enowning
Thursday, January 18, 2007
 
Isn't the critique of the the Cartesian subject a simple reversal, privileging being? Michel Haar responds in Heidegger and the Essence of Man.
The very idea of subjectivity, which is that of man's self-positing and positing the outside as object, rests on the idea of something facing. Yet is the thought of being not then simply a reversal of the metaphysics of subjectivity, insofar as it would simply turn the subject's self-positing around into the self-positing of being? Moreover, is not the fact that being somehow reassumes and takes on all the functions of the subject the index of this reversal?

To reply to this objection, according to which the subject-object relation would merely be inverted--being becoming the true subject and man its object--Heidegger develops the difficult notion of Ereignis, which is to think the tie between man and being in a quite different way. Their joining would precisely not be a link in the sense of a relation "with or without dialectic," in the sense of an attachment of two terms originally separated, but of an initial Identity, a full and unlimited "belonging together," a "constellation," an "interlacing," or "intertwining". Ereignis is an interbelonging of being and man, as "the belonging together of call and obedience", would be more original than the relation considered in terms of its two moments. Only a "leap" of thinking, a leap that "leaps away from being," would allow us to understand this wholly reciprocal appropriation, allow us to see that being belongs as much to us as we belong to it, since "being itself belongs to us; for only in us can it essence, i.e. presence as being." "The leap is the abrupt entry into the realm from out of which man and being have always already reached one another in their essence, because both are appropriated over to one another out of a reaching-towards. The entry into the realm of this transpropriation first attunes and determines the experience of thinking."

P. 65-66
Continued.
 
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