THINGS
course to the Old High German senses of these terms, ring and gering, in order to emphasize the connection between this slightness and adaptability of things with his discussion of the round-dance and the mirrorplay of the fourfold. The appropriative-expropriative mirroring of the four was understood as a “circling” (Gering). It named the way in which each member of the fourfold remained itself through a joining with the others. This way of being oneself as party to others was described in terms of a suppleness. This supple, malleable, pliant, and therefore compliant thing is slight (gering). Made slight by the expropriative circling of its essence, the thing is likewise nimble (ring), i.e., responsive to what comes, even (like the wedding visited by the round-dance) “referred” to the coming of this. As Heidegger notes toward the close of the lecture, “in accordance with this circling, the thinging itself is slight [gering] and the thing that each time abides is nimble [ring], inconspicuously pliant in its essence” (GA 79: 21/20).
The thinging of the thing is thus this doubled movement whereby each element of the fourfold joins with the others while retaining its distinction from the others. Or rather, each one achieves its distinction from the others only through its implication among the others. This is the logic of the Einfalt, the single fold that gathers the four together (and why the translation of Geviert as “fourfold,” too, is misleading). In the circling around this non-center of the thing, the four splay themselves onto the middle, a middle or medium that is only able to receive them because it, too, is nothing fully given, but something that comes—otherwise it would brook no passage. The thing complies with what comes, complies with its medium, and complicates the world. This is its slightness.7
In the mid-1970s, in sketches for what was intended to be an introduction to his Collected Edition with the general title Legacy of the Question of Being (Vermächtnis der Seinsfrage), Heidegger takes up this conception of the slight in a brief gathering of notes aptly entitled “The Slight” (Das Geringe). Here the idea of compliance, i.e., the supple receptivity of the thing for what comes, is presented as a relation of “sanctioning” (Befugnis).8 Examining Heidegger’s remarks in this short text should help us understand the way in which the slight relates to a world (or in the language of the text, to the “sanctioning region”) that lies beyond it. The opening section of the text, for example, reads:
The Slight [das Geringe]
The Negligible [Das Gering-fügige]
ambiguous
but naming much
7 See also the discussion of the salvatory (das Rettende) in the closing pages of “The Question Concerning Technology.” After noting that we are “not yet” saved, Heidegger remarks that, “we are there upon summoned to hope in the growing light of what saves,” asking, “how can this happen?” (GA 7: 34/QCT 33, tm). His answer is in keeping with what we have stated above: “Here and now in what is slight [im Geringen], that we may tend what saves in its growth [in seinem Wachstum hegen]. This includes that we always hold before our eyes the most extreme danger” (GA 7: 34/QCT 33, tm).
8 Heidegger, Das Geringe, 16.