The Death We Owe (for) Beyng

Abstract

This article explores the role that death plays in Heidegger’s ontology after Being and Time, focusing especially on volumes 97–104 of the Gesamtausgabe. Within these volumes, death occupies a pride of place within Heidegger’s being-historical (and post-being-historical) attempts to articulate beyng, coming to play a role as significant as, and not unrelated to, the Nothing. In order to give a full accounting of the role that death plays within these texts, a number of other structurally significant terms within Heidegger’s Seinsdenken—such as Gebirg, Enteignis, Brauch, and Sage—will be examined. It is ultimately argued that these volumes, by exposing the human to the heretofore un-thought truth of beyng (as radical concealment), carry out the transition from “human” to “mortal” so essential to Heidegger’s later thinking.

1. Introduction

Heidegger’s inquiry into death in Being and Time remains one of the richest and best-known analyses in his vast corpus. However, there is reason to believe that Heidegger himself was ultimately dissatisfied with it; not just with what he saw as being its widespread misinterpretation (GA 82: 135/102 and 277/217) [1]1, but above all with the limitations and shortcomings he believed endemic to the analysis itself (GA 82: 129/99; also 148/116; and 185/145) [1]. It is because of these shortcomings—owed both to the narrow orientation of Being and Time toward analyzing Dasein (rather than Sein more broadly) and to the manner in which that analysis remained inadvertently mired in certain metaphysical categories (GA 9: 328/250) [2]—that Heidegger continued to inquire into death long after his turn away from an analytic of Dasein and toward his project of articulating the truth of beyng on its own terms. Even a high-altitude survey of Heidegger’s corpus reveals a long-standing and focused interest in death that spans nearly the entirety of his career; and while there have been innumerable scholarly treatments of Heidegger’s analysis of death from Being and Time—indeed, far too many to recount here—there have been relatively few that have dealt systematically with his view of death as it develops after Being and Time [3,4,5]2, and none (to date) that have focused on the role that death plays in the volumes of the Gesamtausgabe belonging to Heidegger’s so-called “Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen” (“Notes and Chronicles”), i.e., GA volumes 96–104, a cluster of mostly private and highly experimental notebooks that span the years 1939 to 1970 (and all of which were published after 2013) [6]3. In what follows, I offer such an analysis. Although only mentioned explicitly a handful of times in these texts, death nonetheless plays an architectonic role in shaping the contours of Heidegger’s thinking therein. Indeed, as the following demonstrates, death, in many respects, operates as the cornerstone to Heidegger’s later attempts to think the truth of beyng and the human’s exposure to that truth.

Understanding how death operates in these texts requires grappling with a dense and convoluted constellation of terms in which death is implicated and over which, to a great extent, death presides. Because Heidegger employs a rich and idiosyncratic vocabulary in his attempts to bring the alethic operations of beyng to language—and because death, as “the shrine of the Nothing,” is the intimate and inseparable obverse of beyng—any attempt to understand death requires reckoning with this broader and often experimental vocabulary. Simply put, death cannot be treated in isolation within these texts but must rather be understood in relation to Heidegger’s broader (and sometimes maddeningly abstruse) movements of thought.

Although death, as the following analysis shows, is in the background of the entirety of Heidegger’s attempt to articulate the truth of beyng, there are four specific terms that bear the brunt of his considerations about death and its relation to beyng: namely, Gebirg (“concealing stronghold”), Enteignis (“expropriative bestowal”), Brauch (“deployment”), and Sage (“saga”). In what follows, I offer analyses of each of these terms all for the sake of seeing how each relates, for Heidegger, to the concealing withdrawal of beyng and the human’s unique capacity to comport itself toward that concealing withdrawal, a comportment that is necessary, in Heidegger’s eyes, in order to cultivate an appropriate and authentic relation to death. Taken together, understanding these terms in their interrelationship will provide a more comprehensive sense of Heidegger’s overall project within these volumes and the extent to which death serves as a keystone to his later movements of thinking.

