GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART TWO
History

§ 8 *Se: Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis

Sergio Solmi in memoriam . . . accustomed to an unexplained duty . . .
I
The reflections that follow consider the structure and meaning of the Indo-European theme *se (*swe). The pertinence of this theme to philosophical discourse is so little in question that it can be said to determine the fundamental philosophical problem itself, the Absolute. The Latin verb solvo, from which the adjective "absolute" is derived, can be analyzed as se-luo and indicates the work of loosening, freeing (luo) that leads (or leads back) something to its own *se.
II
In Indo-European languages, the group of the reflexive *se (Greek he, Latin se, Sanskrit sva-) indicates what is proper (cf. the Latin suus) and exists autonomously. *Se has this semantic value in the sense of what is proper to a group, as in the Latin suesco, "to accustom oneself," consuetudo, "habit," and sodalis, "companion"; the Greek hethos (and ēthos), "custom, habit, dwelling place"; the Sanskrit svadhá, "character, habit"; and the Gothic sidus (cf. the German Sitte), "custom," as well as in the sense of what stands by itself, separated, as in solus, "alone," and secedo, "to separate." It is semantically and etymologically linked to the Greek idios, "proper" (hence idioomai, "I appropriate," and idiōtēs, "private citizen"); it is also related to the Greek heauton (he + auton), "itself" (contracted as hauton), as well as to the English "self," the German sich and selbst and the Italian sé and si. Insofar as it contains both a relation that unites and a relation that separates, the proper--that which characterizes every thing as a *se--is therefore not something simple.
א The terms absolute and absolutely correspond to the Greek expression kath' heauto, "according to it itself" For the Greek philosophers, to consider something kath' heauto is to consider it absolutely, that is, according to what is proper to it, according to its own *se (he-auton).
III
The fact that the term Ereignis, "event," with which Heidegger designates the supreme problem of his thought after Being and Time, can be semantically linked to this sphere is shown by the (etymologically arbitrary) relation Heidegger suggests between Ereignis and both the verb eignen, "to appropriate," and the adjective eigen, "proper" or "own." Insofar as it indicates an appropriation, a being proper, Ereignis is not far from the meaning of *se and, with reference to it, can be grasped in the sense of ab-so-lution.
א Heidegger himself links the problem of Ereignis to that of Selbst, the "same." Semantically (but not etymologically), eigen is to Selbst as idios is to he. The established etymology of Ereignis (to which Heidegger also makes reference) relates it to the ancient Germanic term ouga, "eye": ereignen 〈 ir-ougen, "to place before one's eyes." Eigen instead derives from another stem, *aig, which signifies possession.
IV
The idea that *se is not something simple is contained in one of the most ancient testimonies to Western philosophy's consideration of the proper. This testimony (Heraclitus, Diels fragment 119) reads as follows:
ēthos anthropōi daimōn.
The usual translation of this fragment is "for man, character is the demon." But ēthos ("character") originally indicates what is proper in the sense of "dwelling place, habit." As for the term daimōn, it neither simply indicates a divine figure nor merely refers to the one who determines destiny. Considered according to its etymological root (which refers it to the verb daiomai, "to divide, lacerate"), daimōn means "the lacerator, he who divides and fractures." (In Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 1472-73 the daimōn, "lacerator of the heart" [kardiodēkton] is crouched as a wild beast over the body of the dead man.) Only insofar as it is what divides can the daimōn also be what assigns a fate and what destines (daiomai first means "to divide," then "to assign"; the same semantic development can be found in a word that is derived from the same root: dēmos, "people," which originally means "division of a territory," "assigned part"). Once restored to its etymological origin, Heraclitus's fragment then reads: "For man, ēthos, the dwelling in the 'self' that is what is most proper and habitual for him, is what lacerates and divides, the principle and place of a fracture." Man is such that, to be himself, he must necessarily divide himself.
א A phrase that is surprisingly similar to Heraclitus's fragment and that, indeed, almost seems to be its literal translation can be found in one of Hölderlin's hemistics (in a version of the last strophe of Brod und Wein): Ihn zehret die Heimat, "the homeland lacerates it [sc., the spirit]." In Schelling, the dwelling in the absolute is compared to the "purity of the terrible blade, which man cannot approach unless he possesses the same purity." And Hegel's thought of the Absolute conceives the same dwelling in division.
V
Let us continue our reflections on the sphere of meaning of *se. Grammarians tell us that it is a reflexive form; in other words, it indicates a movement of re-flexion, a departure from the self and a return to the self, like a ray of light reflected in a mirror. But who is reflected here, and how is this reflection achieved? Grammarians observe (and this fact is worth pausing to consider, despite its apparent obviousness) that the pronoun "self" is lacking in the nominative form (cf. the Greek hou, hoi, he; the Latin sui, sibi, se; the German seiner and sich; hence also heautou, heautoi, heauton). Insofar as it indicates a relation with itself, a re-flection, *se necessarily implies a reference to a grammatical subject (or at least another pronoun or name); it is never employed by itself, nor can it be employed as a grammatical subject. The indication of the "proper," as reflection, therefore cannot have the form of a nominative; it can only appear in an "oblique" case.
The linguistic meaning of this "defect" of *se can be best understood if it is placed in relation to the essential character of the Indo-European word (to which J. Lohmann called attention in an important text, finding it in the verbal structure of the ontological difference), according to which it appears as fractured ("flexed") into a theme and endings. Ancient grammatical thought interpreted inflection as a ptōsis, a "fall" (in Latin, casus, declinatio) of the name in the occurrence of discourse. And in this sense, it opposed the nominative (the ancients do not clearly distinguish a theme and tend to identify it with the nominative as the case of the grammatical subject) to the other cases (even if the Stoics defined the nominative as orthē ptōsis, casus rectus, and therefore as a form of the "fall," albeit a special kind with respect to plagiai ptōseis, casus obliqui).
The possibility of a reflection, that is, of a relation of speech to itself, is in a certain sense already implicit in the inflected structure of IndoEuropean speech. But precisely for this reason, the reference of a word to itself, the indication of the proper, is not separable from an oblique course in which what reflects never has the same form as what is reflected.
