Daniela Vallega-Neu
This paper explores the question of the body in Heidegger’s (non-public) being-historical writings. After developing the question of the body along Heidegger’s thinking first in the horizon of Contributions, and then in the horizon of The Event, I show how the body plays a fundamental role in maintaining a relation to the withdrawal of beyng and the beingless. This will put into question Heidegger’s claim in the Zollikon Seminars that the understanding of being exceeds the body (Leib), or, in words relating to his beyng-historical writings, that beyng is somehow more originary than beings and the body.
In his “non-public” being-historical writings that span from Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (GA 65) to The Event (GA 71), Heidegger writes close to nothing about the human body.1 Indeed, his explicit attempt in these writings is to not write about anything, i.e., not to think in a representational and objectifying way, but to let a historical sense of being eventuate and resonate in his thinking and saying. Hence, I call these writings also Heidegger’s “poietic” writings (in reminiscence of the Greek word poiesis, “to bring forth.”)2 Accordingly, to raise the question of the body in the context of these writings encounters at least a double difficulty. First, since we think of the body first and foremost as an entity or a thing, what Heidegger attempts to think, and the very way Heidegger attempts to think and write in his poietic writings, seems to run counter to thematizing the body. This is tied to a second difficulty, which is that we very rarely encounter the word body (be it Leib or Körper)3 in these being-historical writings, and that raising this question thus must go beyond what Heidegger explicitly writes.
To think the body in a way that remains faithful to Heidegger’s way of thinking, we need to refrain from thinking it in an objectifying way. Neither should we approach the body in a subject-centered way, i.e., in how we experience “our” body, since Heidegger attempts to think a historical sense of being that first determines how we come to understand ourselves and things in the world. This means that we cannot presuppose, at the outset, what the body is, and that we need to resist our tendency to represent the body as a thing. And yet, insofar as the body may be, in fact, objectified, and may appear as a phenomenon one may describe, the body is (at least also) “thingly.” It is a being, an entity (Seiendes), and not be-ing (Sein) as such.
The difficulty of speaking of the human body is, then, tied to the difficulty of speaking of things (beings) in light of Heidegger’s continued efforts to precisely not speak about beings (which occurs in metaphysics) but of being (or beyng)4 as such as a disclosive and concealing event (i.e., as “the truth of beyng.”) The effort is to evoke a sense of the “is” (of the arising or clearing of an “is”) in its coming to pass in light of the fact that in our age, at the end of metaphysics, such a disclosive event is precisely precluded. In our age, under the dominance of what he calls “machination” and “lived experience,”5 the being of beings, that things are, is not truly experienced. As he puts it, beings (things and events) remain “abandoned by being” (Seinsverlassenheit) and this abandonment, the void underneath the frenzy of productivity and consumption, is not experienced.
As Heidegger sees it, in order to open up a sense of how being occurs in our age, this abandonment needs to be experienced. Sustaining this abandonment leads to an experience of how being occurs not as a presencing but as refusal (Entzug, Versagung). For Heidegger, this experience carries with it the possibility of another beginning in which an originary sense of being (the “is” of all that is) may permeate a world. He understands his own thinking and saying as preparing such a possibility through what he calls “the grounding of the truth of beyng in Da-sein,”6 i.e., the grounding of a concrete open site where truth happens through, in this case, Heidegger’s own thinking and writing. This requires a turn in thought to the refusal of being, to non-being, to silence. This implies turning away from questioning beings or things as present entities. But at the same time, Heidegger stresses that finding an open site, a “there” (Da) of this truth of beyng in its refusal, requires beings. There is no beyng without beings, without words, works, and deeds. In Contributions, Heidegger tries to address this in the notion of the “simultaneity of beyng and beings.”7 With respect to Heidegger’s own thinking and saying, this implies that there is no appropriate(d) saying of being without words (beings) that say of it. Yet, one may ask, does this not also imply that such thinking and saying happens with and through a being, a bodily being, the bodily being of the thinker? What, then, is the role of the body in the thinking and saying of beyng? A body not represented as a thingly object but addressed in how it partakes in poietic thinking?
While we do find various reflections by Heidegger on an appropriate saying,8 we find none on the body of the thinker. And while this question takes us beyond what Heidegger explicitly writes, we can take clues as to how this question may be developed by thinking through the role of beings in the grounding of the truth of beyng. In Contributions, Heidegger speaks of the sheltering (Bergung) of truth in beings, and he attempts to develop this thought especially in the contemporaneous essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art” (GA 5).9 In the later work The Event, however, he lets go of this notion of sheltering, and instead addresses the relation between beings and being in terms of the “rising into being of beings,” which (as we will see) brings into play the difficult notion of “the beingless” (das Seinlose) such that in the rising into being, the relation to the beingless is maintained. In what follows, I will develop the question of the body along Heidegger’s thinking first in relation to Contributions, and then in relation to The Event. This requires that, in each case, I first introduce how Heidegger thinks in the respective works. I will propose that the body plays a fundamental role in maintaining a relation to the refusal of beyng and the beingless. This will put into question Heidegger’s claim in the Zollikon Seminars10 that the understanding of being exceeds the body (Leib), or, in words relating to his beyng-historical writings, that beyng is somehow more originary than beings and the body.
To think the human body in the context of Heidegger’s Contributions requires that one think it out of Da-sein, out of how one finds oneself to be (sein) there (da) in a disclosure of a sense of beyng as it occurs in our age. Such disclosure happens through fundamental attunements, and for Heidegger in Contributions most prominently through what he calls Verhaltenheit, restraint. As he develops it in section 5 of Contributions, an experience of the truth of beyng requires that one be unsettled in shock from the customary relation to things and events such that beyng as it occurs historically (written with a “y” to distinguish it from the being of this or that entity) is experienced as self-refusal. Through restraint, this self-refusal of beyng is held in hesitation and sustained such that it does not slip away but endures at least for a while. What opens up in restraint is a sense of being (I want to add: a bodily sense of being) as a coming to pass, with the emphasis on the passing, i.e., on withdrawal and concealment; one may also say, with emphasis on a certain sense of lack.
