The Speech of Dasein: Heidegger and Quotidian Discourse

Abstract

Martin Heidegger's denunciation of Gerede (idle talk) in §35 of Sein und Zeit is scathing: “Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.” But how might this concept be understood in relation, for example, to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic and heteroglossia or to the notion of discours as it has been developed by Émile Benveniste, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette? This essay undertakes a reading of the “lapse” or entanglement of Dasein that situates the place of Gerede in its sense-making capacity. This potential of Gerede—one that is based on the covering/uncovering mode of Erschlossenheit and of truth as a-leitheia—draws out an implication of Sein und Zeit that in part runs counter to its explicit argument and to Heidegger's later work on language.