Beyond the Subject by Gianni Vattimo;Peter Carravetta;

Author:Gianni Vattimo;Peter Carravetta; [Carravetta;, Gianni Vattimo;Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438473833
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Being-Towards-Death and Silence

“Das Wesenverhältnis zwischen Tod und Sprache blitz auf, ist aber noch ungedacht” (“The essential relation between death and language beckons, but is not yet thought”).9 The relation of language with silence can be understood only if we recall the double function, founding-degrounding, which being-towards-death has for Heidegger since Sein und Zeit. In that work, as is well known, being-there is finally constituted as a whole, that is, it can confer a historical continuity to its own existence but only as it projects itself towards its own death. This is one of the most intricate points, even at the terminological level, of Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger explicitly picks up elements from the religious and metaphysical tradition. Death is defined by Heidegger as the permanent possibility of the impossibility of all other possibilities on this side of it which make up existence. These possibilities can be linked in a continuum, in a mobile context lived as history, but only if they do not become absolutized, if being-there in short does not assume any of them as unique and definitive. What allows us not to absolutize the single possibilities—thus producing an unsurmountable discontinuity in existence—is the anticipatory decision for one’s own death. Placed in relation to death, the possibilities of existence reveal themselves and are lived as pure possibilities. Being-there can go on from one to the other in discourse, and existence becomes a tissue-text, a continuity of references, of retentions and protensions. The very passing of time, tied as it is, in Sein und Zeit, to the self-projecting of being-there and to its going back over its own past, is disclosed in the end only by this anticipation of death.

We can thus perceive the essential relation between language and death which Heidegger declares “is not yet thought.” The world, in fact, discloses itself in its essential dimensions through language. On the other hand, the self-articulation of the dimensions of the world means above all the unfolding of the three temporal ecstasies of past, present, and future. Let us turn to an elementary example. The relation image-background (figura-sfondo), the model against which we can think the thematization of anything as some thing, that is to say, any appearing of beings within the horizon of the world, is not above all a spatial fact, but rather it is a temporal fact (in the sense in which Kant attributes a greater originary character to time as opposed to space). There is no disclosing of the world except as the instituting of a language. Yet, on the other hand, language does not unfold, ultimately, but in time (and as time), which temporalizes itself only beginning with the anticipatory decision for one’s own death.

The decided anticipation of death as the possible impossibility of all possibilities on this side of it serves ultimately as the foundation of language, of temporality, of the horizon of the world, and of existence as historical continuity. But if this foundation occurs with reference to death, then this means also

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