● 29

The Relation

W e r n e r H a m a c h e r

Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main

Translated by Roland Végsö

☐ What relation?

☐ Th e one that allows to ask which relation is being talked about—in what

sense and if it is a “relation” at all. Th erefore, the one that allows to ques-

tion and to speak. Clearly, the question “What relation?” is not asked

primarily because we are speaking of a relation that is still unknown and

is therefore astonishing, but because there is something being spoken at

all, something addressed and addressing, touching and entering into a

relation.

☐ Does this mean that the question concerning the relation is, in truth,

no question at all but an answer? And, then, does this mean that the

answer is not an answer to a question but an answer to something that

[Th is excerpt from a longer text, entitled “Das Verhältnis” in German, is, in some passages, among other things a response

to Rodolphe Gasché’s essays “On the Nonadequate Trait” (Of Minimal Th ings, Stanford 1999) and “Th e Eclipse of Diff erence”

(Inventions of Diff erence, Harvard 1994).]

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2009, pp. 29–69, issn 1532-687x.© 2009 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

T h e R e l a t i o n30 ●

we cannot call either a question or an answer, yet something that speaks

with and accompanies every question and every answer?

☐ “Speaks with” and “remains silent with” and, who knows, maybe even

remains mute or becomes muted in every question and answer. In any

case, the difficulty of the relation that we are speaking about lies in that

we must already speak from it when we speak about it. We can call what

we call a “relation” only because another “relation” already precedes it

that remains unnamed.

☐ We may also say that this other “relation” always accompanies the name

or the notion of the “relation” whenever we use it and allow the syn-

tax of our statements, (of our “relations” [Verhältnisse] and “behaviors”

[Verhalten] with each other) to be determined by this name or notion.

Regardless of whether this other “relation” precedes or accompanies its

naming, evidently there must be a particular relation between the lin-

guistic expression “relation” and the “relation” that makes this expression

possible in the first place. But the relation between the one and the other

relation, whether that of a “before” or a “with,” cannot be defined by the

concept that we form of it, since the latter is first rendered possible by

the other relation.

☐ Th erefore, we will have to assume, first, that there is a “relation” beyond

the one that we designate with that name. Furthermore, we will also

have to assume that this further relation allows the so-called “relation”

in the first place. And, third, we must assume that this relation beyond

the named and nameable relations, on its part, does not speak in that it

allows speech, and rather holds itself back with speech, withholds speech

and only this way, withholding it, preserves it as speech.

☐ Th e other, the further relation of which and from which we are speaking

would not be then a simple relation (Relation), nor a relation of relations

(Relation von Relationen). It would be a relation (Verhältnis) that we could

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 31

describe as abstention (Enthaltung) or, as the German language makes it

possible, Verhaltung as retention.

☐ Th us, we can speak only as long as something other withholds itself with

speech, does not speak and, not-speaking, holds a “not” against speech.

☐ Th e way an other can speak only

☐ if I

☐ or I

☐ remain or fall silent or mute. In every word of every sentence, in every

syllable, every sound, every letter, the “not” of language must off er to it

this resistance (Widerhalt) from which everything that is said, shown,

and written, and above all, speaking, showing, and writing as such can

set themselves off . Th e happening of language is from the very beginning

withholding or retention even in relation to this happening. It happens

out of the “not” of its happening. We can also say: Language speaks from

its “not.” Or: Language speaks—its “not.”

☐ Th is retention, however, alters every concept of the “relation” that we

have used so far, since it renders every relation withheld and held at a

distance from itself and, thus, a mis- or even an un-relation.

☐ But not on the ground of the intervention of some external, lower or

higher agency, which can first emerge only from this peculiar “relation.”

Only by virtue of its own structure will such a relation in its retention

become a mis-relation. To be more precise, we should say that the further

or other relation—which is only to be understood in all the aspects of

the German word Verhältnis—must be in itself a mis-relation, but not

because of the capabilities of its structure, rather because of the inca-

pability of this structure. Th erefore, this relation can be the relation that

holds “itself ” back, denies “itself,” and in this way withholding “itself ”

T h e R e l a t i o n32 ●

holds all other relations, but not because it preserves the fullness of a

capability and releases from it all imaginable possibilities and realities,

rather because it is itself a “not” of a capability and thereby makes it

possible to miss its capabilities.

☐ So what about this “holding”—a holding, which is supposed to be at the

same time a carrying, and as such this holding and carrying should be

something steady, durable, enduring yet without being capable of being.

So far, we have always thought language from a—rarely clearly defined—

capability. But since this clearly fails to grasp the structure of language,

we might not be able to continue to think it from what corresponds to

this capability, this potentia or essentia, as substance or carrying hold. We

may not continue to think it as a thing or as something, as a being, even

as the highest that grounds everything. Such a relation, the other and

further relation of which we are speaking, such a mis-relation must off er

a completely other “hold” that off ers nothing but a “halt.”

☐ Th erefore, this hold is not—it is not a being—but a not—a not to beings

and so that which first releases beings as such.

☐ What we call language must be thought from this holding of the “not,”

from this holding back without a hold, and this hold without hold. We

could then describe it, if it is possible to do so at all, without the risk of

misunderstanding or self-misunderstanding, as the relation—das Verhält-

nis—and, more precisely, the relation of all relations—das Verhältnis aller

Verhältnisse.

☐ We are approaching Heidegger and his “language” . . . . As far as I know,

he was the only one who spoke of Verhältnis in the sense of this emphatic

polysemy; the only one who did not use this word—this word of words—

in the usual meaning of the German concept; the only one who used

it always also in the sense of the Greek epoché and the Latin retentio

and, thereby, turned it into a neologism that could hardly be any less

“Germanic.” In “Anaximander’s Saying” he spoke of the “epoché of Being”

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 33

as the “holding to itself with the truth of its essence” (2002b, 254). In the

“Letter on ‘Humanism,’” to the question how Being relates to ek-sistence,

he gave the answer: “Being itself is the relation [das Verhältnis] to the

extent that It . . . holds to itself [an sich hält] ek-sistence” (1998, 253).

And in “Th e Way to Language,” the essence of language—in modern high

German: language as happening—is written as Ver-hältnis and is thought

from what he calls the event of appropriation (Ereignis), which is defined,

along with language, in the following way: “For that event, appropriating,

holding, self-retaining is the relation of all relations” (1971, 135).

☐ All this, quite frankly, is so awkwardly formulated that one longs for a

Heideggerian Dialect Dictionary to translate it into at least a usable if

not a usual language.

☐ Dictionaries list meanings but not relations of tension, not the paths and

movements between them, which can only be presented in sentences and

even there not without losses and additions. To approach this Verhält-

nis—this relation, this retention, abstention and holding to itself—and

thereby approach language, and if we try to do so by the detour of some

of Heidegger’s texts, we need to strike another path. We could describe

this path, tentatively and reservedly, as that of a “critical variation” and

start it at the point that we have already touched.

☐ At the “not.”

☐ In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Heidegger summed up in a few sentences

his observations on “nothing” from Being and Time and from his inaugu-

ral lecture in Freiburg, “What is Metaphysics?,” and thereby specifically

rejected the assumption that the “not” could be derived from the “no”

of an already constituted language: “What annuls makes itself clear as

something that is not. Th is can be addressed by the ‘no.’ Th e ‘not’ in no way

arises from the no-saying of negation. Every ‘no’ . . . answers to the claim of

the annulment that has become clear. Every ‘no’ is simply the affirmation

of the ‘not’” (1998, 272). First of all, this apodictic explanation emphasizes

T h e R e l a t i o n34 ●

that no-saying can only posit a “not” that—as something said, posited,

and signified—is at the same time “something” and is not the “not” that

is at stake here. Before any no-saying, in the sense of a negation through

an act of positing, there must have been a “not,” that as an address, must

have already directed itself to a possible speech, if this speech is to be able

to address not only an existing “something” but precisely the “not”—and

especially the “not” in its happening as annulment. Although within the

medium of language the “no” can be said, every such “no” as a statement

can refer only to “something” that is already given and contained in the

form of representation. Furthermore, as an instrument of language, this

“no” itself must be a given for representation. Th erefore, this “no” would

be an exemplary word for a commercium among present-at-hand beings,

which can only count with what is sayable but has no access to what it

no longer or not yet is, and thus has no access to the factum that it is and

to the way it is not. With the derivation of the “not” from the word of a

constituted language, something represented is derived from another

representation. Th e “not” is converted into a being and, thereby, misses

the point that it is precisely not this, namely a being.

☐ “Not” is underivable. But it is not solely the “not” that cannot be said

by any language and its “not.” It is also the “not” that must inexplicitly

speak with—remain silent with and fall mute with—in every language as

the not-sayable. Th e “not” is sensu strictu a not-word. It is the counter-

linguistic, the counter-word as such, through which every language can

become language. If it is a language, it is the language from this “not” that

is missing from it and resists it.

☐ Language is the “no” to the “not” that precedes it and must precede it

in itself as its own proper “not,” if it is to speak as language at all and,

speaking, is to be in the movement from its not-yet to its not-anymore.

☐ Th is is why Heidegger says of language that it is the answer to the move-

ment of the “not,” that it can only speak in response to the address of the

“not” and, in its turn, address its not-ness. But if it is an answer, it is not

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 35

so as the existing acknowledgement of an existing object or a content of

representation, but only in the way that as language it itself corresponds

to the “nihilation” or “annulment” that addresses it.