Hence the apparent paradox according to which if to think something according to its *se (kath' heauto) is to think it absolutely, beyond its ties to other words and independently of its inflection in the occurrence of discourse, *se nevertheless cannot be thought kath' heauto. (This is only an apparent paradox, since modern philosophy is precisely the attempt to show what it means to think *se, to think it absolutely and as subject.)
VI
The relation of one thing to itself, its being proper to itself, can also be expressed in Indo-European languages through the repetition of the same term in two different cases, the nominative and the genitive. In Aristotle, the expression of absolute thought (hē de noēsis hē kath' heautēn) thus has the form of the following proposition:
estin hē noēsis noēseōs noēsis. ( Metaphysics, 1074 b 35)
(thought is the thought of thought.) .
( Aristotle's proposition is thus a phrase in which, in addition to the definite article and the verb "to be," there is only one word, which is repeated in two inflections.) The genitive is the case that indicates a predication of belonging, a being-proper (hence the term genitive, genikos, which expresses belonging to a family, and a genos; Varro also calls the genitive patrius). But it does so only on the condition of distinguishing between a being-proper characteristic of a logical subject (subjective genitive: patentia animi = animus patitur) and a being-proper characteristic of a logical object (objective genitive: patientia doloris = pati dolorem).
In the Aristotelian phrase cited above, the distinction between the two forms of genitive necessarily disappears; in the being-proper of thought to itself there is no more distinction between the thinking of the subject and the thought that is its object. This gives the proposition a circular structure and, at the same time, opens it to the risk of an infinite flight. Radicalizing this structure, which is implicit in thought's reference to itself, the Neoplatonists conceive of the Absolute as a "flight of One toward One" (phygē monon pros monon); but, at the same time, they conceive the One (or the self itself), subject-object of the flight, as beyond Being and thought (epekeina tēs ousias, epekeina ti nou). The relation of a self to itself is beyond Being and thought; in other words, *se, ēthos, the dwelling place, is without Being and thought, and only on the condition of thus remaining alone in itself does it escape demonic fracture. If *se tries to think itself, even in the authentic form of a thinking of itself, it is immediately affected ( Plotinus says "speckled," poikilon) by division and multiplicity.
א In medieval theology, the problem of *se appears as the problem of the coincidence of essence and existence in God. It is stated in the following formula: Deus est suum esse (or essentia), "God is His own Being (or essence)." What confronts thinking in this definition (and what modern thought has never ceased to think) is precisely the enigma of suum, "own." The coincidence of essence and existence (being Being) signifies suum esse, being one's own Being. Spinoza's "cause of itself," causa sui (in this case too the genitive sui is both subjective and objective), as quod in se est et per se concipitur, is a consideration of this very problem.
VII
Given the fact that the reflexive belongs to the category of the pronoun, a presentation of the sphere of meaning of *se necessarily seems to imply a clarification of the sphere of meaning of the personal pronoun. In linguistics, the personal pronoun is classified as a "shifter," that is, as a term whose meaning can be grasped only with reference to the event of discourse in which it is contained and which indicates the speaker. "I" de notes no lexical entity; it has no reality and consistency outside its relation to actual discourse. "I" is the one who produces the present event of speech containing the shifter "I" (as Hegel says concerning Kant, "I is not a concept, but a mere consciousness that accompanies every concept").
Hence the impossibility to which one is necessarily led every time one tries to grasp the meaning of the "I" as something substantial: insofar as it is identifiable only though its pure reference to the event of actual speech, "I" necessarily has a temporal and negative structure; it is always transcendent with respect to all of its psychophysical individuations and, moreover, incapable of referring to itself without once again failing into an event of speech.
What, then, happens if we want to grasp the "I" in its propriety, in its dwelling place, in its pure reference to itself? If we want, that is, to grasp the "I" as *se, as ab-so-lute? This is Hegel's problem ("but surely it is ridiculous to call this nature of self-consciousness, namely, that the 'I' thinks itself, that the 'I' cannot be thought without its being the 'I' that thinks, an inconvenience"). 1
א In philosophy, the displacement of reflection from the "I" to the third person and the Absolute (Es, Es selbst) corresponds to the attempt to absolve the subject of its necessary relation to the event of speech, that is, to grasp the *se of the "I," what is proper to the subject independent of its "fall" into the event of speech. Or, better, to grasp the very movement of pure temporality and pure Being, beyond what is temporalized and said in actual discourse.
VIII
Hegel's determination of the Absolute is characterized by its appearance as "result," as being "only at the end what it truly is." The proper, *se, is for humans the principle and place of a fracture; according to Hegel, this is the point of departure of philosophy, "the source [der Quell] of the need of philosophy." 2 Philosophy must therefore absolve the proper of division, leading *se back to *se, thinking *se absolutely. Yet if *se is not simple, but always already implies demonic division (if it is itself daimōn), then to think *se absolutely--kath' heauto, according to itself--cannot be simply to think it beyond all relation and division. As is already implicit in its origins as a past participle, the Absolute is not something immobile or nonrelational that is equal to itself outside of time, an abyss without movement and difference (or, as Hegel also says, the pure name that has not yet entered propositions). Since *se contains difference in itself as "internal difference" (innerer Unterschied), to think the Absolute is to think what, through a process of absolution, has been led back to its *se; it is, in other words, to conceive of what has become equal to itself in its being other. Human being, insofar as it is an "I," a speaking subject, is such that to be itself, it must have come back to itself, having found itself in the Other.
IX
The proper of thought is therefore not the mere name (blosser Name) that remains in itself but the name that leaves itself to be uttered and "declined" in propositions. And precisely in this becoming other it becomes equal to itself, finally returning to itself (it is, in other words, Hegel's "concept"). We may say that in the Absolute, Hegel thinks the fundamental character of Indo-European languages--the "internal fracture" of speech into theme and endings--that Lohmann recognized as the linguistic mark of the ontological difference. But Hegel--and this is what is proper to him--regards this fracture as absolute, thus understanding Being as equal to itself in its being other and conceiving of fracture in its unity as the phenomenon (Erscheinung) of the Absolute. This--the absolute concept--is not something that is given in its truth at the beginning; it becomes what it is, and therefore only at the end is it what it truly is. Hegel thus conceives of declension itself as the movement of the Absolute.
