The Hermeneutics of Origin

Abstract

Arche & Palimpsest Finding the Hermeneutic Middle To write under erasure is to write as the substance of what could be written were already determined by a logic of submersion, a logic itself constituted by what the surface allows. Under such erasure philosophical language often works both within and against its own hypostatic structure employing metaphors that are sometimes frozen or calcified to serve the archaic and the metaphysical. But we were to acknowledge that philosophy itself cannot elude its own writerly logic, then we would have to abandon the desire to find an archaic that no longer falls victim to the logic of erasure itself. Within such a self-implicating skein of involvements, philosophical writing would, rather, have to acknowledge the history of metaphysics as a palimpsest whose layers offered not the clear and distinct ideas of a Cartesian system, but the hybrid inscriptions of rhetors, poets, and grammarians. Under erasure this palimpsestic style of reading might yield a discourse whose own history would not be aligned according to the isomorphic narratives of a single narrative tradition but would offer instead the plurality of differentiating narratives whose paths would lead in many directions without identifying a specific or a directed end. Philosophy, Aristotle writes, begins in wonder, but the wonder of philosophy itself begins in the discourse about beginnings, origins, Ursprunge, archai. The oldest desire of philosophy is for the arche. In the Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon, you will understand then that the most important part of any work is its beginning (377b), and yet, following the path of palimpsestic erasure, the of Plato's own work is governed by a turn downward, a katabasis, that dismantles the very idea of an arche at the arche as it were, a under erasure, withdrawing from the possibility of an original beginning, opening rather to the understanding of the arche as a meson or hermeneutic middle. Plato's own work plays with the philosophical notion of an arche by situating his tale in the middle of a recollection, an anamnetic reflection on the events of a yesterday when Socrates went down to the Piraeus to begin his discourse about beginnings. Book One begins on a note of wonder: Socrates wishes to see the first performance of a new festival; it ends, however, on a note of failure and frustration-after the long dialogue with Thrasymachus, Socrates confronts a genuine aporia. Book Two begins anew on the note of beginnings: Socrates tells Adeimantus, if we begin our inquiry by examining the of a city would that not aid us also in identifying the origins of justice and injustice? (Republic 369a). Again, here Socrates turns his attention to the discourse about origins and beginnings. But as Socrates completes his discourse in Book Ten as we are led back to the of Er's account of his descent (katabasis) into Hades, we wind up again at/in a middle: the middle of life in all its factically generated complexity which refuses to be reduced to a mere conclusion. This hermeneutic excursus on the meaning of Plato's works was first explored by Heidegger in his early lectures in Freiburg where he took up the theme of the factically generated arche of experience in the middle of life itself in its there in being. Heidegger was fond of citing Plato's Republic. His lecture course of WS 1931/32 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit focused on the Allegory of the Cave and his rectorial speech of 1933 alluded to Plato, especially in his remarks concerning the power of the beginning(GA34; SdU: 11/6 and 19/13). Like Plato's, Heidegger's work was a series of reinscriptions whose genuine character lay not in their status within a fixed system or as final truths but as impermanent carvings on the palimpsest of the Western philosophical tradition, inscriptions whose very impermanence carried the mark of constant erasure (and reinscription). …