On use and care: a debate between Agamben and Heidegger

ABSTRACT

The theory of use with which Giorgio Agamben concludes his Homo Sacer-series is introduced as an alternative to the concept of care. This article critically examines the ontological status of use and care as developed by Agamben through the lens of Agamben’s discussions with Martin Heidegger’s thought on the notion of use. In particular, it is shown that this discussion includes at least three different stages: Agamben’s explicit analysis of the relation of use and care in Sein und Zeit, Agamben’s attention to the more ontological and abstract sense of use in ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ and, much more implicit, a debate between Agamben and Heidegger concerning the role of use and concern in their reading of the letters of Saint Paul. This article critically discusses these three stages in order to flesh out in detail the basic disagreement between Agamben and Heidegger on the role and the sense of use in relation to care and related terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Giorgio Agamben
• Martin Heidegger
• use
• care

1. Introduction

Agamben concludes the tour de force of his Homo Sacer-series with a theory of use: as the preface of The Highest Poverty already notes, the series’ concluding volume, The Use of Bodies, aims to offer this theory¹. The discussions with Foucault and Heidegger in The Use of Bodies suggest that, for Agamben, use is an indispensable and more originary alternative to care². The interpretation of Foucault concentrates on the question of why an ethical alternative to biopolitics is found in use rather than in the care of the self³. The interpretation of Heidegger, on the other hand, belongs to Agamben’s intricate debate with the German philosopher on the ontological status of care and use. This latter debate is the topic of this article in which I want to show both what is at stake for Agamben and how Agamben’s emphasis on use can be criticized from a Heideggerian perspective. At the moment, this topic is hardly, if at all, touched on in the secondary literature on Agamben and Heidegger even though it is indispensable for a proper reception of the conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series.

This debate includes Agamben’s reading of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ as offered in The Use of Bodies⁴. In the third and fourth section, I offer a critical examination of these two readings in order to flesh out in detail the difference between Heidegger’s and Agamben’s account of use and care. In the second section, I turn to an earlier, more implicit staging of this debate on the ontological status of use and care in Agamben’s and Heidegger’s readings of Saint Paul’s 1 Corinthians 7.

2. The pauline provenance of use and care

The discovery of the theme of use goes back to Agamben’s reading of Saint Paul’s 1 Corinthians 7:17–31, where chrēsis, use, appears in the context of two other basic terms that guide Agamben’s reading of this passage, namely klēsis, calling, and hōs mē, as not⁵. While the latter two terms play an essential role in Heidegger’s reading of the same passage as well, the former term, chrēsis, is absent from it⁶. Despite this difference, Agamben’s and Heidegger’s basic assessment of klēsis and of Saint Paul’s five hōs mē-statements are quite similar⁷. They both emphasize that for Saint Paul the divine vocation to believe is not an imperative to leave one’s previous, worldly vocations behind. Rather than such a transformation, the divine calling calls for another enactment (Vollzug) of these callings; one should live these worldly callings in a different mode, as Heidegger suggests. Thus, in a sense, as Heidegger describes the enigma of the divine calling, everything stays the same – because one remains in one’s worldly callings – yet everything is different – because based on the divine calling, one enacts each of these worldly callings in a fundamentally different way⁸. The five hōs mē-formulas articulate this different enactment:

But this I say, brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is that even those having wives may be as not [hōs mē] having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not abusing it. For passing away is the figure of this world. (1 Cor. 7:29-31)⁹

Hōs mē or ‘as not’ thus introduces a particular tension between the worldly vocation and the mode of its enactment¹⁰. As Heidegger explains, the hōs (as) adds a new significance to the worldly vocation which is founded in the mē (not) of the enactment. Agamben writes that the divine vocation revokes all vocations¹¹. Yet, ‘to revoke’ does not mean the withdrawal or negation of the previous vocations, but it rather concerns a re-vocation: it calls to repeat or continue the previous vocation in a different mode.

Despite this proximity between Agamben’s and Heidegger’s interpretation of both klēsis and hōs mē, an important difference remains. For Heidegger, the tension expressed by the hōs mē-formulas exemplifies the brokenness of Christian life. While the normal enactment of weeping is simply described as ‘weeping,’ the complication introduced by the hōs mē-formulas expresses that in Christian life, as envisaged by Saint Paul, no harmonious experience of this worldly calling exists. Rather, this worldly calling, which belongs to a particular order or figure of the world, is enacted in anticipation of the end of this figure of the world: ‘For passing away is the figure of this world’ (1 Cor. 7:31). This is why, for Heidegger, the hōs mē-formulas are preceded by Saint Paul’s remark that time is short: time is experienced in the mode of an intensified distress, Bedrängnis, that anticipates the end of the present figure of the world to which this worldly calling belongs. This distress and its accompanying tension mark the attunement of the enactment to which Saint Paul calls the believers. For Heidegger, the passing away of this figure of the world is only genuinely understood and experienced as a possibility of human life in and through this specific enactment.

In this context, Heidegger introduces a predecessor of Sorge, care, namely Bekümmerung, concern. While in the order or figure of the world, the worldly callings have their particular sense and significance, the enactment to which the divine calling invites the believers – namely to experience and understand these callings in light of the transience of this figure of the world – is an enactment in which this worldly sense becomes void. While one may be taking care of one’s callings as good as possible, this normal taking care tends to be oblivious and careless about the transience of the order from which these callings retrieve their sense and significance. The enactment to which Saint Paul calls the believers, as Heidegger suggests, is marked by a concern that does not shy away from experiencing and understanding this transience.

Agamben, however, adds an ingredient that significantly displaces Heidegger’s emphasis on distress, brokenness, and concern. The different considerations in 1 Cor. 7:17–31, Agamben suggests, should be read in light of this other term that enters the scene, namely chrēsis or use: ‘hōs mē […] does not only have a negative content; rather, for Paul, this is the only possible use of worldly situations.’¹² The enactment to which the divine calling invites the believers, according to Agamben, is one of use. This is the terminological difference between Heidegger’s and Agamben’s interpretation of this fragment: while the first stresses Bekümmerung or concern – the predecessor of Sorge or care in Sein und Zeit – over the transience of one’s callings and the figure of the world, the second stresses the possibility of a use of one’s callings.

