ordering first. But once the phenomenological gaze moves back from the quality and interplay of things present toward their presencing, the line of descent in which these constellations were put into place by figures of an epochal first proves to have itself sprung from an initial concealment: from the forgottenness of the event of presencing and the inability to sustain its manifold. The genealogy, then, which calls attention to the multiplicity of historical orderings, discovers at this line's start the incapacity to stand or bear, and hence to understand or grasp, the "poietics" in those orderings, the plasticity of their making and unmaking. The quest for principles springs from a lack of stature.19 Heidegger's last writings could therefore be read as the attempt to elaborate the chief traits of an economy of presencing that is not reducible to one archē—the traits of a plural economy.
If this is the case, it is clear that the "phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology" promised in Being and Time, can be fully understood—and carried out—as a deconstruction only from the standpoint of Heidegger's last writings. Only then does it become apparent how time can be "der Sinn des Seins": not the "meaning" of being, but its directionality; the "sense" as the direction in which something, e.g., motion, takes place (this acceptation of both the English 'sense' and the French sens—'sense' of a river, or of traffic—stems, not from Latin, but from an Indo-European verb that means to travel, to follow a path). Not the "signification" of being for a man and hence "a human accomplishment"20 (a misunderstanding that Heidegger says threatened the deconstruction in its first phase, that of a destruction in Being and Time), but the directionality of the orderings by which constellations of presencing produce themselves. Not the sens unique, the one-way street of the epochs unfolding across the ages either (a misunderstanding that threatened during the phase of "the history of being"), but the multiple presencing in which things present emerge from absence. These distinctions are what is most difficult in Heidegger. The point here is that the correct understanding of his early writings is obtained only if he is read backward, from end to beginning.
The hermeneutical dilemma of whether Heidegger should be read forward or backward appears most clearly in connection with praxis. Much has been written on the possible political implications of Being and Time. According to some, the pronouncement to follow the Führer, made six years after its publication, could already be seen in germ in that book. The address delivered by Heidegger at the inauguration of his university rectorship, with its call for triple mobilization in the service of labor, arms, and knowledge,21 would show the outcome of a direction taken by him ever since the Existential Analytic. The key term which supposedly indicates this continuity of thinking is that of resolve, Entschlossenheit. The same themes are said to reappear still later with the praise of the great statesman (compared to other "creators" like poets, artists, and thinkers) in the late thirties. Heidegger's early writings are thus supposed to constitute the