☐ Language cannot speak but by letting the “not” that addresses it happen

in language’s own happening. Th e residuum of correspondence theory

that persists in this explanation demands, however, that we conceive of

language as the answer and correspondence to the counter-linguistic

“not,” and understand every “no” as only the affirmation of the “not” and at

the same time understand the happening of language itself and in general

as a “no,” as the affirmation of the “not” and of nihilation. Language, how-

ever, corresponds to the nihilation—and the correspondence dissolves

itself in it—only in such a way that it ent-spricht: it corresponds to itself

as language as not-saying. It loses its linguistic nature (ent-sprachlicht)

as it evacuates its contents as well as its forms, and it allows its being to

become a not-saying and with this not-saying the naked “that” of saying.

Saying “no” to itself as a being in all its moments, language speaks, and it

speaks beyond itself and the totality of beings: transcendence of language

in its being as the movement of “not.”

☐ Th is is why Heidegger can write describing the movement of Being, and

along with Being also that of language: “Being annuls—as Being” (1998,

273). It annuls as language in as much as it departs from itself as an exist-

ing correlation to other beings and it is evicted from what it can be as an

instrumental structure of reference: ek-sistence of language into a Being

without beings.

☐ Th is movement that language never performs through acts of positing by

its speakers, this movement that occurs not only occasionally and never

intentionally or caused by motives, this movement that defines language

as the language expelled from language was defined by Heidegger in his

Freiburg lecture as the language of anxiety, as the angst-ridden language.

At the end of a short description of an experience of anxiety, this reduc-

tion of language to its most properly own is characterized in the following

T h e R e l a t i o n36 ●

terms: “Not a hold remains [Es bleibt kein Halt]. In the slipping away of

beings only this ‘not’ [kein] remains and comes over us” (1998, 88).1 Th e

“essential impossibility of determining” beings as a whole (88) that we

experience in anxiety leaves nothing enduring, nothing that speech or

action could off er to hold on to, no hold apart from this “not” of the hold,

the hold without hold. “Not” is the word for the language no longer of be-

ings, but for language as it happens as a parting—parting from everything

that can be defined, represented, and held. It speaks only by saying that

nothing remains to be said, and therefore, it corresponds to its own “not”:

still speaks, speaks for the first time, and speaks as language even beyond

what in and through it is definable. “None” (Kein) is not a word, nor is

it a mark; it is the counter-word and the counter-mark to all that could

be merely stated and signified. But as this anti-word (Anti-Wort), it is the

answer (Antwort) of bare speech to the merely speakable. It is the primary

Ur-word, the word-word as such, the only word of language; language

itself as this single word, as it exactly says its Sein, its “”Being.”

☐ “Not a hold remains. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘not’ remains

and comes over us.” “Not” does not say anything about Being. It speaks

itself as Being. Being happens in the “not” and nowhere else. It is the

hold without hold, the up- and with-holding dwelling (Auf-ent-halt) that

language is as the house of Being, the only ethos. Language speaks only

when it becomes this house of the “not” in all its idioms, in every word

and every silence, and thereby gains its Being as that which is not a being.

“Not” contracts the individual appearances in their nihilation into the

whole of a “there.” It allows to step back from the world assembled under

the deletion mark of the “not”: it is the word of the epoché of every word

and every world. Still, precisely as speaking beyond all merely real and

possible words, it speaks as one that does not represent anything, does

not declare, signify, or does anything, but simply happens: it is the “that”

of its self; and as this “that” it is the horizon of Being within which every

being can first be what it is. It is the word of apocalypse, the revelation

of the possibility of all worlds and words. Epoché and revelation: the re-

turn of beings into their “not” and the rise of Being. In the “not,” beings

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 37

and Being separate and (d)emerge as diff erent. “Not” is the word of the

ontological diff erence.

☐ A theory of the origin of language and at the same time of the origin of

Being and beings with language. “None” or not would be then the fiat, the

finite, not the originating but the witnessing, the Dasein-opening fiat of

the homo humanus of whose humanitas Heidegger speaks in the “Letter

on ‘Humanism.’” Although here the connection between the origin of

language and the “not” remains only a suggestion, it defines the gesture

that carries Heidegger’s thought in general: namely, that something

emerges as something first in its slippage. For example, the hammer in

the becoming useless of the “equipment”; the “world” in the loss of reason

in anxiety; the possible wholeness of Dasein in “being-toward-death”; the

work of art in the rejection of the usual coherence of the world; the Being

of the word in its “apartness” and its “infirmity.”

☐ Th e “not” reveals nothing and it is as this revelation: a historical moment

in which nothing will be seen apart from the “not” of seeing: “Being is

more in being than any beings” (1998, 273).

☐ However: the “not” can reveal the nothing only because, as a citation—

Heidegger puts it between quotation marks—from the inner-worldly

discourse of Dasein, it opens up the distance that allows Dasein to relate

to the world as a whole as its “there” (1998, 109). Th e “no” as the word of

transcendence is at the same time that of the diff erence between Being

and the beings of the world. It can be both transcendence and diff erence

only as exposed from every determinable meaning. And, yet, this “not”

does mean. But it does not mean what “something” or “one,” “cover” or

“Lazarus” means, but rather always their and its own “not.” Heidegger’s

“not,” however, does not remain only a residue of innerworldliness and

meaningfulness. It also follows a direction in which it approaches Dasein,

relates to its language, allows its affirmation and even its recognition,

and allows Dasein to be bound to the “not” in its “yes” and “no”: “Every

‘no’ is simply the affirmation of the ‘not.’ Every affirmation consists in

T h e R e l a t i o n38 ●

recognition. Recognition lets that toward which it goes come toward it.”

(1998, 272) Just as in Hegel, in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” the “not” is

the “not” of something. But even when in an ek-sistential conversion it

turns itself into the something of a nihilation, this nihilation remains

as counter-phenomenon oriented toward something and remains ca-

pable of being grasped in an answer which, even though a citation, a

remainder, a residue, and a trace, remains still the determined trace of

a determined being and not the “essential impossibility of determining”

beings as a whole (1998, 88). In contradistinction to his claim, Heidegger

does not describe the “not” itself but the “not” of a self. Even though the

“not”—“only this ‘not’” (88)—is supposed to be the “not” of the hold on

a determinable meaning and a determinable direction, it moves toward

the transcendental “no” of language and toward the dwelling in its house:

it remains a directional “not.”

☐ And the other way around: if the “no” of language is the “the affirmation of

the ‘not’” (1998, 272), then this “not” can be affirmed only as the one that

language moves toward. Th e spoken “no,” according to Heidegger’s words,

is an already addressed “no” in which only the “not” as an intentional

object will be affirmed: language retains for Heidegger an intentional

structure even in its epoché. Accordingly—and, in fact, in the sense of

a correspondence in a relational pair—the “not” in Heidegger’s “Letter”

is attuned to the affirmation of its affirmation. It is an intentionally

disposed and, moreover, affirmative “not.” Only this way can the whole

domain of meaningfulness be thought in it as simultaneously suspended

and founded.

☐ Furthermore, if the recognition of the “not,” as Heidegger writes, “lets

that toward which it goes come toward it” (1998, 272), the recognition

becomes the place of the advent of the “not,” and the intentional “not”

becomes not only linguistically affirmable but, moreover, recognizable

and locatable in its recognition. In all these structures, the “not” appears

to be reduced to something less than what as the “annulment” should

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 39

refuse every recognition and remain placeless, wordless, and non-inten-

tional. Since “Being is more in being than any beings” (1998, 273), the

“not” should be more nihilating than any nihilation within the horizon of

intentional acknowledgement. It should remain irreducible to relational

pairs, and it should withdraw itself from such alternatives as speaking to

and turning away from, presence to and absence from. Since it is “not,”

it should not remain restricted to pressure, constriction, and anxiety. It

should each time happen as that which in these relations releases from

them and makes them possible in the first place.

☐ “Being is more in being than any beings”—Heidegger’s catchy formula

employs a comparative to describe the relation between Being and beings

and, thus, the relation as such. It compares the two that should remain

absolutely incomparable. It speaks of Being in the language of beings

and says that it is a Being of enhanced intensity. Th e formula, however,

remains ambiguous. It says, on the one hand, that being is in being and

even more in being than beings. On the other hand, however, it says that

it is in being only in such a way that it transgresses the measure and

range of beings, releases itself from all beings and gives up every hold on

them. Th e relation that this formula speaks of is therefore the relation of

the dissolution of every relation, of transcendence into the relationless,

and of not only quantitative and merely relative but of the ontological

diff erence between Being and beings. Catchy as it is, it speaks only the

slippage of Being out of every form of every existing language—and,

hyperbolically, speaks beyond its own speech. Language in diff erence to

language; language of diff erence; language out of it.

☐ Th e syntagm “being more in being than any beings” is at the same time

a hypertagm. It off ers a proposition and steps outside every—even its

own—proposition.

☐ Horrifying (entzetzliche) language. Every language is displacing (en-

tzetzlich).

