AS THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION OF METAPHYSICS, WE ASK: “WHY ARE THERE BEINGS AT ALL INSTEAD OF NOTHING?” IN THIS FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION THERE ALREADY RESONATES THE PRIOR QUESTION: “HOW IS IT GOING WITH BEING?” . . . BEING NOW JUST COUNTS AS THE SOUND OF A WORD FOR US, A USED-UP TERM. IF THIS IS ALL WE HAVE LEFT, THEN WE MUST AT LEAST ATTEMPT TO GRASP THIS LAST RESONANT OF A POSSESSION.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER, INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS (1935)
IF THE REAL TASK OF MODERN AS WELL AS ANCIENT philosophy has been to raise the question of the meaning of Being, since it has always been interpreted as being-present-at-hand, Vorhandenheit, the moment has come, after its destruction, to question the remains of Being. If Being, after the destruction of metaphysics, is no longer something present, something of which we may ask, “What is it?” then it is something that, regardless of what we do with it, remains. And it remains because ontology is nothing other than the sending of Being, Geschick des Seins, as presence, Anwesenheit. But as presence, the meaning of Being is passed along not as a property of present objects but as an essence, Wesen, understood as Anwesen, an actively being-present. The meaning of Being is no longer determined through the objective, the subjective, or the time horizon but rather through its own remnants, the remains of Being. Being, then, is that which remains, independently and separately from all predications, accidents, and qualities. But in what state is it today? Questioning Being was, is, and will always be the privileged form of philosophy. If the first question of philosophy concerned Being, could this also be the last question? In this case, would we be left only with the remains of the many answers to this question? And would this state have to be called the “ontology of remnants” and require an interpretative philosophical position, that is, hermeneutics? Let me start by outlining the meaning of metaphysics for philosophy.
Western humanity, in all its relations with beings,1 is in every aspect sustained by metaphysics, because every age, every epoch of Western thought, however different it may be from others—Greece after Plato, Rome, the Middle Ages, postmodernity after modernity—is established in some metaphysics and thereby placed in a definite relationship to an understanding of Being. Although philosophy has been defined since the mid-seventeenth century as “ontology,” the study of being as such, its nature was, is, and will always be metaphysical. The word “metaphysics” was given by an early editor of Aristotle’s works who collected under that term (meaning meta, “after/beyond,” and physics, “nature”) all the works that came after his Physics. Despite the fact that metaphysics includes other branches (e.g., philosophical cosmology, theology, and psychology), for Aristotle it was meant to be the first philosophy, the philosophy that studied being qua being. By limiting itself only to the one-sided, objective, present Being of beings, metaphysics has used beings as the only source for truth, providing an answer to the question of the Being of beings for contemporary men and women, but it has skillfully removed from the field of investigation the problem of existence, hence, of Being. In this way, metaphysics is the history of the formations of Being; in other words, it represents the constitutive nature of philosophy, where Being has been left aside in order to concentrate on the (physical, technological, ethical, religious, cultural, etc.) manipulation of beings. Metaphysical problems are the ones that have in common this ontological dimension. This way of thinking looks beyond beings toward their grounding; in other words, each metaphysics aims at the fundamentum absolutum, the ground of such a metaphysics that presents itself indubitably.
What about destruction? By this term I am not alluding to the role that Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction played in the Anglo-American philosophical context, particularly in the areas of literary criticism and cultural studies, where distinguished theorists such as Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Jonathan Culler, Mark C. Taylor, Drucilla Cornell, David G. Carlson, Hélène Cixous, and Annie Leclerc have developed very interesting investigations.2 Derrida himself, in a famous interview entitled “Implications,” said, “what I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Martin Heidegger’s questions.”3 I am not trying to find out what happened after Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics,4 which has conditioned our philosophical tradition, but how to respond today from within and, if necessary, against the grain of self-misunderstandings on his part.
