When Heidegger speaks of the untruth as inherent to the truth-event itself, he has two different levels in mind:

• On the one hand, when he is engaged in inner-worldly affairs, forgets the horizon of meaning within which he dwells, and even forgets this forgetting itself (exemplary here is the 'regression' of Greek thought that occurs with the rise of the Sophists: what was a confrontation with the very foundation of our Being turns into a thrifling play with different lines of argumentation, with no inherent relation to truth).
• On the other hand, the way this horizon of meaning itself, in so far as it is an epochal Event, arises against the background of -- and thereby conceals -- the imponderable Mystery of its emergence, just as a clearing in the midst of a forest is surrounded by the dark thickness of the woods.

Leaving aside the difficult question of how these two levels are co-depenedent, let us focus on the second, more fundamental level: is it enough to perceive the Untruth in the heart of Truth as the imponderable background against which every epochal truth-event occurs? It seems that even the parallel with Lacan (in so far as we admit it as legitimate) would justify this conclusion: for Lacan also, in order to lie properly, our speech has already in advance to refer to the big Other qua the guarantee of Truth -- this is why, in contrast to a simple animal feigning, man can feign to feign, he can lie in the guise of truth itself, like the Jew from the famous anecdote quoted by Freud ('Why are you telling me you're going to Lemberg, when you are really going to Lemberg?'). So, for Lacan, the 'untruth' which is not in this sense derivative of the dimension of truth would be simply the imponderable thickness of the pre-symbolic Real itself as the unsurpassable background of every symbolic universe.... It was William Richardson who -- from his unique knowledge of Heidegger and Lacan, and in a direct response to Sallis's essay -- drew this conclusion when he said [Heidegger among the Doctors]: 'When I hear Heidegger talk about lethe as "older" than the essence of truth, I hear what Lacan means by the real.'

Here, however, one has to venture a further step, the step whose necessity is indicated by Heidegger himself when, in the elaboration of this notion of an untruth older than the very dimension of truth, he emphasizes how man's 'stepping into the essential unfolding of truth' is a 'transformation of the being of man in the sense of a derangement [Ver-rückung] of his position among beings.' The 'derangement' to which Heidegger refers is not, of course, a psychological or clinical category: it indicates a much more radical, properly ontological reversal/aberration, when the universe itself, in its very foundation, is in a way 'out of joint', thrown off its rails. What is crucial here is to remember that Heidegger wrote those lines in the years of his intensive reading of Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom, a text which discerns the origin of Evil precisely in a kind of ontological madness, in the 'derangement' of man's position among beings (his self-centredness); in his early writings, Hegel also refers to such an ontological madness (the 'night of the world', the radical withdrawal of the subject from the world, its radical self-contradiction) as a sine qua non, a necessary intermediate step ('vanishing mediator') in the passage from 'prehuman nature' to our symbolic universe.

P. 80-82

¶ 6:26 PM