These are daunting questions, but they are nevertheless secondary in relation to this question, which is graver still: How is one to think? Not “What is one to think?” Not “Which datum is to be borne in mind and followed?” But rather: How is one to bear in mind that which gives itself without submitting it straight away to subsumptions? Only the lover of the disparate has stopped denying the diremption—which has already been legislating, in any case, for a century and a half.
Philosophy (or whatever takes its place) can contribute to this apprenticeship. Once thetic candor has been lost, the conversation with texts remains. Then what is to be read to better understand how the normative hold is coming undone around us? We have just seen a first criterion for reading. To proceed first upon the great awakenings of Hölderlin, then of Nietzsche, without for all that losing from oneʼs view the transcendental problematic in view of which these awakenings were possible, one would need a text that would inscribe referential consciousness into the lineage of the fantasms which have guided our history—a topological text. It should also have to allow the diremption which has become our epochal lot to be linked to normative topology. Lastly, it would have to be a text which helps the tragic truth emerging from under the diremption to be born in mind, the tug of death ceaselessly stealing life away from fantasmic attraction.
Riveted to a monstrous site
. . . the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in progress—only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, nascent and terrifying form of monstrosity.4
I find these expectations, as well as some others, to be satisfied by a text of Heidegger, the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy), written between 1936 and 1938.5
Why Heidegger rather than any other? Because Nietzsche spoke, from a site which is already no longer ours, of there being new nights, then of their falling upon the natural metaphysician that lies dormant in us, nights having to do precisely with that “nature” and the maximizing thrusts by which it awakens; because the Husserl of the Crisis did not put the primacy of subjectivity and consciousness into question; because Wittgenstein made it a point of honor to neglect history; and, finally, because all three only got rid of the very question of metaphysics—the question of being—by speaking an Indo-European language and therefore using the copula “is” without interpreting it.
Why this text of Heidegger rather than any other? It certainly is not because, following certain commentators, I consider it his masterwork.6
Far from it. But, in a sense, because of this “far from it.” Here is the sense of this. First, these Contributions date from the years when Heidegger has behind him what he would later call his greatest blunder; when, circumspectly, he dared in his courses to imply criticisms of the regime; and when he was writing under the most intense, combined influence of Hölderlin and Nietzsche. Next, this text deserves oneʼs attention for the overdetermined legacy it bequeaths to us. Indeed there is something dis