Well, what the hell is Ereignis? Understanding the concept requires situating it within Heidegger’s later conception of the “history of being”; I’ve talked smack about that view of the history of philosophy before, but for the moment we’ll give him his due. For later Heidegger, “being” is not a brute fact or timeless dimension of human experience but something that irrupted into human consciousness with the Greeks and can undergo decisive changes (such as he hoped the Nazi-Zeit would bring). Ereignis is a word for that irruptive dimension, the historical point at which thought can latch onto Being: it is equally implicated in thought, being, and history.

What could this possibly have to do with the expressive facilities for talking about individual possible worlds? Well, consider this: each use of a “nominal” to refer to a point is a miniature instance of Ereignis (though Heidegger called it a singulare tantum, Latinspeak for mass noun, we won’t reopen that issue at this point). Using the nominal, we can talk about how something is in a way distinct from its “essence” as parceled out over different possible configurations. Furthermore, I think there is a natural-language phenomenon which illustrates this very nicely: plays on words like the title of this post, which “hybridize” sayings and phrases in a way that subverts figural expectations: that sort of hybrid language creates a path of access to a truly singular description, one which breaks the bonds of the “eternal return” of metaphor in cliche and offers access to a form of words which says one thing, be it true or not. (I’m attracted to this as a theory of prose, but perhaps it has the consequence that one is not speaking prose without even knowing it after all.)

¶ 11:55 AM