Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley

University of Maine
tony_brinkley.academic@admin.umead.maine.edu

 

The place where they lay, it has a name–it has none. They did not lie there.

 

Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat einen Namen–er hat keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort.

 

–Paul Celan, “The Straitening [Engführung]”

 

Part I

 

I(a). Saying

 

LEGEIN–A 1951 lecture by Heidegger on Heraclitus offers a series of readings of the Greek word LEGEIN, and, in response to the semantics of the word, discovers “the beginning of Western thinking, [when] the essence of language flashed in the light of Being” (“Logos” 78). “We have stumbled,” Heidegger writes, “upon an event whose immensity still lies concealed in its long unnoticed simplicity,” that “the saying and talking of mortals comes to pass from early on as LEGEIN, [as] laying [Legen],” so that “saying and talking occur essentially as the letting-lie-together-before [das bei-sammen-vor-liegen-Lassen] of everything which, laid in unconcealment, comes to presence” (63/8). As a sign, Heidegger suggests, LEGEIN “refers to the earliest and most consequential decision concerning the essence of language” (63). “Where did it [the decision] come from?” he asks (63). He does not answer this question historically but philosophically. “The question reaches into the uttermost of the possible essential origins of language. For, like the letting-lie-before that gathers [als sammelndes vor-liegen-Lassen], saying receives its essential form from the unconcealment of that which lies together before us [der Unverborgenheit des beisammen-vor-Liegenden] . . . the unconcealing of the concealed into unconcealment [that] is the very presencing of what is present [das Anwesen selbst des Anwesenden] . . . the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden]” (64/8). From another perspective, one might have said instead that LEGEIN becomes the evidence of a different event, the offering up of language to philosophy (specifically, and quite recently, to Heidegger’s philosophy). But, whatever the reading, is LEGEIN as evidence a saying, is it a sign in the sense that LEGEIN speaks of signs? If not, then–as evidence–LEGEIN might be the sign of a semantics for which LEGEIN itself does not speak.

 

What does LEGEIN say?

 

What LEGEIN says may be different from what LEGEIN shows–To put this another way, what Heidegger says with LEGEIN may turn out to be distinct from what use of LEGEIN (the offering up of language to philosophy, and specifically to Heidegger’s philosophy) indicates. Not that Heideggerian philosophy is not alive to the indications: the interpretation of LEGEIN as evidence (as what we will refer to later as an index) shapes Heidegger’s presentation of language. Already in Being and Time (1927) he writes that “LEGEIN is the clue [der Leitfaden, the guide] for arriving at those structures of Being [der Seinsstrukturen] which belong to the beings we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or [in] speaking about it [des im Ansprechen und Besprechen begegnenden Seienden]” (47/25. Translation modified). And: “in the ontology of the ancients, the beings encountered within the world [das innerhalb der Welt begegnende Seiende],” and which are taken as an example “for the interpretation of Being [ihrer Seinauslegung],” presuppose that the Being of beings “can be grasped in a distinctive kind of LEGEIN [in einem ausgezeichneten LEGEIN]” that “let[s] everyone see it [the specific being] in its Being [in seinem Sein]” (70/44. Translation modified). Whatever the turns in perspective between Heidegger’s earlier and later writing, the approach to LEGEIN as a clue and guide, as Leitfaden, is not abandoned. Nor is the interpretation of the clue (of what saying shows) as indicative of the ontological difference between Being and beings. As a complement to the semantics of LEGEIN, there is always this semantics as well, a semantics of showing, a complement to be found not only in Heidegger’s writing but in the writing of his contemporaries as well. A concern with showing may itself be indicative of a collective project in which any number of collaborators knowingly or unknowingly participate (in this essay we will be concerned, in addition to Heidegger, with Wittgenstein, Peirce, Benjamin, Arendt, and Celan, but this list–like the essay– should be regarded as open-ended). At the same time, inasmuch as a concern with showing (and with what shows-up) will have as a kind of remainder what does not show-up, or what remains concealed, or what might be selected to go unnoticed, a reading of evidence which restricts itself to the relations between Being and beings can turn out to be at the expense of the specific historical referents to which evidence points but which a turn toward Being conceals. The second part of this essay will be concerned specifically with the way particular histories can turn up.

 

What does LEGEIN say?–The word can be translated as talking or saying, as expression (“Logos” 60). Heidegger says (60) that LEGEIN can also be translated as laying down before (like the German legen), as lying (like the German liegen), and as arranging, or gathering together (like the German lesen). Elsewhere Heidegger writes that translation requires “thoughtful dialogue” in which “our thinking must first, before translating, be translated” (“Anaximander” 19). It is in “thoughtful dialogue” with LEGEIN that Heidegger finds that “the saying and talking of mortals comes to pass from early on as LEGEIN.” Heidegger’s reading of LEGEIN might be regarded as an instance of LEGEIN, i.e. as an example of the decision it describes: “LEGEIN properly means the laying-down and laying-before [Nieder- und Vor-legen] which gathers itself and others” (“Logos” 60/4), and these actions in turn have “come to mean saying and talking” (61). Henceforth, to express is “to place one thing beside another, to lay them together [zusammenlegen] . . . to gather [lesen]” (61/5). This makes them available for reading, but “the lesen better known to us, namely, the reading of something written remains but one sort of gathering, in the sense of bringing-together-into-lying-before [zusammen-in-Vorliegen-bringen]” (61/5). There is also “the gleaning at harvest time [die Ährenlese]” that “gathers fruit from the soil,” a “gathering” that involves “a collecting which brings under shelter” (61/5). This “safekeeping that brings something in has already determined the first steps of the gathering and arranged everything that follows” (61). It has arranged it as a sheltering. For “what would become of a vintage [eine Lese] which had not been gathered with an eye to the fundamental matter of its being sheltered” (61/6). This sheltering, according to Heidegger, the laying side by side in a selected order, is also what is meant by saying. It determines that saying (LEGEIN) will be “from the start a selection [eine Auslesen] which requires sheltering”: “the selection [die Auslese] is determined by whatever within the crop to be sorted shows itself to-be-selected [als das Erlesene zeigt]” (62/6). It shows itself to-be-selected in terms of “the sorting [das Erlesen]” or “the fore-gathering [das Vor-lese]” that “determines the selection [die Auslese]” (62/6), so that “the gatherers [die Lesenden] assemble to coordinate their work” according to the “original coordination [that] governs their collective gathering” (62/6). This governance determines the essential choice in the selection of “things [to] lie together before us” (62), of that which “lies before us [and] involves [angliegt] us and therefore concerns us” (62/7). Saying produces this lying before that involves and concerns us, and that is selected to be sheltered by the saying–a sheltering, Heidegger says, that is the equivalent of truth, of unconcealment (ALETHEIA). So that saying means “shelter[ing]” and “secur[ing] what lies before us in unconcealment [des Vorliegenden im Unverborgenen] . . . the presencing of that which lies before us into unconcealment [das Anwesen des Vorliegenden in die Unverborgenheit]” (63/7). At the same time, implicit in Heidegger’s reading is the understanding that what will also be involved is a selection of what will not be included, sheltered, selected, a selection of the excluded that will then remain in concealment (LETHEIA, untruth), and henceforth go without saying.

