The word "event" [Ereignis] is taken from ordinary language. To appropriate [Er-eignen] means originally to eye [er-äugen], i.e., to catch sight of, to call into view, to take possession [an-eignen]. More originarily thought, the word "event" is now, as a guiding word, taken into the service of a thinking that attempts to keep in memory that dark word of Parmenides, τὸ αὐτό - the same is thinking and being. The word "event of appropriation" [Ereignis] can be translated just as little as the Greek guiding word λογός or the Chinese Tao. The word event of appropriation here no longer means that which we otherwise name an occurrence, an incident. The word is now used as a singulare tantum.

Event of appropriation names the letting belong that is to be thought from it, and thus the authentic letting belong that brings the human and being into the ownership of each other. In positionality, what we experience as the essence of this constellation in the modern technological world is a prelude so what is called the event of appropriation. The event of appropriation does not necessarily or even merely remain in its prelude so as to let the human and being belong together the manner of positionality. Rather, in the event of appropriation, the posibility arises that the event as the sheer reign of positionality is converted [verwindet] into a more inceptual appropriating. One such conversion of positionality from the event of appropriation - something never accomplishable by humans alone - would result in the appropriative retraction of the technological world from its position of mastery into one of servitude within a realm where the human more authentically reaches into the event of appropriation.

P. 117-8

¶ 6:52 AM