One may approximate the sense of beyng revealed in shock and restraint by thinking of moments when the news hit us that a loved one is about to pass away and when one decides to accept that passing and stay with it. For Heidegger, however, the notion of restraint and the truth that opens up have historical dimensions and relate to the abandonment of beings by being in our age. For Heidegger, in our age, beyng occurs without ground. This experience of beyng is removed from things: truth happens in an abyssal way. It is this abyssal truth of the hesitating self-refusal of beyng that needs to be sustained in restraint. At the same time, in sustaining this refusal, i.e., the abyssal happening of truth, Heidegger experiences a gifting, a call: he experiences the opening up of the possibility of another history of beyng, another beginning, in which things (or whatever is) are no longer abandoned by being but are more fully and at the same time in such a way that a sense of concealment is preserved.11
Heidegger speaks of the way truth happens transitionally as a time-space of decision. His thinking happens in the midst of what he experiences as an historical transition. We may approximate this experience by thinking of fundamental decisions that may happen in our lives. For example, all of a sudden we come to the realization that a relationship or a phase of our life has ended and we accept this ending; we find ourselves in the midst of a fundamental transformation of our lives, but at the same time, we do not know yet what will come, even if we intimate new possibilities. Similarly, Heidegger finds himself in the realization of the end of “the first beginning” (i.e., the history of metaphysics that is initiated in ancient Greek thought) and the intimation of an “other beginning.”
Heidegger’s thinking in his beyng-historical writings attempts to hold itself (attuned by restraint) in a strange in-between, an abyssal time-space (that of the hesitating refusal of beyng), removed from things and in the intimation of a world to come in which truth would be sheltered in the “is” of all that is and permeate a world. Yet, already in this transitional time-space, truth happens. Said differently, the abyssal time-space of which Heidegger speaks is the way truth is inceptually there (da) in Heidegger’s thinking, in transition to the other beginning.
In Section 242 of Contributions, titled “Time-Space as the Abyssal Ground,” Heidegger meditates on the inceptive abyssal opening of truth. By hyphenating the German word Ab-grund (translated by Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu as “abyssal ground”), Heidegger highlights that to the abyss belongs ground: “Abyssal ground is […] the originary essence of the ground, of its grounding, of the essence of truth” (GA 65: 378/299). “Ground” here does not mean something like a solid foundation; we may think of it more dynamically as a determining event that implies constancy. What is grounded in the ground is not this or that thing or occurrence, but “the essence of truth,” i.e., how truth happens essentially in an epoch. In the case of the ancient Greeks, Heidegger thinks this happening of truth is a-letheia as the unconcealment in the coming to presence of things. In our epoch, in the yet to be decided other beginning of a people, the grounding of truth would imply that not only unconcealment but also concealment is preserved (grounded) in the appearing of things. The transitional “time-space as abyss,” however, is not yet a grounding, but the staying away of ground, its refusal. No truth permeates the world here. Heidegger writes that insofar as in the abyssal ground “the ground still grounds and yet not properly grounds, it [the ground] stands in hesitation” (GA 65: 380/300; translation altered). Hence “the abyssal ground occurs as the hesitating refusal of ground” (GA 65: 380/300; tm). Through the hesitation, the possibility of a grounding (of another beginning) is held open.
Later in the section, Heidegger elucidates this hesitating refusal as a temporalizing and spatializing. The temporalizing aspect of the abyssal ground lies in the emptiness that is opened up in the refusal of ground in the abandonment of beings by being. This emptiness, Heidegger writes, is “in itself transporting, i.e., transporting in the ‘to-come’ and thereby simultaneously bursting open the has-been that, in meeting the to-come, constitutes presence as a moving into the abandonment that remembers and expects” (GA 65: 383/303; translation altered). We may approximate this sense of time by thinking again of the example I gave above concerning fundamental decisions in our lives: We come to the realization that a phase in our life has ended. In the emptiness of that ending we are transported in the to-come that at the same time opens up (and transforms) what has-been. Indeed, Heidegger speaks of the emptiness as a domain of decision (a decision that is yet to occur) concerning the grounding of beyng (GA 65: 382/302).
The spatializing aspect of the abyssal ground lies in the hesitation. It is by virtue of the hesitation that the possibility of a gifting and appropriating is held open. Hesitation implies a certain spacing, a making room for what is possible; in this case, for the possibility of the grounding event of beyng. Insofar as it is held in hesitation, the self-refusal of beyng is held in “captivation” (Berückung), with which Heidegger indicates how the spacing of abyssal truth is held open: “By virtue of captivation, the abandonment is one that is to be withstood” (GA 65: 384/303). The abandonment of beings, the lack of ground, is withstood by human being (i.e., how a human “is” there in this experience of abyssal truth) in the disposition of restraint. Time-space, as it is elaborated in the transitional thinking of Contributions, precedes a grounding of truth in which truth would permeate the openness of a world. And yet, in the transitional abyssal time-space, Da-sein takes place: there “is” (sein) a “there” (da) of truth. In the saying of the thinker, attuned by restraint, beyng is sustained and brought forth (transitionally) as hesitating refusal, as a coming to pass that bears the possibility of a world to come. This saying, in turn, can be such only if it is responsive to how beyng gives itself to the thinker, namely, as a telling refusal.12
The saying of the thinker is one way in which truth may be sheltered. As Heidegger points out, the sheltering of truth may occur in a variety of modes of creating or preserving.13 In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” for instance, he thinks ahead into how truth may be sheltered in a work of art. In what follows, I turn to this essay to get more clues as to how one may think the role of the body in this sheltering, and then, more specifically, in Heidegger’s saying in his poietic writings.
