The Performative Difficulty of Being and Time

Abstract

retrieving forgotten question of for philosophy, Heidegger prescribes an ontological-phe nome no logical method in which the first philosophical step ... consists in not muthon tina diegeisthai, `not telling a story.'1 Why is step back from storytelling first step in understanding problem of being? Heidegger's further warning against determining if Being had character of a possible gives clue.2 Storytelling requires a matter, or thing, or entity with which story deals. Indeed telling in general has structure of being about, i.e. telling tells something, and thereby implicitly ascribes entitativeness-the character of a being-to its topic. this regard Gunter Figal writes, Every talking is a talking something. Whoever talks something makes it present. in that hr expressly distinguishes it or even does not distinguish it from other things. It is impossible to speak, without that which is spoken becoming something specific.3 Precisely because is not to be confused with beings, actualities, and even with possible beings, it is in every case inaccurate to tell about being, for there is in very about-structure of telling danger of characterizing as an entity even if this characterization is not explicit.4 For this reason every telling being, including theorizing, arguing, describing and explaining, entails a sort of storytelling, insofar as it engages even merely indirectly in determination of as an entity. The same problem with storytelling and implicit ascriptions of entitativeness holds also for call of conscience in Being and Time, insofar as what calls is no entity but instead Dasein's ownmost possibility to be itself, according to Heidegger, and thus call of conscience is also at a remove from entities. Arguing, claiming, describing and explaining are thus inappropriate approaches to and call of conscience. Accordingly, readers of Heidegger attempt to find other words for kind of telling that is at stake in Heidegger's Being and Time. Indeed there are a plethora of other terms used by Heidegger's readers that attempt to express this not-about quality. Hannah Arendt describes it as transitive: This thinking has a digging quality peculiar to itself. which, should we wish to put it in linguistic form. lies in transitive use of verb 'to think.' Heidegger never thinks 'about' something. he thinks something.5 David Krell describes not-about quality of Heidegger's account of anxiety in terms that approximate Austinian performativity: In description of phenomenon of anxiety Heidegger's existential analysis reaches that crucial point where disclosure and disclosed converge.6 Borrowing David Wood's terminology of performance in Philosophy at Limit, I focus in this essay on Being and Time's character as an exemplary performance. [Heidegger) seeks to awaken a new experience of language. not a new view of it. And he does so by an exemplary performance. He writes in such a way as to demonstrate such a new relation.7 This performative quality corresponds to transitivity described by Arendt and convergence of disclosure and disclosed described by Krell, but in Wood's case it is an evocation of a specifically performative element of language. Hence I consider precisely Heidegger's demonstration or performance of this new relation to language. I argue that Being and Time oscillates between, on one hand, what I will characterize as a specifically rhetorical performance and, on other hand, impossibility to treat in literal or proper words themes of and conscience.8 What is here called performativity of Heidegger's text may also be characterized in terms of movement. Ronald Bruzina, for example, describes Heidegger's thought in terms of a wording movement. …