Research

in
Phenomenology

Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 90110

www.brill.nl/rp

The Self as Resolution: Heidegger, Derrida and the

Intimacy of the Question of the Meaning of Being
John Russon
University of Guelph

Abstract
Because Dasein, as conceived by Heidegger, is inherently temporal, the who of Dasein can
never be dened simply in terms of a (self-)present identity but must have the character of what
Derrida calls dirance. Daseins authenticity, then, must be an embracing of this, its character
as dirance. This means that the self is neither a substance nor a subject but a resolution. The
anticipatory resoluteness of authenticity, however, is a unique kind of resolve: it is the resolve to
be open to transformation. For that reason, Daseins proper self-appropriationauthenticityis
found precisely in its inherent inappropriability. Because Dasein is always being-in-the-world,
the openness of its own who is equally an openness of beings what. Daseins authenticity is
nothing other than the enactment of the question of the meaning of being.
Keywords
Heidegger, Derrida, authenticity, dirance, resolution.
[T]his most thought-provoking thing turns away from us,
in fact has long since turned away from man. And what
withdraws in such a manner keeps and develops its own
incomparable nearness.1

My goal in this paper is to investigate the nature of authentic selfhood. My

central focus will be Heideggers discussion of anticipatory resoluteness in
Being and Time, but I will also draw signicantly on Derridas notion of
dirance. I will begin, in section 1, with the concept of self-conscious selfidentity as that theme emerges in Fichtes Science of Knowledge and will connect that with Derridas notion of dirance. Section 2 will focus on this

1)

Martin Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken? (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), 51; translated by
J. Glenn Gray as What is Called Thinking (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 17. Hereafter, I will
cite this text as WCT, with the German pagination given as G and the English as E.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008

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notion of dirance as it relates to familiar aspects of human self-identity. Section 3, the focus of the paper, will bring this concept to Heideggers analysis of
authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) in Being and Time. Here I will specically address
the notion of authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. Section 4 will consider how this conception of the authentic self is uniquely capable of explaining the nature of learning and of ethical experience. Section 5 will conclude by
connecting this analysis of authenticity to the question of the meaning of
being, with which Heidegger begins Being and Time, and will show that, far
from being an abstract question or a matter of mystical speculation, the question of the meaning of being is the most intimate question in human life.

1. Identity
Any self-identity is represented in the formula A = A.2 This is precisely the law
of identity, and it presents generically what it is that we assert whenever we
speak of something as self-identical. And typically (though this will be the
central point of philosophical scrutiny and controversy in what follows), we
hold such self-identity to be a truth or property (and an obvious one) of anything insofar as it is at all.
The law of identity is something we understand. We do not need it proved
to usindeed, it is the very foundation of all of our normal systems of proof:
it is presupposed in any proving.3 Let us look more closely at what is actually
said in this proposition, and what our understanding of it involves.
This law of identity is a proposition, a statement. Rendered in words rather
than mathematical symbols, we would say Any thing is itself. Like any statement, this statement needs to be read in order to be understood. This statement can be understood only by someone who can distinguish noun from
verb, subject from predicate, etc. and who can take the time to read the proposition from start to nish and maintain a sense of the whole. More specically
in the case of understanding this proposition, A = A, to be able to assert of
2)

This discussion of the law of identity is largely drawn from J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge,
ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
pt I, Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge, sec. 1, First, Absolutely
Unconditioned Principle.
3)
If anyone were to demand a proof of this proposition, we should certainly not embark on
anything of the kind, but would insist that it is absolutely certain, that is, without any other
ground: and in so sayingdoubtless with general approvalwe should be ascribing to ourselves
the power of asserting something absolutely (Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 94).

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the second A (the one after the = sign) that it is the same as the rst A
requires of us that we not confuse the two. We do not, for example, make the
mistake of thinking that we are still just beginning our statement of the equation but recognize, rather, that we are completing the equation we have been
enunciating. Again, we do not forget that we have already laid down A =
when we lay down the nal A. On the contrary, our understanding of the
equation means that we retain the content and context of the earlier portions
of the equation when we articulate its last element. The meaning of the second
A, in other words, is dierent from the meaning of the rst A: it, experientially
and meaningfully, is something like the answering of the question posed by
the rst A. Another way of saying this is that the equation is a sentence, with
a beginning and an end: the dierent elements of the equation play dierent
rolesdierent logical rolesin accomplishing the articulation of what is
said in the sentence. The nal (closing) A plays a dierent logical role than the
initial (initiating) A. This analysis of the logical structure of the law of identity
has some important implications.4
The rst implication was noticed by Fichte (and, in dierent terms, by
Kant).5 In the recognition of any identity, which means therefore in any
normal experience, what is accomplished is at root an armation of the selfidentity of the experiencer. The only way it is experientially possible to recognize the truth (and more, the necessary truth) of the equation A = A is that
I must retain my assertion of the rst A as I assert the second A (which is what
we said in the preceding paragraph), and that means, further, that I must recognize myself now to be the selfsame self as the one who asserted the initial A.
In other words, my ability to recognize the continuity of the two As presupposes my ability to recognize the continuity of my own experience. Thus,
Fichte argues, in any assertion of A = A, I am I is tacitly asserted. Since all
experience takes the form of recognizing identities, all experience has self4)
For this notion that the statement says something to us on condition that we dierentiate the
two sides of the = sign, compare 2 + 2 = 4. On this theme of the hermeneutical dimensions
and dynamics of reading, compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2000), 267, 291. See also Jacques
Derrida, Violence et Mtaphysique: Essai sur la Pense dEmmanuel Levinas, in Lcriture et la
dirence, (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1967), 119; translated by Alan Bass as Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, in Writing and Dierence (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 80. Hereafter I will cite this text as Violence and Metaphysics, with the French pagination given as F and the English pagination as E.
5)
This discussion replays the central argument Fichte makes in his demonstration of the rst
principle, Science of Knowledge, 94102.