In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger thinks how the work of art shelters truth by “setting up a world” and “setting forth the earth” such that earth and world are essentially in a strife. He writes of the work of art not as a thing but in terms of what it does. Through the artwork, truth happens such that a world and the earth come into appearing in an originary way. Truth, as the unconcealing-concealing of world and earth, finds a site (and thereby some constancy) though a particular being, in this case, a work of art. As we will see, it is the “earthly” character of the work of art that plays a particular role in the sheltering of truth in a being (e.g., work of art, word, deed).
To show how earth occurs as sheltering, in “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger invokes the Greek notion of physis as a coming into the open and emerging. In his example of the Greek temple, he invokes how, in resting on the rocky ground, the temple first brings forth the darkness of the rock’s bearing: standing there, the Greek temple withstands the raging storm and thus first lets the storm’s force appear; tree, grass, eagle, snake, etc., first emerge as such as what they are. In this coming forth, the earth is what shelters: “The earth is that into which the emerging shelters all that emerges, and indeed as such. In the emerging the earth essentially occurs [west] as the sheltering” (GA 5: 28/BW 168, tm). To earth belongs also that which traditionally is understood as the “thing-quality” of a being. Concerning the latter, Heidegger writes:
But what looks like the thingly element, in the sense of our usual thing-concepts, in the work taken as object, is, seen from the perspective of the work, its earthly character. The earth juts up within the work because the work essentially unfolds as something in which truth is at work and because truth essentially unfolds only by installing itself within a particular being. In the earth, however, as essentially self-secluding, the openness of the open region finds that which most intensely resists it; it thereby finds the site of its constant stand, into which the figure [Gestalt] must be fastened (festgestellt). (GA 5: 57/BW 194, tm)
In the earth lies a resistance to the unfolding of truth by virtue of which truth finds “a site of its constant stand [die Stätte eines ständigen Standes].” Earth, in turn, comes forth and shelters only insofar as it is in strife with the world that Heidegger characterizes as “the paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being” (GA 5: 28/BW 168). In the strife of world and earth, held fast in the earthliness of a sheltering being, truth happens. At the same time, Heidegger writes, truth understood as the unconcealing-concealing of being is more originary than the strife of world and earth. They are, then, at least in one sense not the same: “World, however, is not simply the openness that corresponds to the clearing; earth is not what is closed that corresponds to concealment” (GA 5: 42/BW 180, tm). Heidegger calls the unconcealing-concealing of truth “Urstreit,” “primordial strife.” In it, “that open center is won within which beings stand and from which they set themselves back into themselves” (GA 5: 42/BW 180). Only because there is the emerging of an openness that happens with and against what remains closed off in that openness do world and earth emerge for us, and do things come to appear as such. In Contributions, we also find a passage that suggests that truth somehow precedes the strife of earth and world: “The occurrence is transformed and maintained (Why?) into the strife of earth and world” (GA 65: 391/308). That truth is “transformed” suggests, again, that it precedes the strife of world and earth. As to “why” this transformation happens, Heidegger does not answer that question, but it is interesting that he poses it.
And yet, while truth is more originary than the strife of earth and world, it only permeates a world if it is sheltered in a being, which implies, again, an earthly resistance by virtue of which a concrete site for the truth of being can be held open. There are various places in which Heidegger emphasizes that there is not a truth by itself that then would be sheltered in a being. Indeed, in section 243 of Contributions, he even notes that the very notion of “the sheltering of truth in beings is misleading, as if truth could ever already in advance be for itself ‘truth.’” And then he adds: “Truth essentially occurs only and always already as Da-sein and thus as the playing out of the strife” (GA 65: 390/308). What appears here as a logical contradiction (on the one hand, truth happens only in the sheltering, but on the other hand truth is said to be more originary than the beings that shelter it) could be taken as a foundational structure indicative of Heidegger’s attempt to think not on the basis of present entities or things, but from the happening of the truth of beyng. He attempts to think from the emerging of a sense of being, prior to any self-awareness we may have as so called “subjects” who are having an experience. If the truth of beyng (with a “y”) happens, beyng does not bespeak my being or the being of a thing. It bespeaks, rather, a temporal-spatial event in which emerges a sense of being characterized as hesitating refusal or a clearing and concealing in the appearing of what comes to appear. In the appropriating (or “enowning”) event (Ereignis) that Heidegger attempts to prepare and think (to a certain extent) in the “Origin of the Work of Art,” whatever is first comes to emerge as such and thus comes to its “own” or “proper” being in the midst of the strife of world and earth (that also emerge as such), i.e., in the happening of truth in a world.
What distinguishes the event of the other beginning from what Heidegger calls the first, Greek beginning, is that while the Greeks experienced being primarily as a coming into presence, in the other beginning concealment would be preserved. The emphasis is, then, on concealment and on the sheltering earth. Hence, in section 244 of Contributions, Heidegger asks whence sheltering has its plight and necessity and answers: “From self-concealing. The sheltering of this occurrence is needed to preserve the self-concealing rather than do away with it. The occurrence is transformed and maintained (Why?) into the strife of earth and world” (GA 65: 391/308), and this strife is sheltered in the earth: “Sheltering of truth as growing back into the closedness of the earth” (GA 65: 391/309).
But what about the body in this happening of truth that (though it is not only human) occurs only in relation to humans? The body belongs to the earth. Heidegger is explicit about this in various places.14 We certainly may also take the human body as a being, just like the eagle and snake, that, in their appearing, Heidegger takes as examples (among others) of physis in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” We may take the body as phenomenon in its phainesthai, i.e., in how it shows itself. We may also address the body in how it is at play in the spatiality of our being-in-the-world, as Heidegger does in the Zollikon Seminars. The aspect of the body I wish to stress here, in the context of Heidegger’s being-historical writings, is, however, the body in its earthliness and seclusion.
