of language to Being which Heidegger declares to be itself so close to the very core of his work[95]. Certain issues are beginning to coagulate perhaps, issues of truth, the metaphorical/literal, and the relation of language to Being, as foci for the problematic of the priority of the question which began this essay and which I want to address through the contrast of the figure of the Interpreter to that of the Lover. To further clarify this I want to turn to a brief reading of OGM.
Nietzsche's third essay is a critique of the Interpreter. Critique in the sense of a limit finding interpretation, an aspect of the stance of OGM which, amongst all Nietzsche's works, most appears as an 'academic' text[96] with its subtitle of 'a polemic' and its tone and style. Here the Interpreter is criticised as part of a general account of the malaise of the human being through the influence of the ascetic culture. In this essay the priority of the question is critiqued as a situation where new 'anti-ascetics' "worship the question mark itself as their god"[97]. Through a subtle and convoluted movement Nietzsche attempts to bring out the situation in which such philosophy as exists works, with its 'will to truth' and it is "the will to truth [which] must be scrutinised; our business now is tentatively to question the will to truth"[98] Interestingly the Interpreter is not here dismissed and replaced by a figure of the Lover but rather the two aspects are brought out. Interpretation is not "renunciated" since such renunciation would form another form of asceticism[99]. Rather a situation is pointed to that wherever philosophers exist, and an explicit inclusion of the Eastern philosophies is also contained here, then "there has prevailed a special philosopher's resentment against sensuality"[100]. It is this weakness, this one-sidedness that is being challenged, though the role of questioning is not dismissed as worthless[101] but rather it is suggested that the interminability of interpretation, the Interpreter, rests on further desire. "It's restless activity thinly veils a lack of ideals, the want of a great love"[102]. Here then, this section, is perhaps an example of the 'against' mentioned in the title of this section, an against of contrast in the way in which we can see the outline of the figures against the light.
(6) Conclusion/Beginning.
In OGM Nietzsche brings forward the figure of the assassin, the 'hashishin' of the Islamic resistance to the crusades[103], as a figure of freedom in relation to truth." 'Nothing is true; everything is permitted'. Here we have real freedom, for the notion of truth itself has been disposed of"[104]. If we compare this to the relation of truth and freedom suggested by, for example, Robert Bernasconi in his interpretation of Heidegger we can see the subtleties of difference; "the essence of truth, he [Heidegger] continues in the third section [of the essay by Heidegger, The question concerning technology] is 'freedom' in the sense of being free for what is opened up in the open region"[105]. Both are posing a freedom for but in Heidegger this freedom is for what can be opened, what can be understood maybe, whereas in Nietzsche the freedom of interpretation is a 'freedom from' predominantly and the underlying thrust falls back onto his notion of will. The will to power is not, I suggest, identical to the figure of the Lover I wanted to introduce through the word 'desire' but, as a provisional thesis, is a will that comes from such basic desire as 'foundation'. Foundation here would play the role of the 'fact' that Heidegger begins from in his existential analytic, as such the analytic shifting back from intellect and understanding to something less conceptually constrained, something that allows the yes-saying of affirmation to be prior to the categorising and indexing fury of the yes/no of interpretation. Thus the figure of the Interpreter can be seen against the background of the figure of the Lover as more basic. This thesis is not, however, a conclusion, but another starting point and thus this 'conclusion' would lend itself to the need to 'begin again'. This starting point is analogous to the 'facts' of Heidegger, the priority of the event or the essent of Dasein. In Nietzsche it is maybe the first and last assertion of the third essay of OGM: that "Our will requires an aim; it would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose"[106]. My suggestion would be more 'Nietzschean' than 'Heideggerian' in that the 'fact' of desire and even of the desire for interpretation, would be a beginning. The Interpreter would begin within the Lover.
To 'show' such things would require considerably more space and a greater depth of weave than is possible in this essay but the attempt has been to lay out the threads of such a weave, the rough sketch of a pattern within which I could further elaborate a texture of thought. Derrida is fertile ground for such work, himself referring at times to a notion of figuration such as in the essay The retrait of metaphor[107], as would be Barthes, Heidegger and Nietzsche. These texts then, these writers, form the threads and the weave that can be constructed from them is in part dependent upon a contextualisation in the language of their thoughts. This is, in part, the reason why such an essay as this must be an attempt, simply not having a body sufficient to the full exhibition of the weave and a full working of its effect. That said, the attempt has, hopefully, pointed to the desire that it has and in this attempted to bring itself to the point from which further attempts can be made.