2. Death and Gebirg

In GA 98, Heidegger offers the following: “Death is the concealing stronghold of beyng in the poem of world” (GA 98: 216) [7]4. The word I have translated as “concealing stronghold” is Gebirg which, under normal circumstances, means “mountain,” and Heidegger will indeed occasionally use it in that quotidian sense, such as when he writes in GA 101 that “death is the world-mountain [Welt-Gebirg] which towers over the sea of life, a sea which obtains its unceasing swell from that mountain, and whose waves bear to mortals the saga [die Sage] of the earth” (GA 101: 62–63) [8,9]5. For the most part, however, Heidegger uses the term Gebirg in an innovative and highly idiosyncratic manner, drawing on the “Ge-“ to denote “gathering”—a sense that belongs to the word Gebirg itself (i.e., a gathering, or range, of mountains)—but drawing on the “birg” not to denote a mountain, but rather to call bergen to mind, which has the dual sense of “concealing” and “harboring [5].” Understood in this way, the above passage suggests that death is the concealing gathering of beyng, the latter whose withdrawal serves as the opening (i.e., the disclosive “poem”) of world [10]6.

Said otherwise, death—and by this Heidegger means death taken as our ownmost possibility, our projective relation to death—serves as our most direct entry point into the black hole, so to speak, that always looms as the generative source of the disclosive openness of beyng, the Nothing over against which beyng opens a world and into which beyng itself withdraws. Death holds and preserves a trace of the concealing withdrawal that characterizes beyng as it opens (or un-conceals) as world, a function that Heidegger elsewhere captures with his vivid claim that “death is the shrine of the Nothing” (GA 79: 17/17) [10,11]7. Stated most simply, death provokes the human into attending to the concealment at the core of un-concealment, which Heidegger considers to be the very truth of beyng.

One way to understand all of this would be in terms of Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time, where the projective experience of one’s own possible death—otherwise known as being-toward-death—allows one to experience one’s existence, and thus the world, somewhat as a whole. So understood, the experience of one’s own possible death would be the catalyst that allows one to experience being in relation to the Nothing [12]8. Although this is the case from the point of view of human experience, the relationship that serves as the ontological ground of that experience actually goes the other way. One sees this in the Bremen lectures from 1949, where Heidegger writes the following while drawing on the vocabulary of Gebirg:

Death is neither the empty nothing, nor is it merely the transition from one existence to another. Death belongs in the Dasein of the human as appropriated from the essence of beyng. Thus death harbors [birgt] the essence of beyng. Death is the highest refuge [Gebirg] of the truth of beyng itself, the refuge that in itself shelters [birgt] the concealment [Verborgenheit] of the essence of beyng and gathers together the sheltering [Bergung] of its essence. Thus the human is first and only capable of death when beyng itself from the truth of its essence brings the essence of the human into the ownership of the essence of beyng. Death is the refuge [Gebirg] of beyng in the poem of the world.

(GA 79: 55–56/53–54) [11]

The truth of beyng is the generative concealment, the granting withdrawal, that makes possible its disclosive opening [1]9; and death, for its part, serves as the highest expression, the shrine, the “highest refuge” or “concealing stronghold,” of such concealment.

This means that, properly speaking, it is not death that first allows us entry into the Nothing of beyng, but rather the Nothing of beyng that first allows us to die (i.e., to relate to our death as death). Were it not for the bestowal of the concealing, withdrawing character that beyng gives, the human would not be able to die its death. Heidegger asserts this most directly in GA 100:

What it genuinely pertains to is that human beings first become (the ones) who in a veiled way they are—and for a long time have been—named: βροτοί, the mortals. Yet: to first become mortals means: the enabling [Vermögen] of dying, letting it come open and bloom in this liking [Mögen], whose love has gathered itself in the mystery of death. People try to determine the essence of death on the basis of its relationship to “life”; but if one grasps “life” as human life, which determines the rational creature, then death is represented as a human occurrence and a human fate. However, if we think the essence of the human being from out of its achieving appropriation in the safe-keeping of the event, in which it essentially—on the basis of appropriative granting—belongs, then death receives its genuine determination from the event (from the in-ception of beyng) (GA 100: 118) [13]. [….] What is essential about death is that it conceals [verbirgt]—and that means that it authentically gathers and, as gathering, shelters [birgt]—Being. Death is the refuge [Gebirg] of Being. Those who are essentially capable of death, the mortals, are the ones who dwell in the refuge [Ge-birg] of the event.

