of its eminence then is pressed into the service of a retrospective and descriptive phenomenology. This positivist stratum (but, as in Michel Foucault, it is a second-order positivism) remains part and parcel of any inquiry into hegemonic fantasms. When read historially, on the other hand, the epochalization is instead linked to “the word as what founds history,” to speech, that is, as it wrests from concealment an economy of unconcealment. Here, the same has a power of obligation only insofar {dans la mesure}37 as conflictual truth binds us in advance, “in silence,” forgotten, denied, and prior to any spoken language. According to the first reading, Sprache has to be translated as ‘tongueʼ {langue}, according to the second, as ‘languageʼ {langage}. Neither of these two epochal concatenations is construed somehow above history (which is why the very status of the “history of being” is missed by those who see it as posited “in an idealist heaven . . . above or behind real history”38). Rather the past, which has modulated beingness, is first read from the viewpoint of fantasized beings and a second time from that of being that is sundered. According to the first reading, speaking amounts to “humanizing beings”; according to the second, speech has already and always wrought “the most originary dehumanization of man as a ‘factual living entityʼ” (BzP 510). What is dehumanized is the phenomenological gaze. The phenomenological gaze shifts from the focal {meaning of being} that is always a posture of “man,” toward what is originary, toward the event giving rise to all such postures that standardize the confl ictual essence of the truth so as to norm the true.
Hence the advantage, as will be seen below, of beginning the investigation of the agonistic event by an examination of “topology.” Hence, above all, the relentless historial differend that twists oneʼs words as soon as one asks: What sets the standard? Because of the diversity of answers—“it is the one,” “it is nature,” “it is self-consciousness”— the differend is not superelevated into the event. If the latter remains nameless and unnameable, it is because it synthesizes nothing. It sets its standard, but one that is singular and originary without being simple. There is then nothing more equivocal, and by the very equivocalness that accounts for differing, than Heideggerʼs formula: “so ist die Sprache Massetzung” (ibid.). It twists oneʼs words because, following the first strategy that construes the history of beingness from beings, it must be translated as “thus a tongue posits the standard.” Law-making logos is illusory because of its factual and entitative multiplicity. Following the second strategy, which receives from the event the double bind that debilitates all fantasms, the phrase must be translated instead as “thus language sets the standard.” Understood this way, what sets the standard is the unique dissension emphasized by the word alétheia. Any logos laying down the law uniformly remains illusory because it camouflages and deceives the rent between unconcealing and concealing. The singulare tantum, which is the logical illusion, has its condition in that other singularlum tantum—that entirely other singular—that is fractured being.
The double bind of natality and mortality manifests for us the event in its dissension of appropriation-expropriation; truth is also manifested there in its confl ict of unconcealment-concealment. How, then, does the logical illusion arise from the double bind? By the thoughtlessness (Gedankenlosigkeit) of life positing itself as if the expropriating and concealing undertow were not. Thus by tragic denial.
The task of thinking, then, amounts to the repetition of this polymorphic undertow.