through his ignorance and perversity, for the culpable evocation of vulgar meanings. By using ordinary words in other ways, by reviving the subtle truth, the etumon. which has been lost by routine usage, one turns the correct relation between words into the principle by which philological/philosophical alchemy stands or falls: 'If an alchemist, uninitiated in heart and soul, fails in his experiments, it is not only because he uses impure elements but above all because he thinks with the common properties of these impure elements and not with the virtues of ideal elements. Thus, once the complete and absolute duplication has been achieved, ideality can be fully experienced.’14 Language, too, has its subtle elements, liberated by philological/philosophical subtlety, such as the grammatical duality of the Greek word on (being), both a noun and a verbal form, which prompted Heidegger to remark: ‘What is here set forth, which at first may be taken for grammatical hair-splitting, is in truth the riddle of Being.’15
Thus assured of the effectiveness of philosophical negation, we can even recall censored meanings and find a supplementary effect in the complete reversal of the relationship between the overt system and the hidden system which is provoked by this return of the repressed: indeed, it is difficult not to see this as proof of the powerful ability of ‘essential thought’ to ground in Being such realities as the derisorily contingent ‘social security' - so unworthy of thought that they are named in inverted commas.1(1 Thus, in this ‘upside-down world’, where the event is never more than the illustration of the ‘essence’, the grounding is grounded by what it grounds.17 ‘For example, “welfare work” [Fursorge], as a factical social arrangement, is grounded in Dasein's state of Being as Being-with. Its factical urgency gets its motivation in that Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in the deficient modes of solicitude.'18 This blatant and invisible reference, invisible because it is blatant, helps, by its audacity, to disguise the fact that continuous mention is made of social welfare in an entire work ostensibly devoted to an ontological property of Dasein whose 'empirical [i.e. ordinary, vulgar and banal| need' for assistance is only a contingent manifestation. The paradigm of the stolen letter, which Lacan illustrates with the anecdote, ‘Why do you tell me you are going to Cracow so I'll believe you are going to Lvov, when you really are going to Cracow?’,29 is used by Heidegger to encourage the belief, by proclaiming what he is really doing, that he is not really doing what he has always done. There is. in fact, no doubt: ‘social welfare, Sozialfursorge, is indeed ‘concern for’ and ‘on behalf of
those in receipt of aid, which disburdens them of concern for themselves and authorizes their inclination to be ‘careless’, to ‘take things easily and make things easy', just as philosophical solicitude (Fiirsorge), which is the sublime variant of the former, disburdens Dasein of concern, or as Sartre said (or might have said) in 1943, frees the Pour-soi (self-conscious being) from its freedom, thus dooming it to ’bad faith1 and the ‘serious-mindedness’ of an ‘inauthentic’ existence. ‘Thus the particular Dasein in its everydayness is disburdened by the "they”. Not only that; by thus disburdening it of its Being, the “they” accommodates Dasein if Dasein has any tendency to take things easily and make them easy. And because the "they" constantly accommodates the particular Dasein by disburdening it of its being, the "they” retains and enhances its stubborn dominion.’20
The play with the palpable forms of language is most accomplished when it bears on pairs of terms rather than isolated words, i.e. on the relations between contradictory terms. In contrast to straightforward philosophical puns based on assonance and alliteration, ‘primordial' puns, those which orient and organize Heidegger’s thought in depth, play on verbal forms to exploit them both as palpable forms and as forms of classification. These total forms, which reconcile the independent necessities of sound and sense in the miracle of an expression that is doubly necessary, are the transformed form of a linguistic fabric that is already moulded politically, that is. moulded by objectively political principles of opposition, and which is recorded and preserved in ordinary language. There is no other way of explaining the predilection of scholarly languages for binary thinking: what in this case is censored and repressed is not a taboo term taken in isolation, but a relation of opposition between words which always alludes to a relation of opposition between social groups.21
