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8 The Null Basis-Being of a Nullity, Or Between Two Nothings Heidegger’s Uncanniness S I M O N C R I T C H L E Y for Bill Richardson At times, reading a classical philosophical text is like watching an ice floe break up during global warming. The compacted cold assurance of a coherent system begins to become liquid and great conceptual pieces break off before your eyes and begin to float free on the sea. To be a reader is to try and either keep one’s footing as the ice breaks up, or to fall in the icy water and drown. This is true of every page of Heidegger’s Being and Time.1 But it is nowhere truer than in the discussion of conscience in Division 2, which, to my mind, is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. I want to try and show where the ice floe of fundamental ontology begins to crack, for it is there that the questions of the uncanny and the stranger will begin to make themselves heard. At stake will be bringing the human being face to face with its uncanniness, with the utter strangeness of being human: we are the null basis-being of a nullity, a double zero suspended between two nothings. As everyone who has read Being and Time is aware, what Heidegger is seeking in Division 2 of Being and Time is an authentic potentiality for being a whole, which turns on the question of the self. If Dasein’s inauthentic selfhood is defined in terms of das Man, the ‘‘they,’’ and this is something over which I exert no choice, then what Heidegger is after in Chapter 2, Division 2 is a notion of authentic selfhood defined in terms 145 of choice. So, I either choose to choose myself as authentic or I am lost in the choiceless publicness of das Man. Heidegger’s claim is that this potentiality for being a whole—for being authentic—is attested in the voice of conscience. Ontologically, conscience discloses something: it discloses Dasein to itself. If we analyse conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call (Ruf). Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality -for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-guilty. 2 Conscience is a Ruf, a call. The call is a mode of Rede, a silent call, as we will see. The call has the character of an Anruf, an appeal that is a summons or a convocation (Aufruf ) of Dasein to its ownmost Beingguilty . We will see below what Heidegger means by guilt, which is something closer to lack in the Lacanian sense or indebtedness than moral guilt or culpability. Heidegger insists that our understanding of this call, hearing this call, unveils itself as wanting-to-have-a-conscience, Gewissenhabenwollen . Adopting this stance, making this choice, choosing to choose, is the meaning of Entschlossenheit, resoluteness or decidedness or being determined or possessing fixity of purpose. Such is the basic shape of the argument in Division 2, Chapter 2 and the terminology employed. Heidegger argues that the call of conscience calls one away from one’s listening to the they-self, which is always described as listening away, hinhören auf, to the hubbub of ambiguity. Instead, one listens to the call that pulls one away from this hubbub to the silent and strange certainty of conscience, ‘‘The call is from afar unto afar. It reaches him who wants to be brought back.’’3 To what is one called in being appealed to in conscience? To one’s eigene Selbst, to one’s own self. Conscience calls Dasein to itself in the call. What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. But how are we to determine what is said in the talk that belongs to this kind of discourse? What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a ‘‘soliloquy’’ in the Self to which it has appealed. ‘‘Nothing’’ gets called to (zu-gerufen) this Self, but it has 146 Simon Critchley [3.144.17.45] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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