(GA 100: 118) [13]

Death first becomes possible as what it most “is”—namely, the stronghold or refuge or safe-keeping of the Nothing at the heart of beyng—by way of its connection to the event; and it is by virtue of being exposed to this concealing withdrawal at play in the truth of beyng that humans—or, at least, some humans—become capable of dying.

All of this means that death does not first and foremost belong to the human but is rather only conferred to the human from beyng, to whom death properly belongs. This becomes clearer in the following passage from GA 98:

Because death is the stronghold [Gebirg] of beyng, we die, when a death is granted to us, for beyng in beyng. Death is not the means and the way of dying, the way the human dies through a death—death is the world-stillness of dying.

(GA 98: 156) [7]

The human is able to die (i.e., is able to become mortal) only if and when beyng grants that human a death, and it accomplishes this by bestowing its concealing character to the human.

Because death is not something that belongs natively to the human, but is rather something that must be given to the human by beyng, Heidegger is able to say in GA 96 that “there are some who never come to die their own death; others die their own death often” (GA 96: 50/40) [14]. Or, as he puts it more poetically in GA 100,

Death, oh lovely concealing stronghold [Gebirg] of the dawn,

Nightfall’s stilling of nearness.

When are we first mortals, when are we mortals in the sense of the truth of beyng?

Only then, when we dwell in the concealing stronghold [Gebirg] of the relation of holding-back [Ver-Hältnisses], underway, way-faring in the field of the jointure [der Fuge].

(GA 100: 129–130; trans. modified) [13]

Only when the human relates to the concealment at the core of beyng’s unfolding, joining to it through an operation of dwelling, does it first become mortal.

There are some strange consequences to the above claim. To begin with, such a view leads Heidegger to wonder at times, such as in the Bremen lectures, whether the victims of mass murder and the “liquidated [liquidiert]” prisoners of concentration camps can properly be said to have died (GA 79: 56/53) [11], a claim that has resulted in a veritable avalanche of analysis on the part of scholars [3,15,16,17,18]. Of course, Heidegger’s underlying claim—namely, that only those who have experienced the concealing withdrawal at the heart of beyng are capable of relating authentically to death—would apply no less to the German soldiers carrying out such mass killings, since they, like their victims, live in an epoch prior to the turning-around (Kehre) by which beyng would reveal its true, concealing essence. Until such a time, “the human is not yet mortal [11]” (GA 79: 56/54; my emphasis), and so any human who had yet to follow beyng in its turning would be incapable of dying in the rich sense Heidegger intends. Given that Heidegger’s texts only herald the turning-around of beyng, but do not yet full carry it out, one wonders if anyone, in Heidegger’s view, has truly died in the fullest sense of the term. Perhaps it is only those few thinkers and poets who have glimpsed a trace of the passing-by of beyng’s withdrawal who have truly “died their own death.”

In any case, because death gains its proper determination (i.e., its concealing character) from the truth of beyng, death is not to be thought in terms of life, as it almost invariably has been. Indeed, Heidegger will go so far in GA 99 as to divorce death entirely from life, tethering it exclusively to the concealing character of beyng:

If we were, for once, to think the human no longer as a living-being [Lebewesen], but rather as a dying-being [Todes-wesen]—i.e., if we were, for once, to think the human on its own terms—then we would follow this human into its essence and experience the mortal and would attain to the region in which we, thinking the essence of the human, have also already inevitably thought beyng. The human essence of the human, but not understood as a living being, is beyng.

[10] (GA 99: 62.)

The human—the sole entity capable of dying its death—is able to do so not by virtue of being alive, but rather by virtue of relating to the withdrawal at the heart of beyng’s unfolding: and such withdrawal is the ownmost essence of the human. (In other words: the essence of the human is the truth of beyng.) Such is made even clearer in a footnote appended to the above passage:

The mortals: this names the human insofar as its essence is experienced from out of the essence of death, i.e., on the basis of the essence of expropriation at play in the event.

