I write this letter with a Luger pistol on my work desk. It is here, at hand; it is, for the moment, only a utensil waiting for a project to embody it. That would give it a sense, a decision to give it over to the density of historicity. I recall, now, and don't take this as a digression (although, I suppose, you must accept, exempt my wanderings, I have a right to them, I have a right to everything, I even have the inopportune right of enjoying the art of writing, from which I was always estranged and which now, belatedly, is revealed to me), a class of Heidegger in the course on logic, around 1934, that I didn't complete, given that I took part in meetings driven more by curiosity than by eagerness for the word of the Master. Don't ask me why. I have, also and perhaps over all, the right to forget, or to remember with imprecision, in fragments. Heidegger said something correct, yet surprising, perhaps the surprise in the surprising dwelled in that it was a course on logic. He spoke of Hitler and Mussolini. I remembered it on telling you of the Luger. What is an object without a human project to grant it a sense? I heard him say: "Or is it that nature doesn't have a history?" That was something I had figured out. There isn't history in nature. What turns the eruption of Vesuvius into "history" is that a human project had raised a city, Pompey, at its feet. If not, that eruption would be just another incident in nature, and not a historic event. Heidegger said: "When an airplane's propellers move, then, rigorously, nothing happens. But when that airplane is the one carrying the Führer to where Mussolini was, then history happens. The airplane becomes history". He then said it might one day be in a museum. And he insisted that the historical being of the airplane had no relation with the turning of the propellers, did not depend on that happening, that, rigorously, was not it, but in the meeting the Führer and Mussolini would have, which, yes that, would be a historic event. I was surprised by the coarse facticity of the example. I can, however, apply it to my actual situation, whose coarse facticity won't surprise anyone. There, I told you, on my work table, there is a Luger pistol. Perhaps it is an object with a tradition. Perhaps, let us exaggerate; it expresses something of the warrior of our nation. But now it lies there. It cannot, by itself, give rise to any event. That possibility rests in me, the only man in this room. Only I can deliver it to history. Only I, if I use it. It's an individual story, certainly. It is a particular passion, or an intimate one, if you prefer. But perhaps not all that is great is done in history with passion? And who gives their passion, who lives and who dies in it? Us, men. Any particular, intimate, use that I, a man between four walls, make of that Luger will make of it a historic event. I know you know this: the universal comes about through the particular. If I leave it there, if I disdain it being ready-to-hand, I leave it outside history, totally empty of meaning, given over to being an orphan thing.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:22 AM