Yet, what does this difference mean? How does Agamben’s emphasis on chrēsis displace Heidegger’s interpretation? To answer these questions, we need to be aware that, for Agamben, Saint Paul’s notion of chrēsis introduces an alternative to possession, ownership, mastery, dominion, and related terms. To account for this opposition, he mainly offers two references.

He notes that in 1 Cor. 7:21, the notion of use is introduced in relation to the slave. (Note that The Use of Bodies also introduces the notion of use in relation to the slave, namely by means of Aristotle’s account of the slave¹³.) To use one’s calling as a slave means that one neither possesses nor dominates one’s own life nor that of others, and that one is not the master of one’s own existence and callings; nevertheless, one is free to use one’s own existence and all its contingent characteristics and callings¹⁴. One cannot become master of the situation of one’s existence; one cannot become a subject in full control, possessing or appropriating the contingencies of one’s existence, but one can become one who freely uses the circumstances and worldly callings in which one finds oneself. This particular account of use anticipates Agamben’s analysis of inappropriables in The Use of Bodies: our body and our language can be used, but they can never be owned, possessed, mastered or appropriated¹⁵. For Agamben, consequently, the real threat to use and the real form of abuse is found in the attempts that nevertheless aim to possess, master, or appropriate. In line with this understanding of chrēsis, he interprets Saint Paul’s hōs mē-formulas to state exactly this: to enact one’s worldly callings – and by extension, one’s body, one’s language, and so on – in order not to possess, master or appropriate, but only to use. While the attempt to possession and domination may lead to the brokenness in life, the use of life to which Saint Paul invites the Christians is in itself not broken, for Agamben. To assess this sense of use and to see whether it can genuinely offer an alternative to the brokenness that Heidegger discerns in the fragment from Saint Paul’s letter, let me examine in more critical terms the second reference.

Agamben interpretatively combines the last two hōs mē-formulas – ‘those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not abusing it’ – thus tracing in them the same opposition between use and possession. While, for him, the former hōs mē-formula expresses the rejection of possession, the second hōs mē-formula expresses the preference for use. However, it remains to be seen whether the opposition between use and possession captures the meaning of the consecutive hōs mē-formulas. In the fourth of these five formulas, Saint Paul does not object to buying things and, hence, he does not object to become the owner of something. In this sense, he is not a Cynic philosopher who rejects the social custom of selling and buying. Rather, much like the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of his age, he objects to a buying that only buys for the sake of multiplying one’s possessions, because he considers this as an abuse of the practice of buying. If one buys only for multiplying one’s possessions, one is a slave to one’s desire for more. Saint Paul objects to this slavery. Therefore, it is not clear that the relation between the fourth and the last hōs mē-formula should be interpreted as an opposition.

Instead, it may make more sense to read the last formula as summarizing the structure of the four preceding ones: ‘to use the world as not abusing it.’ This formula does not introduce an opposition between use and possession, but rather introduces a tension within the notion of use: chrēsis is inhabited by the possibility of abuse; it is marked by a self-differentiation between use and abuse¹⁶. Hence, use is not an unbroken, harmonious phenomenon but rather a phenomenon that is in itself broken: it calls for the end of the forms of abuse that permeate use in the present figure of the world. This, then, gives us the key to another interpretation of the fourth formula. It does not reject the practice of buying, but it rather says: We may use the practice of buying as not abusing it.

When the possibility of abuse inhabits all use, it becomes impossible to simply affirm the use of the world and of worldly callings without further qualification, as Agamben does. If the possibility of abuse inhabits all use and if it is not clear when or where use becomes misusing, abusing or, as the French say, usure or using up – an attentiveness to this possibility gives rise to a particular distress: it demands our concern with respect to our use of the worldly situations: how to use as not abusing, misusing or wearing out? In this way, Heidegger’s emphasis on distress and concern is not removed by the affirmation of use, but rather reinstated at the heart of Saint Paul’s description of use in the form of the distress and the concern ‘to use the world as not abusing.’

Thus, we see how the first contours of difference between Heidegger’s and Agamben’s assessment of use and care can already be traced and reconstructed in the analysis of their different orientations to 1 Corinthians 7 and the genuine phenomenon to which the hōs mē-formulas call us: distress and concern or a use that does not possess?

3. Care as the interruption of use

The second stage of the debate between Agamben and Heidegger departs from The Use of Bodies, in which Agamben interprets Heidegger’s notions of use and care in Sein und Zeit. As noted above, The Use of Bodies aims to provide a theory of use that can intervene in the basic problem of the Homo Sacer-series, namely that of bare life. Bare life is not a natural phenomenon, but rather a product of the distinction between natural life, zōē, and the form of life attained by an individual or a group, bios¹⁷. This distinction, which runs parallel to that between phusis and nomos, ultimately divides life into two separate spheres. Bare life is the life on the threshold of these spheres¹⁸. While Homo Sacer stipulates that bare life belongs neither to phusis nor to nomos, The Use of Bodies adds that bare life is the (human) life that is needed to enable the transformation from mere, animal life to the good life in the sphere of the human polis; bare life is, however, excluded from the possibility of attaining the good life for itself. Aristotle’s account of the slave, with which The Use of Bodies opens, offers a striking example of this phenomenon. The slave’s life is not natural life, but it is the human life used (up) by the master to attain the good life and excluded by the master from the good life¹⁹.

Note that Agamben does not simply reject the phenomenon of ‘the use of the body’ that he finds in Aristotle’s slave. For him, such a use is basic to all human life: to live together means to mutually use each other’s body²⁰. Sometimes we are the user in this use and sometimes the one who is being used, that is to say, in general, as a basic human characteristic, this mutual use implies that the poles of master and slave – if we want to maintain these notions – are not fixed but that we rather continuously change roles. This dynamic, mutual use, according to Agamben, is a primordial use of the body in the realm of human sociality. In this sense, the slave’s mode of being as use and as use of the body discloses a primordial dimension of human life.

