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5. is apophantic Discourse the Touchstone? The chapter title intends to ask whether Heidegger takes apophantic discourse, which he (following Aristotle) attributes to humankind alone among all living beings, to be the ultimate distinguishing feature of humanity. In the 1929–1930 lecture course, especially in its final hundred pages, from section 69 onward, this appears to be the case. It would be the capacity of human beings to assert beings as such—the god as a god, the dog as a dog—that would make human being something other than god or dog. And, with great good luck, something closer to the former than to the latter. Such exceptionalism would be a perquisite of the human being’s successful confrontation with death as death, dying as dying. In earlier chapters I have claimed that Heidegger’s analysis of the existential-hermeneutic-as still needs to be brought to bear in all considerations of apophantic discourse , which for its part is fundamentally derivative. As I mentioned in the foregoing chapter, sections 32–34 and 44 of Being and Time, which argue for the preeminence of the existential-hermeneutic over the apophantic “as,” still seem to me among the greatest achievements of Heidegger’s thought. Yet it is also possible to look ahead in Heidegger’s career of thought in order to challenge the priority of assertory language—the language of statements and judgments—as the earmark of humankind. Here I will consider Heidegger’s 1951 “Logos” essay, which contemplates Heraclitus’s fragment B 50. We might in all innocence render the fragment in this way: “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to say in accord with that Logos: One is All, All is One.” It would of course also be possible to trace Heidegger’s thinking of language through his 1959 Under Way to Language . Yet the “Logos” essay has the advantage of having been translated by Jacques Lacan—a Lacan who may differ from the one we have seen so far, that is, the Lacan whom Derrida locates squarely within the Cartesian canon. For, as Derrida would surely admit, there Is Apophantic Discourse the Touchstone? 121 is a more obstreperous Lacan, for whom language is much more than a structuralist “symbolic.” Is there, then, a Heidegger beyond assertion and assertiveness, beyond apophansis, beyond the seemingly omnipresent gesture of gathering into one through statements? Or does Heidegger take apophantic discourse to be the touchstone of all philosophy? Is there, by contrast, a Heidegger who resists the unifying force of the Parmenidean One, τὸ ἕν, and who acknowledges the disseminating force of the All, or the many, Heraclitus’s τὰπάντα? Jacques Lacan, who translated the “Logos” article of Heidegger into French decades ago, may not have believed that Heidegger was able to resist the drive to unify, to gather All into One; yet as his translator Lacan was certainly willing, as we shall see, to help Heidegger along the path of difference and plurivocity.1 One wonders what could have drawn Lacan to such a text. Perhaps he was attracted to Heidegger’s “Logos” by its initial remarks on reason and unreason, the rational and irrational, both of which our tradition, according to Heidegger, equally neglects in their essential provenance: irraison and déraison would be, as it were, Lacan’s home territory in the Heideggerian landscape; the relation of these words to raison could constitute the very ethics, or at least the ethos, of psychoanalysis, which takes the book of reason so seriously that it attempts to swallow it whole (EP 375). Or could Lacan have been excited by the notion of an irresistible gathering that occurs in and through language, a Versammlung in and through a unique unifying One—the ῝Εν of Heraclitus’s fragment B 50, as read by Heidegger? Or, quite to the contrary, could he have espied in Heidegger’s reading, in spite of the unique-unifyingOne , a force of resistance or interruption that disrupts all gathering of 1. Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s “Logos” appears in La psychanalyse, no. 1 (1956): 59–79. His translation ends three pages before the German text (as published in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1954) comes to a close: to be sure, Heidegger added these final pages to his earlier text for the Festschrift für Hans Jantzen, written and published in 1951. What makes the situation strange, however, is that Lacan’s translation, in the endnotes, refers several times to the more complete version in Vorträge...

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