prefix, in which the originative fold of the event is reprised into the threefold play of “being at one,” the infold, and singularity. Keeping in view this threefold reverberation of ein in many of the key terms employed by Heidegger is, therefore, critical to tracing how language forms and guides Heidegger’s insight into the matters of identity and difference. It is a matter not simply of conceptual distinctions and determinations but, instead, of the manner in which Heidegger induces folds within the terms he uses in order to forestall an all too easy slide of the terms back into their usual signification and its logic of repetition. What breaks the terms Heidegger uses, whether Einheit, Einfalt, or Einmaligkeit, out of their containment within metaphysical conceptuality is precisely this initially invisible, transformative echoing brought about among the terms Heidegger puts into play. This strategy is not defined or expressly articulated, yet its insistence and recurrence come into focus in a reading attentive precisely to how “language speaks” in the late writings. In other words, the conceptual work performed by these crucial terms becomes framed and inflected by the implicit nexus drawn among the textual occurrences of ein. It is language itself that provides the conduit for these connections—sometimes scripted, as in the handwritten note in Heidegger’s copy of Unterwegs zur Sprache, sometimes not—showing the extent to which thinking along with Heidegger must become attentive to the way in which his language disposes (Stimmen) whatever determinations (Bestimmen) arise in it.
The idiom of folds discussed above plays a decisive role, for instance, in how the issues of temporality, the proper, unity, and difference can be read in Heidegger’s late works. The prefix ein suggests that folds are indelibly marked by what perhaps must be referred to as a beyng-historical (seynsgeschichtlich) uniqueness or singularity, because it evinces nonrepeatable, event-like singularity (Einmaligkeit), which is always plural in its folds, and distinct from the conceptual play of the distinction between the singular and the universal. Without considered attention to the echoes of such Einmaligkeit, it is not possible to follow the nuance of Heidegger’s comments on difference, words, or singularity, and thus also on the role of conceptual thought in his work. Heidegger’s often-used terms eindeutig, einzigartig, and einmalig all carry the connotation of such “being-historical” uniqueness. Yet as Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness in particular make clear, this idiom of uniqueness is associated with Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality as a futural, projective infolding of the having-been and of the possibilities opening up from the present, where the fold marks the between, or the nearness as Heidegger refers to it in On Time and Being, never reducible to presence, constancy, or punctuality. The one-fold of time is the nearness of