It must be immediately stressed that I am not going to talk about the remains of Being because it has gone through a negative destruction, leaving nothing to Being as such. This would be a misunderstanding of the word “Destruktion.” Heidegger, instead of using the usual German word for destruction, “Zerstörung,” opted for the Latinate “Destruktion” and “Abbau” in order to avoid his term’s being confused with Nietzsche’s “demolition.” Derrida used “déconstruction,” but, as we will see, he did not intend by it what Heidegger did. For Heidegger, “philosophical controversy [discussion] is interpretation as destruction,”5 because philosophy is active philosophizing, “not a body of truths.” Philosophy is not supposed to answer the question “What are beings?” but instead is meant to unfold it into the question about Being. But in order to unfold it, it is first necessary to deconstruct it. Heidegger explained in 1956 how the meaning of philosophy depends on destruction:
We find the answer to the question “What is philosophy?” not through historical assertions about the definitions of philosophy but through conversing with that which has been handed down to us as the Being of being. This path to the answer to our question is not a break with history, no repudiation of history, but is an adoption and transformation of what has been handed down to us. Such an adoption of history is what is meant by the term “destruction.” . . . Destruction does not mean destroying but dismantling, liquidating, putting to one side the merely historical assertions about the history of philosophy. Destruction means—to open our ears, to make ourselves free for what speaks to us in tradition as the Being of being.6
What must be destroyed for Heidegger is what covers up the sense of Being, the structures piled on top of one another that make the sense of Being unrecognizable, that is, metaphysics.7 In other words, Heidegger, by demanding and undertaking this Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition, does not destroy it in the usual sense of abandoning it but instead loosens it up in order to be able to ask, in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), with a kind of complaint, “Wie steht es mit dem Sein?” which I think translates best as, “How is it going with Being?”8 This new articulation of the fundamental question of philosophy is going to be at the center of my investigation, because it better suits the radical consequences of Heidegger’s destruction. If philosophy cannot stop investigating Being, cannot overcome this problem (Heidegger used the term “überwindung,” overcoming, to mean a complete abandonment of the problem), but can only get over it (here Heidegger used the term “verwindung,” surpassing, alluding to the way one surpasses a major disappointment not by forgetting it but by coming to terms with it or “to what happens when, in the human realm, one works through grief or pain”),9 then its solution will depend on a philosophy capable of recognizing the insolubility of the problem in order to come to terms with it. When we talk about Being, we will “still” be talking about it in terms of metaphysics, because its metaphysical nature cannot be overcome, only gotten over.
Heidegger explained that when we speak of Being, we are also speaking of the people, specifically the creative force of the people that, in its poets, thinkers, statesmen, and artists, performs the greatest assault on the whole of Being that has ever happened in Western history. Given this, philosophy will also consist in returning to the main creative force that inspired these creators.10 But, if we assume (as we should) that the “main creative force that inspired these Men” is questioning, then philosophy today must clarify the remains of this questioning: hence, “How is it going with Being?” We finally have come to understand today that destroying the presence of Being was an inevitable task for philosophy. But now it is time to accept the consequences of this event, and the philosophy most suitably capable of doing this is hermeneutics, which centers its forces on recalling the remains of metaphysics through interpretation. But can a philosophy that has taken leave of the foundational illusion—in other words, a philosophy after metaphysics—really continue to call itself ontology? To continue to speak of Being and ontology is not an excessive claim, because, on the one hand, this same Being and ontology have shaped what we call philosophy, and, on the other, one cannot just abandon Being and replace it with something else, since it is the sphere through which we think. Continuing to discuss Being also keeps us committed to the metaphysical nature of the destruction that Heidegger performed, because, as I have just said, metaphysics is not something we can overcome but something we can only accept as a remnant we must come to terms with.
As far as the terms “remains” and “remnants” are concerned, which I will use frequently in this work, it is important to note that they will be used as variations of the same expression, that is, “the remains of Being” and “Being’s remnants.” While the former refers to the whole corpse of Being after Heidegger destroyed it, the latter instead indicates what is left, the traces of Being. “Remains” and “remnants” have similar origins, but there are differences in their denotations and connotations. However, I use both terms because I mean both things when I talk about Being—both Being’s body, its corpse, and the traces and scraps of Being that I use to discover this ontology. The remains of Being is the condition of the ontology of remnants, and these remnants show Being’s remains. I want both aspects of being—its destruction and its survival in fragments—to underpin this study.
