In profound boredom, Dasein regresses, so to speak, to an animal condition: it is
consigned to something that refuses itself to it, exactly as the animal in its capti-
vation is captured and exposed in a non-unveiling. For this reason Heidegger can
write that profound boredom is the human phenomenon to which “captivation,
as precisely the essence of animality, apparently belongs in the closest proximity”
(p. 409/282). But it is precisely in this “being-held-in-suspense” ( Hingehaltenheit) of the human being with respect to the things that encircle it, in this self-refusal of
beings as a whole, that something like a possibility—the possibility of Dasein—is
produced in the human being. And this is precisely what the animal, captivated in
its disinhibitor, cannot do, because its relation to the environment is constituted
in such a way that a suspension and a possibility can never manifest themselves.
The human being thus appears as a living being that, in suspending its re-
lations to things, grasps beings in their self-refusal as possibility. It is an animal
that, in becoming bored, has awoken from and to its own captivation and can
now grasp it as such, a moth that, while the flame is consuming it, notices the
flame and itself for the first time. This means that Dasein is an animal that has
grasped its animality and has made of this the possibility of the human being.
But the human being is void, because it is only a suspension of animality.
10. Nowhere does Heidegger clearly pronounce a similar thesis, and it is
in fact possible that at a certain point he retreated before it. And yet perhaps
only such a thesis could allow us to understand why the clearing of Dasein is a
burden that it is necessary to take up, why mood or attunement reveals Dasein
in its being consigned and thrown into the “there.” The “there” that the human
being is and has to be and that stands before it as an implacable enigma has no
concrete content, because what is grasped in it through its suspension is only
animal captivation. This latter, which is something like an Ur-Stimmung and the
ultimate source of every human mood or attunement, is the dark jewel set in the
clearing of being, the black sun shining in the open.
For this reason, in the Beiträge, the fundamental attunement of the human
being to come is defined as “die Verhaltenheit,” re-straint, which is to say the
“readiness for the refusal as gift” (Heidegger 9, p. 15/14), and “das Erschrecken,”
the dismay that withdraws before something that is veiled and, at the same time,
holds Dasein enchanted with itself. And in the 1934–35 course on Hölderlin, it
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is the same factical situation, the same being irrevocably thrown into a given
condition that presents itself as a task: “the historical vocation is always that of
transforming the already-given [ das Mitgegebene] into what is given-as-task [ das Aufgegebene]” (Heidegger 11, p. 292/264). And if one wanted to name something
like the fundamental attunement or mood, the Grundstimmung that dominates
all of Heidegger’s thought, one would have to define it as being obstinately con-
signed to something that just as tenaciously refuses itself, or being consigned
to something unassumable. But this unassumable is nothing other than animal
captivation, the “essential shock” that arises out of the living being from its being
exposed and captured in a non-revelation. The living being is not simply a pre-
supposition, which can be dialectically overcome and conserved, but something
unassumable and obscure that remains in suspense in the very heart of Being.
11. This feeling of being implacably consigned to something that nevertheless
must be taken up—being-thrown as task—was perhaps at the root of the “pet-
ty-bourgeois radicalism” and “will to destruction” in Heidegger that so irritated
Löwith and Leo Strauss, and by which they partly explained his support of Na-
tional Socialism. And perhaps this also explains why, at the end of the eighties
in Paris, when Levinas, knowing of my participation in the seminars of Le Thor,
had asked about my impressions of Heidegger, he was so surprised that I had
found him “gentle.” Like Löwith, Levinas, who had known him in the thirties,
remembered him as strong and decisive, as someone who sought precisely to
assume a task that he did not manage to carry through.
I remember the moment of his arrival at Le Thor in September 1966. I met
him in the garden of the small hotel—it was called “Le chasselas,” named after
a vintage of the region—where he was also going to stay and suddenly his eyes
struck me, so lively, bright, and penetrating, with nothing at all downcast about
them, as in Löwith’s recollection. The expression on his face was at once severe
and gentle, of the kind of gentle severity that I had seen on the face of Tuscan
peasants. He was, or so it seemed to me, self-conscious and yet seemed to sud-
denly forget himself to abandon himself to a smile, as when I showed him the
photograph that I had just taken of him with a Polaroid (in those years it was
still a novelty) and he exclaimed with surprise: “Sie sind ein Zauberer!” (“You are
a magician!”). But he had impulses of anger that were just as sudden, as when,
toward the end of the seminar on Heraclitus, he said, staring at Jean Beaufret:
“You have constantly kept me from bringing the seminar to a conclusion.”
