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Typewriter

in the private sector central to the war effort."56 "A state-it is," Heidegger observed in 1935. But only in order to doubt whether this "being" consists in the "fact that the police arrest a suspect, or so-and-so-many typewriters are clattering in a government building, taking down the words of ministers and state secretaries. "57

Only his winter semester in Stalingrad revealed to the thinker-much to the surprise of his listeners-the relationship among Being, Man, and typewriter.


MARTIN HEIDEGGER ON THE HAND HAND THE TYPEWRITER (1942 - 43)

Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand] ; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, "has" the word (μύθος, λόγος), can and must "have" "the hand." Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the "work" of the hand, the "hand-work," and the tool. The handshake seals the covenant. The hand brings about the "work" of destruction. The hand exists as hand only where there is disclosure and concealment. No animal has a hand, and a hand never originates from a paw or a claw or talon. Even the hand of one in desperation (it least of all) is never a talon, with which a person clutches wildly. The hand sprang forth only out of the word and together with the word. Man does not "have" hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears to the regard is the written word, i.e., script. And the word as script is handwriting.

It is not accidental that modern man writes "with" the typewriter and "dictates" [diktiert] (the same word as "poetize" [dichten]) "into" a machine. This "history" of the kinds of writing is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word. The latter no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand, but by means of the mechanical forces it releases. The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something "typed." Where typewriting, on the contrary, is only a transcription and serves to preserve the writing, or turns into print something already written, there it has a proper, though limited, significance. In the time


Friedrich Kittler - Gramophone, Film, Typewriter