If, since Plato, philosophers have been incapable of definitively answering the fundamental question of philosophy—“Why is Being, and why is there not rather nothing?”—hence, the “question of Being,” it is because they have thought of Being as an essence, an “optical model” in accordance with an ideal, an empirical image, or a representation of objective experience. But by “becoming representation, being loses its Being.”11 Although Aristotle explained that philosophy is essentially the study of Being—the attempt to clarify its sense and the attributes that belong to it by virtue of its own nature—Greek, medieval, and modern philosophy, that is, the entire philosophical tradition, privileged only the present participle of Being, meaning a presence of Being, a modality of time that is the present. For Plato, the Being of beings resided in eternal immutable matters of perfect form, and for Aristotle, in what he called energeia, that is, in currents of idealization and analysis that sprang from his taking for granted of the central existential mystery. The consequence of these structures of “presentness of the present” piled on to one another are the causes, reasons, and history of how Being came to be forgotten, because it was interpreted only as presence. But philosophy, guided by the question of Being, has now deconstructed this same “presentness of the present” down to the original experiences in which the first guiding determinations of Being were acquired, in order to reveal new possibilities.
If the task of philosophy has always been to answer the question of Being, and if we fell, as Heidegger explained, into the so-called metaphysics of presence, or logocentrism, because we think of Being as an objective presence, then philosophy, after deconstructing this presentness, has finally become aware, as Heidegger once said to Joan Stambaugh, that “there is a point where one can no longer ask questions.”12 We have now reached this point. We have finished questioning, describing, and deconstructing Being, that is, asking questions about Being as presence, and the moment has arrived to interpret what remains of Being. Presentness is just one of the many forms in which Being can appear, together with its metaphysical question: “Why is Being, and why is there not rather nothing?”
The goal of this investigation is to try to find out to what extent there is nothing to Being itself after its destruction, in order to clarify what Being signifies in our present situation. This is what the ontology of remnants is all about. The ontology of remnants can only begin after the destruction of metaphysics. The word “after” alludes to the German term “Nachdenken,” the “thinking that follows.” And “Nach-” does not stand primarily for “after” but for “following upon,” for the “follower of Being.” Fundamentally, to engage in Denken, thinking, is not to analyze but to attend to or remember Being. Bauen, to build, which comes after the destruction of something, does not point to the notion of a novel construction but to Hegen, conservation, preservation, custodianship, and “looking after.” Philosophy has become a response, an answer to the history of the various events of Being that have been handed down to us through a dialogue. The philosopher, after Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, must become a listener, a respondent to the remains of Being (this is in contrast to the Cartesian and positivistic attitude, which holds the philosopher’s task as grasping what is in front of her), in order to establish a relation of “audition.” Philosophy, by looking after Being, which is not previously marked on a map, must think and therefore discover a path through unfamiliar terrain; science, in contrast, does not need to think, since it calculates inside already opened paradigms.
Philosophy has become a consequence of and from destruction. It is a consequence of destruction because we have learned that we cannot overcome the problem of Being and leave it completely aside, because it continues to appear, being the heart of philosophy. It is a consequence from destruction because we may only come to terms with it in order to find constructive ways to respond to it. It is important to understand from the start that metaphysics (Being as presence, objectivism) is not something we can neglect once and for all, because it is not something we can completely overcome, überwinden; we can only get over it from within, verwinden. And Heidegger’s destruction of objectivistic metaphysics cannot be carried forward by replacing it with a more adequate conception of Being (this would mean overcoming metaphysics), because one would still have to identify Being with the presence characteristic of objects. Instead, by recognizing the inevitable metaphysical nature of Being, following Heidegger in Nietzsche, we can see how “within metaphysics there is nothing to Being as such.”13 If, as I believe, after deconstruction “there is nothing to Being as such,” then philosophy ceases to be the search for Being “as an objective datum that precedes the application of conceptual schemes” and becomes the “remembering of Being that Heidegger wished to inaugurate.”14 The philosopher, living through the history of the remains of Being, of which he will never become the historian but only, at his rare best, a custodian, must learn to recollect Being, because Heidegger’s efforts in Being and Time were not meant to arrive at a new definition of Being. Heidegger only wanted to prepare us to “apprehend, to hear the word of Being.”