T h e R e l a t i o n40 ●

☐ Every language speaks with an “ent-,” with a “dis-,” with a “not.” It should

also hold true for this “not,” since it is not a being, that it makes itself

noticeable beyond every linguistically verifiable “not” in the domain of

the present-at-hand and the representable, beyond every mere lack and

every localizable privation, as a “not” of the verifiable, a “not” of repre-

sentability and positing. To characterize the “not,” it does not suffice to

grasp it as an intra-linguistic phenomenon. It must also be understood as

a “not” of the phenomenon of language in general—otherwise it cannot

be understood as a “not.” Th is is why Heidegger insists that it cannot

be reduced to a linguistic negation and cannot emerge from a “no.” At

the same time, it cannot be disputed that the “not” is still a linguistic

expression, a mark within a given language, a syncategorematic particle,

that can be substantivized as “the not” (das Nicht) and verbalized as “to

annul” (nichten). But what it says within language is that it is an “out of ”

and outside language and is not subjected to its laws and sentences. Only

from out of this “not” that does not belong to language can language be

understood as language—even if it should be always understood as the

not-understandable and the inconsistent. Th erefore, in the characteriza-

tion of the “not,” as in that of language, all traits that reduce its relations

to relations of intention, orientation, and localization should disappear.

Th e “not” should in fact be articulated as what in these relations lets go

of them and, thus, lets them be.

☐ Language left to be and, in every sense, left out.

☐ Th e “not” would not be a “not” if it could not let go of itself and could

not let be something other than itself. “Not” also means: counter-not,

more-or-less-than-not, other-than-not, and not-not. Not is not enough.

Th erefore it cannot be missed by anyone.

☐ Let us, then, admit that Heidegger did not miss it either, only did not say

enough to or about it, to clarify how the structure of the “not” and the

“none” of his language operate. If we engage this structure—which is, let

us not forget, above all a not-structure—we might clarify the significance

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 41

of the structure of intentionality, which is too strongly emphasized in his

thoughts on the “not” to have merely slipped into them. For Heidegger,

it is important that the “not” is not a nihil negativum or absolutum, not

an empty “not” merely posited by a “subject” or an “I”—even if posited,

like in Fichte and Hegel, through a not-positing. For if it were a positum,

it would not only be a logicized “not,” but also a something (ens rationis)

and so precisely what it is not. At the same time, it is also important for

Heidegger that the happening of the “not”—which, albeit always pos-

sible, still “rarely enough” really is (1998, 88)—does not disappear in an

annihilation: once again, in such a case the “nothing” would not be a

“not”; it would not be “there”; it could not be experienced as a happening

or the happening of the withdrawal from happening. Joined together, the

two observations can be understood in such a way that the “not” cannot

be either a “something” or the fait accompli of a mere absence. It opens

itself as the zone of separation between beings and empty nothing, and

it can be the “not” only as that which emerges in the experience of the

departure or slipping away of all beings. Th e experience of this “not” and

the “not” of this experience—and an abyss opens up in the reversibility

or irreversibility of these expressions and their double genitives—is the

decisive, pre-predicative synthesis. It is not an arché, an in itself unified

principle. It is structurally an-archic (and in this sense originary), since it

is a synthesis only because of the split that crosses it. Heidegger describes

this bifurcation as a “repelling reference toward beings [abweisende

Verweisung]”2 (1998, 90): as a reference to beings through which they are

brought together and, at the same time, repelled as a whole. At the same

time as this “not” that formulates itself as a “no” and, in Heidegger’s

definition as reference, carries an emphatically linguistic trait, the experi-

ence of Being itself emerges as the happening of this repelling reference.

Th e “not” is the in itself diff erentiated archi-disjunction.

☐ Th e separation, therefore, takes place between beings as a whole and

Being, and not between the “not” and being—this separation is accom-

plished or is (or “exists”) in the “not.” “Th e nothing itself annuls” (1998,

90): it is what happens in the repelling reference, and it is that it happens

T h e R e l a t i o n42 ●

as this reference. Since the “not” would not be without its happening

(without its nihilation), the previous phrase can be made more precise:

“Being nihilates—as being” (1998, 273).

☐ Th is is to say: Being is always already not-anymore and always not-yet. It

is in that it is the “not” of itself. As diff erence from itself, it is at the same

time the diff erence from everything and in everything that exists.

☐ Th e title of “Being” in Heidegger’s thinking belongs only to the movement

of the “not,” to the separation, the diff erence as inter-rift (Unter-Schied),

the ontological diff erence. Th is is why we find in the preface to “On the

Essence of Ground” the following ambiguous formulation: “Th e onto-

logical diff erence is the ‘not’ between beings and Being” (1998, 97). Th is

programmatic formula can be misunderstood because it places the “not”

between beings and Being as if they were two beings of diff erent nature

or intensity. But this “not” is to be thought as the “between” with which

Being emerges as diff erentiated from all, even the highest of all beings.

Being is what is resulting from and in the separation that happens in the

“not” and, thus, itself is the “between,” the diff erence. Th erefore, Heide-

gger can write “nothing and Being the same”: “Holding itself out into the

nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. Such

being beyond beings we call transcendence. . . . if [Dasein] were not in

advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never adopt a

stance toward beings nor even toward itself ” (91).

☐ For Heidegger, to transcend means above all to transcend into a “not”

and, therefore, to transcend into a “not” of even this transcending. It does

not mean indication and relation “to” but repelling and repelling reference

“from,” as well as repelling of all reference, in-predication, ir-relation:

dis-intention. Transcending—if it is not already connected through

a continuous movement with a homogenous other and thereby in no

need of transcending—must transcend into a nec trans and can only be

a transcending into the un-enterable: it must be attranscendence.

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 43

☐ “Le pas au-delà,” writes Blanchot: step beyond; not beyond; step beyond

to the not of the step.

☐ Only as transition into the not-going can it reach the zone of diff erence in

its own movement, where first a possible toward of this movement opens

up as a relation to something and an intentional attitude to beings as

beings becomes possible. Th us, intentions are grounded in a structure of

transcendence that, in its turn, is defined by a “not,” a halt, a putting on

hold, or a suspension. Only this arrest off ers the possibility of a relation

to something; only in this suspension happens not something but only

the that of it happening.

☐ Th e “not” of this in-transcendence, therefore, can happen in two ways:

the retreating reference to something and the experience that the hap-

pening of this reference is other than and diff erent from the reference

conceptualized as a relation and its correlates.

☐ Th is arresting of the “not” in in-transcendence clearly defines the mini-

mal structure of language. Whenever and in whatever way language is

spoken, there is reference that distances. But beyond this, something else

also happens that cannot be reduced to this (repelling) reference and the

agents emerging from it, the referents and their relations to each other.

Whether absolutely novel or older than old, it is incommensurable with

them. Th e intentional attitude only exists as crossed out by the event of

its own epoché.

☐ Th erefore, it appears to be insufficient and even erroneous to speak of

“the claim of nihilation that has come to the clearing” (1998, 272) and

to say that “nihilation first requires the ‘no’ as what is to be said in the

letting-be of beings” (273). Th is phrase attributes a linguistic structure

to the “not” that is at the same time also denied. Language is defined as

something claimed—not claimed by a pre-linguistic “existentiell” beyond

of language but by its own exterior limits and, thus, by what cannot raise

T h e R e l a t i o n44 ●

claims. Heidegger, therefore, goes around in circles—even if we consider

all the complications of going, going over, and inaccessibility. He goes

against himself, and he might be going that way because he thinks lan-

guage as a response.

☐ Th e commentary on the structure of transcending (namely, that it must

be that of in-transcending) and intentionality (that it must be suspended

in dis-intending) made it clear that these movements, for Heidegger,

always emerge first in their “not” and their suspension. In very much

the same way, we could clarify the structure of the claim as Anspruch,

as Heidegger understands it, not by reading this word according to the

measure of its dictionary meaning but by reading it based on its context

with an emphatically stressed An: speaking onto.

☐ Th en the claim raised by the “not”—from nowhere by nobody and, mind

you, never—would be a “speaking” onto and in the proximity of language

and its words and particles of negation, which, persisting in the onto,

would never make it out of this proximity to reach language. Th e claim

would be a speaking onto because it would never be a speech in the sense

of a statement or a performative act. It would always be en route or on

the way to language. An-spruch would be toward language, what language

itself is not and that it itself is not present—it would be the irruption of

language, its start.

☐ In fact, according to Heidegger’s text, “the claim of nihilation” cannot be

more than this, cannot be language. For he says of this claim that it calls

for the “no” as what is to be said but never as something already said,

never already given in or by language, rather as a “no” that remains still

and always yet to be said and, as what is to be said, remains forever im-

minent in every possible future. Speaking onto and speaking its “not” onto

language, the claim would be the retentive relation in which language is

kept away from itself but, at the same time, held to and held back from

itself and sustained and held in this holding onto and holding back. But,

unlike what an obvious misunderstanding would suggest, this sustaining

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 45

does not hold in potentia as something always merely “possible” but

never “real.” Rather, it holds on this side of all modal categories, in statu

nascendi et moriendi (as Celan writes in an explicit reference to Heidegger

in a letter to Werner Weber): held out into the happening of language as

perpetual beginning (1997, 398).

☐ Th is understanding of the speaking-onto of the “not” also clarifies the

structure of intention. It would not be some already given relation of an

already constituted consciousness to a content of consciousness, but the

irruption of these relations in their pre-withholding and, therefore, inten-

tion only arising out of the freedom from such a relation and the openness

to it. Th us, every An- that Heidegger writes is to be read not merely as a

“close to” or “onto” in the sense of a given extension, but always also as

the echo the Greek ana- as a privative in- or un-. In words like Anspruch

(claim) or Anruf (call), or Answesen (presence), Angehen (approach), and

Ankunft (arrival), with every “close to” and “onto” at the same time a “not”

and a “no” is also said that relates relation to irrelation, reference to ir-

reference, direction to indirection. An- is the prefix of diff erence—but

not only of an intra-linguistic diff erence between diff erent meanings of

one and the same morpheme but, before meanings can appear at all, the

diff erence between language speaking its “not” and language speaking

onto something. An-, not unlike vor-, zu-, hin-, and aus-, is the prefix of

ontological diff erence. Whoever uses “speaking onto” in this sense in fact

is saying something insufficient and erroneous but is also saying that this

insufficiency and erroneousness belongs to the structure of language.

