[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

Let’s return to the greatest living writer of my country. The first sentence in Foucault’s book is: “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges”. He lies. His book arose from reading you, from copying you and – through you – Nietzsche. But if I return to this, I’ll get off the path again. We already have the name of the great Argentinian writer. Foucault has offered it to us on a silver and gold and jeweled tray of universal consecration. Professor Heidegger, for an Argentinian author, when a stellar French philosopher confesses to having written, for him, a book, is to reach glory without way stations. From now on let Borges be Borges, let him be our universal writer. Of you – as with so much else – he knows little and, I would say, less than nothing. But, genial teacher of contrivance, what he doesn’t know he invents, and what he can’t invent he annihilates with some irony, an art he is no less genial at than he is in that other, that of contrivance. Of you, I insist, he knows nothing. But he has said: “The only thing Heidegger has done is to invent an incomprehensible dialect of German”. See! He’s made you smile; him, not I; his ingenuity, not mine.

Now the adjective, our Cervantes has an unbound passion for adjectives and adverbs. He uses and abuses them. On one page he writes: “Interminable prairie”. On the other he writes: “Inexhaustible prairie”; all forgivable. Who does have their defects, or who doesn’t pay a price for their obsessions. That obsession to add adjectives leads him to deliver himself many, but there was one – of those he uses most frequently – that I want to quote to you. Listen, Master: inextricable. Often times I ask myself why our Cervantes abuses this adjective. Because he is an Argentinean and Argentina is that: it is inextricable. That is to say, tangled, ambiguous, troubling, muddied and, finally, irresoluble. And so today, Professor Heidegger, on this clear, fresh morning, you have before you an Argentinian. What does that mean? He who speaks to you is an irresoluble Dasein.

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