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18 2 Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics1 is John Sallis’s fourth book. Its first edition (1986) concludes with a chapter that concerns itself with exceeding phenomenology by rigorously following out and reflecting upon its own peculiar pathway. Its second, expanded edition concludes with an added chapter, on Schelling. The papers contained in Delimitations were initially presented on different occasions. Nevertheless, they constitute an organic whole, animated by matters that have claimed this thinker from the beginning: end or limit, the inheritance of philosophy’s history, excess. For readers in search of lucid exegeses of other thinkers, especially Heidegger, Delimitations serves as a valuable resource. For readers seeking a way to think the end of metaphysics that does justice to the difficulty, the weight, and the importance of this task, Delimitations offers an exceptionally well-marked pathway. The text for this chapter is the second, expanded edition, published by Indiana University Press in 1995. This edition includes the provocative supplement to the 1986 original edition of a final chapter on Schelling. The four principal words of the title should be heard together, and will come to intertwine and to reflect one another. First, delimitations awakens the sense that the book will attempt a certain kind of circumscription of philosophy. In terms of the outcome of Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, such limiting must involve imagination in an important way. But in what way does imagination provide such limiting? This small question resounds through the book, and its “irreducible remainder ” (in Schelling’s formulation) animates and directs Sallis’s thought here and everywhere.Phenomenology, when heard in connection with “delimitations ,” announces a connection of some kind between descriptive self-evidence and the limiting of philosophy by imagination. The simple word End is, and turns out to be, the most knotty of all. “End” connects with “Delimitations” and with “Phenomenology” in distinct but interrelated manners. First of all, “end” in connection with “delimitations” clearly denotes a limit of a certain kind. But further, in connection with “phenomenology,” end occurs as phenomenon, as itself an appearance 19 D E L I M I T A T I O N S before the gaze of the philosopher. In this connection, it must be interpreted as both limit and as element in the phenomenal “eidetic flow.” Finally, metaphysics: its Aristotelian “definition” almost removes the “finit . . .” from “definition”: the science of being as being. Its evolution can be regarded as one with the evolution of philosophy as a discipline from the time of Aristotle to Nietzsche, and perhaps beyond. Metaphysics is not a “doctrine” or a “method” but a destiny. Even as philosophy has divided stylistically in the academy along two major lines, clumsily denoted geographically by “Anglo-American” and “Continental,” and even as both strains are predominantly “anti-metaphysical” (although in very different ways), metaphysics lingers around like an old guest who one would like to be rid of once and for all. Sometimes one pretends that he has been gotten rid of (Anglo-American philosophy); sometimes one can contest or even ignore him since his presence has somehow been rendered entirely obsolete (Continental philosophy). But in Sallis’s title and in the text itself, phenomenology and end come face to face with metaphysics as a destiny that has both liberated and constrained us, that has both occupied our thought and continues to run through our arteries and veins. “Horismos” is the title of the section that stands in for a preface. In Greek, it is heard as bothlimit and as beginning. However, the very deed of marking a limit involves transgression upon the controlling operation of the limit—one might think of it as “limiting the limit.” The marking of limit is Sallis’s overarching task in the book. He calls the papers contained therein “a series of transgressive delimitations” (xiv). The advent of the Fichtean productive imagination at the conclusion of Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings unfolds here as the opening of imagination and as abysmal operation. This operation will effect a displacement of phenomenology from within itself, precisely by appealing to those very “things themselves” to which phenomenology had traditionally appealed . In this brief opening passage, which might properly be called an “anti-preface,” Sallis appeals to a voice that echoes even beyond Heidegger ’s Lichtung (clearing). It is a voice issuing from a darkness that utterly encloses, rather than that of a darkness that promises a dawn. Sallis writes: “The...

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