281 §46. From Violence to Anarchy

but he has been explicit on what it entails for language to uncover the break that releasement introduces into the metaphysical structure of propositions. As has been shown earlier, the obstacle par excellence that screens off the event of appropriation stems from the "Greek metaphysical fundaments ... of the sentence as a relation of subject to predicate." The potential of complying solely with the event of presencing appears in the realm of language as "the potential of saying 'There is being' and 'There is time' without understanding these as propositional statements."108 Heidegger points directly to the ambiguity of our contemporary economic site-the ambiguity of the 'anarchy principle'-when he regrets that the conference "Time and Being" could still "speak merely in propositional statements."109

However allusory Heidegger's remarks about the practical implications of his thinking may be, and however obstinate his refusal to admit to any at all there is no doubt that, on the linguistic level, his attack on the proposition and, on the ontological level, his interpretation of the temporal difference in terms of 'thing and world', demand the introduction of radical fluidity into social institutions as well as into practice in general. Given the bifrontal essence of technology, to legitimate practice can no longer mean to refer what is doable to a first ground or some supreme reason, to a final end or some ultimate goal. The principle of reason is overturned as it is not present entities (and acts inasmuch as they are entities, too) that call for a ground, but groundless presencing that calls upon existence and demands equally groundless acting. This is how we are to understand the complex link, mentioned toward the end of the epigraph to this section, between the grammar of the proposition, the difference between 'thing and world', and the removal of the principial obstacles as just so many conditions for compliance with the event of appropriation: "Any conception and enunciation of the thing, which tend to place themselves between the thing and us, must first be removed. "Which are the conceptions and enunciations that most massively tend to place themselves between us and things emerging into their world? They are the conceptions and enunciations about essentially hubristic ('unjust', in Anaximander's words) representations—the epochal principles. These, then, are to be removed if the potential in our disjunctive era is to be seized and systemic violence transmuted into economic an-archy. Only on the condition of that removal does the "entry into the Ereignis" become possible in the strict sense of the word: the entry into what is eigen—not what is 'proper' or one's 'own' (property, appropriation, possession), but what is oikeion (from oikos, the 'house', hence 'eco-nomy'), pertaining to one's dwelling. The entry into the event is the homecoming from metaphysical errancy, which, for us children of technology, remains thinkable and doable only as the struggle against the injustice, the hubris, of enforced residence under principial surveillance—whatever form it may take. Such removal would be the politics of 'mortals' instead of 'rational animals'. It carries out the answer to the question , What is to be done at the end of metaphysics?


Reiner Schürmann - Heidegger On Being and Acting