This vase which has always been there, and which has long been used to make us conceive the mysteries of creation by means or parables, analogies and metaphors, may still be of use to us.

To have confirmation of the appropriation of the vase for this purpose, look up what Heidegger affirms when he writes about das Ding. He’s the last in a long line to have meditated on the subject of creation; and he develops his dialectic around a vase.

I will not be concerned here with the function of das Ding in Heidegger's approach to the contemporary revelation of what he calls Being and that is linked to the end of metaphysics. You can all of you easily go to the volume entitled Essays and Lectures and to the article on das Ding. You will see the function Heidegger assigns it of uniting celestial and terrestrial powers around it in an essential human process.

Today I simply want to stick to the elementary distinction as far as a vase is concerned between its use as a utensil and its signifying function. If it really is a signifier, and the first of such signifiers fashioned by human hand, it is in its signifying essence a signifier of nothing other than or signifying as such or, in other words, of no particular signified. Heidegger situates the vase at the center of the essence of earth and sky. It unites first of all, by virtue of the act of libation, by its dual orientation - upwards in order to receive and toward the earth from which it raises something. That's the function of a vase.

This nothing in particular that characterizes it in its signifying function is that which in its incarnated form characterizes the vase as such. It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not or them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with the same sense.

This is the moment to point to the fallacious opposition between what is called concrete and what is called figurative. If the vase may be filled, it is because in the first place in its essence it is empty. And it is exactly in the same sense that speech and discourse may be full or empty.

P. 120

¶ 4:59 PM