The connection of owning and showing carried by Ereignis is made more evident when Heidegger draws on an etymological trace to say, "Ereignis ist eignende Eräugnis" (GA 12:253). We could read this as "enowning is the owning bringing-before-the-eye." Eräugnis (from Auge, eye) is a bringing-before-the-eye, bringing forth into disclosive appearance. Something shows up, just as it is, in its own way. This is not necessarily just to be taken literally, visually. Enowning as the heart of saying-showing may come into thinking as the arising of an insight, a decisive gathering up of the thinking experience around some matter, especially an insight into enowning itself, by whatever word is invoked. It can also involve sound, silence, and dwelling with things (another preview, this time pointing forward to chapter 4).

The showing of enowning always remains in dynamic tension with what is not shown, in relation to both the showing of things and of language. Neither language nor things are "boundlessly unconcealed"; there is always more than meets the eye or something held back. The arising as such of language and things always withdraws from thought and perception. It shows itself only in the intimations of this withdrawing. We can take that a little deeper, at least in a preliminary way. "Ereignis withdraws what is fully its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought in terms of Ereignis, this means: in that sense it expropriates [enteignet] itself of itself. Expropriation [Enteignis] belongs to Ereignis as such. By this expropriation, Ereignis does not abandon itself--rather, it preserves what is its own" [Pp. 22-23]. Enteignis is fairly nearly untranslatable. "Expropriation" for it is no better than "appropriation" for Ereignis, but it does tell us one thing: Enteignis pulls in the other direction from Ereignis. To enowning, dynamically bringing everything into what is its own, belongs movement that goes the other way, too. How? In a different context the translators of Contributions translate Enteignis as dis-enowning [P. 164]. What does this mean? Heidegger says that what is ownmost to language, language's own arising and holding-sway, refuses to come to conceptual, propositional language and that this refusal or withholding belongs to its very arising as such, which denies its ownmost holding-sway, its emerging as such, to our usual notions [P. 164]. What are our usual notions? Being. Presence. Essence. Subject. Object. Instead of "being" coming to word in a concept, we are here trying to think be-ing, which "is" enowning, which moves as saying-showing. "Being" is only an idea. "Be-ing" and "enowning" and "saying" are words that try to say something that is neither a being nor an idea. Any attempt to grasp and fix enowning is not something that can be lifted out by itself but is always the enowning of things, it is, in a sense, dis-enowned of "itself." There is nothing here that can be fixed and reified. Enowning is ongoing dynamic relationality, which necessarily brings continuous change.

Pp. 78-79

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