In this sense, the Hegelian notion of the dialectical process is a presentation of the particular character of the reflexive form *se, namely, its lack of nominative form (which the grammarians considered to be obvious, but which only reveals its true significance in German Idealism). To clarify the matter, let us now posit the two figures of the name (inflection) and of *se (reflection):
ROS -a
-ae
-am
-a
-ae
-arum
-is
-as . . . .
sui
sibi
se
The interpretation of the word according to *se (the absolute word) implies that the name, as presupposition of the movement of declension, is sublated (aufgehoben) and that it occurs as concept only at the end of the dialectical process of inflection. There is no name that first is meaningful and then falls into inflection and discourse; rather, the name, as concept, occurs in its truth only at the end of its re-flexion. Only at the end is the rose, which dances in the cross of its declensions, truly what it is: itself. This is why Hegel defines the movement of the Absolute as the "circle that returns into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end": 3
In the preface to the Phenomenology of spirit, Hegel himself speaks of the movement of the Absolute as the movement of a name that is only a "meaningless sound" (sinnloser Laut) in the beginning but that achieves its meaning as it passes into a proposition (Übergang . . . zu einem Satze). Only judgment, the concrete event of discourse, says what the name is, granting it meaning (erst das Prädikat sagt, was er ist, ist seine Erfüllung und seine Bedeutung). An empty beginning thus becomes, in the end, actual knowledge (der leere Anfang wird nur in diesem Ende ein wirkliches Wissen).
X
This circular character of the Absolute determines its essential relation to temporality. Insofar as the Absolute always implies a process and a becoming, an alienation and a return, it cannot be something nontemporal, an eternity before time, but is necessarily temporal and historical (or, in linguistic terms, it appears not as a name but as discourse). And yet, as result it cannot simply be identified with an infinite course of time; it must necessarily fulfill time, ending it. Since the Absolute becomes equal to itself in its being other, and since division is posited in it as its appearance (Erscheinung)--this was the "task of philosophy" (die Aufgabe der Philosophie) 4 --this "appearance," that is, the historical and temporal becoming of "figures," has now been achieved and has become totality. Spirit can grasp itself as absolute only at the end of time. Eternity is not something before time but is, in essence, fulfilled time (erfüllte Zeit), finished history. Hegel states this clearly at the end of the Phenomenology: "Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e., until it has annulled time. . . . Until Spirit has completed itself in itself, until it has completed itself as world-Spirit, it cannot reach its consummation as self-conscious Spirit." 5
Hence the essential orientation of the Absolute toward the past, its appearance in the figure of totality and remembrance. Contrary to an ancient tradition of thought that considers the present as the privileged dimension of temporality, Hegel regards the past as the figure of fulfilled time, time that has returned to itself. It is, however, a question of a past that has abolished its essential relation to the present and the future, a "perfect" past (teleios, to use the term with which Stoic grammarians characterize one of the forms of the conjugation of the verb), in which no historical destination remains to be realized. "The past," Hegel writes in the text in which he most fully considered the movement (Bewegung) of time,
is this time that has returned onto itself; the One Time [Ehemals] is a selfidentity to itself [Sichselbstgleichheit], but it is a self-identity to itself that originates in this sublation [of the present and the future]; it is a synthetic, completed self-identity to itself, the dimension of the totality of time, which has in itself sublated the first two dimensions. . . . The past that has thus sublated its relation to the Now and to the Once [Einst] and is therefore no longer itself One Time [Ehemals], this real time is the paralyzed unrest of the absolute concept, time that in its totality has become absolutely other. From the determination of the infinite, whose representation is time, the past has passed over into its opposite, the determination of self-identity to itself; and in this way, in this self-identity to itself whose moments now stand in front of each other, it is space." 6
In the "paralyzed unrest" of the absolute concept, what is ultimately achieved is simply what has happened. What is fulfilled is only the past, and what human spirit must recognize as proper at the point at which it extinguishes time is its having-been, its history, which now confronts it as if gathered into a space: a "picture gallery" (Galerie von Bildern). The end thus spirals back to the beginning.
Only at this point, at the end of time, in the absolute knowledge in which all the figures of spirit are fulfilled (hat also der Geist die Bewegung seines Gestaltens beschlossen), 7 is it possible for a critique of Hegel's thought to formulate decisive questions that are truly adequate to the task. What does it mean for history to be finished, for spirit to have withdrawn into itself(Insichgehen)? 8 Are we even capable of conceiving such a fulfillment and such a journey? Does such finishing mean a simple cessation, after which there comes nothing? Or does it mean--according to an equally legitimate interpretation--an infinite, eternal "circle of circles" (ein Kreis von Kreisen)? 9 What happens, in any case, to what has "gone into itself" and, having sunk into its "night," is now absolved, fulfilled? What happens to the perfect past? What happens to its "figures"? It is certainly over, definitively dispersed (here, as in the mysteries, "to go into oneself" is to die, to abandon existence, sein Dasein verlässt), 10 and "consigned" to timeless memory. But does Hegel himself not speak of an "existence now reborn" (aus dem Wissen neugeborene)? 11 And how are we to conceive of a timeless past and memory that no longer refer to a present and to a future? A total memory that is always present to itself and that therefore has nothing to remember?
The answers we give to these questions will determine the form and sense that Hegelianism will have for us. They will decide whether Hegel's thought will survive in the form of an innocuous historiographical memory that gathers and contemplates historical becoming while infinitely repeating and enlarging its dialectical circles, or, alternatively, in the form of a dejected--but ultimately useless--wisdom by which man understands and is himself only in his death. At the same time, they will decide whether Hegel's thought will appear to us as what it is--one of the supreme attempts of philosophy to think its own supreme thought, humankind's entry into its *se, into its being without a nominative, which constitutes its dwelling and its ēthos: its solitude and its consuetude, its separation but also its solidarity.
