The event of what?
“Now, being—up until now in the form of beingness, that which is most general and most familiar—becomes, as event, the most singular and the most alienating.” (BzP 177)
Caution is required, if only because Heidegger exudes a certain overcautiousness with regard to the “proper” and “appropriation,” too akin to property, possession, and full presence. However, doesnʼt the word Ereignis, ‘event,ʼ come from eigen, ‘properʼ or ‘ownnessʼ? And doesnʼt Heidegger go so far as to understand it as Eigentum, ‘propertyʼ—and the latter, in the manner of Fürstentum, ‘principality,ʼ which is to say, despite everything, as “sovereign center” (BzP 311)? Monstrosity has a strong back if these vertebrae are grafted onto “the most alienating” being (das Befremdlichste).
However, it is not the proper that, under the diremption, proves to be an illusion. To wager on the attraction of the proper, while at the same time denying the withdrawal that alienates and expropriates—now that is the illusion.
Caution is required not only with regard to the connotations of a word. One must also remain attentive to its use. Where I distinguished between the terms “event” and “appropriation,” Heideggerʼs vocabulary fluctuates considerably. One encounters Ereignis, Er-eignis, Ereignung, Eignung, eineignen, and still more variants. The first of these uses is the most heavily overdetermined. Ereignis is written, as we saw, sometimes in the singular (originary condition of phenomena) and sometimes in the plural (epochal beginnings, “thrusts” in history). But Heidegger also lapses into synecdoche, since phrasings in the singular sometimes designate the event of the originary strife of appropriation and expropriation, sometimes appropriation alone. In the latter case (analyzed above with regard to the “other beginning”), Ereignis and its cognates emphasize the part for the structural whole. Here what will be at issue is this structural whole, the originary conflict of which I will note some incidences. Finally, in the next section, I will return to alienation taken by itself, and thus to expropriation (Ent-eignung, enteignen, etc. . . .)
The illusion of pure property, of possession, and of simple presence can arise only by disregarding the synecdoche. One starts to talk about the metaphysics of the proper only if one takes the part for the whole, that is, if one sets up as a noun-referent the strategy of being by which natality gathers particular phenomena, makes them come to pass and belong to some others, and in that sense appropriates them to one another. But that strategy of the proper would be null and void—and being would not have to come to pass—if it werenʼt for the counter-strategy of mortality in the event, and thus of disavowal, exclusion, expulsion, and singularization, namely, what Heidegger here calls alienation. Thus one would be mistaken about the event—the issue guiding his thinking up until the last writings—so long as one proceeds as if it were obvious that the originary condition of phenomena must be simple.
The non-simple, conflictual Ereignis is best deciphered by observing it at work. In what way is it both appropriating and what is most alienating? To see more clearly, one should ask of what is being the event. One will then discover a structure of avowal inevitably calling for disavowal—just as Oedipus could only disavow the queen, his