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ELEVEN Is There a Heidegger—or, for That Matter, a Lacan—Beyond All Gathering?
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201 eleven Is There a Heidegger—or, for That Matter, a Lacan—Beyond All Gathering? διαφερόμενον in Heidegger’s “Logos: Heraclitus B 50” as a Possible Response to Derrida’s Disquiet David Farrell Krell Is there a Heidegger beyond the seemingly omnipresent gesture of gathering ? Is there a Heidegger who resists the unifying force of the One, τὸ ἕν, and who acknowledges the disseminating force of the many, τὰ πάντα?A number of Heidegger’s translators have suggested that there is indeed such a Heidegger. Yet let it be said at the outset: translators of Heidegger, and especially of Heidegger’s “Logos” article, are a mad bunch at best, and are certainly not to be trusted. I am thinking of course of Jacques Lacan, who translated the “Logos” article of Heidegger into French decades ago.1 One wonders what could have drawn Lacan to such a text. Perhaps he was attracted to Heidegger’s “Logos” by its early remarks on reason and unreason, the rational and irrational, both of which our tradition, according to Heidegger, equally neglects in their essential provenance: irraison and déraison would be, as it were, Lacan’s home territory in the Heideggerian landscape; the relation of these words to raison could constitute the very ethics, or at least the ethos, of psychoanalysis, which takes the book of reason so seriously that it attempts to swallow it whole.2 Or could Lacan have been excited by the notion of an irresistible gathering that occurs in and through language, a Versammlung in and through a unique unifying One—theἛνofHeraclitus’sfragmentB 50,asreadbyHeidegger?Or,quite to the contrary, could he have espied in Heidegger’s reading, in spite of the 202 · David Farrell Krell unique-unifying-One, a force of resistance or interruption that disrupts all gathering of the Πάντα? In any case, must not Jacques Derrida have been troubled by Lacan’s attraction to this essay, inasmuch as almost everything in Lacan and a great deal of what is in Heidegger—above all, the insistence on gathering, versammeln—disquieted him? Perhaps Derrida feltthatLacan’stranslationofHeidegger’s“Logos”wasjustanothercaseof thepsychoanalyticpostmangatheringupthetruthofdesireandconducting it to its final destination, delivering the logos to the door of the École Freudienne?Forevenif,inLacan’sview,thetruthofdesireisunconscious, isnottheunconsciousstructuredasa language?Everyone,itseems,except for Derrida, knows what language is. Thought-provoking questions or suspicions—to which I have no repliesandnoanodynes .HereI cansaylittleaboutLacan,andverylittle,and only very indirectly, about Derrida. The focus will be on Heidegger’s pervasive notion of Versammlung as the gathering of beings in their presencing , with the “Logos” essay as my text. Yet that text is not merely about gathering. There is also something of a differing and a deferring there, or at least a moment of hesitation, expressed initially by the word Πάντα in Heraclitus’sfragmentB 50,andaboveallbythewordδιαφερόμενον,which Heraclitus employs several times in other fragments. Logos as gathering, yes, but also as something very much like difference, deferral, dissemination —perhaps even dispersion and scattering. Heideggerbeginsthe“Logos”essaybynotingthatthepathmostneeded for our thinking of ὁ Λόγος “stretches far ahead,” or so says the translator into English, bless his pitter-pattering heart. Yet when Heidegger says that thepathistweit,hemaymeanthatwearenotyetonit—thepathmaybefar off to our left or right, or far ahead or far behind us, still remote from our position no matter where we may be wandering in our wasteland; we may still be wide of the path, or far off the beaten path, as English says so beautifully ; the path may lie on a remote horizon, a horizon that has 360° with which to beguile us, each degree opening upon an infinite number of possible directions. Heidegger is fond of quoting Novalis when it comes to language , and one of Novalis’s favorite words is mannigfach, as in the opening sentence of ἀ e Apprentices at Saïs, “Manifold are the paths that human beingstread,”MannichfacheWegegehendieMenschen(CHV1:201).3 Fullof twists and turns is each of our many paths, and each path opens upon the most diverse objects (mannichfache Gegenstände: CHV 1: 204); but there is [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-30 01:15 GMT) Is There a Heidegger or a Lacan Beyond All Gathering? · 203 morethanonepathinanycase,evenifonecanidentifytheonethatis“most needed.”ForNovalis,natureismyriad,or“thousandfold,”andtheconversations and activities that are pursued in the halls at Saïs are themselves mannichfach ; if only a human being could learn to feel as well as to think, says Novalis’s apprentice, “the stars would rise in him or her, and each would learn to feel the entire world, feel it more clearly and multifariously [mannichfaltiger ] than the...