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armation as its tacit, universal form. Kant called this the transcendental
unity of apperception. Fichte expresses this by saying that the rst principle
of all experience is the ego posits itself.6
The second implication of our analysis of the (epistemo-)logical structure of
the law of identity was noticed by Derrida. In the recognition of any identity,
which means, therefore, in any normal experience, the condition of the possibility for arming the self-identity is the non-identity of what is identied:
A = A can be armed as true if and only if the two As are not identical and
are pointedly not confused. The coincidence of the As can be armed only on
condition that they do not coincide. This necessary diering of (according to the
law of identity) the thing from itself that is the condition for its self-identity is
what Derrida calls dirance. This dirance is not some entity other than
the self-identity; strictly speaking, it is not even another feature. Dirance,
rather, is the very nature of self-identity. Dirance is the self-diering that is
the ignored founding condition of any self-identity.7

6)

For Kants transcendental unity of apperception, see Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), A1067, A11819, B13135. Fichte
identies the rst principle as the self begins by an absolute positing of its own existence,
Science of Knowledge, 99. This is also more or less the argument that Descartes makes in his second meditation, though with much less depth.
7)
See also La voix et le phnomene (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 92; translated
by David Allison as Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 82:
The movement of dirance is not something that happens to a transcendental subject; it produces a subject. Auto-aection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that
would already be itself (autos). It produces sameness as self-relation within self-dierence; it
produces sameness as the non-identical. (Hereafter, I will cite this text as Speech and Phenomena,
with the French pagination given as F and the English pagination as E.) The opening of
chapter 5 of Speech and Phenomena (F 67., E 60.) does not invoke this term but clearly raises
the problem with the notion of unmediated self-conscious self-identity in terms of the (unsatisfactory) concept of the self-contained present moment; see also F 7677, E 68, F 9496, E 85
and F 98, E 88. The essay la dirance, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Les ditions de
Minuit, 1972), 129, translated by Alan Bass as Dirance, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 127, discusses this notion of dirance directly, but primarily in relation to Derridas central focus on writing (hereafter I will cite this text as Dirance,
with the French pagination given as F and the English pagination as E.) See especially F 8,
E 8 and F 1314, E 13 for dirance as the notion of the temporization of identity, i.e., the way
a self-identity is not fully realized in a moment but takes time. See Karin de Boer, Tragedy,
Dialectics, and Dirrance: On Hegel and Derrida, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 39 (2001):
334: Dirance is one of the many names that Derrida chooses for the dierencing force by
virtue of which nothing can remain identical to itself or be present to itself, yet without which
nothing could even begin to take shape or accomplish itself. For a discussion of the classic

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This implication noticed by Derrida also has an implication of its own for
the implication noticed by Fichte. The dirance that characterizes any selfidentity must also characterize the self-positing of the ego that is itself the
universal form of any self-identity. Every I, in other words, is likewise an
originary self-diering.
I indicated an originary self-diering. What do I mean by using that term?
I mean that, as the condition of possibility for As self-identity, the nonidentity of the As is the generative source of that identity. It is only in the
context where their dierence is marked (here in their dierent spatial relations with respect to the = sign) and only by this installing of their
dierentiation that the assertion of their identitytheir identication
becomes possible. Now, to the extent that, as we noted above, the law of
identity applies universally to whatever is, dirance must be the origin of all
beings.8 Let us go deeper into understanding what is meant by dirance.

2. Dirance
Even as a strictly logical point, the argument made in section 1 would be
important, but its importance becomes clearer when we see what is really
implied concretely by this revision of our usual conception of identity. To see
this, we need to consider more closely the dierence between the two As in the
law of identity.
I stated above that the rst and the second As dier roughly as question and
answer. Insofar as the equation has not been completed, the identity of the
rst A has not yet been sealed o, has not yet been resolved. The equation says
something about A, and that (namely, its identity) has not yet been said as
long as the equation/proposition is not yet completed. Using the language of
question and answer, we could say the rst A is asking what it is, and the sec-

sense of how this relates to Derridas textual practice, see Edward S. Casey, Origins in (of ) Heidegger/Derrida, Journal of Philosophy (1984): 60110. For a excellent and detailed discussion of
Derridas philosophical project as it relates to Husserls phenomenology, see Leonard Lawlor,
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002).
8)
In fact, the notion of dirance challenges the very notion of origin as much as it redenes it.
Inasmuch as the self-diering simply is the identity, dirance is not a pre-existent state and,
thus, not an origin in the sense of an earlier from which some later comes forth. It is also not
a strictly identiable one as opposed to some other and, thus, again not an origin, i.e., a
diering is already two, already too late (delayed) for the origin. See below, note 9.

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ond is answering. The second A, to be meaningful, must be a choice from

among other possiblebut rejectedanswers. The equation could have
ended in many other ways: B, X, ~A. These answer may well all have been false
(though not necessarily), but they are still meaningful. Their meaningfulness
would be precisely the way they respond to the context for possible meaning
opening up by the rst A. The second A resolves the identity of A; it reduces
the range of possibilities inaugurated by the rst A-as-question to the specic
actuality. Putting our analyses in these terms of question and answer, or of
potentiality and actuality, allows us to clarify the nonidentity of the two As.
The second A claims to present the truth of the rst: it claims to be identical. But precisely what is nonidentical is the respective status of the two As as
potential and actual. The rst A announces the possibility of an identity, and
the second makes it actual. But in making it actual, precisely what is lost is the
status of the rst as possible. Or, again, we could say that the answer takes away
from the question its questioning character. At this level of the logic of the
law of identity, it may be hard to see the force of these distinctions, but it is
not at all hard to see the force of this distinctionthis diranceif we move
into more familiar empirical domains.
Imagine yourself wanting to write a story, or wanting to speak in class. In
both cases, you have a strong feeling of what you want to express. Perhaps you
formulate words in your head rst, or perhaps the words rst appear when you
speak or put pen to paper. As you write, your idea is articulate. You believed
that you had something to say, and you are now making that actual, realizing
it as words. Only in coming to words does your initial sense become something realuntil it is articulated, it is only the promise of a meaning, but you
have not yet actually said anything.9 And this sometimes happens: we have
an urgent sense that we have a contribution to make to the conversation, and
we await the moment when the other speaker pauses and allows us room,
and then . . . we have lost the thought; it never came to words, and we literally
cannot say what was on our minds. In the absence of articulation, the sense
amounts to nothing. And yet, the nothing that it amounts to does not do
it justicewe really did have something, or more exactly, there was a real

