The event, which is abyssal because it is non-foundational (abgründig), also is structured from within by the “momentary places.” The event does serve as the origin of space and time, but not as an axis reducing them to some focal point. A transmutation throws spatio-temporal representations off their received axes. Heidegger turns the pure dimensions of universal mathematization into singular traits so as to singularize the event. The monstrosity of our historical site appears nowhere more clearly than when the Aristotelian categories of Where and When, together with their Kantian offspring, get converted—perverted perhaps, certainly subverted—into singular traits ajoining the event. It will be necessary to recognize in the singularization to come the deadly effect that turns time against itself and thereby transmutes presence into event. Now, unlike what some read into Heidegger, there is nothing harmonious in this jointure. The “emptiness of the abyss” indeed points to the event as “joined together” (gefügt, BzP 381); yet, since its jointure occurs through strife, this still means that any aeonic terrain sinks away from under the here and the now. The abyss thus leads toward the caesura-decision where being absents itself from hegemonies. Heidegger redirects the appendage of the German mystics: “The ‘voidʼ is just as much, and properly speaking, the fullness of what remains still undecided and to be decided: the abyssal” (ibid.). The abyss exerts no power at all, but it harbors the fullness of the possible.

Heidegger calls the locus of that decision Da-sein—which diremption reveals. Da-sein continues to “be away” as long as man seeks to posit himself on some univocally normative foundation. Da-seinʼs own place is the abyss of the ground lost and of singularization regained. At the risk of losing itself unto death (not out of a willing, like Leonidas, but out of a knowing, like Oedipus), Da-sein must keep the groundless. “Holding firmly onto the abyss belongs to the essence of Da-sein” (BzP 460). Here we see our abode, assigned to us by diremption.

What is abyssal, finally, is the tragic contrariety itself that through all these strategies Heidegger seeks to rehabilitate in being, beyond theticism [sic]. On this point, there is no “influence” to deconstruct. The renunciation of all names that lay down the law and the subsequent affirmation of tragic being remains without precedent in the doctrines of first conditions. The event, then, equals originary dissension. “Being: the event.” “Abyss: as the time-space of dissension” (BzP 346).

P. 551

¶ 4:16 AM