In his being-historical writings, Heidegger, disposed by restraint, experiences the hesitant-self-refusal of beyng and attempts to bring forth the abyssal happening of truth in his thinking and saying. It is above all the abyssal time-space (in which the possibility of an event of truth in a world announces itself) that Heidegger’s thinking attempts to hold open. But even if there is no historical world of a people emerging here, in Heidegger’s transitional thinking, in this thinking, too, the opening of truth needs to be sheltered in a being, needs the resistance of earth, in order to be held open. The sheltering being here is certainly the word (or, rather, words), but, as I indicated already, I intend to argue that it is also and foremost the body, the body in its (non-objective) self-secluding sheltering aspect, and in how it offers a resistance in relation to which an opening of truth and of a world may occur. Let me quote again the pertinent passage from “The Origin of the Work of Art,” such that we may hear, as belonging to earth, also the body: “In the earth, however, as essentially self-secluding, the openness of the open region finds that which most intensely resists it; it thereby finds the site of its constant stand, into which the figure [Gestalt] must be fastened [festgestellt]” (GA 5: 57/BW 194, tm). Together with whatever else shelters truth (words, a work of art, a deed), the attuned body co-constitutes a site for the happening of truth, holds the “da” (the “there”) of truth open such that Heidegger may think and speak of this happening.
The body, as we may think it out of attuned Da-sein, out of “there-being,” is not an object or a mass. It is closer to how Jean-Luc Nancy thinks it, namely, as a site of openness, as “the open.”15 The body also delimits the openness of a world or of a happening of truth through the resistance it offers. It occurs, one may say, as a threshold in that it allows for, shelters, and delimits the opening of a site of being (Da-sein). In its earthly resistance, the body co-constitutes a temporal-spatial opening: it is constitutive of time-space. The question, here, is certainly: Time-space in what sense? There is the abyssal time-space of Heidegger’s being-historical writings, but there also is the time-space of a world, as Heidegger thinks it later, for instance in terms of the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals.16 If we go back to Being and Time, we may also think of the spatiality of Dasein (of human being) in its everyday being in the world as bodily.
In fact, in the few writings in which Heidegger attempts to say something about the body, as in the Zollikon Seminars (held between 1959 and 1972), he takes recourse to the language of Being and Time (1927) and thinks the body in the context of the everyday being-in-the-world and particularly in how it occurs spatially beyond what we see as the limit of our body when we represent it as a thing.17 Heidegger thinks of the body in terms of Leiben, “bodying-forth,” and such bodying-forth as transversing spaces (or, rather, as co-constituting space in how we experience it). He often repeats how bodying-forth co-determines being-in-the-world. One of the examples he gives is hearing: “To hear something in itself involves the relation of bodying-forth to what is heard. Bodying-forth [Leiben] always belongs to being-in-the-world. It always codetermines being-in-the-world, openness, and the having of a world” (ZS: 126/97). Hearing, then, does not happen “inside” a body but in a bodying-forth that exceeds our body understood as a corporeal thing. Our body is out there with what is heard. Furthermore, as Heidegger emphasized, our bodying-forth is determined by our understanding of being: “The limit of bodying-forth […] is the horizon of being within which I sojourn [aufhalten]” (ZS: 113/87). Thus, when, for example, making present the train station, we are oriented bodily and spatially toward that train station.
In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” we find a similar thought:
Only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very essence are they able to go through spaces [….] [W]e always go through spaces in such a way that we already sustain them by staying constantly with near and remote locales and things [.…] I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it. (GA 7:159/BW 395)18
The examples of bodying-forth we get from the later Heidegger, then, all relate to our everyday being with things in relation to our spatial-temporal existing. At the same time, Heidegger claims that the understanding of being – which is, in the language of Contributions, the disclosure of beyng in Da-sein – exceeds bodily being. With respect to Heidegger’s being-historical thinking in Contributions and The Event, what I am claiming is that the very disclosure of beyng as self-refusal happens only by virtue of the opening and resistance of the body, which puts into question the primacy of beyng over beings and the body, which Heidegger appears to maintain throughout his writings. I will now develop this thought a little further.
The abyssal time-space occurs through the body that shelters and thus holds open a relation to the concealment of beyng. Heidegger thinks this concealment also in relation to death, for instance, in section 202 of Contributions, where he says that the original concealment of beyng is mirrored in death (GA 65: 325/257).19 There is, then, an intimate relation between the possibility of death and a relation to the concealment belonging to historical beyng (that occurs as refusal). In both cases (death or original concealment) it is our earthly, mortal bodies that shelter death and the concealment of beyng as such. We may reiterate here that if the originary concealment of beyng finds an open site, it finds it through the strife of earth (to which our bodies belong) and a historical world. Even if in “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger writes that we should not conflate the strife of unconcealing-concealing and the strife of world and earth, they are not separate events. It is in the strife of world and earth that truth (self-concealment) emerges and finds a site in Da-sein (that truth “is” (sein) “t/here” (da)). Through the earth and (with the earth) through our bodies, concealment is brought into the open. At the same time, “the earth is not simply what is closed off, but rather that which emerges as self-secluding” (GA 5: 42/BW 180). Thought from the event of beyng, prior to any self-awareness or representation of our bodies as things, our bodies emerge, temporalize and spatialize, as self-secluding.
There is one more thing we need to take into account in this context, namely, that concealment, as Heidegger thinks it already in “On the Essence of Truth,” and as he highlights also in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” is always double concealment. Concealment has the sense of an originary refusal and the sense of a Verstellen, a dissembling or obstructing as when one thing or event disguises or obfuscates another (GA 5: 40–42/BW 179–80). Originary refusal and disguising always happen together. It is the originary refusal (the possibility of not being at all, but now thought not only in relation to human existence) that is mirrored in death. The originary refusal is, I add, held open and delimited through our earthly (and mortal) bodies. But one could also develop more (I am not developing it here) how truth in the sense of disguising or obstructing happens with and through “our” earthly bodies. One may think of the many ways bodies are closed off to experiencing being, or simply things; how we don’t hear or feel something while we are absorbed in a “lived experience” (perhaps in the movie theater) or go about making plans and responding to the urge to be “productive” in our jobs.