However, this use can lead to an abuse, namely when the poles of slave and master are reified by a process of juridification, so that some people identify solely as masters and others solely as slaves²¹. Hence, not so much the phenomenon of the use of the body itself but rather its juridification produces the phenomenon of bare life. Hence, juridification is a process in which the mutual use is transformed, by an identification of the poles of master and slave, into a one-sided or one-way use. With respect to my considerations in the previous section, it is important to note that this abuse is not intrinsic to primordial use; rather, it is produced by a juridical process. Therefore, Agamben determines also in this context the distinction between use and abuse as the distinction between primordial use and possession, mastery or dominion. Yet, can we determine all forms of abuse as a product of the juridification by which someone attains possession or dominion?

With this question in mind, I turn to Agamben’s interpretation of Heidegger’s analyses of Zuhandenheit in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger’s analysis of Zuhandenheit in terms of ‘der gebrauchende-hantierende Umgang,’ ‘the association which makes use of things’ – or as Agamben translates: ‘the familiarity that uses and handles’ – is one of the important sources Agamben can draw on that demonstrates the primacy of use in everydayness²². Agamben’s translation of Umgang as ‘familiarity’ – dimestichezza, which means something as being-at-home²³ – is somewhat peculiar, but it allows Agamben to stress that Umgang is the process of use by which we become at home in the world: by using, we become familiar with the things we use as well as with ourselves as the ones who can use these things in particular ways. In use, we discover the possibilities of the things used as well as our own capacities with respect to them. In this sense, use is not only a form of disclosedness in which the innerworldly being appears in a certain sense and against the background of a horizon of significance from within which it is interpreted, but it is also a disclosedness in which Dasein discovers its own capacities to act. For instance, by frequently using a hammer – by getting accustomed to its shape, its size, its weight, the power one can exercise with it – the one who uses this hammer becomes familiar with the possibilities this tool offers (and which not) and becomes familiar what he or she can (and cannot) do with it him or herself. Thus, the user is the one who not only uses, but also senses the effect of this use on him or herself as a capable human being²⁴.

This type of disclosedness of everyday use, mirrors Agamben’s understanding of use. For him, use is a complex of being-affected and being-discovered to-and-fro: in use, the user affects what is being used, but, in turn, what is being used affects the user; moreover, the user is aware of this being-affected. Hence, use also constitutes a self-relation for the user, which Agamben refers to as autoaffection and which we may understand in Heideggerian terms as the self-understanding that comes equipped with use²⁵. According to Agamben, this can already be heard in the Greek verb chrēsthai, which ‘expresses the relation that one has with oneself, the affection that one receives insofar as one is in relation with a determinate being.’²⁶ Our primordial relation to innerworldly beings is not that of a subject in command, but rather that of the everyday familiarity, Umgang, that uses and handles innerworldly beings²⁷.

Although Sein und Zeit is not concerned with juridification or (bio)politics, the book contains an ontological analogy of the abuse that Agamben traces in the juridification, fixation and identification of use. Although this is only an analogy, the kinship is noteworthy. Vorhandenheit, as explored in Sein und Zeit, conceals the mode of disclosedness that enables Dasein to deal with innerworldly beings, that is, the disclosedness of Zuhandenheit. In Vorhandenheit, beings are approached objectively and in isolation so that a subject can determine its identity. Thus, only in the mode of Vorhandenheit, it makes sense to speak of the epistemological poles of subject and object and of a being that can be identified as what it is by a subject who places it in front of itself – Gegenstand – and thus masters it in knowledge. For Heidegger, this objective approach both refers back to and conceals the horizon of significance that determines our everyday use of things. Because of this concealment, Vorhandenheit has become the mode of being in terms of which the philosophical tradition tends to understand the meaning of being itself. One might thus say, to return to the analogy, that Agamben’s discussion of biopolitics and bare life elaborates in political terms the impact of what for Heidegger is the metaphysical conception of being in terms of Vorhandenheit. The type of solution Agamben explores is analogous to the one Heidegger proposes in his analysis of everydayness. Heidegger shows how Vorhandenheit is grounded in Zuhandenheit and use, and how Vorhandenheit conceals this dimension of everyday use. Similarly, Agamben discerns in the structure of everyday use the ontologically prior background of the abuse of mastery, which is concealed by this abuse.

While we thus see that Agamben is indebted to Sein und Zeit, his interpretation also expresses his disappointment at Heidegger’s subsequent step: his turn towards the notion of Sorge, care, and his claim that it is more originary than everyday use. Agamben fears this undermines the discovery of everyday use: ‘The originary place of care is situated in the non-place of handiness, its primacy in making the primacy of use disappear.’²⁸ Let me explain in two steps what is at stake in this comment.

First, the role of care in Heidegger’s analysis is fundamentally different from that in Foucault’s analysis²⁹. In relation to Foucault, Agamben can simply show how the primacy of chrēsis, discovered by Foucault in Plato’s Alcibiades, is left behind in order to introduce the soul as the great caretaker of the body. Here, one might say, the notion of the subject – Foucault explicitly speaks about the subject-soul – appears as soon as Foucault turns his attention to care and the related technologies of the self. In this context, care, thus, concerns the question of becoming a master. Given our explication so far, it is comprehensible why Agamben might fear that in this turn to care as turn to a subject who aims to become a master of, for instance, a body, we are already on our way to the type of abuse that tends to distort and conceal the primordial use at the heart of our existence.

Such a conception of care, however, is not addressed under the heading of Sorge in Sein und Zeit. Rather, Heidegger determines these forms of care in terms of Besorgen, taking-care-of, which is simply another variation of Umgang as besorgende Umgang³⁰. Compared to Foucault’s analysis, in which Agamben fears that the notion of care brings us towards an emphasis on a subject that masters something, which counts for him as a forgetfulness of the primary use, Heidegger’s analysis of taking-care-of shows exactly why it does not make much sense to distinguish between use and this particular type of care as taking-care-of. For him, they are the same: Dasein’s disclosedness to innerworldly beings is of the order of everyday use and of taking-care-of and cannot be understood in terms of a subjectivity that only makes sense in the mode of Vorhandenheit.

