At the heart of presence, at the heart of the determination on which the metaphysical edifice is built, Heidegger identifies a gap that cannot be filled, an absence older than presence itself. For the present is not envisaged as the "effect" of a certain withdrawal that is infinitely rather richer and fuller than those present things with which metaphysics concerns itself, of a certain twofold horizon in excess of presence itself:

But because this abandonment in originally remembering-awaiting (belongingness to being and the call of beyng), it is in itself no mere sinking and dying away in a not-having, but conversely, it is the present that aims at and is solely carried out into decision: moment. The raptures are moved into this moment, and this moment itself unfolds only as the gathering of the raptures.

P. 268

The present is now entirely envisaged from out of the founding event, the event of being as Ereignis, which frames both past and present in terms of a belongingness to being, and of the call of being, as if time now stretched between these two horizons, at once retaining the trace of an event forever past and, at the same time, tending toward that event as always to come. We must resist interpreting this turn toward past and future in psychologisitic, even subjectivistic terms: it is the abandonment, the present itself that is structurally oriented in that way, even if such an orientation implicates man from the start and defines who he is; as a result, and insofar as grounding involves a turning toward that toward which one is always turned, "remembrance" and "awaiting" must not be understood psychologically, as possibilities or faculties that would belong to man, but as the very form of grounding itself, in which man as such takes place for the first time (as Da-sein). Any grounding, whether it is in the order of thought, poetizing, creation, leadership, etc., amounts to a remembering-expecting. These determinations must be understood historically (geschichtlich) and not anthropologically. It is not that the present remembers and anticipates in an "intentional"--retentional and protentional--sense. Rather, the present comes to be constituted in this remembering-awaiting. The source of time is not so much the present as the twofold horizon of belongingness and the call. As such, the present bears the trace of this event that is "before" and "after" it, and toward which it is extended, in a rapturous gesture, of which it is thus rememberance and the anticipation. Time is as it were stretched out on the frame of being, toward it tends as toward this past and this future, as this withdrawal that marks an irreducible event, and of which it is itself the trait. Time comes and goes, it stretches and returns, as in a bow or a hairpin turn (Kehre). In a way, we are faced here with something like yet another reworking of the Husserlian analysis of temporality, and of the tension (retention-protension) that characterizes it: with the significant difference that time is no longer so much constituted for and by a consciousness, or even by an ex-sistence, as it is temporalized from out of the twofold horizon of the event of being. Such is the reason why Heidegger, reinscribing the determination that characterized the "proper" mode of the present in Being and Time, prefers to designate the present as the "moment" (Augenblick), that is, not as an abstract point along the line of time, but as the gathering of the raptures of time, their point of convergence or intersection--their critical point, if crisiV does indeed involve a sense of decision, a point at which an incision is made is inserted into the fabric of being.

Pp. 159-160

¶ 9:04 PM