א Hence the legitimacy of every thought that, like Marx's, interrogates in Hegel's philosophy precisely the moment of the end of history, thus considering humanity's state once it has left the "Reign of necessity" to enter into its proper condition in the "Reign of freedom." The suggestion has been made--and this is certainly possible--that once humanity has returned to itself, it may no longer have a human form and thus appear as the fulfilled animality of homo sapiens. The suggestion has also been made--and this is equally possible--that with the supremacy of the Absolute's orientation toward the past, the fulfilled figure of the human may instead have the form of a book that forever gathers and recapitulates in its pages all the historical figures of humanity, such a book being a volume published by Goebhard of Bamberg in April 1807 under the title Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of spirit). This-but not only this--is certainly possible.
XI
The Absolute appears equally problematic if we try to consider it in its linguistic aspect, as absolute speech or fulfilled discourse. For what is a truly fulfilled discourse that has exhausted all its historical figures and has returned to itself, if not a dead language? What happens when human speech, which has left itself to be uttered in the infinite multiplicity of events of discourse, ultimately returns to itself. In the last chapter of the Science of Logic, Hegel states:
Logic exhibits the self-movement of the absolute Idea only as the original word [das ursprüngliche Wort], which is an outwardizing or utterance [Äusserung], but an utterance that in being has immediately vanished again as something outer; the Idea is, therefore, only in this self-determination of apprehending itself, it is in pure thought, in which difference is not yet otherness, but is and remains perfectly transparent to itself. 12
How are we to conceive such an "original word," which is dispersed as soon as it is uttered? Has it not once again become a sinnloser Laut, a meaningless sound? Are we capable of fully considering all the implications of Hegel's statement that in the end the Idea "deposes" itself and lets itself go free (sich frei entlässt), having the form of the pure "externality of space and time"? 13 Is Hegel's "original word" an animal voice--like the singing of birds and the braying of donkeys--which man utters immediately? Or rather, as is also possible, is it a glossolalia (in the sense of 1 Cor. 14), a word whose meaning has been forgotten, an immemorial human word that has exhausted all its possibilities of meaning and now, fully transparent, lies fulfilled, that is, untouched and in-conceivable in the "night" of its *se?
Or is what is at issue here a language that, while remaining human and alive, dwells in itself--a language no longer destined to grammatical and historical transmission, a language that, as the universal and novel language of redeemed humanity, coincides without residue with human activity and praxis?
א In his 1930-31 lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger, underlining the character of the movement of the Absolute, distinguished an absolving element in absolute knowledge and defined the essence of the Absolute as "infinite absolving."
Many years later, Henry Corbin took up Heidegger's observations in the realm of religious phenomenology, reformulating the distinction in more explicit terms. "The absolutum," Corbin writes, "presupposes an absolvens, which absolves it from non-Being and concealment." It is this absolvens that, from a religious point of view, founds the necessity and legitimacy of angelology: "The Angel is the absconditum that is absolved of its concealment. This shows the necessity of the Angel, since to claim to do without the Angel is to confuse the absolving (absolvens) with the absolved (absolutum)." According to Corbin, this confusion constitutes the error of metaphysics (in its Hegelian form and, above all, in the form of orthodox Christian theology): "This is why metaphysical idolatry hides itself under the cover of the aspiration for the absolute. This idolatry does not consist in the construction of the relative as absolute, but in the construction of the absolute as absolving."
Hegel's thought of the Absolute is in fact not at odds with such a formulation. For Hegel, too, the Absolute, originating in a past participle, needs an absolution that ultimately allows it to be only at the end what it truly is. Absolution consists in "positing the fracture in the Absolute as its appearance [Erscheinung]," in recognizing the phenomenon of the Absolute. The difference between the two positions may consist in the fact that, in Hegel, the speculative proposition states that "the Absolute is absolving," whereas for Corbin it inversely affirms that "the absolving is the Absolute." In both cases, what is decisive is that in absolute knowledge, the absolved is no longer concealed in its figures, the phenomenon being fulfilled (saved, according to the Platonic ta phainomena sōzein). Here we enter into a region in which God and Angel necessarily become indistinct and in which theology and angelology can no longer be distinguished. At this point, the decisive questions become: What happens to the phenomenon (the Angel, the absolving)? What happens to the Absolute (God)?
As to the first question: at the point at which the revelation of the absolute is accomplished, the phenomenon shows itself insofar as it is no longer a phenomenon but rather a fulfilled figure (that is, no longer as figure of . . .).
As to the second question: at the point at which the Absconditum, having been absolved and led back to its *se, exhausts its figures, it shows itself as without figure. Only if the two sides (the Without Figure and the Fulfilled Figure) are thought together in their reciprocal appropriation can there be *se itself, the frontal vision of God. As long as we remain in only one of these two aspects, there can be only the repetition of one of the figures of the negative foundation of the metaphysical tradition, but no fulfillment. In the first case, the phenomenon subsists as the absolute appearance of nihilism; in the second, the Without Figure remains hidden in the shadows of mystical darkness.
XII
Heidegger often compares the thought of Ereignis to Hegel's Absolute. This comparison--which is certainly the sign of a proximity that, for Heidegger himself, constitutes a problem--always has the form of a differentiation that aims to minimize the common traits between the two notions. In his 1936 course on Schelling, Heidegger wrote that Ereignis "is not identical to the Absolute, nor is it its antithesis, in the sense in which finitude is opposed to infinity. With Ereignis, on the contrary, Being itself is experienced as such; it is not posited as a being, let alone as an unconditioned and supreme being." "Time and Being" ( 1962) contains a more explicit passage on the proximity and difference between Hegel's Absolute and Ereignis. "Starting with the lecture in which it is shown that Being is appropriated [eignet] in Ereignis," Heidegger states,