[10] (GA 99: 62.)

The event casts death into the human essence, a casting which is the very opening of world as the play-space of being. Said otherwise: death receives its proper determination—and, thus, the human receives its ownmost being—through a shadowy dispensation or bestowal on the part of the event. To better understand the nature of this bestowal, we turn to Heidegger’s favored term within the notebooks for the concealing withdrawal that serves as the truth of beyng: Enteignis.

3. Death and Enteignis

Enteignis—which I here translate as “expropriative bestowal”—is an ambiguous term in Heidegger’s thinking, serving at least a double function. On the one hand, prior to the essencing of beyng’s concealing character—that is, during the epoch of the forgottenness of beyng, otherwise known as “metaphysics”—the human is cut-off or expropriated from the true character of beyng and cast into the framework of being/beings (in the age of machination). One could call this the “negative” moment of Enteignis, though, for reasons that will become immediately evident, one would need to be careful with that term. On the more “positive” side, Enteignis, especially in the texts under consideration here, names the movement that is most proper to beyng/Ereignis, namely, concealing withdrawal. Here, too, one must be careful using the word “positive,” since it is precisely the concealing character of beyng—that is, its affinity or identity with the Nothing—that is most characteristic of Enteignis.

Insofar as Ereignis—the “appropriative event”—gives beings without itself being a being, its giving occurs as a moment of radical withdrawal: the event gives nothing of itself (i.e., it gives the Nothing of world), expropriating the openness of world as what is not most characteristic of itself [10]10. In other words, beyng is the opening of a world of meaningful beings that is itself neither a being nor discretely meaningful, concealing itself behind such beings through a movement of pure withdrawal: and the name of this pure withdrawal constitutive of the giving of the event is Enteignis, “expropriative bestowal.” When beyng gives itself—i.e., when it reveals its true character—it bestows the concealing withdrawal most characteristic of its simple unfolding.

So understood, Enteignis is, in a certain sense, structurally anterior to Ereignis, insofar as it serves as the latter’s generative, abyssal ground (i.e., the lethe at the core of a-letheia). Heidegger states this clearly in On Time and Being (from 1962):

Insofar as the destiny of Being lies in the extending of time, and time, together with Being, lies in the event of appropriation, the event of appropriation makes manifest its peculiar property, that the event of appropriation withdraws what is most fully its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought in terms of the event of appropriation, this means: in that sense it expropriates itself of itself. Expropriative bestowal belongs to the appropriative event as such. By this expropriative bestowal, the appropriative event does not abandon itself—rather, it preserves what is its own.

[19] (GA 14: 27–28/22–23; trans. modified)

By giving itself as what is not itself, the event withdraws back into what is most proper to itself, namely, concealment. (Within GA 99 et al., Heidegger will use the language of Ein-Kehre—“turning-in”—to capture this originary movement of withdrawing or turning back towards itself.) Heidegger says all of this a bit more tersely, but perhaps even more unambiguously, in GA 101: “Expropriative bestowal [is] the ownmost of the appropriative event [die Enteignis das Eigenste des Ereignens] [9]” (GA 101: 154). Expropriative bestowal is the defining limit of the disclosive, world opening operations characteristic of the event.

In calling Enteignis the “ownmost” of the event in the above passage, Heidegger has already tacitly connected it to death, which he will refer to throughout his career as the “ownmost” possibility of human Dasein. In various passages throughout the texts presently under consideration, Heidegger makes this connection explicit. For example, in GA 101, Heidegger offers the following:

The always preserving in-ception of stillness: death. The feast of the expropriative bestowal toward the turning-in into the Same as the tranquility of the way-making into the richness of the world-play.