This book could have been given the title On the Manifold Remains of Being Since Heidegger (similar to that of Franz Brentano’s dissertation, “On the Manifold Meaning of Being Since Aristotle” [1862]) or even The Ontology of Remnants, but since it does not share the traditional ambition of ontologies, of proposing a “first philosophy,” I sought to avoid the word “ontology.” Although these could have been appealing titles, the word “ontology” could also induce readers to regard this book as just another treatise on ontology, which is not the case because of the “thing itself.” Such a treatise would presuppose an outline of the “essence of the remains of Being” as its foundation, but this is impossible, because of Being itself and its history. Another problem with ontological treatises is that they are never sufficiently discursive about the world or the history, people, and politics that surround and condition it, limiting their subject matter or, in Heideggerian terms, forgetting the ontological difference. Although I will be using the notion of the ontology of remnants throughout my investigation, this notion has its origin and is an explicit development of the “ontology of actuality” articulated by Michel Foucault and Gianni Vattimo. These two philosophers must be credited for my use of this idea, the former for inventing it and the latter for integrating it into the history of Being.
The expression “ontologie de l’actualité” was first used by Foucault on January 5, 1983, in a course at the Collège de France. Although an extract of the course was published under the title “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”15 the following year, Foucault published a larger version of the same text in English16 but dropped the term “ontology of actuality” for the term “historical ontology of ourselves.” In the first edition, ontology of actuality was opposed to an “analytics of truth,” and in the second edition, “historical ontology of ourselves” was opposed to the “critical ontology of ourselves.” Comparing both editions, we can easily observe that Foucault meant the same thing by both phrases and probably found “historical” and “critical” more appropriate, because they both could be used as opposing modifiers to the subject “ontology.” Foucault never used the term “ontology of actuality” again, but he did refer to “historical ontology” a few months later in an interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus in Berkeley.17
Foucault used this pair of terms to distinguish the possibility of choosing between “a critical philosophy which presents itself as an analytical philosophy of truth in general and a critical thought which will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of actuality.”18 In other words, an ontology of actuality (or a historical ontology of ourselves), according to Foucault, would not turn to projects that claim to be as global as an analysis of truth (or a critical ontology of ourselves) but, on the contrary, would use only historical investigations into the “events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.”19 This new historical ontology is archeological, because it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge but instead will only try to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. In other words, this ontology is not trying to “make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”20 Although the definition of historical ontology Foucault gives here could also be used for what I mean by an ontology of remnants, it is not my aim here to investigate further why he defined both ontologies the same way, preferring one term to the other. The important thing is to note that even if Foucault always declared that Heidegger was the author (together with Nietzsche) he studied the most but wrote the least about,21 he did not work on the history of Being, and I doubt he was thinking about Heidegger’s destruction of ontotheology when he wrote about the ontology of actuality.
Having given Foucault the recognition and credit for first deploying the concept of the ontology of actuality, I will not be giving him any more space in this book, because he did not develop this concept in his other writings and, more importantly, because he was not referring to ontology as the history of Being.22 This might also be why he immediately dropped the word “actuality” in favor of “historical.” He preferred historical ontology to the ontology of actuality because he felt closer to historicism than to ontology or, for that matter, to philosophy. Recently, the term “historical ontology” captured the interest of Ian Hacking23 and many other pioneers of historicism, who regard history as the only truth of reality.24 Although historicism is a significant philosophical position and tradition (which starts with Vico and develops through von Ranke, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, Simmel, Weber, Spengler, Löwith, Croce, Gramsci, and Collingwood), since I am dealing with philosophy after metaphysics, this work must describe an ontology of “actuality” (I would say “remnant”) and not a “historical” one. Historical ontology would imply understanding Being from a historical point of view, which would be a mistake, since Being cannot be determined by an ontic science. History has its own discourse, which depends on Being as the interpretation upon which it establishes and structures its own functions. History, by moving in a particular direction (conceived as