9)

This is a further aspect of why dirance is not strictly an origin. If it is only in my actual
saying that the possibility of that saying is not nothing, then it is as much true that the actual lets
the possible be as that the possible lets the actual be. The very form of happening is this splitting
into an actual and a possible, which both exceed and are exceeded by each other. On the making-specic that is inherent to any speaking, see Gnter Figal, Martin Heidegger: Phnomenologie
der Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum, 1988), 4142.

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potentiality for meaning there. When we do put it in words, that potentiality

does for the rst time become something actually meaningfulfor us as much
as for othersbut do not these actual words also fail to do justice to the
potentiality? Yes, those words express our thought, but they have not said it
well enough. Indeed, what initially seems like a good articulation may be challenged by others, and we see then the inadequacy of our chosen words to
communicate what we meantso we try again, with new words, a second
articulation to supplement the rst and to make our initial intended sense
clear. But these words, too, though they seem to us to say satisfactorily what
we meant, can be interpreted dierently by others, requiring us again to supplement our words with more words, to ensure that they say what we meant.
These back and forth articulations are a kind of evidence for the way our
meaning as potential exceeds our meaning as actual. It shows, for example, that
our meaning was said in words, but it remained a power to be said otherwise.
Let me give two other examples that will make the force of this point clearer.
A student earns a Ph.D. and seeks employment as a university professor. He
aspires to teach at a prominent university where he believes that his teaching
could have an important impact in his eld. In fact, he is hired at a small
institution with few professional connections. He teaches well, but dies without leaving a mark on his eld. Could he have made a dierence, given the
opportunity? There is no way to know. He was not given the opportunity and
did not make a dierence. The question, however, is not meaningless. His
power to teach names something real about himself, but that power was never
able fully to display itself. And nally, the artist who over and over again transforms our perception through her artworks, demonstrates precisely her power
thereby, but that power as power, as possibility, never appears as such; on the
contrary, her power always appears as an actual work. The works are the traces
of her power, but that power itself never comes into view as such. What we
will have left when she dies will be her oeuvre, but this body of work, this totality, will show what she did, not what she could have done. We can meaningfully ask what would have happened had our Ph.D. been hired at a prominent
school, or had our artist not died in a shing accident. In each case, the potential in fact resulted only in these specics, but this was not the inherent
fulllment of that potential, that is, this was not the de jure result.
This notion of unfullled potential is not new. In the Republic, for example,
Socrates recounts a story: a man from Seraphos tells Themistocles that he,
Themistocles, would not have been great had he not lived in Athens; Themistocles replies that he, the Seraphian, would not have been great had he lived in

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Athens.10 The point is that Athens provided the situation that allowed Themistocles to show himself: Themistocles had a potential that would not have
been manifest had he not been in Athens, but it is a real feature of him, as
shown by the fact that the Seraphian in Athens makes (or, rather, would have
made) no such impact. So, again, the story of unfullled potential is not new.
What is perhaps new here is the stress: all potential, qua potential, is unfullled.
In other words, in any actualization of potential, the potential as such remains
under-/unexpressed.
In these empirical examples, we have seen the force of the nonidentity of
possibility and actuality. Actuality actualizes the possible, but the possible as
possible is not present in that actuality. The possibility of the possible is a
remainder in the equation, which is not assimilable within the actual, i.e.,
there is no actuality that can be it. Now let us take this insight back to the
issue of the self, i.e., the self-conscious self-identity of the I.
Before investigating the peculiar logic of the I, we must rst get clear on
the basic phenomenon of the who of our human reality (Dasein). Heidegger,
in the First Division of Being and Time (the preparatory existential analytic),
describes human reality as characterized by two dierent modes: we can disown ourselves and live dispersed in the they (das Man) or we can own
ourselves in authenticity.11 This description is not particularly a thesis of Heideggers; it is rather a simple description of familiar facts about ourselves. In
Socrates, for example, or Luther, or Antigone, we have an individual who
resolutely takes hold of him- or herself and takes a stand against the prevailing
way of interpreting a situation. It would be easier to go with the ow and
not expressly ask ourselves who we are and what we stand forand this is how
most of us act most of the time, in large part because our circumstances do not
call upon us to take a standbut these individuals have the courage to stand
up for themselves, even unto death. Noticing this dierence between everyday existence as a theyself and authentic existence is not particularly novel
or striking in Heidegger. What is striking is his brilliant insight into the nature
of this authentic self. What is the form of this resoluteness? It is a resolve, an

10)

Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), I.329e330a.
See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7. Au. (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953).
sec. 9, pp. 4243, and Division 1, chap. 4, esp. pp. 115, 12930; Being and Time, trans. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 68, 150, 16768. Hereafter, references to this work will be given to the pagination of the German text (SZ) followed by
the pagination in the translation of Macquarrie and Robinson, (BT). See also SZ 12/BT 3233.

11)

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anticipation, a promise. Let us look at Heideggers notion of the temporalizing of authentic resoluteness.