 

What does the selection exclude?–Heidegger’s reading of LEGEIN might be exemplary in this regard as well. Fundamental to this reading is the recognition of an exclusion in what is said. Inasmuch as saying is a presencing of what is present, and presencing (das Anwesen) cannot be included as what is present (das Anwesende). Inasmuch as the saying of what is said cannot be included as what is said.

 

Then how does one know the presencing of what is said? One might say that, in addition to what is said, Heidegger points it out, but this pointing out–this showing of the saying of what is said as the presencing of what is present–would be indicative of a semantics that remains unsaid.

 

Of what, without saying, does LEGEIN give evidence?

 

I(b).Showing

 

“[T]he lighted and the lighting”–In a 1942-43 lecture course on Parmenides, Heidegger uses the distinction between “the lighted and the lighting” to indicate the difference between unconcealment (ALETHEIA, truth) and the unconcealed: on the one hand, “the determining radiance, the shining and appearing” of ALETHEIA; on the other hand, the “ones who look and appear in the light” of this truth (Parmenides 144). In a 1954 lecture, also on Parmenides, Heidegger employs the same figure of speech to distinguish between presencing and what is present: “every presencing [is] the light in which something present can appear” (“Moira” 96); while “what is present attains appearance [Erscheinen],” in this appearance “presencing attains a shining [Scheinen]” (97/48).

 

Is this then how LEGEIN gives evidence of what it cannot say, of what occurs in addition as the saying?

 

All these distinctions might be interpreted as more of what is said, as what through this saying is made present. Given such an interpretation–which is also a reading for which the meanings of LEGEIN allows–the evidence of what LEGEIN cannot say will remain concealed. A concealment that Heidegger calls the destiny of Western thinking. Insofar as Western thinking is restricted to this semantics of LEGEIN.

 

But isn’t it precisely the work of a Heideggerian reading that, while it restricts thinking to this semantics, it approaches thinking in a way that exemplifies a different semantics, one in which what is said gives evidence of what it cannot say? So that the writing is not so much a gathering, laying before and in front, sheltering, selecting, or saying, as it is an indication of what cannot be gathered, laid before and in front, sheltered, selected, said? Inasmuch as Heidegger points to a distinction between what is said and the saying as something that is not said, but that nevertheless can be shown in what is said and by what is said? So that through the unconcealment (truth, ALETHEIA) of what is said, the unconcealment of LEGEIN as presencing is shown: “the presencing (of what is present) manifests itself [das Anwesen (des Anwesenden) selbst zeigt] . . . the manifold shining of presencing itself [das vielfältige Scheinen des Anwesen selber]” (“Moira” 98/48)?

 

How else might we approach this shining?

 

Cf. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), where a distinction like the difference between lighting and lighted also occurs–In the Tractatus, the distinction between saying and showing will be adopted to account for what propositions can and cannot say, where “what can be shown [gezeigt] cannot be said [gesagt]” (4.1212). The Tractatus regards propositions as logical pictures, saying as a kind of picturing: “a picture [Bild] can picture [abbilden, depict or represent] any reality whose form it has” (Tractatus 2.171. Translation modified). What a “picture cannot picture [is] its [own] form of picturing [Form der Abbildung]; it shows it” (2.172. Translation modified). A picture cannot picture its own form of picturing because a “picture pictures its object from without (this standpoint is its form of representation)” (2.173. Translation modified), i.e. its form of picturing. A picture cannot picture its form of picturing (this standpoint from without) because it “cannot . . . place itself outside its [own] form of representation” (2.174), outside its own standpoint. A picture’s form of picturing can only be displayed, i.e. shown by the picture without being pictured. It cannot be represented; it can only be exhibited.

 

The Tractatus anticipates the radiance to which Heidegger refers, the shining in what is lighted of the lighting (the presencing of what is present that “manifests itself [selbst zeigt]” [“Moira” 98/48]). “There is indeed the inexpressible [Unaussprechliches],” Wittgenstein writes in 1921. “This shows itself [Dies zeigt sich]” (Tractatus 6.522). One might speak of the semantics of this display. Wittgenstein said as much in a 1919 letter to Russell, commenting on work toward the Tractatus: “The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions–i.e. by language (and what comes to the same, what can be thought)–and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy” (quoted in Anscombe, 161). But should the concern with a semantics of showing be restricted to “what cannot be expressed . . . but only shown”? Specifically should it be restricted to what is shown by an expression but which the expression cannot express?

 

In connection with Heidegger’s Being and Time, Wittgenstein said (1929) that while “we do run up against the limits of language” and “are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said,” this “inclination, the running up against, indicates something” (Conversations 68-69). Given Wittgenstein’s subsequent understanding (1930s–1940s) of language as not singular but plural (the plurality is indicated by the many language-games that Wittgenstein can devise), one might say that the limits of one language (for example, a language of depiction) turn out to be within another (for example, a language of display). In running up against the limits of one language (or language-game), I might be part of another language (game) in which there is something indicated.

 

I(c). Toward an Indexical Criticism

 

DEIXO–We will say that, together with the semantics of LEGEIN, there is another semantics which seems to be its complement, a showing alongside the saying.

 

For the moment we will restrict the reference of showing to the saying of what is said, i.e. to LEGEIN as it is indicated in what is said.

 

Perhaps this semantics is always alongside and complementary to the semantics of LEGEIN, indicative at each moment, but subordinate, so that the showing is always of the production of what is said.

 

A comment of Aristotle’s may be illustrative in this regard (suggestive precisely because it is presented as unexceptional, involving a kind of distinction one makes–without argument–in the process of making an argument). Aristotle says that when “what is said [LEGETAI] is not alike,” but “appears so because of the expression [LEXIN],” what I take to be the same “because of the expression [LEXIN]” can be “shown [EDEIXEN]” to be different (178a).

 

On the one hand, LEXIN or LEGEIN (expression). Also LEXO or LEGO (to tell, to speak, to say, to express, to lay in order, to arrange, to gather, to select). And the lexical. Also, legibility.

 

On the other hand, EDIXA or DEIXO (to point out, point towards, to show, display, bring to light, to tell, to indicate). Also DEIGMA (sample or example), PARADEIGMA (paradigm). And DIKE (the way, custom, justice), which may “originally [have] meant the ‘indication’ of the requirement of the divine law” (Hugh Lloyd-Jones 167). Also the deictic, the indexical. Gestures and signs that point (this) out.

