The cad asks for ten pounds, and is offered four and sevenpence: the encounter involves not just indebtedness and impropriety (Schuld) but also bartering, like the bartering Heidegger describes when discussing the Anaximander Fragment. Beings come, then go back whence they came, thus rendering justice and paying penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time, the fragment tells us. ‘Thus,’ Heidegger writes, ‘they exhibit a kind of barter system in Nature’s immutable economy’. What the Fragment, an incomplete account from deep, deep in the past – just like the Wake’s accounts of the encounter, or encounters, of which Joyce himself only received partial accounts – represents to Heidegger is the dawn of that destiny whereby Being, the presencing of what is present, is sent to us – the dawn, that is, of the possibility of the Ereignis, the event, ‘in which the history of the Western world comes to be born out, the event of metaphysics’. Finnegans Wake, the book of history, of knowledge and of ignorance, of rereadings, repetitions and exegeses, turns around the possibility of the event: of the event that might have happened way back in the park, or might happen again, or maybe is continually happening and has never stopped – and round the possibility of understanding it, of finally containing it in thought. In Joyce’s text, the event unfolds as possibility, as destiny. It comes round again and again; it is retaled. But what it brings round is not Being, presencing and presence – rather, it reopens all lines of difference and credit around a monetary sign, an event of economic exchange. It is a tale that is retailed, again and a gain. Joyce’s Ereignis is not that of presence, but rather of différance. In it, es gibt Sein becomes es gibt Geld.

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