Language itself is the speaking onto language and therefore a speaking

onto another language or something other than language.

☐ Understood as “speaking onto” (An-spruch) language is its othering (An-

derung).

☐ Th e An- is, therefore, the word and the fore-word of the madness of lan-

guage. In the essay “Language in the Poem” Heidegger writes as a com-

mentary on the line “Th e madman [Wahnsinnige] has died” from Georg

T h e R e l a t i o n46 ●

Trakl’s “Psalm”: “Th e word Wahn comes from Old High German wana

which means ‘without.’ Th e madman senses—senses in fact as no one

else does. But he remains without the sense of others. He is of another

sense. Sinnan originally means: to travel, to strive for, to strike a direc-

tion. Th e Indo-Germanic root sent and set means ‘path.’ Th e departed is

the madman, because he is on his way somewhere else” (1971, 173).3 Th e

other way that the madman follows is the way into de-parture, into a dif-

ference that departs from every possible distinction and discrimination.

So Heidegger can write about the stranger who is the madman without

the sense of the other: “Th is stranger unfolds the essence of the human

into the beginning of what has not yet come to bearing [Tragen] (Old

High German: giberan). Th is quieter and hence more stilling element

in the nature of mortals that has not been borne out is what the poet

calls the unborn” (1971, 175).4 But if the other way—this without-path, the

aporia—leads into what has not been borne out, how do we stand with

what is defined as “gesture” in “A Dialogue on Language”: “the originary

gathering of bearing against and bearing to” (1971, 19)? And how does the

thought of the not-yet-born and the unborn relate to the thought of being

as diff erence, which is described in “Th e Onto-Th eo-Logical Constitu-

tion of Metaphysics” in the following way: “Th at inter-rift [Unter-Schied]

alone grants and holds apart the ‘between,’ in which the overwhelming

and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and

toward each other. Th e diff erence of Being and beings, as the inter-rift of

overwhelming and arrival, is the bearing out [Austrag] of the two in un-

concealing keeping in concealment. Within this bearing out there prevails

a clearing of what veils and closes itself off —and this prevalence bestows

the being apart, and the being toward each other, of overwhelming and

arrival” (2002a, 65).5

☐ In these sentences, it becomes clear that the words “held” and “borne”

are used in the same sense: being held in relation (Ver-halten) is being

borne out (Austrag). Both describe the movement of diff erentiation that

Heidegger writes as Unter-Schied (literally, inter-rift) to separate it from

rational distinctions as well as from diff erences in perception and to

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 47

emphasize the “between” that corresponds to the inter of the unter in

the concept of Unterschied (diff erence). Th e German word Austrag is the

literal translation of the Latin diff erentia, which in turn, is a translation

of the decisive Greek term diaphorá. In a definition provided in the first

essay on Trakl, “Language” (in 1950), diaphorá, diff erence, and bearing

out are juxtaposed with the following commentary: “Th e intimacy of

dif-ference [Unter-Schied] is the unifying element of the diaphora, the

carrying out [Austrag] that carries through. Th e dif-ference carries out

world in its worlding, carries out things in their thinging. Th us carrying

them out, it carries them toward one another” (2001, 200). And a few

sentences later, the series of synonymous concepts is extended to include

Ereignis, the appropriating event, gesture as bearing, and granting: “Th e

dif-ference for world and thing disclosingly appropriates things into bear-

ing a world; it disclosingly appropriates world into the granting of things”

(200). In accordance with these connections, in “Th e Way to Language,”

relation (Verhältnis) is thought out of the appropriating event and, more

precisely, as the appropriative happening of the essence of language: “For

that appropriating, holding, self-retaining is the relation of all relations.

Th us our saying—always an answering—remains forever relational. Rela-

tion [Ver-hältnis as holding to itself] is thought of here always in terms

of the event, and no longer conceived in the form of a mere reference”

(1971, 135). But if relation means appropriation, if appropriation means

diff erence, diff erence means diff erentia and diaphora, and the latter two

mean the carrying out that carries through, while carrying out means

bearing, the question, unavoidable, emerges: How do the concepts from

the Trakl commentary, the unborn and what is not borne out, relate to this

series? And how can this series be unified with the other, the without-

path, and the aporia of madness? Th ese questions are not yet answered

by the remark that Heidegger understood human Dasein in the sense of

ek-sistence as the ecstatic being outside of itself of madness. Th is only

makes the question more urgent of whether this being-in-madness can

be thought with the concepts of diff erence and “bearing out.” Or whether

this madness overburdens “the carrying out that carries through” and the

“bearing out” and is, therefore, thrown away, evacuated, and forgotten.

T h e R e l a t i o n48 ●

Th e question, therefore, is once again whether the madness of ek-sis-

tence, of the “not,” of Being, and of language can still be articulated in a

language—even if it as outré as Heidegger’s.

☐ Or: Is it possible to think the not-borne-out as the not-borne-out? More

precisely: Does the not-borne-out allow itself to be thought only as a not

yet or, beyond that, does it allow itself to be thought as a never borne

out?

☐ Hence: Can the “not” as a “never”—as a never of the sayable—define the

horizon of language? And can this “never,” then, also provide the tran-

scendental horizon of the possibility of what is sayable? Is the “never”

the condition of the happening of language and the horizon of being?

☐ Or: Can the “never” be thought? But: How could it be other than never be

thought? Consequently: If the “never” were the pre- and proto-predicative

happening that is called “Being” and later, more precisely, coming-over

(Überkommnis) because it is what “overcomes,” sur-prises, overwhelms,

more than just comes and—overburdens? Th erefore: Can the unbearable

be borne and borne out?

☐ Otherwise: How could Being—whether as happening, history, destiny,

or coming-over—as the unbearable not be borne? Because: Can the un-

bearable be found at all otherwise unbearable than as always still and

nevertheless borne? And, then, still not? Th erefore: Is there not in Being

itself such a still and nevertheless, a but that keeps Being at a distance

from Being, and keeps Being out of Being, and in this out and apart brings

it together?

☐ However: What does the “out” mean in “out of each other” and in “bearing

out,” if it still contains a “together”? Does it refer to an originary synthesis

before every predicative synthesis? Is not such a reference misleading, if it

suggests a “together” there where we can encounter only an “out of each

other”—even if we encounter it in the impossibility of its encounter?

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 49

☐ In his seminar in Le Th or in September 1966, Heidegger cites a paragraph

from the chapter “On the impossibility of a cosmological proof of God’s

existence” from Kant’s First Critique. Th ese stunning sentences—which,

with their evocation of sinking, floating without stop, and the abyss,

may well have contributed to the descriptions of anxiety in Being and

Time (1962) and “What is Metaphysics?” (1998)—speak explicitly not only

about the groundless but also about the unbearable. Kant writes:

Th e unconditioned necessity, which we need so indispensably as the ultimate

sustainer of all things, is for human reason the true abyss. Even eternity—

however awful the sublimity with which a Haller might portray it—does not

make such a dizzying impression on the mind; for eternity only measures the

duration of things, but it does not sustain that duration. One cannot resist the

thought of it, but one also cannot bear it that a being might, as it were, say

to itself: “I am from eternity to eternity, outside me is nothing except what is

something merely through my will; but whence then am I?” Here everything

caves in beneath us, and the greatest perfection as well as the smallest, hover

without hold before speculative reason, for which it would cost nothing to

let the one as much as the other disappear without the least obstacle. (Kant

1999, 574; Heidegger 2003, 17) God, the highest ground of what is, appears in

its monologue as an abyss that does not carry it but lets it collapse. And Kant

says of this thought of a God that does not carry itself that “one cannot resist

the thought of it, but one also cannot bear it.”

☐ With this the primal scene of critical transcendental philosophy and

speculative idealism is described: an ens realissimum et nesessarium

that does not contain the guarantee of its own being, a God that is not

a causa sui and sinks in the abyss of its own question after a ground

cannot off er beings any more hold and must, therefore, pull down in

its own fall the categories that render it thinkable, necessary, and real.

What remains is the scene of the sinking away of the totality of beings,

“the greatest perfection as well as the smallest,” and with this scene, the

form of representation, the mere idea of reason, in which beings as a

whole together with the categorial structures of their knowability survive

T h e R e l a t i o n50 ●

under the condition of their transcendentality. For the “transcendental

object”—that Kant can only speak of after the sinking away of a world

and its transcendental ground—is not an empirical object and not even

an object at all. Th is object, as Kant writes, “therefore cannot be further

intuited by us, and that may therefore be called the non-empirical, i.e.,

transcendental object = X” (1999, 233). In his Kant book, Heidegger calls

this transcendental X “a Nothing” that is at the same time “Something”

(1997, 86), and describes the X as “the horizon of a standing-against. Th is

horizon is indeed not object but rather a Nothing, if by object we mean

a being which is apprehended thematically” (87). Furthermore: “Only if

the letting-stand-against of . . . is a holding oneself in the nothing can

the representing allow a not-nothing, i.e., something like a being . . .” (51).