 

This then might be a complement for a semantics of LEGEIN, a semantics of DEIXO in addition. The significance for Aristotle lies in what is pointed out about what is said, and here too showing has been restricted to saying, i.e. to the reality constituted by saying. But showing in words might also be directed elsewhere, in response to what is shown in other circumstances, to material displays that are not first of all a matter of LEGEIN but of DEIXO. Just as saying is open-endedly nuanced in its semantics, won’t showing be as nuanced? So that the showing of what cannot be said might be only part of an open-ended existential continuum of the instances in which showing can meaningfully occur?

 

The Indexical–How might one describe the semantics of DEIXO? Cf. Peirce, where the nuances of showing serve to distinguish each of his three categories of signs. Not that this is always the emphasis in Peirce’s writing. Insofar as he approaches the study of signs as a study of representations, the semiotics he offers might still fall within the realm of LEGEIN, as a re-presentation or re-presencing. So that when he writes that “a sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (Elements of Logic 135)–that “it must ‘represent’ . . . something else” (136), so that “for certain purposes it [a sign] is treated . . . as if it were the other” (155)–this might be taken as an interpretation of the way words participate in presencing. But at the same time (often in the same passages, so that we are emphasizing a distinction that emerges in Peirce’s thought but is not held strictly apart from representation), Peirce approaches signs as referential. Then a sign is “anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which [it] itself refers (its object)” (169). Inasmuch as reference is a pointing–it indicates its referent, which Peirce calls its object, in such a way that another sign, which Pierce calls the interpretant of the first, will point to the same referent as the first (the reference of the second sign is determined by the reference of the first)–meaning becomes a showing.

 

It is the status of the object (or referent) and of the interpretant that distinguishes an index from Peirce’s other two categories of signs: a symbol or icon requires interpretation to be meaningful–regardless of any referent–whereas an index is meaningful regardless of interpretation: “an index is a sign which would, at once lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as [a] sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not (170). Even if the bullet-hole were never seen, even if an interpretant were never determined, the bullet-hole would still refer to the gun-shot.

 

But in a sense, given Peirce’s theory of reference, all signs will be indexical. Inasmuch as reference involves an existential (or material) relation, and the determination by a sign of an interpretant involves an existential (material) relation between the two (the relation of determining), any interpretant might be regarded as an index of the sign that determined it–whether anybody reads the interpretant as an index or not. One might say that insofar as a sign determines the reference of an interpretant, it is indexical in the sense in which Peirce writes that deictic words like “this” or “that” are indexical: “The demonstrative pronouns, ‘this’ and ‘that,’ are indices . . . [because] they call upon the hearer . . . [to] establish a real connection between his mind and the object; and if the demonstrative pronoun does that–without which its meaning is not understood–it goes to establish such a connection; and so is an index” (162). In the same way, an interpretant is also an index because a real connection is established with the referent. Given a theory of meaning as a theory of reference, meaning might be regarded as deictic, “more or less detailed directions for what the hearer is to do in order to place himself in direct experiential or other connection with the thing meant” (163). This connection would be the interpretant; the interpretant would also be an index of the sign that determined this reference.

 

Within an indexical semantics one might then distinguish: as object or referent, what shows itself to be shown (the shot fired into the wood); as sign, the showing of what shows itself to be shown (the bullet-hole as a sign of the shot); as interpretant, the pointing out–more or less interpretative in its gesture–that responds to this showing (the deictic gesture by which I indicate this as the sign that a shot was fired). At the same time, the interpretant will also be an index of the sign that determined this reference. One might say that any interpretant indexes its production. ¹

 

Reading Heidegger and Wittgenstein indexically–Crucial to Heideggerian philosophy seems to be the understanding that what is present indexes presencing even when this reference goes unrecognized. If saying is a presencing, then what is said (presenced) becomes an index of the saying (presencing). As an index, what is said exists in an indexical relation with the saying and can determine an interpretant to refer to the saying (presencing) as well. So that the interpretant is in turn an index of the power of what is said (what is present) to determine a reference to the saying (presencing) that it indexes.

 

And with respect to Wittgenstein’s work in the Tractatus: in representing the world, a picture (ein Bild) simultaneously indexes its form of picturing, and can therefore determine an interpretant to refer to this form of picturing as well. Thus the interpretant will index the power of a picture to determine a reference to its form of picturing. However, the indexing by the picture of its form will occur regardless of interpretant.

 

We might want to explore a range of indexical reference that exists regardless of interpretation, the bullet-hole, for example, as a historical instance–To the extent that the bullet-hole determines a saying, the saying will also be an index of the bullet-hole. Inasmuch as the bullet-hole is an index of the shot, the saying will also be an index of the shot. But then the saying of this, although a presencing of what is present, as this index of the past, would be secondary to the bullet-hole and to the shot that was fired, about which I still know very little, but of which indices remain, regardless of what I know. What happened once can be presented now, determined not only by the bullet-hole in the molding, but by its legibility as a sign at this moment, the complexity of indices, the complexities at this moment of reading: an existential, material tangle. What cannot be said might now have an additional resonance, not so much the logical or ontological constraint, but the existential, the material constraints on interpretation–that only a portion of what is indexed will be possible for me to interpret (though another interpreter might be able to interpret more or less). Given the determinants of possibility (including, perhaps, a sense of the freedom to interpret or the willingness to interpret). Given the legibility and illegibility of a sign at any given moment, of “an image [ein Bild, a picture] of the past [der Vergangenheit, of pastness] which unexpectedly appears” (Benjamin, “Theses” 255/270), “flash[ing] up at the instant . . . it can be recognized” (255/270), the possibilities of reading its “historical index [historische Index]” (Benjamin, “N” 8/577). “The image that is read,” Walter Benjamin writes, “I mean the image at the moment of recognition [Das gelesene Bild, das Bild im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit], bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse, that lies at the source of all reading [den Stempel des kritischen, gefährlichen Moments, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt]” (Benjamin, “N” 8/577-78).

 

Then how would an indexical criticism elaborate an alternative, or a complement, to the semantics of LEGEIN?–From the perspective of an indexical criticism, the semantics of LEGEIN seems to be restricted to a self-referential interpretation of its deictic gestures, to an indexing of the interpreting by what is interpreted. This restriction can also be read as an evasion of other indications that demand and exceed an interpretation, but that the deictic gestures of the interpretation can point out. Where interpretation as a deictic gesture is a more or less adequate response, a more or less responsive gesture (a saying in response to the indices that address you).

 

To approach an indexical criticism, one can begin by approaching what we have interpreted as the semantics of LEGEIN at a point where it indicates its own limits, but, in indicating those limits, it also marks its participation in a continuum of other indications, the indices and displays of an existential or material referentiality. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, we run up against limits and the running-up-against points to something–i.e. to a semantics of pointing out, indexing, showing–in which the indications of saying, representing, LEGEIN participate. It may turn out to be one of the gestures of LEGEIN to offer its saying as universal, to restrict semantics to its designations of meaning, and to offer encounters with its limits as an encounter with limits in general. So that what the running-up-against points to seems to be self-referential. Where an indexical criticism might begin is by questioning this universal claim. As if the limits we run up against could never point to something else.

