concerting about it. Its elevated tone easily veers to exaltation (“No one understands what ‘Iʼ am thinking here.” BzP 8) The idiolect is more ponderous than in any of his other writings. At times one might think one were reading a piece of Heideggerian plagiarism, so encumbered is it with ellipses and overwrought phrases. The uneven treatment of trivialities—in the sense of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric— makes for difficult reading. An atrophy of grammar (the undernourishment of the sentence, often stripped of predicates) and a cacotrophy of logic (malnourishment of the rules of discourse so as to make them perish) are indeed accompanied by a hypertrophy (overnourishment) of rhetoric. Litotes, hyperbole, questions left open, periods parceled out, nouns reduced to their verbal origins, these oratorical techniques are meant to undo the work of construction in philosophical discourse.
The masterwork of the thinking of being? Far from it—but doubtless Heideggerʼs most signifi cant. Far, as is the periphery from the center in the metaphysical arena. The text begins by tracing this periphery: We are living in “the age of the transition from metaphysics to the historical thinking of being” (BzP 3). Thus traced by the closure, which is epochally impossible to leap over in order to place oneself abruptly outside it and so to assert an absolute break. . . . Centripetal forces, however, which there is reason to believe are not foreign to those that drew Heidegger to the administrative center of a model university, never cease to pull his thinking back from the periphery, such that the railing that encloses our site accounts for all the embarrassments of this text. They, just as much as the attempts to think otherwise, are what make it significant.
Why this text rather than another? Because it states with the greatest urgency—I do not say the greatest clarity7—the differend within being itself encountered in the establishment of the modern hegemony in Luther and Kant. It never ceases to vary the double bind, the effect of the everyday ultimates that are natality and mortality—thus it never ceases varying the originary dissension of being.
One hears it said that phenomenology remains incapable of any critical discourse, particularly as far as political regimes are concerned. Its very method condemns it from the outset to mere descriptions, whatever might be the realm to which one “applies” it. It can only remain mute in debates concerning the forms of public life.
In Heideggerʼs case, this objection is just not pertinent. His phenomenology speaks of “worlds”—of regions of manifestation, of economies, of plays, of gathering, of contextualizations. We always find ourselves inscribed in various worlds, each of which phenomenalizes according to its own laws. Now, to free these irreducibly multiple worlds, Heidegger has to argue against all ultimate fantasms posited as trans-regional. The epochal serialization of these fantasms provides him with a powerful tool against totalitarianism. Indeed, totalitarianism exalts the regional political referent to the point of identifying it with the modern epochal referent. National Socialism raises the collective subject to the rank of the standard sense of being, conferring upon it the function that subjectivity has for modernity.
What makes the Contributions symptomatic is that Heidegger, while denouncing it, also gives in to exaltation. I will come back at length to the advances he makes in thinking otherwise than in reference to an exalted fantasm. Here, on the other hand,