bilingualism. Heidegger says we have yet to become “dwellers in the time-space from which the gods have flown” (BzP 52). This means first of all that we have to learn to speak in both ways of the flaw that ruins hegemonies. Our century is readily described as one of great destructions, and oneʼs refl ection would have to suffer from a hopeless case of anorexia to characterize it otherwise. But if to think is to concentrate on the conditions under which one is living, then it is worthwhile to ask: How did we arrive at this? To this question, topology answers by pointing to the krisis around which the history of being turns, and which makes of us its in-dwellers. Critical topology implies that in the twentieth century, the double bind beneath every monofocal position becomes more obvious than ever, which in turn implies that the tragic denial at the foundation of order imposes itself all the more. Institutionalized brutality, guilt, an isomorphism that stifles reflection; then, the turning that moves outside of the same and its laws; lastly, the lesson learned from collapses, the vision of empty sockets and the silent affirmation of the legislation-transgression that diremption bequeathed to us. All this is afforded only to a bifocal phenomenological thinking. It is a thinking, for Heidegger does no more than linger upon the site and its conditions; it is phenomenological, since it gathers what shows itself there; and it is bifocal, since what shows itself is the emptying-out of normative epochs (another pleonasm: an epoch—a suspension of conflictual truth—always results from an idea that puts a stop to questioning, a halt posited, a decree, a thesis and, in that sense, a norm) and the possible there, deferred.
The difficulties have less to do with the circular character of this topology (which surmises a transition to be at work and then discovers symptoms verifying the surmise). Not every hermeneutical circle is vicious. The difficulties arise rather from the fact that topology can be retrospective and critical only because it is essentially anticipatory. In the vocabulary of representation, which is the promoting agency behind any maximized meaning, the meta-narrative instructing us about the stage whence we come, just as the semi-narrative about the possible exit that we are living (semi-, since narrative speech remains suspended at the exit of representation), both have their condition on a discontinuous plane upon which we are already summoned, brought to court. Both the analytic of the hegemonies that once were and that of the diremption that is suppose the pre-eminence of the possible over the actual.
By virtue of the temporal discontinuity that it singles out, this pre-eminence requires there be an “approach in order to reach our ‘stationʼ in being itself and thereby our history” (BzP 501). Only the contingent future, which is the eventual, occurrent topos, can teach us about our past and about our present. So long as the there has not been seized upon as our own possibility, one will never “measure what has happened in the history of metaphysics: the prelude to the event itself” (BzP 174), a prelude that has always deferred the there and anarchy.
Heidegger is not saying that soon, perhaps in the year 2000,* we shall reach our station in being. He is saying that the tragic there is possible, that it always has been so, that it is even more clearly so in the age of the diremption that is our own, and that there is no bearer of salvation (salvus, as ‘whole,ʼ which is what the tragic gaze
*Schürmann is writing this in the early 1990s.