modernization, Westernization, increasing rationality, and control through technology), thus under the shadow of metaphysics, forgets its dependence on Being. Historians have established the relation with history in a “safe” metaphysical way by positing a past radically distinguished from the present on the basis of a present object (such as the historical past or future events) that allows it to be unilinear. Thus history was determined to absorb everything in a Hegelian way, since it is ordered around a center. Instead, an ontology of remnants will regard history primarily from the point of view of the meaning of the events of Being, which are not at all linear (note that “linear” depends on a start and a finish), because, as Vattimo explains, “there is no origin located somewhere outside the actuality of the present. The event has its own thickness and certainly bears within it the traces of the past, but it is just as much composed of the voices of the present.”25
In March 1980, Vattimo gave a conference at the Goethe Institute in Rome entitled “Toward an Ontology of Decline”26 and, following Foucault’s lead, published an essay entitled “Ontology of Actuality.”27 Since then, in many of his writings, especially Beyond Interpretation, he has explained the similarities between Foucault’s understanding of what an ontology of actuality should be and Heidegger’s new fundamental question, “How is it going with Being?” Vattimo has specified:
I conceive it [the ontology of actuality] as the (most persuasive) answer to Heidegger’s call to recollect Being. . . . For the rest, since the thrust of Heidegger’s thinking leads to the recognition that Being “is” not but rather that it happens, and thus that we cannot simply return to an object, to its coming-about in presence, by dispelling the cloud of oblivion into which it has fallen, then to recollect Being will signify, for those who wish to interpret Heidegger even against the grain of certain self-misunderstandings on his part, the effort to grasp what is meant by “Being”—the word itself and virtually nothing else—in our experience now.28
For Vattimo, not only are all philosophies ontologies of actuality, and therefore responses to contingent questions (as Kantian transcendentalism was born as a response to the need to secure a foundation for the universal validity of knowledge, or existentialism as a response to the consequences of mass societies), but our ontological question must be formulated in such a way as to respond to the events of Being. Although my “ontology of remnants” has the same goals, ambitions, and purposes as Foucault’s and Vattimo’s “ontology of actuality,” I prefer the terms “remains” and “remnants” to “historical” and “actuality,” since the former terms clearly imply not only that “Being is” but also that we are at a point where metaphysical dichotomies are overcome because what remains, not what is, is essential to philosophy. Through Heidegger’s new fundamental question, hermeneutics, and the ontology of remains, I intend to pursue systematically what all three thinkers had in mind, not only Foucault and Vattimo but also Heidegger.
The problem for the ontology of remnants is the remains of Being. The development of this ontology will bring forward a logic of remains (a logics of discursive continuities) that will function through interpretation, because Being is not but happens; it remains. The logic of remains is hermeneutics. Since Being happens and occurs, the philosophical response to Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics must be hermeneutics. Not only is it the closest we can get to An-Denken, the only term that Heidegger used to express a postmetaphysical thought, but it is also the most persuasive way to recollect the remains of Being. In other words, an ontology of remnants needs hermeneutics, a philosophy capable of speaking of Being through its remains, which occur in events (which I will analyze in chapter 2). If philosophy is not only the expression of the age but also interpretation, a striving to be persuasive, it must acknowledge its own contingency, liberty, and perilousness. This is why hermeneutics is the right response to Heidegger’s destructive demand to “loosen Being up” in order to be able to ask, “How is it going with Being?” This is from now on both the question of the ontology of remnants and the new fundamental question of philosophy.
So, since Being happens and occurs, hermeneutics is the most adaptive way to recollect the remains of Being. The term “hermeneutics” derives from a Greek word connected with the name of the god Hermes, the reputed messenger and interpreter of the gods, and hermeneutics was originally concerned more narrowly with interpreting sacred texts. Although hermeneutics had its origins in problems of biblical exegesis and in the development of a theoretical framework to govern such exegetical practice, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, theologians and philosophers such as Johann Martin Chladenius, Georg Friedrich Meier, Friedrich Ast, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Nietzsche developed hermeneutics into a more encompassing theory of textual interpretation in general, rules that provided the basis for good interpretive practice regardless of the subject matter: God, nature, art, or even the social sciences. But it is first through Dilthey and then firmly with Heidegger that hermeneutics became a complete and recognized position in twentieth-century German philosophy.
