and a Yes that are equally vehement. No, for the world rendered uniform makes being- there (Da-sein) difficult and rare, it perverts it into being-gone (Weg-sein, BzP 323). Yes, since for the phenomenologist of being, there is nothing other than singulars. This there is, to be sure, is not nothing. It “is” being itself as an event that phenomenalizes and rephenomenalizes singulars according one constellation, then another constellation. But a universal and most intense being, which would measure everything according to the top and the bottom of a scale—such a normative being lacks all phenomenality. Or, rather, it possesses only fantasmic phenomenality, like a historial illusion.
The motive of the vehemence that prompted Heidegger to wager on a certain political movement becomes clearer. If beingness in the shape of one fantasm or another has kept us spellbound for over two thousand years, the work of disenchanting the world was already completed in the first half of the twentieth century. Giganticism and operational machinations had taken care of it quite effectively. They had already displayed, in the full light of day, the evidence for all beings henceforth being worth the being that is most of all. Did the movement in question not promise a break with that tedium by resituating the “we”?
The isomorphism of the most monotonous indistinctness at least conveys this truth about being: There is no use probing for its depth in the direction of archai and ultimate authorities. The whole problematic of the profound and the superficial proves to be essentially calculative, as it amounts to measuring one being against another. If one is to think otherwise, then nothing must be sought behind phenomena; they themselves are to be preserved in the caesura in which the event of contextualization-decontextualization arranges them. Thinking emancipates itself from the normative “difference” (Unterscheidung) between beings and their beingness by stepping back from occurrent being toward the “decision” (Entscheidung, BzP 455)—a decision that one would never have needed to open a text of Heidegger in order to conceive of as a human initiative. Rather, it shows quite clearly the heterogeneity in the twofold step back by which Heidegger transmutes the ancient theme of the a priori. Difference allows one to move from beings to the depth that is illusory—which is archic because thetic—of beingness; the decision, on the other hand, moves from these illusions to their phenomenal condition, to the “time” deeper than history (unterzeitlich, BzP 108)—that is anarchic because occurrent.
The Yes to the isomorphic understood this way—that is, to the collapse of normative beingness into normalized beings—sustains the narrative that is the history of being. “There was once a time when beingness became what was most of all (ontôs on).” From that point on, “being has had the character of beingness.” And how has the latter been understood? “Always and solely as koinon, as that which is common and thus ordinary for all beings” (BzP 243, 425, 75). Now if being has been posited as beingness (as one posits a foundation) and beingness in turn is represented as a being, then the ancient question “What is the being of beings?” is only the title of a management program applied to beings that have been tacitly understood44 to be all worth the same, but among which this or that one had to be promoted for the sake of consoling the soul and consolidating the city. The question “What is the being of