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10. Grounders of the Abyss John Sallis How is one even to read, much less to write about, a work that at the very outset disclaims being a work, at least of the style heretofore, and declares that all fundamental words have been used up and that the genuine relation to the word has been destroyed? What is to be said of a book the very title of which is deliberately made to exemplify this destitution of words, even if with the utmost irony, as if the blandest of covers had been mockingly wrapped around this text, which, in starkest contrast , does not shy away from the most unheard-of—and, indeed, courageous1—ventures, letting words slide toward the most extreme limit, toward the unsayable to which saying would always already have submitted? As in what is, though parenthesized and set as if it were merely a subtitle, nonetheless called the proper, suitable, appropriate title: Vom Ereignis. How is one to read and to write (translating even into another language) of and from what would be said in this word that Heidegger himself later declared untranslatable?2 What is one to make— or not make—of a text that says—and says that it says—”always the same of the same” (GA 65/CP, §39), weaving its tautological threads always around the same pole or at least around the single axis secured by that pole? What of a text that, at the other extreme, yokes together words that to all appearances speak against one another, issuing in such apparent contradictions as “grounders of the abyss”? To say nothing of the way in which the text crosses back over itself, crossing out what, in the crossing toward the other beginning, it could not but have put forth. How is one to read this strange text otherwise than as Nietzsche once demanded of his readers: “slowly, deeply, looking cautiously back and forth, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate ¤ngers and eyes”?3 How is one to write of Contributions to Philosophy otherwise than by trying to keep one’s bearings alongside some short stretches of the “pathway which is ¤rst traced out by the crossing to the other beginning , into which Western thinking is now entering” (GA 65/CP, §23)? It is remarkable that grounding weighs so heavily in the thinking that would cross to the other beginning. For, in this crossing, grounding would be exceeded, as would be indeed the entire orbit within which grounding was heretofore possible and was determined as such in the¤rst beginning. Yet it is precisely through—as a result of—this transgression that the need for another grounding is exposed and the necessity of rehabilitating grounding, even if exorbitantly, is put into play. Grounding comes to ¤gure so prominently that the word, even if used up in the history of metaphysics, can entitle one of the major fugal moments of 182 John Sallis Heidegger’s text. And, from its beginning, Contributions celebrates those who are called “grounders of the abyss.” The thinking inscribed in Contributions begins at the end of metaphysics , begins within that inde¤nitely extending end in order to break with it, out of it, for the sake of another beginning. Metaphysics designates “the whole history of philosophy up to now” (GA 65/CP, §258), that which began in the ¤rst beginning and which came to its end (in the double sense of completion and termination) in Nietzsche’s reversal of what he called Platonism. With the Nietzschean inversion of the de¤ning opposition between supersensible and sensible—that is, when the “true world” ¤nally becomes a fable—the ¤nal possibility of Platonism is realized and the entire store of such possibilities, played out in the history of metaphysics, is exhausted (GA 65/CP, §91).4 What Nietzsche calls Platonism corresponds to what Heidegger calls the ¤rst beginning, though Heidegger’s analysis goes well beyond any that Nietzsche ventured—except, in a very different register, in The Birth of Tragedy. According to Heidegger’s analysis, the ¤rst beginning is marked by the eruption, among the Greeks, of the question regarding beings as a whole, regarding beings as such—the question as to what beings as such are, the question “What are beings?”5 In the arising of this question and thus in the ¤rst beginning as such, necessity is operative. Yet, as pertaining to the ¤rst beginning, necessity does not have the sense determined for it in and by the ¤rst...

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