Thinking along with (but also beyond) Heidegger, one may develop further how what we call “our” bodies are not simply “ours” but are part of the spatial and temporal (worldly-earthly) configuration into which we find ourselves thrown, bodies through which we find ourselves being- there before we look at ourselves in the mirror. These bodies, in their resistance and openness, are thresholds between being and not-being. They also delimit and hold open (or not) our spatial orientation and the ways we find ourselves being in relation to things and events or in relation to nothing – and this in more or less disclosive or obfuscating ways.
As I see it (and can here only indicate), the earthly body determines fundamentally the mode, degree, and quality of our relation to things, to being, or to no-thing and non-being. On the other hand, in their openness and relationality, bodies are very much determined as well. They are historically determined in their finitude and in relation to things and events and the very world in which they take place dynamically and in shifting ways.
Bodies are also determined by attunements. This may be experienced precisely and emphatically in relation to what Heidegger calls “grounding attunements” that displace us from our orientation toward things and events we relate to in everydayness, grounding attunements that expose us to finite being. But one can also think of how fear and anger or a specific desire can, so to speak, blind our bodies, such that we cannot hear, feel, or see things that are happening in proximity, right there. One may, perhaps, develop the thought of how attunements determine our bodies and bodily orientation also in terms of what can be experienced as tonus, tension, constriction, relaxation, or effusion that qualify bodies, and how these in turn determine ways of seeing and feeling or not-seeing and not-feeling. I am only indicating all this here to show how thinking with and beyond Heidegger opens ways to rethinking the body in different ways.
I noted in my introduction that a shift happens in Heidegger’s thinking between Contributions to Philosophy and The Event. As I see it, this is a shift in attunement and in the bodily being and disposition of the thinker. It is a letting go of a resistance that marked Heidegger’s thinking in the 30s, and a bodily reorientation toward abyssal being determined by what he calls the pain of departure (Schmerz des Abschieds). In the following section, I turn to how one may rethink the role of the body in the horizon of The Event.
In The Event (GA 71) and the volume preceding it, titled On Inception (GA 70),20 Heidegger rethinks the truth of beyng as an inceptual event. The attunement of restraint that marked Contributions, as a withstanding of the hesitating self-refusal of being, gives way to a certain releasement into the inceptual happening of the truth of beyng. If we try to approach Heidegger’s thinking, here, again in analogy with fundamental decisions happening in our lives, perhaps we can think of this releasing as a further acceptance of a fundamental change that is happening, a change in which we let go of our previous life without us knowing yet what is about to come. We are departing from what has been, and wedded to the “to come,” finding ourselves at a moment of inception that is groundless, abyssal. Analogously, in The Event, Heidegger articulates his thinking in terms of a “departure into the abyss” and an indwelling in and carrying out of the inceptual difference (Unterschied): the difference between beyng and the beingless (das Seinlose).
One may initially take this difference between beyng and the beingless as rethinking the difference between being and nothingness, a difference that marks the surging of a sense of being of what is. The difference between being and nothingness is not an opposition or separation between being and nothingness. Indeed, already Being and Time is guided by the insight that it is in relation to the possibility of not being (being toward death) that being discloses as such. In “What is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger also elaborates on nothingness as that which makes possible the disclosedness of beings as such for humans.21 The experience of an “is” (i.e., of being as being) surges and discloses in relation to not being. (This is why often in relation to moments of departure or in recovering from serious illness, a sense of being intensifies for us.) In Contributions, the notion of beyng as hesitating refusal bespeaks again the relation of being and nothingness but with a stronger emphasis on nothingness, such that nothingness can be found in the refusal that is experienced as such in the attunement of restraint. Nothingness is here not that from which being differentiates itself, but is rather “part” of beyng itself, beyng as a coming to pass.
The situation is different in Heidegger’s (new) thinking (in On Inception and The Event) of the originary difference between beyng and the beingless, as the notion of “the beingless” is a term relating not to being as such but to beings (entities) before or after they rise into being, before or after we may experience something as being or being this or that. Hence, one cannot properly say that “the beingless” “is.”
Insofar as “the beingless” (which bespeaks “nothing” and hence is a term we may want to cross out as we use it) precedes the rising into being of what is (precedes the surging of a sense of being of things or events), it needs to be differentiated from beings in so far as they are abandoned by being. In the latter case, beings (things and events) still are, albeit they are not experienced as being: rather, they disclose for us (under the dominance of machination) as calculable, usable, as a means for production and personal enjoyment. In beinglessness, on the other hand, beings remain “disappropriated” (enteignet; one may also translate this as “disowned”), which is, again, different from saying that they are abandoned by being, since they have not yet become what they would be, either insofar as we experience them as being or insofar as they have become mere means of calculation, production, and enjoyment (GA 70: 122/99).
Whereas the nothingness that belongs to being or beyng discloses for us through attunements (e.g., angst, deep boredom, shock, and restraint), “the beingless” does not. We may think of the beingless as sheer soundless, non-attuning no-thingness. There is no withdrawal here, no sense of lack that attunes thinking. Hence, Heidegger speaks of the beingless also as “the nothingless” (das Nichtslose): “The appropriative event is the incipience of inception, in as much as this incipience, as the inceptually nothingless, detaches itself over against beings, and in such ‘against’ lets beings arise into the ‘there’ [Da]” (GA 70: 16/8, tm). The incipience of inception is the event of the difference of beyng and the beingless: “The difference sets apart [scheidet] being and the beingless [.…] Beyng differentiates itself from the beingless and this is the incipient event” (GA 71: 132/112, tm).