Second, is Agamben correct in fearing that Heidegger’s subsequent step towards Sorge would make the everyday primacy of use simply disappear? If we keep in mind that one of the qualifications of Umgang is that it also besorgend, taking-care-of, we may discern how the turn towards care is in fact a transition from everyday care to another, more primordial form of care, Sorge. This transition is necessary for Heidegger because the everyday besorgende Umgang remains in certain respects careless: a fundamental dimension of Dasein’s disclosedness remains concealed in the disclosedness of everyday use. While innerworldly beings are disclosed to Dasein and while Dasein has a self-understanding based on this disclosedness – it discovers, for instance, its own capacities to deal with such an innerworldly being – Dasein’s basic interest in these dealings remains concealed, although this basic interest forms the very ground and reason for these everyday dealings. It is this basic motivation that Heidegger conceives as Sorge.

For Agamben, use is a form of autoaffection. Translated in Heideggerian terms, this means that the everyday dealings indeed give rise to a particular self-understanding: immersed in its dealings with an innerworldly being, Dasein understand itself and its capacities to deal in such and such a way with this being. However, what is concealed from Dasein is that these dealings are motivated by its very own being: Dasein is a concern for its own being, and as this concern it is open to its own potentiality-for-being beyond the particular possibilities of use that are discovered in everyday dealings³¹. For Heidegger, this excess of potentiality-for-being over particular possibilities of use is shown par excellence in relation to death: being-towards-death is the disclosedness of Dasein’s own finitude and the transience of its own existence. To understand why Dasein uses innerworldly beings in the first place, we need to be aware of this concern for its own transience. If we would like to call this an autoaffection, it is not the one that occurs in everyday use, but rather one that confronts the phenomenon that represents the ultimate interruption of use, namely death.

Here, the analogy with the analysis in the previous section is most striking: the hōs mē-structure to which Saint Paul calls the believers means, according to Heidegger, that the worldly callings need to be enacted in such a way that the transience of the order that grants significance is experienced in the enactment. The experience of this transience discloses the primordial concern that motivates the worldly callings. Similarly, that Dasein is immersed in a particular horizon of significance when dealing with innerworldly beings – Heidegger calls this fallenness – and that this immersion itself is grounded on Dasein’s concern for its own transitory being, is only disclosed when this horizon of significance is suspended. In the reading of Saint Paul, this suspension is due to an intensified distress, leading to concern; in Sein und Zeit, this suspension is due to anxiety, disclosing to Dasein how it is concern for its own being, how this concern is always that of a being which is in the world, and how this concern is usually enacted in the everyday dealings with innerworldly beings³².

Consequently, Agamben’s suggestion that the turn to primordial care makes the primacy of everyday use disappear distorts the stakes of Heidegger’s enterprise. It is not a matter of making something disappear, but rather of letting something appear. Everyday use is grounded in care, but care is not disclosed in it. This means that use and the self-understanding or autoaffection, as forms of self-disclosedness, to which they give rise are limited in its scope and do not reach into the depths of self-understanding or autoaffection that are possible for Dasein in the form of the basic attunement of anxiety. This latter attunement is an exceptional and extraordinary form of autoaffection disclosed in Dasein’s being-towards-death. Thus, the genuine controversy between Agamben and Heidegger concerns here the particular disclosive power of everyday use. Is this use the primary source of self-understanding? Or is this use itself motivated by that which it conceals, namely the disclosedness to the transience of its own existence, which is also the ground of Dasein’s dealings with innerworldly beings? While everyday use is both a form of care, as taking-care-of, and a form of disclosedness, it is nevertheless permeated by carelessness and concealment, which itself harbors a call for the disclosure of the concern for what is not cared for in everyday use.

4. Brauch as word of being

In ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander,’ Heidegger suggests to translate to chreōn, the ‘early word of being,’ as Brauch or ‘usage.’³³ Compared to the derivative place awarded to use in Sein und Zeit, this suggestion significantly extends the realm of application of the notion of use. Yet, for Agamben, this extension ‘deprive[s] it of any concreteness and distinctness. What does it in fact mean that being uses beings […]?’³⁴ This comment seems to affirm that Agamben’s sense of use does refer quite strongly to the realm of pragmatic and everyday use. However, his analysis in The Use of Bodies offers a similar extension as Heidegger does: the account of use in the first part is complemented by a modal ontology in the second part. Agamben does not do any justice to the particular impact Heidegger’s analysis in ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ may have on his modal ontological furthering of the notion of use. In three steps, I want to show how ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ in fact offers a criticism of certain aspects of this modal ontology.

4.1. Terminological remarks

Let us first consider the specifics of Heidegger’s terminology, which I will need in the two following steps. Agamben translates Brauch and the related verb brauchen consistently as ‘use’ and ‘to use,’ respectively. This is not incorrect, but it is one-sided because Heidegger also uses brauchen in the sense of ‘to need.’ Hence, the sentence ‘Das Sein braucht das Seiende’ can mean both ‘Being uses beings’ and ‘Being needs beings.’ Especially in relation to the human being, as I shall discuss under 4.3, the latter meaning makes much more sense³⁵.

Agamben emphasizes the sense of use because Heidegger’s translation is motivated by the reference to the hand discerned in the Greek term³⁶:

chraō means: to place in someone’s hands [in die Hand geben], to hand over [einhändigen] and deliver [aushändigen], to let something belong to someone [überlassen einem Gehören]. Such a delivery is, however, of a kind which keeps the transfer in hand [daß es das Überlassen in der Hand behält], and with it what is transferred [das Überlassene]. […] to hand something [aushändigen] over to its own essence and, as so present, to keep it in the protecting hand [in der wahrenden Hand]³⁷.

In the explication of to chreōn as a word of being, however, the reference to the hand gets a rather specific sense: being is that which hands out and hands over to beings their own share – or, we could also say in English: their own hand, as in ‘the hand dealt to us’ – in being and existence. In the verb einhändigen also resonates the sense of ‘to entrust’: beings are entrusted their own being; Überlassen says the same: the presence handed over to the beings is left to them. Yet, this leaving-to and entrusting-to remains in the hand of the handing-out of being. Being as to chreōn thus also keeps in its own protective hand this share of presence handed out to beings.

