whence something emerges. If we think ἀρχή solely in these terms, then the word means the beginning and the place of beginning for a process, a result. Then being a beginning involves being left behind in the course of the process. The beginning is there just to be abandoned and passed over. The beginning is always surpassed and left behind in the haste of going further. Were we to think of ἀρχή in such a way, as meaning “beginning,” then we would give up all claim to the essential content at the outset.
To be sure, ἀρχή that from which something emerges, but that from which something emerges retains, in what emerges and its emerging, the determination of motion and the determination of that toward which emergence is such. The ἀρχή is a way-making for the mode and compass of emergence. Way-making goes before and yet, as the incipient, remains behind by itself. Ἀρχή is not the beginning left behind in a progression. The ἀρχή releases emergence and what emerges, such that what is released is first retained in the ἀρχή as enjoinment. The ἀρχή) is an enjoining egress. In this we perceive that from whence (ἐξ ὧν) there is emergence is the same as that back toward which evasion returns.
But not only this. The ἀρχή also disposes over what is between emerging and evading. This means, however, the ἀρχή enjoins precisely this between, which is no longer merely emergence but also no longer merely elusion: a transition. Transition is the actual emergence,its extremity, so to speak. The ἀρχή pervades transition. The ἀρχή is in itself an egress that everywhere prevails, that includes everything in its enjoinment and through this inclusion predetermines {GA 51: 109} a domain and opens anything like a domain in the first place. Because egress and pervasiveness belong together in the essence of the ἀρχή, a third moment has determined itself, not as a result, but as an equally originary and essential moment: the domain-character of the ἀρχή, the measurable and the measured. With "measure" we do not think of numerical delimitation, but the opening domainness of the extension of enjoinment. The everywhere prevailing egress includes domainness within itself. Enjoinment would be perhaps the most likely and appropriate word for ἀρχή, if we grasp enjoinment in a threefold way: