What is the question best adapted to the event, then, if not that of its what? How does one qualify verbs, as opposed to substantives? What, if any, is, if not the definition—for definitions apply to essences only—at least the formulation or the proposition of being? It is when philosophy can no longer say that being is this or that, only when being has been radically distinguished from any thing or being or any attribute that would immediately assume the presence of a previously given substance, that formulations such as "das Sein ereignet," "das Sein west," "es gibt Sein" become not only possible, but indeed necessary. For such formulations suspend and neutralize the metaphysical operation of definition, attribution, qualification that belongs most intimately to the quidditative interpretation of philosophical discourse. Yet these formulations do not simply give up on qualifying the matter at stake. They indeed qualify Sein, only verbally, emphasizing from the very start that, at issue in the issue of Sein, is precisely something like an Ereignis, or rather an Ereignen, a wesen or a Wesung (and not a Wesen), a Geben (and not some thing given). Sein, the noun Sein, is first and foremost a verb, a noun that is always qualified by way of a doubling of its verbal origin. With Heidegger, being can no longer be mistaken for a being, so long as we envisage being as the originary, always presupposed, and always operative event within which every thing, every event, including the event of language itself and its metaphysical grammar, takes place. And so, if one wishes to extend these formulations, if one wishes to go deeper and further into that which is being designated in such formulations, one needs to shift the questioning from the what of metaphysics to the how of premetaphysical thought. For this is how verbs are qualified: not nominally, but adverbially. Adverbs address verbs in the how of their unfolding, in terms of unfolding. And so, the proper mode of questioning with respect to being will have always begun, for Heidegger, with the quomodo. How is being? Wie west das Sein? This, Heidegger tells us time and again, especially in Contributions to Philosophy, is the question with which the other, nonmetaphysical, nonrepresentational thinking begins. And yet, holding to this question, remaining faithful to the demand contained in the simplicity of the question, is a task that proves to be infinitely complex, a task that Heidegger himself will have found most difficult to achieve (and in a sense, all I shall be attempting here is to show the way in which this difficulty persists in Heidegger’s work, and the form it takes). For thinking verbally (and adverbially), thinking from out of the originary event of presence, is an enterprise that runs against our entire tradition, our perhaps naturally representational tendency, our very grammar. "Wie west das Seyn?", even before Heidegger formulated the question in precisely those terms, is the question with which he was concerned. And to this question, Heidegger will have provided one answer and one answer only. To the question regarding the "how" or the being of being, Heidegger will have retained a single word, the meaning of which evolved, in ways that are not easily identifiable, but that I shall try to clarify: Da-sein. Moving away from addressing beings in their whatness, Heidegger addresses them in terms of their being-there, that is, in terms of the "there is" that exceeds the mere physical contours of the individuated thing and that this thing is, retaining it, displaying it, as the dimension of its own virtuality, in the moment in which, as a thing, it also erases it. Dasein is the word—primarily an adverb—that will have served to capture the "how" of being, or being as the very "how," the style, or the garment in which things wrap and present themselves. Da-sein will have designated this intangible, invisible, impalpable dimension at the heart of the tangible and the visible. It will have pointed in the direction of the "there is" that sustains and traverses every phenomenon, in the direction of the phenomenality of all phenomena, but with this remarkable characteristic that this phenomenality is itself non-phenomenal, beyond phenomenality. Heidegger’s phenomenology is a phenomenology of the inapparent. The being of what is, and which never can be confused with its beingness, its presence, is the "there is" prior to all present beings. Being unfolds as "there" (da), or as the "there is" of everything that is: not as the "here" and "now" of a concrete being individuated in the world, but as the dimension, nowhere visible, never actual, yet always in place, virtually, whence beings emerge and tower up. Not a concrete hic et nunc, then, but the very opening up of space and time, the unfolding of the Open as such, or the happening of the clearing in which things take place and a world is born. For every thing, in its hic et nunc, is the crystallization of a prespatial locality and a pretemporal moment, of a single dimension made of two co-originary sheaves (time and space). It is as this primary dimension that Da-sein is the adverb of being. The adverb, and not the noun. Even if, and at the cost of some confusion, the consequences of which remain to be analyzed fully, in Being and Time in particular, but in the Beiträge too and in the texts surrounding the Beiträge as well as in later texts, Heidegger will have never been in a position, or indeed even willing to dissociate entirely the adverbial, preindividual aspect of the Seinsfrage from the question of what, with the necessary caution, I would like to call the "subject" of being, thus pointing to the "who" of being. In other words, Heidegger will have never been in a position to separate completely the question of the how of being, which does not immediately call for an individual qualification of this how, with the question of man as the "proper" name of being. As if, as Heidegger explicitly suggests, being "needed" man, as if the being or the "how" of being were inevitably and necessarily drawn to selfhood, as if being came into its own and were properly only in being preserved in man. As if being destined itself to man. That being needs and opens up the domain of the proper is something that Heidegger will have assumed throughout. Could it have been otherwise? Does the thinking of being as event necessarily lead to thinking the event as propriation? Does the thinking of being as Ereignis necessarily open onto this other humanism Heidegger speaks of in his letter to Jean Beaufret from 1946? And is this other, more primordial form of humanism not still a form of anthropocentrism? Can philosophy escape anthropocentrism altogether? Or can the question of being be deployed anew so as to not even presuppose the human as one pole of its unfolding?

¶ 4:05 PM