is not a nomic but a nomadic act—a breakthrough of squatters knowing themselves to be removable and singularizable since they are {settled} outside any univocal law.
Nothing suggests the diremption undergone by the representations of the universal and the general better than this transmutation of place and moment into features of a possible there. As an ontological trait of being-in-the-world (Being and Time) the there denoted precisely the most common character of a certain being. It denoted the existential—that is, universal and necessary—condition of finite transcendence. As the possible momentary site, however, it comes to denote the non-generalizable other of all that has passed for universal and necessary. It names the event occurring only once and just this once. Heidegger thus seeks to turn the there from a common noun into a proper name. This violence done to the deictic adverb only reflects the violence of the boundary on which we live. Thus the monstrousness of our site translates easily into a series of alternatives, each pointing to either side of the epochal caesura. The limit where theticism reveals its fictitious impulses provides a place and a moment for an either-or (which obviously has nothing to do with any choice put before a free will). The alternatives thematize the other of any subsumptive universal that is without genus. May it suffice, as a mere indication, to mention the two that have to do with the questions, “Who are we?” and “What is being?” Heidegger writes that it is a matter of knowing “whether man wants to remain a ‘subjectʼ or if he is to found Da-sein; . . . if beings accept being as what is ‘most general,ʼ thereby handing it over to ‘ontologyʼ and submerging it, or if being is to come to word in its singularity, and, like that which happens only once, determine beings” (BzP 90f.).
What is more traditional in philosophy than theories on the dimensions of the phenomena of the here and now? Heidegger removes these dimensions from the dominion of theories. It is a lesson in deconstruction to see him work through the legacy of “place and moment” and to conjoin them in the “momentary site.” This conjunction destroys them as forms, whether apophantic, transcendental, or other. Not being the site and time of anything, they no longer lend themselves to subsumptions. The singular event, thought from out of the singular there—that is the other of the ontological tradition. Space and time thus come to lie beyond the reach of normative co-optation. Concerning the expropriating trait riddling the event of appropriation, a trait that sunders all normativity from within, it will be necessary to try to retrace the temporal conditions of this other right down to its fissured place of emergence. It suffices, however, to have understood this singular that is not simple—the event of the tragic there—to see that being will no longer be thinkable as the other of beings. Instead of their ontological and normative difference, what will have to be thought is a temporal and dispersive discordance. Reading the opening paragraphs of the lecture “Time and Being” (1961), one may be left with the impression that it was only with his last word on the question of being that Heidegger found an access to the site from which he could raise it “without regard for a grounding of being in beings.”74 With the Contributions, such a reading of the texts no longer holds. I continue to believe that Heidegger is to be read backward, from the last to the first writings. By reading him in this way, one glimpses precisely the motives and paths that led him to raise the question of being for its own sake and out of itself, motives arising from the singular,