Those are so many manners in which the incongruity of death is adjoined to life. Strictly speaking, the undertow it exerts no longer gives rise to a differend, but to a discordance—if at least by differend one understand the confl ict of disparate laws calling for an impossible common authority. I speak of a differend only to describe this call and the referents that are posited to fulfill it in an illusory manner. “What will I do?” Antigone asks, caught between the laws of the family religion and those of the city. The generic law is lacking. “What then is electromagnetic force?” asks Heinrich Hertz, caught between two incongruous yet equally useful models. The answer to the question of Wesen is lacking.

Is it reading too much into Heideggerʼs sudden awakening in the mid-1930s to
view it as the attempt to think a discordant originary condition without any affinity with some ultimate nominative-normative authority? He would then be echoing the Sophocles of Oedipus at Colonus. In this tragedy, the most difficult for us moderns to understand, all questioning has ceased. Discordance has been accepted, even affirmed, and it breaks the hero. Something analogous happens to Heidegger after his failing. Concerning the entry into the singular “momentary place,” he asks: “In what way [does this occur] in Greek tragedy?” (BzP 374). He seeks to accept and to assert in being the discordance of appropriation-expropriation. But to learn to retain the labor of subtraction that breaks them, “‘rational animalsʼ must first become mortals.”

P. 551-2

¶ 4:30 AM