The Time of the King | 19
[F]orgetting plays an essential role that aligns it with the very movement of history and of the truth of Being (Sein) which is nothing since it is not, since it is not being (Seiendes), that is, being-present or present-being. Metaphysics would have interpreted Being (Sein) as being-present/present-being only on the basis of, precisely, a pre-interpretation of time, which pre-interpretation grants an absolute privilege to the now-present, to the temporal ecstasis named present. That is why the transcendental question of time (and within it a new existential analysis of the temporality of Dasein) was the privileged horizon for a reelaboration of the question of Being. Now, as we know, this movement that consisted in interrogating the question of Being within the transcendental horizon of time was not interrupted (even though Sein und Zeit was halted after the first half and even though Heidegger attributed this interruption to certain difficulties linked to the language and the grammar of metaphysics), but rather led off toward a further turn or turning (Kehre). After this turning, it will not be a matter of subordinating the question of Being to the question of the Ereignis, a difficult word to translate (event of propriation that is inseparable from a movement of dis-propriation, Enteignen). This word Ereignis, which commonly signifies event, signals toward a thinking of appropriation or of de-propriation that cannot be unrelated to that of the gift. So from now on it will not be a matter of subordinating, through a purely logical inversion, the question of Being to that of Ereignis, but of conditioning them otherwise one by the other, one with the other. Heidegger sometimes says that Being (das Seyn, an archaic spelling that attempts to recall the word to a more thinking—denkerisch—mode) is Ereignis.9 And it is in the course of this movement that Being (Sein)—which is not, which does not exist as being present/present being—is signaled on the basis of the gift.
9. See for example the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe vol. 65, chap. 8, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1989). A French translation of ¶267 has recently been proposed by Jean Greisch in Rue Descartes, an issue titled "Des Grecs" (pp. 213 ff.). Beginning with the first pages of the Vorblick, a certain Ereignis is defined as the truth of Being [die Wahrheit des Seyns]. "L'être est l'Ereignis [Das Seyn ist das Er-eignis]" (¶267, p. 470); or again: "L'être est (este, s'essencie) comme l'Ereignis [Das Seyn west als Ereignis]" (¶10, p. 30).