[O]ne should raise the question of the ontological status of the ‘power’ which sustains particular ‘philological’ configurations—for Nietzsche himself, it is the will to power; for Heidegger, it is the abyssal game of ‘there is’ which ‘sends’ different epochal configurations of the disclosure of the world. In any case, one cannot avoid ontology: historicist hermeneutics cannot stand on its own. Heidegger’s history of Being is an attempt to elevate historical (not historicist) hermeneutics directly into transcendental ontology[...]. Heidegger, however, leaves open what one might call the ontic question: there are obscure hints all around his work of ‘reality’ which persists out there prior to its ontological disclosure. That is to say, Heidegger in no way equates the epochal disclosure of Being with any kind of ‘creation’—he repeatedly concedes as an un-problematic fact that, even prior to their epochal disclosure or outside it, things somehow ‘are’ (persist) out there, although they do not yet ‘exist’ in the full sense of being disclosed ‘as such’, as part of a historical world. But what is the status of this ontic persistence outside ontological disclosure?