Thinking enowning with the concepts of being and the history of being will not be successful; nor will it be with the assistance of the Greeks (which is precisely something “to go beyond”). With being, the ontological difference also vanishes. Looking ahead, one would likewise have to view the continual references to the ontological difference from 1927 to 1936 as a necessary impasse [Holzweg].14
A similar point also seems to be made in the discussion On Time and Being in which Heidegger considers an apparent tension between the thinking of the Event and the thinking of being:
In the “Letter on ‘Humanism’ ” . . . the term “Being itself” already names the Event. (The relations and contexts constituting the essential structure of the Event were worked out between 1936 and 1938.). . . . It is precisely a matter of seeing that Being, by coming to view as the Event, disappears as being. Thus there is no contradiction between the two statements. Both name the same matter with differing emphases.15
It is significant that talk of “being,” as distinct from beings, does indeed
take on much less prominence in the final phase of Heidegger’s thinking
that occurs in the period after 1945–1946. The reason for this would seem
to be that Heidegger recognizes even talk of being as carrying a tendency
within it that leads away from the poetic, back into metaphysics, and so
back into the oblivion of being, or better, of being (which is one of the
ways in which late Heidegger tries to deal with the difficulty in speaking
that threatens here).16
The language of the Event, and of the simple happening of the onefold that is the fourfold, eschews the talk of being and of the ontological difference in favor of the happening of a single differentiating and differentiated unity. It is this unity that is invoked in the poetic language of Hölderlin, as well as in the increasingly explicit topological language of Heidegger’s very late thinking. It is also the unity to which Heidegger seems to refer in his poem on Cézanne:
In the late work of the painter the twofoldness
Of what is present and of presence has become
one, “realized” and overcome at the same time
Transformed into a mystery-filled identity.17
The attempt to articulate the happening of Event is itself an attempt to
articulate what also appears in poetry and art as such: the single, simple
happening of world, of place, of being.
Art and poetry always work, of course, within and through particular spaces and places—with respect to particular “works,” modes, and practices. The same is true, in its own way, of the thinking of place that Heidegger attempts, and, indeed, of any such thinking. The thinking of
14. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” pp. 60–61 (GA 15:366).
15. “Summary of a Seminar,” p. 43 (Zur Sachen des Denkens, p. 46). Translation modified.
16. See especially “On the Question of Being.”
17. Heidegger, “Cézanne,” GA 13, p. 223.