Haar (1985:2-3) – Being and Ereignis

Being is the commencement itself which does not cease happening. As the inaugural, being can neither pass away nor become a mere moment of History. If one day it recommences in a completely different way, it is because it is more originary than the series of epochs to which it has given birth. The discovery of this limit where the History of Being flows back, as it were, into itself, where it folds back upon the radical simplicity of the belonging-together of man and being — this is what Heidegger calls Ereignis: the "event of appropriation." It is an event in which all that happens is the non-coincidence of History with itself; all that happens is the play of being and man. Or rather, the coincidence of completed metaphysics with technology leaves a remainder, an unthinkable inverse, namely a more radical and ancient relation of being to man which governs all phases of History. Ereignis, the last word of thought and which is inaugural like "Tao," refers to the other side [face], the nonhistorical side of the "historical" reign of Technology. Ereignis, which does not belong to the History of Being, brings about with the abruptness of lightning the simple thought "outside any epoch": namely, if the essence of technology summarizes twenty-five centuries of Western history, being is thereby assembled into an ultimate and intense congealing of truth in which the forgetfulness of its destiny both increases and can reverse itself. If the elementary insight that man is the property of being and being the property of man belongs to a brief time, to an instant, to an instantaneous glimpse (Blitz-Blick), it is ahistorical and does not belong to any epoch. Heidegger often insists on the fact that Ereignis is not a new name for being, which means it is not the principle of a new epoch. The "event" (of thought) by which we are reappropriated by being and disabused of metaphysics is not itself historical. Because it raises the veil over the essence of being, over its withdrawal and its forgottenness — which is thereby potentially overcome — Ereignis is called "nonhistorical" and "beyond destiny": "What addresses us as Ereignis is itself nonhistorical (ungeschichtlich), or better, beyond destiny." [1] Only the perspective of Ereignis seems to allow for a place outside the History of Being and, in the end, for grasping it as a completed ensemble and recollecting it without aiming for a totalization of the Hegelian type. In any case, only Ereignis allows thinking to avoid the possible nihilism of a deconstruction necessarily dedicated to the indefinite traversal of "the closure" of metaphysics or to exploring its ambiguous edges and polysemic margins. Ereignis is the condition of entering into this non-metaphysical experience of the world that Heidegger sometimes describes as letting-be, or as the non-objectivized proximity of things, or as the completely non-anthropomorphic deployment of the four regions (earth/sky, mortals/gods) that reflect into each other. (p. 2-3)