The implications are again part of what would need to be brought out further and so not only are certain directions pointed to in terms of re-reading thoughts from the context of philosophy but the practice of philosophy itself is capable of being challenged, at least the implications of the idea of the figure of the Lover would tend towards such suggestions if we were to elucidate a certain 'superiority' or 'more originary' nature to such a figure. This is the principal implication I would like to draw perhaps, but one that follows Nietzsche in seeing the negative attitude to sensuality as part of the contingent origins of this discipline[108] rather than a necessity to the pursuit that embodies philosophy as a practice rather than merely as interpretation. The Philosopher can be a Lover but perhaps only when they learn to be "one who smells not only with his nose but also with his eyes and ears"[109] and who also learns to think not only with their head but also with their body and soul, when our sense is returned to our thought.
Perhaps, though, one of the most important implications for me, for the notion of 'desire' as a way to begin to walk a path of though, is to begin to re-read the Philosopher as a Lover and thus to read philosophy lovingly In doing this we may find it useful to add to our weave, which so far has the figures of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Barthes, that of writers such as Luce Irigaray. A final hint then towards a new beginning, perhaps a new reading of a new text, maybe even one by Irigaray, such as her 'fragments' of a Lovers voyage contained in Elemental Passions. Almost as an afterthought then, a thought that is to come after this attempt, Irigaray could be one of a wealth of additional figures to a weave of the Philosopher which brings back in the figure of the Lover. The last words, then, to Irigaray as an opening to such an afterthought. "At the furthest extreme of love, it is a question of the divine. Because we are not God(s), individually or together, love has become sorrow, degradation or enslavement. A love between the sexes, in which natures and gods are united and fertile, is essential to the discovery of an individual and collective happiness, one which is both empirical and transcendental"[110]. A new weave then, with a new bibliography, that figures in the Lover, which is now beginning to perhaps be seen as woman, as figuring in "the most radical difference"[111]. Loves voice is calling and Philosophy needs to listen with its heart and mind as well as its ears.
MATT LEE 30th August 1996
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Martin Heidegger
An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Ralph Mannheim, Yale University Press, 1987.
Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 1992.
Basic Writings(revised and expanded edition), Ed. by David Farrell Krell, Routledge, 1993.
Schelling's treatise on the essence of human freedom, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, Ohio University Press, 1985.
On the way to language, trans. by Peter D.Hertz, Harper and Row, 1982.
Identity and Difference, trans, by Joan Stambaugh, Harper and Row, 1969.
The Principle of Reason, trans. by Reginald Lilly, Indiana University Press, 1996.
Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, 1975.
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert Hofstadter, Indian University Press, 1982
Other Works
Theodore Kisiel The genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time, University of California Press,
1995.
Charles B.Guignon (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge Univerity Press, 1993.
Hubert Dreyfuss and Heidegger: a critical reader, Blackwell, 1995.
Harrison Hell (Ed.s)
William Richardson Heidegger. Through phenomenology to thought, Martinus Nijhoff, 1963.
Robert Bernasconi The Question of Language in Heidegger's History of Being, Macmillan,
1985.
Thomas A. Fay Heidegger: the critique of logic, Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.
Roland Barthes A Lover's Discourse; fragments, trans. by Richard Howard, Penguin, 1990.
Georg Lukacs Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, Merlin Press, 1974.
Jacques Derrida Of Spirit - Heidegger and the question, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, John Hopkins
University Press, 1976.
Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserls' theory of signs,
trans. by David B.Allison, Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982.
The Retrait of Metaphor, trans. F.Gasdner, B.Iginla, R.Madden and W.West
contained in Enclitic 2, number 2, 1978, Pges 5-33.
Rodolphe Gasche The Tain of the Mirror; Derrida and the philosophy of reflection, Harvard
University Press, 1986.
David Wood (ed.) Of Derrida, Heidegger and Spirit, Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Style and Strategy at the limits of philosophy: Heidegger and Derrida,
contained in The Monist, Vol.63, number 4, October 1990, Pges 494-512.
David Fryer Of Spirit: Heidegger and Derrida on Metaphysics, Ethics and National
Socialismcontained in Inquiry, Volume 39, number 1, March 1996.
Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Francis
Golffing, Anchor Books, 1990.
The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Volume 2, Ed. Dr.Oscar Levy,
London, 1911.
Michel Haar The Doubleness of the Unthought of the Overman: Ambiguities of
Heideggerian Political Thought, contained in Research In Phenomenology,
Volume XX, 1990, Pges 87-111.
Bernd Magnus, Stanley Nietzsche's Case: philosophy as/and literature, Routledge, 1993.
Stewart and Jean-Pierre
Milieur
G.W.F.Hegel Phenomenology Of Spirit, trans. by A.V.Miller, Oxford, 1977.
Science of Logic, Volume 1, trans. W.H.Johnson and L.G.Struthers, Allen
and Unwin, 1961.
Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, Blackwell, 1990.
Georges Bataille The story of the eye; with essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes,
trans. by Joachim Neugroschel, Penguin, 1982.
Lancelot R. Fletcher Slow reading lists (and the meaning of slow reading), published on the
World Wide Web (Internet) at http://www.freelance.com/slowread.txt
F.A.Ridley The Assassins, Socialist Platform, 1988.
Thomas Nagel Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Maurice Blanchot The space of literature, trans. by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press,
1989.
Luce Irigaray Elemental Passions, trans. by Joanne Collie and Judith Still, Athlone Press,
1992.
A Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form, On
the nature and form of the essay, Pge 18
[1] cf. G.Bennington; Spirit's Spirit
Spirits Spirit, Pges 82 - 92, in the collection of essays Of Derrida,
Heidegger and Spirit (henceforth OD), ed. by D.Wood. It seems that Bennington alludes to such
slipperiness in the title of his essay, though the 'oddness' he talks of is
unable to be pursued directly here despite its presence.
[2] Which are 'represented' in this text perhaps by OD.
[3] cf. the essay by S.Critchley, The
Question of the Question: an ethico-political response to a note in Derrida's
De l'espirit (henceforth QoQ), OD Pges 93 - 102. Here, in Critchley's essay, the similar
terrain is explicitly noticeable, though it is also apparent as the first of
the 'four themes' Derrida says he distinguished in discussions at Yale in
"a sort of private seminar with some
American friends"; J.Derrida, Of Spirit; Heidegger and the Question
(henceforth OS), trans. G.Bennington and
R.Bowlby, Pges 8 - 13. These
threads are also picked up and distinguished in the essay by D.Fryer, Of Spirit: Heidegger and Derrida on
Metaphysics, Ethics and National Socialism, in Inquiry, Vol.39
Number 1, March 1996.
[4] R.Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, henceforth LD.
[5] Heidegger's ITM plays a peculiar role I think in its current form as a
text. Originating in a lecture course
delivered by Heidegger in Freiburg in the summer semester of 1935 it comes at a
time when Heidegger is beginning to re-examine his work, to explore the notion
of logos (for example in the 1934
course on Logic) and work out his attitude to metaphysics. Moreover the text is prefaced and amended in
1953 and numerous, often quite lengthy insertions added which appear to enable
ITM to play some useful role, for Heidegger, in attempting to 'bridge' his
works, to provide some threads of unity in an explicit way.
[6] cf. Heidegger, ITM, Pge 19 where he says "the title of the work is deliberately ambiguous"
[7] Ibid, Pge 9.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, Pge 1.
[10] Heidegger, What is metaphysics?,
(heneceforth WIM) in Basic Writings, (henceforth BW) ed. D.F.Krell, Pges
93 - 110.
[11] Heidegger; BT, Pge 25 for example, where Heidegger makes explicit that
"we do not know what 'Being' means" but that we "keep within" an understanding. This is what lies behind, or around, the
claim that a "vague average
understanding of Being is a Fact".
[12] Heidegger; Schelling's Treatise on the essence of human freedom
(henceforth ST), Pge 105.
[13] For a fairly straightforward 'meta' account of his use of the term
'hermeneutic' cf; Heidegger, A dialogue
on language (henceforth DL), Pges 1
- 54 of Heidegger, On the way to language. With special attention to Pges 10 - 12.
[14] Heidegger, ST, Pge 110.
[15] ibid, Pge 105.
[16] ibid, Pge 106. It merits
pointing to the similarities I read between this quote and the quote from
Lukacs at the head of the essay.