In the Kant commentary, the “holding oneself in the nothing” is—like

the anxiety scenes in Being and Time, in the Freiburg lecture, and more

abstractly in the “Letter” in diff erent ways—the gesture of the horizontal-

transcendental constitution of the domain of objectivity and with that,

at the same time, of no longer onto-theologically founded beings held

in the mere form of representation: not a creatio but still a constitutio ex

nihilo. Th e fact that “holding oneself in the nothing,” as Kant examines

it in his critical philosophy, stops at the form of representation (Vorstel-

lung) and the idea of reason, makes these gestures into a regulatio nihili,

and prevents the further analysis of the transcendental form of being

represented and posited.

☐ Heidegger took on this further analysis starting with the exposition of

Dasein in Being and Time. Th is analysis must show that the sinking of the

ens necessarium and, with it, that of mere being (which does not hold and

bear itself) remain irreducible to the beings of representation, the idea,

or the concept. It must expose the fact that transcendental representa-

tion merely displaces the “not” that it encounters in the sinking of the

highest being, instead of engaging it as the decisive content of being. To

do justice to the implications of the anxiety-scene and the unbearable

question of God for his ground, the classical analytical concept of diff er-

ence between ground and the grounded, positing and the posited must

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 51

be transformed into the concept of a diff erence that can no longer be

contained within the horizon of representation and its transcendental

language. Th is analysis, therefore, should yield a concept of diff erence

that retains only a single transcendental remainder, namely that even

the horizon of a transcendental representation off ers no other hold than

the “no hold”—thus, a diff erence in which everything that can bear is

abandoned except for this: that nothing bears. Being must be thought on

the basis of this diff erence and as this diff erence, since Being is neither

its own ground nor grounded in the structure of representation.

☐ Consequently, this diff erence cannot be said in a language of predica-

tion, of position, or of synthesis. It must be the diff erence of ex-thesis,

im-predication, and the ex-positing of all forms of representation, the

concept, and the idea. Not only beings in their being-ness, not only the

highest and grounding being, but primarily and above all Being itself is

to be thought from and as this diff erent diff erence: “Being as diff erence”

(2002a, 64). To bring out the diff erence of this diff erence, Heidegger

writes Unterschied as Unter-Schied—that is, as inter-rift—and transposes

the Greek diasphorá and the Latin diff erentia to the German Austrag.

With this, no rational distinction and no stable distance in the space of

the represented can be defined, only a movement that leaves the space

of representation and moves into an incommensurably other space.

☐ Bearing out is primarily the “bearing out” between diff erence and bear-

ing out. (It is a transposition, a translation, an “Übersetzung” as it is

written in “Anaximander’s Saying” [2002b, 260] to show that it changes

over from one domain of language and thought to another.) Bearing

out now means nothing else but that the concept of diff erence has alto-

gether abandoned its meaning based in theories of representation and

consciousness as well as its historical-philosophical meaning, which is

not replaced by anything of the same order, that is, by any meaning. Not

only does Heidegger pursue in his whole work this elimination of the

historical meanings and contents of words and concepts, he also always

explains it and comments on it. Th is is what we find in “Language,” where

T h e R e l a t i o n52 ●

Heidegger discusses Unter-Schied: “Th e word ‘dif-ference’ [Unter-Schied]

is now removed from its usual and customary usage. What it now names

is not a generic concept for various kinds of diff erences. It exists only

as this single diff erence. It is unique” (2001, 200). It is unique in Trakl’s

poem “A Winter Evening” as well as in its interpretation by Heidegger.

Consequently, it is unique in the now of the moment that is not only

world-historical but also belongs to the history of being, the moment

that the interpretation of the poem tries to grasp. Th e same is true for the

translation of diff erence into bearing out: the historical word is withdrawn

from its customary usage, and it is submitted to an anasemie that takes

out its usual meaning like a false figure from an equation and leaves only

this evacuated meaning: “Being as diff erence” means being as bearing out

in the sense of the eff erence of nominal as well as predicative structures,

as a carrying-out-of into an outside of all hold and, at the same time, as

an opening of an ex, an out, and a not inside the “house” of language.

☐ Being as bearing out is, therefore, the parting with beings and, at the

same time, with every habitual and inhabitable linguistic formulation of

being. Bearing out is to be read as the diff erence and parting from itself

of an elementary philosophical concept, as well as the parting diff erence

of being from itself in which alone it holds itself and holds onto itself as

being in that it holds itself away from itself. Understood as bearing out,

im-predicable being bears itself out in its own proper happening as this

im-predicable being: bearing out fulfills itself as the eff erence, the evacu-

ation and expropriation of historical beings.

☐ Since this evacuation of historical modes of being is the proper historical

happening of Being itself, its expropriating bearing out is also its self-

appropriation and exists as the appropriating event of Being. Bearing out

carries itself out in the sense of an appropriating event in the history of

language. It carries itself out in the sense of an appropriating event in the

history of thought and being, which rests on nothing else but that being

suspends all of its habitual representations, exposes itself as a coming-

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 53

over, and allows beings as diff erent and separate from itself to come to

their proper status of predication. Th e appropriating event that carries

itself out in Heidegger’s Unter-Schied is an appropriation only out of ex-

propriation, only possible due to the ex-propriation, ex-nomination, and

ex-predication of all concepts and sentences of representation that, his-

torically speaking, have fixed and still might fix themselves onto “being”

and “beings.” But it is also the appropriation of ex-propriation and, thus,

the affirmation of the propriative structure of all happenings, regardless

of whether it is understood as belonging to the history of being, thought,

or language. Th erefore, in On Time and Being we read: “Th ought in terms

of the event of propriation, this means: in that sense it expropriates itself

of itself. Expropriation belongs to the event of propriation as such. By this

expropriation, propriation does not abandon itself—rather, it preserves

what is its properly own” (2002c, 22–23).

☐ Bearing out therefore does not only mean evacuation and exference. For

the same reason, it also means carrying to an end and a goal, a telos, in

which something comes to its own and to itself, and thus it designates

once again the archi-teleological movement of the whole history of

philosophy. No matter how diff erent the concepts and practices of dia-

phorá and diff erentia, distinction and diff erence might be in this history,

Heidegger pulls them together into the unity of the fundamental—and

a-fundamental—diff erence and, thereby, clarifies the ference-structure of

the thought of Being in general. Only hence the vocabulary of unity; only

hence the symmetry between bearing “away from” and “toward” each

other; only hence, in the end, the persistence of the phorá and ferre of

bearing: “Th at inter-rift [Unter-Schied] alone grants and holds apart the

‘between,’ in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward

one another, are borne away from and toward each other” (2002a, 65).

And: “Of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world

and things are at one with each other. . . . Th e dif-ference for world and

thing disclosingly appropriates things into bearing a world; it disclosingly

appropriates world into the granting of things” (2001, 200). As long as the

T h e R e l a t i o n54 ●

thought of being is understood as diff erence and carrying out, it remains

caught in the logic of the event of appropriation, of the property even in

expropriation, as well as the logic of bearing and of the bearable.

☐ After this long detour, we must now return to the problem of what

happens with God’s unbearable question about his own ground, with

a ground that does not hold and holds nothing, with what cannot be

borne and with the unbearable that “one cannot resist the thought of.”

Furthermore, we must also ask if what happens here can still be called

or thought of as a happening? And in what relation, if it still is a relation,

does it stand with the other way of madness?

☐ Kant calls the thought of “the ultimate bearer [Träger] of all things” that

is not its own ground—causa sui—a true abyss for finite reason. For rea-

son only positional and propositional being is thinkable, only being as

positing, but never as an ab-solute being emerging from its self, that is,

from the “not” of every position. Such a being without position, such an

ex-posed being is the unbearable from which reason, transcendentally

posting its own horizon and always made anxious by it, must turn itself

away. Bare being cannot be borne. Th at there “is” such a thing is attested

by the thought that Kant calls unbearable. What it also attests to at the

same time is an abyss, a “not” of reason, that belongs to reason as its

own property, and not although but precisely because and as long as this

“not” expropriates reason, dispossesses it, and makes reason unbearable

for itself.

☐ Th e “not” of bare Being is always carried and borne only as the simply

unbearable that cannot be rejected. Being, which does not obey reason yet

belongs to it, must therefore be thought as bearing out of the incapability

to bear out. “Being as diff erence” must be thought as ex-ference of diff er-

ence and diaphorá. As a result, thinking must be thought as un-thinking.

☐ When the unbearable must be thought, it must be thought as the unbear-

ability of thinking itself. It must be thought as the unthinkability or the

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 55

forgetting of thought. Not-thinking belongs to the structure of thinking

itself. As long as it does not think its not-thinking, it does not yet think.

To be thinking, it must bear its diff erence from itself and therefore its own

not-thinking. Th inking must bear its “not being able to bear.”

☐ A diff erence that does not bear anything apart from its not-bearing? It

would bear the “without” of ference. But would it be its own “without”

and could it be the “without” of its own ference? A bearing out that would

be unbearable for itself—could it still give itself in its property and, in

the end, obtain itself ? Are these possessive pronouns in fact justified,

when we are dealing with a “not” that precedes every act of positing by

a subject and, thus, it must release all nouns, pronouns, and possessives

that are made possible by such an act?