[9] (GA 101: 73)

This admittedly opaque passage suggests, it seems to me, nothing other than what was stated above, namely, that death is the projective event that alerts us to the gesture of concealing withdrawal (i.e., the turning-in) by which the event preserves its ownmost truth (i.e., its tranquil Sameness): the human feasts upon this concealing character, and is nourished by it, when she thinks about death. (Why nourished? Because, as seen above, the truth of beyng is the very essence of the human.) Heidegger perhaps suggests the same in the following passage from GA 104: “Death—not from out of the future of ‘time’ understood generally—rather, from out of the coming [Kunft] of the going into the event of expropriation [20]” (GA 104: 248). Death is granted its character by Enteignis, that is, by the concealing character most proper to the event properly understood.

A passage from GA 98 further suggests that, precisely because it bears this connection to Enteignis, death can be understood as functionally identical to world:

The essence of death: it is the highest concealing stronghold [Gebirg] of the clearing of beyng. Death: gathered in the enigmatic directive [Ratsal]: the event of world as the expropriative-bestowal into world-stillness.

[7] (GA 98: 127)

Because world is itself not a being, but rather the open play-space in which beings can appear (i.e., beyng itself), world is to be understood as the opening that the concealing withdrawal of beyng makes possible; and insofar as death is that possibility that opens us to this opening, allowing us to stand thoughtfully in the truth of beyng, it itself bears a functional identity with world. Heidegger makes this expressly clear with the following from GA 73.2:

Is death the cold shadow which beyng, as the event, throws into its locality? Does the light of beyng shine into the essence of the human, insofar as this essence belongs to the setting-apart? Is this light the glow of the resounding of stillness which eventuates world in a manner that withdraws, such that death does not first come into the world from somewhere else, but rather is the world itself?

[21] (GA 97: 318)

Death “is” the withdrawing eventuation of beyng, the dark force of the Nothing over against which a world of beings opens, for a time. Death “is” the unfolding of world, the unconcealing openness, that eventuates from out of the pure concealment of Enteignis. To make the chain of connections at play here more visible, one could say that death serves as the site of the expropriative bestowal of beyng, a bestowal that unfolds as world. Heidegger says as much in GA 101 when he writes that

[t]he completed-coming of what is to come, from out of the fullness of the gathered life approaching, is authentic death. It limits neither a “this side” or a “beyond”—it does not have the character of a limit—rather, it is the endowment [Stiftung] of expropriation in the earth…

[9] (GA 101: 154)

Then, as though it captures everything he means to say here, Heidegger—for the only time in his entire published corpus—writes the Spanish “La Muerte,” offering no further elucidation [3]11.

The above passages help us see that death gives the concealing withdrawal of beyng to the human, a giving whereby we come into relation to beyng itself and, thus, to our own essence. Elsewhere, Heidegger will connect this withdrawing gift to Gelassenheit (“releasement”), using the term now in a special sense: “Releasement is now no longer the name of a human bearing in relation to beings, but rather the worlding of the expropriation [10]” (GA 99: 40). By withdrawing back into the concealment that serves as its ground (i.e., by expropriating), the event lets beings be: such letting is the obverse of such withdrawal; and death, as the stronghold of the expropriative bestowal, safeguards this letting by letting it show itself in its withdrawal.

For this reason, even where the letting in question is to be understood as the basic operations of beyng itself, such letting still needs the human in order to bear itself out. (We could say the human is deployed for the sake of preserving this letting, for letting this letting be.) In order to better understand the nature of this relationship by which the human lets beyng’s letting occur, we turn now to Heidegger’s use of the term Brauch within these texts.

4. Death and Brauch

Within the texts presently under consideration, Brauch names the occurrence whereby the human comes into contact with the concealing character of beyng (i.e., the truth of beyng) or, what amounts to the same, the occurrence of the originary setting-apart between beyng and the metaphysical pairing of being and beings. For reasons that will become clear, I have translated it as “deployment [22]12.” Simply put, as Heidegger puts it in GA 99, “‘the Deployment [Brauch]’ is a forename for the setting-apart” (GA 99: 7), a nickname, we might say, for the bearing out of radical ontological difference (i.e., the difference between being and beings that beyng opens up in and through its withdrawal) [10]13.

