What accounts for the chilling character of these passages is that, here, Heidegger does not merely provide a new variation on his standard rhetorical figure of inversion (“The essence of violence has nothing to do with ontic violence, suffering, war, destruction, etc.; the essence of violence resides in the violent character of the very imposition/founding of the new mode of the Essence – disclosure of communal Being – itself.”); implicitly, but clearly, Heidegger reads this essential violence as something that grounds – or, at least, opens up the space for – the explosions of ontic or physical violence itself. Consequently, we should immunise ourselves against the effect of the violence Heidegger is talking about by classifying it as "merely" ontological: although it is violent as such, imposing a certain disclosure of world, this world constellation also involves social relations of authority. In his interpretations of Heraclitus fragment 53 ("Conflict [polemos] is the father of all things and king of all. Some he shows to be gods and others men; some he makes slaves and others free"), Heidegger - in contrast to those who accuse him of omitting to consider the "cruel" aspects of ancient Greek life (slavery, etc.) -- openly draws attention to how "rank and dominance" are directly grounded in a disclosure of being, thereby providing a direct ontological grounding to social relations of domination:

If people today from time to time are going to busy themselves rather too eagerly with the polis of the Greeks, they should not suppress this side of it; otherwise the concept of the polis easily becomes innocuous and sentimental. What is higher in rank is what is stronger. Thus Being, logos, as the gathered harmony, is not easily available for every man at the same price, but is concealed, as opposed to that harmony which is always mere equalizing, the elimination of tension, leveling.[P. 102]

There is thus a direct link the ontological violence and the texture of social violence (of sustaining relations of enforced domination) that pertains to language.

Pp. 70-71

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