298 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2019
    1. What Heidegger calls the already there, constitutive of the temporality of Dasein, is this past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I never would have had any past of my own. Such a structure of inheritance and transmission, which is the very ground of facticity itself since tradition can always conceal from me the sense of the origin that it alone can transmit to me, presupposes that the phenomenon of life qua Dasein becomes singular in the history of the living to the extent that, for Dasein, the epigenetic layer of life, far from being lost with the living when it dies, conserves and sediments itself, passes itself down in “the order of survival” [survivance] and to posterity as a gift as well as a debt, that is, as a destiny. This is not a “program” in the quasi-determinist biological sense, but a cipher in which the whole of Dasein’s existence is caught; this epigenetic sedimentation, a memorization of what has come to pass, is what is called the past, what we shall name the epiphylogenesis of man, meaning the conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses, mutually articulated. Epiphylogenesis is a break with pure life, in that in the latter, epigenesis is precisely what is not conserved (“the programmē cannot receive lessons from experience” [Jacob 1974, 11 ]) even if this is not without effect on the genetic selection in which evolution consists (these questions have at any rate to be put in the perspective of the relation phenotype/genotype as embryology sets it forth, thereby giving a new place to epigenesis)1— but this effect can therefore only transmit itself genetically, precisely; epi-phylo-genesis also in the sense in which, just as the embryo recapitulates each stage of evolution, each branch of the shrub of which it is the most recent bud, epigenesis must be recapitulated to take place. This is the very ideal of mathesis (an analogy to be handled all the more prudently as the concept of embryonic recapitulation is itself a metaphor). Epiphylogenesis bestows its identity upon the human individual: the accents of his speech, the style of his approach, the force of his gesture, the unity of his world. This concept would be that of an archaeology of reflexivity. This is what Heidegger called the historical [l’historial]. We come now to Heidegger after having opened up the questions of the temporality of différance qua the movement of life in general because there is in Heidegger an opposition between the time of technical measurement and concern, which is the loss of time, and authentic time, which is proper to Dasein— wrenched from the technical horizon of concern. Now if it is true that only epigenetic sedimentation can be the already-there, this is only possible when the transmission allowing for the sediments is of an absolutely technical, nonliving essence: made possible by the organized albeit inorganic matter that the trace always is— be it a matter of tool or of writing— let us say one of an organon in general.

      Stiegler > Heidegger: the "epiphylogenesis" of the "already there" ||

    2. Thus the difficulty of an interpretation of the meaning of modern technics for Heidegger is on a par with the difficulty of his entire thought. Modern technics is the concern of numerous texts, which do not always appear to move in the same direction. In other words, the meaning of modern technics is ambiguous in Heidegger’s work. It appears simultaneously as the ultimate obstacle to and as the ultimate possibility of thought. Among the works that deem it an obstacle, “The Question of Technics” and “The Age of the World Picture” are often quoted. However, the late essays “Time and Being” and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” inscribe the possibility of another thinking within the task of contemplating the belonging-together of being and time in the Gestell. In “The Principle of Identity,” Gestell designates

      Stiegler > Heidegger: [Gestell] "appears simultaneously as the ultimate obstacle to and as the ultimate possibility of thought" ||

    3. Simondon characterizes modern technics as the appearance of technical individuals in the form of machines: hitherto, the human was a bearer of tools and was itself a technical individual. Today, machines are the tool bearers, and the human is no longer a technical individual; the human becomes either the machine’s servant or its assembler [assembliste]: the human’s relation to the technical object proves to have profoundly changed. Heidegger characterizes this “mutation” with the notion of Gestell (the systematization of the principle of reason). The semantics of Gestell is not foreign to that of system, and, in Gille’s view, the concept of a technical system grounds a scientific history of techniques.

      Stiegler > Simondon / Heidegger: "technical individuals / systems" / "Gestell" ||

    4. If it is true that systematicity informs the entire history of technics, in what respect, then, can modern technics be characterized as Gestell?

      Stiegler > Heidegger: "If it is true that systematicity informs the entire history of technics, in what respect, then, can modern technics be characterized as Gestell?" ||

    5. If modern technics nevertheless remains a mode of disclosure, it constitutes what is most properly to be thought. For it is through technics that the destiny of being unfolds, that is, technics is the history of being itself.

      Stiegler > Heidegger: "technics is the history of being itself" ||

    6. A technical system constitutes a temporal unity. It is a stabilization of technical evolution around a point of equilibrium concretized by a particular technology

      Stiegler > Gille: "A technical system ... is a stabilization of technical evolution around a point of equilibrium concretized by a particular technology" ||

    7. Expression is the possibility of generalization, that is, of anticipation qua intellectualization. The symbol is always already an “intellectual,” “general” symbol, and never simply the “technical symbol” of a merely technical language— and it is always with such adverbs that thought deals offhandedly with its limits. Moreover, all operating sequences, qua combinatorics, already presuppose such a possibility.

      Stiegler: "technical symbol" / "it is always with such adverbs that thought deals offhandedly with its limits" ||

    8. The genetic/epigenetic relation is a dimension of différance qua the history of life. The question then is that of a specification of différance differing and deferred, of the possibility of such specification, if it is true that Leroi-Gourhan’s major point consists in putting into question a clear break between the animal and the human. His way of broaching this problem brings him back, in the final analysis, to the heart of a simple opposition, albeit one shifted to the also quite traditional level of faber/sapiens. He is brought back in the same stroke (the coup of the second origin) to the metaphysics of an opposition between the inside and the outside, the before and the after, of the animal human and the spiritual human, and so on. We are trying to preserve and to broach the aporetic impossibility of simply opposing the interior to the exterior in speaking of an instrumental maieutics that alone permits an understanding of how tools do not derive from a creation or from a consciousness present to itself, master of matter, but pursue a process engaged long before the rupture yet nevertheless constitute a rupture— a new organization of différance, a différance of différance. Now, if the central concept is in fact that of epiphylogenetic memory, allowing for both the contestation of oppositions and the description and preservation of differentiations, it does not seem to us to have any equivalent in grammatological deconstructions. We shall develop this question further on the level of linear writing. Without such a concept, it seems to us impossible to specify the différance, differing and deferring, with respect to différance in general qua the history of life in general, or to say what the human is or is not. We are left: with the ambiguity of the invention of the human, that is, of the subject of the verb “to invent,” that which holds together the who and the what, as being that which binds them while separating them; this is, then, différance— this double movement, this intersection of reflection, this reflecting whereby the who and the what are constituted as the twin faces of the same phenomenon.

      Stiegler: (partial) critique of "différance" || interested to know whether Derrida ever responds to this point directly

    9. The question is time, becoming qua the bringing into play of the non- programmed, the improbable, and destiny qua nonpredestination. The temporality of the human, which marks it off among the other living beings, presupposes exteriorization and prostheticity: there is time only because memory is “artificial,” becoming constituted as already-there since [from the point of: depuis] its “having been placed outside of the species.” And this “since” must be taken literally: inheriting the name “human” is inheriting the entire past already there, everything that has taken place, since the “appallingly ancient.”

      Stiegler: "there is time only because memory is "artificial" ||

    10. Accounting for the technical dynamic non-anthropologically, by means of the concept of “process,” means refusing to consider the technical object as a utensil, a means, but rather defining it “in itself.” A utensil is characterized by its inertia. But the inventiveness proper to the technical object is a process of concretization by functional overdetermination. This concretization is the history of the technical object; it gives the object “its consistency at the end of an evolution, proving that it cannot be considered as a mere utensil” (Simondon 1958, 15). The industrial technical object is not inert. It harbors a genetic logic that belongs to itself alone, and that is its “mode of existence.” It is not the result of human activity, nor is it a human disposition, only registering its lessons and executing them. The lessons of the machine are “inventions” in the ancient sense of the term: exhumations.

      Stiegler > Simondon: "genetic logic" of the "technical object" / "invention" as "exhumation" || "concretization by functional overdetirmination" is an interesting way of restoring a sense of facticity to something that is untraceable causally. Just because the causal knot cannot be untangled does not prevent it from being registered (here again I have in mind an algorithmic mapping of rhetoric). It seems necessary to compare the "genetic logic" of the technical object with the generativity of the trope (c.f. de Man). Also, thinking of the rhetoric of the en-abyme / abground surrounding the "understanding" Being and Time, one might ask what, exactly, is this "ground" from which technical "inventions" are exhumed?

    11. There is here an actual techno-logical maieutic. Certainly, what is invented, exhumed, brought to light, brought into the world by the object exists in the laws of physics. But in physics they exist only as possibilities. When they are freed, they are no longer possibilities but realities, irreversibly— pure possibilities that have become effects which must from that point on be taken into account. They become reality only through the technical object’s potential of inventiveness, in the process of concretization characterized by the fact that the human has no longer the inventive role but that of an operator. If he or she keeps the inventors role, it is qua an actor listening to cues from the object itself, reading from the text of matter. To draw further on the metaphor, the actor is not the author— and that is why existing technical objects are never thoroughly concrete; they are never consciously conceived and realized by the human from out of this “logic,” which is strictly speaking empirical, experimental, and in a sense quasi-existential (it is the object’s mode of existence), the sense, namely, that this logic is revealed only in its realization, in the experience of the object itself, or, as it were, on stage, and not at the time of conception. In this move the logic of invention becomes in essence unpredictable, as in Maunoury; and this is why “the technical object is never totally known.” For this very reason, it is never totally rational nor “ever totally concrete, except in the quite rare case of a fortuitous encounter” (Simondon 1958, 35). Thus does concretization call on technics to transform itself into technoscience and on technoscience to replace science. But this means that concretization calls for technoscientific experimentation to replace scientific deduction.

      Stiegler: the "techno-logical maieutic" || My understanding is that the human attends the "labor" of the machine but I'm a bit lost when he adds the performative dimension of the actor to this metaphor. Perhaps it is the relay from the metaphor of birth (where the "technical object" would seem to be personified as child if personification weren't already superseded by this point) to the metaphor of performance (where the human acts semi-autonomously improvising upon "the text of matter") that we actually touch on what the strangeness of the maieutic. It is a mixed metaphor wherein each scene the central figure (child / actor) is a concretion of man and machine (mixed parentage) while the more one-sided tutelary figures are exchanged (from the distinctly human "midwife" to the overtly technical "text of matter"). Or is it, rather, that the reading of the text of matter is the becoming-human of the machine (language) and the becoming-machine of the actor. C.f. Benjamin's idea of being on camera as a performance of one's humanity

    12. It must of course be understood in the cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention. This movement goes far beyond the possibilities of “intentional consciousness.” It is an emergence that makes the grammē appear as such (that is to say according to a new structure of nonpresence) and undoubtedly makes possible the emergence of the systems of writing in the narrow sense. (Derrida 1974, 84) The grammē structures all levels of the living and beyond, the pursuit of life by means other than life, “since genetic inscription’ . . . up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain Homo sapiens.” And it must be thought from out of the process of the “freeing of memory” described by Leroi-Gourhan: “an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary programmēs of so-called ‘ instinctive’ behavior up to the constitution of electronic card indexes and reading machines, enlarges différance and the possibility of putting in reserve” (Derrida 1974, 84).

      Stiegler > Derrida: the "program...must... be understood in a cybernetic sense" ||

    13. What is specific to the human is the movement of putting itself outside the range of its own hand, locking onto the animal process of “liberation”: “the brain was not the cause of developments in locomotor adaptation but their beneficiary” (26). The hand never has anything within its range. Prostheticity, here a consequence of the freedom of the hand, is a putting-outside-the-self that is also a putting-out- of-range-of-oneself. Pursuing the “process of liberation,” the installation of this techno-logical complex nevertheless brings on a rupture. The conquest of mobility, qua supernatural mobility, qua speed, is more significant than intelligence— or rather, intelligence is but a type of mobility, a singular relation of space and time, which must be thought from the standpoint of speed, as its decompositions, and not conversely (speed as the result of their conjunction). It would be necessary, moreover, to analyze the relation of différance to speed: différance is itself also a conjunction of space and time more originary than their separation. It is in this sense, then, that différance will, perhaps, have to be thought as speed.2

      Stiegler > Derrida / Leroi-Gourhan: "différance will, perhaps, have to be thought as speed" || I would think of this primarily in terms of academic-educational technology where the speed of access is paramount.

    14. To oppose speech to writing is always also to oppose man to animal in opposing him in the same stroke to the technical. However, it must not be forgotten that if grammatology is not “one of the sciences of man, [this is] because it asks first, as its characteristic question, the question of the name of man” (Derrida 1974, 83). How does grammatology pose this question? By calling man (or his unity) into question, and by forging the concept of différance, which is nothing else than the history of life.

      Stiegler > Derrida: " différance, which is nothing else than the history of life" ||

    15. We are left with the question of determining what the conditions of such an emergence of the “grammē as such” are, and the consequences as to the general history of life and/or of the grammē. This will be our question. The history of the grammē is that of electronic files and reading machines as well— a history of technics— which is the invention of the human. As object as well as subject. The technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical. Technics as inventive as well as invented. This hypothesis destroys the traditional thought of technics, from Plato to Heidegger and beyond.

      Stiegler > Derrida: "the history of the grammē" / "technics as inventive as well as invented" ||

    16. Différance is the history of life in general, in which an articulation is produced, a stage of différance out of which emerges the possibility of making the grammē as such, that is, “consciousness,” appear. The task here will be to specify this stage. We shall refer to a double rupture in the history of life— of what comes to pass or what passes, between two blows, two coups received by différance in general from a specific différance: the Zinjanthropian and the Neanthropian are the names of these two coups. What takes place here, the place of this event, is the passage from the genetic to the nongenetic. Derrida here refers, without quoting them, to two texts of Leroi-Gourhan (1993, 221 and 228), from which other consequences will be drawn in the second volume of this work. The passage from the genetic to the nongenetic is the appearance of a new type of grammē and/or program. If the issue is no longer that of founding anthropos in the pure origin of itself, the origin of its type must still be found. This means that a typology of grammēs and programs must be constructed.

      Stiegler > Derrida: "two coups received by différance in general from a specific différance: the Zinjanthropian and the Neanthropian" || It would be interesting to examine further why, in such a patently intertextual work, these Leroi-Gourhan texts go unexamined. My instinct would be to say that Derrida is lack of enthusiasm for pursuing a "typology of grammēs and programs." Though he is, at this point at least, willing to allow some provisional genetico-historical distinction in the (pro).

    17. If, reading Herodotus, we have the sentiment of a turning point, do we not have, reading our times, the certainty of an even more considerable change, such that the events offering themselves to us would no longer be linked in a way according to what we are used to calling history, but in a way still unknown? . . . Today we meet an event bearing an elementary trait, that of impersonal powers, represented by the intervention of mass phenomena, by the supremacy of mechanical play, and thirdly by the seizure of the constitutive forces of matter. These three factors are named in a single word: modern technics, since technics comprises at once collective organization on a planetary scale for the calculated establishment of plans, mechanization and automation, and finally atomic energy, a key word. What hitherto only stars could accomplish, mankind does. Mankind has become astral. This astral era that has begun no longer belongs to the measures of history. (Blanchot 1969, 396) To the measures of history belonged the divide separating the human world from the stars, and thereby constituting that world. Humanity (the human world) was history (the world of Herodotus was the human world). Humanity (the human world) has become a star (has become the world of the human having become a star). This is an astral figure of power, which speaks to a change in epoch, to modern technics. But the power of whom or of what? Of humanity, or of the “impersonal forces” of modern technics itself?

      Stiegler > Blanchot > Herodotus: "Humanity (the human world) has become a star (has become the world of the human having become a star)." ||

    1. Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the contrary, starts with the ‘concretion’ of factically thrown existence itself in order to unveil temporality as that which primordially makes such existence possible. ‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality. Temporality temporalizes world-time, within the horizon of which ‘history’ can ‘appear’ as historizing within-time. ‘Spirit’ does not fall into time; but factical existence ‘falls’ as falling from primordial, authentic temporality.34 This ‘falling’ [“Fallen”], however, has itself its existential possibility in a mode of its temporalizing—a mode which belongs to temporality.

      Heidegger > Hegel: "‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality." ||

    2. Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple.42 And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis.

      Heidegger: "Being is the transcendens pure and simple" ||

    3. When an assignment to some particular “towards-this” has been thus circumspectively aroused, we catch sight of the “towards-this” itself, and along with it everything connected with the work—the whole ‘work-shop’—as that wherein concern always dwells. The context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself.

      Heidegger: lighting of the the "work-shop" ||

    4. A. The Concept of Phenomenon H. 29 The Greek expression φαινόμενον, to which the term ‘phenomenon’ goes back, is derived from the verb φαίνεσθαι, which signifies “to show itself”. Thus φαινόμενον means that which shows itself, the manifest [das, was sich zeigt, das Sichzeigende, das Offenbare]. φαίνεσθαι itself is a middle-voiced form which comes from φαίνω—to bring to the light of day, to put in the light. Φαίνω comes from the stem φα—, like φῶς, the light, that which is bright—in other words, that wherein something can become manifest, visible in itself. Thus we must keep in mind that the expression ‘phenomenon’ signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest. Accordingly the φαινόμενα or ‘phenomena’ are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light—what the Greeks sometimes identified simply with τὰ ὄντα (entities). Now an entity can show itself from itself [von ihm selbst her] in many ways, depending in each case on the kind of access we have to it. Indeed it is even possible for an entity to show itself as something which in itself it is not. When it shows itself in this way, it ‘looks like something or other’ [“sieht”… “so aus wie…”]. This kind of showing-itself is what we call “seeming” [Scheinen]. Thus in Greek too the expression φαινόμενον (“phenomenon”) signifies that which looks like something, that which is ‘semblant’, ‘semblance’ [das “Scheinbare”, der “Schein”]. Φαινόμενον ἀγαθόν means something good which looks like, but ‘in actuality’ is not, what it gives itself out to be. If we are to have any further understanding of the concept of phenomenon, everything depends on our seeing how what is designated in the first signification of φαινόμενον (‘phenomenon’ as that which shows itself) and what is designated in the second (‘phenomenon’ as semblance) are structurally interconnected. Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself—that is, of being a phenomenon—can it show itself as something which it is not; only then can it ‘merely look like so-and-so’. When φαινόμενον signifies ‘semblance’, the primordial signification (the phenomenon as the manifest) is already included as that upon which the second signification is founded. We shall allot the term ‘phenomenon’ to this positive and primordial signification of φαινόμενον, and distinguish “phenomenon” from “semblance”, which is the privative modification of “phenomenon” as thus defined. But what both these terms express has proximally nothing at all to do with what is called an ‘appearance’, or still less a ‘mere appearance’.22

      Heidegger: "The Concept of Phenomenon" ||

    5. The work produced refers not only to the “towards-which” of its usability and the “whereof” of which it consists: under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it. The work is cut to his figure; he ‘is’ there along with it as the work emerges. Even when goods are produced by the dozen, this constitutive assignment is by no means lacking; it is merely indefinite, and points to the random, the average.

      Heidegger: craftsman's "work is cut to his figure; he ‘is’ there along with it as the work emerges" ||

    6. Proximally and for the most part, de-severing69 is a circumspective bringing-close—bringing something close by, in the sense of procuring it, putting it in readiness, having it to hand. But certain ways in which entities are discovered in a purely cognitive manner also have the character of bringing them close. In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness. All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to do today, push us on towards the conquest of remoteness. With the ‘radio’, for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance of the ‘world’—a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized.

      Heidegger: radio and the "conquest of remoteness" ||

    7. The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw [zurückzuziehen] in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves [die Werkzeuge selbst]. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work—that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered.12

      Heidegger: "The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered" ||

    8. The upshot of this is that if in our analysis of dealings we aim at that which is dealt with, then one’s existent Being alongside the entities with which one concerns oneself must be given an orientation not towards some isolated item of equipment which is ready-to-hand, but towards the equipmental totality. This way of taking what is dealt with, is forced upon us also if we consider that character of Being which belongs distinctively to equipment that is ready-to-hand—namely, involvement.xvii We understand the term “involvement” ontologically. The kind of talk in which we say that something has with it an involvement in something, is not meant to establish a fact ontically, but rather to indicate the kind of Being that belongs to what is ready-to-hand. The relational character of involvement—of its ‘with… in…’—suggests that “an” equipment is ontologically impossible. Of course just a solitary item of equipment may be ready-to-hand while another is missing. But this makes known to us that the very thing that is ready-to-hand belongs to something else. Our concernful dealings can let what is ready-to-hand be encountered circumspectively only if in these dealings we already understand something like the involvement which something has in something. The Being-alongside which discovers circumspectively in concern, amounts to letting something be involved—that is, to projecting an involvement understandingly. Letting things be involved makes up the existential structure of concern. But concern, as Being alongside something, belongs to the essential constitution of care; and care, in turn, is grounded in temporality. If all this is so, then the existential condition of the possibility of letting things be involved must be sought in a mode of the temporalizing of temporality.