one might be tempted to compare Ereignis as the ultimate and the highest with Hegel's Absolute. But back behind the illusion of identity one would then have to ask: for Hegel, how is man related to the Absolute? And: what is the manner of relation of man to Ereignis? Then one would see an unbridgeable difference. Since for Hegel man is the place of the Absolute's coming-to-itself, that coming-to-itself leads to the overcoming [Aufhebung] of man's finitude. For Heidegger, in contrast, it is precisely finitude that comes to view--not only man's finitude, but the finitude of Ereignis itself. 14
In Ereignis as in the Absolute, what is at issue is the access to a kind of propriety (eigen). Here, too, the entry of thinking into the proper, into *se and into the simplicity of idios and ēthos, is paradoxically the most difficult matter to consider. Here too, this matter appears as "the coming of what has been" (die Ankunft des Gewesenen). 15 In "Time and Being," Ereignis is defined as the reciprocal appropriation, the co-belonging (das Zusammengehören) of time and being, 16 while in Identity and Difference Being and man are led back to their propriety. 17
In each case, the decisive element in the characterization of Ereignis with respect to the Hegelian Absolute is finitude. As early as the lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1930-31, Heidegger identified the essence of the Absolute as "in-finite absolving" (un-endliche Absolvenz), and the lecture "Time and Being" confirms this interpretation of Hegelianism in the sense of a sublation (Aufhebung) of the finitude of man. Yet we have seen that precisely with respect to the Absolute, the sense in which it is possible to speak of infinity remains problematic as long as one does not also introduce the subject of the end of history. Only a clarification of what Heidegger understands here by "finitude" will allow us, therefore, to measure the distance--or the proximity--between Ereignis and the Absolute.
Now, it is Heidegger himself who, at the end of "Time and Being," specifies the precise sense of this finitude:
The finitude of Ereignis, of Being, of the fourfold [Geviert] hinted at during the seminar, is different from the finitude spoken of in the book [by Heidegger] on Kant, in that it is no longer thought in terms of the relation to infinity, but rather as finitude in itself: finitude, end, limit, the Proper--being at home in the Proper. The new concept of finitude is thought in this manner-that is, in terms of Ereignis itself, in terms of the concept of propriety. 18
What is decisive in this passage as well is the idea of an end, an achievement, a final dwelling in the proper. The thought that considers finitude in itself, with no more reference to the in-finite, is the thought of the finite as such, that is, of the end of the history of Being:
If Ereignis is not a new formation [Prägung] of Being in the history of Being, but if it is rather the case that Being belongs to Ereignis and is reabsorbed in it (in whatever manner), then the history of Being is at an end [zu Ende] for thinking in Ereignis, that is, for the thinking which enters into Ereignis--in that Being, which lies in sending--is no longer what is to be thought explicitly. Thinking then stands in and before That [Jenem] which has sent the various forms of epochal Being. This, however, what sends as Ereignis, is itself unhistorical, or more precisely without destiny [ungeschichtlich, besser geschicklos].
Metaphysics is the history of the formations of Being, that is, viewed from Ereignis, of the history of the self-withdrawal of what is sending in favor of the destinies, given in sending, of an actual letting-presence of what is present. Metaphysics is the oblivion of Being, and that means the history of the concealment and withdrawal of that which gives Being. The entry of thinking into Ereignis is thus equivalent to the end of this withdrawal's history. The oblivion of Being "supersedes" ["hebt" sich "auf"] itself in the awakening into Ereignis.
But the concealment which belongs to metaphysics as its limit must belong to Ereignis itself. That means that the withdrawal which characterized metaphysics in the form of the oblivion of Being now shows itself as the dimension of concealment itself. But now this concealment does not conceal itself. Rather, the attention of thinking is concerned with it.
With the entry of thinking into Ereignis, its own way of concealment proper to it also arrives. Ereignis is in itself expropriation [Ent-eignis]. This word contains in a manner commensurate with Ereignis the early Greek lēthē in the sense of concealing.
Thus the lack of destiny of Ereignis does not mean that it has no "e-motion" [Bewegtheit]. Rather, it means that the manner of movement most proper to Ereignis--turning toward us in withdrawal--first shows itself as what is to be thought.
This means that the history of Being as what is to be thought is at an end. 19
Any true understanding of Ereignis must fully consider this passage, just as any thinking capable of confronting Hegel must risk an interpretation of the last pages of the Science of logic. For what can be the sense of a destination that no longer withdraws from what it destines, a concealment that no longer conceals itself, but rather shows itself to thought as such? And what does it mean that withdrawal, which "characterized metaphysics in the figure of the oblivion of Being," now shows itself as the "dimension of concealment itself"? What does it mean for Ereignis to be Enteignis? What does it mean to think concealment (lēthē) as such? What can it mean, if not that what appeared in metaphysics as the oblivion of Being (in the sense of an objective genitive: man forgets Being) now shows itself as what it is, that is, as the pure and absolute self- forgetting of Being? We cannot speak of there being something (Being) that subsequently forgets itself and conceals itself (we cannot speak of a name that withdraws, destining itself in events of speech). Rather, what takes place is simply a movement of concealment without anything being hidden or anything hiding, without anything being veiled or anything veiling--pure self-destining without destiny, simple abandonment of the self to itself.
This can only mean that "the history of Being is finished," that Ereignis is the place of the "farewell from Being and time"; 20 Being no longer destines anything, having exhausted its figures (the figures of its oblivion) and revealing itself as pure destining without destiny and figure. But, at the same time, this pure destining without destiny appears as the Proper of man, in which "man and Being reach each other in their nature" (Menschen und Sein einander in ihrem Wesen erreichen). 21 That (Jenes) in which and before which thinking stands at the end, as "what has destined the different figures of epochal Being," is therefore not something that can be said to be even in the form of a "there is," an es gibt. In Es gibt Sein, es gibt Zeit--literally "it gives Being, it gives time"--the Es, the "it," in itself and in its propriety, denotes nothing that exists and is namable. What thinking must confront here is no longer tradition or history--destiny-but, rather, destining itself (the hermeneutic interpretation of Heidegger thus reaches its limit). But this destining--the Proper--is pure abandonment of the self to what has neither propriety nor destiny; it is pure ac-customing [as-sue-fazione] 22 and habit. As Heidegger writes at the end of his 1930-31 course on the Phenomenology of Spirit, offering the most radical formulation of his distance from Hegel: "Can and should man as transition [Übergang] try to leap away from himself in order to leave himself behind as finite? Or is his essence not abandonment [Verlassenheit] itself, in which alone what can be possessed becomes a possession?" 13