He stopped for a long time to watch bocce players in the village, comment-
ing on their moves with a sort of participatory, cheerful skill. And in the com-
THE USE OF BODIES
1197
pany of René Char or in Madame Mathieu’s house, he showed a comfortable
familiarity with the quality of the grape or wine. But when, near Aix, after a long
hike in the woods we reached the point where Cézanne placed his easel to paint,
he remained motionless for almost an hour, silent and as though struck dead be-
fore the stupendous vision of Ste. Victoire. Perhaps, even if the history of Being
had now reached an end and the fundamental mood or attunement was by this
time Gelassenheit, he still sought to assume the “there,” to remain in the clearing of Being, in suspended animality.
12. If the interpretation of the genesis of the human being from animality
that we have delineated here is correct, then possibility is not one modal cat-
egory among others but is the fundamental ontological dimension, in which
Being and the world are disclosed by the suspension of the animal environment.
And it is because Being reveals itself above all in the form of the possible that
Heidegger can write that “the human being, which as existent transcendence is
thrown before in possibility, is a being of distance” (Heidegger 10, p. 131/135).
The human being is a being of distance because it is a being of possibility, but
insofar as the possibility to which it is assigned is only the suspension of the im-
mediate relation of the animal with its environment, it contains the nothing and
non-being as its essential traits. And precisely because being-human is given to it
only as possibility, the human being is continually in the act of falling back into
animality. The privilege of
possibility in Heideggerian ontology is indissoluble
from the aporia that assigns humanity to the human being as a task that, as such,
can always be mistaken for a political task.
13. In 1929 at Davos, during the encounter—or clash—between Cassirer and
Heidegger, the young Emmanuel Levinas, who was attending with other com-
panions among whom was Franz Rosenzweig, resolutely took the side of Heideg-
ger. It is recounted that that evening, while they were discussing and celebrating
together the victory of the new thought against the old academic philosophy,
Levinas, putting a white wig on his head, had caricatured the neo-Kantian phi-
losopher, with his imposing, premature white hair. All the more striking, then,
is the fact that some of the central categories of the early Levinas can be read,
without forcing, as caricatures (in the etymological sense of an “affected [It.,
caricata] figure,” whose traits have, that is to say, been exaggerated) of Heideg-
gerian notions, particularly of being-thrown.
In the essay De l’évasion (cf. above, part I, §8.4), Levinas pushes the opacity
of Geworfenheit to the extreme, to the point of making of the brute fact of the
“there is” ( il y a), to which the human being is always consigned and “nailed
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down” ( rivé), the fundamental characteristic of his ontology. In the experience
of the “there is,” which is revealed in insomnia, “when there is nothing to watch
and despite the absence of any reason for remaining watchful,” we are delivered
over to an anonymous and oppressive presence, from which we cannot flee: “one
is held by being, held to be” (Levinas 2, p. 75/65).
That what is in question here every time is nothing other than a heighten-
ing of the Heideggerian being-thrown is not doubtful; but while in Heidegger
it is a matter precisely of assuming the “there” that Dasein is and has to be, by
contrast, for Levinas, by means of a caricatured exaggeration of the emotive
situation, of which he has highlighted the dreadful and shameful traits, it is
a question of running away from the experience of “being consigned,” from
which—Levinas seems to suggest—Heidegger never seems to have managed to
liberate himself. And the fact that the parodic intention here had a decisively
critical function is confirmed beyond any doubt by the brief text On the Phi-
losophy of Hitlerism written a year before, in which the same category of “being
nailed down” serves to define the Nazi conception of corporeity.
14. Oskar Becker, one of the most gifted of Heidegger’s early students, had
also sought to find a way out of the master’s thought by means of an exagger-
ation of the category of being-thrown. But while in Levinas it was a matter of
a caricature of excess, Becker seems to practice a sort of caricature of defect or
antiphrasis. To the Heideggerian pathos of being consigned, there corresponds
here the adventurousness and lightness of a mode of existing from which every
weight and every having-to-be seem to have disappeared.
The parodic intent is so little concealed that Becker, in opposition to the
Heideggerian ek-sistence, can call the “hyperontological” experience that he seeks
to analyze “paraexistence,” and in the same sense, he can place a Dawesen precisely alongside Dasein.
One of the spheres in which Becker seeks to put what can be defined as
his “counter- or para-analytic of Dasein” to the test is the existence of the
artist. Heideggerian being-thrown, he argues in a 1929 essay, is not sufficient
to account for the peculiar Dasein of the genius in all its aspects. Here the
“character of weight” that defines Dasein in its being consigned and thrown
into the “there” disappears. The artist’s mode of existence, which is not simply
historical but “adventurous and eventful,” needs a new ontological category
to be grasped, which can be approximately designated as “quasi-existential
or para-existential.” The “paraexistential” that is in question appears as some-
thing symmetrically inverse with respect to the existentials that Heidegger calls
THE USE OF BODIES
1199
“ being-thrown” and “projected.” For this reason Becker calls it “being carried”
( Getragensein; Becker, passim).
