For two sessions now, we have been lingering on these last chapters of Sein und Zeit, without denying ourselves anticipations and references to much later texts. But always to attempt to situate—and it isn’t easy—the intention of this penultimate chapter devoted to temporality and historicity. Two sessions ago we tried, following Heidegger, to bring out the most general structure of the Geschehen and the Geschichtlichkeit of Dasein. And this preliminary stage could only be passed after the solicitation (what I shall now call solicitation rather than destruction) of metaphysics and onto-theology insofar as they are but the determination of being as Present and Presence of the Present. Thinking the always on the basis of the now. Historicity cannot be thought so long as Presence is the absolute form of meaning. And we have seen what that means, and that it is precisely the metaphysically and philosophically irreversible and profoundly invulnerable character of this metaphysical proposition determining being as presence that had to be destroyed, solicited. I will not go back over this. In this vein, we wondered last time about what I called the phenomenon of running out of breath that happens at the end of Sein und Zeit. I tried to analyze the signs of this—two signs coming down to only one, and the reasons—two reasons coming down to only one. I cannot take them up again, any more than I can take up [264] everything we said about the strange architectonic procedure that gives the last three chapters of Sein und Zeit their rhythm. We drew some anticipatory conclusions from this concerning the meaning of the abandonment of Sein und Zeit and the future treatment of the theme of the history of being, the erasure of the theme of Entschlossenheit and even of temporality in the texts to come. And above all we recognized this noteworthy phenomenon: that at bottom it is never really a question of historicity in the proper sense in Sein und Zeit. Not only is it not a question of the historicity of being (but there was no question in Heidegger’s intention of it being a question of this). But it is also not even a question of the historicity of Dasein in the proper sense. And I showed this by explaining what I meant here by proper sense. Because basically, as we saw, Heidegger almost without exception deals only with inauthentic (non-proper, uneigentlich) historicity and only insofar as it is rooted in inauthentic temporality, in intratemporality (Innerzeitigkeit). As to all that, I firmly insisted, referring to later texts, on the necessity of what is more a decisive turning than an impasse. And we commented on this chapter devoted to the common—inauthentic—conception of historicity, to the enigma of a Vergangenheit or a Gewesenheit that no longer had the sense of past present as present past or past present of a subject. (The four meanings of the common concept.) And once again, venturing the formula according to which history did not happen to a subject in general but the subject happened to history, we had to take many precautions to understand this formula appropriately and first of all to understand it neither in an empiricist sense nor in a Hegelian sense.
Finally, in conclusion, I began to look at this §74 that presents itself as a descriptive sketch of the authentic historicity of Dasein and that I proposed to show, precisely, (1) comprises no new concept allowing us to distinguish the root from the rooted (i.e., temporality from historicity); (2) depended on the Entschlossenheit that I had earlier shown runs the risk, in privileging the ekstasis of the future, of death, and a freedom still not fully released from [265] ethico-metaphysics and which will subsequently be abandoned for good reason by Heidegger, ran the risk, then, of barring our access to historicity.
The only apparently new concepts, as we saw, were those that designated the first tissue, the nuclear tissue, the first text, I said for specific reasons, the first phrase of historicity, or at least the first phrase as first historicity; these were the concepts of heritage (Erbe), of transmission (Überlieferung) and, especially and first of all, of auto-transmission, auto-tradition (Sichüberlieferung):1 a tradition of self that, for the moment, obviously, has no intra-worldly or intra-temporal meaning. No intra-worldly or intra-temporal meaning since we are dealing with the originary synthesis, with traditionality and the originary tra-jectory that allows temporalization and thus worldization in general to happen. So one must not understand these words heritage and tradition in the everyday sense. On the contrary, there is heritage and tradition in the common sense only if this originary synthesis is possible and if it is possible first of all as self-tradition of experience or rather of ek-sistence, this being no longer the experience of a subject.
This Sichüberlieferung—auto-transmission—is analogous to the synthetic movement of protentions and retentions described by Husserl, only with these two decisive differences: (1) that here it is no longer a matter of the movement of a consciousness, but of an ek-sistence that is not determined at the outset as consciousness; (2) that the absolute form of transmission is ekstasis, going outside oneself and not Present, self-presence (present going outside itself in itself), a present only modified and originarily and ceaselessly modified by protentions and retentions. Sichüberlieferung is therefore, if you will, a complementary concept or, if you prefer, the other side of the concept of the concept2 of pure auto-affection that describes time in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. And if we could do so, this is the book we would need to delve into here. Auto-affection and auto-tradition—such is the movement of the [266] temporalization of time. Setting off, for example, from the theme of Kantian affectivity and receptivity (intuitus derivativus), Heidegger shows how Kant does not limit himself to saying that time like space is the universal form of sensibility (i.e., affectivity, affection), but that time itself affects, must always affect, says Kant, “the concept of the representation of objects.”3 Comment. Now every affection is a manifestation through which an already given being announces itself. A rigorously Kantian proposition. Being-affected, spirit, is the form of appearing, the phenomenalization of a being that appears to me, that touches me, that affects me precisely because I have not created it. Intuitus derivativus. Now, how is one to maintain this definition of affection as an affection already given to me? How to maintain it when it is a matter of time? What does being affected by time mean, given that time is nothing, is not an already-given being, is nothing external to us? [Illegible word]4 Idea. Comment. To clarify what he calls Kant’s “obscure assertion” that “time affects a concept, in particular, the concept of the representations of objects” (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 133), Heidegger shows what time as pure intuition must signify: originarily, it can in no way signify affection of something by something, affection of a being by another being, affection of an existing subject by something outside it: because time is nothing, as such it cannot affect anything. It is affection of self by self. Auto-affection, a concept that is as incomprehensible as is, in truth, the movement of temporalization. This auto-affection as temporality is not a characteristic affecting transcendental [267] subjectivity, one of its attributes; it is, on the contrary, that starting from which the self, the Selbst, the I think constitutes itself and announces itself to itself. Heidegger writes, [French] p. 244:
As pure self-affection, time is not an acting affection that strikes a self which is at hand (vorhandenes Selbst). Instead, as pure it forms the essence (Wesen) of something like self-activating (Sich-selbst-angehen as self-relating, to relate to self, angegangen werden zu können). However, if it belongs to the essence of the finite subject to be able to be activated as a self, then time as pure self-affection forms the essential structure of subjectivity. Only on the grounds of this self-hood can the finite creature be what it must be: dependent upon taking things in stride (angewiesen auf Hinnahme). (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 132)
It follows that it is only by referring to inauthentic temporality, to intra-temporality, that Kant would have been so determined to separate the I think from temporality, to make it into an intemporal subject. The I think is intemporal only with regard to intra-worldly intra-temporality, but, if one gets back to originary and authentic temporality, the I think is temporal. The separation of the I think from temporality is in the end nothing other than the difference that separates originary temporality from constituted and intra-worldly temporality.