It is important to remember that in his classic of 1927, Heidegger used the term “hermeneutics” not in the sense of a theory of the art of interpretation, nor interpretation itself, but rather to attempt a first definition of the nature of interpretation on hermeneutic grounds. These would be different than the grounds of epistemology or analytical philosophy, because this same concept of interpretation, after two thousand years of submission to unquestioned metaphysical paradigms, has “achieved a discourse on discourse, an interpretation of interpretation,” as Julia Kristeva explains, which will finally make the “word become flesh.”29 Kristeva emphasizes this as a success, because it is a way out from what Hegel called “the desire for absolute knowledge”: interpretation stood secretly side by side for all this time with this desire until Heidegger elevated it to the center of philosophy, providing a practice that finally could start loosening this entire encompassing framework. Having studied a tradition of philosophers who centered their work on the concept of interpretation, Heidegger did not regard hermeneutics as an operation of construction but as an announcement of what had already been constituted, therefore, a bringing into speech of the meaning of Being. Heidegger explained that Hermes is the divine messenger, the one who brings “the message of destiny; hermeneuein is that exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message. Such exposition becomes an interpretation of what has been said earlier.”30 In other words, hermeneutics is not a philosophical method but an attitude, the right attitude “to bring tidings, with respect to preserving a message” in order “to gather in, to bring together what is concealed within the old,”31 thus to respond to “how is it going with Being?” Also, as interpreters rather than describers, by bringing forward an ontology of remnants we avoid the problem of finding the authentic meaning of Being or limiting it to only one terrain, because to do either would again lead to a problem of description.
If the only possible ontology after metaphysics is an ontology of remnants, because its question (how is it going with Being?) best suits the status of Being after the destruction of metaphysics (“within metaphysics there is nothing to Being as such”), then my duty toward Being in this work is to ask this new question through six beneficiaries of Heidegger’s philosophical insights, that is, by entering into a dialogue with philosophers of the remains. But this dialogue, in order to be truly philosophical, must presuppose that if “the Being of being addresses itself to philosophers to the extent that they state what being is, in so far as it is, then our discussion with philosophers must also be addressed by the Being of being.”32 This is the only way to philosophize. It is one thing to describe the opinion of other philosophers; it is an entirely different thing to talk through them about what they are saying. Heidegger explained that we can never find the answer to the question of what philosophy is “through historical assertions about the definitions of philosophy but through conversing with that which has been handed down to us as the Being of being.”33 I do not want to suggest that philosophy has always been, without knowing it, the remains of Being, but only that some philosophers after Heidegger’s destruction of ontotheology have overcome metaphysics by recognizing that Being must be worked out anew, that is, destroyed, interpreted, and generated.
In the first chapter, “Being Destroyed,” I will analyze why and how Heidegger retrieved, through destruction, the question of Being and how the new fundamental question of philosophy posed by Heidegger in 1936 was also a consequence of this destruction. This will be essential to introduce the second chapter, “After the Destruction,” which will expose the remains of Being within the works of Schürmann, Derrida, Nancy, Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Vattimo. Since the very nature of Being does not allow a conclusion (conclusions imply final arrangement, definitive settlement, and outcomes of an act or process), my third chapter, “Generating Being Through Interpretation,” will expose the immeasurable consequences of having developed a philosophy as interpretation of the remains of Being; that is, I will show why productive interpretations generate Being. These three chapters also represent three practical examples of destroying, interpreting, and generating philosophy, which are philosophy’s preliminary and necessary steps if it is to function after metaphysics.
Finally, let me explain that the Being I will deal with in chapter 2, as the investigation of Heidegger in chapter 1 will show, is “worn out,” because it indicates Being’s remnants. These remnants are all we have left after the deconstruction of our metaphysical tradition, and it is our philosophical duty “to grasp this last resonant of a possession.”34 The main characteristic of the worn-out Being is its “indeterminateness,” “unpresentability,” or “ungraspable-ness.”35 As remnants, it does not presence or represent anything but only answers the fundamental question of the ontology of remnants: “How is it going with Being?” It is essential to emphasize that I have chosen the six philosophers in chapter 2 because they are the first to have achieved the unpresentability of Being by following the logic of remains. Of course, it could seem too arbitrary to limit the ontology of remains to these six philosophers who, one way or another, studied with Heidegger (Gadamer and Tugendhat) or based their philosophy on his work (Derrida, Schürmann, Nancy, Vattimo), when there are so many others who are Heidegger’s direct disciples (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, José Ortega y Gasset, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Bernhard Welte, Karl Rahner, Paul Tillich), colleagues (Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann), contemporaries (Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas), and followers (Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou). But some of these were so profoundly influenced by him that in some cases their philosophy was limited to either commentary on his works or developments in other disciplines such as theology, politics, and mathematics. At first sight, some of them could also have a place in my ontology of remnants, since a sort of similar destruction (such as Bultmann’s “demythologizing”) or unpresentable remains of Being (as Jaspers’s “cypher”) can be found in their work, but many of these philosophers were either too close to or too far from Heidegger to interpret his work beyond pure imitation, unconditional refusal, or simple development.
