Every metaphysical question ‘always encompasses’ the whole range. Each question is itself always the whole. As such, what question, if indeed thinking, escapes being embedded within this question: What is metaphysics? “The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics.” In the spirit of this reading of Heidegger, I would like to emphasize the next sentence down to the word. That is, Heidegger defers the question of metaphysics, he says that the very question is held under standard interrogation, the awakened expectations that any question presupposes. Yet, Heidegger claims that ‘we’ will ‘forgo’ a ‘discussion’ about metaphysics. For this moment, let us naively give the question of translation over and rely upon at least one meaning of the word. To forgo is to give up, to forsake. Thus, to forsake, to give up upon the discussion of metaphysics is to admit an alternative that a-waits in negation of the desired thing.
How is it with nothing? We have already won the answer that for our purposes is at least at first the only essential one when we take heed that the question of the nothing remains actually posed. This requires that we actively complete the transformation of the human being into the Da-sein that every instance of anxiety occasions in us, in order to get a grip on the nothing announced there as it makes itself known. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. The nothing becomes manifest in and through anxiety, although, to repeat, not in such a way that the nothing becomes manifest in our un-canniness quite apart from beings as a whole. In anxiety, the nothing is encountered at one with beings as a whole. The nothing makes itself known with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole.
I’m not going to grant any concession to reality, despite its overwhelming claims. While sitting along outside along a brick wall, a single woman walked by along the sidewalk. She was the only one walking and I was the only one there at the entrance to the library courtyard. As she passed along, now some twenty-five yards beyond my position, she turned as if to cough and suddenly exclaimed “I love trash” with a guttural ferocity of a angry young man ninety-six pounds her senior. It was a strange gesture to say the least. The clarity of the phrase, and the style of the utterance seemed uncommonly directed at my person despite the overwhelming novelty of her action. Literally random, the irruption of her voice in the dumb bright summer silence was like a paranoid clue in some malignant design; yet, paranoid in its utter failure to materialize in any further production or stirring. She walked on with all the confidence of a young American woman with a college degree would seem to possess. No faster or slower, with no turn or absent gaze in my direction, perfectly as if nothing had happened. Calm, as any mute reckoning of the horizon, the boredom that returns to the surface of the ocean after the unaccountable sighting of something surfacing, a splinter of black alive moving within the dead slop of the water. With calm, the silence that followed the hoarse cry of the girl of the street, a cry whose volume was strangled by the forcing of such a death metal pitch.
I love trash. Was she at all connected to the brawny and shaved brown man wandering around the first floor lobby this morning? He seemed to be shouting unknown verses at me. He must have coursed through the open desks and chairs three or four times. Wiping his mouth of water from the fountain as he looked around at the nearly deserted room. It occurred to me that he was preparing to shoot everyone, and I thought of flipping the table over as a preemptive gesture. Although in unconscious dreams, such gestures always fail, as the true navel of the dream always reveals itself at that moment when the malignant force of the projection—the stalking killer, the kinetic figure of nearly every movie ever made, regardless of the genre concept—shifts around the impediment you have so naively constructed, thus acquiring a clear shot. Perhaps this man was related to the woman, and perhaps this all has something regrettable to do with a flash mob. Some bastard spawn of Allen Kaprow, unloosed upon the pedagogy of summer leadership retreats.
Perhaps if I were to run after the young woman, and ask her why she had pushed this gotterdammerungian chant at me, she would explain it all away as some inventive Behavorial Psychology experiment, where actors attempt to intervene within a network modality and effect the charge of spatial proximity via subconscious suggestions. Early adopters of the study claim that such “flash utterances” can be used for effective crowd control. Random, nonsensical utterances, directed at no one in particular, have the high degree of what researchers call ‘net affectability.’ That is, because no one believes that the anonymous actor’s utterance is for them, they are thus free to ‘choose’ the phrase for themselves, and therefore self-manage the information internally. Statistics show that there is a higher rate of retention among those tested in their ability to recall ‘randomly overheard’ phrase as opposed to similar injunctions ‘directed’ at the particular test subject. The utility of the experiment our death metal girl was testing involves efforts to reduce littering in public places.
Another possibility or theory would involve the suggestion of fetishized sexual practices. Without irony, and with only the whincing prose of rendering sexual games aloud, one could easily have considered the woman’s exorcist cry as a means of invitation. ‘I love trash’ could be the symptomal point of non-sense staging the perversion of a anonymous libidinal confession. The fear of being caught doubles safely as a means to draw the phantom interlocutrix into a humiliating paranoia of accusation, and forces the other into a teasing game of interpellation: hey you, did you just yell ‘I love trash’ into the bushes, and was the sentiment meant for me? At this instance, which beautifully arches beyond and slips from the grasp of ever occurring, so stylized are its defenses, a true sadism slips out from under its veil. You hapless ear, I want to punish your curiosity because I gave it to you; like a ghost, I wiped your blindness with my white perversion, an invisible disembodied voice. I like trash. Are you my trash? I am your trash.
Some time back, I was walking along fifth street downtown, and there in a the dead middle of a northern block, a stringy train of distressed men were spaced out along the sidewalk, standing against this or that. When you passed a sing-song voice would sound at your side: klonopin, klonopin. Non-sense of the busy street, enjambed reminders of insignificance; almost as if no one had said anything at all, and as point of fact no one really had. A utility vanished upon the stone’s fall into the water, descending beyond the ripples into almost nothing, lost among at least a world away.
In anxiety, we say ‘one feels uncanny.’ Yet, we cannot say, by definition, what it is before which one feels uncanny. As surely as we can never comprehend absolutely the whole of beings in themselves we certainly do find ourselves stationed in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our Dasein. It does seem as though we cling to this or that particular being, precisely in our everyday preoccupations, as though we cling we were completely lost in this or that region of beings. No matter how fragmented our everyday exsistence may appear to be, however, it always deals with beings in a unity of the whole, if only in a shadowy way. Even and precisely when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves, this ‘as a whole’ comes over us—for example, in authentic boredom. Such boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or that idleness, that drags on and on. It irrupts when ‘one is bored.’ Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and humans beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference. This boredom manifests beings as a whole.
We hover in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging, because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. We ourselves—we humans who are in being, we in the midst of being—slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel uncanny; rather, it is this way for some ‘one.’ In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto to, pure Da-sein is all that is still there. Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that precisely the nothing crowds around, all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent in the face of the nothing. That in the un-canniness of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the presence of the nothing. That anxiety unveils the nothing is immediately demonstrated by human beings themselves when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid vision sustained by fresh remembrance we must say that that in the face of which amd concerning which we were anxious was properly nothing. Indeed, the nothing itself—as such—was there.
Unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke have a more abysmal source than the measured negation of thought. Negation, expressed or implied, permeates all thought, it is by no means the sole authoritative witness of the manifestness of the nothing belonging essentially to Dasein. Galling failure and merciless prohibition require some deeper answer. Bitter privation is more burdensome. These possibilities of nihilative comportment—forces in which Dasein bears its thrownness without mastering it—are not types of mere negation.
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