      Heidegger: ontological meaning of "involvement" || Return to the claim that "'an' equipment is ontologically impossible"

    9. The context of assignments or references, which, as significance, is constitutive for worldhood, can be taken formally in the sense of a system of Relations. But one must note that in such formalizations the phenomena get levelled off so much that their real phenomenal content may be lost, especially in the case of such ‘simple’ relationships as those which lurk in significance.

      Heidegger: context of reference and the 'leveling' of phenomena ||

    10. Regions are not first formed by things which are present-at-hand together; they always are ready-to-hand already in individual places. Places themselves either get allotted to the ready-to-hand in the circumspection of concern, or we come across them. Thus anything constantly ready-to-hand of which circumspective Being-in-the-world takes account beforehand, has its place. The “where” of its readiness-to-hand is put to account as a matter for concern, and oriented towards the rest of what is ready-to-hand. Thus the sun, whose light and warmth are in everyday use, has its own places—sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight; these are discovered in circumspection and treated distinctively in terms of changes in the usability of what the sun bestows. Here we have something which is ready-to-hand with uniform constancy, although it keeps changing; its places become accentuated ‘indicators’ of the regions which lie in them. These celestial regions, which need not have any geographical meaning as yet, provide the “whither” beforehand for every63 special way of giving form to the regions which places can occupy. The house has its sunny side and its shady side; the way it is divided up into ‘rooms’ [“Räume”] is oriented towards these, and so is the ‘arrangement’ [“Einrichtung”] within them, according to their character as equipment. Churches and graves, for instance, are laid out according to the rising and the setting of the sun—the regions of life and death, which are determinative for Dasein itself with regard to its ownmost possibilities of Being in the world. Dasein, in its very Being, has this Being as an issue; and its concern discovers beforehand those regions in which some involvement is decisive. This discovery of regions beforehand is co-determined [mitbestimmt] by the totality of involvements for which the ready-to-hand, as something encountered, is freed. The readiness-to-hand which belongs to any such region beforehand has the character of inconspicuous familiarity, and it has it in an even more primordial sense than does the Being of the ready-to-hand.64

      Heidegger: "inconspicuous familiarity" of the "region" || familiarity of mind maps / infographics

    11. The psychological Interpretation according to which the “I” has something ‘in the memory’ [“im Gedächtnis”] is at bottom a way of alluding to the existentially constitutive state of Being-in-the-world.

      Heidegger: inwardness of memory ["Gedächtnis"] as an allusion to "Being-in-the-world" ||

    12. Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to…’ [“etwas um-zu…”]. A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability.

      Heidegger: "Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment" || c.f. Enframing

    13. Αἴσθησις, the sheer sensory perception of something, is ‘true’ in the Greek sense, and indeed more primordially than the λόγος which we have been discussing. Just as seeing aims at colours, any αἴσθησις aims at its ἴδια (those entities which are genuinely accessible only through it and for it); and to that extent this perception is always true. This means that seeing always discovers colours, and hearing always discovers sounds. Pure νοεῖν is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess, and it perceives them just by looking at them.34 This νοεῖν is what is ‘true’ in the purest and most primordial sense; that is to say, it merely discovers, and it does so in such a way that it can never cover up. This νοεῖν can never cover up; it can never be false; it can at worst remain a non-perceiving, άγνοεῖν, not sufficing for straightforward and appropriate access.

      Heidegger: truth of "aesthesis" ||

    14. In characterizing the change-over from the manipulating and using and so forth which are circumspective in a ‘practical’ way, to ‘theoretical’ exploration, it would be easy to suggest that merely looking at entities is something which emerges when concern holds back from any kind of manipulation. What is decisive in the ‘emergence’ of the theoretical attitude would then lie in the disappearance of praxis. So if one posits ‘practical’ concern as the primary and predominant kind of Being which factical Dasein possesses, the ontological possibility of ‘theory’ will be due to the absence of praxis—that is, to a privation. But the discontinuance of a specific manipulation in our concernful dealings does not simply leave the guiding circumspection behind as a remainder. Rather, our concern then diverts itself specifically into a just-looking-around [ein Nur-sich-umsehen]. But this is by no means the way in which the ‘theoretical’ attitude of science is reached. On the contrary, the tarrying which is discontinued when one manipulates, can take on the character of a more precise kind of circumspection, such as ‘inspecting’, checking up on what has been attained, or looking over the ‘operations’ [“Betrieb”] which are now ‘at a standstill’. Holding back from the use of equipment is so far from sheer ‘theory’ that the kind of circumspection which tarries and ‘considers’, remains wholly in the grip of the ready-to-hand equipment with which one is concerned. ‘Practical’ dealings have their own ways of tarrying. And just as praxis has its own specific kind of sight (‘theory’), theoretical research is not without a praxis of its own. Reading off the measurements which result from an experiment often requires a complicated ‘technical’ set-up for the experimental design. Observation with a microscope is dependent upon the production of ‘preparations’. Archaeological excavation, which precedes any Interpretation of the ‘findings’, demands manipulations of the grossest kind. But even in the ‘most abstract’ way of working out problems and establishing what has been obtained, one manipulates equipment for writing, for example. However ‘uninteresting’ and ‘obvious’ such components of scientific research may be, they are by no means a matter of indifference ontologically. The explicit suggestion that scientific behaviour as a way of Being-in-the-world, is not just a ‘purely intellectual activity’, may seem petty and superfluous. If only it were not plain from this triviality that it is by no means patent where the ontological boundary between ‘theoretical’ and ‘atheoretical’ behaviour really runs!

      Heidegger: "just as praxis has its own specific kind of sight (‘theory’), theoretical research is not without a praxis of its own." ||

    15. And if we are inquiring about the meaning of Being, our investigation does not then become a “deep” one [tiefsinnig], nor does it puzzle out what stands behind Being. It asks about Being itself in so far as Being enters into the intelligibility of Dasein. The meaning of Being can never be contrasted with entities, or with Being as the ‘ground’ which gives entities support; for a ‘ground’ becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss of meaninglessness.45

      Heidegger: "‘ground’ becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss of meaninglessness." || The metaphorical "ground" of meaning only makes sense within the context of an equally metaphorical space of ideas that impend / depend / build / undermine one another. The metaphor which grants conceptual / theoretical language this spatiality (this sine qua non of reason) is itself meaningless or, as de Man / Schlegel would say, arbitrary. The "arbitrariness" of irony / language, the mechanicity of the "text machine" are related to this Abgrund of Grund.

    16. However much this understanding of Being (an understanding which is already available to us) may fluctuate and grow dim, and border on mere acquaintance with a word, its very indefiniteness is itself a positive phenomenon which needs to be clarified.

      Heidegger: "indefiniteness is itself a positive phenomenon..." || c.f. algorithmic visibility of unreadability

    17. With regard to the awkwardness and ‘inelegance’ of expression in the analyses to come, we may remark that it is one thing to give a report in which we tell about entities, but another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’.

      Heidegger: lacking a "grammar" of Being ||

    18. When we talk in an ontically figurative way of the lumen naturale in man, we have in mind nothing other than the existential-ontological structure of this entity, that it is in such a way as to be its “there”. To say that it is ‘illuminated’ [“erleuchtet”] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing.2 Only for an entity which is existentially cleared in this way does that which is present-at-hand become accessible in the light or hidden in the dark. By its very nature, Dasein brings its “there” along with it. If it lacks its “there”, it is not factically the entity which is essentially Dasein; indeed, it is not this entity at all. Dasein is its disclosedness.

      Heidegger: "lumen naturale" / Dasein "is itself the clearing" ||

    19. Its own past—and this always means the past of its ‘generation’—is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it.

      Heidegger: future past of a "generation" ||

    20. So if it is said that ‘Being’ is the most universal concept, this cannot mean that it is the one which is clearest or that it needs no further discussion. It is rather the darkest of all.

      Heidegger: Being as "darkest" concept || c.f. "lumen naturale" (below)

    21. In the question which we are to work out, what is asked about is Being—that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which [woraufhin] entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in detail. The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity

      Heidegger: "The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity." ||

    22. We can make clear the connection of discourse with understanding and intelligibility by considering an existential possibility which belongs to talking itself—hearing. If we have not heard ‘aright’, it is not by accident that we say we have not ‘understood’. Hearing is constitutive for discourse. And just as linguistic utterance is based on discourse, so is acoustic perception on hearing. Listening to… is Dasein’s existential way of Being-open as Being-with for Others. Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being—as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears, because it understands. As a Being-in-the-world with Others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to Dasein-with and to itself; and in this thraldom it “belongs” to these.60 Being-with develops in listening to one another [Aufeinander-hören], which can be done in several possible ways: following,61 going along with, and the privative modes of not-hearing, resisting, defying, and turning away. It is on the basis of this potentiality for hearing, which is existentially primary, that anything like hearkening [Horchen] becomes possible. Hearkening is phenomenally still more primordial than what is defined ‘in the first instance’ as “hearing” in psychology—the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hearkening too has the kind of Being of the hearing which understands. What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling. H. 164 It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide the springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood. Likewise, when we are explicitly hearing the discourse of another, we proximally understand what is said, or—to put it more exactly—we are already with him, in advance, alongside the entity which the discourse is about. On the other hand, what we proximally hear is not what is expressed in the utterance. Even in cases where the speech is indistinct or in a foreign language, what we proximally hear is unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone-data.62 Admittedly, when what the discourse is about is heard ‘naturally’, we can at the same time hear the ‘diction’, the way in which it is said [die Weise des Gesagtseins], but only if there is some co-understanding beforehand of what is said-in-the-talk; for only so is there a possibility of estimating whether the way in which it is said is appropriate to what the discourse is about thematically. In the same way, any answering counter-discourse arises proximally and directly from understanding what the discourse is about, which is already ‘shared’ in Being-with. Only where talking and hearing are existentially possible, can anyone hearken. The person who ‘cannot hear’ and ‘must feel’63 may perhaps be one who is able to hearken very well, and precisely because of this. Just hearing something “all around” [Das Nur-herum-hören] is a privation of the hearing which understands. Both talking and hearing are based upon understanding. And understanding arises neither through talking at length [vieles Reden] nor through busily hearing something “all around”. Only he who already understands can listen [zuhören]. H. 165 Keeping silent is another essential possibility of discourse, and it has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can ‘make one understand’ (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length [Viel-sprechen] about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity—the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be dumb. On the contrary, if a man is dumb, he still has a tendency to ‘speak’. Such a person has not proved that he can keep silence; indeed, he entirely lacks the possibility of proving anything of the sort. And the person who is accustomed by Nature to speak little is no better able to show that he is keeping silent or that he is the sort of person who can do so. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk’ [“Gerede”]. As a mode of discoursing, reticence Articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a Potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent.

      Heidegger: hearing / hearkening [Horchen] / keeping silent || This fascinating ontological exposition needs to be considered in the context of modern communication technology (e.g. social media). What does it mean when the force shaping the sphere of Gerede is no longer primarily one of embodied interpersonal communication? Does Dasein's relation to others undergo a primordial transformation when the interval / caesura / epoche / possibility of silence is foreclosed / enframed? It would be useful to explore this alongside Habermas' theory of the public sphere and his quarrel with Derrida (Limited Inc.)

    23. Inauthentic understanding temporalizes itself as an awaiting which makes present [gegenwärtigendes Geswärtigen]—an awaiting to whose ecstatical unity there must belong a corresponding “having been“. The authentic coming-towards-oneself of anticipatory resoluteness is at the same time a coming-back to one’s ownmost Self, which has been thrown into its individualization. This ecstasis makes it possible for Dasein to be able to take over resolutely that entity which it already is. In anticipating, Dasein brings itself again forth into its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. If Being-as-having-been is authentic, we call it “repetition“.10 But when one projects oneself inauthentically towards those possibilities which have been drawn from the object of concern in making it present, this is possible only because Dasein has forgotten itself in its ownmost thrown potentiality-for-Being. This forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a ‘positive’ ecstatical mode of one’s having been—a mode with a character of its own. The ecstasis (rapture) of forgetting has the character of backing away in the face of one’s ownmost “been”, and of doing so in a manner which is closed off from itself—in such a manner, indeed, that this backing-away closes off ecstatically that in the face of which one is backing away, and thereby closes itself off too.11 Having forgotten [Vergessenheit] as an inauthentic way of having been, is thus related to that thrown Being which is one’s own; it is the temporal meaning of that Being in accordance with which I am proximally and for the most part as-having-been. Only on the basis of such forgetting can anything be retained [behalten] by the concernful making-present which awaits; and what are thus retained are entities encountered within-the-world with a character other than that of Dasein. To such retaining there corresponds a non-retaining which presents us with a kind of ‘forgetting’ in a derivative sense. Just as expecting is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not vice versa; for in the mode of having-forgotten, one’s having been ‘discloses’ primarily the horizon into which a Dasein lost in the ‘superficiality’ of its object of concern, can bring itself by remembering.12 The awaiting which forgets and makes present is an ecstatical unity in its own right, in accordance with which inauthentic understanding temporalizes itself with regard to its temporality. The unity of these ecstases closes off one’s authentic potentiality-for-Being, and is thus the existential condition for the possibility of irresoluteness. Though inauthentic concernful understanding determines itself in the light of making present the object of concern, the temporalizing of the understanding is performed primarily in the future.

      Heidegger: "remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not vice versa" ||

    24. The fact that, even though states-of-mind are primarily disclosive, everyday circumspection goes wrong and to a large extent succumbs to delusion because of them, is a μὴ ὄν [non-being] when measured against the idea of knowing the ‘world’ absolutely. But if we make evaluations which are so unjustified ontologically, we shall completely fail to recognize the existentially positive character of the capacity for delusion. It is precisely when we see the ‘world’ unsteadily and fitfully in accordance with our moods, that the ready-to-hand shows itself in its specific worldhood, which is never the same from day to day. By looking at the world theoretically, we have already dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely present-at-hand, though admittedly this uniformity comprises a new abundance of things which can be discovered by simply characterizing them. Yet even the purest θεωρία [theory] has not left all moods behind it; even when we look theoretically at what is just present-at-hand, it does not show itself purely as it looks unless this θεωρία lets it come towards us in a tranquil tarrying alongside…, in ῥαστώνη and διαγωγή.iv Any cognitive determining has its existential-ontological Constitution in the state-of-mind of Being-in-the-world; but pointing this out is not to be confused with attempting to surrender science ontically to ‘feeling’.

      Heidegger: theoretical moods || theory 'dims' the deep texture of equipment / stuff / pragmata / zuhandenheit (i.e. its projection into and weaving within time / history) into the merely present-at-hand. Heidegger's acknowledgment of a "new abundance of things" here is interesting. Does this refer to the prior equipmental totality that has been dimmed by theoretical insight or is he suggesting a new layer of readiness-to-hand that emerges only when that totality has been grasped theoretically. Might this "new abundance" of theory suggest what de Man calls the "generative" power's of trope. It will be especially helpful to contrast this theoretical dimming with de Man's theory of theoretical blindness and insight since that latter was formulated earlier in de Man's career when he was (arguably) more swayed by the rhetoric of Heideggerian temporality. Certainly this discussion also approaches the crux of pathos in de Man / Derrida / Rousseau. At the moment, though, I'm more concerned with the possibility of mapping the "psycholinguistic" dimension of tropes that de Man alludes to in Allegories of Reading. Heidegger gives us this gives us this theory of pathos / pathos of theory which are clearly never far from de Man's mind. Both want to install "rhetoric" in a space that isn't simply inside or outside the world...

    25. That which is understood gets Articulated when the entity to be understood is brought close interpretatively by taking as our clue the ‘something as something’; and this Articulation lies before [liegt vor] our making any thematic assertion about it. In such an assertion the ‘as’ does not turn up for the first time; it just gets expressed for the first time, and this is possible only in that it lies before us as something expressible.38 The fact that when we look at something, the explicitness of assertion can be absent, does not justify our denying that there is any Articulative interpretation in such mere seeing, and hence that there is any as-structure in it. When we have to do with anything, the mere seeing of the Things which are closest to us bears in itself the structure of interpretation, and in so primordial a manner that just to grasp something free, as it were, of the “as”, requires a certain readjustment. When we merely stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more. This grasping which is free of the “as”, is a privation of the kind of seeing in which one merely understands. It is not more primordial than that kind of seeing, but is derived from it. If the ‘as’ is ontically unexpressed, this must not seduce us into overlooking it as a constitutive state for understanding, existential and a priori.

      Heidegger: "articulartion lies before [liegt vor] our making any thematic assertion about it || This is a typical enough evocation of the circularity of interpretation and perception / hermeneutic circle. Stiegler will question the extent to which this idea of articulation can include the tertiary retentions of technical being. As it concerns the question of thematization, Stiegler's question gives us occasion to ask whether thematic intervention is possible without such a mnemotechnical intervention

    26. If the question of historicality leads us back to these ‘sources’, then the locus of the problem of history has already been decided. This locus is not to be sought in historiology as the science of history. Even if the problem of ‘history’ is treated in accordance with a theory of science, not only aiming at the ‘epistemological’ clarification of the historiological way of grasping things (Simmel) or at the logic with which the concepts of historiological presentation are formed (Rickert), but doing so with an orientation towards ‘the side of the object’, then, as long as the question is formulated this way, history becomes in principle accessible only as the Object of a science. Thus the basic phenomenon of history, which is prior to any possible thematizing by historiology and underlies it, has been irretrievably put aside. How history can become a possible object for historiology is something that may be gathered only from the kind of Being which belongs to the historical—from historicality, and from the way it is rooted in temporality.

      Heidegger: seeking "the basic phenomenon of history" as object "prior to any possible thematizing" ||

    27. Nevertheless, our way of exhibiting the constitution of Dasein’s Being remains only one way which we may take. Our aim is to work out the question of Being in general. The thematic analytic of existence, however, first needs the light of the idea of Being in general, which must be clarified beforehand.

      Heidegger: "our way of exhibiting the constitution of Dasein’s Being remains only one way which we may take" || Baffling for many reasons, this statement throws the whole "necessity" of the questioning into suspension and adds a strange luminescence to the "thematic" idea of Being which doesn't clearly map onto the previous rhetoric of "lighting up" / "dimming down" / "lichtung" etc.

    28. That with which one’s concernful dealings fail to cope, either by producing or procuring something, or even by turning away, holding aloof, or protecting oneself from something, reveals itself in its insurmountability. Concern resigns itself to it.36 But resigning oneself to something is a mode peculiar to circumspectively letting it be encountered. On the basis of this kind of discovery concern can come across that which is inconvenient, disturbing, hindering, endangering, or in general resistant in some way. The temporal structure of resigning oneself to something, lies in a non-retaining which awaitingly makes present. In awaitingly making present, one does not, for instance, reckon ‘on’ that which is unsuitable but none the less available. “Not reckoning with” something, is a mode of “taking into one’s reckoning” that which one cannot cling to. That which one has “not reckoned with” does not get forgotten; it gets retained, so that in its very unsuitability it remains ready-to-hand.37 That which is ready-to-hand in this manner belongs to the everyday stock or content of the factically disclosed environment.

      Heidegger: "That which one has “not reckoned with” does not get forgotten; it gets retained, so that in its very unsuitability it remains ready-to-hand" ||

    29. The idea of historiology as a science implies that the disclosure of historical entities is what it has seized upon as its own task. Every science is constituted primarily by thematizing. That which is familiar prescientifically in Dasein as disclosed Being-in-the-world, gets projected upon the Being which is specific to it. With this projection, the realm of entities is bounded off. The ways of access to them get ‘managed’ methodologically, and the conceptual structure for interpreting them is outlined. If we may postpone the question of whether a ‘history of the Present’ is possible, and assign [zuweisen] to historiology the task of disclosing the ‘past’, then the historiological thematizing of history is possible only if, in general, the ‘past’ has in each case already been disclosed. Quite apart from the question of whether sufficient sources are available for the historiological envisagement of the past, the way to it must in general be open if we are to go back to it historiologically. It is by no means patent that anything of the sort is the case, or how this is possible.

      Heidegger: "Every science is constituted primarily by thematizing" || Just as Heidegger does not reject facticity outright he is equally careful in his critique of the limits of thematization. Indeed, the two discussions seem to correspond on many points. Is thematization a kind of meta-factualization? A factualization with a temporal component?

