Broken Hegemonies

CHAPTER 6: What, the Deferred There?

CHAPTER 6 What, the Deferred There? On topology “Every beginning is in itself complete, unsurpassable. Beginnings escape historicist recording not because they are trans-temporal and eternal, but because they are greater than eternity. As thrusts of time they grant to being, by spatializing it, the openness in which it conceals itself. The proper founding of this time-space is called Da-sein.” (BzP 17) Da-sein is not yet. Such is the surprising reinterpretation of the there in the Contributions . The reader remembering Being and Time can only be jolted: How is the there deferred? The Da designates a possible place (topos). Topology is the phenomenology of this possible place. It matters little whether the reinterpretation would have occurred that way without the expectations Heidegger had invested in the political movement of the day and without the harsh awakening that ensued. What does matter, however, is the “terrible warning,” the thetic hubris culminating in planetary technicity. Would Creon have seen the conflicting laws of city and family without first having been blinded in his nomothesis against Antigone? Would Agamemnon have seen them thus without too having been blinded in his nomothesis against Iphigenia? The Greeks did not speak of hubris eutuches (felix culpa). Yet this would have been an apt description of the tragic crisis. Not that it leads to a happy ending. But what does the hero see who, late in the day, confesses his excesses? He stops denying that there is, that there has always been, a legal double bind. If the word pathei mathos, ‘suffering to understand,ʼ51 does not speak of denial, nevertheless it states its consequences: suffering and knowledge. In the crisis marked by guilt and sorrow, hubristic blindness turns—or may turn—into the visionary blindness embodied in Tiresias and Oedipus. Being as dissension is seen by bloodied eye sockets alone and is affirmed by silence. Heidegger had hoped for a German response to the Greek beginning. Little did he suspect how right he would prove to be. . . . Far from repeating in late modernity the old gesture going from Homer to Solon, “the history of being” ended up by making us retrace the tragic crisis: hubristic blindness and guilt, followed by the clear—or at least possible and urgent—vision of originary unconcealment-concealment. Suddenly it is no longer Rede that is first and silence a mere modification;52 like the heroes of 554 PART THREE. THE MODERN HEGEMONIC FANTASM Aeschylus and Sophocles, our age has had to learn the ineluctability of legislationtransgression . Hence, “language is grounded in silence” (BzP 510). Like Oedipus at Colonus, the other thinking vows “not to break silence concerning things forbidden .”53 The undertow that ruins normative referents from within remains unspeakable . The legislator on whom certain texts of Heidegger had counted had not “properly founded” a new site. As a result, topos needed to be understood otherwise. Thus there was an awakening to the topical fissuring that legislators—and in their service, philosophical functionaries—have always made it their job to cover up. The hubristic blindness that had led to the statement, “The Führer himself alone is the German reality of today and of tomorrow as well as its law,”54 turns into the tragic blindness that sees the retraction of death in the attraction for life; that sees concealment in unconcealment and expropriation in appropriation; or again (but these are no longer Heideggerʼs words) the singularization to come in every phenomenal constellation, hence the transgressive thrust in every aggregate making up a world. The topological inquiry asks: How is the there deferred? In order to answer, the inquiry follows the itinerary formed by the tragic crisis. It looks back toward beginnings that have initiated epochs and discovers in them an ambivalence breeding hubris. Then it seeks to grasp the critical “thrust of time” where tragic denial bursts forth. Lastly, it finds its own task in keeping alive the question of the possible there and of its discordant spacings. Recapitulative topology. This asks: What was the fracture in being that in its Greek, Latin, and modern ministry, the philosophical civil service repressed? In this its retrodictive task, topology spells out the double bind marking epochal beginnings. Although these are “in themselves what is complete, unsurpassable,” they are indeed never simple, as we have seen. The era of the Greek hen opens with the discordance between the laws in force and their contraries subverting them; the era of natura opens with a teleological...