You know that this theme of pure auto-affection is merely the opening in Heidegger’s thought to the theme of the transcendence of Dasein and to the question of being, beyond the metaphysics of subjectivity. The notion of affection or of affectivity is at bottom—as is time, precisely, of which auto-affection is the name—the notion of affectivity is at bottom merely the name of the transcendence of Dasein toward the being of beings, and as time, the meaning of the transcendental horizon of the question of being. Affectivity [268] is in this sense transcendence. Well, let it be said in passing and elliptically, it is in this proposition that—according to M. Henry, the author of The Essence of Manifestation,5 that book of rare power and depth in its movement but, it seems to me, totally pointless in its result—it is this proposition—affectivity as transcendence or transcendence as essence of manifestation—that would sum up today the history of Western philosophy, whether it be summed up in Hegel, Husserl or Heidegger. It is this proposition that M. Henry wishes in turn to try to destroy in order to restore a concept of affectivity that has supposedly been dissimulated, affectivity as pure subjectivity, without transcendence outside itself, auto-affection of being for itself, as spirit. So that at the end of a very strong, very meticulous and very profound critique of Hegel in particular, strictly Hegelian or even infra-Hegelian conclusions are formulated. This is not the first and no doubt is not the last time this will happen.
This detour—which I cannot extend here, via Kant and the problem of metaphysics—was supposed to bring us back to this notion of Sichüberlieferung, of self-transmission, that Heidegger makes, as it were, the originary synthesis and the nucleus of historicity, and that I would say is basically the other side of what will be called auto-affection in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. This reference and this detour were already necessary for two reasons.
(1) By reason of the fact that Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics occupies with respect to Sein und Zeit a situation that is not without interest from the point of view that is ours here. For, on the one hand, the essential content of this book was presented in lectures in 1925–266—and so not long before the writing of Sein und Zeit and before its publication. On the other hand, Heidegger tells us in the foreword to the first edition of this book that the explication of the Critique of Pure Reason that is proposed in it has its origin in a first working out of the second division of Sein und Zeit, the very one that was never definitively worked out and published. Kant and the Problem [269] of Metaphysics thus gives us an idea of the path into which Heidegger ventured and gave up finding his footing after Sein und Zeit, and this becomes very illuminating if one thinks of what we said about the impossibility of a continuous progress from Sein und Zeit. [Interlinear: _____..... dotted line. . . . renunciation.] A risky path, full of pitfalls, as Heidegger recognizes himself, since he writes in the foreword to the first edition,7
The instances in which I have gone astray and the shortcomings of the present endeavor have become so clear to me on the path of thinking during the period referred to above that I therefore refuse to make this work into a patchwork by compensating with supplements, appendices and postscripts.
Thinkers learn from their shortcomings to be more persevering. (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, xx)
That Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was thought of as a stone supposed to be added to the edifice of Sein und Zeit, then having to be abandoned on the building site, like a discarded and unusable piece of material, some distance from the unfinished edifice itself, is confirmed when one reads, for example on [German] pp. 23–24 of Sein und Zeit, the plan for this explication of the Kantian design. I’ll read rapidly in the translation (here because we are not looking at it closely) this passage from Sein und Zeit in which an essential clarification of the unpublished second division is, programmatically, announced:
Read French translation, pp. 39–41:
*In accord with the positive tendency of this destruction, the question must first be asked whether and to what extent in the course of the history of ontology in general the interpretation of being has been thematically connected with the phenomenon of time. We must also ask whether the problematic of temporality, which necessarily belongs here, was fundamentally worked out or could have been. Kant is the first and only one who traversed [270] a stretch of the path toward investigating the dimension of temporality—or allowed himself to be driven there by the compelling force of the phenomena themselves. Only when the problem of temporality is pinned down can we succeed in casting light on the obscurity of his doctrine of schematism. Furthermore, in this way we can also show why this area had to remain closed to Kant in its real dimensions and in its central ontological function. Kant himself knew that he was venturing forth into an obscure area: “This schematism of our understanding as regards appearances and their mere form is an art hidden in the depths of the human soul, the true devices of which are hardly ever to be divined from Nature and laid uncovered before our eyes.”8 What it is that Kant shrinks back from here, as it were, must be brought to light thematically and in principle if the expression “being” is to have a demonstrable meaning. Ultimately the phenomena to be explicated in the following analysis under the rubric of “temporality” are precisely those that determine the most covert judgments of “common reason,” the analysis of which Kant calls the “business of philosophers.”
In pursuing the task of destruction along the guideline of the problem of temporality the following treatise will attempt to interpret the chapter on the schematism and the Kantian doctrine of time developed there. At the same time we must show why Kant could never gain insight into the problem of temporality. Two things prevented this insight: first, the neglect of the question of being in general, and second, in conjunction with this, the lack of a thematic ontology of Dasein or, in Kantian terms, the lack of a preliminary ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject. Instead, despite all his essential advances, Kant dogmatically adopted Descartes’ position. Furthermore, although Kant takes this phenomenon back into the subject his analysis of time remains oriented toward the traditional, vulgar understanding of it. It is this that finally prevented Kant from working out the phenomenon of a “transcendental determination of time” in its own structure and function. As a consequence of this double effect of the tradition, the decisive connection between time and the “I think” remains shrouded in complete [271] obscurity. It did not even become a problem. By taking over Descartes’ ontological position Kant neglects something essential: an ontology of Dasein. In terms of Descartes’ innermost tendency this omission is a decisive one. With the “cogito sum” Descartes claims to prepare a new and secure foundation for philosophy. But what he leaves undetermined in this “radical” beginning is the manner of being of the res cogitans, more precisely the meaning of being of the “sum.” Working out the tacit ontological foundations of the “cogito sum” will constitute the second stage of the destruction of, and the path back into, the history of ontology. The interpretation will demonstrate not only that Descartes had to neglect the question of being altogether, but also why he held the opinion that the absolute “being-certain” of the cogito exempted him from the question of the meaning of the being of this being.* (Being and Time, 22–23)
Such then was the first reason for this detour via Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The second reason is, then, more immediately, this notion of auto-affection as the other side of the Sichüberlieferung that interests us here directly. Thus, for example, on [French] page 244 of Kant . . . , describing time as pure auto-affection, Heidegger writes,
According to its essence, time is pure affection of itself. Furthermore it is precisely what in general forms [aiming: intuition, the way] seeing which, setting off from itself, heads for . . . [which translates so etwas wie das, “Von-sich-aus-hin-auf-zu”] something like the “from-out-itself-toward-there . . . ,” so that the upon-which looks back and into the previously named toward-there. (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 132)
Read the German, pp. 180 and 1819:
*Die Zeit ist ihrem Wesen nach reine Affektion ihrer selbst. Ja, noch mehr, sie ist gerade das, was überhaupt so etwas wie das, ‘Von-sich-aus-hin-zu-auf . . .’ bildet, dergestalt, dass das so sich bildende Worauf-zu zurückblickt und herein in das [272] vorgenannte Hin-zu . . .10*
Well, this exiting from self that rebounds onto self and holds itself in the exit from self, gives itself and transmits itself so as to keep it, its own ekstatic movement, in itself, and that is auto-transmission, taking rigorously into account the fact that the absolute form of this movement, of this self-keeping, is not the present or the now . . . for the reasons we know.
