Broken Hegemonies

CHAPTER 7: On the Discordance of Times

CHAPTER 7 On the Discordance of Times On the singularizing “momentary sites” “Being—the remarkable error to believe that being must always ‘beʼ. . . . Being is what is most rare because most singular. Thus no one appreciates the few moments in which a site founds itself and comes to be.” (BzP 255) The discordance of times sums up for Heidegger the origin that is dreadful because it is turned against itself, the tragic origin that diremption frees. Now the issue is to understand how the ultimate that mortality is effects such a turning and undermines time. As everyone knows, time is what we always lack. Now Heidegger looks to what everyone knows for a hint of the condition of being. One must carefully follow his criticism of the “always ‘beingʼ.” Discordance and diremption are indeed at play in the “what is most rare” and “the most singular.” The there of the tragic double bind is deferred, we can recall, by the modal category under which Heidegger places it in the Contributions: that of the possible, higher than the actual. Accordingly, its temporality is structured by the priority—a simple consequence of the possible as Heidegger understood it—of the future over the present. Still, this priority is only the penultimate word on time. The last word belongs to the discordance that defines the event and hence the there. On the one hand, it is essential for the there to be deferred. On the other, however, we have seen that its contingency makes it depend on “thrusts of time” that occur or do not occur. To “enter into the there” will therefore amount to making oneʼs own a singular condition that is not simple. In the lines quoted, Heidegger is translating the originary agôn into a reading tactic. He is pathetically turning against the tradition commonplaces received from it, thereby hoping to prepare a place out of the common, the koinon, the universal, the general, and the generic. The remarkable error announced in these lines with regard to being—remarkable because it is the most traditional—is expressed by two philosophemes that are just as remarkably traditional. One has to do with time, the other with space. The issue of time is deceptively introduced by one of the most classical antitheses, that of being-always and of the instant. Heidegger is obviously not proposing an nth 576 PART THREE. THE MODERN HEGEMONIC FANTASM permutation of the disjunction of the genus “time” into fixed everlastingness and the fleeting now. Since these lines neither invert nor even preserve the framework of the pairings of aiôn-nûn or the sempiternitas-nunc, it is equally obvious that such a framework no longer fits the temporality of the anticipated place. They do not invert the coefficients of those opposites, transforming what would endure into the negative and the fleeting into the positive—to turn against does not mean to invert. Nor do they preserve the framework, for being “is” not, “it unfolds” (west) or does not unfold. Rather, Heidegger twists the framework of the genus time so as to prepare to overcome it (double meaning of the verb verwinden: ‘to twist,ʼ ‘to overcomeʼ). To apply to the tradition the terms inherited from it thus does not serve to refute it. They serve another strategy, since in the rare instants in question, dissension founds a site for itself, wherein “being unfolds.” Such founding can only be received, and the “founders ” can do no more than respond to it. It is pointless to look for any doxographic antecedent serving as a handrail for this sort of transitional strategy. As to the issue of space, it too emerges from a classical binary schema since the “site” follows the “moment.” Does this not amount to having the representation of space derive once again from that of time? If so, Heidegger would be transmuting rather than permuting an old pair, but still a pair. Do these lines not reduce space and time to the atomic, space to a given site and time to a given moment? If so, Heidegger then would be passing—yet another classical disjunction—from the demonstrable to the merely ostensible. He would be abandoning the dieresis starting from a genus and leading to its components in order to confine himself to the components alone: to deictic objects. His polemic against the prestige of continuous duration is well-known. But even if, rather than totalizing time and space, one were to retain...