    30. Indeed history is neither the connectedness of motions in the alterations of Objects, nor a free-floating sequence of Experiences which ‘subjects’ have had. Does the historizing of history then pertain to the way subject and Object are ‘linked together’? Even if one assigns [zuweist] historizing to the subject-Object relation, we then have to ask what kind of Being belongs to this linkage as such, if this is what basically ‘historizes’. The thesis of Dasein’s historicality does not say that the worldless subject is historical, but that what is historical is the entity that exists as Being-in-the-world. The historizing of history is the historizing of Being-in-the-world. Dasein’s historicality is essentially the historicality of the world, which, on the basis of ecstatico-horizontal temporality, belongs to the temporalizing of that temporality. In so far as Dasein exists factically, it already encounters that which has been discovered within-the-world. With the existence of historical Being-in-the-world, what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand have already, in every case, been incorporated into the history of the world. Equipment and work—for instance, books—have their fates; buildings and institutions have their history. And even Nature is historical. It is not historical, to be sure, in so far as we speak of ‘natural history’;ix but Nature is historical as a countryside, as an area that has been colonized or exploited, as a battlefield, or as the site of a cult. These entities within-the-world are historical as such, and their history does not signify something ‘external’ which merely accompanies the ‘inner’ history of the ‘soul’. We call such entities “the world-historical“. Here we must notice that the expression ‘world-history’ which we have chosen and which is here understood ontologically, has a double signification. The expression signifies, for one thing, the historizing of the world in its essential existent unity with Dasein. At the same time, we have here in view the ‘historizing’ within-the-world of what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, in so far as entities within-the-world are, in every case, discovered with the factically existent world. The historical world is factical only as the world of entities within-the-world. That which ‘happens’ with equipment and work as such has its own character of movement, and this character has been completely obscure up till now. When, for instance, a ring gets ‘handed over’ to someone and ‘worn’, this is a kind of Being in which it does not simply suffer changes of location. The movement of historizing in which something ‘happens to something’ is not to be grasped in terms of motion as change of location. This holds for all world-historical ‘processes’ and events, and even, in a certain manner, for ‘natural catastrophes’. Quite apart from the fact that if we were to follow up the problem of the ontological structure of world-historical historizing, we would necessarily be transgressing the limits of our theme, we can refrain from this all the more because the very aim of this exposition is to lead us face to face with the ontological enigma of the movement of historizing in general.

      Heidegger: Dasein's "historicality" and "world-historicality" || I'm particularly interested in the line: "Equipment and work—for instance, books—have their fates; buildings and institutions have their history." So far as I can tell Heidegger would see the "fate" of the book springing from the fundamental historicality of Dasein. My question is whether this fate is compatible with the kind de Man assigns to texts a material events?

    31. In our first description of the genesis of the theoretical attitude out of circumspection, we have made basic a way of theoretically grasping entities within-the-world—physical Nature—in which the modification of our understanding of Being is tantamount to a change-over. In the ‘physical’ assertion that ‘the hammer is heavy’ we overlook not only the tool-character of the entity we encounter, but also something that belongs to any ready-to-hand equipment: its place. Its place becomes a matter of indifference. This does not mean that what is present-at-hand loses its ‘location’ altogether. But its place becomes a spatio-temporal position, a ‘world-point’, which is in no way distinguished from any other. This implies not only that the multiplicity of places of equipment ready-to-hand within the confines of the environment becomes modified to a pure multiplicity of positions, but that the entities of the environment are altogether released from such confinement [entschränkt]. The aggregate of the present-at-hand becomes the theme.

      Heidegger: "The aggregate of the present-at-hand becomes the theme." || Very interesting take on thematization especially in how it seems to clash with Heidegger's use of "thematic" in the language of the existential analytic itself ("...has not been grasped thematically"). Are these two uses of "theme" (for Dasein and for Us) really interchangeable? At stake would be the difference between Heideggerian and Hegelian phenomenology.

    32. The scientific projection of any entities which we have somehow encountered already lets their kind of Being be understood explicitly and in such a manner that it thus becomes manifest what ways are possible for the pure discovery of entities within-the-world. The Articulation of the understanding of Being, the delimitation of an area of subject-matter (a delimitation guided by this understanding), and the sketching-out of the way of conceiving which is appropriate to such entities—all these belong to the totality of this projecting; and this totality is what we call “thematizing“. Its aim is to free the entities we encounter within-the-world, and to free them in such a way that they can ‘throw themselves against’42 a pure discovering—that is, that they can become “Objects”. Thematizing Objectifies. It does not first ‘posit’ the entities, but frees them so that one can interrogate them and determine their character ‘Objectively’. Being which Objectifies and which is alongside the present-at-hand within-the-world, is characterized by a distinctive kind of making-present.xxiii This making-present is distinguished from the Present of circumspection in that—above all—the kind of discovering which belongs to the science in question awaits solely the discoveredness of the present-at-hand. This awaiting of discoveredness has its existentiell basis in a resoluteness by which Dasein projects itself towards its potentiality-for-Being in the ‘truth’. This projection is possible because Being-in-the-truth makes up a definite way in which Dasein may exist. We shall not trace further how science has its source in authentic existence. It is enough now if we understand that the thematizing of entities within-the-world presupposes Being-in-the-world as the basic state of Dasein, and if we understand how it does so. H. 364 If the thematizing of the present-at-hand—the scientific projection of Nature—is to become possible, Dasein must transcend the entities thematized. Transcendence does not consist in Objectifying, but is presupposed by it. If, however, the thematizing of the present-at-hand within-the-world is a change-over from the concern which discovers by circumspection, then one’s ‘practical’ Being alongside the ready-to-hand is something which a transcendence of Dasein must already underlie. If, moreover, thematizing modifies and Articulates the understanding of Being, then, in so far as Dasein, the entity which thematizes, exists, it must already understand something like Being. Such understanding of Being can remain neutral. In that case readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand have not yet been distinguished; still less have they been conceived ontologically. But if Dasein is to be able to have any dealings with a context of equipment, it must understand something like an involvement, even if it does not do so thematically: a world must have been disclosed to it. With Dasein’s factical existence, this world has been disclosed, if Dasein indeed exists essentially as Being-in-the-world.43 And if Dasein’s Being is completely grounded in temporality, then temporality must make possible Being-in-the-world and therewith Dasein’s transcendence; this transcendence in turn provides the support for concernful Being alongside entities within-the-world, whether this Being is theoretical or practical.

      Heidegger: "thematizing of the present-at-hand" as "the scientific projection of Nature" || The crucial question is whether Dasein is capable of "transcend[ing] the entities being thematized." Especially the entities which have been prosthetically grafted onto its theoretical insight

    33. The world is already presupposed in one’s Being alongside the ready-to-hand concernfully and factically, in one’s thematizing of the present-at-hand, and in one’s discovering of this latter entity by Objectification; that is to say, all these are possible only as ways of Being-in-the-world. Having its ground [gründend] in the horizonal unity of ecstatical temporality, the world is transcendent. It must already have been ecstatically disclosed so that in terms of it entities within-the-world can be encountered. Temporality already maintains itself ecstatically within the horizons of its ecstases; and in temporalizing itself, it comes back to those entities which are encountered in the “there”. With Dasein’s factical existence, entities within-the-world are already encountered too. The fact that such entities are discovered along with Dasein’s own “there” of existence, is not left to Dasein’s discretion. Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it does so, how and how far it does so—only these are matters for Dasein’s freedom, even if always within the limitations of its thrownness. Thus the significance-relationships which determine the structure of the world are not a network of forms which a worldless subject has laid over some kind of material. What is rather the case is that factical Dasein, understanding itself and its world ecstatically in the unity of the “there”, comes back from these horizons to the entities encountered within them. Coming back to these entities understandingly is the existential meaning of letting them be encountered by making them present; that is why we call them entities “within-the-world”. The world is, as it were, already ‘further outside’ than any Object can ever be. The ‘problem of transcendence’ cannot be brought round to the question of how a subject comes out to an Object, where the aggregate of Objects is identified with the idea of the world. Rather we must ask: what makes it ontologically possible for entities to be encountered within-the-world and Objectified as so encountered? This can be answered by recourse to the transcendence of the world—a transcendence with an ecstatico-horizonal foundation. If the ‘subject’ gets conceived ontologically as an existing Dasein whose Being is grounded in temporality, then one must say that the world is ‘subjective’. But in that case, this ‘subjective’ world, as one that is temporally transcendent, is ‘more Objective’ than any possible ‘Object’.

      Heidegger: "The world is ...‘further outside’ than any Object can ever be" / the "'subjective' world...is 'more Objective' than any possible 'Object'" ||

    34. Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historizes’ out of its future on each occasion.2

      Heidegger: "Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historizes’ out of its future on each occasion.2" ||

    35. The historiological disclosure of the ‘past’ is based on fateful repetition, and is so far from ‘subjective’ that it alone guarantees the ‘Objectivity’ of historiology. For the Objectivity of a science is regulated primarily in terms of whether that science can confront us with the entity which belongs to it as its theme, and can bring it, uncovered in the primordiality of its Being, to our understanding. In no science are the ‘universal validity’ of standards and the claims to ‘universality’ which the “they” and its common sense demand, less possible as criteria of ‘truth’ than in authentic historiology. Only because in each case the central theme of historiology is the possibility of existence which has-been-there, and because the latter exists factically in a way which is world-historical, can it demand of itself that it takes its orientation inexorably from the ‘facts’. Accordingly this research as factical has many branches and takes for its object the history of equipment, of work, of culture, of the spirit, and of ideas. As handing itself down, history is, in itself, at the same time and in each case always in an interpretedness which belongs to it, and which has a history of its own; so for the most part it is only through traditional history that historiology penetrates to what has-been-there itself. This is why concrete historiological research can, in each case, maintain itself in varying closeness to its authentic theme. If the historian ‘throws’ himself straightway into the ‘world-view’ of an era, he has not thus proved as yet that he understands his object in an authentically historical way, and not just ‘aesthetically’. And on the other hand, the existence of a historian who ‘only’ edits sources, may be characterized by a historicality which is authentic. H. 396 Thus the very prevalence of a differentiated interest even in the most remote and primitive cultures, is in itself no proof of the authentic historicality of a ‘time’. In the end, the emergence of a problem of ‘historicism’ is the clearest symptom that historiology endeavours to alienate Dasein from its authentic historicality. Such historicality does not necessarily require historiology. It is not the case that unhistoriological eras as such are unhistorical also.

      Heidegger: "history is, in itself, at the same time and in each case always in an interpretedness which belongs to it, and which has a history of its own" || So much going on here: what seems like a critique of Hegelian history (i.e. "Africa does not have a history") and an anticipation of Nietzsche. I'm curious what is meant by the phrase "not just 'aesthetically," especially given that Heidegger has already tied a classical Greek conception of aesthesis with the truth of Dasein itself.

  2. Oct 2018
    1. In hankering, Being-already-alongside… takes priority. The “ahead-of-itself-in-Being-already-in…” is correspondingly modified. Dasein’s hankering as it falls makes manifest its addiction to becoming ‘lived’ by whatever world it is in. This addiction shows the character of Being out for something [Ausseins auf…]. Being-ahead-of-oneself has lost itself in a ‘just-always-already-alongside’.13 What one is addicted ‘towards’ [Das “Hin-zu” des Hanges) is to let oneself be drawn by the sort of thing for which the addiction hankers. If Dasein, as it were, sinks into an addiction then there is not merely an addiction present-at-hand, but the entire structure of care has been modified. Dasein has become blind, and puts all possibilities into the service of the addiction.

      Heidegger: "Dasein’s hankering as it falls makes manifest its addiction to becoming ‘lived’ by whatever world it is in." || C.f. the "becoming 'lived'" by the world with the "being spoken" by Language in the later Heidegger.

    2. Dasein’s Being reveals itself as care.

      Heidegger: "Dasein’s Being reveals itself as care." ||

    3. Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the world in so far as space has been disclosed by that Being-in-the-world which is constitutive for Dasein.

      Heidegger: "Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space" ||

    4. The ready-to-hand is encountered within-the-world. The Being of this entity, readiness-to-hand, thus stands in some ontological relationship towards the world and towards worldhood. In anything ready-to-hand the world is always ‘there’. Whenever we encounter anything, the world has already been previously discovered, though not thematically.

      Heidegger: "Whenever we encounter anything, the world has already been previously discovered, though not thematically" ||

    5. We must set forth the ontological Constitution of inhood [Inheit] itself.

      Heidegger: "We must set forth the ontological Constitution of inhood [Inheit] itself." ||

    6. Thus the term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim which can be formulated as ‘To the things themselves!’ It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as ‘problems’, often for generations at a time. Yet this maxim, one may rejoin, is abundantly self-evident, and it expresses, moreover, the underlying principle of any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Why should anything so self-evident be taken up explicitly in giving a title to a branch of research? In point of fact, the issue here is a kind of ‘self-evidence’ which we should like to bring closer to us, so far as it is important to do so in casting light upon the procedure of our treatise. We shall expound only the preliminary conception [Vorbegriff] of phenomenology.

      Heidegger: "To the things themselves!" ||

    7. Dasein is ontically ‘closest’ to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger.

      Heidegger: "Dasein is ontically ‘closest’ to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger." ||

    8. If to Interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself—the pre-ontological understanding of Being.

      Heidegger: question as a "radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being..." ||

    9. Aristotle says: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστιν.vi “Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.”

      Heidegger > Aristotle: "Aristotle says: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστιν.vi “Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.”" ||

    10. Is there not, however, a manifest circularity in such an undertaking?

      Heidegger: "manifest circularity" ||

    11. One can never carry on researches into the source and the possibility of the ‘idea’ of Being in general simply by means of the ‘abstractions’ of formal logic—that is, without any secure horizon for question and answer. One must seek a way of casting light on the fundamental question of ontology, and this is the way one must go. Whether this is the only way or even the right one at all, can be decided only after one has gone along it. The conflict as to the Interpretation of Being cannot be allayed, because it has not yet been enkindled. And in the end this is not the kind of conflict one can ‘bluster into’; it is of the kind which cannot get enkindled unless preparations are made for it. Towards this alone the foregoing investigation is on the way. And where does this investigation stand?

      Heidegger: "The conflict as to the Interpretation of Being cannot be allayed, because it has not yet been enkindled" || This is about as mysterious as Derrida's exergue to Of Spirit : "I will speak of ghost, of flame and of ashes." How does the "enkindling" of the conflict relate to the "ashes" of Derrida's reading?

    12. The distinction between the Being of existing Dasein and the Being of entities, such as Reality, which do not have the character of Dasein, may appear very illuminating; but it is still only the point of departure for the ontological problematic; it is nothing with which philosophy may tranquillize itself. It has long been known that ancient ontology works with ‘Thing-concepts’ and that there is a danger of ‘reifying consciousness’. But what does this “reifying” signify? Where does it arise? Why does Being get ‘conceived’ ‘proximally’ in terms of the present-at-hand and not in terms of the ready-to-hand, which indeed lies closer to us? Why does this reifying always keep coming back to exercise its dominion? What positive structure does the Being of ‘consciousness’ have, if reification remains inappropriate to it? Is the ‘distinction’ between ‘consciousness’ and ‘Thing’ sufficient for tackling the ontological problematic in a primordial manner? Do the answers to these questions lie along our way? And can we even seek the answer as long as the question of the meaning of Being remains unformulated and unclarified?

      Heidegger: "What positive structure does the Being of ‘consciousness’ have, if reification remains inappropriate to it?" || Strange to see reification addressed so late. Similar to the way that the concept of the sigh is addressed after seeing / hearing / ambiguity.

    13. World-time, moreover, is also ‘more subjective’ than any possible subject; for it is what first makes possible the Being of the factically existing Self—that Being which, as is now well understood, is the meaning of care.

      Heidegger: "World-time [is] ‘more subjective’ than any possible subject" || c.f. earlier claims about Being-in-the-world as more objective than any possible object

    14. This dating of things in terms of the heavenly body which sheds forth light and warmth, and in terms of its distinctive ‘places’ in the sky, is a way of assigning time which can be done in our Being with one another ‘under the same sky’, and which can be done for ‘Everyman’ at any time in the same way, so that within certain limits everyone is proximally agreed upon it. That by which things are thus dated is available environmentally and yet not restricted to the world of equipment with which one currently concerns oneself. It is rather the case that in the world the environing Nature and the public environment are always discovered along with it.ii This public dating, in which everyone assigns himself his time, is one which everyone can ‘reckon’ on simultaneously; it uses a publicly available measure. This dating reckons with time in the sense of a measuring of time; and such measuring requires something by which time is to be measured—namely, a clock. This implies that along with the temporality of Dasein as thrown, abandoned to the ‘world’, and giving itself time, something like a ‘clock’ is also discovered—that is, something ready-to-hand which in its regular recurrence has become accessible in one’s making present awaitingly. The Being which has been thrown and is alongside the ready-to-hand is grounded in temporality. Temporality is the reason for the clock. As the condition for the possibility that a clock is factically necessary, temporality is likewise the condition for its discoverability. For while the course of the sun is encountered along with the discoveredness of entities within-the-world, it is only by making it present in awaitingly retaining, and by doing so in a way which interprets itself, that dating in terms of what is ready-to-hand environmentally in a public way is made possible and is also required.

      Heidegger: "Temporality is the reason for the clock" ||

    15. The “there” is disclosed in a way which is grounded in Dasein’s own temporality as ecstatically stretched along, and with this disclosure a ‘time’ is allotted to Dasein; only because of this can Dasein, as factically thrown, ‘take’ its time and lose it. H. 411 As something disclosed, Dasein exists factically in the way of Being with Others. It maintains itself in an intelligibility which is public and average. When the ‘now that…’ and the ‘then when…’ have been interpreted and expressed in our everyday Being with one another, they will be understood in principle, even though their dating is unequivocal only within certain limits. In the ‘most intimate’ Being-with-one-another of several people, they can say ‘now’ and say it ‘together’, though each of them gives a different date to the ‘now’ which he is saying: “now that this or that has come to pass…” The ‘now’ which anyone expresses is always said in the publicness of Being-in-the-world with one another. Thus the time which any Dasein has currently interpreted and expressed has as such already been given a public character on the basis of that Dasein’s ecstatical Being-in-the-world. In so far, then, as everyday concern understands itself in terms of the ‘world’ of its concern and takes its ‘time’, it does not know this ‘time’ as its own, but concernfully utilizes the time which ‘there is’ [“es gibt”]—the time with which “they” reckon. Indeed the publicness of ‘time’ is all the more compelling, the more explicitly factical Dasein concerns itself with time in specifically taking it into its reckoning.

      Heidegger: "the time which ‘there is’ [“es gibt”]—the time with which “they” reckon" ||

    16. The making-present which awaits and retains, interprets itself. And this in turn is possible only because, as something which in itself is ecstatically open, it has in each case been disclosed to itself already and can be Articulated in the kind of interpretation which is accompanied by understanding and discourse. Because temporality is ecstatico-horizonally constitutive for the clearedness of the “there”, temporality is always primordially interpretable in the “there” and is accordingly familiar to us. The making-present which interprets itself—in other words, that which has been interpreted and is addressed in the ‘now’—is what we call ‘time’. This simply makes known to us that temporality—which, as ecstatically open, is recognizable—is familiar, proximally and for the most part, only as interpreted in this concernful manner.4 But while time is ‘immediately’ intelligible and recognizable, this does not preclude the possibility that primordial temporality as such may remain unknown and unconceived, and that this is also the case with the source of the time which has been expressed—a source which temporalizes itself in that temporality.

      Heidegger: "The making-present which awaits and retains, interprets itself" || Rather remarkable formulation Being qua Time interprets itself!

    17. The existential Interpretation of Dasein’s historicality is constantly getting eclipsed unawares. The obscurities are all the harder to dispel when we have not disentangled the possible dimensions of the appropriate inquiry, and when everything is haunted by the enigma of Being, and, as has now been made plain, by that of motion.20 Nevertheless, we may venture a projection of the ontological genesis of historiology as a science in terms of Dasein’s historicality. This projection will serve to prepare us for the clarification of the task of destroying the history of philosophy historiologically—a clarification which is to be accomplished in what follows.x

      Heidegger: "the task of destroying the history of philosophy historiologically" ||

    18. Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical “there” by shattering itself against death—that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision for ‘its time’. Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say, authentic historicality.