I think we can now broach the commentary announced last time on the sentence I translated at the very end of the session. Let me read it again. (Open the German text to p. 385.)
Only a being that is essentially futural in its being, so that it can let itself be thrown back upon its factical there, free for its death and shattering itself on it, that is, only a being that, as futural, is equiprimordially having-been [Present = past of a future], can hand down to itself (sich selbst überliefernd) its inherited possibility [inheriting from itself the inherited possibility], can [therefore] take over its own [its authentic] thrownness and be augenblicklich for “its time.” Only authentic temporality that is at the same time finite makes something like fate, that is, authentic historicity, possible. (Being and Time, 366)
In recognizing the Sichüberlieferung as another name for the auto-affection of pure time, we clearly recognize that we are dealing here with an auto-tradition that is pure, a priori, non-empirical, non-ontic and the condition of possibility for any ontic history. We are dealing with an ontological structure of traditionality in general.
You see that here authentic historicity is described in the same terms as authentic temporality and that its authenticity depends on the authenticity of what is translated as decision or resolute anticipation: Entschlossenheit. [273] What does this mean?
First, let’s recall the premises of this analysis.
1. Dasein has its history not because history befalls it but because it is historical in its very being.
2. The being of Dasein has been recognized as Care, in the rigorous sense of this term, which can be thought only on the basis of its grounding in the movement of temporality.
3. “Thus, the interpretation of the historicity of Dasein is,” says Heidegger, “basically just a more concrete elaboration of the interpretation of temporality” (Being and Time, 364). Clearly, as I noted, it is only this admittedly vague notion of a more concrete elaboration (konkretere Ausarbeitung) that distinguishes the theme of temporality from that of historicity, and this is rather disappointing.
In any case, since the analysis of historicity is rooted in that of temporality and of care, authentic historicity will have to depend, as does authentic temporal existence, on Entschlossenheit.
We will have, then, to retain from the analyses of Entschlossenheit, which we obviously would need to reread patiently here—something we cannot do—only what pertains directly to this problematic of historicity.
The translation of the notion of Entschlossenheit is difficult and heavy with philosophical decision. We will keep the translation “resolute decision,” making quite clear that this is not the decision of a consciousness that deliberates, initiates absolutely, decrees, is decisive, all these significations designating precisely the interruption of historicity, the progress of a voluntarist radicalism, a philosophy of consciousness deciding and tearing the tissue and the text of [illegible word] history with its verdicts and its absolute beginnings. If that is what resolute decision means, then we should not translate Entschlossenheit as resolute decision.
Entschlossenheit, as Heidegger reminds us here, has been determined as “verschwiegene angstbereite Sichentwerfen auf das eigene Schuldigsein,”11 as secret (hidden, reserved, discreet) and anxiety-laden self-projection, self-projection toward one’s own Schuldigsein: schuldig here means neither simply guilty, nor simply responsible (in the abstract and formal sense of freedom [274] and moral responsibility); here it is a matter of a non-empirical debt of which I am the debtor as if I were always already bound by a contract—and that’s historicity—a contract that I did not sign, that I did not have to sign but that obliges me ontologically. This means both that I never had to sign in the present and in consciousness this contract (for example, here the one that binds me to the tradition that reads me and binds [qui me lit et lie] my responsibility to the received heritage, to all the heritages, on the basis of which the meaning of my ek-sistence finds a horizon already there). So I never had in the present and in consciousness to sign this contract, but its terms and content obligate me anyway—that is, do not affect me empirically, do not fall upon me like falling roof-tiles, but to the contrary constitute my own freedom, like the possibility of death and the anxiety that constitute my own freedom. [The historicity that is awakened in Schuldigsein ≠ accident and event.] So the proper debt—this Schuldigsein with respect to the very thing to which I have not simply chosen to obligate and bind myself—this Schuldigsein is that toward which the self projects itself. That the self projects itself does not mean that this self exists first and then projects itself or not, but that the self constitutes itself in projecting itself. The self is this projection. Authenticity is this projection when it is taken up and vorlaufend: anticipation. “In this Entschlossenheit,” says Heidegger,
Dasein understands itself with regard to its potentiality-of-being in a way that confronts death [literally unter die Augen, under its eyes] in order to take over completely the being that it itself is in the Geworfenheit of its throwness. Resolutely taking over one’s own factical “Da” “implies” at the same time decision (Entschluss) in the situation. (Being and Time, 364)
In other words, the taking up of the factical Da, the taking charge of facticity and the factical conditions of my ek-sistence—that is, of the Da, of my historial relation to Being—and we know, and Heidegger in any case will say so later on, it is Being that destines the Da, and the history of being that destines the Da. Which means that human ek-sistence does not purely and simply produce, does not at every moment invent, the conditions of its existence. [Three illegible interlinear words] not empirically. So, the taking up of the factical Da, the resolute taking charge of the factical conditions of the [275] Da and of ek-sistence, will be simultaneously the decision of the situation, which means that the taking up will be neither conformist acceptance nor fatalistic resignation but decision in the situation. The freedom of the decision and the taking up of the facticity of ek-sistence will be one and the same thing, and they constitute and unite with each other through this double limitation that they seem to oppose to each other. In fact, they do not each exist authentically before their mutual opposition. There is not, strictly speaking, a mutual opposition—for that would suppose the prior existence of separated terms—but the freedom and the taking up of the situation constitute each other in and by the other, before having to oppose each other or come to an agreement in the form of paradox, as in the degraded form that these themes took in the heroic voluntarism which, in the early Sartre, was externally associated with a kind of mechanism of contingency. Cartesian regression of Heideggerian themes.
Naturally, here, Heidegger does not provide, and does not have to provide, an ethics or a politics. Insofar as he is analyzing the essence of the decision in the situation—the decisionality and being of the structure in general—he does not have to tell stories and say what must be done, in fact, here or there, in this or that situation. He does not have to propose a morality as he has often been asked to do. That the constitution of a morality or a politics on the basis of these originary structural analyses might be simply derivative or simply impossible is a matter of consequences that should not inflect the ontological analysis.
Nonetheless, not to have to decide here about what ought to be decided in Entschlossenheit does not totally eliminate the question of knowing in general, in an absolutely general way, at the level of principles, the place from which the possibilities that are projected in the decision are to be drawn. Whence to draw them? That is, on what basis to create them, since possibilities cannot be drawn like water from the spring, but rather open up, are invented. It is obvious that one must respond to this general question of the resource of possibilities and that one cannot respond by simple resolute anticipation of death or anxiety before death. Heidegger is the first to know and say this, and it is in knowing and saying it that he is, precisely, led to pose the problem [276] of traditionality. In particular, he writes this, German p. 383: “Wozu sich das Dasein je faktisch entschliesst, vermag die existentiale Analyse grundsätzlich nicht zu erörtern.”