3. Resolution
What is it to make a resolution? It is to make a promise; it is to (try to) decide
now what the future will be. On New Years Day, I say I will not smoke
again; at the altar I say, I will always love you. In each case, I claim now to
speak on behalf of my future self. I arm that I now am the same as I then,
and that I have the authority to so speak. In fact, though, I do not yet know
who I will be. Sartre makes this point in his analysis of vertigo in Being and
Nothingness: the vertigo I feel at the edge is the recognition that I now do not
know that the I I will be in a few seconds will not jump.12 I now cannot
speak for the I then. In Sartres language this is (one of many ways in which) I
am what I am not and am not what I am: that I will be me, but I am not that
I. If I resolve not to jump now, I am promising on behalf of an I that I do not
have the authority to speak for. That I will be meit will be my very selfidentitybut I am not yet that I.
I am not yet that I. This expression is accurate enough as far as it goes, but
the word that can be misleading. To say that I appears to be to point at
something denite. In fact, though, that I does not yet exist, and it is not at
all clear who that I will be.13 It will be me, all right, but will it be a me who
jumps? a me who steps back from the edge? a me who decides to leave her
spouse? a me who decides to return to his family home? This question cannot
be answered: who I will be in the future is not yet decided; indeed, it will be
precisely my decision that determines that identity. I am now I. The I who
will jump or step back will in fact be methe same I. I am I, that is, I now
and I then are the same I. But these two Is dier precisely as possible and actual,
precisely as question and answer. The future, now, is my possibilities. Who I will
be will be someone actual. That I will be me, but it will be the resolving of
my possibilities into a specic actuality. It will be me; it will actualize my
12)

Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956),
6569. See also Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37: I had
sent to myself, who did not yet exist. . . . Self-consciousness is as much a matter of faith as it is a
matter of perception.
13)
Compare Aristotle, De Interpretatione, chaps. 9 and 13, regarding the undecidability of the
truth or falsity of statements about the future.

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potential; but it will precisely thereby fail to answer adequately to my possibilities. The undecidednessthe undecidabilityof my identity will be replaced
with a decision, and thereby something denitive of my identity will be eaced.14
A resolution, as normally understood, is a promise, and a promise one has
insucient authority to make. One speaks on behalf of someone one is not.
In this sense, resoluteness is, in its logical structure, a lie and a fraud. Heideggers claim, however, is that authenticity is a particular kind of resoluteness:
it is anticipatory resoluteness. Let us look at this notion of anticipation to see
what implications it has for this analysis of self-identity. First, though, let us
look a little more exactly at his notion of authenticity.
Heidegger identies a specic relationship between authenticitybeing a
self in a way that is true to the inherent nature of selfhoodand anxiety.15 By
anxiety (Angst), Heidegger has in mind the particular frame of mind
(Bendlichkeit, Stimmung) in which nothing seems meaningful: one is in
despair of doing anything because the grounding context of meaning in ones
life has been removed. Of course, all those things are still there, but they do
not matter anymore. It is in this anxiety that authenticity becomes possible.
Authenticity becomes possible here, because this mood of anxiety has a
unique capacity to disclose something about our existence. In this anxiety
where nothing matters, what is on display is precisely that mattering matters; i.e., it is how we care about the world that lets things be signicant.
Anxiety, in other words, discloses care as the fundamental meaning of our
reality, and in so doing, it discloses the way in which my reality and the reality
of my world are interwoven.16 Authenticity is the distinctive stance in which I
own up to this, my role as caregiver, so to speak, of my world: it is uniquely
up to me to take my world up in a meaningful way.
In recognizing myself as the one who lets things matter, I have made a fundamental shift in my whole way of being. Normally, we treat things in the
world as imposing their meanings upon us: this is important because it is a job
or because it is cold or because it is what my family wants or because it is a law.
14)

This means that I am (will be) I only with a loss of myself. Every actual identity will thus tacitly
be witness to such a loss, will be a trace of a loss, a memorial to that loss. Self-consciousness, no
less than being an enactment of self-identity, will therefore always tacitly be an act of mourning.
This is the central motif in Derridas Memoirs of the Blind, which studies self-portraiture to disclose this (self-)blindness inherent to all seeing: seeing eyes are mourning eyes. See especially
12122. See also Speech and Phenomena, F 73, E 65.
15)
Division 1, chap. 6, sec. 40, SZ 18491/BT 22835; see also SZ 251/BT 295.
16)
Divison 1, chap. 6, sec. 41, SZ 19196/BT 23541. See also SZ 21112/BT 255; SZ 220
21/BT 263 and SZ 22630/BT 26973.

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All of these ways of identifying the cause of importance, however, are inauthentic; that is, in authenticity, one recognizes that these things can only
mean in the way they do on the basis of a prior setting of the terms of care
by oneself. Anxiety is the initial discovery that the meaningful weight of things
is not inherent to them but can be stripped away, and authenticity is owning
up to ones own reality as the founding meaning-giving power here.
In authenticity, then, one can no longer go along with the simple way
things are but recognizes oneself as the one who must set the terms of care.
The resoluteness, then, which characterizes authenticity, is not any kind of
resolution: it is not simply a resolution to quit smoking, for example, but is
precisely the resolution to maintain oneself in the role of the one who lets
things matter.
While anxiety draws ones attention to the essentiality of ones own care
only ones caring lets things matterit also draws attention to what we might
call the intentionality of care. Care is always about . . . In other wordsor
rather, in other emphasisones caring lets things matter. While ones care is
the opening to value, its very nature as care is to bind itself to matters. Letting things matter means precisely forgoing the privilege of artibrariness and
self-will, and instead, experiencing the binding power of other values.
The specic character of authenticity as a form of resolve, then, is that it is
the resolution to hold oneself open to value, to meaning. Whereas resolutions
typically involve the streadfastness of refusing to yield to changing circumstances, and to deciding oneself now what will be allowed to matter then,
authenticity is the unique form of resolve that refuses to close o the terms of
value now, but resolves to be open to letting value show itself.17
This resolution to be open to letting the value of ones situation show itself
is what Heidegger identies as the experience that founds the familiar phenomenon of conscience. Conscience is the experience of the fundamental
imperative to be answerable to the call of value, to the call of care. The call of
conscience does not demand this or that, but demands that one be responsive
to how ones situation calls. Conscience, then, as the essential phenomenon of

17)
Authenticity is thus a letting show, a releasing of the possible. Compare the denition of
phenomenology as letting what shows itself show itself (note 37, below), and WCT, G 50,
E 14: If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to
the dierent kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood. For an excellent discussion of the primacy of this responsiveness to what shows, see Bernard Waldenfels, Antwort auf
das Fremde. Grundzge einer rseponsiven Phnomenologie, in Der Anspruch des Anderen. Perspektiven phnomenologischer Ethick, hrsg. von B. Waldenfels and I. Drmann (Munich: W. Fink,
1998), 3549.