Note the particular ambiguity that follows from this explication of Brauch. On the one hand, to chreōn refers to a handing out that entrusts – überlassen, einhändigen – the handed-out presence to beings. On the other hand, being keeps and preserves the share that is handed out in a protective hand. This ambiguity suggests that also Brauch is marked by a particular self-differentiation, leading to the possibility of an improper use, a using up, misuse or abuse at the heart of being’s primordial handing-out. This brings me to the second step.

4.2. Use and abuse of being

Agamben limits his remarks on ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ to the last three pages, in which Heidegger discusses to chreōn³⁸. By not considering the analysis that leads up to this discussion of to chreōn, Agamben misses two essential contributions this text could make to his own reflections in The Use of Bodies.

The first concerns the discussion on the relation of use and care. Agamben does not acknowledge that, for Heidegger, Brauch is itself a form of care, which Heidegger traces in the Greek tisis, which he therefore translates as ruoch and Ruch, reck³⁹. Also in this context, the issue of care arises when a difference between two modes of being is encountered in which one of the two leads to a particular distortion or concealment. In ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander,’ this difference is described in terms of the difference between dikē and adikia⁴⁰.

Dikē concerns the proper or natural order of things and Heidegger’s translation as Fug approximates this sense: Fug is the compliance or jointure by which all beings are gathered in a whole and are related back to or comply with the original handing out of being that granted them their allotment in presence. Adikia usually means injustice, that is, a wrongdoing against this order. Heidegger’s translation as Unfug expresses that the opposite of dikē is not simply disorder; it is rather, as the English translation of adikia suggests, a state of being ‘out of joint.’ Present beings have lost their joint or connection to the original handing out of presence that marks being. Adikia concerns the movement by which beings are abandoned by being and are left alone. I mentioned before that being’s handing out presence to all beings is also a movement of Überlassen. Heidegger qualifies this Überlassen also as Loslassen, letting go or letting loose⁴¹. Loslassen is a form of abandonment by which beings let go of their original Fug, their compliance in the handing out of being so that being as a whole – das Seiende im Ganzen – becomes a sheer plurality of present, isolated beings. In their isolation, as Heidegger notes, these beings merely strive for their own ‘continued existence’:

That which stays persists in its presencing. In this way it takes itself out of its transitory while. It extends itself in a stubborn pose of persistence [Eigensinn des Beharrens]. It concerns itself no longer with the other things that are present. As though this were the way to stay, it becomes concerned with [es versteift sich auf] the permanence of its continued existence [die Beständigkeit des Fort-Bestehens]⁴².

In the comment preceding this quote, Heidegger describes that beings receive their presence from and are taken up in a transitory movement – die übergängliche Weile – of coming into presence and moving into absence, by which all beings are related to each other⁴³. This is the movement of dikē, the Fug or jointure of being that hands out to each present being its presence. Although present beings depend for their presence on this movement, they take themselves out of this Fug. This taking-out is at the same time the loslassen, the letting-go or the abandonment by being. For Heidegger, adikia thus marks a distortion by which the original compliance in the handing out of being is lost in the particular mode of being the beings subsequently adopt. This mode of being consists in striving to continued existence, that is, it consists in the conatus of the present beings, to borrow this expression from Spinoza⁴⁴. Care as reck, on the other hand, concerns the contrary movement and offers another mode of being which consists in letting beings belong, gehörenlassen, in the Fug:

Of the eonta, of that which is present, it says that, as that which stays awhile [Je-Weilige], it is released [losgelassen] into the reckless dis-order [ruchlosen Un-Fug]; and it tells how, as so present, it surmounts the dis-order inasmuch as it allows order and reck to belong one to another [indem es Fug gehören läßt und Ruch eines dem anderen]⁴⁵.

This allows us to address the second point Agamben misses. For Heidegger, the mode of being that we know under the heading of the conatus is nothing less than the present beings being out-of-joint. In order to persevere in this state of presence, it turns away from the other beings. In this sense, to strive to persist in presence means to ignore other beings in their presence and absence. Yet, for Heidegger, the conatus as a mode of being in which beings are out of joint, both refers back to and conceals a more original belonging to being. The care for one’s own existence in the sense of the conatus is a form of self-care, but it is only a derivative care that remains careless and reckless with respect to the original Fug from which each being derives its presence together with other beings. Therefore, Ruch or recking-of is a concern to bring back beings from their sheer Loslassen in adikia to a Gehörenlassen in dikē.

I connected Heidegger’s account of the striving to continued existence to the notion of conatus because it is the latter term that Agamben awards a privilege place in the modal ontology he develops in The Use of Bodies. For Agamben, the conatus is an ontological reformulation of the autoaffection that characterize use: ‘the being that desires and demands, in demanding, modifies, desires, and constitutes itself. “To persevere in its being” means this and nothing else.’⁴⁶ For Agamben, the conatus is thus a name for the modal ontology he is looking for. For Heidegger, by contrast, it is an indication of Un-Fug, of a mode of being in which beings are abandoned to their own presence and in which they do not comply with the transitory existence in relation to other beings that is handed out to them. In this sense, Agamben misses the most relevant claim in Heidegger’s ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander,’ which can be read as an objection to his own privileging of the conatus, namely that the conatus corresponds to a form of recklessness and carelessness. Thus, also here, Agamben does not consider the possibility of a ‘misuse’ at the heart of ‘being using beings’: in the conatus, being’s use of beings abandons them and leaves them to their own self-preservation. Yet, for Heideggger, this use is richer than this: the handing out of being exceeds the gift of this conatus because it takes beings and their being back into the transitory movement from which this mode of being stems. This is itself understood as a possible mode of being: The recking-of is the gift of another form of Lassen, namely Gehörenlassen, that lets beings belong and listen to each other as well as to the transitory movement from which they receive their presence. Thus, the turn to Brauch as a word of being is not simply a turn that ‘deprive[s use] of any concreteness and distinctness,’ as Agamben states⁴⁷. Rather, it points to a fundamental disagreement between Agamben and Heidegger concerning the ontological meaning of Agamben’s use, grounded in the conatus, and Heidegger’s Brauch, that encompasses both the conatus and its overcoming.