Anticipatory self-projection [pre-cursory: vorlaufende Sichentwerfen] upon the insuperable possibility of existence—death—guarantees only the totality (Ganzheit) and authenticity of Entschlossenheit. But the factically disclosed possibilities of existence are not to be learned from death. All the less so since anticipation [the Vorlaufen] of that possibility is not a speculation about it [i.e., about death], but rather precisely means coming back, a recourse (Zurückkommen) to das faktische Da, the factical Da. (Being and Time, 365)
≠ Contemplation of the possibility of death.
Among many others, such a declaration would confirm, if it were still necessary, that what Heidegger is calling us to in Sein und Zeit is not a philosophy of death, a piercing of the self by rending anxiety that paralyzes us in a kind of fright and romantic seizure. As he says elsewhere,12 the point is not to speculate on death or on what is beyond death, nothingness or survival; the point is not to resign oneself to one’s mortality as though to a castration that is a relief for the master or the disciple, but to constitute the present as the past of a future: that is, to live the present not as the origin and absolute form of lived experience (of ek-sistence), but as the product, as what is constituted, derived, constituted in return on the basis of the horizon of the future and the ek-stasis of the future, this latter being able to be authentically anticipated as such only as finite to-come, that is, on the basis of the insuperability of possible death, death not being simply at the end like a contingent event befalling at the far end of a line of life, but determining at every—let’s say moment—the opening of the future in which is constituted as past what we call the present and which never appears as such. The “Da” emerges and is [277] taken up in the horizon of death. Horizon and anticipation of death which are, then, I recall, neither a consciousness of my mortality nor a vigilance to save me at every moment from what threatens me with death nor a desire for death or a death-instinct, and so on. So many notions that, by making the signification of death enter into the configuration consciousness of . . . , instinct or desire of . . . , presuppose as self-evident the meaning of death, and this on the basis of an unelucidated relation to death which is not yet a consciousness or an instinct, and so on. The notions of consciousness and instinct or desire being precisely borrowed from discourses, philosophies or zoologies that have as principal common feature their neutralization of the relation to death as originarily constituting or constitutive of ek-sistence, reducing it in countless ways, even when they were talking about it. Finite temporality.
Now here, the expression “anticipation of death” does not at all predetermine the relation to death by any appeal, any pre-recourse to a determinate signification such as “consciousness of,” instinct or drive. It is on the basis of an absolutely in-determinate, non-predetermined relation to death, a relation precisely to indeterminacy itself (anxiety of death), relation to the indeterminate as opening of the horizon of the future, that what designates the relation itself is, in return, determined. Whence the effaced neutrality of the expression “being-toward-death,” the “toward” here designating only the opening to that indeterminate possibility that, in return, determines, on the basis of the pure future, my present as the past of that future. The toward, to the extent that it still has a determinate meaning (preposition requiring the dative and implying that existence is given to death, dedicated to death, devoted to death), this toward insofar as it is determinate has a metaphorical value that must be crossed out in discourse. Philosophical discourse or rather the discourse of thought destroying the grammatico-metaphysical metaphorics has as its function this destruction of metaphor, a destruction carried out with the certainty that one will only ever destroy metaphors with the help of other metaphors. But that does not suffice to strike down as pointless the gesture of destruction, once the meaning of this gesture and of this [illegible word] destruction appears as such. It will be said that in an expression [278] such as “consciousness of mortality” or “certainty of mortality,” or in a quite different register, the expression “death-instinct” and all the significations that determine it and that are connotations (force, aim, source, animate-inanimate, conservation, etc., etc.)—it will be said, then, that these expressions are also held to be metaphorical by their authors. But, supposing that that is the case, it is clear that so long as the metaphorical dimension is not destroyed as such expressly or systematically, even gestures that are the most scientific in intention and the most faithful in their description cannot fail to import a whole latent metaphysics at the very moment when one believes oneself and plans to be placing the whole of metaphysics into parentheses. I do not need to insist here to show what this presence of metaphysics, this adherence of metaphysics to the skin of language, can in fact import in the way of metaphysical thesis or presupposition when one pronounces the words consciousness, certainty, drive, and so on, in Heidegger too, for that matter. The work of philosophy in general, or rather, let’s say, of thinking, far from simply consisting in crowning scientific work from the outside, in reflecting on it or criticizing it from the outside, in working on it; the work of thinking is basically nothing other, in what is called science or elsewhere, than this operation of destruction of metaphor, of determined and motivated reduction of metaphor, whenever and wherever it happens. Which does not mean that one leaves the metaphorical element of language behind, but that in a new metaphor the previous metaphor appears as such, is denounced in its origin and in its metaphorical functioning and in its necessity. It appears as such. One can perhaps call thinking and the thinking of being (the thinking of being as the horizon and the appeal of an impossible non-metaphorical thought) what calls for such a gesture of de-metaphorization. Given that, it could happen that there is more thinking in the gesture of a scientist or a poet or a non-philosopher in general when he gives himself up to this, than there is in the philosophical-type gesture that moves around in metaphorical slumber, in non-vigilance faced with the metaphorical character of language. [279] If, then, using another metaphor, one calls vigilance this thinking destroying metaphor while knowing what it is doing (knowing what it is doing, for it is not only a matter of substituting one metaphor for another without knowing it: that is what has always happened throughout history, that universal history that Borges says is perhaps only the history of a few metaphors or of various inflections of a few metaphors).13 So it is not a matter of substituting one metaphor for another, which is the very movement of language and history, but of thinking this movement as such, thinking metaphor in metaphorizing it as such, thinking the essence of metaphor (this is all Heidegger wants to do). So I return to my proposition: If by another metaphor one calls thinking this vigilance destroying metaphor while knowing what it’s doing, there is no need to wonder where there is more thinking, in science, metaphysics, poetry, and so on. There is thinking every time that this gesture occurs, in what is called science, poetry, metaphysics or elsewhere.
I return now to that being-toward-death and that possibility in general as a general structure of ek-sistence of which Heidegger says that one cannot expect from it determinate possibilities in fact. In the movement in which the authentic anticipation of my death sends me back to my da and to my thrownness, I discover myself as being already in the world, assigned to a world, and originarily to a being with others. Being in the world with others: I have not constituted this structure, and I can moreover always inauthentically dissimulate the phenomenon of originary finding oneself, and of being assigned to a world with others, but I can also, Da-sein can also, returning to itself, take on this thrownness and this being in the world with others, and so forth.
