Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds

4. Failure, Loss, Alterity: Being and Time and Spatiality

4 Failure, Loss, Alterity Being and Time and Spatiality Introduction As the last chapter indicated, Heidegger’s critique of Descartes’ ontology releases spatiality from its traditional interpretations in terms of objective and ideal presence, and makes a move toward the recovery of the phenomena of the world and spatiality. This happens in light of a certain exilic aspect inherent in the very event of Heidegger’s thought in that critique—i.e., in that after Heidegger’s critique neither the metaphysical nor the transcendental grounds of the tradition can be taken as the basis for Heidegger’s thought, and in that the engagement of the phenomena remains to be accomplished. Beginning, then, from Heidegger’s critique of Descartes’ conception of the world and spatiality, one sets out from these exilic grounds. But this situation points already to at least two necessary tasks for the engagement of the phenomena of world and spatiality: to engage the phenomena of world and spatiality in their temporality or finitude, i.e., in their concrete events; and to engage the spatiality or “taking place” of that very thought that engages the phenomena. As this chapter indicates, the shadow of alterity appears behind Heidegger’s attempt to take up these tasks. The impossibility of grounding Heidegger’s thought on metaphysical or transcendental terms calls into question the character of Heidegger’s positive account of spatiality: How does one begin to engage spatiality if not in terms of the tradition? A possible path is suggested by a warning born out of Heidegger’s single focus on temporality in Being and Time. Even the most careless look at the book makes immediately apparent Heidegger ’s focus on temporality as “the” horizon and originary character of the occurrences or events of beings. Furthermore, this focus indicates a separation between Being and Time, the book about “being” and “time,” the book of temporal ontology, and a difficulty brought to it, i.e., the issue of spatiality. The relentless focus on temporality as “the” horizon of the disclosedness of beings makes clear that spatiality comes to Being and Time as a foreign issue since, according to Heidegger, spatiality will only be understood and hence accepted into his discourse once temporality has been recovered. This sense of strangeness points first of all to the traditional interpretation of the work as needing to be engaged purely in terms of the question of temporality and being, an interpretation already operative by the time one begins to attempt to engage the difficult issues of spatiality as they appear in the book. But this sense of the strangeness of spatiality may also serve as a warning against the danger of beginning in a way that has already given up spatiality in the name of temporality. Indeed, this issue of spatiality as somewhat foreign to the main point of the book points to another difficulty, one that, rather than obscuring or concealing the issue of the spatiality of beings, serves as an engaging intimation of the difficulty of spatiality as operative in Being and Time. If spatiality comes to being as a stranger, it comes as a stranger on its way toward its native land. As we have already seen, in spite of Heidegger’s focus on temporality, spatiality does not appear as an issue exterior to the question of being; spatiality is operative in the disclosedness of events of beings. Thus, if the ontological drive that seems to keep spatiality at a distance from Heidegger’s analysis of the disclosedness of events of beings is to recall the question of being, this same drive must engage the originary being of spatiality operative in those events of disclosedness. Precisely in the difficulty of this “homecoming ,” in the difficult proximity of spatiality and being, does one begin to encounter spatiality in Being and Time. In Heidegger’s book the recalling of the question of being occurs through the ontological analysis of dasein, first by assessing its being-in114 Scherzi the-world in its everydayness, then by rethinking this structure in its fundamental temporality. In §70 of Being and Time, a latter part of the analysis of dasein, Heidegger attempts to “trace back” (zurückführen) dasein’s existential spatiality to its temporality. In what follows I discuss how this is a failed attempt to think being’s spatiality: Heidegger fails to engage the phenomena of spatiality because he articulates it transcendentally . This “failure” is manifested in...