Places of Elision

Abstract

Places of Elision Kristina Mendicino (bio) Die abgewrackten Tabus, und die Grenzgängerei zwischen ihnen, weltennaß, auf Bedeutungsjagd, auf Bedeutungsflucht. There: Where? “There” cannot be pointed out, nor can it be predicated upon. It is not a place, nor is it an “it.” One cannot arrive “there,” because one is already “there,” just as every word that is spoken or written, including these here, is there. And yet, what is “there” is always elsewhere… an alibi. “There” (Da) is cast, precisely, as “Entfernung”—where distance (Ferne) and distance from distance (Ent-) hang together in a dynamic suspension—towards the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the “Da” in Sein und Zeit (1927), between the paragraphs addressing the directions (Verweisungen) that constitute worldliness and the tuning (Stimmung) in which one is ever finding oneself.1 This suspension is not, therefore, indifferent, but emerges with the structure of pragmatic directions from which spatiality is first to be understood. Because the “there” is, first of all, the “Verweisungszusammenhang” (87) of the world in which understanding, meaningfulness, and possibility are co-founded and lived out, all that there is cannot but be oriented. Being-there is, in this context, being-towards; topology, teleology; every “Da” and “Wo,” a “Dazu” and “Wozu” (78): “Der Platz und die Platzmannigfaltigkeit dürfen nicht als das Wo eines beliebigen [End Page 585] Vorhandenseins der Dinge ausgelegt werden. Der Platz ist je das bestimmte »Dort« und »Da« des Hingehörens eines Zeugs” (102). For this reason, Heidegger points out, a topos or “Platz” cannot be fixed as a particular position in space, conceived as a mathematical, homogeneous continuum of points. The accent in “Hingehören” must be placed on the “hin,” insofar as being-there is to be at work from and towards mutable, but impassible distances: “[s]eine Ent-fernung hat das Dasein so wenig durchkreuzt, daß es sie vielmehr mitgenommen hat und ständig mitnimmt, weil es wesenhaft Ent-fernung, das heißt räumlich ist” (108). Wherever something is, either in the greatest distance from view, like the glasses on my nose, or in the nearing “Reich-, Greif, und Blickweite” of the next tool to grasp (107), it is always here… and elsewhere. The meaning of “there,” in every sense, thus stems from an existential, teleological syntax. Much is staked upon this syntax of what is there, for this is the condition of the possibility “dafür, daß das verstehende Dasein als auslegendes so etwas wie »Bedeutungen« erschließen kann, die ihrerseits wieder das mögliche Sein von Wort und Sprache fundieren” (87). Edmund Husserl, to whom Heidegger dedicates his book, also distinguishes “Bedeutungen” as prior to and independent of any individual word that might give them expression.2 These “Bedeutungen,” though structured by intentional acts, [End Page 586] depend for their truth and fulfillment upon the “Anschauung” of the intentional objects of these acts.3 But Heidegger seeks the existential foundations of meaning and sense in praxis,4 where theory and praxis, meaning and fulfillment, object and subject are not yet distinguished for themselves as the derivative, “undaseinsmäßig[en]” categories that they are (44). Before the timeless realm of ideal, selfsame, unified meanings that Husserl traces in his logic, meaning and, secondarily, words, emerge from the “there.” For this same reason, “there” cannot be, properly speaking, a noun or even a deictic adverb—these, as Heidegger writes in his discussion of “hier” and “dort,” “sind nur möglich in einem »Da«, das heißt wenn ein Seiendes ist, das als Sein des »Da« Räumlichkeit erschlossen hat” (132)—nor can it be primarily spatial, if “Räumlichkeit” must first be “erschlossen” by and from the “Sein des Da.”5 The word “there” can be none other than an alibi for a structure that is articulated differently. And indeed, the sense of “there” will differ, as Heidegger’s analysis of being-there among everyday tools—where no “Um-Zu” marks an authentic end, but the endless circulation of worldly production—turns around with the exposure of the temporal horizon from which the “Da,”6 as well as every direction, is to be truly understood. [End Page 587] This peripeteia pivots upon Sein...