With the difference between beyng and the beingless, Heidegger is thinking the very first surging of a sense of being (the first dawning of an “is,” one may say) in the other beginning (as he experiences it in his thinking), such that now he thinks this surging also right away in relation to beings (or rather “the beingless”), i.e., in relation to what then rises into being as a word, thing, work, or deed. Indeed, as Heidegger thinks it in The Event, out of this originary difference occurs what he calls “the differentiation [Unterscheidung]” of being and beings or the rising into being of beings. As announced in my introduction, this notion of the “rising into being of beings” replaces the earlier notion of a sheltering of being into beings. This means that, while on the one hand the event of being is articulated inceptively right away in relation to beings (things, events), albeit as “the beingless,” on the other hand, when beings rise into being, the emphasis is less on this or that thing as what harbors (shelters) a sense of being, but rather on the sense of being that arises with beings, a sense of being that inceptively (in Heidegger’s thinking) remains tied to “the beingless.”
Before addressing how Heidegger’s rearticulation of the incipient event of beyng changes the way one may think of the role of the body in his poietic thinking, we need to get a sense of how Heidegger rearticulates his own thinking and how it is attuned (gestimmt) and determined (bestimmt).
Heidegger now understands his thinking as a “carrying out” [Austrag] of the difference of beyng and the beingless such that “being comes in between the beingless”22 (i.e., an “is,” a “there” begins to dawn) and things rise into being. Thinking carries the difference out, attuned by “the pain of departure [Schmerz des Abschieds].” Pain and not restraint characterizes the grounding attunement that attunes thinking. It seems to me that this marks a deeper insertion or “indwelling” in the incipient event of beyng in departure from beings. Whereas “restraint” involves some kind of resistance against the withdrawal of beyng such that the withdrawal is held in hesitation, “pain” clears and sustains the inceptual difference.
Like all fundamental attunements, in Heidegger’s understanding, pain is nothing subjective but rather overcomes and attunes thinking. He speaks of it as a “beyng-historical pain” and as belonging to the clearing of the difference itself, such that in a note he even writes: “pain as the clearing of the difference—the difference itself” (GA 71: 218/187). This pain is nothing negative for Heidegger; it gathers in itself both the horror (Schrecken) of the abyss and the bliss [Wonne] of the departure (GA 71: 68/55).23 In parting, thinking lets go of beings, from being primarily involved with things and events: it lets go also of machinationally deployed things.
How does Heidegger’s thinking find itself determined to go under, to depart from beings and dwell (attuned by pain) in the originary difference? The German word for “determined,” “bestimmt” (stimmen means to tune, as in when one tunes an instrument), contains the decisive hint: Thinking finds itself attuned and thus determined by “the voice” (Stimme) of beyng.
In Section 247 of The Event, Heidegger writes: “Attunement is the name for what is attuning/disposing of the voice [Stimme] of beyng. This voice is so called because it is audible for a hearing as the hearkening (Horchen) of the obeying (Gehorchen) of an inceptual obedience, the pliancy (Fügsamkeit) that is itself uniquely historical and as such is also already uniquely determined” (GA 71: 222/191, tm). Heidegger’s thinking finds itself in hearkening obedience, pliant to the attuning voice of beyng that differentiates itself from (and in this difference remains tied to) the beingless. In pliant obedience to the voice of beyng, the attunement of thinking turns into a “thanking” (Danken). Thanking usually bespeaks a having received and an accepting of a gift, but at the end of Section 306 of The Event, Heidegger also relates it to renouncing something, renouncing understood in a positive sense. We may think of this renouncing as a releasing, a letting go or releasing of an attachment to beings, a “letting pass by” the abandonment of beings by being.24 Thanking occurs together with the pain of carrying out the inceptual difference.
Heidegger calls the (i.e., “his”) thinking and saying of the inceptual event “imageless” also in contrast to the poetic saying that is imagistic. In his understanding, this imageless thinking is a thinking ahead (Vordenken) that grounds Da-sein. Just as in Contributions, the task is to prepare another beginning or inception of the history of being, where beings would “be” more fully and in such a way that concealment is preserved. Heidegger finds this inception—i.e., the opening up of a world he later articulates as the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals—poetized (and thus “founded”) in Hölderlin. Heidegger understands his imageless thinking of the inceptual difference as a thinking ahead that grounds Da-sein (an opening of truth) such that Hölderlin’s poetry may be heard.25 I mention this relation of Heidegger’s thinking to Hölderlin’s poetry here (a relation that would need to be developed further elsewhere) in order to highlight again how Heidegger’s imageless and abyssal thinking happens prior the disclosure of a world (“founded” in Hölderlin’s poetry), and not in relation to any thing (thing understood in the widest sense).
Heidegger’s imageless thinking and saying in The Event occurs in departure into the abyss and carries out the inceptual difference, i.e., the differencing of beyng from the beingless. The “there” (the Da) that discloses in imageless saying out of the thankful dwelling in this difference is not a world, not the world poetized by the poet, and yet related to this world yet to come.
How are we to understand the role of the body here? In the context of Contributions, I developed it in relation to the earthly resistance and seclusion of the sheltering earth. In The Event, we may rethink the body in relation to the beingless.
As said above, the beingless is (“is” needs to be crossed out because there “is” no “is” in the beingless) beings (words, things, works, deeds) before or after they rise into being. No-thing resonates in the beingless. There is no appropriating event (Er-eignis) happening here, nothing surges into its “own” or “proper” being. What resonates without sound is rather what Heidegger calls Enteignis, dis-appropriation.26 The beingless is not part of the history of being. With reference to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” one may think of the beingless as the aspect of the earth that remains completely secluded.
Bodies, like any thing or event, are (again “are” needs to be crossed
out) before or after they rise into being, the beingless. But I would like to
contend that even when we experience (“our”) bodies as being, a relation
to the beingless is maintained. We find this relation to the beingless
not in how we experience or feel our bodies but rather in the strange
“thing-character” in which our own bodies remain alien to us. Our
bodies carry a relation to the beingless insofar as they remain closed off
to a clearing, to the experience of an “is,” to our understanding, and to a
world.27
In reminiscence of Charles Scott’s work on indifference,28 I would
want to say that bodies are open to and carry not only senses of being,
attunements, but also utter indifference. Or, in reminiscence of Charles
Scott’s work on silence:29 they carry sheer silence.
