114 | Heidegger’s Poietic Writings


the abandonment of beings by being (i.e. in the machination of beings) beings are completely outside of beinglessness” (GA 70: 121). Beinglessness is preserved only in the event of appropriation such that this event inceptively occurs as dispropriation.

The beingless are (“are” needs to be crossed out here) beings before and after they rise into being, that is, before a clearing of being is appropriated; before Da-sein! We should won der how Heidegger or anyone could come up with such a thought. Is not his thinking in Contributions and the following writings precisely an attempt at thinking of being, that is, out of a basic attunement that already is a being in the “ there,” that is, in Da-sein? How can he think “prior to” Da-sein? He cannot. So in some way, in Da-sein is announced or indicated for thinking a seclusion (beinglessness) from and in relation to which in the other beginning the clearing of Da-sein is differentiated.

Still in section 98 he writes:


But in beinglessness can be conceived something most extreme belonging to the essence of being (inception—downgoing—departure).

Here—in the “beinglessness” and in the “beingless”—lies a challenge [eine Zumutung] in the face of which no metaphysics finds a way. (GA 70: 121)11


Heidegger here does not say anything about the beingless as being experienced in restraint or withstood in Da-sein. The beingless is thought in a movement of departure (Abschied) and allows him to conceive something most extreme belonging to the essence of being. This is not the concealment belonging to truth that is held in hesitation; it is not the nothing that we experience in the draft of being’s withdrawal or in the face of our mortality. It is the not-yet and no-longer begun inception of being as event.12

It may be helpful here to consider at what point he thinks this thought of the “unsayable” (das Unsägliche), as he calls it (GA 65: 85). He thinks this most extreme thought in “the last downgoing”:

This [the last downgoing] determines an inceptive time in-between [Zwischenzeit], in which history does not necessarily continue in the same manifestness [Offenbarkeit]....

When the inception of beyng is and beyng essentially occurs only inceptively, then beyng itself (as event) must once bring forth the “time” (temporal-spatial-playing field) in which and with which it [beyng] essentially attains [erwest] its downgoing.

“Then” every possibility of a “then” has dis appeared; then—spoken still again and only out of the transitional leaving [aus der übergänglichen Überlassung gesprochen]—there also are no “beings.” Non- beings, which— said transitionally—continue, are neither nothingness nor not nothingness. They “are” (but thought only in a more inceptive sense) the μηδέν Parmenides thought (but differently) in the first beginning.13 (GA 70: 51)


11. That Heidegger indicates here that “inception, downgoing, departure” belong to being (written with an “i”) confirms my sense that there is no separation between “beyng” and “being” but rather a different emphasis (downgoing and arising).

12. “The beingless ‘is’ the prior- inceptive and the post- inceptive and this not insofar as it has the character of inception but insofar as it only ‘becomes’ a being in the inception and ceases to be [entwird] in the downgoing. . . . only here the innermost nihilation [Nichtung] of being itself is revealed, that in itself it is not only concealment and refusal but the disappropriation in the manner of downgoing [untergänglich die Enteignung]” (GA 70: 122).

13. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi is written μηδέν ἄγαν, “nothing in excess.” This is a princi ple of life advocating for moderation. The “nothing” shelters being from excess.


Heidegger’s Poietic Writings : from Contributions to Philosophy to The Event by Daniela Vallega-Neu