[17] This tension is also what informs the 'interminabiity of interpretation'
that I will come back to later.
[18] Heideggers' references to his work as a priori are too diverse and widespread to cite, except that there
is clearly a certain notion of a
prioricity at work in Heidegger, though one that is not simply that
associated with the 'division' which philosophy, as a discipline, makes between
the 'a priori' Rationalists and the 'a posteriori' Sceptics of the
Enlightenment (most notably of course the figures of Hume and Descartes). For example, in The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology , Pges 324-325., the a
priori is seen as connected to the temporal nature of ontological
propositions and thus we can assume that Heidegger's notion of a priori is to be informed by his
conception of time and that it would differ from , for example, Kant's which
rests on the so-called 'vulgar conception of time'.
[19] Heideger, ITM, Pge 12.
[20] J.Derrida; Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl's theory
of signs, Pge 4.
[21] Heidegger; BT, Pge 27.
[22] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 1.
[23] ibid, Pge 20.
[24] Clearly this is related to the conception of "Language is the house of Being", from the Letter on Humanism; BW, Pge 237.
[25] Heideger, ITM, Pge 1.
[26] It is perhaps worth indicating that the 'broader' here is not a matter
of increasing the extension of a term but rather of in terms of, for Heidegger,
"keeping with that vastness which
springs form originary being", DL Pge 11.
[27] cf T.Kisiel, Genesis of Being and Time, Pges 16, 24, 42, 47,
etc. Cf.also BT, Pge 26 - "Being lies in the fact that something is,
and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in
validity; in Dasein; in the 'there is' (im 'es gibt')."
[28] cf., Heidegger, ITM, Pges 8 (on the 'untimely - very Nietzschean -
nature of philosophy), 12 (on the problme of asking 'what philosophy can do for
you') and 44 (where philosophy is distinguished from "all science"). Compare
also the discussion in BT regarding the relation of the existential anal;ytic
to 'anthropology, psychology and biology', BT, Section 10, Pges 71-75.
[29] Heidegger, The onto-theological
constitution of metaphysics, contained in Identity and Difference
(henceforth ID), Pge 49.
[30] Heidegger, BT, Pge 25.
[31] Ibid, Pge 27.
[32] Ibid, Pge 34.
[33] Heidegger, ITM Pges 22 - 25; the role of the 'nothing' (absence) is
also clarified in WIM where this nothing impels the Question which begins ITM.
[34] Ibid, Pge 51. I also refer to
the 'broad structure' of the text and its whole tone.
[35] This is made quite explicit in the two introductory chapters to BT.
[36] Heidegger, BT, Pge 35.
[37] BT, Pge 27.
[38] Ibid, Pge 25.
[39] cf. T.Sheehan's essay, Reading a
life, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Pges 70-96; cited as
part of the steps 'behind and beneath'
Husserl, Pge 81.
[40] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 51.
[41] Heidegger, BT, Pge 35.
[42] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 5.
[43] cf., T.Kisiel, op.cit., Pge 3.
[44] At which point Derrida's Of Spirit would crash through this
essay with too much force as vermeiden
is central to that work. "And I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of
flame, and of ashes. And of what, for
Heidegger, avoidingmeans."
(OS, Pg 1. cf. also Pges 40-41 where
metaphysics is declared to be the centre of the process of avoiding.)
[45] Heidegger, Language, in Poetry,
Language, Thought, Pge 202.
[46] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 5.
[47] Pge 10 of this essay below.
[48] Heideger, BT, Pge 26.
[49] Ibid, Pge 31.
[50] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 41.
[51] ibid.
[52] Derrida, OS, Pge 134. The
footnote is from pages 129 - 136 and is 'dedicated' to Francois Dastur.
[53] J.Baudrillard, On Seduction,
henceforth OnS, contained in Selected Writings, Pge 150.
[54] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 5.
[55] cf. the Prefaces to both the Science of Logic (Greater Logic),
for example pges 37, 45, 46 and 47, and the Phenomenology of Spirit,
Section.61.
[56] cf. the reference to the role of the 'philosopher kings' in Heidegger's
readings of Nietzsche contained in Michel.Haar's essay, The doubleness of the unthought of the overman: ambiguities of
Heideggerian political thought, Research in Phenomenology, Vol XX
1990, Pge 89.
[57] Heidegger, ITM, Pges 21-22.