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authentic resoluteness, is, in the language Heidegger elsewhere uses, an undecidable call. It does not oer a prefabricated answer (a decision): it precisely
puts one in the position of having to originate a way of taking up the call.18
This undecidability can be illuminated simply by constrasting two imperatives: Go to the store, and Be good. Both imperatives are meaningful: both
involve a meaningful norm by which to guide and evaluate ones subsequent
actions. The second imperative, though, unlike the rst, does not tell one how
to realize it. Love your father is a similarly undecidable imperative: it is
meaningful, but ones own interpretive powers and also the unique specicities
of ones father are inseparably interwoven into the very meaning of the command. One must oneself take responsibility for determining how to enact love
in relation to the unique specicitiesthe singularityof ones father.
The authentic self, thenthe eigentlich self, the self properis the undecidable resolution to let what matters show itself. Most resolutions accept the
given terms of the everyday world as it actually exists and resolve to enact some
specic and familiar actual form within or upon that everyday actuality. Unlike
these familiar resolutions of everyday life, which are precisely determinate
decisions, the authentic resolutionHeidegger calls it anticipatory resoluteness, where anticipation means holding oneself open to the transformative
possibilities of the futureinsofar as it is undecidable, is committed to the
possibility of ones situation, not the actuality.19 Being open to what can show
18)
On conscience as authenticity, see Division 2, chap. 2, sec. 58, especially SZ 287/BT 333:
Hearing the appeal correctly is thus tantamount to having an understanding of oneself in ones
ownmost potentiality-for-Beingthat is, to projecting oneself upon ones ownmost authentic
possibility for becoming guilty. When Dasein understandingly lets itself be called forth to this
possibility, this includes its becoming free for the callits readiness for the potentiality of getting
appealed to. In understanding the call, Dasein is in thrall to its ownmost possibility of existence. It
has chosen itself. This passage should be compared with the discussion of making up for not
choosing (SZ 268/BT 313), and the discussion of taking over Being-a-basis (SZ 284/BT 330).
On the undecidability of the call of conscience, see Division 2, chap. 2, sec. 5657, SZ 27280/
BT 31725; compare especially SZ 294/BT 340: 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 expectmaxims which could
be reckoned up unequivocallythe conscience would deny to existence nothing less than the
very possibility of taking action. On conscience and anxiety, see SZ 29697/BT 34243. The
theme of the undecidability of the call of conscience is the central focus of chapter 3, Heideggers Being and Time: Not About Being, of Karen S. Feldman, Binding Words: Conscience
and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006),
esp. 98102. Feldman especially studies the nature of Heideggers language in his discussion of
conscience, and on Being and Time itself as an enactment of conscience.
19)
See Division 2, chap. 1, sec. 53,SZ 26067/BT 30411, for the notion of anticipation
(in contrast to expectation). For the notion of authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness, see

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itself means not closing o possibilities in the situation. Indeed, we began by

seeing that anxiety precisely showed the non-substantiality of actual meanings and showed the situation could appear otherwise. Authenticity is the
opening to releasing other possibilities of meaning within the situation.
The authentic self, then, is, as Heidegger says, neither substance nor subject. It is, rather, a resolve, and a resolve to let what is possible show itself.20
Let us now return to our discussion of the temporality of the self (the I am
I) as a promise, in light of this conception of authenticity as anticipatory
resoluteness.
Authenticity is a promise to be someone. It is precisely intended as a promise that does not know what it is promising. In any promiseI will stop gamblingone (lying, without authority) claims to speak on behalf of an I that
one is not. Authenticity is the explicit avowal of this ignorance, this non-selfidentity. I hold myself open to nding out who I am.21
Such a promise can never be fullled. This non-fulllment, however, is
not failure. It is, rather, the nature of this promise that its successful enactment
is never exhausted. Any way one lives, any way in which one actually facilitates
the releasing/disclosing of meaning will always be precisely thatan actuality
and not, therefore, the possibility of the situation as such. Being open to values
as they show themselves is indeed a stance of total commitmentfor one is
being open to being beholden to the matters that show themselvesbut a total
commitment that must remain open to transformation.22 Openness to oneself

SZ 298301/BT 34448, and Division 2, chap. 3, passim. Compare Contributions to Philosophy:

(From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999), sec. 173, p. 209: Man is futural insofar as he undertakes to be the Da. For discussion see John Sallis, Grounders of the Abyss, chap. 10 of Companion to Heideggers Contributions
to Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 193 and passim.
20)
Neither substance nor subject is found inSZ 303/BT 351. For a very stimulating discussion
of the way in which the self is neither substance nor subject but an ultimately inappropriable
retroactive unication in the context of an encounter with unassimilable otherness, see Rudolf
Bernet, The Traumatized Subject, Research in Phenomenology 30 (2000): 16079, esp. 16061.
In his discussion of dirance as the origin of dierences, Derrida says, they are eects which
do not nd their cause in a subject or a substance (Dirance, F 12, E 11). For the authentic self
as resolve, seeSZ 322/BT 369: Existentially, Self-constancy signies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness.
21)
Authentic selfhood is thus a kind of blind faith: faithful, because it is a keeping of the promise to be open; blind, because, qua futural, it cannot see what it is promising or how (whether)
it will be justied; see Memoirs of the Blind, 30. See also Speech and Phenomena, F 115, E 103.
22)
See Division 2, chap. 3, sec. 62, SZ 3078/BT 355, on constancy as making oneself free for
taking it back. The context is a discussion of truth and certainty as they pertain to resoluteness,

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as possible is also openness to the situation as possible: how matters actually show themselves will not be adequate to those matters as possible.23
What then is the self? It is nothing other than the opennessthe clearingin which what matters matters, in which what is shows itself. Let us take
this notion over, now, into the most central matters of human life and development: learning and ethics.