And here Heidegger’s way of proceeding can be surprising. One might think that this is indeed the moment to broach the problem of heritage and the taking up of the heritage: that is, of our relation to the historical situation and the historical past to which we are appointed, which is assigned to us. And in fact, Heidegger does here pronounce the words taking up, heritage, and so on. And one might think that his question is: How is it with [280] our relation to history as past, as set of traditions, and so on? In fact, via a sort of new regression or reduction, Heidegger is going to fold his question back toward a form that in principle comes before that one, and that would basically be the following: Whatever possibilities of ek-sistence we find in the world to which we are in fact assigned, whatever our decision with regard to our heritage, because this decision should be authentic (i.e., governed by Entschlossenheit, etc.), one must first be sure of the conditions of a historicity of Entschlossenheit itself. The transcendental condition of all the determinate projections through which I shall determine myself with regard to history and the situation is, for these projections to be authentic, that they transmit themselves authentically, that the fidelity to the projection be authentic, be itself a history and a destiny. So one must pose the problem of the traditionality of Entschlossenheit before that of the relation of Entschlossenheit to traditionality in the world. The authenticity of historicity requires the historicity of authenticity. It is to this that the notion of Sichüberlieferung responds—auto-tradition, a concept describing, well before what is called the psychological movement of memory or forgetting, the ethical movement of fidelity or infidelity, and so forth—we are dealing with a concept describing this tradition of a projection that is itself defined neither in terms of consciousness nor of moral will and without which all of these concepts would themselves be meaningless. Even before remembering anything or forgetting anything, before being faithful or unfaithful to anything, my tradition of myself must be secured and, if I am to secure it authentically, this cannot be decided by fiat once and for all, but my authentic projection must ceaselessly transmit itself to itself. That is the ontological condition of a proper or authentic historicity and of what Heidegger also calls a destiny. Schicksal (≠ inevitability, history as destiny, ≠ freedom, decision or inevitability). It is on condition that the authenticity of Entschlossenheit be constituted as destiny and inherit from itself that heritage in general—the heritage of goods, of values, of culture— [281] the tradition of meaning in general, will be possible and authentic. Without the authentic auto-tradition of Entschlossenheit, every relation to history will be inauthentic, whether, for that matter, it takes the form of a conservative traditionalism or of a revolutionary demolition. Entschlossenheit is not sufficient, then, to constitute historicity; only the authentic auto-tradition of Entschlossenheit can do that.
Concluding an important sub-paragraph of §74, Heidegger writes thus:
The finitude of existence thus seized upon tears one back out of endless multiplicity of closest possibilities offering themselves—those of comfort, shirking and taking things easy—and brings Dasein to the simplicity of its destiny. This is how we designate the primordial Geschehen of Dasein that lies in authentic Entschlossenheit, [originary Geschehen] in which it transmits itself to itself, free for death, in a possibility that it inherited and yet has chosen. (Being and Time, 365–66)
“Inherited and yet has chosen.” “Inherited and yet has chosen” means that one must think, before the alternative between heritage and freedom, that the two terms of a heritage received or undergone and of a decisive or inaugural freedom are abstractly dissociated on the basis of a movement that is freedom as heritage or heritage as freedom. Sichüberlieferung is this profound movement of ek-sistence on the basis of which, later, the ethico-metaphysical problematic of freedom in situation, of choice in determinism, and so forth, can come about.
Here again we can measure the labor of philosophical translation that Sartre indulged in, not only when he translated Da-sein as “human reality” in Being and Nothingness, but when Entschlossenheit became free projection, with an absolute freedom in the Cartesian sense, the freedom of a consciousness and a for-itself caught in the opacity of a radically heterogeneous in-itself, [282] the two forming two regions the unity of which was hastily qualified as a metaphysical problem in the final pages of Being and Nothingness. And one imagines to what Platonico-Kantian-type difficulties must be exposed the existential psychoanalyses that use this language and supposedly get back to the famous original project that made one think of Plato’s myth of Er and of the intelligible character that Kant talks about rather than what was already known by the name of psychoanalysis. In this sense [two illegible words] and these two themes Merleau-Ponty closer both to psychoanalysis and to Heidegger [four illegible words in parentheses].
For Heidegger, Entschlossenheit is neither a projection of consciousness, nor an experience for-itself, nor the heroic responsibility of a subject: it can be defined neither in terms of morality nor in terms of psychology. The Sichüberlieferung that ensures the history of Entschlossenheit is not the transmission to the self of the possibilities of an already-constituted subject; it is the very movement on the basis of which something like a subject will be able to emerge, and might be for-itself, and so on. The traditionality of Sichüberlieferung does not befall a subject but constitutes it, and the Sich of Sichüberlieferung is not primary with regard to the Überlieferung but is constituted by and in the Überlieferung.
One might once more be tempted to say that, basically, this is still Hegel. Indeed, to say first that the for-itself and consciousness are constituted on the basis of the traditionality of experiences and as the appearing of the movement of transmissibility, the passage from one shape of consciousness to another being the condition of coming to consciousness and becoming for-itself what it was in-itself, and so forth; to say secondly that consciousness is secondary and depends, for its constitution and its recognition and its being-for-itself, on the courageous affirmation of its mastery as freedom for death; to say finally that the primary movement, prior to the constitution of a conscious subject, is elevation above life, the risking of one’s life, the courage to lose one’s life, the preference of freedom over life, and so forth. Is this not, as in Hegel, to place at the origin of subjectivity and consciousness or the Da the taking up of the anxiety of death and freedom for death—that is, mastery (since the slave who feels anxiety, as Hegel says, not about [283] this or that thing, not during this or that moment, but with regard to the whole of his essence, for he has experienced the fear of death, the absolute master, the slave who has felt this anxiety has preferred—this is at least one of the abstract moments of the dialectic—to preserve (servare) his life and has constituted himself as preserved in life, kept, servus), the repressed servile consciousness (zurückgedrängtes Bewusstsein) having to turn around (sich umkehren) into true independence?14 And indeed one might think that Heidegger also makes of freedom for death, of anxiety, of the resolute taking up of death, and so forth, the condition of that return to the Da as such that one might be tempted to call consciousness. And no doubt one could push this analogy very far, showing for example that at bottom it is indeed a mastery, a lordship that is described by Heidegger by the name authentic freedom and resolution for death. And when a little later in §74, a little later than the passages I commented on just now, he speaks of destiny or history no longer in terms of Dasein in general but of a people, you see where you could easily be led, basically without leaving Hegel.
I am not saying that this analogy has no value or truth. Besides, you know that this analogy has been pursued, precisely around this theme of freedom and death (and not in general, as is often done), by Kojève, so far as I know, in at least two notes added to his lectures on Hegel ([French], pages 566–75).15 These two notes are noteworthy in that,
(1) on the one hand, Kojève here extends to Heidegger the anthropological reading he had already—or so it seems to me—unwisely performed on the Phenomenology of Spirit. And in Heidegger’s case this misreading is unforgivable, for Heidegger’s declarations on this matter are explicit.
(2) On the other hand, these notes make of Heidegger and Marx the two best examples of Hegelian filiations (still around death and the master-slave [284] dialectic) and at the same time of regression with regard to Hegel. For different reasons, both Marx and Heidegger supposedly dropped an essential element of the master-slave dialectic. Let me read these notes. [French] p. 566:
Heidegger will say, following Hegel, that human existence (Dasein [comment]) is “life in view of death” (Leben zum Tode). The Christian also used to say it, a long time before Hegel. But for the Christian death is but a passage into the beyond: He does not accept death properly speaking. The Christian man does not place himself face-to-face with Nothingness. He relates himself in his existence to an “other world,” which is essentially given. There is not therefore in him any “transcendence” [= freedom] in the Hegelian, and Heideggerian, sense of the term. (Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 73, n. 6)
Nothing more to say about this passage. French p. 575.