Interestingly, in the recent text ‘What is the Act of Creation,’ Agamben seems to correct his unconditional reference to Spinoza’s conatus thus affirming the above argumentation with respect to The Use of Bodies⁴⁸. By arguing that ‘we need to insinuate a small resistance […] into this Spinozian idea as well. Certainly, everything desires and strives to persevere in its being; but at the same time, it resists this desire; at least for an instance it renders it inoperative’; at this point, the question of justice – dikē and Fug – is brought into play when concluding that it is this resistance that ‘alone confers on conatus its justice and its truth.’⁴⁹

4.3. The need of being

As mentioned, the German verb brauchen does not only mean ‘to use’ but also ‘to need.’ In ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander,’ this latter meaning is referred to when Heidegger describes the relation between being and the human being in the concluding sentences:

But what if being, in its essence, needs [braucht] the essence of the human? What if the essence of the human rests in thinking the truth of being? Then thinking must poeticize [dichten] on the enigma of being. It brings the dawn of thought into proximity to that which is to be thought⁵⁰.

To think the truth of being is the essence of the human being; and thinking is here characterized as poeticizing, Dichten. This relation between Denken and Dichten is already introduced in the opening considerations of the essay. The English translation ‘to poeticize’ conceals the crucial etymological relation between dichten and diktieren in the German language. As Heidegger notes in the opening pages: ‘Thinking says what the truth of being dictates.’⁵¹ Note that in this translation, a crucial line from the original is left untranslated, namely ‘Thinking is the original dictare.’⁵² This sentence indicates that thinking listens to the dictation of being and says this dictation. Here, the truth of being prompts what thinking has to say. In turn, by thus listening to and speaking out of this dictation, within human speech, thinking is the original dictation in which this truth is preserved: ‘The poeticizing essence of thought preserves [verwahrt] the sway of the truth of being.’⁵³

Combining this with Heidegger’s previous considerations on how being hands out the presence and absence of beings, we see how the relation of being and thinking receives a definite chiasmic character. On the one, being preserves the being of beings, and thus also of the human being, in its protective hand, while on the other hand, thinking preserves this word of being. Indeed, as Heidegger writes in his reflection on the notion of Brauch at the end of ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’: ‘The word “der Brauch” is dictated to thinking in the experience of oblivion of being.’⁵⁴ Hence, what is prompted to thinking and what thinking subsequently preserves in its own dictation is Brauch as a word of being.

In a text written three years after ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander,’ Heidegger returns to the figure of the hand, but this time in a reflection on what it means to act, Handeln, and how thinking helps or gives a hand, an die Hand gehen, to the essence of beyng:

How must we think, for thinking is the authentic action [Handeln], where action means to give a hand [an die Hand gehen] to the essence of beyng in order to prepare for it that site in which it brings itself and its essence to speech⁵⁵.

Being is what hands out and what preserves in its protecting hand, but being is also what needs and demands a lending hand, a helping hand by which its essence is brought to language. When the verb brauchen is used in relation to being, it thus concerns both elements: being is the need and the demand on thinking – its dictation – to say and preserve its essence in thinking. To preserve and to say this essence in thinking is the most proper form of action – Handeln – for Heidegger because it enacts the overcoming of oblivion of being. It is now clearer what this means: the oblivion of being corresponds to Loslassen – beings being left to or abandoned to their isolated presence – ; the task of thinking is to say the essence of being as Gehörenlassen – letting beings belong together in the transitory movement of presence and absence that is handed out to them.

This specific need of being for thinking to bring it to language is also present in the second part of The Use of Bodies, when Agamben places the notion of the demand at the heart of ontology:

[Demand] corresponds neither to language nor to the world, neither to thought nor to the real, but to their articulation. If ontology thinks being insofar as it is said, demand corresponds to the insofar that at once separates and unites the two terms⁵⁶.

This sense of the demand of being combines the dictation of being to thinking and the need of being to be said by thinking. In this sense, the demand indeed separates and unites the two terms, just as brauchen in the sense of ‘to use’ and ‘to need’ unites and separates being in its essence and the essence of the human being.

Agamben describes the separating-uniting of the demand as articulation. The latter term does not only mean to bring to language, but also to connect and relate: articulation comes from articulus or joint that both connects elements and keeps them apart. In this sense, we see in articulation the particular form of Heidegger’s Fug – of being and beings in general – applied to the relation of being and the human being’s essence to think.

This intricate connection between Heidegger’s and Agamben’s account of the relation of being and thinking is important in light of our previous considerations on the conatus. While Agamben first argues that the demand is that which unites and separates being and thinking, he goes on to equate being with this demand. This particular equation, which obscures the mediating function of the demand – that is, its role as the joint or articulus of being and thinking – is the stepping stone to arrive at his reinterpretation of Spinoza’s conatus. Once he equated being and conatus, he can subsequently equate conatus with demand⁵⁷. Thus, we confront a peculiar transformation of the notion of the demand in the course of only two pages in The Use of Bodies: a demand that is made on thinking to say being is transformed into the demand that is the mode of being of a being itself, namely the demand by which a being demands to preserve its own being.

When reading this transformation against the background of ‘Der Spruch der Anaximander,’ we may conclude that it is not clear at all that these two demands – or perhaps we should rather say: the demand as it is originally conceived between being and thinking on the one hand, and the conatus, on the other hand – are the same. In fact, from Heidegger’s perspective, they are not simply different, but rather opposed: the former is a demand for the overcoming of the oblivion and abandonment that sways in the latter, the conatus. Thus, the confrontation with Heidegger’s ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ shows that also the need or the demand expressed by brauchen is marked by a differentiation: the demand is doubled. If we understand being as a demand, as Agamben suggests, the following question arises from Heidegger’s point of view: in which mode of being, in which key do we hear this demand? Is it the demand of the being that is losgelassen, left and abandoned to its own presence that it aims to preserve by all means? Or is it the demand made on thinking to say how this abandoned being has received its share from the handing out of being in which hand it is still preserved – that is, is it a demand to say the recking-of being and preserve it in the language of thinking? The former demand hides and conceals the latter. The latter, to phrase it in Agamben’s own vocabulary, is the resistance that ‘resists this desire’ of the conatus.