☐ A diff erence that bears nothing but a “not” can never exclude the pos-

sibility that the “not” it bears is its own. But it cannot renounce the other

possibility either, namely, that it can not be its own. It is always possible

to turn the “not” into a possessive (even if it is primarily “only” a linguistic

possessive) or into a “not” of something, a genitive or dative “not,” but

with this putting into relation of the “not,” its reduction leads to a depen-

dence that is in fact dissolved by the “not.” Th e “not” remains irreducible

to something other, since it means: not-other. It remains irreducible to

itself, since it means: not-self. Neither other nor self, the “not” is a “not”

also to the Hegelian “other of itself.” It is other than other, the movement

of unstoppable othering and, as such, always the other as well as the self,

yet never one of the two. It is the tie between them but only a tie that

dissolves itself.

☐ Th e “not” would be the solution—but only as the dissolution of the “not.”

Th is is why it bears and does not bear—and the formula “Th e ontological

diff erence is the ‘not’ between beings and Being” (1998, 97) is insufficient.

It is not borne and cannot be the bearing out of itself to itself and to

the beings disclosed by it. Even the directional formula “diff erence from

Being toward beings” (2002b, 281) represents a restriction of diff erence,

T h e R e l a t i o n56 ●

namely, its restriction to the teleological relation between “Being” and

“beings.” If this restriction is removed, the directional character of the

“essence” of diff erence is suspended by the “not,” that it carries and also

does not carry but rather mis-carries, carries away or throws off . Th is way,

bearing out as well as being and beings can only be thought of as one of

the possibilities of diff erence that is always thwarted by the other: that

the “not” of Being, the Being from “not,” is not and does not bear itself

out to beings. Between these two possibilities of the “not,” between these

two impossibilities, a diff erence in the sense of a bearing out can and also

cannot be thought and must remain, therefore, un-thought. Th is is why

Heidegger’s assumption that “this localisation, which assigns the diff er-

ence of Being and beings to bearing out as the approach to their essence,

could even bring to light something all-pervading which pervades Being’s

destiny from its beginning to its completion”6 (2002a, 67) either must be

considered erroneous or must be abandoned. It does not bear out and

pervade because it does not bear witness to the alternative possibility

that the aporetic structure of the “not” breaks up every process before

its end and completion.

☐ “Not” is the exproprium par excellence. It is what approaches yet does not

ever approach—anything or anybody anytime. In this not-approaching

approach, it is the not-bearable that cannot be borne out. Th e diff erence

that bears the “not” of its bearing, at the same time also always bears

the “not” of another bearing and the “not” of something other than bear-

ing. And since it can not be its own, diff erence cannot be thought in the

emphatic sense as bearing out, as the gesture of bearing, the birth and

the gift of the “not” of being, and neither can bearing out be thought

as the unconcealing of the concealment of being and the arrival of be-

ings. Rather, it must be thought as the withdrawal of bearing out, as the

epoché of diff erence, the deactivation of giving, and the depassivation

of bearing. Since it does not ever belong (gehört) and does not belong

to itself, as a “not” it cannot be either heard (hört) or simply not heard;

it can neither be stilled nor reached through the saying not-saying that

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 57

Heidegger speaks about at the end of Identity and Diff erence. As the abyss

of reason, it is also the abyss of hearing and of every language that seeks

to answer it. It is silent not only in the sense that language could be “the

peal of stillness” (2001, 205); it is (if we can still say is here) also mute.

Since it must precede every distinction between outside and inside, it is

simply what cannot be interiorized in memory and yet also what simply

cannot be forgotten either.

☐ Both may be said of Heidegger’s phrase of the forgetfulness of being. In

the final chapter of the Kant book (1929), it is spoken of as “the primal

metaphysical factum [Urfaktum]” of Dasein: “Th is factum consists in the

fact that what is most finite in its finitude is indeed known, but neverthe-

less has not been grasped. Th e finitude of Dasein—the understanding

of Being—lies in forgetfulness. Th is [ forgetfulness] is not accidental and

temporary, but on the contrary is necessarily and constantly formed”

(1997, 163–64). Th e moderate assessment of this forgetfulness shows itself

in that, even as it is a “primal factum,” it nevertheless must be possible to

ascertain; and even as it is forgetfulness, it must still be apprehensible. Al-

most 20 years later, in “Anaximander’s Saying” (in 1946), Heidegger writes

the following, no longer from the perspective of the analytic of Dasein but

from that of the history of being: “the destiny of Being begins with the

oblivion of Being so that Being, together with its essence, its diff erence

from Being, holds back with itself ” (2002b, 275). Th e tension between

forgetfulness (veiling, concealment, holding back with itself) and mani-

festation (unconcelament, experience, clearing) is dissolved here in the

thought of the trace, the trace of the erasure of the trace of diff erence: this

trace “the oblivion of the diff erence,” that Heidegger defines as “the event

of metaphysics” (2002b, 275), remains legible because it bears diff erence

in its very forgetfulness and brings it out from its forgetfulness and bears

it out (275). With the oblivion of diff erence, the trace (the diff erentiality of

diff erence that Derrida writes as diff érance) carries two things: it carries

diff erence and hence the “essence” of Being, but also carries it together

with its forgetting, withholding, and withdrawal. Th erefore, on the one

T h e R e l a t i o n58 ●

hand, it is carrying the “not” of beings in which their Being emerges; on

the other hand, it is carrying the “not” of this “not” in which it conceals

and maintains itself.

☐ Heidegger’s diff erence is the amphora of being, lethe-phorá and aletheia-

phorá, and as such, the sheltering that unfolds itself into unconcealment

and concealment and defines the whole “world-history of the Occident”

(2002b, 275), yet maintains itself securely preserved and remaining

equally in both as sheltering. Heidegger writes: “Th e diff erence collapses.

It remains forgotten” (275). But since this collapse and forgetting remains

unforgotten at least in the trace of a trace, which remains the primal

factum of the self-preservation of being and forgetting, it does not fall

and does not collapse but is rather preserved and maintained as the

erased and self-erasing. Nothing is forgotten. Th e forgetting as thought

by Heidegger is the sublation of forgetting, Being, and self.

☐ But it is not so in the sense of a sublation in an absolute knowledge that

knows itself in its negativity and secures its past in internalizing memory.

It is rather a keeping of forgetting and keeping forgetting in a medium

that—before every subjectivity of consciousness and every objectivity

determined by its representations and concepts—makes consciousness

and self-consciousness possible in the first place, and therefore cannot

be thought or remembered by it. Whereas Hegel can think forgetting as a

moment of internalizing memory, he cannot think it as the unthinkable

that still remains to be thought, and to be thought in its stillness. Forget-

ting does not allow itself to be internalized or remembered. Internalizing

memory, in which the gallery of forgotten contents of consciousness is

re-presented, does not forget the forgotten but forgets forgetting itself. If

in the Kant book, “remembering again” (written in quotation marks) is

described by Heidegger as “the basic fundamental-ontological act” (1997,

164), it does not make a case for a platonic anamnesis of what is, was,

and will be, but rather refers to the primal fact of forgetfulness and hence

to something absolutely un-rememberable that off ers the possibility of

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 59

remembering it as absolute withholding, as that which cannot be held

or held up, kept, maintained, or preserved.

☐ Being forgets itself; this fact of the pre-ontological de-facticity of finite

and thus defective Dasein cannot be raised into internalizing memory

and, therefore, cannot be sublated. Neither can it be reversed, arrested,

or postponed. It resists every classical analytical work of dissolution

as well as every act, albeit a basic act, of separation or repression, of

internalization or opposition or positing. Th at being forgets itself—this

auto-amnesia in the ur- and un-factum of happening in general—blocks

every operation of and every access to memory, remembrance, and think-

ing that tries to grasp and revive, to understand or explain a “what” or a

something. Th is self-forgetfulness of Being is the “inaccessible” (1983, 226),

the unanalyzable, phenomenologically inexposable in every attempt at

access, analysis, and exposition. Precisely because it is an irresolvable im-

possibility and, in that sense, a necessity, it must be thematized, however,

and in fact must be thematized as the un-thematizable. What remains

still unthought is the “oblivion of the diff erence” (2002a, 50), which is

not contingent and episodic, but structural oblivion, forgotten from the

beginning, never-yet-thought and still-to-be-thought.

☐ End of thinking (Denk-Ende)—the one thought to be thought: the un-

thinkable one. Th erefore Heidegger speaks of memory not as internaliz-

ing Erinnerung, but as Andenken, once again with the emphatic isolation

of the prefix, as An-denken, which could hardly be understood diff erently

than “to think against a wall” or “to think of something that withdraws

itself.” Th e one who thinks forgetting thinks the “not” of thinking and

thinks toward, against, and from the “not” of this thinking. He thinks

from that which cannot be thought by his thinking itself, as long as it

happens with this thinking itself and happening this way resists thinking.

Always thought from the diff erence of thinking, the ontological diff erence

is at the same time forgetting and the forgotten, the out—the ex- and

exitus—of thinking, happening, and being. Being as diff erence, diff erence

T h e R e l a t i o n60 ●

as bearing out, therefore, means: the bearing out of the “out” into the

“out”—into lethe, forgetting, death. It also means: the appropriation of

the “out” as the end, from which every experience receives its definition.

Furthermore, it means: the appropriation of beings as those which first

receive their contour from their “out.”

