permutation of the disjunction of the genus “time” into fixed everlastingness and the fleeting now. Since these lines neither invert nor even preserve the framework of the pairings of aiôn-nûn or the sempiternitas-nunc, it is equally obvious that such a framework no longer fits the temporality of the anticipated place. They do not invert the coefficients of those opposites, transforming what would endure into the negative and the fleeting into the positive—to turn against does not mean to invert. Nor do they preserve the framework, for being “is” not, “it unfolds” (west) or does not unfold. Rather, Heidegger twists the framework of the genus time so as to prepare to overcome it (double meaning of the verb verwinden: ‘to twist,ʼ ‘to overcomeʼ). To apply to the tradition the terms inherited from it thus does not serve to refute it. They serve another strategy, since in the rare instants in question, dissension founds a site for itself, wherein “being unfolds.” Such founding can only be received, and the “founders” can do no more than respond to it. It is pointless to look for any doxographic antecedent serving as a handrail for this sort of transitional strategy.

As to the issue of space, it too emerges from a classical binary schema since the “site” follows the “moment.” Does this not amount to having the representation of space derive once again from that of time? If so, Heidegger would be transmuting rather than permuting an old pair, but still a pair. Do these lines not reduce space and time to the atomic, space to a given site and time to a given moment? If so, Heidegger then would be passing—yet another classical disjunction—from the demonstrable to the merely ostensible. He would be abandoning the dieresis starting from a genus and leading to its components in order to confine himself to the components alone: to deictic objects. His polemic against the prestige of continuous duration is well-known. But even if, rather than totalizing time and space, one were to retain what is most minuscule about them and transmute them into “momentary sites” {lieux dʼinstants}, wouldnʼt one still be wandering amongst the very representations that have sustained the career of mathesis?

A whole set of problems arises here that go to the core of ultimate fantasms, and thus the law. They thematize the withdrawal that singularization exerts, that condition in the event that we know by virtue of our mortality. One will remember that it was the work of the singular that thwarted the subsumption beneath the references to the one, nature, and consciousness. Now the “momentary sites” thematize singularization for itself and thus the diremption of the universal as well as of its subsumptive and particularizing mechanisms.

One will also remember that underneath these hegemonies, the singular caused the failure of normative constructions that in each case were worked on precisely by time. It is an epochally variable labor, for in Parmenides it called for the narration of an intrigue with its reversals of fortune and outcome; in Cicero and Augustine, the chronicle of the res gestae and the res gerendae; in Luther and Kant, lastly, the reception of a singular presented to the subject—in the former a reception in the spirit opposed to reason, and in the latter in the internal sense opposed to the understanding. According to each of these arrangements, the singular was given, and in its givenness, was to be left alone. That marked its recalcitrance to co-optation, as subsuming referents are never given but posited. Under a normative regime, it would