The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy

10. Man and Dasein Boring Each Other

241 “The Thin Partition that Separates Dasein from Itself” nor beings, of being and beings. This then is what, from one Dasein   > >  The partition is the form within structure, and in being put into play this way, it at the same time con- >     threatens the latter by deforming it. The partition marks, in effect,   @@  @ * @@  metamorphosed. How many times must we pass over the partition like smugglers, unrecognizable to ourselves and always covered, recovered, and discovered  @`         —€>   €€  `> imprint into this hidden, tense, sensitive, and sickly @   —€>   `>    *       — ƒ    *      exceeding the “totality” of structure through always    *      *     characterization of existence as a simple movement € Œˆ q  Œˆ € —q Breakdown of Self ~  *>  *    *  ~  already indicated that Heidegger sometimes employed the word Umschlag, or mutation, as though it were synonymous with % '  , and therein brought 242 The Heidegger Change the latter and Aristotelian +¡o_`kh– together in some of their shared senses: thrown, turnaround, passage. Such a “mutation” is that which is produced, for instance, when the tool “falls damaged” and appears thereby in another, surprising light. “In its conspicuousness , obtrusiveness, and obstinacy [Auffäligkeit],” writes Heidegger, “what is at hand [das Zuhandene] loses its character of handiness. . . . It does not just disappear, but bids farewell, so to speak, in the conspicuousness of what is unusable. Handiness shows itself once again [noch einmal] and precisely in doing so the worldly character of what is at hand also shows itself, too.”15 And then, later: “The understanding of being guiding the heedful association with innerworldly beings has been mutated [hat umgeschlagen].”16 Everything takes place as though the tool emitted a sign prior to its disappearance, signifying its mutation; as though its crossing the threshold of usability rendered visible its bidding itself farewell. As though the two ways of being of the tool intersected at some improbable point that marked the time of their exchange, this farewell also being an encounter. If the tool is indeed capable of surprising us, this is because it can break with its * >    `   > All of these analyses in Being and Time secretly prepare the last mutation of Dasein, its “mutation [Umschlag] into no-longer-being-there [Nur-nochvorhandensein ].”17  *    *    €   @ ` *€  `‡  the possibility of a farewell of structure to itself. The secret insistence in Being and Time on the plasticity of the partition already displaces and metamorpho-    `  * € * *  243 “The Thin Partition that Separates Dasein from Itself” introducing into it, against all expectation, a line ofŠ  € *        @  ` breakdown and failure. The partition inscribes onto Dasein|  €   ` ` > *         the future of structure as its own breakdown and  > ~    *        @  €   presence nonetheless so very well “slips away” in the text, demands much fuller development because it already exceeds the framework of the existential analytic. Announcing itself here is what, in the texts immediately following Being and Time, will be bound up with the thinking of Stimmung. Stimmung, or affective tone, resolutely takes in those writings the @ |  @ * $    @    * a place of division and exchange at the heart of which the existential and the historical are no longer distinguishable, which further complicates the difference between the authentic and the inauthentic. Henceforth, as we will see, passing over the parition means surpassing metaphysics, an equivalence not yet drawn in Being and Time. As the inscription of the fantastic in Being and Time 3           0 the one separating metaphysics from its other. It already impresses, right on Dasein, the improbable wrinkle of the difference of time. ~ >€`    Being and Time from the same movement as falling prey, if what is at issue, that is, is the same modi-    ~   € `   >  `    separated from itself by a “thin partition,” if a paral-  €   > *  `   >  `  and those of the epochs “sedimented in tradition” can be established with certitude, if the plasticity of thresholds also concerns the nature of the crossing from metaphysics to the other thought. 244 The Heidegger Change This ontico-ontological fontanelle makes the emptiness of this question apparent, as the former already inscribes on \  * ~ >       € > *     * @    fate of being an immutable routine, and how something like the forming of Dasein  > *  can be outlined—a formation precisely corresponding to its metamorphosis. 10 Man and Dasein, Boring Each Other In the philosophical concept [Begriff], man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack [Angriff]—driven out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Dasein in man launches the attack upon man. Thus man in the ground of his essence is someone...