14. The Telling of Difference | 21
public. In the telling, which belongs to the receding, there is always vouchsafed a possibility of shelter; concealment, always, is protected and especially so, and so too, more inceptively, is the first inception.
Thus “difference” [Unterschied] is the word of “separation” [Abschied] and “receding” [Untergang].
The telling-ness of this language.
The word of telling is never a statement in the sense that it (the telling) can account for and exhaust what is to be named. But this inexhaustibility also does not mean that there might be some remainder left over which might be diminished over time in the saying. Telling is a statement in the sense that it says inception inceptively, always in an inceptively veiled way. In all interpreting there is a uniqueness, the essential weight of whose truth is that the interpretation is history-grounding, meaning that it makes necessary another interpretation, one that is just as inceptive, but other than it. (By contrast, historiographical construal is assiduous in making every further explanation superfluous.)
The word of telling never itself knows “what” it says, if by the “what” is meant a represented totality of singularities that an inception conceals within itself.
But the word of telling can be tuned by the attuning voice of the unsaid. Thus is the telling and its word what is properly to be heard, a hearing of the unsaid, bound in listening to the inception, receding into it, historical.
Recognize that in the correspondence of the essential relation between beyng and the essence of the human, what is required, necessarily, is an acceptance of the historical non-essence of this relation at the end of metaphysics. Therefore, on the same ground that makes “necessary” the saying of inception, “the human” must also be immediately and continually named. The initially insuperable appearance of the anthropological is to be accepted. And so too must the continual weakening of the telling, even its occasional distortion into the “existentiell.” This is only one of the many forms of humanism.
Strange is the telling, in its essence, and thus it remains open as a task.
There is no statement, here, as in a secure and recognizable arena. But it is also not a matter of the arbitrary setting-down of what, without hint or direction, remains simply “incomprehensible.” Nor, though, is it a matter of a comprehensibility that would seize hold of what is understood merely in order to dispose of it right away.
What there is, here, is the crossing into inception.