The most proper, ēthos, *se of humankind--of the living being without nature and identity--is therefore the daimōn itself, the pure, undestined movement of assigning oneself a fate and a destiny, absolute selftransmitting without transmission. But this abandonment of the self to itself is precisely what destines humankind to tradition and to history, remaining concealed, the ungrounded at the ground of every ground, the nameless that, as unsaid and untransmissible, transmits itself in every name and every historical transmission.
XIII
Let us now seek to consider Ereignis with respect to language, as ac-customed speech led back to its "self." How can there be a language in which destining is no longer withdrawn from what is destined, if not in the form of a language in which saying is no longer hidden in what is said, in which the pure language of names no longer decays into concrete events of speech? And yet this would not be a language that remained present to itself in silence, a theme that never succeeds in being declined in its "cases." Rather, Heidegger says, what reveals itself in language is concealment as such, pure destining without destiny; what comes to language is neither merely speech nor a pure, unspoken name, but rather the very difference between language and speech, the pure--and in itself untransmissible--movement by which saying comes to speech (die Be-wegung der Sage zur Sprache). 24
In Identity and Difference, Heidegger formulates the difference between his thought and Hegel's philosophy with respect to the matter (Sache) of thinking. He writes: "For Hegel, the matter of thinking is thought [Gedankel] as the absolute concept. For us, formulated in a preliminary fashion, the matter of thinking is difference as difference." 25 Hegel thus strives to think the becoming equal to itself of speech, in its enunciation in the totality of events of discourse; he attempts to consider the word as wholly com-prehended, con-ceived: as absolute concept. Heidegger, instead, wants to think the difference between saying (Sage) and speech (Sprache) in itself, he thus searches for an experience of language that experiences the Es ("it") that destines itself to speech while itself remaining without destiny, the transmitting that, in every event of speech and every transmission, remains untransmissible. This is the Proper, *se, which never becomes a nominative and which is therefore nameless: not the absolute concept, Being that has become equal to itself in being-other, but rather difference itself, led back to itself. Once again, the thought of the Absolute and the thought of Ereignis show their essential proximity and, at the same time, their divergence. We may say that for Hegel, the unsayable is always already said, as having-been, in every discourse (omnis locutio ineffabile fatur). For Heidegger, by contrast, the unsayable is precisely what remains unsaid in human speech but can be experienced in human speech as such (im Namenlosen zu existieren, "to exist in the nameless"). 26 And yet precisely for this reason, insofar as all human language is necessarily historical and destined, 27 only by un-speaking (Ent-sprechen) and by risking silence can human beings correspond to difference (im Nichtsagen nennen, erschweigen).
א This impossibility of grasping the Es itself in the propositions Fs gibt Zeit and Es gibt Sein becomes transparent if one recalls that the impersonal pronoun es is originally a genitive (the genitive of er, hence es ist Zeit, ich bin's zufrieden, etc.). Over time, the genitive es in expressions of this kind ceased to be perceived as such and became equivalent to a nominative in linguistic use. An analogous process lies at the origin of the Italian impersonal pronoun si (in the phrase "it is said," si dice, or in si fa), which represents a dative or an accusative (the Latin sibi, se). A pronoun that, as genitive, indicates a predication of belonging, the being proper of something to something else, becomes a subject in a verbal syntagma that therefore appears as impersonal. If es is a genitive and not a nominative, it is possible to understand why Heidegger, attempting to consider the es of es gibt Zeit, es gibt Sein, was obliged to grasp it as an Ereignis, as an appropriation and an ac-customing. In Ereignis, time and Being belong to each other; they appropriate each other. But to whom and to what? As es and as genitive, Ereignis does not exist and does not give itself, like the Italian si, es does not exist as a lexical entity.
The thought that wants to think the Proper (like the thought that wants to think *se) cannot lead to any lexical entity or existing thing. Insofar as it is itself what destines, the Proper, the ēthos of humankind, remains unnamed in philosophy. Unnamed, it is thus without destiny: an untransmissible transmission.
XIV
With Hegel and Heidegger, the tradition of philosophy has therefore truly reached its end. As was announced in the most explicit fashion, what was at issue here was precisely a "closing of figures" 28 and a "destruction of tradition." 29 Tradition, which covered over what was destined in figures, now shows itself for what it is: an untransmissible transmission that transmits nothing but itself Philosophy, that is, the tradition of thought that posited wonder as its arkhē, has now gone back beyond its arkhē to dwell in its ēthos, thinking only its *se. In tradition, this--the dwelling of humankind and its most proper ground--remains pure destining without destiny, an unsayable transmission. This means that man, the speaking being, is ungrounded and grounds himself by sinking into his own abyss; it means that man, as ungrounded, incessantly repeats his own ungroundedness, abandoning himself to himself. *Se is abandoned (verlassen) to tradition as untransmissible, and only in this negative fashion is it grounded in itself (in sich selbst gegründete Bewegung derselben)." 30 It is the mystery of the origins that humanity transmits as its proper and negative ground.