      Heidegger: fate / "authentic historicality" ||

    19. We contend that what is primarily historical is Dasein. That which is secondarily historical, however, is what we encounter within-the-world—not only equipment ready-to-hand, in the widest sense, but also the environing Nature as ‘the very soil of history.’ Entities other than Dasein which are historical by reason of belonging to the world, are what we call ‘world-historical’. It can be shown that the ordinary conception of ‘world-history’ arises precisely from our orientation to what is thus secondarily historical. World-historical entities do not first get their historical character, let us say, by reason of an historiological Objectification; they get it rather as those entities which they are in themselves when they are encountered within-the-world.

      Heidegger: primary / secondary historicality ||

    20. As equipment belonging to a world, that which is now still present-at-hand can belong nevertheless to the ‘past’. But what do we signify by saying of a world that it is no longer?

      Heidegger: the past of equipment present-at-hand ||

    21. After this first characterization of the course of the ontological exposition of historicality in terms of temporality, do we still need explicit assurance that the following investigation does not rest upon a belief that the problem of history is to be solved by a coup de main?

      Heidegger: "belief that the problem of history is to be solved by a coup de main" || c.f. Derrida - Heidegger's Hand

    22. Disclosing and interpreting belong essentially to Dasein’s historizing. Out of this kind of Being of the entity which exists historically, there arises the existentiell possibility of disclosing history explicitly and getting it in our grasp. The fact that we can make history our theme—that is to say, disclose it historiologically—is the presupposition for the possibility of the way one ‘builds up the historical world in the humane sciences’. The existential Interpretation of historiology as a science aims solely at demonstrating its ontological derivation from Dasein’s historicality. Only from here can we stake out the boundaries within which any theory of science that is oriented to the factical workings of science, may expose itself to the accidental factors in its way of formulating questions.

      Heidegger: "making history our theme" / disclosing it "historiologically" ||

    23. In the moment of vision, indeed, and often just ‘for that moment’, existence can even gain the mastery over the “everyday”; but it can never extinguish it.

      Heidegger: "In the moment of vision, indeed, and often just ‘for that moment’, existence can even gain the mastery over the “everyday”; but it can never extinguish it." ||

    24. We must now make an existential-analytical inquiry as to the temporal conditions, for the possibility of the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein—the spatiality upon which in turn is founded the uncovering of space within-the-world. We must first remember in what way Dasein is spatial. Dasein can be spatial only as care, in the sense of existing as factically falling. Negatively this means that Dasein is never present-at-hand in space, not even proximally. Dasein does not fill up a bit of space as a Real Thing or item of equipment would, so that the boundaries dividing it from the surrounding space would themselves just define that space spatially. Dasein takes space in; this is to be understood literally.46 It is by no means just present-at-hand in a bit of space which its body fills up. In existing, it has already made room for its own leeway. It determines its own location in such a manner that it comes back from the space it has made room for to the ‘place’ which it has reserved.47 To be able to say that Dasein is present-at-hand at a position in space, we must first take [auffassen] this entity in a way which is ontologically inappropriate. Nor does the distinction between the ‘spatiality’ of an extended Thing and that of Dasein lie in the fact that Dasein knows about space; for taking space in [das Raum-einnehmen] is so far from identical with a ‘representing’ of the spatial, that it is presupposed by it instead. Neither may Dasein’s spatiality be interpreted as an imperfection which adheres to existence by reason of the fatal ‘linkage of the spirit to a body’. On the contrary, because Dasein is ‘spiritual’, and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal Thing.

      Heidegger: "Dasein takes space in; this is to be understood literally" ||

    25. Circumspective concern includes the understanding of a totality of involvements, and this understanding is based upon a prior understanding of the relationships of the “in-order-to”, the” towards-which”, the “towards-this”, and the “for-the-sake-of”. The interconnection of these relationships has been exhibited earlierxxiv as “significance”. Their unity makes up what we call the “world”. The question arises of how anything like the world in its unity with Dasein is ontologically possible. In what way must the world be, if Dasein is to be able to exist as Being-in-the-World? Dasein exists for the sake of a potentiality-for-Being of itself. In existing, it has been thrown; and as something thrown, it has been delivered over to entities which it needs in order to be able to be as it is—namely, for the sake of itself. In so far as Dasein exists factically, it understands itself in the way its “for-the-sake-of-itself” is thus connected with some current “in-order-to”. That inside which existing Dasein understands itself, is ‘there’ along with its factical existence. That inside which one primarily understands oneself has Dasein’s kind of Being. Dasein is its world existingly. H. 365 We have defined Dasein’s Being as “care”. The ontological meaning of “care” is temporality. We have shown that temporality constitutes the disclosedness of the “there”, and we have shown how it does so. In the disclosedness of the “there” the world is disclosed along with it. The unity of significance—that is, the ontological constitution of the world—must then likewise be grounded in temporality. The existential-temporal condition for the possibility of the world lies in the fact that temporality, as an ecstatical unity, has something like a horizon. Ecstases are not simply raptures in which one gets carried away. Rather, there belongs to each ecstasis a ‘whither’ to which one is carried away.44 This “whither” of the ecstasis we call the “horizonal schema”. In each of the three ecstases the ecstatical horizon is different. The schema in which Dasein comes towards itself futurally, whether authentically or inauthentically, is the “for-the-sake-of-itself“. The schema in which Dasein is disclosed to itself in a state-of-mind as thrown, is to be taken as that in the face of which it has been thrown and that to which it has been abandoned. This characterizes the horizonal schema of what has been. In existing for the sake of itself in abandonment to itself as something that has been thrown, Dasein, as Being-alongside, is at the same time making present. The horizonal schema for the Present is defined by the “in-order-to“. The unity of the horizonal schemata of future, Present, and having been, is grounded in the ecstatical unity of temporality. The horizon of temporality as a whole determines that whereupon [woraufhin] factically existing entities are essentially disclosed. With one’s factical Being-there, a potentiality-for-Being is in each case projected in the horizon of the future, one’s ‘Being-already’ is disclosed in the horizon of having been, and that with which one concerns oneself is discovered in the horizon of the Present. The horizonal unity of the schemata of these ecstases makes possible the primordial way in which the relationships of the “in-order-to” are connected with the “for-the-sake-of”. This implies that on the basis of the horizonal constitution of the ecstatical unity of temporality, there belongs to that entity which is in each case its own “there”, something like a world that has been disclosed. Just as the Present arises in the unity of the temporalizing of temporality out of the future and having been, the horizon of a Present temporalizes itself equiprimordially with those of the future and of having been. In so far as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too. In temporalizing itself with regard to its Being as temporality, Dasein is45 essentially ‘in a world’, by reason of the ecstatico-horizonal constitution of that temporality. The world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality. It ‘is’, with the “outside-of-itself” of the ecstases, ‘there’. If no Dasein exists, no world is ‘there’ either.

      Heidegger: "The unity of the horizonal schema" ||

    26. The awaiting of the “towards-which” is neither a considering of the ‘goal’ nor an expectation of the impendent finishing of the work to be produced. It has by no means the character of getting something thematically into one’s grasp. Neither does the retaining of that which has an involvement signify holding it fast thematically. Manipulative dealings no more relate themselves merely to that in which we let something be involved, than they do to what is involved itself. Letting something be involved is constituted rather in the unity of a retention which awaits, and it is constituted in such a manner, indeed, that the making-present which arises from this, makes possible the characteristic absorption of concern in its equipmental world. When one is wholly devoted to something and ‘really’ busies oneself with it, one does not do so just alongside the work itself, or alongside the tool, or alongside both of them ‘together’. The unity of the relations in which concern circumspectively ‘operates’, has been established already by letting-things-be-involved—which is based upon temporality. A specific kind of forgetting is essential for the temporality that is constitutive for letting something be involved. The Self must forget itself if, lost in the world of equipment, it is to be able ‘actually’ to go to work and manipulate something. But all the same, inasmuch as an awaiting always leads the way in the unity of the temporalizing of concern, concernful Dasein’s own potentiality-for-Being has, as we shall show, been given a position in care.33 The making-present which awaits and retains, is constitutive for that familiarity in accordance with which Dasein, as Being-with-one-another, ‘knows its way about’ [sich “auskennt”] in its public environment. Letting things be involved is something which we understand existentially as a letting-them-‘be’ [ein “Sein”-lassen]. On such a basis circumspection can encounter the ready-to-hand as that entity which it is. Hence we can further elucidate the temporality of concern by giving heed to those modes of circumspectively letting something be encountered which we have characterized abovexviii as “conspicuousness”, “obtrusiveness”, and “obstinacy”. Thematical perception of Things is precisely not the way equipment ready-to-hand is encountered in its ‘true “in-itself” ’; it is encountered rather in the inconspicuousness of what we can come across ‘obviously’ and ‘Objectively’. But if there is something conspicuous in the totality of such entities, this implies that the equipmental totality as such is obtruding itself along with it. What sort of existential structure must belong to letting things be involved, if such a procedure can let something be encountered as conspicuous? This question is now aimed not at those factical occasions which turn our attention to something already presented, but rather at the ontological meaning of the fact that it can thus be turned.

      Heidegger: ordinary v. "thematical perception of things" || Particularly intererested in the "specific kind of forgetting" mentioned here

    27. It remains a problem in itself to define ontologically the way in which the senses can be stimulated or touched in something that merely has life, and how and where24 the Being of animals, for instance, is constituted by some kind of ‘time’.

      Heidegger: "how and where the Being of animals ... is constituted by some kind of ‘time’" ||

    28. One’s mood discloses in the manner of turning thither or turning away from one’s own Dasein. Bringing Dasein face to face with the “that-it-is” of its own thrownness—whether authentically revealing it or inauthentically covering it up—becomes existentially possible only if Dasein’s Being, by its very meaning, constantly is as having been. The “been” is not what first brings one face to face with the thrown entity which one is oneself; but the ecstasis of the “been” is what first makes it possible to find oneself in the way of having a state-of-mind.13 Understanding is grounded primarily in the future; one’s state-of-mind, however, temporalizes itself primarily in having been.14 Moods temporalize themselves—that is, their specific ecstasis belongs to a future and a Present in such a way, indeed, that these equiprimordial ecstases are modified by having been.

      Heidegger: "Moods temporalize themselves" ||

    29. Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling, and in this way constitutes primordially the totality of the structure of care. The items of care have not been pieced together cumulatively any more than temporality itself has been put together ‘in the course of time’ [“mit der Zeit”] out of the future, the having been, and the Present. Temporality ‘is’ not an entity at all. It is not, but it temporalizes itself. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid saying, ‘Temporality “is”… the meaning of care’, ‘Temporality “is”… defined in such and such a way’; the reason for this can be made intelligible only when we have clarified the idea of Being and that of the ‘is’ in general. Temporality temporalizes, and indeed it temporalizes possible ways of itself. These make possible the multiplicity of Dasein’s modes of Being, and especially the basic possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence. H. 329 The future, the character of having been, and the Present, show the phenomenal characteristics of the ‘towards-oneself’, the ‘back-to’, and the ‘letting-oneself-be-encountered-by’.40 The phenomena of the “towards…”, the “to…”, and the “alongside…”, make temporality manifest as the ἐκστατικόν pure and simple. Temporality is the primordial ‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself. We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the Present, the “ecstases” of temporality.41 Temporality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from itself; its essence is a process of temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases. What is characteristic of the ‘time’ which is accessible to the ordinary understanding, consists, among other things, precisely in the fact that it is a pure sequence of “nows”, without beginning and without end, in which the ecstatical character of primordial temporality has been levelled off. But this very levelling off, in accordance with its existential meaning, is grounded in the possibility of a definite kind of temporalizing, in conformity with which temporality temporalizes as inauthentic the kind of ‘time’ we have just mentioned. If, therefore, we demonstrate that the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein’s common sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality, then, in accordance with the principle, “a potiori fit denominatio“, we are justified in designating as “primordial time” the temporality which we have now laid bare. In enumerating the ecstases, we have always mentioned the future first. We have done this to indicate that the future has a priority in the ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic temporality. This is so, even though temporality does not first arise through a cumulative sequence of the ecstases, but in each case temporalizes itself in their equiprimordiality. But within this equiprimordiality, the modes of temporalizing are different. The difference lies in the fact that the nature of the temporalizing can be determined primarily in terms of the different ecstases. Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself in terms of the authentic future and in such a way that in having been futurally, it first of all awakens the Present.42 The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future. The priority of the future will vary according to the ways in which the temporalizing of inauthentic temporality itself is modified, but it will still come to the fore even in the derivative kind of ‘time’.43

      Heidegger: "Temporality ... is not, but it temporalizes itself" ||

    30. The primary meaning of existentiality is the future.

      Heidegger: "The primary meaning of existentiality is the future" ||

    31. Anticipatory resoluteness understands Dasein in its own essential Being-guilty. This understanding means that in existing one takes over Being-guilty; it means being the thrown basis of nullity. But taking over thrownness signifies being Dasein authentically as it already was.29 Taking over thrownness, however, is possible only in such a way that the futural Dasein can be its ownmost ‘as-it-already-was’—that is to say, its ‘been’ [sein “Gewesen”]. Only in so far as Dasein is as an “I-am-as-having-been”, can Dasein come towards itself futurally in such a way that it comes back.30 As authentically futural, Dasein is authentically as “having been“.31 Anticipation of one’s uttermost and ownmost possibility is coming back understandingly to one’s ownmost “been”. Only so far as it is futural can Dasein be authentically as having been. The character of “having been” arises, in a certain way, from the future.32 Anticipatory resoluteness discloses the current Situation of the “there” in such a way that existence, in taking action, is circumspectively concerned with what is factically ready-to-hand environmentally. Resolute Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand in the Situation—that is to say, taking action in such a way as to let one encounter what has presence environmentally—is possible only by making such an entity present. Only as the Present [Gegenwart]33 in the sense of making present, can resoluteness be what it is: namely, letting itself be encountered undisguisedly by that which it seizes upon in taking action. Coming back to itself futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the Situation by making present. The character of “having been” arises from the future, and in such a way that the future which “has been” (or better, which “is in the process of having been”) releases from itself the Present.34 This phenomenon has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been; we designate it as “temporality“.35 Only in so far as Dasein has the definite character of temporality, is the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of anticipatory resoluteness, as we have described it, made possible for Dasein itself. Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care.

      Heidegger: Temporality / "I-am-as-having-been" ||

    32. What are we seeking ontologically with the meaning of care? What does “meaning” signify? In our investigation, we have encountered this phenomenon in connection with the analysis of understanding and interpretation.xxii According to that analysis, meaning is that wherein the understandability [Verstehbarkeit] of something maintains itself—even that of something which does not come into view explicitly and thematically. “Meaning” signifies the “upon-which” [das Woraufhin] of a primary projection in terms of which something can be conceived in its possibility as that which it is. Projecting discloses possibilities—that is to say, it discloses the sort of thing that makes possible.

      Heidegger: "“Meaning” signifies the “upon-which” [das Woraufhin] of a primary projection in terms of which something can be conceived in its possibility as that which it is."

    33. The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts. In the ‘I’, ‘nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts’. ‘Consciousness in itself (is) not so much a representation… as it is a form of representation in general.’xvii The ‘I think’ is ‘the form of apperception, which clings to every experience and precedes it’.xviii

      Heidegger: "The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts" ||

    34. We have indeed already shown, in analysing the structure of understanding in general, that what gets censured inappropriately as a ‘circle’, belongs to the essence and to the distinctive character of understanding as such.viii In spite of this, if the problematic of fundamental ontology is to have its hermeneutical Situation clarified, our investigation must now come back explicitly to this ‘circular argument’. When it is objected that the existential Interpretation is ‘circular’, it is said that we have ‘presupposed’ the idea of existence and of Being in general, and that Dasein gets Interpreted ‘accordingly’, so that the idea of Being may be obtained from it. But what does ‘presupposition’ signify? In positing the idea of existence, do we also posit some proposition from which we deduce further propositions about the Being of Dasein, in accordance with formal rules of consistency? Or does this pre-supposing have the character of an understanding projection, in such a manner indeed that the Interpretation by which such an understanding gets developed, will let that which is to be interpreted put itself into words for the very first time, so that it may decide of its own accord whether, as the entity which it is, it has that state of Being for which it has been disclosed in the projection with regard to its formal aspects?16 Is there any other way at all by which an entity can put itself into words with regard to its Being? We cannot ever ‘avoid’ a ‘circular’ proof in the existential analytic, because such an analytic does not do any proving at all by the rules of the ‘logic of consistency’. What common sense wishes to eliminate in avoiding the ‘circle’, on the supposition that it is measuring up to the loftiest rigour of scientific investigation, is nothing less than the basic structure of care. Because it is primordially constituted by care, any Dasein is already ahead of itself. As being, it has in every case already projected itself upon definite possibilities of its existence; and in such existentiell projections it has, in a pre-ontological manner, also projected something like existence and Being. Like all research, the research which wants to develop and conceptualize that kind of Being which belongs to existence, is itself a kind of Being which disclosive Dasein possesses; can such research be denied this projecting which is essential to Dasein?

      Heidegger: "What common sense wishes to eliminate in avoiding the ‘circle’, on the supposition that it is measuring up to the loftiest rigour of scientific investigation, is nothing less than the basic structure of care." ||

    35. Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness.

      Heidegger: the "violence [Gewaltsamkeit]" of "existential analysis" ||

    36. The phenomenon of resoluteness has brought us before the primordial truth of existence. As resolute, Dasein is revealed to itself in its current factical potentiality-for-Being, and in such a way that Dasein itself is this revealing and Being-revealed. To any truth, there belongs a corresponding holding-for-true. The explicit appropriating of what has been disclosed or discovered is Being-certain. The primordial truth of existence demands an equiprimordial Being-certain, in which one maintains oneself in what resoluteness discloses. It9 gives itself the current factical Situation, and brings itself into that Situation. The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something present-at-hand which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It merely gets disclosed in a free resolving which has not been determined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such determination. What, then, does the certainty which belongs to such resoluteness signify? Such certainty must maintain itself in what is disclosed by the resolution. But this means that it simply cannot become rigid as regards the Situation, but must understand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure, must be held open and free for the current factical possibility. The certainty of the resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it back—a possibility which is factically necessary.10 However, such holding-for-true in resoluteness (as the truth of existence) by no means lets us fall back into irresoluteness. On the contrary, this holding-for-true, as a resolute holding-oneself-free for taking back, is authentic resoluteness which resolves to keep repeating itself.11 Thus, in an existentiell manner, one’s very lostness in irresoluteness gets undermined. The holding-for-true which belongs to resoluteness, tends, in accordance with its meaning, to hold itself free constantly—that is, to hold itself free for Dasein’s whole potentiality-for-Being. This constant certainty is guaranteed to resoluteness only so that it will relate itself to that possibility of which it can be utterly certain. In its death, Dasein must simply ‘take back’ everything. Since resoluteness is constantly certain of death—in other words, since it anticipates it—resoluteness thus attains a certainty which is authentic and whole.

      Heidegger: The "es gibt" of Being-Certain || An early evocation of the "giving" which will characterize the later theories of language. The connection of the "es gibt" with the "Situation" here likens the latter to something of an "event" (though this would not be Heidegger's choice of words). Thinking of "authentic resoluteness" as that "which resolves to keep repeating itself" also needs to be thought from the perspective of institutional knowledge production (v. the "hankering" / "temptation" of novelty that characterizes the thematic apparatus)

    37. Ontologically, Dasein is in principle different from everything that is present-at-hand or Real. Its ‘subsistence’ is not based on the substantiality of a substance but on the ‘Self-subsistence’ of the existing Self, whose Being has been conceived as care.4 The phenomenon of the Self—a phenomenon which is included in care—needs to be defined existentially in a way which is primordial and authentic, in contrast to our preparatory exhibition of the inauthentic they-self. Along with this, we must establish what possible ontological questions are to be directed towards the ‘Self’, if indeed it is neither substance nor subject.

      Heidegger: Dasein's "Self-subsistence" ||

    38. In the term “Situation” (“situation”—‘to be in a situation’) there is an overtone of a signification that is spatial.50 We shall not try to eliminate this from the existential conception, for such an overtone is also implied in the ‘there’ of Dasein. Being-in-the-world has a spatiality of its own, characterized by the phenomena of de-severance and directionality. Dasein ‘makes room’ in so far as it factically exists.xiv But spatiality of the kind which belongs to Dasein, and on the basis of which existence always determines its ‘location’, is grounded in the state of Being-in-the-world, for which disclosedness is primarily constitutive. Just as the spatiality of the “there” is grounded in disclosedness, the Situation has its foundations in resoluteness. The Situation is the “there” which is disclosed in resoluteness—the “there” as which the existent entity is there. It is not a framework present-at-hand in which Dasein occurs, or into which it might even just bring itself. Far removed from any present-at-hand mixture of circumstances and accidents which we encounter, the Situation is only through resoluteness and i n i t. The current factical involvement-character of the circumstances discloses itself to the Self only when that involvement-character is such that one has resolved upon the “there” as which that Self, in existing, has to be.51 When what we call “accidents” befall from the with-world and the environment, they can be-fall only resoluteness.52 For the “they”, however, the Situation is essentially something that has been closed off.53 The “they” knows only the ‘general situation’, loses itself in those ‘opportunities’ which are closest to it, and pays Dasein’s way by a reckoning up of ‘accidents’ which it fails to recognize, deems its own achievement, and passes off as such.54

      Heidegger: the "Situation" || the context implied by the situation needs to be reconsidered in regards to the modern digital archive. It's also worth thinking about the "situation" as a corollary concept to the "region" and the implications this would hold for the design of a more exapropriative interface / infrastructure.