 

Part II

 

II(a). A Farmhouse

 

Someone shows you the picture of a house, a white house as presented in a black and white photograph, or, actually off-white, a house that is slightly gray–You are asked what it is. You say, “This is a house.” Perhaps you should say, “This was a house,” or, “Then, this was a house.” Or: “Now, this is a picture of what then was a house.” In such ways a saying of what can be said responds to a presenting of what is present. As what was present is presented again. Or this index of an event in this way shown.

 

You are told, “This was a farmhouse,” that the photograph presents the picture of a farmhouse.

 

But inasmuch as the photograph is a picture of a house under construction, it offers perhaps what was not yet a farmhouse. The photograph of a building that was still to become a farmhouse, presenting as a picture what was not yet present to present. In the process of presenting, indexing the presencing of a farmhouse. Behind are pine trees (if asked, you will say, “These are pine trees,”) but in front, what is not yet a farmhouse.

 

Then: “This is an index of its construction.” Or: “This is the index of its presencing.” This house, you are told, was built of bricks.

 

But this does not look like a farmhouse. It may have been presented as such, you see the bricks in the picture that you were told were the bricks of the farmhouse, but the building is massive–Eventually you are told that this was never simply a farmhouse, that the presencing of this present was a deception. This, you are told, is what the photograph is a picture of: In late 1943, at Treblinka 2, after the camp had been demolished, a farm was created and “the bricks from the gas chambers were used for the farmhouse. . . . The deserted fields were plowed, lupine was sown, and pine trees were planted” (Arad 373). Subsequently, “a Ukrainian . . . name[d] . . . Strebel who had been a guard in Treblinka brought his family and began farming the area” (373). This was witnessed by Franciszek Zabecki: Strebel, Zabecki said, sent “for his family from the Ukraine . . . they all lived there until the arrival of the Russians” [quoted in Sereny 249]).

 

Then here are bricks from the Treblinka gas chambers; this is a farmhouse.²

 

Farmhouses were also built at Belzec and Sobibor. Odilo Globocnik wrote to Himmler that “for reasons of surveillance, in each camp a small farm was created which is occupied by a guard. An income must regularly be paid to him so that he can maintain the small farm” (quoted in Arad 371). The first of the three houses was built at Belzec where, after the camp had been dismantled (December 1942), “the whole area was plucked clean by the neighboring population.” “After leveling and cleaning the area of the extermination camp, the Germans planted the area with small pines and left,” but “at that moment, the whole area was plucked to pieces by the neighboring population, who were searching for gold and valuables. That’s why the whole surface of the camp was covered with human bones, hair, ashes from cremated corpses, dentures, pots, and other objects” (Edward Luczynski, a Polish eyewitness, quoted in Arad 371). In October 1943, Ukrainians, under German command, were sent from Treblinka and Sobibor to Belzec in order to restore the devastation. This work established the pattern to be followed later, first at Treblinka and then at Sobibor, toward the end of 1943, but the success of the operation was limited. Even in 1945 and thereafter, the farm continued to attract “masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands . . . digging and searching and raking and straining the sand” (Rachel Auerbach, member of the Polish State Committee for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes on Polish Soil, quoted in Arad 379). “The area was dug up again and again” (Arad 379).

 

II(b). “[ü]ber Seinen Schatten”

 

Toward an indexical criticism–We wish to consider the situation into which specific evidence places us. When we run up against the limits of language, one limit we run up against may turn out to be historical, that we come to a point when we can no longer say this, without this indicating something more as well, a limit to what words can say–that we run up against–as the history of what else they have said. Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus that the book would “draw a limit . . . to the expression of thoughts,” where “what lies on the other side of the limit [janseits der Grenze liegt, lies beyond the limit] will simply be nonsense [Unsinn, rubbish]” (Preface). What lies beyond the limit of the expression of my thought may be historical, however–including the histories those expressions carry with them. If, as Wittgenstein later found, the semantics of many words are determined by their use, are determined then as well by the situations in which words have occurred–“the meaning of a word [die Bedeutung eines Wortes] is its use in the language [ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache]” (Philosophical Investigations 20); “if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use” (The Blue and Brown Books 4)–then the semantics of a word will be inseparable from the histories of its recurrence.

 

“How hard I find it is to see what lies in front of my eyes [vor meinen Augen liegt]!” Wittgenstein wrote in 1940 (Culture and Value 39)–Under the influence of a linguistics that emphasizes the arbitrary or conventional nature of signs, it is always possible to ignore the existential force of the indexical, to reduce the index to a category of the deictic which itself has been reduced to a gesture dictated by convention.

 

But insofar as even when dictated by convention, the deictic (or any sign) is specific to particular circumstances or situations in which it occurs, inasmuch as in each case it becomes evidence of its occurrence (and therefore historical), it will continue as an index in Peirce’s sense (i.e. as an existential signifier), whatever the hermeneutic conventions which permit this recognition or exclude it. In the 1930s and 40s, Wittgenstein found that we will not know what a remark means–since we will not know its use–if we restrict interpretation to a generalized reading. When I say that “I know that that’s a tree [Ich weiß, daß das ein Baum ist] this can mean all sorts of things [kann alles mögliche bedeuten]” (“On Certainty” 45. Translation modified); it will continue to mean all sort of things–although in principle more than in practice–until I know the specific use, i.e. a specific history. “I look at a plant that I take for a young beech and that someone else thinks is a black-currant. He says ‘that is a shrub’ [Er sagt ‘Das ist ein Strauch’]; I say it is a tree [ein Baum]” (45). Or: “We see something in the mist which one of us takes for a man [einen Menschen], and the other says, ‘I know that that’s a tree [Ich weiß, daß das ein Baum ist]” (45). Or: “someone who was entertaining the idea [dem Gedanken] that he was no use any more might keep repeating to himself ‘I can still do this and this and this.’ If such thoughts often possessed him [öfter in seinem Kopf herum] one would not be surprised if he, apparently out of all context, spoke such a sentence [as ‘I know that that’s a tree’] out loud” (44-45). Or: if “I had been thinking of my bad eyes again and it [the statement] was a kind of sigh, then there would be nothing puzzling about the remark” (45).

 

I can also imagine a circumstance in which I no longer understood this sentence, “though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind” (44). I no longer understand this sentence: “it is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning” (44), i.e. on any use. At that moment what might otherwise be recognized as historical, might appear to be an arbitrary sign (I imagine that these words could mean anything), but here too the use (even in apparently lacking a specific history) is the index of a specific history.