Nevertheless, precisely insofar as the revelation of this abandonment of *se constitutes the extreme outcome of Hegel's and Heidegger's attempts to think the most proper, any thought that wants to be adequate to this outcome and confront it cannot infinitely repeat its essential gesture. And yet today, thinking, whether in the form of hermeneutics, a philosophy of difference, or negative thought, presents as a solution the pure and simple repetition of the fundamental metaphysical problem: that transmission transmits nothing (if not itself), that difference is anterior to identity, that the ground is an abyss. The end of tradition, which was the supreme outcome of the thought of the Absolute and Ereignis, thus becomes an in-finity; the absence of destiny and ground is thus transformed into an in-finite destiny and ground. Both Hegel and Heidegger, by contrast, clearly insisted that for thought to register the abandonment of *se in tradition was necessarily for it at the same time to consider the end of the history of Being and its epochal figures. This was the sense of the word "Absolute," and this was the sense of "Appropriation." To regard the trace as origin, to regard transmitting without transmission and difference as difference, can only mean that traces are canceled and that transmission is finished--that is, that historical destinies have ended, that humankind is definitively in its ēthos, and that its knowledge is absolute. The grounding of man as human--that is, philosophy, the thought of *se--is achieved. The ungroundedness of man is now proper, that is, absolved from all negativity and all having-been, all nature and all destiny. And it is this appropriation, this absolution, this ethical dwelling in *se that must be attentively considered, with Hegel and beyond Hegel, with Heidegger and beyond Heidegger, if what appears as the overcoming of metaphysics is not to be a failing back inside metaphysics and its in-finite repetition.
If metaphysics thinks *se as what, remaining unsaid and untransmitted, destines man to history and transmission, how are we to consider a *se that does not even destine itself as untransmitted, a dwelling of man in his *se that has never been and that has therefore never been transmitted in a historical figure? How, that is, are we to understand human speech that no longer destines itself in transmission and grammar, that with respect to its *se truly has nothing more to say (even negatively, leaving it unsaid in what is said)? Would such speech necessarily fall into silence and preserve the unsayable having-been that destined it to language? Or would such speech instead simply be the speech of humankind, the "illustrious vernacular" [volgare illustre] of a redeemed humanity that, having definitively exhausted its destiny, is one with its praxis and its history? Of a humanity that, having fulfilled its past, is now truly prose (that is, pro-versa, pro-verted, turned forward)? Now, when all destiny is at an end and all epochal figures--grammars--of Being are exhausted, do we not witness the beginning of the true universal history of a humanity that has finally dissolved the secret of its own, "proper" identity?
This simple figure of fulfilled humanity--which is to say, human humanity--would therefore be what is left to say for speech that has nothing to say; it would be what is left to do for praxis that has nothing to do. In the words of Bacchylides, such speech and such praxis would truly have found the doors of the unsaid, having consumed the unsayable transmission:
heteros ek heterou sophos
to te palai to te nyn.
arrētōn epeōn pylas
exeurein.
(The other from the other [is] wise
the once [is] the now.
To find
the doors of unsaid words.)
א That man--the animal who has language--is as such the ungrounded, that his only foundation is in his own action, his own giving himself grounds, is a truth so ancient that it lies at the basis of humanity's most ancient religious practice: sacrifice. However one interprets the sacrificial function, in every case what is essential is that the activity of human community is grounded in another one of its activities--that, as we learn from etymology, all facere is sacrum facere. At the center of sacrifice simply lies a determinate activity that is as such separated and excluded, becoming sacer and hence invested with a series of ritual prohibi tions and prescriptions. Once it is marked with sacredness, an activity is not, however, simply excluded; rather, it is henceforth accessible only through certain persons and determinate rules. It thus furnishes society and its unfounded legislation with the fiction of a beginning; what is excluded from a community is in truth what founds the whole life of community, being taken up by a community as an immemorial past. Every beginning [inizio] is, in truth, initiation; every conditum is an ab-sconditum.
This is why the sacred is necessarily an ambiguous and circular notion (in Latin, sacer means "abject, ignominious" and, at the same time, "august, reserved to the gods"; "sacred" is the attribute both of the law and of whoever violates it: qui legem violavit, sacer esto). Whoever has violated the law is excluded from the community; such a person is thus remitted and abandoned to himself and can as such be killed without the executioner's committing a crime. As Festus writes in De verborum significatione, "The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide" (At homo sacer is est, quem populus iudicavit ob maleficium; neque fas est eum immolari, sed qui occidit, parricidi non damnatur).
The ungroundedness of all human praxis is concealed in the abandonment to itself of an activity (a sacrum facere) that founds every lawful activity; it is what, remaining unsayable (arrēton) and untransmittable in every human activity, destines man to community and transmission.
It is certainly not a casual or insignificant fact that, in sacrifice as we know it, this activity is generally a killing, the destruction of a human life. Yet this killing in itself explains nothing and is itself even in need of explanation (like Karl Meuli's explanation, recently invoked by Walter Burkert, in which sacrifice is related to the hunting rites of prehistorical humanity). It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between antiquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of human life was sacred, whereas for the second what is sacred is life itself). It is the very ungroundedness of human activity (which the sacrificial mythologeme wants to remedy) that constitutes the violent (that is, according to the meaning that this word has in Latin, as contra naturam) character of sac rifice. Insofar as it is not naturally grounded, all human activity must posit its ground by itself and is, according to the sacrificial mythologeme, violent. And it is this sacred violence (that is, violence that is abandoned to itself) that sacrifice assumes in order to repeat and regularize in its own structure.
This is why a fulfilled foundation of humanity in itself necessarily implies the definitive elimination of the sacrificial mythologeme along with the ideas of nature and culture that are grounded in it. The sacralization of life also derives from sacrifice. From this point of view, it does nothing other than abandon bare natural life to its own violence and its own foreignness, in order then to ground all cultural rules and social praxis in it. (In the same way, human speech is grounded in animal speech, on whose exclusion language is constructed insofar as it is transmitted as articulated voice.)
*Se, the proper of man, is not something unsayable, something sacer that must remain unsaid in all human speech and praxis. Nor is it, according to the pathos of contemporary nihilism, a Nothing whose nullity grounds the arbitrariness and violence of social activity. Rather, *seēthos--is the social praxis itself that, in the end, becomes transparent to itself.