    39. The disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a conscience, is thus constituted by anxiety as state-of-mind, by understanding as a projection of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and by discourse as reticence. This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience—this reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety—we call “resoluteness“.

      Heidegger: "resoluteness" (v. "anxiety as state-of mind" / "understanding" as "projection" of "Being-guilty" / "discourse" as "reticence" ||

    40. We miss a ‘positive’ content in that which is called, because we expect to be told something currently useful about assured possibilities of ‘taking action’ which are available and calculable. This expectation has its basis within the horizon of that way of interpreting which belongs to common-sense concern—a way of interpreting which forces Dasein’s existence to be subsumed under the idea of a business procedure that can be regulated. Such expectations (and in part these tacitly underlie even the demand for a material ethic of value as contrasted with one that is ‘merely’ formal) are of course disappointed by the conscience. The call of conscience fails to give any such ‘practical’ injunctions, solely because it summons Dasein to existence, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self. With the maxims which one might be led to expect—maxims which could be reckoned up unequivocally—the conscience would deny to existence nothing less than the very possibility of taking action. But because the conscience manifestly cannot be ‘positive’ in this manner, neither does it function ‘just negatively’ in this same manner. The call discloses nothing which could be either positive or negative as something with which we can concern ourselves; for what it has in view is a Being which is ontologically quite different—namely, existence. On the other hand, when the call is rightly understood, it gives us that which in the existential sense is the ‘most positive’ of all—namely, the ownmost possibility which Dasein can present to itself, as a calling-back which calls it forth into its factical potentiality-for-being-its-Self at the time. To hear the call authentically, signifies bringing oneself into a factical taking-action. But only by setting forth the existential structure implied in our understanding of the appeal when we hear it authentically, shall we obtain a fully adequate Interpretation of what is called in the call.

      Heidegger: "To hear the call authentically, signifies bringing oneself into a factical taking-action" ||

    41. As little as the ‘good’ conscience lets itself be put in the service of a ‘Pharisaism’, just as little may the function of the ‘bad’ conscience be reduced to indicating indebtednesses which are present-at-hand or thrusting aside those which are possible. This would be as if Dasein were a ‘household’ whose indebtednesses simply need to be balanced off in an orderly manner so that the Self may stand ‘by’ as a disinterested spectator while these Experiences run their course.

      Heidegger: "as if Dasein were a 'household'..." ||

    42. Only by first positing that Dasein is an interconnected sequence of successive Experiences, is it possible to take the voice as something which comes afterwards, something later, which therefore necessarily refers back. The voice does call back, but it calls beyond the deed which has happened, and back to the Being-guilty into which one has been thrown, which is ‘earlier’ than any indebtedness. But at the same time, this calling-back calls forth to Being-guilty, as something to be seized upon in one’s own existence, so that authentic existentiell Being-guilty only ‘follows after’ the call, not vice versa. Bad conscience is basically so far from just reproving and pointing back that it rather points forward41 as it calls one back into one’s thrownness. The order of the sequence in which Experiences run their course does not give us the phenomenal structure of existing.

      Heidegger: "The order of the sequence in which Experiences run their course does not give us the phenomenal structure of existing." ||

    43. But must the ontological Interpretation agree with the ordinary interpretation at all? Should not the latter be, in principle, ontologically suspect? If indeed Dasein understands itself proximally and for the most part in terms of that with which it concerns itself, and if it interprets all its ways of behaving as concern, then will not there be falling and concealment in its interpretation of that very way of its Being which, as a call, seeks to bring it back from its lostness in the concerns of the “they”?40 Everydayness takes Dasein as something ready-to-hand to be concerned with—that is, something that gets managed and reckoned up. ‘Life’ is a ‘business’, whether or not it covers its costs.

      Heidegger: "Life’ is a ‘business’, whether or not it covers its costs." || Interesting because this ending quip associates the ontological indebtedness with the ontic marketplace (c.f. Heidegger's earlier resistance to the "commercium")

    44. In being a basis—that is, in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus “Being-a-basis” means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from the ground up. This “not” belongs to the existential meaning of “thrownness”. It itself, being a basis, is a nullity of itself.31 “Nullity” does not signify anything like not-Being-present-at-hand or not-subsisting; what one has in view here is rather a “not” which is constitutive for this Being of Dasein—its thrownness. The character of this “not” as a “not” may be defined existentially: in being its Self, Dasein is, as a Self, the entity that has been thrown. It has been released from its basis, not through itself but to itself; so as to be as this basis. Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection; rather, as Being-its-Self, it is the Being of its basis.32 This basis is never anything but the basis for an entity whose Being has to take over Being-a-basis.

      Heidegger: Dasein "is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis." ||

    45. Nevertheless, in the idea of ‘Guilty!’ there lies the character of the “not“. If the ‘Guilty!’ is something that can definitely apply to existence, then this raises the ontological problem of clarifying existentially the character of this “not” as a “not”. Moreover, to the idea of ‘Guilty!’ belongs what is expressed without further differentiation in the conception of guilt as ‘having responsibility for’—that is, as Being-the basis for… Hence we define the formally existential idea of the ‘Guilty!’ as “Being-the-basis for a Being which has been defined by a ‘not’ “—that is to say, as “Being-the-basis of a nullity“.28 The idea of the “not” which lies in the concept of guilt as understood existentially, excludes relatedness to anything present-at-hand which is possible or which may have been required; furthermore, Dasein is altogether incommensurable with anything present-at-hand or generally accepted [Geltenden] which is not it itself, or which is not in the way Dasein is—namely, existing; so any possibility that, with regard to Being-the-basis for a lack, the entity which is itself such a basis might be reckoned up as ‘lacking in some manner’, is a possibility which drops out. If a lack, such as failure to fulfil some requirement, has been ‘caused’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein, we cannot simply reckon back to there being something lacking [Mangelhaftigkeit] in the ‘cause’. Being-the-basis-for-something need not have the same “not”-character as the privativum which is based upon it and which arises from it. The basis need not acquire a nullity of its own from that for which it is the basis [seinem Begründeten]. This implies, however, that Being-guilty does not first result from an indebtedness [Verschuldung], but that, on the contrary, indebtedness becomes possible only ‘on the basis’ of a primordial Being-guilty. Can something like this be exhibited in Dasein’s Being, and how is it at all possible existentially?

      Heidegger: "indebtedness becomes possible only ‘on the basis’ of a primordial Being-guilty" || c.f. de Man's theory of guilt in "Excuses"

    46. Why should we look to alien powers for information before we have made sure that in starting our analysis we have not given too low an assessment of Dasein’s Being, regarding it as an innocuous subject endowed with personal consciousness, somehow or other occurring?

      Heidegger: "Why should we look to alien powers..." || Something similar could be asked of the general tendency towards the impersonal we find in de Man / Blanchot.

    47. In its “who”, the caller is definable in a ‘worldly’ way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the “not-at-home”—the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the “they”, lost in the manifold ‘world’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the “nothing”? ‘It’ calls, even though it gives the concernfully curious ear nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling and talked about in public. But what is Dasein even to report from the uncanniness of its thrown Being? What else remains for it than its own potentiality-for-Being as revealed in anxiety? How else is “it” to call than by summoning Dasein towards this potentiality-for-Being, which alone is the issue?

      Heidegger: "the caller is Dasein in its uncanniness" ||

    48. But is it at all necessary to keep raising explicitly the question of who does the calling? Is this not answered for Dasein just as unequivocally as the question of to whom the call makes its appeal? In conscience Dasein calls itself. This understanding of the caller may be more or less awake in the factical hearing of the call. Ontologically, however, it is not enough to answer that Dasein is at the same time both the caller and the one to whom the appeal is made. When Dasein is appealed to, is it not ‘there’ in a different way from that in which it does the calling? Shall we say that its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self functions as the caller? Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. ‘It’ calls,13 against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me.14

      Heidegger: "'it' calls ... from me and yet from beyond me and over me" ||

    49. And to what is one called when one is thus appealed to?8 To one’s own Self. Not to what Dasein counts for, can do, or concerns itself with in being with one another publicly, nor to what it has taken hold of, set about, or let itself be carried along with. The sort of Dasein which is understood after the manner of the world both for Others and for itself, gets passed over in this appeal; this is something of which the call to the Self takes not the slightest cognizance. And because only the Self of the they-self gets appealed to and brought to hear, the “they” collapses. But the fact that the call passes over both the “they” and the manner in which Dasein has been publicly interpreted, does not by any means signify that the “they” is not reached too. Precisely in passing over the “they” (keen as it is for public repute) the call pushes it into insignificance [Bedeutungslosigkeit]. But the Self, which the appeal has robbed of this lodgement and hiding-place, gets brought to itself by the call. When the they-self is appealed to, it gets called to the Self.9 But it does not get called to that Self which can become for itself an ‘object’ on which to pass judgment, nor to that Self which inertly dissects its ‘inner life’ with fussy curiosity, nor to that Self which one has in mind when one gazes ‘analytically’ at psychical conditions and what lies behind them. The appeal to the Self in the they-self does not force it inwards upon itself, so that it can close itself off from the ‘external world’. The call passes over everything like this and disperses it, so as to appeal solely to that Self which, notwithstanding, is in no other way than Being-in-the-world. But how are we to determine what is said in the talk that belongs to this kind of discourse? What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a ‘soliloquy’ in the Self to which it has appealed. ‘Nothing’ gets called to [zu-gerufen] this Self, but it has been summoned [aufgerufen] to itself—that is, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. The tendency of the call is not such as to put up for ‘trial’ the Self to which the appeal is made; but it calls Dasein forth (and ‘forward’) into its ownmost possibilities, as a summons to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self.10 H. 274 The call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does not put itself into words at all; yet it remains nothing less than obscure and indefinite. Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent. In this way it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned, into the reticence of itself. The fact that what is called in the call has not been formulated in words, does not give this phenomenon the indefiniteness of a mysterious voice, but merely indicates that our understanding of what is ‘called’ is not to be tied up with an expectation of anything like a communication.

      Heidegger: "conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent" ||

    50. Through disclosedness, that entity which we call “Dasein” is in the possibility of being its “there”. With its world, it is there for itself, and indeed—proximally and for the most part—in such a way that it has disclosed to itself its potentiality-for-Being in terms of the ‘world’ of its concern. Dasein exists as a potentiality-for-Being which has, in each case, already abandoned itself to definite possibilities.4 And it has abandoned itself to these possibilities because it is an entity which has been thrown, and an entity whose thrownness gets disclosed more or less plainly and impressively by its having a mood. To any state-of-mind or mood, understanding belongs equiprimordially. In this way Dasein ‘knows’ what it is itself capable of [woran es mit ihm selbst ist], inasmuch as it has either projected itself upon possibilities of its own or has been so absorbed in the “they” that it has let such possibilities be presented to it by the way in which the “they” has publicly interpreted things. The presenting of these possibilities, however, is made possible existentially through the fact that Dasein, as a Being-with which understands, can listen to Others. Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the “they”, it fails to hear [überhört] its own Self in listening to the they-self. If Dasein is to be able to get brought back from this lostness of failing to hear itself, and if this is to be done through itself, then it must first be able to find itself—to find itself as something which has failed to hear itself, and which fails to hear in that it listens away to the “they”.5 This listening-away must get broken off; in other words, the possibility of another kind of hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself.6 The possibility of its thus getting broken off lies in its being appealed to without mediation. Dasein fails to hear itself, and listens away to the “they”; and this listening-away gets broken by the call if that call, in accordance with its character as such, arouses another kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that is lost,7 has a character in every way opposite. If in this lost hearing, one has been fascinated with the ‘hubbub’ of the manifold ambiguity which idle talk possesses in its everyday ‘newness’, then the call must do its calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience. We take calling as a mode of discourse. Discourse articulates intelligibility. Characterizing conscience as a call is not just giving a ‘picture’, like the Kantian representation of the conscience as a court of justice. Vocal utterance, however, is not essential for discourse, and therefore not for the call either; this must not be overlooked. Discourse is already presupposed in any expressing or ‘proclaiming’ [“Ausrufen”]. If the everyday interpretation knows a ‘voice’ of conscience, then one is not so much thinking of an utterance (for this is something which factically one never comes across); the ‘voice’ is taken rather as a giving-to-understand. In the tendency to disclosure which belongs to the call, lies the momentum of a push—of an abrupt arousal. The call is from afar unto afar. It reaches him who wants to be brought back.

      Heidegger: the "listen[ing] away to the they" v.s. the call [of conscience] "from afar unto afar" ||

    51. We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.

      Heidegger: summary of Being-towards-death ||

    52. In Dasein, as being towards its death, its own uttermost “not-yet” has already been included—that “not-yet” which all others lie ahead of.37 So if one has given an ontologically inappropriate Interpretation of Dasein’s “not-yet” as something still outstanding, any formal inference from this to Dasein’s lack of totality will not be correct. The phenomenon of the “not-yet” has been taken over from the “ahead-of-itself”; no more than the care-structure in general, can it serve as a higher court which would rule against the possibility of an existent Being-a-whole; indeed this “ahead-of-itself” is what first of all makes such a Being-towards-the-end possible. The problem of the possible Being-a-whole of that entity which each of us is, is a correct one if care, as Dasein’s basic state, is ‘connected’ with death—the uttermost possibility for that entity.

      Heidegger: Dasein's being "'ahead-of-itself' is what first of all makes such a Being-towards-the-end possible" ||

    53. Death is deferred to ‘sometime later’, and this is done by invoking the so-called ‘general opinion’ [“allgemeine Ermessen”]. Thus the “they” covers up what is peculiar in death’s certainty—that it is possible at any moment. Along with the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its “when”. Everyday Being-towards-death evades this indefiniteness by conferring definiteness upon it.

      Heidegger: "the 'they' covers up what is peculiar in death’s certainty—that it is possible at any moment" ||

    54. Indeed the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social inconvenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded.xii

      Heidegger: "Indeed the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social inconvenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded." || c.f. M. de Gueremantes' impatience at the end of the Gueremantes' Way

    55. If idle talk is always ambiguous, so is this manner of talking about death.

      Heidegger: "If idle talk is always ambiguous, so is this manner of talking about death." ||

    56. ‘One is’ what one does. In relation to this sort of Being (the everyday manner in which we join with one another in absorption in the ‘world’ of our concern) representability is not only quite possible but is even constitutive for our being with one another. Here one Dasein can and must, within certain limits, ‘be’ another Dasein. H. 240 However, this possibility of representing breaks down completely if the issue is one of representing that possibility-of-Being which makes up Dasein’s coming to an end, and which, as such, gives to it its wholeness. No one can take the Other’s dying away from him. Of course someone can ‘go to his death for another’. But that always means to sacrifice oneself for the Other ‘in some definite affair’. Such “dying for” can never signify that the Other has thus had his death taken away in even the slightest degree. Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time. By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all. And indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the very Being of one’s own Dasein is an issue. In dying, it is shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death.i Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially; and it is to be understood in a distinctive sense which must be still more closely delimited.

      Heidegger: "death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all" ||

    57. Even the Dasein of Others, when it has reached its wholeness in death, is no-longer-Dasein, in the sense of Being-no-longer-in-the-world. Does not dying mean going-out-of-the-world, and losing one’s Being-in-the-world? Yet when someone has died, his Being-no-longer-in-the-world (if we understand it in an extreme way) is still a Being, but in the sense of the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of a corporeal Thing which we encounter. In the dying of the Other we can experience that remarkable phenomenon of Being which may be defined as the change-over of an entity from Dasein’s kind of Being (or life) to no-longer-Dasein. The end of the entity qua Dasein is the beginning of the same entity qua something present-at-hand.

      Heidegger: "... that remarkable phenomenon of Being which may be defined as the change-over of an entity from Dasein’s kind of Being (or life) to no-longer-Dasein." || Death as reification?

    58. Being (not entities) is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is.

      Heidegger: "Being (not entities) is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is" || A corrective reminder: as easy as it is to see Heidegger as anti-(factual)-truth the real work is to first unveil the production and levelling off of factical knowledge and then to re-install Dasein within it.

    59. A sceptic can no more be refuted than the Being of truth can be ‘proved’. And if any sceptic of the kind who denies the truth, factically is, he does not even need to be refuted. In so far as he is, and has understood himself in this Being, he has obliterated Dasein in the desperation of suicide; and in doing so, he has also obliterated truth. Because Dasein, for its own part, cannot first be subjected to proof, the necessity of truth cannot be proved either. It has no more been demonstrated that there ever has ‘been’ an ‘actual’ sceptic37 (though this is what has at bottom been believed in the refutations of scepticism, in spite of what these undertake to do) than it has been demonstrated that there are any ‘eternal truths’. But perhaps such sceptics have been more frequent than one would innocently like to have true when one tries to bowl over ‘scepticism’ by formal dialectics.

      Heidegger: "A sceptic can no more be refuted than the Being of truth can be ‘proved’." || A rare moment of playfulness that is strikingly reminiscent of some of de Man's most dissolving insights (c.f. the rape of lock, archie de-bunker etc.). The point here seems to be that, from an ontological point of view, skepticism is really just an inchoate fundamental ontology / existential phenomenology.

    60. ‘There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is.

      Heidegger: "There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is." ||

    61. Aristotle never defends the thesis that the primordial ‘locus’ of truth is in the judgment. He says rather that the λόγος is that way of Being in which Dasein can either uncover or cover up. This double possibility is what is distinctive in the Being-true of the λόγος: the λόγος is that way of comporting oneself which can also cover things up. And because Aristotle never upheld the thesis we have mentioned, he was also never in a situation to ‘broaden’ the conception of truth in the λόγος to include pure νοεῖν. The truth of αἴσθησις and of the seeing of ‘ideas’ is the primordial kind of uncovering. And only because νόησις primarily uncovers, can the λόγος as διανοεῖν also have uncovering as its function.

      Heidegger > Aristotle: λόγος / νοεῖν / αἴσθησις || This is a peculiar appropriation of aesthetics / aesthesis c.f. Kant's "material vision" in de Man.

    62. When the assertion has been expressed, the uncoveredness of the entity moves into the kind of Being of that which is ready-to-hand within-the-world.33 But now to the extent that in this uncoveredness, as an uncoveredness ofsomething, a relationship to something present-at-hand persists, the uncoveredness (truth) becomes, for its part, a relationship between things which are present-at-hand (intellectus and res)—a relationship that is present-at-hand itself.

      Heidegger: "the uncoverdness (truth) becomes...a relationship that is present-at-hand itself ||

    63. It is therefore essential that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered, defend it against semblance and disguise, and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again. The uncovering of anything new is never done on the basis of having something completely hidden, but takes its departure rather from uncoveredness in the mode of semblance. Entities look as if… That is, they have, in a certain way, been uncovered already, and yet they are still disguised. Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression—ἀ-λήθεια? When Dasein so expresses itself, does not a primordial understanding of its own Being thus make itself known—the understanding (even if it is only pre-ontological) that Being-in-untruth makes up an essential characteristic of Being-in-the-world? The goddess of Truth who guides Parmenides, puts two pathways before him, one of uncovering, one of hiding; but this signifies nothing else than that Dasein is already both in the truth and in untruth. The way of uncovering is achieved only in κρίνειν λόγῳ—in distinguishing between these understandingly, and making one’s decision for the one rather than the other.xxxix H. 223 The existential-ontological condition for the fact that Being-in-the-world is characterized by ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’, lies in that state of Dasein’s Being which we have designated as thrown projection. This is something that is constitutive for the structure of care.

      Heidegger > Parmenides: the "two pathways" / "κρίνειν λόγῳ" || crisis as the distinguishing of the path

    64. In its full existential-ontological meaning, the proposition that ‘Dasein is in the truth’ states equiprimordially that ‘Dasein is in untruth’. But only in so far as Dasein has been disclosed has it also been closed off; and only in so far as entities within-the-world have been uncovered along with Dasein, have such entities, as possibly encounterable within-the-world, been covered up (hidden) or disguised.

