Abyssal Being
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in their originary unity, are thought from out of the play of remoteness and nearness born of the contrary tendencies of the truth of beyng, in the counter-play of which beyng unfolds as Ereignis. As the unfolding of this counter-play, Ereignis is simply the trembling or the echo of this strifely event. It takes place, literally, as the place of the encounter between proximity and distance, between gift and emptiness, or refusal and granting. It is itself this oscillation. Far from being the measure of events and deeds within the world, then, space and time can be genuinely understood only on the basis of that time and that space opened up and held open by a certain configuration of Ereignis, that is, by a certain configuration of man’s belongingness to beyng and beyng’s calling onto man, a specific and singular way in which the world worlds from out of its specific relation to earth. This, in the end, is what Heidegger means by “there”: the concrete, historical place or site opened up and held open by a configuration of truth, the scene of the eternal strife between two tendencies or forces that oppose one another and yet reciprocally implicate one another—a space that is quartered between the contrary tendencies of truth, a place that stretches from within a differential: a differentiating time-space. The free space of time is thus indeed this gaping born of a differential rapport between opposed tendencies, and where a manifold of events and possibilities come to be inscribed, thus constituting the general landscape and the historical contours of the world. This gaping is precisely what Heidegger means by the Augenblicksstätte. Not the occurrence of something in a measurable instant and identifiable place, not even the vision of the essence of time and space in the sense of their ἰδέα—something which, to a certain extent, drives the entire unfolding of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a Platonic novel, indeed, for which “pure” time can only be outside time— but the occurrence or the event of time-space. The essence of time and space, in a way. Except that, here, essence can be understood only as the happening or the unfolding not of some essence that would itself not be entirely implicated in the happening, but as the unfolding or the taking place of a configuration of time-space, a specific and singular time-space assemblage, jointure, or articulation.
By “there,” then, by the unity of time and space as the “site of the moment,” Heidegger will have meant this taking place of place or this temporalizing of time as history. History does not so much take place in time as it is the happening of time-space, every time absolutely singular and unique. The event of time-space is the emergence of a historical configuration from out of a turning in Ereignis, that is, from out of a decisive reorganization or a new deal between world and earth in their eternal strife, and gods and men in their en-counter:
History is not the privilege of man but rather the essence of beyng itself. History is at stake solely in the between of the en-counter between gods and