Heidegger has taken up again the Hegelian themes concerning death; but he neglects the complementary themes concerning Struggle and Labor; thus his philosophy does not succeed in rendering an account of History.—Marx retains the themes of Struggle and Labor, and his philosophy is thus essentially “historicist”; but he neglects the theme of death (even while admitting that man is mortal); that is why he does not see (and even less do certain “Marxists”) that the Revolution is not only in fact but also essentially and necessarily—bloody (the Hegelian theme of the Terror). (Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 74, n. 9)
Let’s not pursue the remark about Marx here. As regards the themes of Labor and Struggle that Heidegger supposedly neglected, and of death that he supposedly picked up from Hegel, a certain number of remarks are necessary. Common sense and the most immediate appearances indeed make it seem that Kojève is right, and in a way, in these cases, common sense is [285] never absolutely nor simply wrong. But it is rarely as right as it thinks it is. Labor, Struggle, and Death.
Labor. Of course, Heidegger says little about labor, by this name. And he explains this, with reference to Marxism, in a note from the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” I read at the beginning of this course.16 But really, and here a remark such as Kojève’s is really not serious, the whole of Sein und Zeit and many later works can be read as works about labor. Of course, Heidegger does not tell us stories about this; his analysis is ontological and thus is in a certain sense formal, but Hegel’s is no less so, and also no doubt, at bottom, Marx’s. What Heidegger is trying to do, for example in chapter 3 of the first division of Sein und Zeit, is to provide the concrete description of the essence of labor and technology, of the structure of equipmentality and the enormous structure of Zuhandenheit in general, of putting to work, of such practical precision on this theme, and so forth. This whole analysis, which I cannot get into here, being an existential analysis of the structure of Dasein (i.e., of a behavior that does not befall Dasein accessorily and arbitrarily, but which belongs to the very essence of its being-in-the-world) and of care (i.e., of finite temporality as a structure of that being-in-the-world, etc.). One might perhaps say that it is on the condition and on the ground of this existential structure that subsequent and essential determinations of the meaning of labor—in Hegelian, for example, Marxist or Christian terms—can make an entrance, and that one can once more tell stories, be they those of original sin and of what follows, or those of the phenomenology of spirit. Even supposing that Kojève is right when he says that the phenomenology of spirit describes an anthropogenesis and that labor and the negativity of labor are indispensible to it, Heidegger, for his part, is describing an ontological structure that precedes anthropogenesis . . . (relation of Dasein to Vorhandenheit and to Zuhandenheit in Care, etc.) that alone can make possible and [286] intelligible the movement of phenomenology . . . , which presupposes at least at a given moment being-in-the-world conditioning the relation of the self to the this, and all that follows, up to the point where it finds itself face to face, consciousnesses at war, and so on. However ontological in their intention these Hegelian analyses may be with respect to other empirical descriptions, they would thus remain ontic and derived with regard to Heidegger’s. In particular and above all in what concerns labor, Hegel has its moment appear only after the emergence of self-consciousness in itself and of the self that has had the experience of the independence of its object; on the other hand, he has to give himself, beyond consciousness and life, beyond the two “individuals” as he says who are going to become master-slave and who will be persons only after they have risked their lives, beyond that, beyond consciousness and life, Hegel gives himself thingliness, without however distinguishing thingliness from what, in its essential structure, can make of it a piece of equipment or material for labor, or what, in thingliness and as a function of the relation between what he himself calls Da-sein and thingliness, can be determined as nature or material for labor [on the one hand], and on the other hand as equipmentality or object of value. One might consider that it is all these ontological preliminaries that Heidegger is trying to satisfy (before consciousness, the individual, etc.).
On this theme of labor, and still very schematically, I shall add three remarks.
(1) Even if the content of the two analyses, the Hegelian and the Heideggerian, were, at a pinch, the same, and in particular as regards labor, well, the fact that Hegel’s consists in telling a story in the language of metaphysics, which for the very general reasons that we went over at the beginning, prevents him from transgressing the onto-theological closure and posing the question of labor within the horizon of the question of being.17
(2) And consequently, even if Hegel links labor to freedom for death, this latter is thought against the infinitist backdrop of Hegelian thought. And against an infinitist background, the essence of labor is always the essence of [287] an accident. Here of course I am going quickly and I am referring to a literal reading of a rather conventional Hegel. But it could be shown that the very direction/movement by which one wrests Hegel from conventionality is a Heideggerian gesture.
(3) It is difficult to reproach Heidegger with neglecting labor if one remembers that Heidegger’s entire thinking, and well beyond Sein und Zeit, is in the end but a meditation on the essence of technology in its non-accidental relations with thought and notably with philosophy and metaphysics as interrogation about the beingness of beings. And so forth. Impossible to go into that here.
It will perhaps be said that technology is not labor, labor insofar as it implies . . . sociality. To which one might reply:
(1) Technology is the very movement that transforms activity in general into labor.
(2) The description of technology and of the relation of equipmentality and of putting to work is inseparable, in Sein und Zeit, from the structure of Mitsein that is co-originary with it.
The problem of Mitsein leads us to the second of Kojève’s objections: the supposed neglect by Heidegger of the theme of struggle. One can here give two types of response. (1) The first of these, the principle of which would resemble the principle that inspired the previous one. In describing Mitsein, Heidegger is trying to get at a stratum of ek-sistence that is absolutely originary with regard to any modification of relations with the other—for example, in the form of war and peace, domination and slavery, the recognition of consciousnesses especially—because Mitsein and in a general way all the structures of Dasein’s ek-sistence are prior and lower, so to speak, deeper than the strata of knowledge and of consciousness, of Wissen, of erkennen, of anerkennen, of Bewusstsein, and of Selbstbewusstsein. It is on the ontological basis of the existential structure of Mitsein that all the phenomena described, for example, by Hegel by the name of “struggle for recognition” can possibly come about, come about in a history, or produce a history that will thus be [288] the modification of a deeper historicity.
There is no doubt that, for Heidegger, Mitsein is a co-originary structure of Dasein. Being unable to expand upon this point, I refer you to §26 of Sein und Zeit, [German] pp. 119–21 [Being and Time, 116–17] in particular. The fact that this structure of the Mitsein is existential (i.e., an ontological structure of Da-sein) means in particular that the Geschehen and the Schicksal is also a Mitgeschehen. And it is against the hidden background of this Mitgeschehen that the form or figure described by Hegel as that of the master and the slave and their struggle can appear. It is precisely in §74 from which we began today that one can read the following, [German] p. 384:
But if schicksalhafte [fateful] Dasein essentially exists as being-in-the-world in being-with others [with: existential ≠ categorial ≠ [illegible word]. Sartre], then its Geschehen is a Mitgeschehen and is determined as Geschick. With this term, we designate the Geschehen of the community, of a people. (Being and Time, 366)
Which means that if Dasein is schicksalhaft, if Dasein is its history and its destiny, and if it belongs to the being of Dasein to be Mitsein, it belongs to the Schicksal to be Geschick (Geschehen—Geschick). And so the historial destiny, historicity, is essentially and originally communitarian. And it is against the structural background of this originary community and this originary historicity that a history can be determined ontically, as by struggle, recognition, and so forth. Entschlossenheit: not heroic individuals but communitarian resolution (support of Nazism).
Second element of a response to Kojève’s reservation.
Heidegger neglects struggle and warfare so little in the essential movement of historicity that he increasingly emphasized that logos was polemos and eris and that the revelation of being was violence. One of the clearest passages on this subject, but there are many others, could be found in the Einführung . . . , where Heidegger, commenting on Sophocles’s Antigone, puts into relation Parmenides and Heraclitus, the revelation of being, deinon, and [289] tekhnē, and where, in particular, he writes this, among other passages (p. 181 of the [French] translation). Read.
*So now we must show the sobriety of thinking in its true light. We will do so through the detailed interpretation of the saying. We say in advance: if we should show that apprehension, in its belonging-together with Being (dikē), is such that it uses violence, and as doing violence is an urgency, and as an urgency is undergone only in the necessity of a struggle [in the sense of polemos and eris (confrontation and strife)], and if in addition we should demonstrate that apprehension stands explicitly in connection with logos, and this logos proves to be the ground of human Being, then our assertion that there is an inner affinity between the thoughtful saying and the poetic saying will have been grounded.
We will show three things:
1. Apprehension is not a mere process, but a de-cision.
2. Apprehension stands in an inner essential community with logos. Logos is an urgency.
3. Logos grounds the essence of language. As such, logos is a struggle and it is the grounding ground of historical human Dasein in the midst of beings as a whole.* (Introduction to Metaphysics, 178–79)
Combat, conflict, is not first determined as an authentic structure but as the essence (Wesen) of being. Estance of being: on the basis of which one can think, in the light of being, an authentic combat that will no longer simply be a raw collision of two beings of the form of thingliness (which no one could ever call warfare) but a phenomenon that implies language and transcendence. Without the pre-comprehension of being that opens language, there would be no war. War is therefore the history of being itself, and the phenomenon of the meaning of being . . . . Phainesthai is polemos. And it is polemos primarily because in the meaning of being, in the manifestation of being, is dissimulation of being. We have seen why the history of Being was this truth of the dissimulation and the unveiling of being. If there were simply unveiling [290] of pure being, outside the being, or dissimulation of being in beings, there would be no history of being. Polemos, then, means this unity of unveiling and dissimulation as movement of history. This is why, for example, in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Heidegger says that “being itself is the polemical, the conflictual” (Pathmarks, 272), not, as Munier translates it, the place of combat but combat, the combative itself. “[ . . . ] das Sein selber das Strittige ist” (Wegmarken, 357). And if war were not the history of Being itself, well, that’s when one would have to say that war is an accident and an ontic modification, something that befalls non-historical and therefore peaceful being, one without disquiet. Taking struggle seriously is thus to take it seriously not merely at the level of the ontic, or even at the level of the ontological (in the sense in which Heidegger is trying to destroy [illegible word] the ontological), but at the level of the thinking of being or of the truth of being.
Naturally, when he speaks of war, Heidegger does not tell stories, he speaks neither of the struggle between individuals or consciousnesses, like Hegel (and we know why), nor of groups, states or classes. But he indicates the conditions on which one might possibly talk about them on this level of ontic determination without making them into accidents and by thinking them at the level of the originary and in the horizon of the question of being.
Such would be the elements—highly schematic and preliminary—of a dialogue on the points emphasized by Kojève (struggle and labor) between Hegel and Heidegger. But it is on the basis of the theme of death that we got to this point. Perhaps we can see more clearly now how, in spite of the apparent and real proximity, freedom for death has a radically different sense in Heidegger and Hegel.
First, freedom for death, as it appears as a moment in the phenomenology of spirit, is precisely only a necessary moment and mediation. Death is not the unsurpassable horizon of a finite ek-sistence or a finite temporality. The anxiety of death, which the slave flees or the master takes on, thereby [291] constituting themselves through this gesture the one as slave, the other as master—the anxiety of death with these two possibilities that are, in truth, the very essence of phenomenality and the becoming of consciousness—this anxiety of death has the sense of a passage. A passage from life to life, first of all. A passage from life in the sense of natural being-there, the life above which the point is to raise oneself through consciousness; then after the passage through struggle and anxiety, the primary inessentiality of life, as it appears to the master, shifts into essentiality (self-certainty). For in fact, at a certain moment, the truth of consciousness that was supposed to be pronounced by death and the risk of death runs the risk of being compromised by death itself. By raising myself above life, I become certain of myself as free consciousness, but I lose my life and therefore also the certainty of myself and consciousness . . . . “This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 114). Just as life is the natural positing of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so is death the natural negation of that same consciousness . . . .
Whence the discovery that mediates freedom for death: the discovery that life is essential and that it must be preserved by living it, preserved by living it in the Aufhebung: i.e., in a negation that is not abstract like the first one.
In the first moment, consciousness, which has only the alternative choice of raising itself above or else saving its life, is placed before an abstract negation: in both cases one loses, either as slave or as master, who in dying, also loses what he has won. So the master would have to keep what he loses (life), just as the slave, through labor, will also keep what he loses: freedom. To do so, he must pass from abstract negation to the Aufhebung: up to this point, says Hegel,
Their act is an abstract negation, not the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes (aufhebt) [sublimates . . . [illegible word]] in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is Aufgehobene [suppressed sublimated], [292] and consequently survives its own Aufgehobenwerden [becoming suppressed]. In this experience, self-consciousness learns that life is as essential (wesenhaft) to it as pure self-consciousness. (Phenomenology of Spirit, 114–15.)
From then on, it’s the game with which you are very familiar: mastery as the slavery of the slave, slavery as mastery of mastery, mediation through labor, and so forth. It is the work [l’oeuvre] that in the end sublimates death. Labor itself, mediation of the economy without loss of meaning. This mediation of death comes down, in spite of this great Hegelian revolution, to thinking death within the horizon of the infinite and the parousia of absolute knowledge, which is pure life, life with itself of consciousness, just as, generally, consciousness—the movement of the experience of phenomenology—is only a mediation of Spirit and of God reflecting on himself, and so on.
There is none of that left in Heidegger. And without even being concerned with theology or teleology as the final horizon of this thinking in which it would suffice to notice right on the level of experience that freedom for death is not for Heidegger a movement of consciousness, no more than it is one of unconditional life, consciousness and the unconscious being, as we have seen, concepts marked by an epoch of metaphysics. Such concepts would oblige us to think as representation or non-representation, clear or blind representation, a movement that no longer has anything to do with representation or with the Idea (in the Cartesian sense, and you know that, for Heidegger, Hegel still remains a metaphysician thinking in the epoch inaugurated or signified by Descartes).
