“giganticism” (late modernity) is already ours, already a necessity in the sense that everyone is living it; but it still remains for us to grasp it. Isnʼt the possible defi ned by such a graft of the not yet onto an already? And doesnʼt it thereby shatter the concordance of times? To say a cataclysm is possible is to say that at present things are holding up, but that the conditions of their collapse are already there. In Heidegger, the conditions—the zones and the standards and the modes of being—are brought together so that the illusion that normativity can be found in values, progress, and technology collapses. Insofar as they remain still to be grasped, these conditions are situated ahead of us (ante); hence anticipation. They fissure the subjectivist topos that continues to pass for bedrock; hence topology.
To establish oneself expressly on the fissured ground is what Heidegger now understands by “Da-sein.” This establishing marks the other beginning. It is a matter of a disjunction—a twofold disjunction—that Heidegger was to attempt ever anew over the forty years to follow.
On the one hand, the fundamentum concussum remains to be disjoined from any foundation luring us as inconcussum. This is an archeological labor of disjunction that frees plateaus in collision from under the numerous foundations posited since the Greeks, that frees, that is, the strife between world and earth. On the world-map of fantasmic arenas, Heidegger traces out especially the bases of the modern enclosure, thereby freeing under the discourse established since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the earthly restraint that has inhibited each of the great founding discourses, as if rendering it mute. Historial critique is responsible for the archeological disjunction. It has its site and its hour, namely, the “thrust of time” making us late moderns feel the collision of plateaus that are presupposed beneath every posited foundation.
On the other hand, the forces in collision themselves remain to be disjoined. Heideggerian responsibility consists in a response to that destabilizing thrust in which normative positings suffer their deposal, making the disparate underneath referential subjectivity obvious. To respond to what is happening to us then means to free up the originary double bind in its various figures: appropriation-expropriation in the event; the world-earth strife and the gods-humans confl ict in history; unconcealment- concealment in truth; the discordance of phenomenalization-singularization in manifestation. . . . This polemological disjunction is the responsibility of anticipatory critique. It separates dislocating strategies so that Da-sein can belong to the originary (Heraclitean) polemos.
Our stupefaction with the isomorphic that we ourselves bring about shows just how far away such a responsible belonging remains. Hence the appeal to “found the historial place for the history to come” (BzP 60), to “create that time-space, the site for the essential instants” (BzP 98). Later, Heidegger will describe the founding instance of history, in an abbreviated form, as the “entry into the event”62 (abbreviated, since the event conjoins mutually hostile tractions). This entry would be as compact as all beginnings have been. What is to be retained in that compactness is the conflictuality glimpsed, then infallibly repressed, in the Greek, Latin, and modern beginnings.
Stupefaction grows exponentially in the consumer of ideas who has seen everything and read everything. There may be something charming about a blasé high