The ontology of remnants follows the logic of remains, that is, a logic that recognizes how, though it only counts as a used-up term, Being is all we have left and that we must try to grasp its last resonance. But this does not mean exchanging Being for something different, proposing a new predicate, or using it to explain other philosophical problems, but ultimately only asking, again, “How is it going with Being?” Because, as Heidegger said, “Being remains constantly available to us” and philosophy “must at all times work out Being for itself anew.”36 Schürmann, Derrida, Nancy, Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Vattimo are the first philosophers to explicitly work out Being anew following the logic of remains. In order to further justify and explain the logic of remains, let me explain why Lévinas, Marion, and Badiou are not analyzed in chapter 2, since initially they would seem to merit a place.
Although Lévinas, as well as Marion37 and Badiou,38 considered “Heidegger the greatest philosopher of the century”39 and Being the main issue of philosophy, Lévinas did so as part of his attempt to think the other of Being, the counterpart of Being, as the title of one of his most important books indicates: Otherwise Than Being; Or, Beyond Essence (1974).40 Already in Totality and Infinity (1961),41 he showed how Western philosophy has “most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.”42 For the French master, ontology, through the concept of Being, gives priority to the self, neglecting and obscuring the encounter with the other. “Otherwise than Being” is not a “something,” but is the relation to the other, the ethical relation that should interrupt and devalorize ontology, because the recognition of the other happens only beyond Being. Lévinas’s philosophical concern is not Being but the other, the ethical responsibility of the self for the other. Although one might be tempted to consider Lévinas a philosopher of the remains of Being because he recognizes clearly that the thought of Being is the thought of that which is meaningful and that the “meaningful would be the concordant, the permanent, that which remains,”43 he only uses ontology as a starting and contrasting point to make a place for ethics. In this way he has developed an ethics by systematically opposing ontology: while “the birthplace of ontology is in the said . . . the responsibility for another is precisely a saying prior to anything said.”44 Lévinas explained that he never wanted to renew philosophy but only to insist on the primordial intellectual role of the other, because the ethical has always been constrained, restricted, or resisted by ontology, where the meaning of the intelligible, instead, is attached to the event of being. Levinas’s fear of being “attached to the event of Being, because it would be ‘in itself ’ like presence, culminating in its repose and perseverance in itself,”45 is both a confirmation that the renewal of philosophy is not possible in his opinion and, above all, an indication that he was not “working out Being for itself anew,” as my ontology of remnants demands. If Being is, and within metaphysics there is nothing to Being as such, then our duty is to find out how it is going with Being, to find its remains.
Marion, in God Without Being, has gone even further than Lévinas in claiming that we must overcome the thought of Being together with its ontological difference because this is the only way to free God from all metaphysical determinations. The French phenomenologist’s point of departure is a response given by Heidegger when he was asked if it would be proper to posit Being and God as identical. Heidegger’s response was that “Being and God are not identical and I would never attempt to think the essence of God by means of Being.”46 Marion interpreted this answer as defining the necessity of liberating God from the question of Being, though Heidegger was only confirming his thesis of Being and Time and the lecture Phenomenology and Theology,47 where he insisted upon the opposition between philosophy (which is ontological) and theology (which is an ontic science like chemistry or mathematics). Although reason is capable of thinking Being, Marion is certain that it cannot disclose God except within the confines of Being and therefore is limited to the ontological horizon. Recognizing this metaphysical condition, he attempted “to bring out the absolute freedom of God with regard to all determinations, including, first of all, the basic condition that renders all other conditions possible and even necessary—for us, humans—the fact of Being.”48 Although Marion could be regarded as a philosopher of the remains since he explicitly recognizes “the fact of Being,” by urging us to think of God in light of St. John’s pronouncement that “God is love” (since “love” has not been thought through in the metaphysical tradition), he, similar to what Lévinas has done with ethics, neglects ontology in order to theologize. But in doing so, he is inevitably conditioning theology by metaphysics—much more so than he would have had he recognized the remains of God within the metaphysical tradition. In this “theological philosophy,” not only is Being not worked out anew—it is not even questioned.
