CONCLUSION
Here the fourfold is joined by a line to the sanctioning-region (Befugnis-Gegend). As we know, the dispensing of the sanction is a giving that entails a withholding. The stretch between that withdrawal and that bestowal is the spacing of this “sanctioning-region,” the space between arrival and donation. The fourfold needs this sanctioning-region because it is into this space that the fourfold radiates in the thinging of the thing. This compliance is expressly directed against the ontological difference as a hallmark of metaphysics, i.e., a thinking of purity, opposition, difference, concretion, and propriety. The fourfold’s relation to the sanctioning region is a relation to withholding (since the sanction is given and thus stretched by a withdrawal). The exposure to this withdrawal leaves the thing slight. The slightness of the thing distinguishes it from the self-assured particular being of metaphysics. The fourfold would not simply expose the thing to an otherwise inert world. It opens the thing onto a world of withholding, a withholding that comes forth to it (Vor-ent-halt). It is a world wherein that withholding is likewise remarked. These marks are nothing other than the marks of the divinities, the hints and traces of a reign beyond/between presence and absence. The fourfold enters the thing into a world of meaning. But such an entry requires abandoning all difference in the name of differentiation, the ontological difference most of all.
There is no longer ontological difference. Being and beings are in compliance. Wondering about the abandonment of this figure, one might consider that ontological difference is a relation between quite related parties, being and beings. The very names could be seen to characterize the relation as one of possession or participation, and it is precisely this that Heidegger wishes to avoid. The names world and thing name a difference (differentiation), one could say, while being and beings name the sides of a relation. The fourfold attempts to name the interface of that relation itself, not to name the sides of it. Those “sides” would be called thing and world, were they ever separable from each other, were the event of them severable in this way. For this reason Heidegger writes on the next page that the slight is “this side of all that is abstract / and everything concrete.”8 The fourfold begins from relationality. It cannot be reached starting from the supposed relata of the relation, abstract/concrete, beings/being. In short and in conclusion, as a marginal note to the collection powerfully states:
the fourfold
no
ontological difference9
8 Heidegger, Das Geringe, 21.