CHAPTER 7
try to understand what is meant here by both “destruction” (Zerstörung) and by “genuine relation” (echte Bezug): what is a “relation to words,” such that its “genuineness” can be thus fragile, exposed to such a vulnerability? And what is to be understood by the threat of its dissolution? Without sidestepping these questions, however, what confronts us more immediately in engaging these “Contributions” is a question of the possibilities for thinking that the doubling of the text might expose. The question, then, is as follows: what kind of thought of beginning, of inception (Anfang), is made possible by the spectral historiographic narrative that Heidegger articulates, and by the distance that he takes from it? Beyond the linear, historiographic narrative of “progression,” then, the central terms of the narrative—“first beginning,” “other beginning,” “transition/crossing”—must be seen to break out of the constraints that a chronology would impose on them. This is the thought that Heidegger describes as an attempt at a “speaking of” and “from” event, “vom Er-eignis” (GA 65: 4/6). In other words, what is at stake can never be a “description,” or an analytic account of some sort, one that stands outside the matter it desires to express, but rather a “speaking from” that owns its emergence and does not presume to leave it behind.
It is in one of the later texts of the seynsgeschichtlich series—Über den Anfang (On Inception)—that Heidegger makes this direction of thought explicit, claiming both that “event is inception” (GA 70: 47) and that “inception is beyng itself as event.” To the extent that this text forms part of the “configuration” of which the Contributions is “the straight edge,” then we can conclude that these equivalences—of event, inception, and beyng—belong to Heidegger’s “attempt at a thinking which would arise out of a more originary basic position.” In the historiographic domain, to which the linear narrative sketched above clearly belongs, the concept of “event” is reduced to that of some kind of “significant occurrence” within “beyng.” In that sense, the statement “das Ereignis ist Anfang” (event is inception) becomes merely platitudinous, merely proclaiming some event-like significance for every historical “beginning.” But what if, instead, inception were to be thought not as a determinate moment along a historical continuum, but rather as being itself in its irruptive, evental happening? Might we not then see the triple equivalence of beyng−event−inception as delineating the inceptive quality of beyng itself, in a way that lifts the notion of beginning, or inception, beyond the reach of a chronology?
The aim, thus, of the set of equivalences expressed above cannot be a matter of simple identity, merely a question of “different terms for the same.” Each word, each term, has its own deep specificity, a history that renders the equivalence purely speculative: suggestion and implication