      Heidegger: "Dasein is in untruth" ||

    65. Being-true as Being-uncovering*, is a way of Being for Dasein. What makes this very uncovering possible must necessarily be called ‘true’ in a still more primordial sense. The most primordial phenomenon of truth is first shown by the existential-ontological foundations of uncovering. Uncovering is a way of Being for Being-in-the-world. Circumspective concern, or even that concern in which we tarry and look at something, uncovers entities within-the-world. These entities become that which has been uncovered. They are ‘true’ in a second sense. What is primarily ‘true’—that is, uncovering—is Dasein. “Truth” in the second sense does not mean Being-uncovering* (uncovering), but Being-uncovered (uncoveredness). H. 221 Our earlier analysis of the worldhood of the world and of entities within-the-world has shown, however, that the uncoveredness of entities within-the-world is grounded in the world’s disclosedness. But disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its “there”. Disclosedness is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, and discourse, and pertains equiprimordially to the world, to Being-in, and to the Self. In its very structure, care is ahead of itself—Being already in a world—as Being alongside entities within-the-world; and in this structure the disclosedness of Dasein lies hidden. With and through it is uncoveredness;28 hence only with Dasein’s disclosedness is the most primordial phenomenon of truth attained. What we have pointed out earlier with regard to the existential Constitution of the “there”xxxvii and in relation to the everyday Being of the “there”,xxxviii pertains to the most primordial phenomenon of truth, nothing less. In so far as Dasein is its disclosedness essentially, and discloses and uncovers as something disclosed to this extent it is essentially ‘true’. Dasein is ‘in the truth’. This assertion has meaning ontologically. It does not purport to say that ontically Dasein is introduced ‘to all the truth’ either always or just in every case, but rather that the disclosedness of its ownmost Being belongs to its existential constitution.

      Heidegger: "Dasein is 'in the truth'" / summary of division I ||

    66. In citing such evidence we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism. Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

      Heidegger: "we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism" || A rather ironic statement given the tenuousness of the preceding passage. What makes the oldest and philosophically rarefied jargon the most "elemental" anyway. Isn't it precisely an "uninhibited word-mysticism" that would privilege the jargon of the (ancient) philosophical tradition over that of any other craft / science?

    67. “Being-true” (“truth”) means Being-uncovering*. But is not this a highly arbitrary way to define “truth”? By such drastic ways of defining this concept we may succeed in eliminating the idea of agreement from the conception of truth. Must we not pay for this dubious gain by plunging the ‘good’ old tradition into nullity? But while our definition is seemingly arbitrary, it contains only the necessary Interpretation of what was primordially surmised in the oldest tradition of ancient philosophy and even understood in a pre-phenomenological manner. If a λόγος as ἀπόφανσις is to be true, its Being-true is ἀληθεύειν in the manner of ἀποφαίνεσθαι—of taking entities out of their hiddenness and letting them be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness). The ἀλήθεια which Aristotle equates with πρᾶγμα and φαινόμενα in the passages cited above, signifies the ‘things themselves’; it signifies what shows itself—entities in the “how” of their uncoveredness. And is it accidental that in one of the fragments of Heracleitusxxxv—the oldest fragments of philosophical doctrine in which the λόγος is explicitly handled—the phenomenon of truth in the sense of uncoveredness (unhiddenness) as we have set it forth, shows through? Those who are lacking in understanding are contrasted with the λόγος, and also with him who speaks that λόγος, and understands it. The λόγος is φράζων όπως ἔχει: it tells bow entities comport themselves. But to those who are lacking in understanding, what they do remains hidden—λανθάνει. They forget it (ἐπιλανθάνονται); that is, for them it sinks back into hiddenness. Thus to the λόγος belongs unhiddennes—ἀ-λήθεια. To translate this word as ‘truth’, and, above all, to define this expression conceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover up the meaning of what the Greeks made ‘self-evidently’ basic for the terminological use of ἀλήθεια as a pre-philosophical way of understanding it.

      Heidegger: λόγος as ἀπόφανσις / ἀ-λήθεια ||

    68. Let us suppose that someone with his back turned to the wall makes the true assertion that ‘the picture on the wall is hanging askew.’ This assertion demonstrates itself when the man who makes it, turns round and perceives the picture hanging askew on the wall. What gets demonstrated in this demonstration? What is the meaning of “confirming” [Bewährung] such an assertion? Do we, let us say, ascertain some agreement between our ‘knowledge’ or ‘what is known’ and the Thing on the wall? Yes and no, depending upon whether our Interpretation of the expression ‘what is known’ is phenomenally appropriate. If he who makes the assertion judges without perceiving the picture, but ‘merely represents’ it to himself, to what is he related? To ‘representations’, shall we say? Certainly not, if “representation” is here supposed to signify representing, as a psychical process. Nor is he related to “representations” in the sense of what is thus “represented,” if what we have in mind here is a ‘picture’ of that Real Thing which is on the wall.25 The asserting which ‘merely represents’ is related rather, in that sense which is most its own, to the Real picture on the wall. What one has in mind is the Real picture, and nothing else. Any Interpretation in which something else is here slipped in as what one supposedly has in mind in an assertion that merely represents, belies the phenomenal facts of the case as to that about which the assertion gets made. Asserting is a way of Being towards the Thing itself that is.26 And what does one’s perceiving of it demonstrate? H. 218 Nothing else than that this Thing is the very entity which one has in mind in one’s assertion. What comes up for confirmation is that this entity is pointed out by the Being in which the assertion is made—which is Being towards what is put forward in the assertion; thus what is to be confirmed is that such Being uncovers the entity towards which it is. What gets demonstrated is the Being-uncovering of the assertion.27 In carrying out such a demonstration, the knowing remains related solely to the entity itself. In this entity the confirmation, as it were, gets enacted. The entity itself which one has in mind shows itself just as it is in itself; that is to say, it shows that it, in its selfsameness, is just as it gets pointed out in the assertion as being—just as it gets uncovered as being. Representations do not get compared, either among themselves or in relation to the Real Thing. What is to be demonstrated is not an agreement of knowing with its object, still less of the psychical with the physical; but neither is it an agreement between ‘contents of consciousness’ among themselves. What is to be demonstrated is solely the Being-uncovered [Entdeckt-sein] of the entity itself—that entity in the “how” of its uncoveredness. This uncoveredness is confirmed when that which is put forward in the assertion (namely the entity itself) shows itself as that very same thing. “Confirmation” signifies the entity’s showing itself in its selfsameness.xxxiv The confirmation is accomplished on the basis of the entity’s showing itself. This is possible only in such a way that the knowing which asserts and which gets confirmed is, in its ontological meaning, itself a Being towards Real entities, and a Being that uncovers. H. 219 To say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ (ἀπόφανσις) in its uncoveredness. The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering*. Thus truth has by no means the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the Object). Being-true as Being-uncovering*, is in turn ontologically possible only on the basis of Being-in-the-world. This latter phenomenon, which we have known as a basic state of Dasein, is the foundation for the primordial phenomenon of truth. We shall now follow this up more penetratingly.

      Heidegger: 'the picture on the wall is hanging askew' || I can't help but read this example allegorically as a meta-philosophical statement about the theory of signs here being somewhat out of joint with the rest of the work. Why separate / postpone this treatment of the sign until after the exposition of language / discourse / theoretical hearing / seeing etc.? It would be interesting to work this slanted frame into a critique of Heidegger's inability to formulate the Abgrund of enframing from a properly linguistic standpoint (though, after Derrida, one must be careful not to overwork a dead / dying horse)

    69. the substance of man is existence

      Heidegger: "the substance of man is existence" || Paradox of the "ex" v. the "sub"

    70. When Being-out-for-something comes up against resistance, and can do nothing but ‘come up against it’, it is itself already alongside a totality of involvements. But the fact that this totality has been discovered is grounded in the disclosedness of the referential totality of significance. The experiencing of resistance—that is, the discovery of what is resistant to one’s endeavours—is possible ontologically only by reason of the disclosedness of the world.

      Heidegger: "The experiencing of resistance—that is, the discovery of what is resistant to one’s endeavours—is possible ontologically only by reason of the disclosedness of the world. " || Again, does this view of disclosedness / truth foreclose a technical resistance that is not appropriable by Dasein (i.e. that which remains 'crowded out' within the horizon though not, necessarily, excluded from it).

    71. What we have already said about the ontological indefiniteness of Dilthey’s foundations holds in principle for this theory too. Nor can the fundamental ontological analysis of ‘life’ be slipped in afterwards as a substructure.

      Heidegger > Dilthey: "Nor can the fundamental ontological analysis of ‘life’ be slipped in afterwards as a substructure" || c.f. the rhetoric of "slipping in" / "between" earlier

    72. Along with Dasein as Being-in-the-world, entities within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed. This existential-ontological assertion seems to accord with the thesis of realism that the external world is Really present-at-hand. In so far as this existential assertion does not deny that entities within-the-world are present-at-hand, it agrees—doxographically, as it were—with the thesis of realism in its results. But it differs in principle from every kind of realism; for realism holds that the Reality of the ‘world’ not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof. In the existential assertion both of these positions are directly negated. But what distinguishes this assertion from realism altogether, is the fact that in realism there is a lack of ontological understanding. Indeed realism tries to explain Reality ontically by Real connections of interaction between things that are Real.

      Heidegger: existential analytic of Dasein "differs in principle from every kind of realism" || Insofar as realism presumes that reality can be proven

    73. The ‘problem of Reality’ in the sense of the question whether an external world is present-at-hand and whether such a world can be proved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences lead to inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question. Our task is not to prove that an ‘external world’ is present-at-hand or to show how it is present-at-hand, but to point out why Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, has the tendency to bury the ‘external world’ in nullity ‘epistemologically’ before going on to prove it.19 The reason for this lies in Dasein’s falling and in the way in which the primary understanding of Being has been diverted to Being as presence-at-hand—a diversion which is motivated by that falling itself. If one formulates the question ‘critically’ with such an ontological orientation, then what one finds present-at-hand as proximally and solely certain, is something merely ‘inner’. After the primordial phenomenon of Being-in-the-world has been shattered, the isolated subject is all that remains, and this becomes the basis on which it gets joined together with a ‘world’.

      Heidegger: "The 'problem of Reality'" ||

    74. The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, aims, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and ‘outside’ of it a ‘world’ is to be proved as present-at-hand. It is not that the proofs are inadequate, but that the kind of Being of the entity which does the proving and makes requests for proofs has not been made definite enough. This is why a demonstration that two things which are present-at-hand are necessarily present-at-hand together, can give rise to the illusion that something has been proved, or even can be proved, about Dasein as Being-in-the-world. If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it.

      Heidegger: "The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again." || A concise formulation of the mnemotechnical crisis

    75. That Kant demands any proof at all for the ‘Dasein of Things outside of me’ shows already that he takes the subject—the ‘in me’—as the starting-point for this problematic.

      Heidegger > Kant: "That Kant demands any proof at all for the ‘Dasein of Things outside of me’ shows already that he takes the subject—the ‘in me’—as the starting-point for this problematic." ||

    76. At the same time our interpretation of understanding has shown that, in accordance with its falling kind of Being, it has, proximally and for the most part, diverted itself [sich… verlegt] into an understanding of the ‘world’. Even where the issue is not only one of ontical experience but also one of ontological understanding, the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of entities within-the-world. Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are present-at-hand. “Being” acquires the meaning of “Reality“.viii Substantiality becomes the basic characteristic of Being. Corresponding to this way in which the understanding of Being has been diverted, even the ontological understanding of Dasein moves into the horizon of this conception of Being. Like any other entity, Dasein too is present-at-hand as Real. In this way “Being in general” acquires the meaning of “Reality“. Accordingly the concept of Reality has a peculiar priority in the ontological problematic. By this priority the route to a genuine existential analytic of Dasein gets diverted, and so too does our very view of the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand within-the-world. It finally forces the general problematic of Being into a direction that lies off the course. The other modes of Being become defined negatively and privatively with regard to Reality.

      Heidegger: "Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are present-at-hand. “Being” acquires the meaning of “Reality“" || The materiality of things (res) always concerns the resistance between the "context" of things present and the deeper context of what's responsible for the phenomenon of "presence" as "present"

    77. As something factical, Dasein’s projection of itself understandingly is in each case already alongside a world that has been discovered. From this world it takes its possibilities, and it does so first in accordance with the way things have been interpreted by the “they”. This interpretation has already restricted the possible options of choice to what lies within the range of the familiar, the attainable, the respectable—that which is fitting and proper. This levelling off of Dasein’s possibilities to what is proximally at its everyday disposal also results in a dimming down of the possible as such. The average everydayness of concern becomes blind to its possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely ‘actual’. This tranquillizing does not rule out a high degree of diligence in one’s concern, but arouses it. In this case no positive new possibilities are willed, but that which is at one’s disposal becomes ‘tactically’ altered in such a way that there is a semblance of something happening.

      Heidegger: "This tranquillizing does not rule out a high degree of diligence in one’s concern, but arouses it" || C.f. de Man's thesis of blind insight

    78. When we ascertain something present-at-hand by merely beholding it, this activity has the character of care just as much as does a ‘political action’ or taking a rest and enjoying oneself.

      Heidegger: "When we ascertain something present-at-hand by merely beholding it, this activity has the character of care just as much as does a ‘political action’ or taking a rest and enjoying oneself." || c.f. Derrida / de Man's generalization (evacuation?) of the "political." This could definitely be cited as an influence.

    79. For the sake of its potentiality-for-Being, any Dasein is as it factically is.

      Heidegger: "Dasein is as it factically is" ||

    80. But this structure pertains to the whole of Dasein’s constitution. “Being-ahead-of-itself” does not signify anything like an isolated tendency in a worldless ‘subject’, but characterizes Being-in-the-world. To Being-in-the-world, however, belongs the fact that it has been delivered over to itself—that it has in each case already been thrown into a world. The abandonment of Dasein to itself is shown with primordial concreteness in anxiety. “Being-ahead-of-itself” means, if we grasp it more fully, “ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world“. As soon as this essentially unitary structure is seen as a phenomenon, what we have set forth earlier in our analysis of worldhood also becomes plain. The upshot of that analysis was that the referential totality of significance (which as such is constitutive for worldhood) has been ‘tied up’ with a “for-the-sake-of-which”. The fact that this referential totality of the manifold relations of the ‘in-order-to’ has been bound up with that which is an issue for Dasein, does not signify that a ‘world’ of Objects which is present-at-hand has been welded together with a subject. It is rather the phenomenal expression of the fact that the constitution of Dasein, whose totality is now brought out explicitly as ahead-of-itself-in-Being-already-in…, is primordially a whole. To put it otherwise, existing is always factical. Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity.

      Heidegger: "existing is always factical. Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity." || I find the caveat about the world of objects not simply being "welded together within a subject" rather curious but am struggling to say why. Is the point that there is still uncertainty / play within the referential totality of the present-at-hand?

    81. Only because Dasein is anxious in the very depths of its Being, does it become possible for anxiety to be elicited physiologically.

      Heidegger: "Only because Dasein is anxious in the very depths of its Being, does it become possible for anxiety to be elicited physiologically." || A schematic statement of a common tendency to turn what may consider to be most essential and human (i.e. emotion) into an epiphenomenon. C.f. Minsky's mechanistic theory of emotion in Society of Mind

    82. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-world. Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-at-home“. Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness’.

      Heidegger: "Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-at-home“" || Dasein cannot simply be "at home" at any particular place within the world when it is the world.

    83. Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’.

      Heidegger: "Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’ ||

    84. Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities.

      Heidegger: Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world || How does this "individualization" relate to the extreme specialization we see in the working world dominated by technoscience?

    85. Thus the turning-away of falling is not a fleeing that is founded upon a fear of entities within-the-world. Fleeing that is so grounded is still less a character of this turning-away, when what this turning-away does is precisely to turn thither towards entities within-the-world by absorbing itself in them. The turning-away of falling is grounded rather in anxiety, which in turn is what first makes fear possible. To understand this talk about Dasein’s fleeing in the face of itself in falling, we must recall that Being-in-the-world is a basic state of Dasein. That in the face of which one has anxiety [das Wovor der Angst] is Being-in-the-world as such. What is different phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is anxious [sich ängstet] and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially incapable of having an involvement. This threatening does not have the character of a definite detrimentality which reaches what is threatened, and which reaches it with definite regard to a special factical potentiality-for-Being. That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. Not only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand discovered within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance. In anxiety one does not encounter this thing or that thing which, as something threatening, must have an involvement. Accordingly, when something threatening brings itself close, anxiety does not ‘see’ any definite ‘here’ or ‘yonder’ from which it comes. That in the face of which one has anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere. Anxiety ‘does not know’ what that in the face of which it is anxious is. ‘Nowhere’, however, does not signify nothing: this is where any region lies, and there too lies any disclosedness of the world for essentially spatial Being-in. Therefore that which threatens cannot bring itself close from a definite direction within what is close by; it is already ‘there’, and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet it is nowhere. H. 187 In that in the face of which one has anxiety, the ‘It is nothing and nowhere’ becomes manifest. The obstinacy of the “nothing and nowhere within-the-world” means as a phenomenon that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety. The utter insignificance which makes itself known in the “nothing and nowhere”, does not signify that the world is absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world are of so little importance in themselves that on the basis of this insignificance of what is within-the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that still obtrudes itself. What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself. When anxiety has subsided, then in our everyday way of talking we are accustomed to say that ‘it was really nothing’. And what it was, indeed, does get reached ontically by such a way of talking. Everyday discourse tends towards concerning itself with the ready-to-hand and talking about it. That in the face of which anxiety is anxious is nothing ready-to-hand within-the-world. But this “nothing ready-to-hand”, which only our everyday circumspective discourse understands, is not totally nothing.5 The “nothing” of readiness-to-hand is grounded in the most primordial ‘something’—in the world. Ontologically, however, the world belongs essentially to Dasein’s Being as Being-in-the-world. So if the “nothing”—that is, the world as such—exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Being-anxious discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world. It is not the case, say, that the world first gets thought of by deliberating about it, just by itself, without regard for the entities within-the-world, and that, in the face of this world, anxiety then arises; what is rather the case is that the world as world is disclosed first and foremost by anxiety, as a mode of state-of-mind. This does not signify, however, that in anxiety the worldhood of the world gets conceptualized. Anxiety is not only anxiety in the face of something, but, as a state-of-mind, it is also anxiety about something. That which anxiety is profoundly anxious [sich äbangstet] about is not a definite kind of Being for Dasein or a definite possibility for it. Indeed the threat itself is indefinite, and therefore cannot penetrate threateningly to this or that factically concrete potentiality-for-Being. That which anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the world itself. In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of Others. Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities. Therefore, with that which it is anxious about, anxiety discloses Dasein as Being-possible, and indeed as the only kind of thing which it can be of its own accord as something individualized in individualization [vereinzeltes in der Vereinzelung].

      Heidegger: Anxiety and the "collapse" of "Being-in-the-world" ||

    86. From an existentiell point of view, the authenticity of Being-one’s-Self has of course been closed off and thrust aside in falling; but to be thus closed off is merely the privation of a disclosedness which manifests itself phenomenally in the fact that Dasein’s fleeing is a fleeing in the face of itself. That in the face of which Dasein flees, is precisely what Dasein comes up ‘behind’.4 Only to the extent that Dasein has been brought before itself in an ontologically essential manner through whatever disclosedness belongs to it, can it flee in the face of that in the face of which it flees. To be sure, that in the face of which it flees is not grasped in thus turning away [Abkehr] in falling; nor is it experienced even in turning thither [Hinkehr]. Rather, in turning away from it, it is disclosed ‘there’. This existentiell-ontical turning-away, by reason of its character as a disclosure, makes it phenomenally possible to grasp existential-ontologically that in the face of which Dasein flees, and to grasp it as such. Within the ontical ‘away-from’ which such turning-away implies, that in the face of which Dasein flees can be understood and conceptualized by ‘turning thither’ in a way which is phenomenologically Interpretative.

