13. We want to advance the concept of originary inauthenticity, which we freely adapt from Heidegger. The thought is that human existence is formed in relation to a brute material facticity that cannot be mastered. Any attempt at authenticity slips back into an inauthenticity from which it cannot escape, but which it would like to evade. It is in this movement of evasion, of the self’s turning away from itself, that our fatal embeddedness in materiality is revealed. Inauthentic existence is experienced as a burden, a weight, something to which I am riveted without being able to know why or know further, like Racine’s Phaedra rooted to the fact of her erotic longing for her stepson from which she longs to escape. Or like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, languishing within an unsatisfied desire, an unbearable physical weariness whose only escape is her father’s pistol. Inauthentic existence has the character of an irreducible thatness, what Heidegger calls ‘das Daß seines Da’. I feel myself bound to the ‘that of my there’, to the sheer fact of my facticity, in a way that demands a response.

14. However, from this point onwards we part company with Heidegger. For us, the nature of this response cannot be the authentic decision of existence that comes into the simplicity of its fate (Schicksal) by ‘shattering itself against death’ as Heidegger melodramatically puts it. The response will not be the heroic mastery of our inauthentic state in the authentic present of what he calls the Augenblick or ‘moment of vision’, which produces an experience of ecstasy and rapture. On the contrary, for us, the response to the materiality of our inauthentic state is a more passive and less heroic decision. This calls for comic acknowledgement rather than tragic affirmation.

¶ 11:34 PM