Dominique Janicaud has rightly emphasized that Badiou’s Being and Event “is the first book since Being and Time which again dares to ask the question of ‘What about being qua being?’ and brings forth an answer to it.”49 Although from Janicaud’s words it seems that Badiou is also a philosopher of the remnants of Being, I cannot apply my logic of remains to him for the same reasons that disqualified Marion. He gives an answer to the ontological question by unfolding its “mathematical dimension.” But mathematics, like theology, is an ontic science. Badiou’s main concern in his investigations has been to escape from any historicism, and he has done so by limiting ontology to mathematics and Being to pure multiples in its proliferations. The idea that Being is like an event, a gift, a presence, and an opening from a historical trajectory of which we are only left with remnants is unacceptable for the French master, because Being does not in any manner let itself be approached but “solely allows itself to be sutured in its void to the brutality of a deductive consistency without aura. Being does not diffuse itself in rhythm and image, it does not reign over metaphor, it is the null sovereign of inference.”50 Although Badiou talks about “the void as proper name of Being”51 and goes on to present it as asubstantial, equivocal to nothing, and inconsistent pure multiplicity, he believes that it must be grasped within a framework capable of containing it: mathematics. If Being is pure multiplicity, and the most formalized, most complete framework of axioms of the multiple is set theory, then philosophy should examine set theories, axiom by axiom. What these axioms say about Being qua Being will answer the ontological question, because “mathematics writes that which, of being itself, is pronounceable in the field of a pure theory of the Multiple.”52 Gilles Deleuze rightly objected that Badiou’s philosophy is dominated by analogical thinking: determining its own structures in order to discover them outside itself through other discourses.53 This objection could also function against Lévinas and Marion, because if Being is used to determine another realm of thought, then an analogy is “imposed” while at the same time “deduced” (as in Otherwise Than Being and God Without Being).
In Lévinas, Being is only a starting and contrasting point to make place for ethics; in Marion, it is the negation of the objective nature of metaphysics in order to theologize; and finally, in Badiou it is the negation of the history of Being, because ontology, as he says, cannot be “haunted by the dissipation of Presence and the loss of the origin.”54 The problem with these three prestigious philosophers is that by excluding Being or the other of Being, they are also denying Being: the exclusion of the other denies itself. But since “Being is the most worn out” and “within metaphysics there is nothing to Being as such,” it can be neither contrasted nor negated, nor can its history be put aside.
My study will not produce conclusions, answers, or, in my terminology, a “remnant” of Being that would presuppose “any remnant of an in-self, which would transcend becoming, as a candidate for what endures through history,”55 as Schürmann explained, because showing the remains of Being is a way of overcoming metaphysics from within, that is, recognizing that it cannot completely be overcome. If metaphysics could be overcome, one of the many past descriptions of Being (idea, energeia, act, representedness, objectivity, or absolute Spirit) or, in my case, one of the six remnants of Being (traits, traces, copresences, conversation, sentences, events) would be the correct one. But since it cannot be overcome but only surpassed through an endless continuation and revisitation, I am going to seek the remains through the new fundamental question that allows Being to appear in its different modalities.
By discussing the remains of Being, am I necessarily discussing Being? Am I taking a stand above and, therefore, outside Being? No. I am trying to enter into Being’s way, path, happening, in order to conduct myself in its manner, from within its manner. The “remnants” in the “ontology of remnants” do not indicate an object but what is left or given after other parts have been taken away, used up, or destroyed. It implies continuation or being left after others have gone, and therefore it cannot be conceived as an object or even objectified. Since Heraclitus, not only has there not been any final solution to the question of Being, but it has actually been forgotten, been completely covered by metaphysics to the point that there is nothing to Being as such. However, it remains the main concern of philosophical thought. Considering that each “epoch of philosophy has its own necessity,”56 and thus is conscious or unconscious of interpreting Being, we simply have to acknowledge that just as the interpretation of presence that was the essence of metaphysics or the oblivion of Being became the stimulus for its destruction, today it is the remains of Being that determine the interpretative nature of philosophy. If, after Heidegger’s destruction of it, Being became once again the center of philosophical inquiry for some philosophers (not only the six I will study), this is not only because Heidegger found the right way to interpret it but because philosophy is only at its beginning, once again.