      Heidegger: "To be sure, that in the face of which it flees is not grasped in thus turning away [Abkehr] in falling; nor is it experienced even in turning thither [Hinkehr]." || Helpful to see the "turning away" associated schematically with falling but I can't help but feel that this reduces the tropology outlined above to a question of Dasein's ability to confront "itself"

    87. Dasein’s Being is not be to deduced from an idea of man.

      Heidegger: "Dasein’s Being is not be to deduced from an idea of man." ||

    1. The questions posed by our reflection on technics and on its dynamic in the paleoanthropological domain in fact spring up again directly into the existential analytic (of “being-for-the-end”)— and into all philosophy. Up to a certain point, it is with a similar gesture that Leroi-Gourhan separates and finally opposes, on the one hand, technicity, and on the other, the relation to death and thus “reflective” intelligence, while Heidegger opposes the time of calculation (the inauthentic time of measurement, the attempt to “determine the undetermined”) and authentic time as relation to death. Starting with the critical analysis of the material proposed by Leroi-Gourhan, we can conversely imagine an existential analytic of time, an analytic of the temporal being that is Dasein, of the who that would be an analytic of the prostheticity whereby he exists and becomes embodied— of prostheticity qua being his already-there, or of his already-there qua being essentially prosthetic (accidental), never manifesting itself other than as a what— and that opens up its relation to time, far from being its denaturalization. Of this analysis, one could say that it is Heidegger’s own, under the name of facticity. However, we shall show in the next section that this is not the case.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan / Heidegger: imagining a prosthetic "existential analytic of time" ||

    2. The point is to focus on the originality of the epigenetic process that is put in place from the moment of the appearance of tools, insofar as they are conserved in their form beyond the individuals producing or using them. (The appearance of these tools, an actual nonliving yet vital memory, organized but inorganic matter, supposes, qua the vector and accumulator of past epigeneses, a singular epigenetic plasticity of the cerebral structure.) In nonartificial life, nontechnical, nonarticulated by the différance of différance, all summation of epigenetic events is lost for specific memory with the loss of the individual who was their support. In the case at hand, life conserves and accumulates these events. This conservation determines the relation to the milieu and the wholeprocess o fselection o fmutations, notably those taking place at the cortical level. Consequently, the hypothesis can be formulated that here, in apparent contradiction of the laws of molecular biology, epigenesis exerts a powerful countereffect on the reproduction of the species, channeling or conditioning an essential part of the drive of selection. In this case, the individual develops out of three memories: genetic memory; memory of the central nervous system (epigenetic); and techno-logical memory (language and technics are here amalgamated in the process of exteriorization). The stereotype is as much the result as the condition of its production, both the support of the memory of operational sequences that produces it, conserving the trace of past epigenetic events that accumulate as lessons of experience, and the result of the transmission of these operational sequences by the very existence of the product as an archetype. Such is epiphylogenesis. Three types of memory should thus be distinguished, to clarify while slightly modifying Leroi-Gourhan’s hypothesis of the three layers. The three types are genetic memory, epigenetic memory, and epiphylogenetic memory. Epipylogenesis, a recapitulating, dynamic, and morphogenetic (phylogenetic) accumulation of individual experience (epi), designates the appearance of a new relation between the organism and its environment, which is also a new state of matter. If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation to its environment (to matter in general, organic or inorganic), when it is a question of a who, is mediated by the organized but inorganic matter of the organon, the tool with its instructive role (its role qua instrument), the what. It is in this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it.

      Stiegler: "genetic / epigenetic / epiphylogenetic memory" ||

    3. The question remains whether there is an acceptable biological explanation of such a phenomenon. We must put forward here the hypothesis of an absolutely new genetic process of selection. Far from being simply determined by cortex evolution, the evolution of knapped flint determines in turn the process of corticalization. Such a hypothesis involves an attempt at elaborating a concept of artificial selection: the selection of mutations exerted at the cortical level in the context of a relation to the original milieu, mediated by the technical apparatus constituting the system of defense and predation and informing simultaneously the process of individual adaptation and the evolution of the entire species, which does not imply a heredity of acquired characteristics, even if that illusion ensues.

      Stiegler: "an absolutely new genetic process of selection" ||

    4. To question the birth of the human is to question the birth of death, as we said at the beginning. Let us see again why by recapitulating. At issue was thinking the “invention of the human” by setting ourselves in the very ambiguity of this expression, and thereby beginning a reflection on the concept of différance: différance is the history of life in general, in which an articulation is produced (where art, artifice, the article of the name, and the article of death resonate),8 which is a stage of différance, and which had to be specified. The rupture is the passage from a genetic différance to a nongenetic différance, a “phusis differing and deferring.” In order to approach the question of time as it has been set up, we anticipated the development of a concept, that of epiphylogenesis. The “paradox of exteriorization” led us to say that the human and the tool invent each other, that there is something like a technical maieutics. Consequently, the vector of epiphylogenetics, at the dawn of hominization, is flint. The process of corticalization is achieved as a process of reflection upon this conservation of experience, upon this constitution of the past that the flint is qua the registering of what has come to pass, a conservation that is itself already, qua trace, a reflection. The aporias that the question of anticipation open up are the very ones that constitute the paradox of exteriorization: a delay that is also an advance, the structure of the après-coup in which it can never be determined whether the cortex makes the flint possible or the reverse. The interior should precede the exterior, but in fact it is constituted by the latter, which therefore precedes it. Unless they are said to precede each other, to be the same thing considered from two different but already derived points of view. We are left then with the question of movement, whatever point of view is taken on the subject (at once exterior-ization and interior-ization): its provenance and its principle.

      Stiegler: summary of "the paradox of exteriorization" ||

    5. Furthermore, the issue is one not of a cause but of a coup, whose dynamic development is marked simultaneously on tools, on the cortex, on the group, and on the territories that it impregnates, occupies, or cuts across.

      Stiegler: "the issue is one not of a cause but of a coup" ||

    6. It is by freeing itself from genetic inscription that memory at once pursues the process of liberation and inscribes thereupon the mark of a rupture— on stones, walls, books, machines, madeleines, and all forms of supports, from the tattooed body itself to instrumentalized genetic memories, dis-organized, made inert [inertifées] as it were, then reorganized, manipulated, stored, rationalized, and exploited by the life industries named “biotechnologies,” including the holographic memories that the information-processing industry is planning. An inscription of memory through rupture, the inscription of the rupture in memory. The rupture is but the memory of the rupture, is but the effects of the traces it engenders.

      Stiegler: "The rupture is but the memory of the rupture, is but the effects of the traces it engenders" ||

    7. The question must be asked: what type of anticipation does a projection- exteriorization of the lithic type, as memory support, make possible? For there is a history of techno-logical possibilities of anticipation— which is the history of the different mirror stages in which humanity reflects itself, and this is how that reflection takes place. This is the whole question of time, apprehended on the basis of the techno-logical problematic of artificial memory, always the memory of the human qua already-there.

      Stiegler: "problematic of artificial memory" ||

    8. where is the memory of the stereotype kept, if not in the material trace of the stereotype in which the preexisting tool itself consists, repeated, duplicated by its “maker” and guiding the latter much more than being guided by him or her?

      Stiegler: "where is the memory of the stereotype kept" ||

    9. From the Zinjanthropian to Neanderthal man, a cortical differentiation as well as a lithic differentiation is effected, extending from the flaked pebble and the laurel leaves of the Neanderthalians to the biface. There is with the Neanderthalian a second rupture. We submit that between these two ruptures, cortex and equipment are differentiated together, in one and the same movement. The issue is that of a singular process of structural coupling3 in exteriorization that we are calling an instrumental maieutics, a “mirror proto-stage” in the course of which the differentiation of the cortex is determined by the tool just as much as that of the tool by the cortex: a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process [Tun se regardant dans l’autre qui le déforme s’y forme].

      Stiegler: the "mirror proto-stage" / "L'un se regardant dans l’autre qui le déforme s’y forme" ||

    10. ” Tools and skeletons evolved synchronously. We might say that with the Archanthropians, tools were still, to a large extent, a direct emanation of species behavior” (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 97).

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: " tools were still, to a large extent, a direct emanation of species behavior"

    11. Differentiation is only possible inasmuch as the memory of the group, when human, is “external.” But from the moment it is external, group memory is no longer species specific, for from that moment it is technological, the technical and the logical (or linked to “language”) being only two aspects of the same property, as Leroi-Gourhan writes elsewhere. Ethnic differentiation in this sense (as species specific) can only be originary in the human, in principle, even if no trace of it can be found (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 141), if only because there is a possibility of language from the moment that there is a possibility of the tool, and a language cannot be conceived that is not immediately an idiomatic differentiation, the ethnic differentiation of which it is perhaps but a case. As soon as there is exteriorization, and even if it must certainly have had a species-specific origin in which it is still caught, we are precisely no longer simply in the specific, but in the process of a differentiation between (human) groups governed by techno-logical and idiomatic, if not “ethnic,” “laws.” The fact that we do not see the differences, that we are not able to identify them, does not mean that they are nonexistent. Genetic differentiation still continues. The problem is, then, to know how these two levels of differentiation are articulated.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: "Ethnic differentiation ... can only be originary in the human ... if only because there is a possibility of language from the moment that there is a possibility of the tool" ||

    12. The question of technics is the question of time.

      Stiegler: "The question of technics is the question of time." ||

    13. With flaked pebbles, there was only one gesture in the handling of the pebble (a blow struck at 90 degrees, to which corresponded one sharp edge and a technical consciousness). With the Archanthropian stereotype, the gesture is combined with others: “This [acquisition] was more than simply the addition of something new, for it implied a good deal of foresight on the part of the individual performing the sequence of technical operations” (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 97). Anticipation was present from the start, from the first gesture, with somewhat less foresight. But what does this “good deal of foresight” mean? As soon as there is any sort of anticipation, in whatever “quantity,” has not a qualitative threshold been surpassed that should first be described for itself before wishing or being able to measure it? If it is possible to measure this “thing,” should one not know what is being measured? Because it is affected with anticipation, because it is nothing but anticipation, a gesture is a gesture·, and there can be no gesture without tools and artificial memory, prosthetic, outside of the body, and constitutive of its world. There is no anticipation, no time outside of this passage outside, of this putting-outside-of-self and of this alienation of the human and its memory that “exteriorization” is. The question is the very ambiguity of the word “exteriorization” and the hierarchy or the chronological, logical, and ontological preeminence that it immediately induces: if indeed one could speak of exteriorization, this would mean the presence of a preceding interiority. Now, this interiority is nothing outside of its exteriorization: the issue is therefore neither that of an interiority nor that of exteriority— but that of an originary complex in which the two terms, far from being opposed, compose with one another (and by the same token are posed, in a single stroke, in a single movement). Neither one precedes the other, neither is the origin of the other, the origin being then the coming into adequacy [con-venance] or the simultaneous arrival of the two— which are in truth the same considered from two different points of view. We shall later name this structure the complex of Epimetheus, and shall see that for Simondon it is a question of a transduc- tive relation. A “prosthesis” does not supplement something, does not replace what would have been there before it and would have been lost: it is added. By pros-thesis, we understand (1) set in front, or spatialization (de-severance [e-loignement]); (2) set in advance, already there (past) and anticipation (foresight), that is, temporalization. The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human” (the quotation marks belong to the constitution). It is not a “means” for the human but its end, and we know the essential equivocity of this expression: “the end of the human.” What is called “interiority” nevertheless indicates the problem of a potentiality of which “exteriorization” seems to be the act, that is, according to the Aristotelian theory, of which it is the truth, the sole truth. “Interiority” would be only the expectation, the call, or the promise of exteriorization— the tendency to exteriorization. Now, expectation means projection and future— anticipation. The whole problem, which thus becomes the distendedness of the past, the present, and the future, is caught in a circle in which the tool appears at one and the same time qua the result of anticipation, exteriorization, and qua the condition of all anticipation, anticipation appearing itself qua the interiorization of the originary fact of exteriorization. Exteriorization qua the act that is the horizon of anticipation, qua the gesture, is also an Erinnerung, the very moment of reflexivity, of the affection of self as a return to self. The problem remains that it does not seem that such a reflexivity may be manifestly characterized as a relation to the grammē as such.

      Stiegler: "The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human”" ||

    14. “We arrived at the concept as being a ‘secretion’ of the Anthropian’s body and brain” (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 91). Its body and brain are defined by the existence of the tool, and they thereby become indissociable. It would be artificial to consider them separately, and it will therefore be necessary to study technics and its evolution just as one would study the evolution of living organisms. The technical object in its evolution is at once inorganic matter, inert, and organization of matter. The latter must operate according to the constraints to which organisms are submitted. The idea of a sort of zoology or phylogenetics of technics as it has been developed here carries further the analyses of Man and Matter.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: "The idea of a sort of zoology or phylogenetics of technics as it has been developed here carries further the analyses of Man and Matter." ||

    15. Flint is the first reflective memory, the first mirror.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: "Flint is the first reflective memory, the first mirror" ||

    16. The movement inherent in this process of exteriorization is paradoxical: Leroi-Gourhan in fact says that it is the tool, that is, tekhnē, that invents the human, not the human who invents the technical. Or again: the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool— by becoming exteriorized techno-logically.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: "the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool— by becoming exteriorized techno-logically" ||

    17. The ambiguity of the invention of the human, that which holds together the who and the what, binding them while keeping them apart, is différance undermining the authentic/inauthentic divide. We shall look into this at the very moment of its passage, from phusis in différance (life in general) to the différance of this différance. Différance is neither the who nor the what, but their co-possibility, the movement of their mutual coming-to-be, of their coming into convention. The who is nothing without the what, and conversely. Différance is below and beyond the who and the what·, it poses them together, a composition engendering the illusion of an opposition. The passage is a mirage: the passage of the cortex into flint, like a mirror proto-stage. This proto-mirage is the paradoxical and aporetic beginning of “exteriorization.” It is accomplished between the Zinjanthropian and the Neanthropian, for hundreds of thousands of years in the course of which the work in flint begins, the meeting of matter whereby the cortex reflects itself. Reflecting itself, like a mirrored psyche, an archaeo- or paleontological mode of reflexivity, somber, buried, freeing itself slowly from the shadows like a statue out of a block of marble. The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorization.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: the "proto-mirage is the paradoxical and aporetic beginning of “exteriorization” ||

    18. One must first ask what mirage of the cortex is experienced [s’éprouve], as pathbreaking, in the hardness of flint; what plasticity of gray matter corresponds to the flake of mineral matter; what proto-stage of the mirror is thus installed. One must then ask what the closure of the cortical evolution of the human implies from the vantage of a general history of life, the closure of the cortical evolution of the human, and therefore the p u rsuit of the evolution of the liv in g by other means than life — which is what the history of technics consists in, from the first flaked pebbles to today, a history that is also the history of humanity— a statement that will lead us to the unusual concept of “epiphylogenesis.”

      Stiegler: "the pursuit of the evolution of the living by other means than life" / "epiphylogenesis" ||

    19. The invention of the human: without our needing to become complacent with the double genitive, its ambiguity signals a question that breaks down into two: “Who” or “what” does the inventing? “Who” or “what” is invented? The ambiguity of the subject, and in the same move the ambiguity of the object of the verb “invent,” translates nothing else but the very sense of the verb. The relation binding the “who” and the “what” is invention. Apparently, the “who” and the “what” are named respectively: the human, and the technical. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the genitive imposes at least the following question: what if the “who” were the technical? and the “what” the human? Or yet again must one not proceed down a path beyond or below every difference between a who and a what?

      Stiegler: "the invention of the human" ||

    20. Rousseau’s narrative of the origin shows us through antithesis how everything of the order of what is usually considered specifically human is immediately and irremediably linked to an absence of property [im propriété ], to a process of “supplementation,” of prosthetization or exteriorization, in which nothing is any longer immediately at hand, where everything is found mediated and instrumentalized, technicized, unbalanced. This process would lead today to something inhuman, or superhuman, tearing the human away from everything that, hitherto, seemed to define him (language, work, society, reason, love and desire and everything deriving thereof, even a certain feeling of death and a certain relation to time: to all of this we shall return), a process by which the realization or the “actualization” of the power of man seems to be as well the derealization of man, his disappearance in the movement of a becoming that is no longer his own. Rousseau will not, therefore, have been mistaken; he will have been right, almost, for this narrative has set us face to face with the problem: an attempt at thinking in a single movement (the origin) of technics and (the “origin”) of the human— technology and anthropology— presupposes a radical conversion of one’s point of view. The question will be that of thinking the relation of being and time as a technological relation , if it is true that this relation only develops in the “originary” horizon of technics— which is just as much an absence of origin.

      Stiegler: "specifically human is immediately and irremediably linked to an absence of property [im propriété ], to a process of “supplementation,” of prosthetization or exteriorization" || Also the introduction of the task of "thinking the relation on being and time as a technological relation"

    21. We have arrived at a decisive point of the narrative: death, time, their originary absence and their arrival qua the fall itself, the appearance of man as his disappearance, the realization of his possibility qua his derealization— it is here, then, in the double of the technical and the human, or rather in the double question of technics and the human, that the relation between anthropology and technics appears as a thanatology.

      Stiegler: "the relation between anthropology and technics appears as a thanatology" ||

    22. Perfectibility is this power whose actualization is negative. Perfectibility is already there, indubitably, with freedom. But it is only there virtually. Perfectibility is tantamount to an originary freedom inasmuch as the latter is virtual perfectibility, but only virtual. This freedom is almost perfectibility, but only this almost. It must in no case be conflated with actual perfectibility. The act of freedom is its loss. The origin is in-action. As long as perfectibility remains virtual, freedom remains originary and man, a quasi-animal. The only initial difference between man and animals is that man is inclined to mimic them all; he has no particular instinct, and by this very fact, he can, endowed with en enigmatic adroitness (Rousseau 1973, 54), appropriate every animal instinct. “Savage man, left by nature solely to the direction of instinct, or rather indemnified for what he may lack by faculties capable at first of supplying its place, and afterwards of raising him much above it, must accordingly begin with purely animal functions” (60, my emphasis). Only the animal is present at the origin of humanity. There is no difference between man (in his essence) and animal, no essential difference between man and animal, unless it be an inactual possibility. When there is a difference, man is no longer, and this is his denaturalization, that is, the naturalization of the animal. Man is his disappearance in the denaturalization of his essence. Appearing, he disappears: his essence defaults [son essence sefait défaut}. By accident. During the conquest of mobility. Man is this accident of automobility caused by a default of essence [une panne d’essence, a “lack of fuel,” an “empty tank”]. Man will mimic the instincts of animals to supplement the instinct he lacks without, however, ever adding anything. This mimetic-animal freedom (freedom qua the latitude that the absence of instinct, determined and proper to man, is), which is a guarantee of equilibrium as long as it not become perfectibility, has nothing to do with the ingenuity of reason, although Rousseau does speak of adroitness, of the singular capacity of man, qua his metis, corresponding to a lack or default of originary essence and determination. How shall we interpret this lack or this originary default, this lack-of… found before the fall, before the realization of the default that is the fall? How shall we interpret this lack and this default which are neither lack nor default, almost not a lack and almost not a default, since we are in the origin, in original equilibrium in which being does not default itself [ne se fait pas défaut à lui-même]? As after the fact [après coup}.

      Stiegler > Rousseau: "perfectability" / originary "default" ||

    23. Technics, as the power of man, is what destroys in its actualization that of which it is the power. But if this comparison is valid, this would mean that power, that is, technics, is in the origin, is the origin as the possibility of deviation qua the absence of origin. This reversal will obviously not have taken place of itself, but “by the help of circumstances” that are themselves the fall.

      Stiegler: "technics, is in the origin, is the origin as the possibility of deviation qua the absence of origin" ||

    24. When man’s natural possibility of deviation from nature deviates from what nature stipulates with respect to equilibrium, nature itself has then deviated. The possibility of deviation thus becomes a negative deviation. But the positive one does not itself have the possibility of deviating from itself.

      Stiegler > Rousseau: "positive" / "negative...deviation from nature" ||

    25. Why was what nature prescribed no longer heeded? Nature is equilibrium, and original man finds himself in harmony with nature and with animals. It is on account of their natural confidence in this equilibrium that “Negroes and savages are so little afraid of the wild beasts they may meet in the woods . . . armed only with bows and arrows; but no one has ever heard of one of them being devoured by wild beasts’ (Rousseau 1973, 55). Here we have the maieutic Carib. He is almost naked. Armed only with a bow and arrow. The whole problem obviously being these two adverbs: what supplement, what separation do they indicate? “Almost,” “only,” but enough for there to be already a question of a “creature,” however close it may be to the origin. In what distancing was this proximity that is also a distance, this separation of two adverbs, able to consist? And how did this Ent-fernung manage to operate?