Taken literally, Becker argues, the expression could be misunderstood, as if
one still had to do with a weight that must be supported. “With being-carried
( vehi, pheresthai), one must rather think the peculiar weightless mobility of the
firmament in the ancient conception (not Newtonian mechanics, according to
which, by contrast, gravitation and centrifugal force uninterruptedly drag the
stars along in the heavens).”
That is to say, we are dealing with a being carried without there being any-
thing that supports us, with a condition in which what carries us is not—as
in Heideggerian being-thrown or persuasion in Michelstaedter—the weight to
which we are consigned but precisely the opposite, our absolute lack of weight
and lack of a task. This does not mean that the artist lives in complete un-
consciousness or outside history: instead, the peculiar “adventurousness” of his
existence is situated “at the midpoint between the extreme insecurity of the pro-
jected-thrown and the absolute security of being-carried, between the extreme
problematicity of everything historical and the absolute ‘no problem’ of every
natural being” (ibid., pp. 31–32).
In this sense, being-thrown and being-carried define the two poles between
which the various grades and modalities of existence are deployed and articu-
lated. And as the form par excellence of being-carried, the inspiration of artistic
existence—“heedless and not menaced by guilt and death” (p. 36)—is the oppo-
site of the anguished and decisive being consigned to a task. And yet it is, at the
same time, exposed in a fragility and caducity that being-thrown does not know.
15. Nothing compares to the condition described by Becker like the am-
orous experience, and the best testimony of being-carried is not found in the
writings and working notes of artists but in the diary of a woman in love: Helen
Grund Hessel.
Even though the events narrated in this diary are known from other sources
and inspired a very celebrated film in the sixties, the edition published in 1991,
almost ten years after the author’s death, constitutes an exceptional document, in
which, beyond the extraordinary amorous events that are narrated there, a form
of life testifies of itself with an absolutely incomparable intensity and immediacy.
The diary covers three months, from August to October 1920. The existence
that is described there in all its particulars, including intimate details, is never
exhausted in a series of deeds and episodes, and thus it does not in any way
constitute anything like a biography. Helen’s life is “carried” to such a point
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that nothing can be isolated in it and acquire a factual consistency: everything
flows and passes ceaselessly into vision (the diary is strewn with such moments
in which the account
breaks into a vision). And her being-carried is not some-
thing individual but drags along with itself the existence of the persons who
surround her, from her lover Henri-Pierre Roché to her husband Franz Hessel,
from her sons Uli and Stéphane to her sister Bobann and her friends Thankmar
von Münchhausen, Herbert Koch, and Fanny Remak. The life that Helen lives
and the life through which she lives are identified without remainder, and what
appears in this coincidence is no longer a presupposed life but something that,
in life, ceaselessly surpasses and overtakes it: a form-of-life.
PART THREE
Form-of-Life
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1
Life Divided
1.1. A genealogy of the concept of zoè must begin from the recognition—
not initially to be taken for granted—that in Western culture “life”
is not a medical-scientific notion but a philosophico-political concept. The fif-
ty-seven treatises of the Corpus Hippocraticum, which gather the most ancient
texts of Greek medicine, composed between the last few decades of the fifth
century and the first few of the fourth century bce, fill ten quarto volumes in
the Littré edition. But an examination of the Index Hippocraticum shows that the
term zoè occurs there just eight times, and never in a technical sense. That is to say, the authors of the Corpus were able to describe in minute detail the humors
that compose the human body and whose equilibrium determines health and
sickness; consult one another on the nature of nourishment, on the growth of
the fetus, and on the relation between modes of life ( diaitai) and health; describe the symptoms of acute maladies; and, finally, reflect on the medical art, without
the concept “life” ever assuming an important role and a specific function. This
means that to construct the techne iatrike (medical art), the concept “life” is not necessary.
א Of the eight texts of the Corpus in which the word zoè appears, three (“The Letter to Damagete,” “The Discourse at the Altar,” “The Discourse at the Embassy of Thessaly”) do not have a medical character and are certainly apocryphal. Of the other five
occurrences, three refer to the patient’s duration of life in relation to imminent death:
On Joints, 63, “life in such cases lasts only a few days” ( zoè oligomeros toutoisi ginetai); On Affections, 23: “there is no hope of life” ( zoes oudemia elpis); Precepts, 9: “they depart this life” ( metallassousi tes zoes). In two, finally, the sense could be relevant, but it is left entirely indeterminate: On the Heart, 7: “These ventricles are the fountains of a person’s being, and rivers pass from them through the body to water its frame; these rivers carry life to
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 186
