by raising and answering this ·simple and long-overdue question: What is the event of appropriation?
At this point we must be permitted an interim question: What is meant here by "answering," by "answer"? Answer means the Saying that co-responds to the matter at stake which we must think here, to Appropriation. But if the matter at stake prohibits our speaking of it by way of a statement, then we must give up the declaratory sentence that is anticipated by the question we have raised. But to do so means to admit our inability to think fittingly what has to be thought here. Or would it be more advisable to give up not just the answer, but even the question? How about this convincingly justified and candidly posed question: What is Appropriation? The question asks for whatness, for the essence, it asks how Appropriation becomes present, how it presences.
Our seemingly innocent question, What is Appropriation? demands information about the Being of Appropriation. But if Being itself proves to be such that it belongs to Appropriation and from there receives its determination as presence, then the question we have advanced takes us back to what first of all demands its own determination: Being in terms of time. This determination showed itself as we looked ahead to the "It" that gives, looked through the interjoined modes of giving: sending and extending. Sending of Being lies in the extending, opening and concealing of manifold presence into the open realm of time-space. Extending, however, lies in one and the same with sending, in Appropriating. This, that is, the peculiar property of Appropriation, determines also the sense of what is here called "lying."
What we have said now allows and in a way even compels us to say how Appropriation must not be thought. What the name "event of Appropriation" names can no longer be represented by means of the current meaning of the word; for in that meaning "event of Appropriation" is understood in the sense of occurrence and happening- not in terms of Appropriating as the extending and sending which opens and preserves.
Thus, we heard it proclaimed recently that the agreement reached