20 | Chapter One
This is played out around the German expression es gibt, which, moreover, in Sein und Zeit (1928) had made a first, discreet appearance that was already obeying the same necessity.10 We translate the idiomatic locution es gibt Sein and es gibt Zeit by "il y a l’être" in French and in English "there is Being" (Being is not but there is Being), "il y a le temps," "there is time" (time is not but there is time). Heidegger tries to get us to hear in this [nous donner à y entendre] the "it gives," or as one might say in French, in a neutral but not negative fashion, "ça donne," an "it gives" that would not form an utterance in the propositional structure of Greco-Latin grammar. that is, bearing on present-being/being-present and in the subject-predicate relation (S/P). The enigma is concentrated both in the "it" or rather the "es," the "ça" of "ça donne," which is not a thing, and in this giving that gives but without giving anything and without anyone giving anything—nothing but Being and time (which are nothing). In Zeit und Sein (1952), Heidegger’s attention bears down on the giving (Geben) or the gift (Gabe) implicated in the es gibt. From the beginning of the meditation, Heidegger recalls, if one can put it this way, that in itself time is nothing temporal, since it is nothing, since it is not a thing (kein Ding). The temporality of time is not temporal, no more than proximity is proximate or treeness is woody. He also recalls that Being is not being (being-present/present-being), since it is not something (kein Ding), and that therefore one cannot say either "time is" or "Being is," but "es gibt Sein" and "es gibt Zeit." It would thus be necessary to think a thing, something (Sache and not Ding, a Sache that is not a being) that would be Being and time but would not be either a being or a temporal thing: "Sein—eine Sache, aber nichts Seiendes, Zeit-—eine Sache, aber nichts Zeitliches," "Being—a thing in question, but not a being. Time—a thing in question, but nothing temporal." He then adds this, which we read in translation for better or worse:
In order to get beyond the idiom and back to the matter [Sache], we must show how this "there is" ["es gibt"] can be experienced [erfahren] and seen [erblicken]. The appropriate way [der geeignete Weg] to get there is to explain [elucidate, localize: erörten] what is given [gegeben] in the “it gives” ["Es
10. We will come back to this point much later, in the second volume of this work, when we approach a reading of On Time and Being and related texts.