The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy

3. “Color, the Very Look of Things, Their Eidos, Presencing, Being—This Is What Changes”*

73 First Incision: Geltung transformation is what makes identity, that a body, a gender, or a currency exists only by virtue of its transformability , exchangeability, and convertibility. And we so much better understand that this retrospective gaze is relieved by a prospective gaze that is freed by the former and directed at our essences, bodies, and genders, the merchandise we buy and sell, our objects of thought—all things promised, quite obviously, to other metamorphoses and other migrations. 5  "          than the taking place of every ontic exchange, this is not because it would itself be priceless or outside price, without and beyond value, or, in other words, sacred—all these being clichés ascribed today to alterity. In its turn, indeed, this locus has got to and will change. It has, it too, its value for exchange—its exchange value. Nothing, for Heidegger, escapes (ex) change or convertibility. It must be repeated: what Heidegger thinks under the heading of ontology is the structure of transformation alone. Being is nothing but (its) transformability. 6           ability , touching up against something heavy, grave, and onerous. In effect, the complicity of change and                 of what must be dubbed ontological capitalism, “the ever-advancing world history of the planet.”1 Was Heidegger, under the name “metaphysics,” after anything but? Ontological capitalism designates the economic system opened by the originary exchange of presence with itself: beings for being via the money of essence. $               gets deployed in “Anaximander’s Saying” follows all the turns of this exchange: Œ  `  > *  `> ` > *  >  >  -    `€  @ `@ *q2 Nevertheless, “presence” (Anwesenheit, Anwesung) and “present beings” (Anwesendes) have from the origin been exchanged—as though they were equal. “From earliest times it has seemed as though presence and€    @    *  >  `  >  ¤ @ * €  @ *> > ` >  q3 This “becoming” is what our sights have been set on; this is what we call (ex) change, or metamorphosis and migration. From here out, which is to say at the same time and from the outset, present beings pass for presence, are of value for it: “presence as such is not distinguished from€    @  $              >    ` @     *  one of them [es gilt nur als das Allgemeinste und Höchste des Anwesendes und somit als ein solches•  ` @       '           =         '            into the scene of philosophy. On the Third Shedding Already cracks and breaks my skin, My appetite unslaking Is fueled by earth I’ve taken in: This snake for earth is aching.1 Heidegger nonetheless judges the migratory and metamorphic power of Nietzsche’s thought to be incorrectly located (erörtet         unquestioned. Nietzsche does not in fact inquire into which of the essential changes the serpent is born from and thereby omits the “changing” (wandelbar)                 sophical mutation. “Nietzsche does not pose the question of truth proper, the question concerning the essence of the true and the truth of essence, and with it the question of the ineluctable possibility of its essential transformation [ihres Wesenswandel].”2 5           9         reason superimpose the triad of W, W, & V over all the movements or “countermovements” (Gegenbewegungen )            the instances of metamorphosis and migration present in Nietzsche’s texts. Although the triad is more vague in appearance than the Nietzschean determinations of                       ing that “Nietzsche’s way of thought does not want to overthrow [umstürzen] anything—it merely wants to retake [nachholen] something.”3 79 “. . . This Is What Changes” What does “retake” mean here? This retaking, which constitutes for Heidegger the veritable metamorphic and migratory force of Nieztsche’s thought, should be understood as the result of the strange             its own traces, of somehow coming back upon itself so as to “go beyond . . . the complete determination of its whole nature.”4 This retake, therefore, is a reinstallation, a reestablishment of the tradition, without which it would remain teetering and unstable. $     '   '              Such reinvestment of self as change of self constitutes for Heidegger one of the most profound motifs of the doctrine of eternal return. Because of this repeating that traces and reforms— a repeating itself repeated in its reinterpretation by Heidegger—being is made to appear as it is: changed      X                                 > @            original gaze (Plato’s) and the ultrametaphysical gaze (Heidegger’s) to converge. The terminal image of metaphysics Nietzsche creates is the condition of the “inclusion of the uncanny in the familiar” that we previously encountered. In Nietzsche’s thought, the beginning reappears “in a metamorphosed form [in verwandelter Gestalt],”5 and “all the themes of Western thought, though all of them transmuted, fatefully gather together [alle Motive des abendlän-    \ '            '   versammeln].”6 X             the streams at the same time separate. Where metamorphosis and migration are revealed to themselves. X                    80 The Heidegger Change...