☐ However: this “ek” and “ex,” this lethe, death and forgetting, the “not” does

not allow itself to be thought. It can be said and passed on, written and

repeated, but it cannot be thought. So when Heidegger speaks of An-

denken, when following a metaphor from Hölderlin and Rilke, he speaks

of the trace of diff erence and the trace of the erasure of the trace (2002b

275), he tries to do justice precisely to the factum of the unthinkablity of

this factum. At the same time, however, he also tries to insist that this

“not” of the thinkable must be thought, and with this insistence he goes

astray. He means the trace to be of necessity the trace of diff erence, the dif-

ference always diff erence of being, forgetfulness always the forgetfulness

of diff erence. But forgetfulness—if it deserves its name—must always be

able to be also something non-relational, non-genitive, and non-genetic,

and nothing is able to ascertain that it ever was not without a tie to

Being. Although there are innumerable passages in Heidegger’s texts that

discuss with utmost care the double meaning of the genitive as subjec-

tivus and objectivus, there are none that formulate a serious thinking of

genitivity as such. When being forgets itself, its forgetfulness must also

be able to be the dissolution of the tie that bound it to the forgotten. If

the forgotten diff erence leaves behind a trace, this trace must always also

be able to be the trace not of this diff erence, but released and abandoned

by it without a memory trace. And finally, if the diff erence of Being from

beings is truly a diff erence, it must also be able to be such that it does not

remain the diff erence of Being, but absolved from it and stepping into the

cold light of something indeterminably other than being.

☐ This other difference and this other forgotten, which can never be

without the possibility of a relation to the one examined by Heidegger,

manifests itself in his language with the re-segmentation, the de- and

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 61

re-semantization of customary words and syntagms, in the continuous

denaming of the already named, in the invention of a idiolect, which

should set against or next to the thoughtlessness of common “metaphysi-

cal” languages not only a new terminology but an alternative gesture of

thought. No less does it show itself in an attention to the languages of

poetry and art, which remain without an equal in modernity from Hegel

to Benjamin. Even if he leaves no doubt that he understands language

as the answer to the “not” of beings, the ontological vocabulary is used

conspicuously more discreetly in the texts devoted to language and po-

etry than in the quasi-systematic and historical works. No matter how

infinitely problematic these texts remain, they correspond to a trait of

language that corresponds to neither beings nor Being and cannot be

defined by the forgotten or preserved diff erence between the two. In

them, we encounter something other than Being, its oblivion, and the dif-

ferentiality of its residual traces without, however, being able to exclude

their possibility, obtrusion, and terroristic gestures of gathering. It speaks

with another and for another “not” in which occasionally still another

may intervene.

☐ More not?

☐ Still more. Language is a matter of the still: of the “still” of a not-anymore

and of a still-not. And this still, the one in the other and this in that,

speaks in such a way that its correlates can first extract themselves from

it: the “not” of what has been and what is still to be in the future, of beings

and their presence and absence is spoken and thought from a “still” that

precedes both thinking and language.

☐ Th e concern that this “still” may be only a further variant of the ontologi-

cal diff erence in which its structures of appropriation, stabilization, and

presentation repeat themselves one more time might perhaps be dis-

persed through two observations. On the one hand, the still of language

always says more—no-more and still-more. In its still-more, it exceeds

every comprehensible limit of the form of representation as well as the

T h e R e l a t i o n62 ●

analytic of its collapse in the history of being. It speaks for a still-more

than what all being and its oblivion could grant; for a forgetting that is

not even forgotten or still more than forgotten, and therefore speaks

beyond what is merely thinkable and thinking. Its still-more does not

say: more of the same but still-another and still-other-than-other. With

its “still,” language speaks itself free from everything that can be said and

thought.

☐ On the other hand, the “still” and the “still-other-than-other” of language

is delirious. Two substantial pages of Heidegger’s “Anaximander’s Say-

ing” bear witness to this that are not too far separated from the passage

in which he defines thinking as based on language and its poetry: “Th e

thinking of being is the primordial form of poeticizing in which, before

everything else, language first comes to language, enters, that is to say its

essence. . . . Th inking is the ur-poetry which precedes all poesy” (2002b,

247). Somewhat later, we read: “By revealing itself in what is, Being

withdraws itself. In this way, in its clearing, Being invests the beings with

deliriousness or errancy. What is, happens in errancy, deliriousness in

which it strays from Being and so . . . founds error and delirium. Th is is

the essential space of history” (253–54). Furthermore, after the “epoché

of being” is described as the “clearing keeping to itself with the truth of

its essence,” Heidegger writes: “Each time that Being keeps to itself in

its sending, suddenly and unexpectedly, world happens. Every epoch of

world-history is an epoch of errancy and deliriousness. . . . Th e epochal

essence of Being appropriates the ecstatic essence of Da-sein” (254–55).

☐ Delirious. Aberrant. It is not only the bright madness of language but also

that of Being and the epochs of its history. As Being discloses (or bears

out or gives birth to) itself in beings, it keeps to itself with its truth, with-

draws and conceals itself: it shelt-ers and errs. What it releases from itself

is its errancy—a delirious birth-giver of delirious births. If every epoch of

world history is an epoch of errancy, it is because the epochal character

of being, as it keeps to itself, does not allow anything other than what

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 63

is held outside of its truth and held into the errancy of Da-sein, into the

“there” and “ek” of ek-sistence as its un-truth. To think the epochality of

the epochs of being means to think errancy as the irreducibility of epochs

to a truth that would not be un-truth, withdrawal, and forgetfulness. Th e

ur-poetry of thinking is the err-poetry of Being in which its epoché comes

about as the oblivion of thinking.

☐ Th e essence of being, which lies in its existence and not its essentia (1962,

68), and its diff erentia could be called only errentia (if the word existed

and did not have to be first invented). It does not lead only into errancy,

but is in errancy, and exists, as it spells the “is” of all beings in the errant

language of its errant Being as “errs.”

☐ Th e appropriating event of language (Ereignis)—exposed in the language

of poetry—that bespeaks its happening, its essence, and its existence,

would be the mis-appropriating err-ent (Err-eignis oder Irr-eignis), since

it goes astray unbound from its essence and without access to it. And the

bearing out of its essence, its ek-sistence and errancy would be the bearing

out of its epochal impossibility of bearing out, its holding to itself and its

withdrawal: bearing out in errancy and, always still more errant bearing

out, in its diaphora as aphora, diff erence as diff -errence.

☐ If language were thought otherwise (as logos apophantikos, proposition,

expression, structure of signification, communication of information), it

would always be thought only within a specific epoch but not from the

epochality of each epoch. Th e epoché of the happening of language, how-

ever, says that the opening as such is held back and, therefore, allows still

other epochs to be announced and to arrive. It says that still more errors

and errancies are possible, without the horizon of this still being able to

set a limit and a measure for a truth other than that of the guarding of its

un-truth. Epochality insists on a “still”—a still-not-yet of the appearance

of Being as such, a still-yet and a still-yet-another of the appearance of

Being in its delirious errancy.

T h e R e l a t i o n64 ●

☐ Th ere “is,” then, only a parodic being—a being on the errant track of its

mere being off ered, named, represented, posited, and positioned—but

not one that can be defined by such positional and propositional state-

ments that would allow a more than an epochal, erroneous, delirious,

parodic access to its truth, its refusal. “Clearing of being,” thus, does not

mean that something but rather that always only the disappearance and

the unclearablity of its happening will become clear. “Th e clearing of

what veils and closes itself off ” (2002a, 65) means the revelation of the

impossibility of revelation, the release of the without-being of everything

that could be said and done, of everything that could be.

☐ To the “epochality of being” (2002b, 254) and the ek-static character of

Da-sein corresponds, in terms of the method of thinking, the “step back”

of which Heidegger speaks taking up a phrase from Schiller’s twentieth

letter on “the aesthetic education of man” (2005, 57). In a marginalium

to Identität und diff erenz, he describes it in the following terms: “the step

back before the whole of the destiny of Being is in itself awakening from

the appropriating event into the appropriating event as expropriation

from the jointure” (2006, 59). Th is step, which is supposed to relinquish

the appropriating event of being as expropriation into the errancy of the

without-being, is (or “errs”) similar to the parekbasis in Greek comedy, a

parodic step, that even in the step back from “the whole of the destiny of

being” enters its parodic structure.

☐ “Awakening from the appropriating event into the appropriating event”—

“the step back” does not step out of “the whole of the sendings of Being.”

Even when it does step out, it does so only in such a way that it steps

into it as an outside without interiority. It is a step into the step itself,

going into going itself, thinking toward (An-denken) the toward (An) of

thinking, speaking toward (An-sprechen) the toward (An) of language, yet

it is not something said, thought, or reached. If this step is to be taken,

then it cannot take place as one of the historically already realized or the

still possible further historical steps, thoughts, or statements in which

Being occurs. It cannot be presupposed or experienced as one among

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 65

other “destinies of being,” because the off ering and giving character of

being itself, its sense of “occurring” first occurs in this step—and with

the occurring of “the whole of the giving of Being” is also its going astray

and erring, its un-destinal and expropriating sense: Being shows itself as

what never shows itself but as the self-withdrawing, shows in itself as

withdrawal of every showing. Being: step into the distance and the gift:

an ellipse.

☐ If this is the meaning of aletheia, it is precisely the originary aletheic truth

that errs. It cannot be anything but what originarily jumps away from

itself and, therefore, can only be erroneous. But inasmuch as it is its own

errancy, only this errancy comes close to it: not the direct but only the

indirect word—one may think here of Kierkegaard’s “indirect communi-

cation”; only the “ironic,” yet neither the objectively nor the subjectively

ironic, but rather the irony of history and Being, which cannot be any

rhetorical figure or trope, since as an anatrope it makes possible in the

first place every trope, figure, form, and shape of Being and thinking,

and makes them possible by withholding itself in its silence or muteness.