4. Ethics and Learning

What I have tried to show in my analysis so far is that the nature of the I is
necessarily characterized by what Derrida calls dirance and that what Heidegger analyzes under the name of anticipatory resoluteness is precisely the
embrace of this dirance in which the self is properly itself: it is only in its
embracing of its not-being-able-to-(yet)-be-itself that the self is properly itself.
Let us now consider how this selfhood-as-dirance denes the arena of learning and ethics.
As we intimated above in considering conscience as a phenomenon of
authenticity, this stance of anticipatory resoluteness is essentially a stance of
responsibility. The stance of authenticity is dened precisely by the imperative
of responsibility, and this in a twofold sense: it is the stance that acknowledges
its up to me, and it is the stance that is denitively attuned to letting itself
be bound by what matters.
Holding oneself responsible to dis-covering what matters is precisely the
stance of the learner. Heidegger describes learning in What Calls for Thinking:
Man learns when he disposes everything he does so that it answers to whatever addresses
him as essential.24

Here, Heidegger describes learning in terms virtually identical to the terms in

which we have described authenticity: in authenticity, we recognize our
responsibility for allowing what matters to show itself in a binding way. But it
with the idea that certainty must not be rigid but must be held open for the current factical
possibility. This is not irresoluteness but authentic resoluteness which resolves to keep repeating itself. Repetition is a central theme in the two subsequent chapters. See especially SZ
339/BT 388; SZ 34346/BT 39496; SZ 385/BT 437.
23)
Miguel de Beistegui rightly captures this notion of resoluteness as openness. See Thinking
with Heidegger: Displacements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 74. Note especially his claim that only such anticipatory resoluteness is the enacting of the essence of man,
the freeing of man for his essence.
24)
WCT G 1, E 4; see also G 4951, E 1416.

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is just the nature of the self as dirance that makes this possible. If all were
actualif I were already actually who I am, and if the world were already
actually what it isthere would be nothing to learn. What matters in the
world would not need my complicity in order to show itself, for there would
be no possibility beyond what is already actually there. I would have nothing
to learn, for I would already be adequate to my situation. Said otherwise,
learning is transformation, a reconguring of the very way in which we are
engaged with our world.25 Learning requires that I can address possibilities
that are not yet disclosed in my situation and, equally, that I can hold out the
possibility to become someone dierent. Learning is the commitment that
responds to the recognition of the possibility that subtends and exceeds actuality, and it is itself a possibility only because of that same structure: learning
is an attempt to live from the possible, to come to be someone I am not, to see
as the one-I-would-be would see.
For this reason, learning is itself a kind of faith. Learning is the abandoning
of the support of the familiar parameters of the actual world in favor of a trust
that a greater possibility will give itself to one. Learning is a stance of risk:
there is no guarantee, as one leaps toward a new way of being that one will
land happily or successfully.26 Learning, living authentically, means putting
oneself at risk with no guarantee of where one will end up. Such learning is
not, obviously, the simple acquisition of predigested informationa process
that leaves the parameters dening self, world and their relation untouched
but is a putting into doubt (recall anxiety) of ones whole framework in order
to allow oneself to be denedredenedby whatever way ones situation
happens to show itself to matter. Learning means holding oneself accountable
to the way in which the world shows itself to matter. Learning, then, is funda25)

Compare Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: ditions Galile, 1974), 15 (right hand column);
translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand as Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1986), 8 (right column): Derrida describes Genet reading the Gospel of John as like a
miner who is not sure of getting out from the depths of the earth alive. For an interpretation of
this text, see John Russon, Reading Hegels Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004), chap. 14, Deciding to Read: On the Horizon (of Christianity). Compare Bernet,
The Traumatized Subject, passim, on the issue of learning as self-transformation, regarding the
general theme of the unpredictability of alterity: the encounter with the foreign is a transformation of the self, that is being open to the foreign means openness to what is incomprehensible on
my terms.
26)
On learning as leap, see WCT G 5, E 8. For an excellent discussion of the concept of the
leap as it gures in Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy that resonates strongly with the
description I am giving here, see Sallis, Grounders of the Abyss, 191. On the problem of interpreting knowledge as information, see de Beistegui, Thinking with Heidegger, 100101.

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mentally a stance of existential openness and transformation, and it is a phenomenon uniquely available toand therefore uniquely explicable by the
concept ofdirance.27
The realm of ethics is also uniquely demanded and explained by this notion
of self-identity as dirance. Dirance marks the reality that has no guarantees
about its own identity, the self that is properly itself only in openness. We saw
above that this is the stance of responsibility to what shows itself. It is thus the
home of ethical value. In anticipatory resoluteness, I am open to the meanings
that present themselves to me bindingly. Though it is my openness that allows
these meanings to show themselves, these meanings are not themselves products of my will. On the contrary, authenticity as openness to the possible is
precisely openness to what I could not expect, what I could not determine on
the basis of my past encounters with actuality. This is the way an other can
appear to me as other: this is the arena in which I am open to encountering
somethingsomeonewho makes demands upon me on his/her terms, not
mine. Here, my responsibility is to that other on that others terms. And my
responsibility is also such that I have nothingnothing actualto which to
appeal to tell me how to answer to the others terms. It is in such a situation
that ethics becomes possible: I have the responsibility to care for the other and
cannot pass that responsibility o by nding elsewhere an actual answer to the
possibilities that are disclosed to me. This open engagement with an undecidable possibility is precisely what makes this ethics and not mere calculation,
not the mere application of an already established actual rule to an already
dened actual instance.
Learning and ethics, our two greatest realms of answerability, are realms for
us only because all self-identity is diernce, and our enactment of theseof
learning and of ethicsis the enacting of our self proper, our resolution to
exist as diernce.

