The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy

Part III. At Last, Modification

Third Incision Changing the Symbolic We come back, again, to the triad of change: W, W, & V. Nothing can be done without it. Of this, you are now convinced. First change or other change, the three terms touch everything: the essential, Dasein, being, god, thought, Gestell, the origin . . . They touch everything because they are of such little consistency. We have not stopped emphasizing their hybridity, neutrality, and (owing to these facts) their capacity to plug the holes in history and seal together epochs or, on the contrary and because they themselves have no history, to break up all continuity. No doubt these  €  which say everything in their very simplicity, are living proof of what Heidegger announced about philosophy and poetry: the end of the sensibilization of the concept as the essential poetico-schematic resource of discourse. The end, that is, of imagistic language, the end of metaphor as noetic clothing and vehicle. The end of the symbolic in general and the emergence, from that fact, of a new form of the real. As we saw at the beginning, Hölderlin says in the hymn “The Ister” that a river is a peregrination, a ~ . Heidegger remarks that this claim is neither a comparison nor a metaphor and neither a symbol nor an image. “We are not saying that it is an ‘image’ of peregrination [wir sagen nicht, er sei 197 198 The Heidegger Change ein ‘Bild’ der Wanderung]” or peregrination an “image ` >   ‘    @   `>    death.”1 Hölderlin is no longer mobilizing the “Chris-  > q`Œ @       > [Durchgang durch das Irdische].”2 No, “the river itself is this peregrination [der Ström selbst ist diese Wanderung ].”3 $  >€  Œ        ¡  › >* >  | `      ‘ ` >   q4 Rivers “are” peregrinations, sojourns, transformations , and time. They really are so. But what would “reality” mean here? Saying “rivers really are what they are” is to say they are not possible sensible translations of a concept, and that in being what they are, they do not refer to anything other than themselves, which is to say they refer to the other in themselves.                    7      @ {    able from its referent and, because of that, interiorizable and assimilatable. The symbolic is the energy of              that there is nothing for it to take into itself, nothing either to interiorize or idealize. Unless an entirely different idea of the river comes together—a real idea. Heidegger is the thinker of the destitution of the symbolic understood as what ideally resists in the real. $       {     triad of change’s presence in Heidegger’s texts by saying that its meaning is metaphoric or symbolic. The¢€  of Dasein, the ¢€  of god, the ~  of the relation to being . . . all these cannot in any event be considered “metaphors” or ways of speaking. ~  ~  and ¢€  are not, as we said, concepts, but neither are they images anymore. They are really what they are and form a device for change, which changes the way 199 Third Incision: Changing the Symbolic we image, symbolize, and translate. W, W, & V are the intrusion of the real into philosophical language. The “transformed saying” Heidegger several times announces does not entail, it should be remembered, the emergence of another language. It takes place, instead, right on language, the metamorphosis of language within language. W, W, & V is the testament to this, what inscribes this mutation of language in language. What neither introduces nor forges anything but which changes everything. The real does not allow anything to unmoor from it, as it permits neither our taking it into ourselves nor mourning and saying goodbye to it this way.5 When I spoke before of the ontological power of reverberation of things—their letting their essences pass through them—I did not mean to say that things are sensible representations, metaphors, or images of an intelligible reality transcending them. In letting their essences be given for them, things refer to nothing— to nothing else but themselves. This strange coming into print is very well, if you will, the emergence of an image, but a real image whose essence surfaces right from what is. The symbol—is what is. Metamorphosis—is what is. Migration—is what is. Ereignis, Heidegger tells us in   is the imagination itself. A real imagination, what we together dubbed the fantastic. A metabolism of gaze and thought that alone enables mutants and mutations "               be perceived. “Dasein           *     domain of imagination [die höchste Wirlichkeit im Bereich der Einbildung•    >€ 200 The Heidegger Change    ` *`    something transcendental (cf. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics‡  Ereignis `€      [Verklärung] reverberates. ‘Imagination’  *** `   clearing itself...