As the occurrence of the originary differing between beyng (in its withdrawal) and the opening of the world of beings—or, said otherwise, as the differing between Ereignis and Enteignis—Brauch requires a site, a there, in (or as) which it can be borne out: “The deployment: simple eventuation needing, i.e., requiring mortals. Mortals needed, i.e., used for the wardship of the simple eventuation [23]” (GA 81: 492). In other words, beyng needs a Da in which the originary difference between beyng and beings can matter; and humans are deployed, or even employed, to this end.

However, as the above passage indicates, it is not the human as such who is needed as this site, but rather mortals. For this reason, Brauch is brought by Heidegger expressly in relation to death. One sees this, for example, in GA 102:

Death—concealing-stronghold [Ge-birg] of being

In the poem of simple eventuation [Eignis].

[11]14

Withholding of the nothing—

Ringing out in the deployment [Brauch].

[24] (GA 102: 282)

Death, as the stronghold of the concealing character of beyng (i.e., of the Nothing), rings out or ushers forth in the deployment of the originary ontological difference. As Heidegger will suggest in GA 73.2, it is precisely from out of this deployment that death attains its unique character: “Death and event of deployment; Death from out of the event as the expropriation [13,25]” (GA 73.2: 1048)15. Death, as the concealing stronghold of beyng, serves as the human’s exposure to the expropriative withdrawal operative in the unfolding of the event of beyng: “Death: Ex-proropriation in the event of the deployment [20]” (GA 104: 249). And it is by means of this exposure that the human becomes capable of dying its death.

Brauch thus principally names the deployment of the comportment of the human to Enteignis, a relation that exposes the human to its own essence (namely, to beyng) and thereby renders it mortal: “The deployment is the event of mortals as such” (GA 100: 90) [13]. Heidegger elaborates further on this connection in GA 104:

Why is the human mortal?

Because his essence is deathly—

He belongs in the neighborhood of death—

Because he, in the event, is eventuated in the deployment | cutting-off.

[20] (GA 104: 247)

It is thus because the human is exposed to the Enteignis operative in Ereignis that it enters into relation to (its) death; or, said otherwise, Enteignis is another name for the possibility of dying that belongs to those beings (whom we ourselves are) who have been exposed to the originary ontological difference. As he puts it in GA 104,

[i]n event, as event, the mortals are brought about—partitioned (from event to true-holding) into the letting of the deployment. In the event, death essences as death. Death is not the essence of being—rather, [it is] from the essence of being as the event of the deployment.

[20] (GA 104: 251)

Death earns its character, so to speak, from out of the deployment of the originary setting-apart between beyng’s radical withdrawal and the opening of world; and the human, for its part, is deployed as mortal insofar as it serves as the site of the bearing-out of this deployment.

As Heidegger suggests in GA 104, this deployment of the originary ontological difference occurs suddenly and, in its suddenness, grants us a rare glimpse into the truth of beyng:

Eventuating of ownness—as be-holding | flashing-forth—the glimpse—the sudden of the setting-apart | of the bearing-out. [….] The setting-apart as the locality of nearing—the locality of “time”—“time” and “place” from out of the ek-stasis of the bearing-out. [Flash and death: the sudden!].

[20] (GA 104: 249)

On this formulation, we can understand death as that possibility that shocks us into thinking about beings as such in relation to the Nothing, a projective possibility that allows us to glimpse the fundamental differing between the event and the concealing withdrawal by which it carries itself out. Simply put, death alerts us to the bare thatness, the “Daß,” of existence, the simple fact that there are beings rather than nothing (GA 99: 67 and 112) [10]; and Brauch is the name given to the moment of the deployment of that difference and the manner by which it brings the human into awareness of its own inevitable cessation.

Because the human’s relation to this deployment is principally characterized by a relation to beyng’s withdrawal—that is, a relation to the Nothing—the saying of the deployment requires a special mode of discourse. We turn now, by way of conclusion, to a consideration of the manner of saying employed by Heidegger within these texts, a manner that, as we will see, has everything to do with death.

