become objects for subjectivity and their being appears to dissolve more and more into the subjectivity which determines and produces them.4 In section 63, Heidegger explains “lived experience” as follows: “To relate beings as that which is represented to oneself as the relational center and thus to draw them into ‘life’”* (C90; B129). Beings acquire their being by coming to subjectivity; they get their sense through subjectivity and its “lived experience.” Insofar as beings find their sense only in their relatedness to subjective life, they remain dis-enowned, they lose their being. What is most frightening in this occurrence is that the abandonment of being is masked by an occurrence which appears to be most alive. For Heidegger, this “life” engendered in lived experience suffocates any need to question be-ing. Beings are not only calculable and producible— thus satisfying our need for security—but are also pleasurable and exciting—thus satisfying our need for discovery and novelty. What else should one look for?
d) The Gigantic
In the total abandonment of being, the occurrence of be-ing is turned into the possibility of its own disempowerment: what sways is not be-ing in its essential occurrence (Wesen) but be-ing in its un-essential occurrence* (Unwesen). This un-essential occurrence of be-ing in machination and lived experience is brought to completion also in the reign of the gigantic (das Riesenhafte). Here machination and lived experienced are completed insofar as they encounter no more boundaries. In the gigantic, beings are discovered through their boundless calculability and makeability. Any being is always already discovered as quantitatively calculable. Indeed, what beings are, their quale, is understood as quantity (C, section 70).
4. Heidegger discusses this process, for instance, in his Nietzsche lecture course of summer 1939 “Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Will to Power as Knowledge,” in Nietzsche, Vol. III, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). German edition: Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis, ed. E. Hanser, Klostermann (Frankfurt am Main, 1989 [GA 47]). Beings are posited by subjectivity in a process of production (Schaffen) which includes the destruction and overcoming of former positings.