 

“It would be difficult,” Peirce writes, “to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality” (172)– The referent of the conventional sign is general (the notion of a tree, rather than any specific tree), but this referent “has its being in the instances which it will determine” and by which it “will indirectly . . . be affected” (143). The tree in relation to specific trees and to specific uses of the word. Through use, both the word and the generality of its reference “will involve a sort of Index” (144). As Jakobson says of Saussure, even arbitrary signs (or what we may choose to regard as arbitrary signs) do not turn out to be arbitrary: what may be “arbitrarily described as arbitrary is in reality a habitual, learned contiguity, which is obligatory for all members of a given language community” (28). This will mean, however, that for members of a community, the contiguity is not arbitrary but existential, a history determining of what is said, what is said indexing this history (the saying of what is said becomes specifically historical). Peirce writes that the conventional sign, “once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. You write down the word . . . but that does not make you the creator of the word, nor if you erase it have you destroyed the word. The word lives in the minds of those who use it. Even if they are all asleep, it exists in their memory” (169). Given any sign, the determination of interpretants is unbounded. Each in turn determines, the sequence of interpretants accrues incrementally, references accumulate.

 

The point of departure may not be arbitrary, arbitrarily the arbitrary sign; it may be the index, the existential sign, indicative of the histories that are determining for members of a community. Then given the histories into which things have been gathered, the word “tree” will never be only the sign for a tree unless the word’s history is denied. Since the sign becomes a historical tangle.

 

“No one can jump over his own shadow”–In 1935, Heidegger used this expression for those who are entangled in the destiny of Being (Introduction to Metaphysics 167), and it is this destiny, he says, in 1935, that in connection with “National Socialism” has concealed from its followers “the inner truth and greatness of the movement [der inneren Wahrheit und Größe die Bewegung]” (166/152). Heidegger adds, however, that entanglement–this entanglement or a “different entanglement”–cannot be avoided, inasmuch as it is the destiny of Being, because “no one can jump over his own shadow [Keiner springt über seinen Schatten]” (167/152).

 

In 1953, Heidegger revised “die Bewegung [the movement]” to “dieser Bewegung [this movement],” no longer referring to National Socialism as he had in 1935, in a way (as a listener recounts) that “the Nazis, and only they, meant their own party” (Walter Bröcker, quoted in Pöggeler 241). At the same time, in 1953, Heidegger also added in a parenthetical phrase an interpretation of “the inner truth and greatness of this movement” as “the encounter between global technology and modern man,” a revision that allows National Socialism not to be an “indication of new well-being,” but a “symptom of decline” (Christian Lewalter, quoted in Habermas, “Work” 451). ³ Heidegger subsequently adopted this reinterpretation as having been there from the beginning, as “historically belonging” and “accurate in every respect” (quoted in Habermas, “Work” 452).⁴

 

But “no one can jump over his own shadow.” In 1962, while writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt reconnected this saying to “the movement”: “It was in the nature of the Nazi movement that it kept moving, became more radical with each passing month,” while its members “psychologically . . . had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with it, or, as Hitler used to phrase it, that they could not ‘jump over their own shadow'” (63). One might say that in what Arendt writes (and specifically for Heidegger as a prospective reader, given his reticence on the subject that Eichmann in Jerusalem addresses, given that he would have had to make the decision either to read or not to read a book of which he could not have been unaware, inasmuch as Arendt had written it, so that, even in not reading the book, he would at least have needed to turn from its address), “an image of the past . . . unexpectedly appears . . . flash[ing] up at the instant . . . it can be recognized” and “bear[ing] to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse that lies at the source of all reading.”⁵

 

II(c). “[e]in Rechtes Licht”

 

“How can one hide himself before that which never sets?”–In the summer of 1943, Heidegger commented on this fragment of Heraclitus (Diels 16: TO ME DUNON POTE POS AN TIS LATHOI), reading “that which never sets” as Being, presencing, das Anwesen: “each comes to presence,” Heidegger writes (“Aletheia” 119). “[I]n what else could that exceptional character of gods and men consist, if not in the fact that precisely they in their relation to the lighting can never remain concealed? Why is it that they cannot? Because their relation to the lighting is nothing other than the lighting itself, in that this relation gathers men and gods into the lighting and keeps them there” (119-120). But if “mortals are irrevocably bound to the revealing-concealing gathering which lights everything present in its presencing,” nevertheless “they turn from the lighting, and turn only toward what is present” (122). Turning toward being and away from Being, mortals hide themselves–or hide from themselves the awareness of–that which never sets. Or, as Heidegger wrote later, in 1946, “every epoch of world history is an epoch of [this] errancy” (“Anaximander” 27).

 

But perhaps, with respect to history, that which never sets is not the light of Being, but that which is there to come to light, the historical reference of indices, traces, evidence, reference produced from the referent. Where what brings them to light is our ability to respond to their persistence. I might hide myself from its legibility, but that which never sets might be the historical force of this lingering.

 

DIKE–From the perspective of the semantics Heidegger offered in the 1930s and 40s, LEGEIN can also be approached as deictic gesture, the gesture of LEGEIN is DIKE, which Heidegger, in 1946, does not translate (as has been customary) as das Recht (justice), but instead translates as das Fug (order). Just as ADIKIA, which has traditionally been translated as das Unrecht (injustice), is translated as das Un-fug (disorder) (“Anaximander” 41-43/326-28). So that the gesture of LEGEIN is not justice but ordering, and the resistance to the gesture is not injustice but disorder. In 1935 Heidegger wrote that “if DIKE is translated as ‘justice [Gerechtigkeit]’ taken in a juridical, moral sense, the word loses its fundamental metaphysical meaning” which “we translate . . . with order [Fug]” (Introduction to Metaphysics 135/123), as “the overpowering” that “imposes” and that “compels adaption and compliance” (135). This “overpowering as such, in order to appear in its power, requires a place, a scene of disclosure,” it needs beings that can be interpreted as its productions. To be human, i.e. to be-there (da-sein) is to be this interpreter of beings. Where the text is the interpreter’s existence (Dasein): “the essence of being-human opens up to us only when understood through the need compelled by Being itself. The being-there [Da-sein] of the historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of Being bursts in its appearing, in order that this breach itself [i.e. “the being-there of historical man”] should shatter against Being ” (Introduction to Metaphysics 136-37/124. Translation modified). In this light Heidegger spoke of Being as DIKE, as das Fug: “Being [das Sein] as DIKE [das Fug] is the key to being [das Seienden] in its structure [seinem Gefüge]” (140/127. Translation modified).