5. The Question of the Meaning of Being

Our question of the nature of self-identity has led us to the conception of the
self-proper as the resolute openness to letting the forms of meaning show
themselves. What is ownmost to selfhood is this openness to possibility.28 In
27)
On learning as transformation, see John Russon, Eros and Education: Platos Transformative
Epistemology, Laval Theologique et Philosophique 56 (2000): 11325.
28)
Authenticity is thus the event of re-appropriating what is proper to itself, which is precisely
its own inappropriableness On the subject of inappropriability, see Bernet, The Traumatized

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unpacking the meaning of this openness, we see that we have unearthed the
very possibility of learning and ethics: the terrain of authenticity-as-dirance
is precisely the terrain of the most formative and intimate matters in our lives.
Our focus on this openness also brings us back to the question with which
Heidegger opens Being and Time: the question of the meaning of being. I want
to conclude with a brief consideration of the nature of phenomenology itself,
and its relation to this question of the meaning of being.
Let us think, rst, in a simple logical way about what being means. Heidegger begins Being and Time with three approaches to the notion being:
being is the most universal concept, the most self-evident concept, and inherently undenable.29 These are not so much his theses, as they are distillations
of traditional insight into the nature of being. Let us think, rst of all, about
the idea that being is the most universal. When we say being, we mean the
is-ness of whatever is; we mean reality as such. Nothing could escape the
domain of being, for insofar as there is anything, it is being. Any determinacy that would supposedly be outside being would, insofar as it can be
identied and situated, be already inscribed within being. Further, this being
could not be some aspect or portion of real things: it must be their very reality,
their very substance. Being is the most universal because nothing can be
excluded from it. For this reason, too, we can see that it is also undenable. To
dene something would be to articulate its nature in terms of other, more
fundamental notions. But insofar as being is totally comprehensive, there is
nothing more fundamental, nothing clearer, in terms of which it could be
dened. Anything other than being (namely, a being) could not dene being,
for this other would already be contained within, and thus dened by, being
itself. And nally, inasmuch as we deal with anything at all, and insofar as
everything is being, we are always already engaged with being: being is not
something yet to be found but is necessarily the only thing we ever deal with.
This is the self-evidence of being: any evidence would itself be, and thus be
evidence of, being. Everything of which we say isand we say it of everythingis evidence of our already being familiar with what it is to be.
To these three lines of thought developed in the opening pages of Being and
Time, I want to add a fourth that is not explicit in this discussion but that is
Subject, 17576. For an interpretation of the notion of the futural appropriation of the past in
Heidegger and Derrida, see Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11427; while the discussion of the issues central to Derridas philosophy is very good, I nd the attempt here to
distinguish Heideggers position from Derridas unconvincing.
29)
Introduction, chap. 1, sec. 1,SZ 24/BT 2124.

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intimated throughout Heideggers writings and is of a piece with these

reections.30 This theme is one we have already been studying above in relation to Dasein, and we can now take it over into our reections on being as
such. It is simply this: being as possibility is not exhausted by being as actuality. It is fairly easy to see this point by a simple thought experiment: whatever
happens tomorrow, it will be. We said above that being, as the most universal,
comprehends whatever is. Now we say that only what is actual now actually is,
and the future is not yet something real. But it will be. So being only is (actually) what is now present, but it will be the case that whatever comes to be
tomorrow will actually be. Being, then, is not just the actuality of what actually
is, but is also the as yet unrealized power to be otherwise. What it is to be, in
other words, has yet to be revealed.
Being, then, is the actual, but it is not just the actual. The actual is being
the very self-evidence of beingbut in an ambiguous way. The nature of being
as possibility is precisely what is not actual, that is, qua actuality, being mispresents itself. In appearing always as actual, being as possibility never appears
as such. Being, then, as much appears as disappears: the nature of being as
possibility is concealed within the actuality of being, or as Heidegger says,
being as possibility withdraws.31 Being is thus truly apprehended only insofar
30)

See in particular Brief ber den Humanismus, in Wegmarken, 2e. Au., (Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 312; translated as Letter on Humanism, by Frank Capuzzi and
J. Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins,
1993), 21765, esp. 314, (German), 220 (English), and compare 312 (German), 218 (English):
The history of Being is never past but stands ever before. Though Heidegger in this text deems
the language of potentiality inadequate to the notion of possibility, because, he maintains, the
concept of potentiality is thought from the concept of actuality (presence), I have preferred to
maintain the language of potentiality and to insist, instead, that it be thought from the notion
of possibility. See also, WCT G 5, E 89. Compare Introduction, chap. 2,SZ 38/BT 6263:
Being . . . is not class or genus of entities, yet it pertains to every entity, and, in a dierent context, Higher than actuality stands possibility. Derrida oers a substantial discussion of these
matters in Violence and Metaphysics, F 198218, E 13547.
31)
WCT G 5, E 9: The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all things currently
present, and so innitely exceed the actuality of everything actual. See the discussion of this text
in de Beistegui, Thinking with Heidegger, 67: What demands to be thought, what gives itself
as the ownmost of thought, is precisely that which, of itself, turns away from thought and, in the
very withdrawing of which thought is itself drawn, comes into being. . . . . This withdrawing is
nothing other than the withdrawing of being itself, nothing other than the event of presence
(Anwesenheit), which, in clearing a space for things, in broaching a world, withdraws in beings
themselves. . . . It is precisely in the withdrawing from and in the actuality that it opens up, in the
turn away from those very things it brings to presence, that the event of being happens. For a
closely related conception of the nature of the thinking that is phenomenology, compare Eugen

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as the actual is seen as the trace or echo of this withdrawal; or said otherwise, it is as the appearingor, rather, the disappearingof the possible that
being shows itself.32 We will apprehend being as such if we apprehend it as the
tension of the expenditure of being as possible for the sake of being as actual,
the withdrawal, as Heidegger elsewhere says, of earth in the self-showing of
world. As Heidegger says in The Origin of the Work of Art,
The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world.33

