The Problem of Distraction by Paul North

Author:Paul North [North, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: German, Phenomenology, Philosophy, General, Literary Criticism, Movements, European
ISBN: 9780804778978
Google: OG_DwUInaUkC
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Un in the Unthought

We must be careful not to say that Zerstreuung is “the unthought” in Being and Time. In order to say what it means to think what was not thought, we would first have to agree on what not-thinking means. Given the large number of possible negations, negativities, privations, refusals, denials, and so on, it would be incautious to immediately read the not in “not-thinking” as if there were only one indispensible way to dispense with or remove or depose a thinking or a thought. Without a doubt—this act, thinking not-thinking or non-thought, involves us almost immediately in a vertiginous whirl. There ought to be as many variations of not-thought as there are negativities, and at least as many negated, nullified, lost, or broken cognitive moments as there are modes of cognition. In order to proceed, one of the multitude must be selected. Twenty-five years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger selects one, or resurrects it, and it subsequently becomes essential to what he calls “Denken.”

Thinking is indeed dependent on one kind of not-thought. “The un-thought in a thinking is not a lack inherent in a thought. The un-thought is there each time only as the un-thought [Das Un-Gedachte ist je nur als das Un-gedachte]. The more original a thinking is, the richer will be its unthought” (Was heißt Denken? 72). This kind of not-thinking—if negativities can be organized into kinds—should remind us of the powerful distraction of the twenties. For one thing, it is a rich not-thinking—the richest—that interests Heidegger at this moment, and so we can assume there are other poorer ones that Heidegger cancels in advance—a lack in thought is the one that he openly denies here, but there are others. At least we can say, preliminarily, anticipating our argument, that the difference, for him, is always one of degree of abundance, and lack would be the lowest degree, the least rich, and not to be applied to not-thinking. The richest unthought for him at this moment is also not absolute not-thinking. The richest unthought thereafter becomes a methodological Kunststück for philosophy, once Heidegger, permitted for the first time after the war to teach in a German university, offers the lectures in Freiburg in 1951–1952 that codify it. He returns to the scene of the crime to ask a more essential question as he sees it then: “Was heißt Denken?”

Upon returning to the site of previous revolutions, real and perceived, he insists again that the emphasis fall not on the negative but on the positive. Unthinking is not worth touching. Only the unthought should be saved, and then only with the stress on thought. Because, we can suppose, the stress in this word will not be obvious to his students and other spectators and readers, he resolves to demonstrate it typographically, and, we may also assume, in a special tone of voice, whose weight hits just so, on the last syllable, and not on the first: “unthought.” Unthought is emphatically not Unthought.

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