 

And of those who resist this structure, resisting its claim of origins–Those beings “stand in disorder [im Un-fug],” Heidegger writes, resistant to an order (ein Fug) that decrees that they appear, then disappear, according to their selection, as they are said and as they are harvested. In disorder “they linger awhile, they tarry [indem sie weilen, verweilen sie],” they are unwilling to go. “They hang on [Sie verharren]. . . . [T]hey advance hesitantly through their while [die Weile], in transition from arrival to departure. They hang on; they cling to themselves [sie halten an sich]. When what lingers awhile [die Je-Weiligen weilend] hangs on, it stubbornly follows the inclination to persist in hanging on . . . each dominated by what is implied in its lingering presencing [im weilenden Anwesen selbst] . . . the craving to persist. . . . Inconsiderateness impels them toward persistence, so that they may still present themselves [sie noch anwesen] as what is present [als Anwesende]” (“Anaximander” 45-46/331. Translation modified). Those who linger resist order precisely as their struggle, in presencing themselves as what is present, resisting the presencing of DIKE, the ordering force of Being. “When what lingers awhile delays . . . stubbornly follows the inclination to persist in hanging on, . . . [it] no longer bothers about DIKE, the order of the while [den Fug der Weile]” (45/331).

 

Or is DIKE the justice of a specific display?–Given the etymological connection between DIKE and DEIXO (to show, to point out, to display). So that the translation of justice as overpowering order might be at the expense of pointing this out, in 1935-46, despite the justice that pointing this out might oblige. Perhaps those who linger persist as a way of pointing this out. Their disorder might then be just.⁶

 

Lingering–In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Filip Müller, a survivor of Sonderkommando, at Auschwitz-Birkinau, recalls the moment in Crematorium II when the prisoners from the Czech Family Camp were to be killed and he chose to join them in the gas-chamber. “I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die,” but “a small group of women approached . . . right there in the gas chamber . . . . One of them said . . . ‘Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice [das Unrecht] done to us” (164-65).

 

Someone offers you the picture of a house–If DIKE is “the order of the while,” would it not be DIKE, this order, which is displayed when a farmhouse replaces gas chambers (as the building blocks of the one become the building blocks of the other. In the photograph of the farmhouse, the image of the bricks is visible, dark shadowing the white)?

 

Then what you see might be DIKE under construction, the order of a particular presencing as it presences what becomes present (at the expense of what is made absent).

 

Or would DIKE require attention to what lingers in the picture, in testimony, pointing out what this was?

 

If the photograph of the farmhouse brings to display what this was, then the photograph of the farmhouse always offers what only lingers. It leads to the question as to what was here before what was here, of what lingers in the lingering, “impelled . . . toward persistence.” It indicates the DIKE of your response.

 

Translation–Heidegger imagines translation as a crossing over: “in the brilliance of this lightning streak . . . we translate ourselves to what is said . . . so as to translate it in thoughtful conversation” (“Anaximander” 27). The result is not so much a sense of the past (“we translate ourselves to what is“–not what was–“said”) nor of a present positioned in relation to the past, but a primordial force, the sense of the originating coming to language, which we can only inadequately sustain, where the “thoughtful translation of what comes to speech . . . is a leap over an abyss” that “is hard to leap, mainly because we stand right on the edge” (19), we lack distance (the perspective offered by what was), we are too close to jump without falling short (“we are so near the abyss that we do not have an adequate runway for such a broad jump” [19]) unless our “thinking is primordial poetry” (19), the lightning streak. “Because it poetizes as it thinks, the translation which wishes to let the oldest fragment of thinking itself speak [the Anaximander fragment is the oldest surviving text of Greek philosophy] necessarily appears violent” (19). This violence, in particular, as an alternative to any historicism (including philological tradition) that would distance the primordial force.

 

But–without hiding from this force by taking refuge in a more comforting historicism–can we let the oldest fragment, this beginning (assuming that it is), only speak in this way (primordially, assuming that it would) as primordial poetry in 1946? In 1948 Paul Celan imagined a conversation with someone who demands “a bath in the aqua regia of intelligence” that would “give their true (primitive) meanings back to words, hence to things, beings, occurrences” (Prose 5). Because “a tree must again be a tree, and its branch, on which the rebels of a hundred wars have been hanged, must again flower in spring” (5). To which Celan imagines in reply: “What could be more dishonest than to claim that words had somehow, at bottom, remained the same!” (6).

 

Questioning–In 1933, in connection with “true knowing [Wissenschaft, science] in its beginning,” Heidegger said that while “two and a half millennia [have] passed since this beginning . . . that has by no means relegated the beginning itself to the past . . . . [A]ssuming that the original Greek Wissenshaft is something great, then the beginning of this great thing remains its greatest moment,” and “the beginning exists still. It does not lie behind us as something long past, but it stands before us,” it “has invaded our future; it stands there as the distant decree that orders us to recapture its greatness” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University” 32. Translation modified). In 1946, developing the same thought slightly differently, Heidegger writes that it is not the beginning that “stands before us,” but we who stand before it, this beginning being separated from us by an abyss on whose edge we stand and that we can only leap poetically. In 1933, Heidegger says as well that “if our ownmost existence stands on the threshold of a great transformation,” this threshold nevertheless requires that “the Greeks’ perseverance in the face of what is, a stance that was initially one of wonder and admiration, will be transformed into being completely exposed to and at the mercy of what is concealed and uncertain, that is, what is worthy of question,” a “questioning [that] will compel us to simplify our gaze to the extreme in order to focus on what is inescapable” (“The Self-Assertion of the German University” 33). In 1933, this questioning, which seemed to have “come together primordially into one formative force” (37), as “the glory and greatness of this new beginning” (38), involved Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism, an engagement in which he hoped (he said later ⁷) to influence the future of the movement, for example by advocating a leadership that would allow for opposition from its followers (“all leadership must allow following to have its own strength . . . to follow carries resistance within it. This essential opposition between leading and following must neither be covered over nor, indeed, obliterated altogether” [“The Self-Assertion of the German University” 38]).⁸ It is possible to accept this explanation, even to find it supported by what Heidegger said in 1933, and still question how accurately he focused or questioned what was inescapable, already in 1933 and later, where this questioning would “compel us to simplify our gaze to the extreme in order to focus on what is inescapable.” In 1933 Heidegger said that “it is up to us whether and how extensively we endeavor, wholeheartedly and not just casually, to bring about self-examination and self-assertion . . . . No one will prevent us from doing this. But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness. . . . Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision” (38). Hiding oneself from that which never sets.

 

Translation–Benjamin speculates (1923) that a translation “issues from the original–not so much from its life as from its afterlife [Überleben, survival]” (“The Task of the Translator” 71/58). Perhaps as an index is a survival, a lingering of its referent. In the Arcades Project, it is as afterlife that historical understanding occurs: “Historical ‘understanding’ is to be viewed primarily as an after-life [ein Nachleben] of the understood” (“N” 5/547), producing “an image . . . in which what has been [das Gewesene] and the Now [dem Jetzt] flash into a constellation” (“N” 8/578. Translation modified). Translations of DIKE might be regarded as specific images, where a difference (not ontological but historical) occurs between the specific time to which an image belongs and the specific time it comes to legibility. Translation as an image, the translation of DIKE as a coming to legibility: “the historical index of the images [der historische Index der Bilder] doesn’t simply say [sagt] that they belong to a specific time, it says primarily [er sagt vor allem] that they only come to legibility at a specific time [daß sie erst in einer bestimmten Zeit zur Lesbarkeit kommen]” (8/577. Translation modified). Or is this saying, a showing?