Being is this strife of earth and world, the (dis)appearing of earth in the selfshowing of the world. We thus are open to being as such only by way of a
passage from, so to speak, engaging the actual as the appearing of being to
engaging the actual as the disappearing of being.
The very nature of being, then, is always to be, so to speak, answering the
question of its identity with actuality. If, on parallel with the A = A or the I
Fink, The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism, in
The Phenomenology of Husserl, ed. R. O. Elveston (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1970), 73147,
esp. 95100, and the discussion of these pages in Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, 1214. As in the
problem with reading a sentence, discussed above (see note 4), metaphysics starts at the end, not
with the (withdrawing, dierential) origin, but with accomplished actuality. See de Beistegui,
Thinking with Heidegger, 7: This then is where metaphysical thought begins: at the point where
the twofold event of being and time arrives, at the point when it has become something actual:
a thing, a being, a state of aairs.
32)
Compare Derrida, Dirance, F 6, E 6: Now if dirance [is] . . . what makes possible the
presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such. It is never oered to the present.
Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth
at a certain precise point, but without dissimulating itself as something, as a mysterious being,
in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminate borders (for example in a topology of castration). In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It
would risk appearing: disappearing. See Contributions to Philosophy, sec. 36, p. 54: we must say
the language of beings as the language of beyng. Compare Sallis, Grounders of the Abyss, 187:
On the one hand, the truth of beyng must be thought from itself and not (as in the rst beginning) from beings; but, on the other hand, the truth of beyng must be sheltered in beings and to
this extent still thoughtif dierentlywithin a certain purview of beings. Yet this dierence is
all-decisive: the truth of beyng is to be brought to an open sheltering in beings, to a sheltering in
beings that not only are in the open but that, precisely by sheltering the truth of beyng, open up
that very expanse.
33)
For the strife of earth and world, see Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Holzwege, 6e. Au.
(Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 34; translated by Albert Hofstadter as The Origin of
the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, 174. See de Beistegui, Thinking with Heidegger, 13035, for
a discussion of the artwork as the strife of earth and world, and 137 for the idea that thinking
dwells with this strife.

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am I, we were to say Being is itself or, with Parmenides, is is, we would

then have the same structure of the dirance of being-as-possibility or beingas-question, and being-as-actuality or being-as-answer.34 Typically, our apprehension of being is as answered, as settled, and we forget the being-as-possible.
This is, of course, not a simple oversight, for we have seen the necessity for this
inscribed in the very nature of being: being as possible by denition withdraws.35 Being-as-question, then, conceals itself. As Heraclitus says, nature
loves to hide.36
Being and Time sets as its task a reopening of the question of being. That
work is the development of the phenomenological method. Phenomenology,
as Heidegger denes it in Being and Time, is letting that which shows itself
from itself show itself from itself.37 Our task as phenomenologists is to let
what shows itself (being) show itself. But this is no dierent from bearing witness to the withdrawal of being or, we might say, reopening the question of the
meaning of being, witnessing being-as-question.38
And now we can bring this analysis back to our earlier analysis of authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. In authenticity, I am resolutely open to letting
my situation qua possible reveal itself. Authenticity is precisely the commitment
34)

Heidegger discusses the relevant Parmenidean texts at length in Part 2 of What is Called
Thinking. See especially WCT G 16566, E 171, G 106, E 172, and all of Part 2, Lecture 11
(G 12530, 17374, E 22944). What Heidegger commonly refers to as das Sein (namely, the
matter for thoughtdie Sache des Denkens), he also refers to as Unterschied and Dierenz als
Dierenz. See Samuel Ijsseling, Das Ende der Philosophie als Anfang des Denkens, in Franco
Volpi, Heidegger et l ide de la phnomenologie, ed. Jean-Franois Mattei and Thomas Sheehan
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 297.
35)
Forgetting being is not just an oversight; rather, it is the very nature of being to appear/disappear in this way; this is the abandonment of being (Seinsverlassenheit) that founds the forgottenness of being (Seinsvergessenheit), discussed especially in Contributions to Philosophy, sec. 52;
see esp. p. 78 for the ineliminable denitiveness of this forgetting for our reality: Abandonment
of being must be experienced as the basic event of our history. See de Beistegui, Thinking with
Heidegger, 97, and the Introduction, passim, for discussion.
36)
Fragment 123 in the standard numbering system from the Diels-Kranz edition of the texts of
Pre-Socratic philosophy; see Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
(Zurich: Weidmann, 1985).
37)
Introduction, chap. 2, sec. 7; see especiallySZ 34/BT 58: Thus phenomenology means
to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way
in which it shows itself from itself.
38)
On the notion of being-as-question, see Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics, F 119, E 80
and F 19596, E 133, and Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, 1. On the relation of Heideggers expressions the question of being and the question of the meaning of being, see Feldman, Binding
Words, 9496.

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to engage with actuality as the trace of the possible. Thus, it is precisely when
this question of the meaning of being is alive for me that I am true to the
ownmost nature of my self. But in that case this is not a simple logical question, as our simple logical investigations into the concept of being might
have suggested, but an existential questionindeed, it is precisely the most
intimate question of our being.39 The passage from encountering being as
appearance to being as disappearance, then, is equally the passage from inauthenticity to authenticity.
In sum, then, the self-proper of Dasein just is the holding open of the question of the meaning of being. Anticipatory resoluteness is the sheltering of the
strife of earth and world. Dasein is itself only as the leap into the abyss of
dirance, of being-as-question.40

39)

Compare Jean-Luc Nancy: The absolute is between us. It is there in itself and for itself, and
one might say, the self itself is between us. But the self itself is unrest: between us, nothing can
be at rest, nothing is assured of presence or of beingand we pass each after the others as much
as each into the others. Each with the others, each near the others: the near of the absolute is
nothing other than our near each other (Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith
and Steven Miller [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 7879).
40)
This paper largely grew out of the discussions at Toronto Seminar III (2005). I am grateful
to the participants in that seminar for their stimulating remarks.

RP 38,1_f6_90-110.indd 110

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