5. Death and Sage

Heidegger will sometimes refer to his own project within these texts as die Sage, which one can translate as “the Saying” or, perhaps more appropriately, “the saga [13]16.” The “saga” is a name given by Heidegger to a manner of saying that brings the heretofore unthought (or forgotten) essence of beyng to language. Such saying is “the ringing of the stillness” of beyng itself, an unfolding of the unspoken (and unspeakable) ground of language itself as the withdrawing opening of world [9] (GA 101: 74). Simply put, this saga is an articulation of the concealing withdrawal at the heart of beyng, an attempt to think-after the manner of beyng’s generative withdrawal:

To think beyng means, among other things, to no longer seek being as beingness (εἶδος) in the over/against characteristic of representation, but rather to engage the saying of the world in the calm of the event; better still, to experience beyng as it has been released, embedded into in the world.

[10] (GA 99: 40)

The saga is, simply, an attempt to say the simple itself, to say world as the vacuous opening of beyng: “The saga is only the clearing of the stillness of the locality of the setting-apart of oblivion: the saga of world [10]” (GA 99: 23). (One should hear this as the subjective genitive: the saga that world itself gives.) Such a project amounts to an attempt to let the deployment of radical ontological difference come to language, the very carrying out, then, of that radical difference. Heidegger will sometimes refer to this saying as “Gespräch,” which I translate as “colloquy”: “The colloquy, as the language of the deployment, is the prevailing dispensation of the event in its expropriation [10]” (GA 99: 7). Heidegger’s texts, as the carrying out of this colloquy, this saga, is the bringing of Enteignis, in its distinction to Ereignis, to language: the texts themselves are the bearing out of the deployment of the setting-apart.

As this bearing out, the saga and the colloquy bear a certain intimacy with, or inclination toward, silence, remaining, as Heidegger puts it, “in the unspoken” (GA 99: 113). [10] (The “unspoken,” or sometimes “the unspoken ineluctable [das ungesprochene Unumgängliche]” is another name for the concealing ground of beyng’s unfolding. [10]) As he goes on to clarify,

[t]o think the truth of being means: to bring the unspoken and to bring it as this into the saying of the commemoration of language: it is to say the deployment. To say the unspoken (as such) means to keep silence. Silent saying.

[20] (GA 104: 137)

In other words, assertoric or declarative discourse does violence to the silent stillness (i.e., the concealing withdrawal) that serves as the generative (but vacuous) open of world, of language broadly conceived. Because of this, a special mode of saying is needed to bring the true nature of this concealing gathering to light. In these texts, Heidegger favors the term Entsagen—“renunciation”—to describe the manner of speaking (or writing) needed to bring the true, unspeakable character of the expropriative moment of the event to light. This manner of speaking attempts to articulate the originary setting-apart (between beyng and being/beings) borne out through the deployment: “The saying of the setting apart is renunciation” (GA 99: 149). [10]

Such renunciative saying, in giving up any pretense of declarative certainty, instead offers hesitant hints whose very holding-back intimates the concealment at the heart of world disclosure:

The saying of the setting-apart eventuates itself in expropriative bestowal.

It does not speak “of” or “about” it.

It does not communicate to anyone.

The saying says. Event expropriates itself.

[10] (GA 99: 144; see also 46)

In other words, the expropriative moment of beyng’s unfolding is better captured through what the saga does not say, through the way the saga says without saying, through the way Heidegger’s words hint and intimate without over-determining. As he suggests in GA 100, such saying unsays as much as it says, renouncing the aspirations (or pretentions) belonging to speech traditionally (or metaphysically) understood:

What does the saying unsay? The statement, the explanation, the justification, the elucidation, even the exposition—the saying purely goes back into the calling-forth—the essence of language is the speechlessness to be thought from out of expropriative bestowal—the speechlessness dissolves into the event and its way-faring that speaks.

[13] (GA 100: 28; trans. modified.)

