Heidegger gathers them under the name of positionality [Ge-stell]. Positionality is the gathering, the totality of all the modes of positing which are imposed upon the human being to the extent that it ek-sists today. Thus positionality is in no way the product of human machination. It is, on the contrary, the most extreme form of the history of metaphysics, that is, of the destiny of being. Within this destiny, man has gone from the epoch of objectivity to that of orderability: in such an epoch, which is now ours, everything and every means of calculation are constantly at the disposal of an ordering. Strictly speaking, there are no longer objects; only “consumer goods” at the disposal of every consumer, who is himself situated in the market of production and consumption.
According to Marx, the man who is for himself his own root is indeed the man of this production and of the consumption that belongs to it. This is the man of our present.
But man understood as Da-sein, ek-static instancy in the clearing of being, stands the proposition of the Marxian statement on its head. Can one then say that for Heidegger it is Da-sein that would be the root of man? No. The concept of “root” makes it impossible to express the relation of man to being.
We return to the question mentioned earlier: the man of the times, the man who understands himself and acts as the producer of all “reality,” the man who finds himself today caught in the increasingly constraining network of the socio-economic “imperatives” (which are, seen from the history of being, the precipitates of positionality), can that man himself produce the means of working a way out of the pressure of the “imperatives”?
How could he manage this without surrendering his own determination as producer? And is such a surrender possible in the horizon of today’s reality? What would such a renunciation signify? It would mean renouncing progress itself, committing to a general restriction of consumption and production. A simple and immediately intuitive example: in the perspective of this renunciation, “tourism” would no longer be possible, instead one would restrict oneself and remain at home.
Now is there still, in these times, something like an “at home,” a dwelling, an abode? No, there are “dwelling machines,” urban population centers, in short: the industrialized product, but no longer a home.
All these questions we are considering, Heidegger notes, engage today’s reality. This seminar, with its seemingly specialized point of departure, in truth confronts the ultimate decisions that this reality compels us to take up.
For, if one attentively followed what emerged when we opposed the attempt to think of man on the basis of Da-sein against the philosophical determination of man as consciousness, it becomes clear that to the