Language to say nothing
For Heidegger, Dasein is the 'space' within which Being becomes unconcealed truth, as aletheia: 'the unconcealedness of what is present, its Being revealed, its showing itself'.67 The showing of what is present takes place in or as language. Heidegger does not, in a sense, think that something other than the showing is shown, because showing is but a saying, viz., the activity of language: 'Dasein is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse.'68 Indeed, the 'asking' of the ontological question, which Dasein enacts, is 'a mode of Being'.69 But the showing is the movement of language itself. The showing, as saying, is the utterance of language, and language utters itself as it utters Dasein. As Heidegger says, 'it is not we who play with words; rather, the essence of language plays with us'.70 In what Dasein says, we must look to understand what is shown in, or as, that saying. Indeed, that which we are to listen for is the showing of language, 'to hear what language really says when it speaks'.71 The showing, which is a saying, lets us see the arrival of what comes to language as language. Heidegger says that 'showing [is a] . . . letting appear'.72
For Heidegger 'something comes to language'.73 What can come to language, what would this something be? It seems that what is to come to language is language itself: We are 'to bring language to language as language'.74 It is for this reason that what must be heard in language is language speaking itself, and in so doing 'language shows itself.75 What arrives to language is language. Just as Time is not, yet temporality is temporalised, language is languaged. Every saying as a showing begins to suggest a certain 'substantiation', viz., language as the arrival of language becomes almost 'bodily'. We know that Dasein is essentially languaged, and that the show of Dasein is the utterance of language. Consequently, with the arrival of Dasein language is brought to language. In saying language Dasein says itself, but Dasein is not in control of this saying. When Dasein says language, Dasein is shown itself. Language, in being languaged, will simultaneously say Dasein while Dasein is saying language; each is brought to itself in the same showing. Consequently, it begins to be possible to think that each is nothing appearing as something by way of a peculiar 'movement' towards the other. (Maybe this is similar to Spinoza's Deus sive natura?)76
If the first motto was ex nihilo nihilo fit, then the second is nihil sine ratione. If nothing is without reason, and if we read this with a particular strength, then we can understand this as the site of the saying/showing arrival. From nothing comes nothing, and this nothing, as the principle of Being, is without reason; hence the ontological question can be restated. There will be no closure effected upon the question. Indeed, it will become appropriate to consider this restated question as the unquestioning question of the nothing as something, if I may put it so. The epitome of this asking is that of Angelus Silesius' rose:
The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms, it pays attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.77
This rose will signal a mode of discourse which is 'non-saying', or a 'not-speaking'. For Heidegger, we 'must first learn to exist in the nameless'.78 He does not appear to mean that we initially exist in the nameless and then do not, but rather that the most basic starting point is to exist and remain in the nameless. Here we can clearly see Heidegger rendering something nothing and then composing a 'discourse' which will enact the nothing as something. The rose is shown to be in a manner which is a saying without 'words'. In a sense, it is language without language, as it is the very arrival of language. In other words, it is the languaging of language. This is the bringing of language to language, the something which comes to language. The rose shows itself as the saying of the nameless, that which is without words, the non-saying which says. We know that Being is understood only when it is considered as nothing, yet a nothing which is for Dasein 'positive'. Time is similar in that temporality must be temporalised, and that Time is not different from
Being. Likewise the rose presents a language without words, in so far as it does not say something. Consequently, this discourse is always just before language, as the not-speaking, the non-saying, viz., the nameless. To say without saying, to be without Being, and so to temporalise and language the Nothing - this is the show of a pure arrival, the arrival of arriving.79 Part II, Chapter 10 will argue that this arrival is the elimination of every particular as it is the 'war of all against all'. For every existent is simultaneously prohibited and permitted - a la Hegel.
For Heidegger, the rose has a relation and a dis-relation with grounds. When it is said that the rose 'blooms without why', we understand that there is a giving up of grounding - the 'why' shows this lack. But it is not privative, to the degree that the 'because' in 'it blooms because it blooms' and so lets appear a 'relationship to grounds'.80 The rose lacks grounds, yet this lack still bespeaks a relationship to grounds, because the saying of grounds is the actual showing, or arrival, of the rose qua rose.81 What is happening here? For Heidegger, what happens is happening itself: 'happening itself . . . is the only event. Being alone is. What happens? Nothing happens, if we are pursuing that which happens in happening. Nothing happens, event e-vents.'82 This is the arrival of arriving. Nothing does come from nothing, and that which comes is without reason. This is the discourse which is a show-ing. The ontological question of Being, which I have characterised as an un-questioning question, makes us inhabit a perpetual arrival: Nothing does arrive.83 What is this that arrives as the arrival? It seems that maybe 'the nihiliative nothing, the essence of the nothing in its former kinship with "being", can arrive and be accommodated'.84 We are shown the arrival of arriving, which is the perpetual saying of the nothing as something: 'Being no more is than nothing. Yet there is a giving of both.'85 We can see this 'rosy' discourse in the crossing of Being: 'Like Being the nothing would also have to be written - and that means thought in the same way.'86 This is the nothing as something; the Abgrund as ground.
Heidegger is confronting a general aporia that is pervasive in all thought, an aporia which has already been mentioned. Nonetheless it may be benefical to reiterate its logic. Thought requires a supplement, for if we do not supplement thought then we remain merely ontic - that is, our answers ask the questions. At the same time if we do supplement thought we can do so only with another thought which will induce an infinite regress, or we can supplement it with something other than thought. Yet this would mean that thought is grounded in an absence of thought, for it would be grounded by what is thoughtless, or what is nonthought. Deleuze later occupies such a position, arguing that sense is produced by non-sense.87 Here, employing a similar logic, Heidegger is grounding Being in the Nothing.88 Furthermore, Heidegger develops this logic in relation to the rose that blooms without a why. This is important because Heidegger is endeavouring to take thinking or language beyond ontic presumptions and the rubric of the metaphysical question. Celan, it will be suggested, does something similar. I will now offer a brief interpretation of a particular impulse which I take to be present in the writings of Paul Celan, one which arguably brings Celan close to Heidegger before necessarily moving them apart. At the end Heidegger will be re-examined in light of this reading of Celan.
Post a comment