Schürmann (1982:264-267) – epocal / clareira

Legein, it will be recalled, was the second guiding category among the prospective ones, and the ‘eternal return’, the second among the retrospective categories. Both addressed the self-structuring, Selbstauslegung, of presencing into a field of presence. They described how presencing ‘interprets itself’, renders itself explicit, unfolds. From the transitional viewpoint, it appears that presencing articulates itself in ‘epochs’ only inside the closed field of onto-theology. Epechein, it will also be recalled, signifies the self-withholding of presencing throughout the ages of metaphysics, the ‘forgottenness of being’. The danger which grows as metaphysics tightens its grip in the form of technology is nothing but this epechein. “The danger is the epoch of being.” But since the category ‘world and thing’ as well as the two that depend on it, ‘favor’ and ‘event’, are traits of presencing independently of its groundedness in present entities, under the hypothesis of metaphysical closure one can no longer speak of epoche. Expressions such as “epoch in which being qua being withholds itself,” “epoch of the withdrawal” have then something pleonastic about them. Instead of ‘epoch’, the phenomenology of the turning has to speak of Selbstlichtung, “self clearing. ”

The hypothesis of withering epochs may seem to cancel what has just been shown regarding the ‘event’, namely, that the transitional categories do not in any way anticipate a total self-giving of presencing, its shadowless reception, its possession without expropriation. And it is true that their function is not to break the seal of concealment and let daylight in on full presence. World, favor and event remain shot through with denial and retention. They remain finite. These titles even indicate the extreme consequence of the modern discovery of finitude. The second guiding category now brings precisely the modality of such radical finitude into relief. The decay of the epochs will not seem incompatible with the persistence of concealment in unconcealment, once it is understood that with the transgression of the closure presencing is not finite the way the epochs were. If, as has been shown, the legein gathers being and entities diversely according to the epochs, then ‘epoch’ designates the irruption of a new constellation of the ontological difference into entities such that its verbal-nominal function (eon) itself does not appear. To think the eon freed from principial overdeterminations – to think it, not in its Greek, but in its post-technological constellation, hence not as eon – means to think a double legesthai, double like Janus’s face. The trait of ‘gathering’ has to be traced through two sites, separated by the closure. Looking back, one would see the epochs of philosophy extending from Plato to that “site in which the whole of its history gathers itself in its most extreme possibility.” This first site, the extreme of the history of metaphysics, is technology. Looking forward, “thinking may, one day, no longer shun the question whether the clearing, the free opening, is not (221) the site in which alone pure space and ecstatic time, as well as everything present and absent in them, are gathered and sheltered.” This second site, the extreme of the old problems of time and space as well as of the entities appearing within them, is the locus toward which the technological threshold is to be transgressed.

In the first locus of gathering, technology, philosophy “comes to an end.” It follows that its second locus, the “clearing” (Lichtung in the active sense), operates beyond the consummation of philosophy as that constituted discourse whose essence is the same as technology’s: “Of the clearing, philosophy knows nothing.”

The clearing remains akin to the epoche, which it replaces, by the sudden revealings of presencing, as if by lightning strokes. The metaphor of clearing must thus not be taken to suggest a patch of light, be it conceived as lumen naturale or as a “fixed stage with a permanently raised curtain,” but a fulguration; not an open field, but the opening up of a field; not a glade in a forest, but (to pursue the sylvan metaphor dear to Heidegger) the very felling of the wood. It must be taken to evoke a setting-out, but not an arrangement settled-in; an event of ‘standing out’ (herausstehen) from concealment, but not the opposite of concealment. So metaphorized, the event of clearing explicitly links the process of absencing to the process of presencing. It also links the peripheral absence of certain entities to the presence of those given by a clearing. This anticipatory title addresses the “bolt” (κεραυνός) of gathering both as it includes entities in the realm of presence and as it excludes others that remain absent. The concept of clearing differs from that of epoche in that it makes explicit the absencing within presencing. In the movement of emergence, of coming into the light of day, in the dawn, it greets both the night that holds back the nascent clarity, and the day that tears the brightening from it. The concept of clearing negates the epochal negation of absencing within presencing, it negates the forgottenness of concealment. To think of presencing as an event of clearing means to think of it in itself and in such a way that absencing is ‘retrieved’ in it. The clearing literally imparts, gives to present entities their share of presence and to absent entities their share of absence. Its categorial stress, however, lies not on (ontic) availability or unavailability, but on the imparting and the giving, or the alleviating and lightening, the lifting-off from oblivion.

The prospective category of logos already functioned as the dispensation of a place or a site, as situation. The logos divided the sum of entities into those present to and those absent from a given economy. It emphasized the arrival of entities in presence and thus, too, ‘accused’ the path from absence to presence. But strictly speaking, legein is not the event of presencing. Rather, it is, as will be recalled, the setting apart, the factor of differentiation that accounts for economic inclusions and exclusions as well as for the sequence of historical epochs. Logos is what allows Heidegger to think being as history of being, as destinal time. But for that very reason, logos is (222) not sufficient for thinking the end of the “stampings of being,” nor, put positively, “the possibility of a path toward presence.” This question of the possibility of wresting entities from absence points beyond the epochs. What responds to that question is the event of clearing. Under the name of clearing, the economies, which are ontic and describable, are explicitly thought of as a function of ontological and transcendental presencing. ‘Clearing’ is a category of a transcendental phenomenology that can dispense with the ‘history of being’ as the systematic link to descriptive phenomenology. The retrospective category, the eternal return, was unfit even for suggesting such a condition of possibility, so exclusive was the reference to man around whom technology orders all things into a circle of availability. The fixity of that circle makes concealment in general unthinkable. It makes it even impossible to understand how entities can remain shut out, absent, from any economy. The pretense to total presence thus proceeds under the trait of eternal return, not of clearing. If‘clearing’ is the word by which Heidegger seeks to think presencing independently of its epochal scansions, this category stresses precisely the movement of absencing in presencing, the undertow away from constant presence, and thereby originary time or the event. “Time … is the clearing of being itself.” It is not the least of ironies that such a transgression of the epochal regime in its entirety should be made possible by the technological danger or peril: “The essence of the danger conceals the possibility of a turning in which the forgottenness of being’s essential unfolding so turns about that, with this turning, the truth of the essence of being properly turns in – turns homeward – into entities.” When, with technology, the thought of the event of appropriation and of the clearing becomes epochally possible, the epochs wither away. This decay provides thought with what will henceforth be its sole issue: “instead of‘Being and Time,’ ” “clearing and presenting].” “The task of thinking would then be to relinquish all thinking until now to the determination of (that) issue for thinking.” Under the reign of epochal principles the absence that characterizes the event remains unthinkable. To work through the philosophy born under their aegis, to surrender the epoche to the ‘clearing’, is to espouse the precarious in place of the principial, the phenomenal surface in place of unshakeable foundations; it is to permeate presencing with absencing.