SICHÜBERLIEFERUNG: RE-MOVING THE HISTORY OF BEING AS PRESENCE

Abstract

How are we to responsively belong to tradition? This paper retrieves the concept of self-tradition (Sichüberlieferung) in Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927). We will take as a guiding light Heidegger’s designation of a mode of his phenomenology as “phenomenology of the inapparent” expressed in the 1973 Zähringen Seminar. We will pay special heed to the function of the middle voice, neutrality of Da-sein, and tautology in the question of Being and history and bring to light the relation between authentic temporality and authentic historicity in a tautological turning of the selfsame. We will make a remark on the delay of Da-sein’s authentic historicity in the light of the “self-tradition” which marks Heidegger’s non-metaphysical response to the heritage of metaphysics of presence. In the wake of the phenomenology of the inapparent, we will turn to Derrida’s 2008 text The Animal that Therefore I Am to explore Derrida’s different approach to free the “I am” from that of Heidegger’s Dasein whose being is set in Jeweilig-Jemeinigkeit. We will show how Derrida’s invention of animot enables him and us to speak with the voices of our non-human animal others and enables us to free ourselves from the fixities of presence of the present in our thought, language, and sensitivity. In a relay of the two philosophers’ reading of us and their ways of self-overcoming of man as rational animal, we will learn to be in question and to learn to relate to one another without reducing one to the other and other to the one.