Each time that Heidegger refers the question of being to the question of the proper-ty (propre), of propriate, of propriation (eigen, eignen, ereignen, Ereignis especially) this dehiscence bursts forth anew. Its irruption here though does not mark a rupture or turning point in the order of Heidegger's thought. For already in Seim und Zeit the opposition of Eigentlichkeit and Uneigentlichkeit was organizing the existential analytic. Once there has been a certain valuation of the property (propre) and Eigentlichkeit, it can never be interrupted. This Permanency, which is that of valuation itself, must be accounted for and its necessity unremittingly interrogated. The order of Heidegger's thought is, however, regularly disoriented by an oblique movement which inscribes truth in the process of propriation. Although this process is as if magnetized by a valuation or an ineradicable preference for the property (propre), it all the more surely leads to this proper-ty's (propre) abyssal structure. In such a structure, which is a non-fundamental one, at once superficial and bottomless, still and always <<flat,>> the proper-ty (propre) is literally sunk. Even as it is carried away of itself by its desire, it founders there in the waters of this its own desire, unencounterable-of itself. It passes into the other.

In its turn, the opposition between metaphysic and non-metaphysic encounters its limit here, the very limit of that opposition and of opposition's form. This might give the impression then of a new metaphysic of property, indeed a new metaphysic. The many instances of such an impression are in fact attested to by the abundance and connotative qualities of statements to that effect. But—-if the form of opposition and the oppositional structure are themselves metaphysical, then the relation of metaphysics to its other can no longer be one of opposition.

Abysses of truth
Metaphysical questions and the question of metaphysics have only to be inscribed in lhe more powerful question of propriation for their space to be reorganized. This occurs quite regularly, if not in fact spectacularly. Its first incidence in the final chapter of Nietzsche (Die Erinnerung in die Metaphysik) is not a fortuitous one. Here a proposition of the type <<Das Sein selbst sich anfänglich ereignet>> (which, as Klossowski has aptly observed, defies translation) gives way to a proposition in which <<Being>> itself is reduced (Das Ereignis er-eignet)—-gives way, but only after the intervention between them of <<... und so noch einmal in der eigenen Anfängnis die reine Unbedurftigkeit sich ereignen läßt, die selbst ein Abglanz ist des Anfänglichen, das als Er-eignung der Wahrheit sich ereignet.>> Finally then, once the question of production, doing, machination, the question of the event (which is one meaning of Ereignis) has been uprooted from ontology, the propert-y or propriation is named as exactly that which is proper to nothing and no one. Truth, unveiling, illumination are no longer decided in the appropriation of the truth of being, but are cast into its bottomless abyss as non-truth, veiling and dissimulation. The history of Being becomes a history in which no being, nothing, happens except Ereignis' unfathomable process. The property of the abyss (das Eigentum des Ab-grundes) is necessarily the abyss of proper-ty, the violence of an event which befalls without Being.

Perhaps truth's abyss as non-truth, propriation as appropriation/a-propriation, the declaration become parodying dissimulation, perhaps this is what Nietzsche is calling the sryle's form and the no-where of woman. The gift, which is the essential predicate of woman, appeared in the undecidable oscillation of to give oneself/to give oneself for, give/take, let take/appropriate. Its value or price (coût) is that of poison. The price (coût) of a pharmakon. Heidegger, furthermore, in Zeit und Sein (1962), submits the question of Being itself to the enigmatic operation of the abyssal gift (le don s'endette/le don sans dette).

In his development (which cannot be reconstructed here) of the es gibt Sein Heidegger demonstrates that the giving (Geben) and the gift (Gabe), which in fact amount to nothing (to neither a subject being nor an object being), cannot be thought of in terms of Being. Because they constitute the process of proptiation, the giving and the gift can be construed neither in the boundaries of Being’s horizon nor from the vantage point of its truth, its meaning. Just as there is no such thing then as a Being or an essence of the woman or the sexual difference, there is also no such thing as an essence of the es gibt in the es gibt Sein, that is, of Being’s giving and gift. The <<just as>> finds no conjuncture. There is no such thing as a gift of Being from which there might be apprehended and opposed to it something like a determined gift (whether of the subject, the body, of the sex or other like things—so woman, then, will not have been my subject.)

Pp. 115-21

¶ 8:17 AM