Destructionis destructio. Heidegger, Foucault and medieval thought (7)

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After recalling Vom Wesen der Wahrheit 's thesis on the Scholastic conception of truth, according to which the concordance of human thought with things presupposes the concordance of created things with creative thought, we resumed our examination of the history of truth in the second Heidegger. History thought in terms of change and metamorphosis must inscribe the double gesture of deconstruction - destruction(Destruktion) and repetition(Wiederholung)- in a narrative that proceeds both regressively (backwards) and progressively (forwards). To get to the bottom of the question of rectitude, we have to go back to the "First Beginning": from veritas toἀλήθεια, from truth as correspondence - adaequatio/όμοίωσις - to truth as non-latency, non-voicing. This ascent from veritas toἀλήθεια is carried out, notably, in the Grundfragen der Philosophie, thanks to a critique of the theory of double adequation underlining the "non-Greek" character of scholastic verum by denouncing the Thomistic recovery of Aristotle and the error of classical philologists (W. Jaeger) who remain closer to the Scholastics than to the Greeks. Faced with the theory of truth-rectitude, the Grundfragen propose an Erinnerung an das erste Aufscheinen der ἀλήθεια, a "recollection of the first knowledge of truth at the beginning of Western philosophy". The term Erinnerung, "recollecting internalization", which joins "deconstruction", "destruction" and "repetition", is taken up in the eponymous text of Nietzsche 's Volume 2: "Recollection in Metaphysics". Its sources are Hegelian and Hölderlian. Heidegger uses Erinnerung as early as 1934/35 in the Commentary on Hölderlin's hymns Germanie and Le Rhin, and again in 1942 in the Commentary on the hymn Der Ister. We analyzed in detail Heidegger's commentary on The Voice of the People, in the lecture on " Der Rhein " ("Deepening Repetition, Poetry and Historic Being"), then §6 of the lecture on " Der Ister ", devoted to rivers as "disappearing" (die "Schwindenden") and "presaging" (die "Ahnungsvollen"), with emphasis on the metaphor of the river flowing away while remaining oriented towards both what has been and what is to come, a metaphor that leads to a theory of authentic recollection as presentiment. We then went on to show that Descartes was the recurrent object of Heidegger's work of interiorizing recollection, from theEinführung in die phänomenologische Forschung to the Zürich seminars of November 1965. This brings us back to the figure of Hegel evoked at the start of the lectures with Hyppolite. For Heidegger, modern metaphysics is a metaphysics of subjectivity. As the Beiträge zur Philosophie put it: between Descartes and Hegel, there is no "essential mutation"(kein wesentlicher Wandel). Descartes and Hegel are the initial and final stages in the process of "ego-logical determination of Being" that characterizes the modern age. The notion of onto-theo-ego-logy replaced that of onto-theology in the winter 1930/31 lecture on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. We then turned to the political dimension of Heidegger's critique of Descartes, analyzing the summer 1933 lecture(Die Grundfrage der Philosophie) and various occasional texts politicizing theErinnerung: "La construction d'un nouveau monde spirituel" (GA 16, no. 32) and "Sur l'immatriculation" (May 1933, GA 16, no. 41). In the 1933 lecture, we emphasized the denunciation of the "false radicality" of Cartesian doubt and the subordination of the new Cartesian foundation to the predominance of the mathematical conception of method. To explain this reading, we distinguished two figures in the Heideggerian critique of the neo-Kantian interpretation of Cartesianism as the "new beginning" of philosophy: the "deconstructive" Marburg interpretation of the 1920s, and the revolutionary and eschatological Freiburg interpretation of the 1930s. We concluded with an analysis of the desire to substitute the eschatological "Other Beginning" for the Cartesian pseudo-"New Beginning". This point was illustrated by a reading of a text from the Cahiers noirs (March 1932), and some remarks on the emergence of the "First Beginning" (Greek) vs Other beginning".

The second hour sketched out the elements of a synthesis and an initial assessment of the history of truth and the history of Being, posing, from this point of view, the question of the difference between Being (Sein) and Being (Seyn). What determines the change in the essence of truth? Being or man? To explain Heidegger's answer (Being/Estre), we took up some elements of the Heideggerian "Grand Narrative" in the Commentary on the Second Inactual Consideration: "Estre itself decides essence", "delivers man to himself", "lets him exploit being", "hands him over to secure himself in the midst of being, and abandons being". On this basis, we returned to the 1950s, and the French reception of Heidegger, and took up the question of the history of truth by reading Henri Birault's "Existence and Truth" (1951), a pioneering text in which we find Errance as the "essential space of history" and, above all, in which the "epochs" of history are presented as figures of one and the same ἐποχ ή. We were thus able to tackle the theme of theἐποχή of Being as the foundation of the history of Being, and continue the investigation by examining in "Time and Being" (1962) the characterization of the Epoch as a "fundamental feature of destiny" and the History of Being as the destination of Being. We look at the late revival and reformulation of "deconstruction" (Abbau), analyzing two devices from Die Geschichte des Seyns, a manuscript from 1938/1940 that synthesizes the "historical" themes of the "second Heidegger": in §26 with "First Beginning", "Machination" (Machenschaft), "Other Beginning", "Advent" (Ereignis); in §58 with Actuality, Subjectivity, Will to Power, Machination, abandonment of being to itself. Over the years, Heidegger embarks on an eschatology of Being, an ontico-historical version of Christian salvation history, with the moving horizon of a parousia without the God of metaphysics, a disappearance of man (Verschwindung des Menschen) as subject in "the other beginning of the history of being", a turn into a de-theologized Ereignis. At the end of the 2017 lecture, we begin to glimpse, on the history of truth, the question that brings Foucault and Heidegger together and separates the "first Heidegger" from the "second": the reading of Nietzsche, and perhaps also separates Foucault from Heidegger in depth. It was through Nietzsche, to whom Heidegger's texts accessible in the 1950s led him, that Foucault inaugurated his lecture at the Collège de France with Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, in which he delivers his own version of an (apophantic) "destruction of logic". We will return to this text in the 2018 lecture, Destructionis destructio (suite): existence et vérité, to introduce a reconsideration/re-reading of the medieval archive.