John Russon the Self as Resolution Heidegger Derrida and the Intimacy of the Question of the Meaning of Being

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156916408X262820

Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 90110 www.brill.nl/rp

R e s e a r c hi n

P h e n o m e n o l o g y

Th e Self as Resolution: Heidegger, Derrida and the Intimacy of the Question of the Meaning of Being

John RussonUniversity 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. Th is means that the self is neither a substance nor a subject but a resolution. Th e 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 self-identity as that theme emerges in Fichtes Science of Knowledge and will con-nect 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 Th inking (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.

RP 38,1_f6_90-110.indd 90RP 38,1_f6_90-110.indd 90 11/23/07 7:32:39 PM11/23/07 7:32:39 PM

J. Russon / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 90110 91

notion of dirance as it relates to familiar aspects of human self-identity. Sec-tion 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 con-sider how this conception of the authentic self is uniquely capable of explain-ing 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 ques-tion 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 Th is 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 any-thing insofar as it is at all.

Th e 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.

Th is law of identity is a proposition, a statement. Rendered in words rather than mathematical symbols, we would say Any thing is itself. Like any state-ment, this statement needs to be read in order to be understood. Th is state-ment 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 prop-osition 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) Th is 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).


92 J. Russon / Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008) 90110

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 equa-tion 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. Th e 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. Th e nal (closing) A plays a dierent logical role than the initial (initiating) A. Th is analysis of the logical structure of the law of identity has some important implications.4

Th e 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 self-identity of the experiencer. Th e only way it is experientially possible to recog-nize 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 rec-ognize 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 presup-poses my ability to recognize the continuity of my own experience. Th us, 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 self-

4) 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. Wein-sheimer 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 Meta-physics: An Essay on the Th ought of Emmanuel Levinas, in Writing and Dierence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 80. Hereafter I will cite this text as Violence and Metaphys-ics, with the French pagination given as F and the English pagination as E. 5) Th is discussion replays the central argument Fichte makes in his demonstration of the rst principle, Science of Knowledge, 94102.



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

Th e 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 pos-sibility 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. Th e coincidence of the As can be armed only on condition that they do not coincide. Th is 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. Th is 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. Th is is also more or less the argument that Descartes makes in his sec-ond 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: Th e movement of dirance is not something that happens to a transcendental subject; it pro-duces 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.) Th e 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 (unsatis-factory) concept of the self-contained present moment; see also F 7677, E 68, F 9496, E 85 and F 98, E 88. Th e 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 primar-ily 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



Th is implication noticed by Derrida also has an implication of its own for the implication noticed by Fichte. Th e dirance that characterizes any self-identity 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 non-identity 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 rela-tions with respect to the = sign) and only by this installing of their dierentiation that the assertion of their identitytheir identicationbecomes 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. Th e 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 ) Hei-degger/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: Th e 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.



ond is answering. Th e second A, to be meaningful, must be a choice from among other possiblebut rejectedanswers. Th e equation could have ended in many other ways: B, X, ~A. Th ese answer may well all have been false (though not necessarily), but they are still meaningful. Th eir meaningfulness would be precisely the way they respond to the context for possible meaning opening up by the rst A. Th e 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.

Th e second A claims to present the truth of the rst: it claims to be identi-cal. But precisely what is nonidentical is the respective status of the two As as potential and actual. Th e 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 some-thing 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) Th is 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. Th e very form of happening is this splitting into an actual and a possible, which both exceed and are exceeded by each other. On the mak-ing-specic that is inherent to any speaking, see Gnter Figal, Martin Heidegger: Phnomenologie der Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum, 1988), 4142.



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 chal-lenged 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 sup-plement our words with more words, to ensure that they say what we meant. Th ese 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 with-out leaving a mark on his eld. Could he have made a dierence, given the opportunity? Th ere is no way to know. He was not given the opportunity and did not make a dierence. Th e 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 trans-forms 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. Th e 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 total-ity, will show what she did, not what she could have done. We can meaning-fully 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 poten-tial 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.

Th is notion of unfullled potential is not new. In the Republic, for example, Socrates recounts a story: a man from Seraphos tells Th emistocles that he, Th emistocles, would not have been great had he not lived in Athens; Th emis-tocles replies that he, the Seraphian, would not have been great had he lived in



Athens.10 Th e point is that Athens provided the situation that allowed Th em-istocles to show himself: Th emistocles 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. Th e 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 dis-own ourselves and live dispersed in the they (das Man) or we can own ourselves in authenticity.11 Th is description is not particularly a thesis of Hei-deggers; 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 every-day 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. 11) 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. Here-after, 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.



anticipation, a promise. Let us look at Heideggers notion of the temporaliz-ing 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. Th at I will be meit will be my very self-identitybut I am not yet that I.

I am not yet that I. Th is 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? Th is 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. Th e 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. Th e future, now, is my possibilities. Who I will be will be someone actual. Th at 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: Th e 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.



potential; but it will precisely thereby fail to answer adequately to my possibili-ties. Th e 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. Hei-deggers 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 mat-ters; 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 fun-damental 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) Th is 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. Th is is the central motif in Derridas Memoirs of the Blind, which studies self-portraiture to dis-close 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 22021/BT 263 and SZ 22630/BT 26973.