This indifference and sheer silence of what we call “our” bodies accompanies our bodily being always. The beingless that accompanies our bodily being is not a source but co-determines attuned senses of being. The experience of an “is,” the experience of a rising into being, of a coming into the word, originates, as Heidegger thinks it in The Event, not from the beingless (since the beingless is not origin), but rather in the difference of beyng and the beingless, i.e., in how a sense of being differentiates itself and surges in relation to the beingless, in relation to the seclusion of the earth (one may add) that also sustains how we may experience a world and things in the world. This difference of being and the beingless is an originary happening, a “middle voice”30 event in which the thinker finds himself sustaining that event, which, I add, requires the body of the thinker that carries in or with itself the beingless or the seclusion of earth.
Heidegger’s imageless poietic thinking happens in corporeal openness to the beingless, to non-being. In differentiating itself from the beingless that the body “is” or sustains at the same time, the body opens itself to a relation to being. Given that there are aspects of the body that rise into being (in attunements) while others remain in the beingless, one may say that the inceptual difference is carried out bodily. In the surging of the experience of a “there is,” the body differentiates itself from itself and sustains an abyssal opening for the “is” to arise. We may think here again of the experience of how a word may come to us as if from nowhere. With respect to Heidegger’s thinking of the abyssal inception of a clearing of being (of the surging of the experience of an “is”), this means that the body opens itself to the attuning silent call through which the word comes to the thinker while the body remains and sustains, also, the beingless.
The task I set for myself in this paper is to articulate the role of the body in Heidegger’s poietic or being-historical writings and, more specifically, in relation to his thinking of the abyssal inceptual disclosure of the truth of being that occurs “hither” the disclosedness of things and events. In the context of these writings, Heidegger hints at how the body belongs to the earth, but he does not develop this thought further. Instead, in the few places where he engages the question of the body more, as in the Zollikon Seminars, he takes recourse to the conceptuality of Being and Time and speaks of the body in terms of a Leiben, a “bodying-forth” (at play in what we call “sensing”) that is co-constitutive of our everyday being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s thinking of the abyssal disclosure of truth, however, is removed from the world (i.e., it does not speak about anything in the world, nor of the world in how it is opened up in our existence) and attempts to prepare a more originary experience of a world to come for a people. Heidegger’s thinking is, no doubt, strange, and his hope for a “new world” for a people (and he was thinking above all of the German people here) must appear utopic in our contemporary Western capitalist world-order. And yet, we can approximate Heidegger’s thinking of the abyssal disclosure of beyng, or the surging of a sense of being in relation to the beingless, if we think, for example, of practices of creative writing, in which we attempt to attune ourselves to the surging of a word or an image, and where there is, at first (and perhaps also in the end), no-thing to say. Heidegger’s attempt at thinking abyssal being is like staying close to that experience of no-thing and right at that turning point where something begins to dawn.
The question of the body in Heidegger’s thinking implicates the question of the relation between the inceptual truth of beyng and beings. I pointed out how there is a certain tension (and apparent contradiction) in Heidegger’s thinking insofar as, on the one hand, he tries to speak of the truth of beyng as it dawns inceptually, prior to the presencing of things, but on the other hand speaks of the simultaneity of beyng and beings already in Contributions and denies that there could be any “beyng” prior to beings. The truth of beyng takes place only insofar as it is sheltered in words, works, or deeds. I noted how, in The Event, Heidegger drops the notion of “sheltering” and instead speaks of the rising into being of beings. One may say that here he radicalizes the “simultaneity” of beyng and beings insofar as the inceptual difference of beyng and the beingless bespeaks inception right away in relation to “beings,” although in relation to beings insofar as they are not yet or no longer (and hence are “the beingless”). On the other hand, also here, in the context of The Event, there remains a certain foundational structure, insofar as Heidegger thinks the rising into being of beings to occur in the (more) originary difference of beyng and the beingless.
When Heidegger speaks of the body in the Zollikon Seminars, there also appears to be a prioritizing of being over the body when he writes that our understanding of being (hence the disclosure of being) exceeds and determines our bodying-forth. Similarly, in the context of Contributions, where we need to think the body in relation to the earth, Heidegger understands the strife of the truth of beyng (the “primordial strife”) to be more originary than the strife of world and earth.
The way I developed the question and role of the body in Heidegger’s thinking of the inceptual and abyssal truth in his poietic writings (which I did both with and beyond Heidegger) leads to a radicalization of the “simultaneity” of beyng and beings, since I am arguing that even this first dawning of beyng in its withdrawal, this first dawning of an “is” that carries a sense of concealment with it, requires the sheltering body. In its earthly resistance, the body delimits and co-constitutes the abyssal inceptual disclosure of truth, the “there” of Da-sein in Heidegger’s inceptual thinking and saying. Finally, I argued that the body, insofar as it does not altogether come into appearance or “rise into being,” the body in its earthly finitude, should also be understood (in the horizon of The Event) as the beingless, i.e., as escaping or resisting, to a large extent, a disclosure. Thinking the body in terms of the beingless addresses the body not in how I experience it, not as a phenomenon, not as “my” body, but rather as that strange, silent, non-attuning “thing” that accompanies my existence, soundlessly; that grows, ages, and disintegrates in its being part of the earth, whether there is an experience of being or not.
Finding the body co-constitutive of what Heidegger calls the truth of beyng, has consequences with respect to Heidegger’s thinking, as it implies that the inceptual disclosure of beyng (in abyssal truth or in the difference of beyng and the beingless) is unhinged from the priority or primordiality of this inceptual disclosure with respect to beings (words, works, deeds, bodies that are). It unhinges the question of how a world discloses from the primacy of the history of beyng Heidegger constructs. It also radicalizes Heidegger’s notion that to truth always belongs errancy such that there never is a disclosure of “being as such” but always a disclosure of being with beings, and such that the body both holds open and conceals senses of being, the way we experience the world and relate to others, to living organisms, to things and events.