 

In this light–In contrast to Heidegger’s focus on beings that stand in disorder, tarrying, craving to persist, Benjamin, in a letter (April 14, 1938) to Gershom Scholem, distinguishes between different illuminations (where Heidegger questions the response to the light, Benjamin questions the lighting): “The point here is precisely that things whose place is at present [derzeit] in shadow [im Schatten] . . . might be cast in a false light [ins falshe Licht] when subjected to artificial lighting [kunstliche Beleuchtung]. I say ‘at present’ because the current epoch, which makes so many things impossible, most certainly does not preclude this, that a just light [ein rechtes Licht] should fall on precisely those things in the course of the historical rotation of the sun [im historischen Sonnenumlauf]” (Correspondence 216-17/262. Translation modified). Not tarrying but awaiting the “just light” and avoiding any artificial lighting: perhaps what this “just light” illuminates is a justice waiting to be found, perhaps as a lingering of DIKE. The persistence of this lingering, Benjamin suggests, even when no longer in what is present, can be found in the index of the past: “the past carries with it a temporal index [einen zeitlichen Index] by which it is referred to redemption” and because of which “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (“Theses” 254/268). Where Heidegger marks the difference between ontic relations among beings and the ontological distinction that separates Being from beings (ontic and ontological differences as defining of primordial relation), Benjamin distinguishes between die Gegenwart (the present) and die Jetztzeit (the time of Now), between the relation, on the one hand, “of the past to the present,” and on the other, “of the past to the moment” (“N” 8), “the present as the ‘time that is Now’ [der Gegenwart als der ‘Jetztzeit’]” (“Theses” 263/279. Translation modified). So that a past becomes legible, and Then gestures from the past to indicate the moment when This is Now. Now responds to Then, to the past’s address. The Then constitutes as Now the time that is historical. What comes to be read responds to the possibilities of the reading in which it is awakened. In 1940, Benjamin wrote that “as flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history” (“Theses” 255). The historian “must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations” (255).

 

To what else then might LEGEIN point?–In this essay, we began by talking about the presencing of what is present and the saying of what is said as if both were not also gestures of power, but what is striking about the semantics of LEGEIN–at least as it is offered by Heidegger–is the specific physicality of its force, that saying at the same time is a laying out before me, an act apparently predicated on my ability to produce (or, perhaps, reproduce) whatever I say as something that will remain in this position–spread out before me, subject to selection and harvesting. From this perspective, the gestures of LEGEIN will turn out to be productive of certain histories.

 

And if what I am saying is, for example, “You,” does this mean that in saying “You,” I also cause (or attempt to cause) you to lie there, spread out before me?

 

Perhaps with Heidegger in mind and in response, Celan writes in 1959 of “the snow-bed under us both, the snow-bed. / Crystal on crystal, / meshed deep as time, we fall, / we fall and lie there and fall [wir fallen und liegen und fallen]” (“Schneebett [Snow-bed]” 120-21). And in 1963: “unwritten things” that have “hardened into language” are “laid bare” like rocks from the ground. “The ores are laid bare [Es liegen die Erze bloß] . . . Thrown out upward, revealed / crossways, so / we too are lying [so / liegen auch wir]” (“À la pointe acérée” 192-93).

 

Translation–Heidegger says that unless what is said (presenced, gathered) is interpreted in the light of the saying (the presencing, the gathering), a concern for what is said can turn us away from the saying (presencing, gathering). From the beginning, however, this turning away has been the destiny of Being: “Presencing itself unnoticeably becomes something present [Unversehens wird das Anwesen selbst zu einem Anwesenden] . . . [it] is not distinguished from what is present [das Anwesende]. . . [and] the oblivion of the distinction, with which the destiny of Being begins and which it carries through to completion, is all the same not a lack, but rather the richest and most prodigious event: in it the history of the Western world comes to be borne out.” Because “what now is [was jetzt ist] stands in the shadow [im Schatten] of the already foregone destiny of Being’s oblivion [der Seinvergessenheit]” (“Anaximander” 50-51/335-36).

 

But what is now, in 1946, what oblivion has Being produced?

 

With respect to the semantics of LEGEIN and to the pre-Socratic thought to which he looks for the origins of this semantics, Heidegger writes that “our sole aim is to reach what wants to come to language . . . of its own accord . . . the dawn of that destiny in which Being illuminates itself in beings” (“Anaximander” 25), so that “in our relation to the truth of Being, the glance of Being, and this means lightning, strikes” (27). Because “only in the brilliance of this lightning streak can we translate ourselves to what is said” (27). “[I]t is essential that we translate ourselves to the source” (28).

 

But in doing the work of translation, in finding an originating semantics (assuming that it is originating) “what wants to come to language” in 1946–Given the selection and harvest that coincides with Heidegger’s hermeneutic project (albeit concealed from him, or from which he seemed later to turn away). In whose persistence the dawn might be reflected, but reflected in a different light. When (at Minsk, August 1941) “they had to jump into this and lie face downwards . . . they had to lie on top of the people who had already been shot and then they were shot . . . Himmler had never seen dead people before and in his curiosity he stood right up at the edge of this open grave—a sort of triangular hole–and was looking in” (quoted in Gilbert 191); when (in November 1943, at Majdanek, during the Erntfeste, the Harvest-festival action) the naked “were driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before” (quoted in Browning 139); when (during the same action, at Poniatowa) “we undressed quickly” and went into “the graves . . . full of naked bodies. My neighbour from the hut with her fourteen-year-old . . . daughter seemed to be looking for a comfortable place. While they were approaching the place, an SS man charged his rifle and told them: ‘Don’t hurry.’ Nevertheless we lay down quickly, in order to avoid looking at the dead. . . . [W]e lay down, our faces turned downwards” (quoted in Gilbert 630).