      Stiegler > Rousseau: "the maieutic Carib" / "almost" / "only" ||

    26. The prosthesis is the origin of inequality. The man of pure nature has everything about himself, carries himself whole and entire about himself; his body is “the only instrument he understands”; he is never in himself in default; no fissure is at work in him that would be provoked by a process of differentiation on the outside of himself, nor a differentiation of an “outside” that would be essential (interiorized) to him: he depends on no outside. This must be demonstrated, for Rousseau well knows that from the moment he no longer has everything within him, whatever he has (however little), not being a part of his being, becomes differentiated, diverges, disrupts, belongs already to the fall. Everything is inside: the origin is the inside. The fall is exteriorization. This thematic of exteriorization is central to Leroi-Gourhan’s definition of the process of humanization. We will see the paradox this definition struggles with as long as its own consequence is not drawn: the human is the technical, that is, time. The man that “carries himself, as it were, perpetually whole and entire about him” does not exteriorize himself, does not ex-press himself, does not speak: speech is already a prosthesis. Any exit outside of oneself is a denaturalization; to the extent that our ills place us outside of ourselves, they “are of our own making . . . and we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed” (Rousseau 1973, 56).

      Stiegler: "The prosthesis is the origin of inequality" ||

    27. Rousseau, precisely, wants to show that there is no originary default, no prostheses, that the claws missing in man are not stones, or, should they be stones, they are precisely not cut or fabricated, being immediately at hand and not inscribed in any process of mediation.

      Stiegler > Rousseau: "Rousseau ... wants to show that there is no originary default" ||

    28. It is in time, in becoming, “in these successive changes in the constitution of man that we must look for the origin of those differences which now distinguish men” (Rousseau 1973, 44). If progress is profoundly a regression, it is because difference means not force (virtue, virtus), the marvelous and generous power of diversity, but inequality in the law of the strongest (or least strong). The law of the strongest is not originary, nor is the difference in which it necessarily consists. Nature is equality: the originary indifferentiation that is the universal. What is at stake in the Discourse is that nature not be the law of the strongest. Let us not forget the following: what is at stake— and this stake is above all philosophical— is a denial of an originary difference that allows one to affirm that, after the fall, there is a difference between principle and fact, here rebaptized as nature and culture. This discourse against difference passes therefore in turn through a differentiation; this is a discourse for difference as well. There is no difference at the origin, but originary equality: we must, but afterward, make an originary difference between what the origin is and what it no longer is, while recalling, reinvigorating, resurrecting in ourselves the origin qua indifferentiation: the problem will be to “distinguish properly [démêler] between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man” (44) (and we will find the possibility of making this difference in the very voice of the undifferentiated origin— which can still speak to us). This is by no means a “light undertaking.” What does “distinguish properly” here mean? Is the original opposed to the artificial, or is it a matter of an a priori distinction rather than an opposition? The answer is complex, and the question full of knots. There must be in any case an original instance, and one must say what it is: the inhuman is there, everything is not permitted, history is interlaced with horrors that must be able to be denounced. But in this relation to the nonoriginary, does this “proper” strictly speaking derive from the originary? Should the original simply be opposed to the artificial? Or should one proceed as if that were the case?

      Stiegler > Rousseau: to "distinguish properly [démêler] between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man" ||

    29. There is the origin, then the fall, forgetting, and loss. But it is quite difficult to distinguish the origin from the fall— which is to say also difficult to distinguish what is at the origin of the fall— this is particularly true in Rousseau.

      Stiegler: "...difficult to distinguish what is at the origin of the fall..." ||

    30. All narratives of the origin take on a mythical turn, in that they speak what is: to speak what is qua what absolutely is, is always to endure Meno’s aporia, to which a positive answer cannot be given. For there to be, in becoming (there can be an origin only when becoming is; the question of origin could never arise in a world of being), something after all, for being to be itself always the same, for it to have an identity in essence, a threshold should not be crossed but experienced. This is the difficulty Rousseau will encounter in thinking originary man7 as what he is in his nature, before any determination by his becoming. This will also be the very difficulty of our question: the human / the technical. When do(es) the human / the technical begin and end?

      Stiegler: "When do(es) the human / the technical begin and end?"

    31. Responding to this question will lead Plato to the enunciation of what will inaugurate metaphysics: the myth of anamnesis. The myth ripostes to an aporia addressed by Meno to Socrates in his discourse on the essence: If you do not rely on experience, if this recourse is in principle impossible in your search for the essence, how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what have found is the thing you didn’t know? (Plato 1961, Meno, 80d) According to you, Meno, says Socrates, repeating the aporia to bring out the stakes, a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know. He would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for. (80e) This aporia, crucial in the history of philosophy, sets out the very difficulty of a reflection on essence, on origin, on that whereby a thing begins to be. The stakes are incredibly high. “Aporia” means that if truth is truly something that is achieved, and achieved in dialogue, one cannot learn; there is therefore nothing new; one cannot say what is. A discourse of truth, which would not be a simple collection of facts but would unite dejure these facts in an essential unity that would speak their origin, such a discourse is a deception. Meno’s aporia, left unanswered, is the thoroughgoing victory of skepticism.

      Stiegler > Plato: Meno's "aporia" / "the myth of anamnesis" ||

    32. As for the enigma of the origin, it has traditionally been untied by a thought of origin qua fall. This is the case from Plato to Rousseau and beyond. If “the discourse of the fall” means the discourse of the fall into the sublunary world, this always means also and at the same time, essentially, a fall into technics. This is certainly not explicitly the way Plato speaks, but it is more clearly the case with Rousseau. Contingency is what that which falls falls into, that which, stemming from what is below the stars, belongs to becoming, to unveiling, to the covering over and to the forgetting of what is: to fall is to forget.

      Stiegler: "origin qua fall" / "fall into technics" as fall into forgetting ||

    33. Technology is therefore the discourse describing and explaining the evolution of specialized procedures and techniques, arts and trades— either the discourse of certain types of procedures and techniques, or that of the totality of techniques inasmuch as they form a system: technology is in this case the discourse of the evolution of that system.

      Stiegler: "technology is ... the discourse of the evolution of [the technical] system" ||

    34. This becoming-obsolete of historical categories (which we shall take up again in more detail in the second volume of this work) would be the price to pay for becoming-astral, would constitute the profound sense of the “change of epoch.” A becoming whose factor is technics understood today as system, tendency, concretization, Gestell. Disaster. “Disaster” does not mean catastrophe but disorientation— stars guide. A loss of guides that would have affirmed itself only in its difference, god, regulating idea, eschatology of emancipation. Consequently, a disaster of the führer. Such differences are lost in the potential illimitation of technics, in which the nature of humanity is thereby threatened by its own power qua technics; and along with humanity’s nature, nature as such is threatened by humanity, by the threat it represents for its own nature. A threat on the “nature” of “Nature”: on being.

      Stiegler: Gestell as "disaster" / "disaster" as "disorientation" || Interesting play on the etymology of disaster here. Interesting to know whether Blanchot is referencing Heidegger's discussion of Gestell and Poiesis as twin stars on the horizon of Dasein's destiny. Also, to know if Heidegger was in any way aware of the play on astral / disaster.

    35. What is the human world insofar as worldness is also always already technicity, technical power, activity,” and perhaps it will finally be asked, for once, What is technology, qua the power of the human, that is to say, the human empowered?

      Stiegler: "What is the human world insofar as worldness is also always already technicity..." ||

    36. our thesis: technics as time

      Stiegler: "our thesis: technics as time" ||

    37. The object self-conditions its functioning, bringing with it its conditions of functioning, thereby reducing the phenomenon of hypertelia. The technical object creator of a milieu “frames” nature. The natural aquatic element encounters the technical object: the natural element not only subjects itself to the technical object’s functioning but favors it (the Guimbal turbine provides the profound sense of that dam on the Rhine to which Heidegger refers). The technical object submits its “natural milieu” to reason and naturalizes itself at one and the same time. It becomes concretized by closely conforming to this milieu, but in the same move radically transforms the milieu. This ecological phenomenon may be observed in the informational dimension of present-day technics, where it allows for the development of a generalized performativity (for example in the apparatuses of live transmission and of data processing in real time, with the fictive inversions engendered therein)— but it is then essentially the human milieu, that is, human geography, and not physical geography, that is found to be incorporated into a process of concretization that should no longer be thought on the scale of the object, but also not on the scale of the system.

      Stiegler: Heidegger's "dam on the Rhine" / "human geography" ||

    38. By becoming naturalized and engendering its own milieu, the object avoids the phenomenon of hypertelia, which limits the object’s indetermination by leaving it dependent upon an artificial milieu. Hypertelia is an “exaggerated specialization of the technical object which renders it unadaptable to change, however slight, taking place in the conditions of its use or fabrication” (Simondon 1958, 50).

      Stiegler > Simondon: Hypertelia is an "exaggerated specialization of the technical object which renders it unadaptable to change..." ||

    39. Nevertheless, an “abusive assimilation of the technical object to the natural and especially the living object” must be avoided. “Mechanology” must not be cybernetics, for one must not “found a separate science that would study the mechanisms of regulation and command in automates built to be automates”; and contrary to Wiener, “it can only be said that technical objects tend toward concretization, whereas natural objects such as living beings are concrete from the start” (49).

      Stiegler > Wiener: "'mechanology' must not be cybernetics" ||

    40. Functional overdetermination means that the part becomes what it is only through its insertion into the whole.

      Stiegler > Simondon: "functional overdetermination" ||

    41. The incompatibilities born of the progressive saturation of the system of subgroups harbor a play of limits whose crossing constitutes a progress·, but owing to its very nature, this crossing can only take place in a leap. (27, my emphasis)

      Simondon: "this crossing can only take place in a leap" ||

    42. The concretization of technical objects, their unification, limits the number of their types: the concrete and convergent technical object is standardized. This tendency to standardization, to the production of more and more integrated types, makes industrialization possible, and not the converse: it is because there is one or another tendency in the process of technical evolution in general that industry can appear, and not because industry appears that there is standardization.12 It is not an industrial invention that imparts form to them.

      Stiegler: origin of industry within "technical evolution" ||

    43. The machine qua individual has its own dynamic: technology as mechanology studies the machinic dynamic of industrial technical objects, that is, of objects that function. Objects that function accomplish functions by synthesizing them, in the double sense of incorporating them— which is the process of concretization by functional overdetermination— and in the sense of reproducing them to realize them in place of… But reproduction, here as in life, produces a new, unique individual, maintaining a family resemblance with the ascending individual but remaining no less absolutely singular. The concretization of the object, or the integration of its functions through overdetermination, is its history, having absolutely left its matter and, in the same move, become absolutely singular. Understanding the technical individual that the machine is means understanding its genesis.

      Stiegler: "The concretization of the object ... is its history" ||

    44. “If there is such a thing as the alienation of humanity (or of culture) by technics, it is caused not by the machine but by the misunderstanding of its nature and essence.” To know the essence of the machine, and thereby understanding the sense of technics in general, is also to know the place of the human in “technical ensembles.”

      Stiegler > Simondon: "the place of the human in 'technical ensembles'"

    45. To consider borrowing as a phenomenon of invention and inversely, invention as borrowing, is tantamount to considering foreign influence and invention as ordinary phenomena of influence of the exterior milieu, composed of natural and technical elements issuing from the other group.

      Stiegler: "...borrowing as a phenomenon of invention..." ||

    46. Within “groups of the same exterior milieu,” “real borrowings” and “simple convergence” should be distinguished (Leroi-Gourhan 1945, 355). But to understand borrowing, the exterior milieu should nevertheless not be treated specifically: the influence of a foreign cultural factor carried by the exterior milieu is basically the same problem as the influence of the exterior milieu on the interior milieu in general. Thus, there is no fundamental difference between the fact of invention and the fact of borrowing. In both cases, the question is that of the plasticity of the technical milieu, and through it, of the availability of the interior milieu to evolution.

      Stiegler: "there is no fundamental difference between the fact of invention and the fact of borrowing" ||

    47. One may conclude that the technical group then gains an advance with respect to the ethnic group to the extent that, as is the case today— with technical evolution accelerating and becoming too fast for the possibilities of appropriation by the “other systems”— one must wonder if we might not be in the presence of a separation and progressive opposition between, on the one hand, cultures, or an ensemble of interior milieus, and on the other hand technologies, which are no longer only a subgroup of the technical milieu but the external milieu become worldwide technology: the dilution of the interior milieu into the exterior milieu has become essentially technical, firstly as an environment totally mediated by telecommunications, by modes of transportation as well as by television and radio, computer networks, and so on, whereby distances and delays are annulled, but secondly as a system of planet-scale industrial production.

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: "separation and progressive opposition between ... cultures [and] technologies" ||

    48. The point here is to understand how the play of the interior and exterior milieus, articulating themselves onto one another, determines the technical fact and “frees” the tendency’s potential. Both are quite variable according to groups, and this is why the tendency presents itself never as such but only as a diversity of facts. The phenomenon of the tendency offers, more profoundly than ethnic singularity, an explanation of all possibility of evolution and reveals the essence of the relation between the two milieus. The techno-logical combinatory is finite, and the problems to which it responds, as well as the solutions resulting from possible combinations, forming the horizon of the tendency— but also of all facts— are limited in number.

      Stiegler: "The techno-logical combinatory is finite..." ||

    49. In order to understand the conditions of technical immobilism or dynamism, the behavior of humans living in groups as technical animals should be analyzed under the double condition of their “interior milieu” and their “exterior milieu.” These concepts, once again, are taken from the field of biology; through them the ethnic group is apprehended as a living structure— and the metaphor becomes here an actual analogy: The human group behaves in nature as a living organism . . . the human group assimilates its milieu through a curtain of objects (tools or instruments). It burns its wood with the adze, consumes its meat with the arrow, the knife, the cauldron, and the spoon. Within this interposed membrane, it nourishes and protects itself, rests, and moves. . . . The study of this artificial envelope is technology, the laws of its development belong in technical economy. (Leroi-Gourhan 1945, 322)

      Stiegler > Leroi-Gourhan: "interior / exterior milieu" / "the metaphor becomes here an actual analogy" ||

    50. Technological superiority is the profound reality of the “superiority” of historical peoples. By this very fact, “civilization” is a technical state, a relation of technical forces, rather than cultural in the limited sense of moral, religious, artistic, scientific, or even political. The following question remains: what are the causes of the appearance of this type of “technical state” qua factor of “civilization” ?

      Stiegler: "'civilization' isa technical state" ||

    51. The enigma of this matter goes back to that of hylē qua dynamis. Matter qua potentiality would be seen in its organization as the act of this potentiality. It would then be tempting to say that the organization of matter is its form, qua the act of this potentiality. But here the question cannot be that of a purely hylomorphic relation: matter organized tech- nomorphologically is not passive; the tendency does not simply derive from an organizing force— the human— it does not belong to a forming intention that would precede the frequentation of matter, and it does not come under the sway of some willful mastery: the tendency operates, down through time, by selecting forms in a relation of the human living being to the matter it organizes and by which it organizes itself, where none of the terms of the relation hold the secret of the other. This technical phenomenon is the relation of the human to its milieu, and it is in this sense that it must be apprehended zoo-logically, without its elucidation being possible, for all that, in terms of the common laws of zoology.

      Stiegler: "hylē qua dynamis" / tendency ||

    52. The question then becomes that of distinguishing the technical tendency within technical facts. The tendency is realized by the facts, and the examination of the links between facts affords us a view of the conditions for the realization of the tendency. A classification of the facts must be carried out, and the unity in the apparent diversity in which it presents itself discovered.

      Stiegler: "The question then becomes that of distinguishing the technical tendency within technical facts" ||

    53. The agreement between the historian and the ethnologist is clear: there is no genius of invention, or at least, it plays only a minor role in technical evolution. Conversely there is a systematicity that here implements tendencies, realized in a coupling, which should be brought to light, of the human with matter.

      Stiegler: "there is no genius of invention" ||

    54. This is the transformation analyzed in “The Age of the World Picture” (Heidegger 1977) from the vantage of the history of being. With contemporary technics, in which “scientific and technical progress are . . . increasingly linked,” in which “economic and scientific progress can no longer function separately” (Gille 1978, 73—74), there is a reversal of meaning in the general scheme: no longer is innovation what results from invention; it is a global process aiming to incite invention, it programs the rise of invention.

      Stiegler > Heidegger / Gille: "no longer is innovation what results from invention; it is a global process aiming to incite invention, it programs the rise of invention." ||

    55. A historical approach to these conditions and to tempos of distribution of an innovation would thus lead to the creation of a typology, “being simultaneously a typology with regard to purely technical elements, which would therefore mesh well with a typology of invention; a typology according to factors of production that are not of a technical nature; and finally a typology following a chronology to be determined” (Gille 1978, 60), which would account for rhythms of transformation, cycles of acceleration and deceleration of the evolution of the technical system.

      Stiegler: historical "typology" of "innovation" ||

    56. The system’s dynamic offers the possibility of invention, and this is what is essential to the concept of technical system: the choice of possibilities in which invention consists is made in a particular space and particular time according to the play of these constraints, which are submitted in turn to external ones.

      Stiegler: "The system's dynamic offers the possibility of invention" || One of the things that makes the history of technics v. history in general so difficult to discern is the apparent impossibility of juxtaposing discrete potentialities for invention around the globe in a rigorous comparative fashion.

    57. The explanation of this actualization is not to be found on the side of scientific discovery. Although technical and scientific progress may converge, and scientific discovery engender technical innovation, there are in each case two different processes of invention or discovery, possibly complementary but irreducible to one another. Technical discovery cannot be typified by the mere development and implementation of a scientific discovery. Such an “implementation,” when it occurs, is itself autonomously inventive, following a logic that is not the logic of science. There is, then, a singularity in the logic of technical invention. Rene Boirel speaks of a “diffuse rationality” (Boirel 1961). The term “rationality” is indeed apt, since technics, in functioning, enters into the causal chains of the principle of reason, is inscribed in the real while transforming it, thereby respecting its laws. But this rationality is nevertheless “diffuse” to the extent that the necessity it entails would be “looser” than that in scientific rationality. Technical invention, not being guided by a theoretical formalism preceding practical operation, remains empirical; however, the inventive operation cannot be said to be produced by chance, for an essential part of innovation is accomplished through transfer, whereby the functioning of a structure in a technical apparatus is analogically transposed into another domain. There is, then, a combinatory genius in technical invention. This also implies the cumulative nature of technical knowledge, although in another sense than in scientific knowledge. One should speak of technological lineages, of paths through the empirical realm [empirie], of tentative groundbreakings [frayages] in the development of the potential of a technique whereby invention deploys itself. The rationality of technical invention, “situated on a determined technological line,” would then be diffuse “to the extent that choices may be made, various combinations set up. For the inventor, the whole question is knowing whether the road to follow is wide or narrow” (Gille 1978, 40).

      Stiegler > Gille: "[singular] ... logic of technical invention" || "Technical discovery cannot be typified by the mere development and implementation of a scientific discovery."

    58. The stakes are high. The incorporation of the history of techniques into general history is particularly difficult. There is first of all the problem, intrinsic to the object “technics” [la technique], of not falling into a specialized, parceled history o ftechniques: technics is the object of a history of techniques, beyond techniques.1 At present, history knows only techniques, because technics is essentially specialization. Technics is not a fact but a result. The history of techniques, then, needs this result to become organized into a history of technics. There is on the other hand a problem in establishing the actual connections with other historical aspects; this places the preceding problem at a more general level. There are economic, political, demographic facts, and so forth. But it is the unity of the historical fact that gathers this diversity into a general history. Here again, the result must provide the unity of the operation from which the result results. The concept of a technical system aims at the solution of these problems. Such a result returns after the event [apres coup] as the possibility of a new, more stable beginning.

      Stiegler: the "difficulty" of incorporating the "history of techniques into general history" ||

    59. More profoundly, the question is to know if we can predict and, if possible, orient the evolution of technics, that is, of power (puissance). What power (pouvoir) do we have over power (puissance)?

      Heidegger: "What power (pouvoir) do we have over power (puissance)?" ||

    60. What is more important is the relationship between technics and time. This is especially so if it is true that individuation and “intersubjectivization” are what is at stake in language. For what is given in speech is time, which is, as Heidegger says, “the true principle of individuation.” The only condition on which Heidegger can oppose speech to instrumental technics in the first place is that speech bears this originary temporality of time, which calculative and technical instrumentality obscures in an intratemporality which is always that of concern. The whole question is whether such an evaluative distribution— according to which technics remains only on one side (of an opposition), itself not constitutive of individuation— in fact remains “metaphysical.”

      Stiegler > Heidegger: "whole question is whether...technics remains only on one side ||

    61. Do you admit to this certainty: that we are at a turning point? — If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point. The fact of being part of the moment in which an epochal change (if there is one) comes about also takes hold of the certain knowledge that would wish to determine this change, making certainty as inappropriate as uncertainty. We are never less able to circumvent ourselves than at such a moment: the discreet force of the turning point is first and foremost that. — Maurice Blanchot

      Stiegler > Blanchot: "If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point" ||