[58] cf. R.Bernasconi, The Question of language in Heidegger's history of
Being, and in particular Chapter 6, section 1, Pges 81-85, where this word
is a place of differentiation, according to Bernasconi, for the concept of
experience in Heidegger relative to Hegel.
[59] cf the discussion of the thread of animality in Derrida's OS, the third
of the four threads of his reading, Pges 11-12.
[60] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 12.
[61] R.Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, (henceforth LD), Pges 3-4. "These
fragments of discourse can be called figures. The word is to be understood, not in its
rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreograhic acceptation; in
short, in the Greek meaning: schma is not the 'schema' but, in a much livelier
way, the body's gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the
body of athletes, orators, statues:"
[62] This would be an attempt to pick up the word 'desire' in an unassuming
assumtion such as Derrida suggest of Heidegger's 'assumption' of the word
'spirit'; Derrida, OS, Pge 23.
[63] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals,(henceforth OGM) Pge 191.
[64] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 8.
[65] I borrow the term 'slow-reading' from the essay Slow reading lists (and the meaning of slow reading) by L.R.Fletcher,
1994. He takes the phrase from
Nietzsche's Daybreak.
[66] S.Critchley, QoQ, Pge 96.
[67] Ibid, Pge 97.
[68] Ibid, Pge 99.
[69] See for example the following comments in Critchleys essay, which
though oblique hint toward such a general dynamic within his argument. When talking of the argument that language
has its origin in a response to the Other, Critchley clarifies his point by
adding, "In short, in Levinasian
terms it is ethical." (QoQ, Pge 97).
Again "by posing the question of the question, Derrida asks if
questioning is indeed at the origin of thinking and, consequently, if all
thinking is, in a Levinasian sense,
ontological." Critchley is
attempting to resituate the dialogue in a position where 'Levinasian terms'
become dominant, (which precisely misses
the point of the question in Heideggerian terms).
[70] Ibid, Pges 101-102.
[71] Heidegger, ITM, Pges 9, 12.
[72] Barthes, LD, Pge 7-8.
[73] Ibid, Pge 4.
[74] T,Nagel, Mortal Questions, Pge xi.
[75] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 7.
[76] Ibid, Pge 26.
[77] J.Derrida, OS, Pge 14-15.
[78] Heidegger, WIM, Pge 110. "Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar
insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein".
[79] M.Blanchot, The space of literature, Pge 101.
[80] Ibid, Pge 102.
[81] Heidegger, WIM, Pge 106.
[82] G.Bataille, The story of the eye, Pge 64.
[83] Derrida, OS, Pge 23.
[84] Ibid.
[85] cf. Pge 29 above, note 76;
Barthes, LD, Pge 8.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Ibid, Pge 5.
[89] Ibid, Pge 22.
[90] Ibid, Pges 23-24.
[91] Heidegger, ITM, Pge 4; Nietzsche, On
truth and falisty in their ultramoral sense, in The Complete Works of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol.2, Pge 173.
[92] Nietzsche, OGM, Pge 252, the last sentences of section ten of the third
essay also use the image of the 'insect'.
[93] Derrida, White Mythologies,
in Margins of Philosophy, Pges 207-273. cf Pges 219, 227 and n.32, 262,
263.
[94] R.Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror, Chapter 11, cf Pges 296-307.
[95] Heidegger, DL, cf. Pges 6-7.
[96] cf. Magnus et al, Nietzsche's Case: philosophy as/and literature,
Pge 18.
[97] Nietzsche, OGM, Pge 292.
[98] Ibid, Pge 289.
[99] Ibid, Pges 287-288.
[100] Ibid, Pge 241.
[101] Ibid, Pge 249 and the assertions about about "we nutcrackers, ... questionable questioners".
[102] Ibid, Pge 285. Emphasis added.
[103] cf. F.A.Ridley, The Assassins, for an ccount of this long-lived
and peculiarly fascinating sect.
[104] Nietzsche, OGM, Pge 287.
[105] R.Bernasconi, op cit, Pge 66.
[106] Nietzsche, OGM, Pges 231 and 299.
[107] Derrida, The retrait of metaphor,
Pge 7.
[108] cf.Nietzcshe, OGM, Pge 251.
[109] Ibid, Pge 258.
[110] Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, Pge 5.
[111] ibid, Pge 3.