Solitude, Violation, Alterity: Rulfo’s Wastelands

Abstract

In the most influential ontology of human being in the last century, Martin Heidegger emphasizes the temporal structure of Dasein as constituted out of the future. My existence, my being here now, is radically unfinished, an open site of possibility, a situatedness that is at once, already and always, toward the future. Existence, according to Heidegger, has the character of project, my practical involvement in the world structured by an in-order-to that develops the sense of Dasein as care. But ultimately my futurity concerns my being-towards-death. Heidegger, death is not one possibility among others, but the possibility most determinative of my being, that which belongs to me and no one else. Death individuates. Authentically or inauthentically, the relation to death gives shape to my existence and marks the way I bear my temporality, the manner in which the future crashes in upon me and dislodges the present from its static representation within linear time. Ecstatic existence is the concrete correlate of the ontological claim that possibility is higher than actuality (Being and Time, 38, 262). The analytic of Dasein that develops this thought, however, belongs to the larger project announced in Being and Time, that of the recovery of the meaning of being. If the nothingness of death individuates, according to Heidegger, the oblivion of being concerns the destiny of the entire West. Unlike my death, then, that destiny is not mine, but ours. And in this respect, recollection is social. Mark the words of the Eleatic stranger from Plato's Sophist, which serve as the epigraph to Heidegger's fundamental ontology: For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression 'being.' We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed (BT xix, my emphasis). If this past is to be reawakened, rediscovered and developed, this is possible only because our factical situation is already hermeneutical, because its interpretation is rooted in our ecstatic