be taken over by philosophy, a question that Heidegger repeats by submitting the history of
metaphysics to it. Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word
“being” nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the
language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language
(concesso non dato), at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of
its irreducible simplicity. One could thus think that it remains only to choose between two
possibilities. (a) Does a modem linguistics, a science of signification breaking the unity of the
word and breaking with its alleged irreducibility, still have anything to do with “language?”
Heidegger would probably doubt it. (2) Conversely, is not all that is profoundly meditated as
the thought or the question of being enclosed within an old linguistics of the word which one
practices here unknowingly? Unknowingly because such a linguistics, whether spontaneous or
systematic, has always had to share the presuppositions of meta-physics. The two operate on
the same grounds.
It goes without saying that the alternatives cannot be so simple.
On the one hand, if modern linguistics remains completely enclosed within a classical
conceptuality, if especially it naively uses the word being and all that it presupposes, that
which, within this linguistics, deconstructs the unity of the word in general can no longer,
according to the model of the Heideggerian question, as it functions powerfully from the very
opening of Being and Time, be circumscribed as ontic science or regional ontology. In as
much as the question of being unites indissolubly with the precomprehension of the word
being, without being reduced to it, the linguistics that works for the deconstruction of the con-
stituted unity of that word has only, in fact or in principle, to have the question of being posed
in order to define its field and the order of its dependence.
Not only is its field no longer simply ontic, but the limits of ontology that correspond to it no
longer have anything regional about them. And can what I say here of linguistics, or at least of
a certain work that may be undertaken within it and thanks to it, not be said of all research in
as much as and to the strict extent that it would finally deconstitute the founding concept-
words of ontology, of being in its privilege? Outside of linguistics, it is in psychoanalytic
research that this breakthrough seems at present to have the greatest likelihood of being
expanded.
Within the strictly limited space of this breakthrough, these “sciences” are no longer
dominated by the questions of a transcendental phenomenology or a fundamental ontology.
One may perhaps say, following the order of questions inaugurated by Being and Time and
radicalizing the questions of Husserlian phenomenology, that this breakthrough does
((22))
not belong to science itself, that what thus seems to be produced within an ontic field or
within a regional ontology, does not belong to them by rights and leads back to the question of
being itself.
Because it is indeed the question of being that Heidegger asks metaphysics. And with it the
question of truth, of sense, of the logos. The incessant meditation upon that question does not
restore confidence. On the contrary, it dislodges the confidence at its own depth, which, being
a matter of the meaning of being, is more difficult than is often believed. In examining the
state just before all determinations of being, destroying the securities of onto-theology, such a
meditation contributes, quite as much as the most contemporary linguistics, to the dislocation
of the unity of the sense of being, that is, in the last instance, the unity of the word.
It is thus that, after evoking the “voice of being,” Heidegger recalls that it is silent, mute,
insonorous, wordless, originarily a-phonic (die Gewähr der lautlosen Stimme verborgener
Quellen . . .). The voice of the sources is not heard. A rupture between the originary meaning
of being and the word, between meaning and the voice, between “the voice of being” and the
“phonè,” between “the call of being,” and articulated sound; such a rupture, which at once
confirms a fundamental metaphor, and renders it suspect by accentuating its metaphoric
discrepancy, trans-lates the ambiguity of the Heideggerian situation with respect to the
metaphysics of presence and logocentrism. It is at once contained within it and transgresses it.
But it is impossible to separate the two. The very movement of transgression sometimes holds
it back short of the limit. In opposition to what we suggested above, it must be remembered
that, for Heidegger, the sense of being is never simply and rigorously a “signified.” It is not by
chance that that word is not used; that means that being escapes the movement of the sign, a
proposition that can equally well be understood as a repetition of the classical tradition and as
a caution with respect to a technical or metaphysical theory of signification. On the other
hand, the sense of being is literally neither “primary,” nor “fundamental,” nor
“transcendental,” whether understood in the scholastic, Kantian, or Husserlian sense. The
restoration of being as “transcending” the categories of the entity, the opening of the
fundamental ontology, are nothing but necessary yet provisional moments. From The
Introduction to Meta-physics onward, Heidegger renounces the project of and the word ontol-
ogy. 12 The necessary, originary, and irreducible dissimulation of the mean-ing of being, its
occultation within the very blossoming forth of presence, that retreat without which there
would be no history of being which was completely history and history of being, Heidegger’s
insistence on noting that being is produced as history only through the logos, and is nothing
outside of it, the difference between being and the entity—all this clearly indicates that
fundamentally nothing escapes the movement of the signifier
((23))
and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier
is nothing. This
proposition of transgression, not yet integrated into a careful discourse, runs the risk of
formulating regression itself. One must therefore go by way of the question of being as it is
directed by Heidegger and by him alone, at and beyond onto-theology, in order to reach the
rigorous thought of that strange nondifference and in order to deter-mine it correctly.
Heidegger occasionally reminds us that “being,” as it is fixed in its general syntactic and
lexicological forms within linguistics and Western philosophy, is not a primary and absolutely
irreducible signified, that it is still rooted in a system of languages and an historically deter-
mined “significance,” although strangely privileged as the virtue of dis-closure and
dissimulation; particularly when he invites us to meditate on the “privilege” of the “third
person singular of the present indicative” and the “infinitive.” \Vestem metaphysics, as the
limitation of the sense of being within the field of presence, is produced as the domination of
a linguistic form.13 To question the origin of that domination does not amount to
hypostatizing a transcendental signified, but to a questioning of what constitutes our history
and what produced transcendentality itself. Heidegger brings it up also when in Zur Seinsf
rage, for the same reason, he lets the word “being” be read only if it is crossed out
(kreuzweise Durchstreichung). That mark of deletion is not, however, a “merely negative
symbol” (p. 31) [p. 83]. That deletion is the final writing of an epoch. Under its strokes the
presence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible. Is effaced while