In “The Seminar on ‘the Purloined Letter,’” we read: “Thus, when we are open to hearing the way which Martin Heidegger uncovers for us in the word aletheia the play of truth, we narrowly rediscover a secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.”

This valuable (since it is rare) allusion to Heidegger deserves to be savored as such and demands to be examined according to its scholarly intentions. One should note that, far from clarifying the paradox of the “Purloined Letter” (invisible because it is so obvious) on the basis of the Heideggerian understanding of aletheia, it submits the discovery of the word “truth” to the always valid logical paradox of a hide-and-seek game in which what seems to be “the most true” is known only to its “lovers.” Nothing was more foreign to Heidegger than such eroticized mind games in social circles that would be more germane to the eighteenth century than to any so-called original Greek thought.

Thus, more than the parsimony of allusions, it is the very nature of this wink that should caution us from “acceding” to the Heideggerian hermeneutic field. It is extremely difficult (and it would most probably be in vain) to want to decide whether this allusion is a kind of coquetterie (precisely since this kind of step is never so simple), or if it is not rather, in the guise of a tribute, the mischievous reduction of the Heideggerian discovery of a key word to a kind of eternal truth for a few privileged minds, or if—third possibility—it manifests a profound fascination masked by the veil of ellipsis, for fear of misunderstanding.

P. 131

¶ 11:00 AM