Notes:
1.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller ( New York: Humanities Press, 1976), p. 777; the original is G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 6: 490.

2.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris ( Albany: State University of New York, 1977), p. 89; the original is in G. W. F. Hegel, Die Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 2: 30.

3.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 488; the original is G. W. F. Hegel , Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 3: 585.

4.
Hegel, Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System, pp. 106-7; original in Hegel, Die Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems, p. 25.

5.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 487-88; original in Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 524-25.

6.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jensener Logik, Metaphysik und Naturphilosophie, ed. Georg Lasson ( Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), pp. 204-6.

7.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 490; original in Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 588.

8.
Ibid., English p. 492 ; original p. 590.


9.
Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 842; original in Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 571.

10.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 492; original in Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 590.

11.
Ibid., English and original.

12.
Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 825; original in Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 550.
13.
Ibid., English p. 843 ; original p. 573.


14.
Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh ( New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 49; the original is in Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens ( Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), p. 53.

15.
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz ( New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 54; the original is in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12: Unterwegs zur Sprache ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985), p. 146.

16.
Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 19; original in Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 20.

17.
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh ( New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 37; the original is in Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz ( Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), p. 26.

18.
Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 54; original in Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 58.

19.
Ibid., English pp. 40-41 ; original p. 44.


20.
Ibid., English p. 54 ; original p. 58.


21.
Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 37; original in Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 26.

22.
[The Italian word assuefazione, like the corresponding English word "assuefaction," contains the pronoun suo, which derives from the reflexive *se. Agamben's division of the word by hyphens is meant to emphasize this derivation.--Ed.]

23.
Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 149; the original is in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 32: Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980), p. 216.

24.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 130; original in Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 249.

25.
Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 47; original in Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 37.

26.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell ( New York: Harper Collins, 1977), p. 199; the original is in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9: Wegmarken ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), p. 319.

27.
Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 133; original in Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 253.

28.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 491; original in Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 588.

29.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson ( New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 41-49; the original is in Sein und Zeit ( Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), pp. 19-26.

30.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 490; original in Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 589.