1 One should add that Heidegger says very little about the body in his work in general, which has generated various criticisms that are summarized by Kevin Aho in the introduction to his book Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2009).
2 Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to The Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). This book traces the development of Heidegger’s thinking in these writings.
3 Heidegger adheres to the phenomenological distinction between Körper, which (akin to corpus) would be the “objectified” body, and Leib, which is the “lived body” as it is experienced prior to an objectification.
4 Beyng (Seyn) written with a “y” indicates that Heidegger thinks beyng historically and with emphasis on its occurrence as refusal. When Heidegger writes being (Sein) with an “i,” this usually addresses the being of a particular being or entity, or being as it questioned in metaphysics.
5 “Machination” (Machenschaft; later Heidegger addresses this as technology) is for Heidegger a mode of revealing beings such that we encounter them as makeable and calculable. “Lived experience” (Erlebnis) is a mode of experiencing things and events on the basis of machination, such that it incorporates things into how we subjectively experience them.
6 In Contributions, the notion of Da-sein (now written with a hyphen) no longer designates primarily human being, as in Being and Time, but an open site (the “da”, the “there”) of truth that is sustained (“is”) by human steadfastness or indwelling in the openness of truth (Inständigkeit). See GA 65, sections 290 and 191 that speak of Dasein as the in-between of the event of the truth of beyng.
7 “Yet beyng is not something ‘earlier’—existing in itself, for itself. Instead, the event is the temporal-spatial simultaneity for beyng and beings” (GA 65: 13/13).
8 See, for instance, Section 41 of Contributions (GA 65: 83–4/66f).
9 English translation by Albert Hofstadter, in: Basic Writings (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 143–203. Cited as BW, followed by the page number.
10 Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, ed. by Medard Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1987). Henceforth cites as ZS, followed by the page number. Translated by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay as Zollikon Seminars (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). The Zollikon Seminars were reprinted in 2017, together with supplementary material, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 89, with the slightly modified title Zollikoner Seminare: (Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen) 1959-1969. This volume has not yet been translated.
11 That concealment is preserved would distinguish the “other beginning” in contrast to the first, Greek beginning, in which being was experienced primarily as a coming to presence.
12 Concerning this turning relation between the truth of beyng and Da-sein, see Section 122 of Contributions.
13 Truth “essentially occurs only if sheltered in art, thinking, poetry, deed” (GA 65: 256/201).
14 See GA 65: 399/316. In the lecture series “The Essence of Language,” where he emphasizes the bodily aspect of language, he writes: “Lived body [Leib] and mouth belong into the streaming and growth of the earth” (Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,1985), 194. Translated by Peter D. Hertz as On the Way to Language (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 98. Translation altered.
15 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, translated by Richard A. Rand (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 122.
16 For example, in “On the Essence of Language” of 1958, Heidegger rethinks the time-space of the fourfold as it emerges in the poetic saying of Hölderlin (GA 12, especially 200-202).
17 See in this context, Kevin Aho’s discussion of the body also in relation to Merleau-Ponty. Aho, Heidegger’s Neglect to the Body, 33–51.
18 English translation from Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992). Cited as BW.
19 See Daniela Vallega-Neu The Bodily Dimension in Thinking (Albany, NY: suny , 2005), 96.
20 All translations are mine.
21 Martin Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik” in Wegmarken GA 9: 115. Translated as “What is Metaphysics” in Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91.
22 Inception happens in “the coming in between of being into the beingless” (GA 70: 121/98; translation altered).
23 In section 242 of The Event, Heidegger speaks of pain as sheltering the unity of the joy of intimacy (Freude der Innigkeit) and the sadness of apartness (Trauer der Abgeschiedenheit) (GA 71: 219/188; translation altered).
24 In The Event, Heidegger writes: “The demise and the transition pass each other by; according to the law of the releasing [Loslassung] of being into its extreme distorted essence (i.e., into the will to willing), beyng lets the distorted essence go on. Beyng overcomes the dominance of the distorted essence not by ‘engaging’ with it and overpowering it but, rather, by releasing the distorted essence into its demise. The abyssal sort of overcoming is the releasing of that which is to be overcome into the fanaticism of its distorted essence” (GA 71: 84/70f).
25 “Thinking ahead (downgoing recollection) as preparation of beyng-historical poetry in the moment of transition (Hölderlin) Or Thinking ahead as thoughtful, imageless saying of the event in the sense of the thoughtful grounding of Da-sein out of the attunement of the attuning of Da-sein, an attuning that attunes it [this can refer either to Da-sein or to thinking-ahead] toward thanking and so first lets it essentially occur pliantly and enjoins it to its essence” (GA 71: 286/248; translation altered).
26 “The beinglessness (of beings) is the inceptual event of the dispropriation; the inceptual dispropriation in the sense of withholding. This dispropriation is the inceptual, not yet twisting out, essencing back [noch unentwundedes Rückwesen] into the groundless inception” (GA 71: 132/112; translation altered).
27 If we rethink Heidegger’s notion of earth in relation to the beingless or as the beingless as part of the earth, one would have to say that there is a non-historical aspect to earth. This brings me close to a main thesis that Michel Haar puts forward in The Song of the Earth, namely, that the earth is not historical. See Michel Haar, Le Chant de la Terre: Heidegger et les assises de l’hisoire de l’être (Éditions de l’Herne, Paris, 1987), 22–24. Translated by Reginald Lilly as The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of Historical Being (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 12–13.
28 Charles Scott, Living With Indifference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). See especially 81.
29 Charles Scott, Telling Silence: Thresholds to No Where in Ordinary Experiences (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2023).
30 The middle-voice is a grammatical voice that exists in ancient Greek language but not in English or German. It is neither active nor passive and escapes thinking in terms of a subject acting on an object or vice versa. It is often rendered reflexively as in “a battle plays itself out.” Heidegger thinks essentially in the middle voice.
Daniela Vallega-Neu - On the Body in Heidegger’s Being-Historical Writings
Original version in Gatherings 15 (2025).