put people to flight, or make them think—that is, which function—under the name of 'Heidegger'? What if this ignorance were so necessary to his discourse that without such a confession it would no longer quite be a text, a fabric governed by internal laws? Can it be said that the Heideggerian corpus is structured according to rules that are few in number, one of which directly concerns this ignorance? That this ignorance is closely woven into the texture of his thinking? If this is so, 'to read Heidegger' will mean to inscribe that other individual, called the interpreter, into the same textual fabric and to advance solely within the written word. Such an approach is modest. Indeed, it deprives itself of the very possibility of verifying or invalidating through experience what is read. It is modest as is 'thinking', which cannot avail itself of the prestige of knowledge. But to approach Heidegger in this fashion is also violent: if it is possible to exhibit a few general rules of procedure in his writings, it may also be possible to steer what is said in a direction the man Martin Heidegger would not have wished to be led.
'Heidegger', then, will take the place here of a certain discursive regularity. It will not be the proper name, which refers to a man from Messkirch, deceased in 1976. We might say 'with Heidegger', but in all strictness we must say 'in Heidegger'.
We know that 'being' was his obsession, his first and final word—or at least nearly so. For it is true that toward the end even he could no longer hear it and would rather speak of 'presencing', of 'world', or of 'event'. What would be more tempting then, more deserving perhaps, than to develop, after Heidegger, what his obsession with that single question prevented him from accomplishing, and to 'derive' a 'practical philosophy' from his 'philosophy of Being'? It may be regrettable that he did not take this step himself. But after all we have the first philosophy, and a little ingenuity may suffice to extract from it a "Politics," an "Ethics," or even a "Second Critique." It could be argued that Heidegger, concerned solely with the lofty problem of 'being', would not have had such an acute sense for more concrete, more earthbound, or at least more philosophically traditional questions: so much so that in his life he stumbled at one of these concrete particulars that was more perilous than Thales' well. His obsession would be embarrassing especially when measured against his predecessors since Socrates, who consistently repeated that "virtue is knowledge," that practical reason receives its architecture from pure reason, and that theoria, since it is what is most noble within our reach, prescribes the routes to praxis. In short, Heidegger's obsession would simply have made him forget that agere sequitur esse, action follows being. He turned the question of being over and over—to us to translate it in terms of action.
I would like to show on the contrary that Heidegger does not at all dissociate 'being and acting'. He does not overlook the latter to the advantage of the former. To speak of presencing as he does is to speak of acting.