Perhaps we may even go one step further and say the following. Taken in their isolation, the demands of abandoned beings are their share; they are the hand that being dealt them. Because these demands hide and conceal, beings are merely used, that is, abused or misused, abandoned and left to their own presence. This form of abuse is itself part and parcel of how being uses being. Yet, this use is also marked by another possibility. Here, the sense of need arises: the need for this other possibility of use at stake in use. For the human being and its particular relation to being, this need is found in the demand made on thinking to say this other possibility against the background of a history of metaphysics that tends to think being out of the conatus.

5. Concluding remarks

The exploration of the relationship between use and care in three different encounters between Agamben and Heidegger has demonstrated the complexity of this relation. Moreover, it has shown a profound disagreement between Agamben and Heidegger concerning this relation. What I have tried to show is that despite Agamben’s critical comments on Heidegger’s different accounts of use and care, these accounts actually hold a firm and important criticism in store for Agamben’s understanding of use. Basically, this criticism boils down to the question of whether the phenomenon of use is traversed by a fundamental difference and marked by an intrinsic form of abuse, oblivion or concealment. As soon as one acknowledges this abuse at the heart of use, it becomes clear that the question of care arises from the demand or the need to overcome this abuse, oblivion or concealment.

In our reading of the passage on Saint Paul’s letters, in which the notion of chrēsis is conspicuously absent from Heidegger’s reading, we already saw how the brokenness that Heidegger discerns in the factical life experience of early Christianity announces this criticism, while Agamben seems to ward off this brokenness exactly by invoking the notion of chrēsis. While Agamben’s discovery of the importance of chrēsis in Saint Paul shows his interpretative ingenuity, I’ve argued that it remains to be seen whether this discovery should not be reassessed in terms of Paul’s own fifth hōs mē-formula: ‘to use as not abusing.’ The idea that the basic difference between Heidegger and Agamben ultimately goes back to the question of whether there is an original possibility of abuse inhabiting every sense of use is subsequently examined in relation to Sein und Zeit and ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander.’

In relation to Agamben’s interpretation of Umgang and Zuhandenheit in Sein und Zeit, I have argued that one should notice how Heidegger’s analysis is marked by a double sense of care. The derivative sense, Besorgen or taking-care-of, is one of the equivalents of the use that marks Zuhandenheit. Heidegger shows how this everyday form of care is marked by a particular carelessness or concealment. It is exactly this ambiguity of the particular disclosedness that reigns in the everyday that nevertheless conceals the structure of care that the human being is, that shows how there is a form of concealment in the first form of disclosedness. It is due to this carelessness or concealment at the heart of everyday use that makes it clear why a subsequent analysis of a more original disclosedness of Dasein’s concern for its transient being is necessary for Heidegger. This ambiguity at the heart of the disclosedness of everyday use cannot be thought in Agamben’s theory of use and the accompanying autoaffection.

Finally, I have shown why ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ deserves a much more prominent place in the comparison with Heidegger than Agamben acknowledges: its relevance exceeds a theory of use since it offers the means to develop a criticism of the basic role of the conatus in the modal ontology that Agamben develops in The Use of Bodies. Agamben’s attention to the conatus as the basic mode of being to which his modal ontology leads, stands in stark contrast to the sense of oblivion that Heidegger discerns in this conatus. I have shown that this contrast goes back to the question of whether or not there is a possibility of abuse residing in the primordial use of beings by being, and I have argued that this use is reciprocal, both care and need as ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ suggests: on the one hand, the need of beings for the care of being, which Heidegger explicated as the recking of and preserving beings, and the other hand, the need of being for the care of thinking to say and preserve the essence of being.

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Notes on contributors

Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Full Professor of Metaphysics at the Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is working mainly on post-Kantian European thought. He published among others Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy (2014), Het uitschot en de geest: Paulus onder filosofen (2018), and The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony (2020).

Notes

1. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, xiii.

2. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 31–48.

3. I’ve analyzed the debate with Foucault on use in “Exile, Use, and Form-of-Life.”

4. Heidegger, “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” in Holzwege, 321–73.

5. See Agamben, The Time That Remains, 19–43. Note that this book was published when Agamben was already working on the Homo Sacer-series: the first volume of the series was published in 1995, while Il tempo che resta was published in 2000. As I’ve argued in ‘The Dialectics of Paul,’ this attention to the notion of use is one of the basic contributions of Agamben to the ongoing debate on the letters of Saint Paul in contemporary continental thought.

6. See for the discussion of klēsis and hōs mē, Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 116–25. Although chrēsis does not figure here, it is worthwhile noting that his course on Augustine from the summer term of 1921, which is also included in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, does contain a reflection on Augustine’s difference between uti and frui (see 222); he returns to the notion of frui in “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” 367, to which also Agamben refers in The Use of Bodies, 46–47.

7. While borrowing from Heidegger, Agamben’s explication of these two terms is much more elaborate. Therefore, one could say that he has truly captured the importance of Heidegger’s rather short allusions to them.

8. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 118.

9. Translation taken from Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23 but slightly altered by me; my italics.

10. The theme of tension (Spannung) returns in Heidegger’s reading of 2 Thessalonians, see Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 108. Also, Agamben speaks of a ‘messianic tension’ and describes the hōs mē as ‘a special type of tensor’ (Agamben, The Time That Remains, 24).

11. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23, 33.

12. Ibid., 26.

13. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 3–23.

14. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 26.

15. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 80–94. See also “The Inappropriable,” in Creation and Anarchy, 29–50, in which Agamben also connects this sense of use to poverty as explained in the Franciscan notion of usus pauper.

16. Note that this ambiguity is affirmed by the Greek expression used by Saint Paul here, katachraomai, which can mean to make full use of, but also to misuse, to abuse or to use up. The ambiguity of katachraomai mirrors that of the French usure, which as Derrida and recently Nancy have reminded us, means both using to the fullest – e.g. in the economic sense of gaining interest – and consuming or using up, see Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, 249–68 and section 5 and 6 of Nancy’s contribution to the special issue of Angelaki on his work that will appear in 2021.

17. For these comments on bare life, see Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1–12.

18. Therefore, the ‘wager’ of this project is to overcome this separation, see Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 219.