All of these ways of identifying the cause of importance, however, are inau-thentic; 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. Th e 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 careonly 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. Let-ting things matter means precisely forgoing the privilege of artibrariness and self-will, and instead, experiencing the binding power of other values.

Th e 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 circum-stances, 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

Th is resolution to be open to letting the value of ones situation show itself is what Heidegger identies as the experience that founds the familiar phe-nomenon of conscience. Conscience is the experience of the fundamental imperative to be answerable to the call of value, to the call of care. Th e 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 discus-sion 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. Pers-pektiven phnomenologischer Ethick, hrsg. von B. Waldenfels and I. Drmann (Munich: W. Fink, 1998), 3549.



authentic resoluteness, is, in the language Heidegger elsewhere uses, an unde-cidable 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

Th is undecidability can be illuminated simply by constrasting two impera-tives: 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. Th e 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 com-mand. One must oneself take responsibility for determining how to enact love in relation to the unique specicitiesthe singularityof ones father.

Th e authentic self, thenthe eigentlich self, the self properis the undecid-able 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 resolute-ness, 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. Th is 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: Th e call of conscience fails to give any such practical injunctions, solely because it summons Dasein to existence, to its ownmost potential-ity-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. Th e theme of the undecidability of the call of conscience is the central focus of chapter 3, Hei-deggers 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



itself means not closing o possibilities in the situation. Indeed, we began by seeing that anxiety precisely showed the non-substantiality of actual mean-ings and showed the situation could appear otherwise. Authenticity is the opening to releasing other possibilities of meaning within the situation.

Th e authentic self, then, is, as Heidegger says, neither substance nor sub-ject. 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 prom-ise that does not know what it is promising. In any promiseI will stop gam-blingone (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-self-identity. I hold myself open to nding out who I am.21

Such a promise can never be fullled. Th is 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 actualityand 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 discus-sion 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, Th e 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 antici-patory resoluteness. 21) Authentic selfhood is thus a kind of blind faith: faithful, because it is a keeping of the prom-ise 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. Th e context is a discussion of truth and certainty as they pertain to resoluteness,



as possible is also openness to the situation as possible: how matters actu-ally show themselves will not be adequate to those matters as possible.23

What then is the self? It is nothing other than the opennessthe clear-ingin 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 devel-opment: 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 Hei-degger 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 learn-ing 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. Th e 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 Th inking:

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. Th is is not irresoluteness but authentic resoluteness which resolves to keep repeat-ing 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 Th inking with Heidegger: Displacements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 74. Note espe-cially 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.



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 actu-ality, 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 untouchedbut 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 funda-

25) 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, Th e 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 transforma-tion 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 inter-preting knowledge as information, see de Beistegui, Th inking with Heidegger, 100101.



mentally a stance of existential openness and transformation, and it is a phe-nomenon uniquely available toand therefore uniquely explicable by the concept ofdirance.27

Th e 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. Th ough it is my openness that allows these meanings to show themselves, these meanings are not themselves prod-ucts 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. Th is 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. Th is open engagement with an undecid-able 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. Th e 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 Th eologique 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, Th e Traumatized



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. Hei-degger begins Being and Time with three approaches to the notion being: being is the most universal concept, the most self-evident concept, and inher-ently undenable.29 Th ese 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 determi-nacy 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. Th is 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 every-thingis 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 Hei-degger, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11427; while the dis-cussion 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.



intimated throughout Heideggers writings and is of a piece with these reections.30 Th is theme is one we have already been studying above in rela-tion 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 actual-ity. 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 (actu-ally) 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. Th e actual is beingthe very self-evidence of beingbut in an ambiguous way. Th e nature of being as possibility is precisely what is not actual, that is, qua actuality, being mis-presents 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): Th e history of Being is never past but stands ever before. Th ough 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 con-text, 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: Th e 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, Th inking 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. . . . . Th is 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



as the actual is seen as the trace or echo of this withdrawal; or said other-wise, 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 Th e Origin of the Work of Art,

Th e 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 self-showing 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.

Th e 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, Th e Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism, in Th e 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, Th inking with Heidegger, 7: Th is 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 topol-ogy 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 begin-ning) 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 Th e Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, 174. See de Beistegui, Th inking 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.



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 being-as-question, and being-as-actuality or being-as-answer.34 Typically, our appre-hension of being is as answered, as settled, and we forget the being-as-possible. Th is 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 with-draws.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. Th at 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 wit-ness 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 authentic-ity 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 Th inking. 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 Th omas 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/disap-pear in this way; this is the abandonment of being (Seinsverlassenheit) that founds the forgot-tenness 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, Th inking 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: Th us 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 expres-sions the question of being and the question of the meaning of being, see Feldman, Binding Words, 9496.



to engage with actuality as the trace of the possible. Th us, 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 ques-tion, 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 Th e passage from encountering being as appearance to being as disappearance, then, is equally the passage from inau-thenticity to authenticity.

In sum, then, the self-proper of Dasein just is the holding open of the ques-tion 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: Th e 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: Th e Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 7879). 40) Th is 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.


Documents

John Russon the Self as Resolution Heidegger Derrida and the Intimacy of the Question of the Meaning of Being