Chapter Four turns to the work of Heidegger, examining his treatment of finitude. Laruelle admires Heidegger for his onto-theological critique of western philosophy, as it allows Laruelle to clear the way for his own reading of the in-One or the between-relations mentioned above. Gangle maintains that there are two distinct layers that constitute Heidegger’s analysis of difference understood as finitude.

the first stratum of Heideggerean Finitude, for Laruelle, consists of a lifting of the empirically derived notions of forgetting, inauthenticity and finitude to the a priori characterisation of philosophy as metaphysics. . . . This first level is . . . the dimension in which Heidegger delimits Western philosophy as metaphysics, or metaphysics as such. . . . the second stratum . . . [:] The tautological turn of Heidegger’s late thought allows this rigorously finite Finitude to be ‘let be’ (Gelassenheit) and thus to become minimally manifest (as essential withdrawal) without thereby determining any correlative and reciprocal syntax.

Ultimately, Gangle notes that though Heidegger is the thinker who most closely approximates Laruelle’s understanding of difference, Heidegger cannot “manage to unveil a clear and visible alternative to the tradition he critiques.” This may be true, if we read the unfinished Being and Time, but Heidegger’s later works certainly give us possibilities, which Laruelle does not fully explore here.

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