Entschlossenheit and freedom for death must be thought outside of the metaphysics that is subjected to the present and to representation, and so can no longer be described in terms of consciousness, self-consciousness, cognition and recognition, nor above all in terms of teleology, death being the negation, the very impossibility of teleology in the Hegelian sense. At the [293] bottom of all this, of this whole dialogue, there is the problem of temporality and the theme of finite temporality that we have seen to be so fundamental in Heidegger. Now the decisive reproach that Heidegger addresses to Hegel in Sein und Zeit would ultimately be the following: he missed the movement of temporality in the finitude of its horizon. And this would depend, on the deepest level, on Hegel’s concept of time, which Heidegger shows, in the last published chapter of Sein und Zeit, to be the most radical and the most systematic concept of the vulgar interpretation of time as Innerzeitigkeit (being in time . . .): that is, the concept inherited from the Aristotelian tradition that thinks time on the basis of an ontology of nature and as essentially linked to place and to movement (§44 of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics).
So that’s where we have been led by this theme, so non-classical in spite of appearances, of Sichüberlieferung. What I would like to suggest here is that once we have thought this concept correctly with all its connotations: Geschehen or Geschick (determined not individually but at the level of Mitsein), as a movement that lets itself be determined only secondarily as a movement of consciousness, of theoretical cognition of truth in the classical sense, of human existence, of ethics, and so on, one notices that the prescription of authenticity, the axiology or ethics hidden in the concept of authenticity, which is a theme only in Sein und Zeit, this axiology or this ethics no longer at all have the meaning they might have in any tradition whatsoever. And this implicit ethics, this ethics in quotation marks, once it is no longer determined by a classical theology or a theology of value or a philosophy of courage, of coming to consciousness, of the heroic projection of knowing one’s truth, and so forth, this implicit ethics occurs at the level of the implicit ethics that governs thinking like that of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: that is, an ethics the source of whose prescription either is not defined, or else, when it is defined, ought to be so in a language radically foreign to the whole of classical metaphysics, [294] whether or not it is so in fact.
This notion of Sichüberlieferung does indeed, then, refer us to the root of historicity: namely, finite temporality, as was said in the passage that I read out at the beginning, and that we have basically done nothing but comment on. Up until now, at bottom, as I suggested, all the conceptual material we made use of was borrowed from earlier analyses. No original concept marked our access to the problematic of historicity, which is thus not yet original. It is true that there are the terms Geschehen and Geschick, but they are just names for the historical. The concept of Sichüberlieferung could function rigorously, as we have seen, in an analysis of temporality. The only concept that appears to me properly to belong to a problematic of history and that emerges as dependent on that of Sichüberlieferung, is the concept of repetition (Wiederholung). Sichüberlieferung is the general structure of temporality as auto-affection: it cannot fail to happen, whether it does so explicitly or not. Repetition will be the movement of Entschlossenheit when it resolutely and explicitly, expressly, takes up transmission, the return of the past, going back to the origin, and so on; repetition will be the phenomenon of the freedom of auto-transmission. Freedom is repetition. Repetition is explicitly tradition, says Heidegger. “It is not necessary,” Heidegger points out,
that resoluteness explicitly know the provenance of the possibilities upon which it projects itself. However, in the temporality of Dasein, and only in it, lies the possibility of explicitly fetching (holen) from the traditional understanding of Dasein the existentiell potentiality-of-being upon which it projects itself. Resoluteness that returns to itself and hands itself down then becomes the repetition of a possibility of existence that has been handed down. Repetition is explicitly tradition, that is, going back to the possibilities of the Dasein that has been there [for example, choosing one’s heroes. But this return to the past, if it is to be authentic] is grounded existentially in anticipatory [pre-cursive] resoluteness; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle over what is to follow and fidelity to what can be repeated. (Being and Time, 366–67)
[295] The concept of repetition, if one remembers what has already been said, implies that repetition is something quite other than a becoming-present-again, than a restoration of the past of what has been left behind. We are dealing with the very opposite of a traditionalism or a philosophy of repetition as immobile recommencement or the return to the origin like a falling back into childhood. This is why repetition has its origin in the future; and as repetition is the possibility of an authentic history, history has its possibility in the future and in death as the possibility of the impossible.
“History,” says Heidegger,
as a mode of being of Dasein, has its roots so essentially in the future that death, as the possibility of Dasein we characterized, throws anticipatory existence back upon its factical thrownness and thus first gives to having-been [to Gewesenheit] its unique priority in what is historical. Authentic being-toward-death, that is, the finitude of temporality, is the concealed ground of the historicity of Dasein. Dasein does not first become historical in repetition, but rather because as temporal it is historical, it can take itself over in its history, retrieving itself. For this, Historie is still not needed. (Being and Time, 367)
Comment.
The general and formal, structural concept of repetition that obliges us to stop opposing the past to the future can lead us to think that we are dealing with a highly abstract, empty and basically rather serene, undramatic description of repetition, when one compares it to Nietzschean or Freudian concepts. One can get the impression that, for Heidegger, repetition is in fact always possible, that it is merely a passage from the implicit to the explicit that a movement of our freedom would make possible and continuous, and so on.
Do we need to make clear that this is not at all the case, and that to lend this naïveté to Heidegger, one must have naïveté to spare, and even a surplus of it to sell? Once we have clearly understood Heidegger’s destruction [296] of the classical concepts of freedom, consciousness, and so on, and all their connotations, it goes without saying that repetition could not be this kind of serene awakening, of confident reanimation of the origin—that is, of death—operating in the diaphanous ether of coming to consciousness.
Simply, once again, Heidegger is defining the general and ontological structure of repetition, within which, and as a modification of it, one could think the repetitions at issue in this or that determinate, non-ontological discourse (this repetition, for example, or else that one); determinate repetitions would not be possible if the fundamental structure of Dasein did not provide an opening for them. What Heidegger brings to light is the ontology hidden in the so-called human sciences that work with, for example, the concept of repetition.
What I have tried to formulate today, by designating, at least from afar, this extreme point of Heidegger’s intention that can be enveloped by no past gesture of metaphysics or science, does not contradict what I said last time under the heading of running out of breath at the end of Sein und Zeit. Both things are true at the same time and the running out of breath comes from the fact that, as Heidegger himself points out, at the end of an uncommon itinerary one realizes—I quoted this passage last time—that one has still been using metaphysical conceptuality and that one cannot go on in this way . . . .18
This is why the end of §74, in particular, does not present itself in any way as an answer or a solution, but as a deepening of the enigma. What in particular is meant by a historicity and a privileging of the past as rooted in the future? The enigma is again that of temporalization and of that condition of the present as the past of a future.
This is the enigma that remains to be thought; this is the question that remains to be questioned. The question has perhaps not received an answer because it has not been sufficiently questioned, sufficiently problematized in its formulation and in its very origin. Before seeking to respond precipitously [297] to this question, we must ask about the origin and the meaning of the question itself and about the ontological horizon of the question.
We now know—and I won’t go back over what I said about this last time—that the ontological trace of the question, the trace of its origin, cannot be found in the path of Sein und Zeit, but will call for a turning (Kehre), as Heidegger says. It will be necessary to retrace one’s steps without this gesture being the sign of an impasse, a stepping back or a renunciation: rather a deepening of the re-petition.
I shall conclude this introduction next time.