 

In 1940–Shortly before his suicide at Port Bou in 1940, Benjamin wrote of “the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate [dem Triumphzung, der die heute Herrschenden über die dahinführt, die heute am Boden liegen]” (“Theses” 256). He imagined the historian who “dissociates himself from” the procession, who “regards it as his task to brush history against the grain” (256-57). With respect to his task, Benjamin wrote in 1936 that the “method of this work [is] literary montage,” because “I have nothing to say, only to show [Ich habe nichts zu sagen. . . . Nur zu zeigen, to indicate, to point out] . . . [To] let it come into its own [zu ihrem Rechte kommen lassen, into its right, into its justice]” (“N” 5/574. Translation modified). “The historical index of images doesn’t simply say that they belong to a specific time, it says primarily that they only come to legibility at a specific time” (N 3, 1).⁹

Notes

 

1. To emphasize the existential as well as the indicative character of indices, is to approach the indexical somewhat differently from those who interpret it primarily in terms of its indicative function. Cf., for example, Arthur Burks, who by emphasizing this function at the expense of the existential, finds that “to begin with, Peirce confuses the cause-effect relation with the semiotic relation” (679). From Burks’ perspective, “the function of an index is to refer to or call attention to some feature or object in the immediate environment of the interpretant” (678); with respect to the bullet hole, however, Peirce says that the interpretant is not crucial. So long as the existential relation exists, the index refers or indicates whether or not there is interpretation. Cause-effect relations are particularly significant indexically because they illuminate the way in which a sign (the index) can be produced by its referent and consequently serve as evidence. It is in term s of the interpretant that Burks denies Peirce’s assertion that “a weathercock is an index of the direction of the wind” (Peirce 286). A weathercock is not an index, Burks says, because “the interpretant does not use the weather-cock to represent or denot e the direction of the wind” (Burks 679), i.e. does not use it to indicate; but representation and denotation (the use of a sign) are not fundamental to an indexical reference. As the bullet hole is an index of the history that produced it, the weathercoc k is an index of the wind’s force; a photograph of the weathercock will be an index of something that has happened.

 

2.A copy of the photograph can be found in Klee, Dressen, and Riess, p. 248, where it is captioned: “The end of Treblinka. A farm is built to give future visitors the impression they are in a ‘normal’ area.” A copy can al so be found in Sereny, between pp. 190-91, where it is captioned: “The house built at Treblinka after the camp had been demolished, in which a Ukrainian farmer was to be installed. If questioned, he would claim that he and his family had lived there for y ears.”

 

3. Lewalter offers this interpretation in Die Zeit, 13 August 1953, as a response to an article by Habermas, “On the Publication of Lectures of 1935,” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 25 J uly 1953. Habermas had written of the 1953 text of the 1935 lectures: that “Heidegger expressly brings the question of all questions, the question of Being, together with the historical movement of those days [i.e. 1935]” (“Lectures” 192). Given this conn ection, Habermas asks if “the planned murder of millions of human beings, which we all know about today, also [can] be made understandable in terms of the history of Being as a fateful going astray?” (197). The question leads Habermas to the possibility o f “think[ing] with Heidegger against Heidegger” (197).

 

4.Heidegger supported Lewalter in a letter to Die Zeit, 24 September 1953. Rainer Marten, who worked with Heidegger in 1953 on the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics, recalls in the Decem ber 19-20, 1987 issue of Badische Zeitung, that Heidegger added the parenthesis at the time of publication (Habermas, “Work” 452).

 

5.As a rhetorical device, we might refer to the dilemma Arendt offers Heidegger as a caieta, naming Arendt’s strategy after an episode in the Aeneid (we are indebted to Robert Dyer for this reading of Virgil). At the end of Book 6, after leaving the underworld through the gateway of false dreams, Aeneas lands briefly in Italy at a place that will henceforth be named for the nurse Aeneas buries there (“Caieta . . . your name points out your bones [os saque namen . . . signat] . . . if that be glory [si qua est ea gloria]” [7:4-5]). As Virgil’s contemporaries knew, Caieta’s name not only predates Virgil’s naming, but refers to the place where Cicero was murdered, a crime in which Octavian wa s an accomplice (Cicero, who at the time was nursing Octavian’s political career, was murdered by Mark Antony’s assassins but with Octavian’s acquiescence, as a choice Octavian made on the way to power). Inasmuch as the Aeneid is addressed t o Octavian as well as those familiar with the recent past, the Caieta episode in the Aeneid works to indicate a buried memory. Virgil says nothing. Recent history is silently indicated both for Octavian and others when as readers they come to Caieta. They can perpetuate this silence or they can break it (though perhaps at some political risk), but either way the silence is marked.

 

With respect to Eichmann in Jerusalem, the caieta that Arendt offers Heidegger leaves him with the dilemma, either to choose not to read, thereby marking (or re-marking) a silence he has already chosen, or to respond to a text which repeated ly marks this silence he has chosen for himself (which for even sympathetic readers can seem “scandalously inadequate” [Lacoue-Labarthe 34] and “beyond commentary” [Levinas 487]. Both are referring specifically to the only break in the silence to be found in Heidegger’s public remarks, the 1949 Bremen lecture in which he compared the Final Solution to “agriculture [which] is now a mechanized food industry,” and is “the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers” [quoted in Schirmacher 34]). Once it is produced, an index can be like that; it addresses you whether or not you turn away, marking your response as additional evidence, whether or not anyone chooses–as Arendt did choose–to underscore the marker.

 

6.Heidgger’s translation of DIKE can be supported by passages from Homer, for example from the Odyssey, when Antikleia tells Odysseus that her existence as disembodied life or PSYCHE (“she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow / or a dream” [11.207-8]) is “the way [DIKE, the order of things] for mortals when they die” (11.218). As such DIKE produces her as a lingering. Like the psyches of the slain suitors, “PSYCHAI, EIDOLA KAMONTON [psyches, images of the outworn, those whose work is done, or who have met with disaster]” (24.14), the dead whose lives Odysseus as an agent of DIKE has worked “to gather [LEXAITO]” into a lingering (24.106). In 1935, Heidegger uses this reference to “the slain suitors [der erschlagenen Freier]” as “an example of the original meaning of LEGEIN as to ‘gather [sammeln]'” [Introduction to Metaphysics, 105/95]).

 

7. Cf. the 1966 Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God Can Save Us”: “My judgment was this: insofar as I could judge things, only one possibility was left, and that was to attempt to stem the coming development by means of constructive powers which were still viable” (92).

 

8.Cf. Parvis Emad’s interpretation of Heidegger’s understanding of leadership: “The rectoral address does not mention anything that would connect it to a totalitarian worldview. On the contrary, Heidegger introduce s a daring notion of leading and following that is diametrically opposed to nazism. Heidegger talks about a leading and following in which resistance is present and which thrives on resistance. What could be more alien to nazism’s demand for unconditional and total obedience?” (xxiii).

 

9. In 1942, two years after Benjamin’s suicide and in response to news of the deportation of friends from the Gurs internment camp to Auschwitz, Arendt wrote a poem titled “WB”: “Dusk will come again sometime. / Night will come down from the stars. / We will lie [Liegen] our outstretched arms / In the nearnesses, in the distances” (Quoted and translated in Young-Bruehl 163/485. Translation modified).

 

Works Cited

 

Where both English translations and German texts are quoted, page references are first to the English translation, then to the German original. Versions of the essay were delivered at the 20th Century Literature Conference (Louisville, Kentucky) in Februa ry 1995, and at the Philosophy Interpretation Culture Conference (Binghamton, New York) in April 1995. We would like to thank Steven Youra with whom we have worked closely in formulating many of the perspectives presented here.

 

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