Such renunciative saying thus attempts, above all, to bring the expropriative moment of the event, i.e., the concealing withdrawal of beyng, to language. Insofar as it attempts this, the saga bears out the partitioning between beyng and beings: it carries out or enacts the originary, radical difference between Ereignis and Enteignis. Indeed, Heidegger will go on to say that “such saying cor-responds [ent-spricht] to the setting apart; renunciation is correspondence [Entsagen is Entsprechen]” (GA 99: 149) [10], and that it strives most of all to correspond to the concealing operative within beyng: “The renunciation corresponds to the expropriation in the event” (GA 99: 112) [10]. One could thus say that such saying, in renouncing, corresponds to the expropriative bestowal of the deployment: renunciation (Entsagen) corresponds (Entsprechen) to expropriation (Enteignis).

Because this saga attempts to silently say the concealment at the heart of beyng, it necessarily bears a relation to death. This comes most clearly to light in GA 101, where Heidegger’s writes, in quotation marks, the following:

“Der Tod und das Mädchen.” [“Death and the Maiden.”]

Then, directly beneath it, he writes:

Der Tod und die Sage. [Death and the Saga.]

“Der Tod und das Mädchen” is the name of a poem by Matthias Claudius; it is also the name of a lied composed by Franz Schubert that draws upon the same poem. The text of the poem comprises two short stanzas. The first consists of a young girl’s terrified appeal to Death as it approaches, urging it to pass her by and let her live. The second consists of Death’s response:

Give me your hand, fair and delicate thing!

I am your friend, and I do not come to harm you.

Take heart! I am not savage, and

You shall sleep gently in my arms17.

Reassuringly—almost lovingly—Death reaches out for her, granting to her oblivion.

Heidegger’s modification of the title into Der Tod und die Sage suggests that the saga is also, in some sense, a song of death. One can understand this as suggesting that the saga of beyng’s withdrawal brought to language by Heidegger’s texts is meant to serve as the enactment (or, indeed, the deployment) of the turning away from the inattention to the concealing character of beyng that has characterized metaphysics toward an attentiveness to that concealing character: or, said differently, the saga is the commemoration of the dark heart of beyng. As the carrying out of this commemoration, the texts themselves, as the saying of the deployment, are meant to initiate the transition of the human into the mortal.

Prior to beyng’s dispensation of its concealing character—prior, that is, to the Kehre by which beyng turns away from the concealing of its concealing character toward a revelation of that character—the human is incapable of dying its death; and it is for this reason that Heidegger will say at various points that the human of the present era is not yet mortal. Only when the human remembers or commemorates the oblivion of beyng does it become capable of dying. Heidegger’s texts themselves, as the eventuating of the saga of the concealment at the heart of beyng, are an attempt to bring the essence of the human into proper relation to the essence of beyng for the first time: so understood, Heidegger’s texts are an attempt to prepare the human for authentic dying.

Such authentic dying, such mortality, is needed in order for the human to enter into its ownmost essence and experience something of the fortified tranquility possible thereby:

All mortal saying remains an accordant-saying [Nach-sagen]: the saga. It is the pure ringing of stillness in the concealing stronghold of world [Welt-Gebirg] (“language” and death), a stillness which, like the stillness of the sea, engenders the joy of quiet tranquility in the “life” of mortals.

[9] (GA 101: 62)

Through our exposure to the concealing character of beyng that announces itself in death, the human is able to enter into its most essential being—is able, in other words, to become what it is—for the first time.

Heidegger’s texts are thus not at all unlike the song sung by Death to the young maiden, a song offered out of friendship and love meant to engender calm and tranquility. Such becomes clear in the following poem offered by Heidegger in GA 102:

Death is the concealing-stronghold [Ge-birg] of being

In the poem of world.

Death—not the end

that tears asunder.

Death—the pure call

into life:

that step by step it

expends itself

into a healing helping, loving, giving

in such a way that I find the way back

to poverty

and on its narrow footbridge

I fathom:

Abundance remains only one thing:

Mindfulness [Eingedenk] of work, letting [Lassens], preserving [Schonens].

[24] (GA 102: 247)

Heidegger’s texts are the loving, dirgic song of beyng, a song of death that brings the human to the arms of the oblivion at the dark heart of beyng, an elegy meant to remind us of the night to which we owe our dawn, the oblivion to which we owe our life and from which we earn our death and into which we will someday ineluctably resolve.