11 JANUARY 1965 ‡ 77
being,” as <the> Gallimard <edition> translates it),2 in the form of content, or constancy (Bestand), in the form of Being-there (Dasein), in the form of value (Geltung), in the form of the there is (es gibt).3
The very fact that Heidegger wonders to what form of being he should address himself, the fact that he remarks that the question is worth posing, however rapidly and discreetly he does so here, is the sign of a vigilance that has never appeared as such in the history of ontology. All ontologies (with the sole exception of what one could, with caution, call Husserl’s ontology) implicitly chose as their guide such and such a type of being without making a theme or a question of their choice. And according to Heidegger it is most often in the form of Vorhandenheit (of the object, if you like, and by what is merely an alternation in the form of the subject) which has served as the exemplary form of being. Cf. §6 on Kant and Descartes ([French] p. 45, Being and Time, 23–24).
Now it is precisely the problem of exemplarity that Heidegger does not want to dodge here. He writes in §2, [French] p. 22, I translate:
On which being is the meaning of being to be read (An welchem Seienden soll der Sinn von Sein abgelesen warden), from which being is the opening up (Erschliessung) of being to get its start (soll ihren Ausgang nehmen)? Is the starting point arbitrary, or does a certain being have a priority (Vorrang) in the elaboration of the question of being? Which is this exemplary being and in what sense does it have priority? (Being and Time, 6)
A problem, then, of exemplarity, a de jure problem, of the justification of exemplarity, of privilege.
A remark on the passage I have just read. Heidegger says “on which being is the meaning of being to be read” (reread the German). And Heidegger does not pause over this notion of reading that is functioning here in a muted way . . . .
So one might wonder: to what extent is this metaphor of reading innocent? To what extent innocent the definition of a question that makes — at least by metaphor — of the questioned Gefragtes a meaning (Sinn, the meaning
2. [Translator’s note:] By “Gallimard,” Derrida appears to refer here to the Boehm- De Waelhens translation of Division 1 of Being and Time (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). But see also p. 96, below, referring to the selections from Being and Time translated by Henry Corbin and included in the 1937 volume entitled Qu’est- ce que la métaphysique? also published by Gallimard.
3. [Translator’s note:] Derrida is paraphrasing Being and Time, 5– 6: “Being is found in thatness and whatness, reality, the objective presence of things, substistence, validity, existence, and in the ‘there is.’”