and Time). They lose their totalizing essence. So finally we have the pain of the earth, which still has to be “taken over in its suffering” (Übernahme als Erleiden, BzP 260). It marks the withdrawal that closes up every phenomenon in itself.
One may say that in these phrases Heidegger is seeking to “square” the tragic. The Greek double bind opposed family law to public law, the heroic daimon to the civil ethos, or simply the clan to the nascent city. Now, Heidegger here multiplies the bonds and confl ictual allegiances. Hence his polymorphic tactics meant to circumvent this fi gure of thinking that is most effective for reinforcing identity, namely, determinate negation. Due to the alterity in the four-fold, it would be a mistake to construe “contrariety” as an opposition between some fi gure of the same and its apparent other. Even if they have need of them, the gods do not go together with men. The contrariety between these two does not indicate their mutual phenomenal constitution. Such would be to represent them as classes of beings, as genera, or as species, and that would truly be to quash the singularity of their occurrent fulgurations. The same goes for the strife. The world and earth are no more opposed, determined over against each other. If they were terms in this sense, they would inevitably lead to subsumptions. But the event does not allow for the superimposition of any grand authority, not the principle of non-contradiction any more than the principle of identity. In contrariety and the strife of the four nouns, Heidegger ventures to think what is never identical to itself. This is, moreover, why the singular is his penultimate word and singularization— thus time—his last word.
But what are we to make of the plural, “gods” and “men.” Isnʼt there here a stubbornness of the koinon by way of a classificatory relapse? Perhaps—if these plurals had anything to do with numbers, even if innumerable numbers.83 Now, the chiastic event gives the lie to these commonplaces, bursting them. Every allegiance to the four nouns is to be sustained as defied by the disparity that faces it: the allegiance to the gods by that to men, the allegiance to the world by that to the earth. It certainly has to do with phenomenal constitution, but with a constitution through quadruple discord. Who or what sustains the contrariety and the strife? This is precisely the question that places a focalizing despotism out of play.
There may be a perverse way of recovering from the tragic by nevertheless raising its gaps up into some unity. This would consist in retaining nothing of the four-fold except for the ‘gathering,ʼ legein. This is perverse because Heidegger really does say that the event gathers together gods and men, world and earth. The Greek word itself, moreover, shifts things without a hitch from “gathering” to “speaking,” and for Heidegger isnʼt it poetic speaking that unifies the four-fold? He even situates the origin of language in their four-fold exchange (BzP 510). However, it is a curious origin that is then immediately described as “the most intimate rift” (ibid.). Indeed the axes of contrariety and the strife cross on logos. But they may be traced back to a new figure of the one only at the cost of a most interesting non sequitur. In the four-fold, legein does not mean “gathering into the one.” Contrariety and the strife indicate there how one must think legein (but this would require other arguments and other readings), not the reverse. The gathering has to be extricated from pros hen relations. And what is the interest that leads to the leveling out of the agôn in the name of legein? Such an