Being is an-tropological. Th erefore it cannot be grasped by thought, but

must come about through poetry. Poetry is the language in which the

errancy of Being finds itself as errancy as its only truth, the truth of its

truth. It is the err-language that deceives itself as little about the absence

of truth as about the fact that there is truth. Errancy without errancy:

ironic.

☐ Aletheia, thus, should not be understood simply as revelation but as

“a clearing of what veils and closes itself off ” (2002a, 65): as revelation

of concealment. Th e concealed that shows itself in this clearing is not

something kept secret that would be finally—who knows through what

process—exposed. Th e concealed is concealment. It is the unstoppable

itself, unstoppability, that holds itself back; the finitude, the forgetting,

the passing away that conceals itself in everything that shows itself and

what can only show itself as self-concealment by withdrawing from,

erasing and crossing out this (and precisely this) showing concealment.

T h e R e l a t i o n66 ●

Th e privation of lethe in the alpha privativum of aletheia belongs to lethe

itself: unconcealment belongs to concealment. When it allows itself—

ironically or parodically—to be written in poetry and, therefore, to be

thought, it does not stand before our eyes as the unconcealed as such,

but always only in such a way that the moment of its appearance is that

of the blinding glare of precisely this moment and the concealment in

this unconcealment. Th e structure of the aletheic, the originary truth, is

paraletheic: it is the truth about truth that it is the “not” of truth, that it

is always almost and approximately, that it is by or close to truth, to the

now already past and the now still coming truth, that it is forever in error

about error itself and, therefore, not is but errs.

☐ Th ere is no “proper” apart from the refused and, therefore, only a going

astray, deliriously.

☐ Every ousía is para-ousía in this par-odos that off ers no passage to no

ending on this other way that Heidegger reads in the madness (Wahnsinn)

of Trakl’s poem.

☐ A somewhat other way of language than the one that is on the way to

it, already naming language as the goal which can be anticipated and,

therefore, promised; a way

☐ “worstward ho,” Beckett writes, “nohow on”

☐ into the “closeness of the inaccessible” of which “Rimbaud vivant” speaks

(Heidegger 1983, 226)—inaccessible but always taken, always traversed,

always in every errancy fulfilled.

☐ Th e epoché of being holds only to itself—it does not hold others. And hold-

ing to itself, it does not hold on to the name or the matter of “being.”

☐ Th e title of our discussion could also have been epoché—“To hold back

is, in Greek, epoche” (2002c, 9)—and still it would have been misleading.

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 67

We have tried to speak of what holds, what does not hold, and what does

not hold itself and, thus, neither bears nor can be carried or borne. We

had to try it in a perhaps errant and probably labyrinthine way—and

the labyrinth is a horizontal abyss. Our dialogue—or, as we have become

other and have been mute: our contribution to a comical com-mutism—

could not therefore bear any title at all, or only the kind that it does not

bear and that at least refers to the complications of bearing, bearing out,

diff erence, diaphorá.

☐ Th is sounds as if our reflections could begin only here, as if we had to

turn around now and return to begin again. As if we did not know where

our head is or if we still had one and not only feet without a ground. And

what turn could we find if “Our Occidental languages are languages of

metaphysical thinking, each in its own way” (2002a, 73) and are, there-

fore, delirious and erroneous, yet we have tried to take two or more steps

back to probe them, these languages and these steps?

☐ It must not be a word from the lexicon of one of these languages. But it

could be two from diff erent languages, which somehow play together,

approach each other and distance themselves from each other, miss

something and thereby allow something to be read—even if only a little—

from that of which we spoke.

☐ For example?

The Aphora

<

T h e R e l a t i o n68 ●

n o t e s

1. Translation slightly modified.

2. Translation modified.

3. Translation modified.

4. Translation modified.

5. Translation modified. In what follows, the Heideggerian term Austrag will be of central

importance. Th e verb austragen means to carry out, deliver, discharge. To maintain the

continuity of argument that centers around tragen, it will be translated as bearing out

or carrying out depending on the context.

6. Translation modified.

r e f e r e n c e s

Blanchot, Maurice. 1973. Le Pas as-delà. Paris: Gallimard.

Beckett, Samuel. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho” Th ree Novels. New York:

Grove Press, 1996.

Celan, Paul. 1997. Fremde Nähe: Celan als Übersetzer. Ausstellung und Katalog. Ed. Axel Gellhaus.

Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft.

Gasché, Rodolphe. 1994. Th e Eclipse of Diff erence. In Inventions of Diff erence: On Jacques Derrida.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1999. On the Nonadequate Trait. In Of Minimal Th ings. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New

York: Harper.

———. 1971. A Dialogue on Language (1953/4) ; Language in the Poem (1952); Th e Way to Lan-

guage (1959). In On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and

Row.

———. 1983. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 13, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 1910–1976. Frankfurt am

Main: V. Klostermann.

———. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press.

———. 1998. Letter on “Humanism” (1946); On the Essence of Ground (1929); What Is Meta-

physics? (Freiburg Lecture, 1929). In Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeil. Cambridg, UK:

Cambridge University Press.

———. 2001. Language. In Poetry, Language, Th ought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter, 185–208. New

York: Perennial.

———. 2002a. Th e Onto-Th eo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics (1956–57). In Identity and

Diff erence. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2002b. Anaximander’s Saying (1946). In Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian Young and

Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2002c. On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

We r n e r H a m a c h e r ● 69

———. 2003. Four Seminars: Le Th or 1966, 1968, 1969, Zähringen 1973. Boomington, IN: Indiana

University Press.

———. 2005. Übungen für Anfänger. Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen:

Wintersemester 1936/37. Ed. Ulrich von Bülow. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schiller

Gesellschaft.

———. 2006. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 11, Identität und diff erenz. Frankfurt am Main: V. Kloster-

mann.

Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press.

C e n t e n n i a l R e v i e w300 ●

Weber, Religion and Media (Stanford 2001) and Violence, Identity, and Self-

Determination (Stanford 1998), and with Henri A. Krop and Arie L. Molendijk,

Post-Th eism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Peeters 2000).

CHRISTOPHER FYNSK is Director of the Centre for Modern Th ought at the

University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is author of Th e Claim of Language: A

Case for the Humanities (Minnesota 2004), Infant Figures (Stanford 2000),

Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (Stanford 1996), and Heide-

gger: Th ought and Historicity (Cornell 1986, 1993).

JUAN MANUEL GARRIDO is Assistant Professor in the Instituto de Hu-

manidades at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. He has recently

published La Formation des formes (Galilée 2008).

RODOLPHE GASCHÉ is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato

Chair in Comparative Literature at the University at Buff alo. He is the author

of, among other books, Th e Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy

of Reflection (Harvard 1986), Inventions of Diff erence: On Jacques Derrida

(Harvard 1994), Th e Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Harvard 1998),

Of Minimal Th ings: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford 1999), Th e Idea

of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford 2003), Th e Honor of Th inking:

Critique, Th eory, Philosophy (Stanford 2007), and most recently, Europe, An

Infinite Task (Stanford 2009).

STEPHEN D. GINGERICH received his doctorate in Comparative Literature

from the University at Buff alo in 2000. He is an Assistant Professor in the

Modern Languages Department of Cleveland State University. His transla-

tions from Spanish and German have appeared in CR and L’Esprit créateur,

and his recent articles bring continental philosophy and literary theory to

bear on contemporary Hispanic literature, philosophy, and culture.

WERNER HAMACHER is Director of the Institute for General and Com-

parative Literature at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, and Dis-

tinguished Global Professor at New York University. He has published widely

C e n t e n n i a l R e v i e w ● 301

about the interrelations between philosophy, literature, and politics, and is

the author of Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

(Stanford 1996) and Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (Stanford 1999).

PEGGY KAMUF is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Com-

parative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her most recent

book is Book of Addresses (Stanford 2005). She has also edited works by Der-

rida, most recently the two volumes of Psyche: Inventions of the Other (with

Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford 2007–2008), and translated texts of Derrida,

Cixous, and Nancy.

JEAN-LUC NANCY is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université

Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. Among the most recent of his many books to be

published in English are Listening (Fordham 2007), Dis-Enclosure: Th e Decon-

struction of Christianity (Fordham 2008), and Noli me tangere (Bayard 2008).

HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER studied philosophy and biology. Since 1997 he

has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in

Berlin. His main topics of interest are the history of molecular biology and

the history and epistemology of experimentation. He has written numerous

articles on molecular biology and the history of science. Among other books,

he published Toward a History of Epistemic Th ings (Stanford 1997), Classical

Genetic Research and Its Legacy: Th e Mapping Cultures of Twentieth-Century

Genetics and From Molecular Genetics to Genomics: Th e Mapping Cultures

of Twentieth-Century Genetics (edited with Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Routledge

2004); Epistemologie des Konkreten (Suhrkamp 2006); Experimentalsysteme

und epistemische Dinge (Suhrkamp 2006); Heredity Produced: At the Cross-

roads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 (edited with Staff an Müller-

Wille, MIT 2007); Historische Epistemologie zur Einführung ( Junis 2007).

STEFFEN STELZER is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department

at the American University in Cairo. He received his PhD from the Freie

Universität in Berlin, did research at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris

and at Harvard, and taught at Johns Hopkins. His areas of specialization are,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.