19. See also Agamben’s analysis of slavery, Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 3–23; the slave is explicitly described as another figure of bare life (20).

20. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 14–15.

21. Ibid., 14.

22. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 69; Being and Time, 65; and Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 39.

23. The Italian word that is translated as familiarity is dimestichezza, see Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, 66, which is derived from dimestico or domestic and, hence, is related to house and home, to where we are at home; thus it is related to Heideggerian terms such as Zuhause-sein (and opposed to the Nicht-zuhause-sein and Unheimlichkeit that Heidegger brings into play that interrupts this everyday being-at-home), see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 250–51.

24. To stress the variation of what is discovered in use as Umgang, Agamben quotes Heidegger: ‘to have to do with something, to produce, order and take care of something, to use something, to give something up and let it get lost, to undertake, to accomplish, to find out, to ask about, to observe, to speak about, to determine … .’ Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 56–57; Being and Time, 53; quoted in Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 41.

25. See, e.g. the discussion of the positive sense of the use of the body, the Stoic oikeiosis, the distinction between use and care, and ‘habitual use’; see Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 31ff.

26. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 29.

27. At this point, Heidegger’s account of use is much more promising for Agamben than Foucault’s care of the self. In fact, in relation to Foucault’s account of care, Agamben fears that chrēsis ‘is resolved … into that of the command (archè) of the soul over the body (130a)’ (Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 33).

28. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 43.

29. As Heidegger explicitly comments: Sorge has nothing to do with the care of the self as it is usually accounted for, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 256.

30. Umgang is first introduced as follows: ‘the everyday being-in-the-world, which we also call association in the world with innerworldly beings [den Umgang in der Welt mit dem innerweltlichen Seienden].’ This is how Umgang is introduced in the opening sentence of § 15 to explicate Dasein’s everyday being-in-the-world Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 66; Being and Time, 62. Subsequently, Heidegger explicates it both in terms of ‘using and handling,’ ‘gebrauchend-hantierend,’ as well as in terms of Besorgen, taking-care-of, in the expression ‘besorgende Umgang.’ Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 57, 68 Being and Time, 53, 64.

31. As Heidegger’s famous statement reads: ‘Das Dasein ist Seiendes, dem es in seinem Sein um das Sein selbst geht.’ Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 191; Being and Time, 179.

32. Since it is a discussion on use, I’m limiting my analysis here mainly to the moment of Verfallenheit (Sein-bei) and do not discuss the other crucial elements of the structure of Sorge, namely Geworfenheit (schon-sein-in) and Entwurf (sich-vorweg): ‘Das Sein des Daseins besagt: Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-(der-Welt-) als Sein-bei (innerweltlich begegnendem Seienden)’ (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 256).

33. Heidegger, Holzwege, 365, 366; Off the Beaten Track, 275, 276.

34. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 47.

35. In this regard, e.g. Agamben’s translation of gebraucht as usato, used, in the sentence ‘Wer ist der Mensch? Jener, der gebraucht wird vom Seyn zum Ausstehen der Wesung der Wahrheit des Seyns’ from Heidegger, Beiträge, 318 [= § 195] seems to distorts the sense expressed here: the human is not the one who is simply used by beyng, but the one who is needed by beyng; see Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 178.

36. See Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 45–47.

37. Heidegger, Holzwege, 366–367; Off the Beaten Track, 276–277, Agamben remarks that this is a continuity between Heidegger’s analysis of use in Sein und Zeit, which is also oriented towards the sense of the hand as the term Zuhandenheit indicates.

38. Heidegger, Holzwege, 363, 365.

39. ‘Wir wissen gar nicht mehr, was Ruch bedeutet. Das mittelhoch-deutsche Wort “ruoche” nennt die Sorgfalt, die Sorge.’ Heidegger, Holzwege, 360.

40. For Heidegger, the sense of the Anaximander Fragment discloses itself in the explication of these three basic Greek words: tisis, dikē and adikia, see, e.g. Heidegger, Holzwege, 331.

41. ‘Er sagt von den eonta, vom Anwesenden, daß es als das Je-Weilige in den ruchlosen Un-Fug losgelassen ist, und wie es als das so Anwesende den Un-Fug verwindet, indem es Fug gehören läßt und Ruch eines dem anderen’ (Heidegger, Holzwege, 362). The English translation suggests ‘release’ as translation of loslassen, see Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 273.

42. Heidegger, Holzwege, 355; Off the Beaten Track, 268. For the plurality of isolated being, see Heidegger, Holzwege, 359.

43. ‘Die Weile west zwischen Hervorkommen und Hin-weggehen. Zwischen diesem zwiefältigen Ab-wesen west das Anwesen alles Weiligen. In dieses Zwischen ist das Je-Weilige gefügt. Dieses Zwischen ist die Fuge, der gemäß von Herkunft her zu Weggang hin das Weilende je gefügt ist.’ (Heidegger, Holzwege, 355).

44. Heidegger does not use the term ‘conatus,’ but he does speak of ‘[die] Sucht des Beharrens’ to characterize this tendency in the present-being, see Heidegger, Holzwege, 359.

45. Heidegger, Holzwege, 362; and Off the Beaten Track, 273.

46. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 171.

47. Ibid., 47.

48. Agamben, “What is the Act of Creation,” in Creation and Anarchy, 14–28.

49. Agamben, “What is the Act of Creation,” 28.

50. Heidegger, Holzwege, 373; Off the Beaten Track, 281; translation slightly adapted: the translation suggests ‘needs to use’ as a translation of ‘brauchen,’ but this still suggests that in relation to the human, being uses; to write simply ‘needs’ emphasizes a specific dependence that Heidegger seems to have in mind here.

51. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 247.

52. ‘Das Denken sagt das Diktat der Wahrheit des Seins. Das Denken ist das ursprüngliche dictare.’ Heidegger, Holzwege, 328.

53. Heidegger, Holzwege, 329; and Off the Beaten Track, 248.

54. Heidegger, Holzwege, 369; and Off the Beaten Track, 278.

55. Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, 71; and Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 66–67.

56. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 169.

57. Ibid., 170; he proposes to render Spinoza’s definition of the conatus in Ethica III.7 as follows: ‘The demand by means of which each thing demands to persevere in its being.’ (171).