The Other This

During a long and intense conversation with Ibitsu the other day we found ourselves pondering yet again Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as laid-out in Being and Time. Most details of that conversation have now been forgotten, but I’ll take the liberty of continuing that line of thought independently. ‘Was Derrida right to criticise the notion of authenticity in Heidegger as metaphysical and as holding out for some ineffable essence?’ we asked ourselves. Are we to understand that the concept of ‘authenticity’ as conceived of in Being and Time is suggestive of an irreversible enlightenment? Nowhere in the ocean of passages laid out systematically across the book does it say that the instant of the call of conscience cannot be repeated. Indeed, the call may be made several times before it is actually heeded for the first time, with Dasein fleeing the call of conscience and remaining within the milieu of the they-self.
For now, however, let us leave the question of whether the ‘heeding’ of the call can only occur as a one off, as it requires a much more detailed argument. We will come back to this later. Let us consider the fact that in order for Dasein to exist intelligibly it requires a degree of inauthenticity. Dasein exists within what Heidegger calls ‘world’, i.e. a pre-conscious and even pre-conceptual network of meanings and significations. As Being-in-the-world Dasein finds all he comes into contact with as ready-to-hand, viz. as already occupying an understood place, role and function within Dasein’s world in such a manner that we must think of it not as an ‘understanding’, but a pre-understanding of sorts, an intuition. Not the intuition of a thing-such-as-it-is, but rather a kind of intuition which intuits itself, as Thomas Wall says. As in Kant’s intuition of space and time. As such, this ‘intuition’ of ‘world’ may not point at anything ‘objective’ (we really shouldn’t use such words anymore), yet it is like a necessary piece of programming without which Dasein would be entirely paralysed. It is the concreteness of this intuition, amongst other things, which is brought to the fore of attention as precarious and fragile in the experience of the mood of anxiety. The experience, then, much as in Levinas ethical experience, is a paralysing one. Being-in-the-world is a lie of sorts, a kind of illusion, though not in the negative sense, for it is a lie which obscures no deeper truth, nothing which can ever be uncovered. In fact, only from this lie can any ‘truth’ arise at all. For ‘truth’ in the Heideggerian sense can only exist as correlative with the totality of meanings and signification embedded and interlinked within a ‘world. If we thus accept the lie as necessary, we come to understand that absolute authenticity is not possible, as this would mean the very undoing of Dasein. This is implied in Heidegger’s magnum opus based on everything we’ve mentioned so far.

Let us try to think of authenticity in terms of deconstruction. What if authenticity can be thought of as the experience of singularity, as this paralysing experience we’ve been discussing so far? We may yet find that we would be right to understand authenticity and the call of conscience as unrepeatable, but only insofar as we make of ‘call of conscience’ a synonym of deconstruction, and think of authenticity as an event of singularity. Can the call of conscience be that event of deconstruction which occurs ‘within me’ time and time again? As Thomas Wall reminds us: the call of conscience is not mine to make, as my ‘self’ was not mine to forget in the first place. To take it a step further: just as it isn’t in my power to make the call or to forget (for it is always ‘it’ who always calls and forgets in the Blanchotian sense), it isn’t even in my power to heed the call. The consequences of heeding the call will be felt entirely by me as an “I”, but the heeding itself will never be registered or undertaken by me. It must be an event which paralyses and dissolves the “I”. The instant of heeding – or event of authenticity as I would like to think of it – are each time singular and unpredictable, and it is only thus that they are paradoxically prone to ‘recurring’. The next instant of ‘authenticity’ infinitely singular, infinitely different from the last, and infinitely different from ‘it-self’. Yet it will also be infinitely of the same ‘genus’ of singularity as any other such event (can we entertain this thought for kicks?). The next instant will be entirely singular and new because each time it recalls us to the guilt of a forgetting that was not ‘done’ by the same “I”. I am not the same “I” that I was before that last event of authenticity precisely because that which ‘precedes’ the “I” is and is forgotten by the “I” – namely, the Other in Levinas – is itself never the same, never itself, but always becoming. We could even say that the forgetting is the forgetting of the very moment of forgetting and of the forgetter, by the forgetter itself. Always Other because it manages to remain other, different, nothing but difference, in the Deleuzeian sense. To conclude, the event of authenticity, this ‘call of conscience’, is never the same, not only because ‘he’ who forgets is never the same, but because that which is forgotten is never the same either. It is the split atom, that which continually disguises itself and shape-shifts at the same time as it is revealed. Therefore it cannot be traced. It merely leaves a trace, this trace being but the trace of a trace of a trace of a trace…