Ordinary language is not only an infinite store of palpable forms available for poetical or philosophical games, or. as with the later Heidegger and his followers, for free associations in what Nietzsche called a Begriffsdichtung: it is also a reservoir of forms of apperception of the social world and of commonplace expressions, in which the principles which govern the vision of the social world common to an entire group are deposited (Germanic/Romance or Latin, ordin-ary/distinguished, simple/compiicaled, rural/urban, etc.). The structure of class relations is only ever named and grasped through the forms of classification which, even in the case of those conveyed by ordinary language, are never independent of this structure (something forgotten by the ethnomethodologists and all the formalist
analyses of these forms). Indeed, although the most socially 'marked' (vulgar/distinguished) oppositions may receive very different meanings according to usage and users, ordinary language, as the product of the accumulated labour of thought dominated by the relations of power between classes, and a fortiori scholarly language, as the product of fields dominated by the interests and values of the dominant classes, are in a way primary ideologies which lend themselves more 'naturally* to usages conforming to the values and interests of the dominant classes.2* But whereas the ordinary practice of euphemization (as it is pursued in 'political science', for example) substitutes one word for another, or visibly neutralizes the ordinary meaning of an excessively marked word by an explicit caution (inverted commas, for instance) or a distinctive definition, Heidegger proceeds in a manner that is infinitely more complex: by using the ordinary word, but in a network of morphologically interconnected words, he invites a philological and polyphonic reading that is able to evoke and revoke the ordinary sense simultaneously, able to suggest it while ostensibly repressing it, along with its pejorative connotations, into the order of vulgar and vulgarly ‘anthropological’ understanding.23
The philosophical imagination - which, like mythical thought, rejoices when the purely linguistic relation, materially exemplified by homophony, is superimposed on a relation of sense - plays on linguistic forms which are also class! ficatory forms. Thus, in the essay The Essence of Truth ( Von Wesen der Wahrheif), the opposition between the ‘essenf (VVejew) and the 'non-essent* (Un-wesen) is superimposed on the underlying opposition, simultaneously evoked and revoked, between order - a kind of phantom term - and disorder, one of the possible senses of non-essent. The parallel oppositions, unequally euphemized variants of certain ‘primordial’ oppositions, themselves roughly reducible to one another, numerous examples of which appear in Heidegger’s work subsequent to his 'reversal*, reaffirm - in a form which is sublimated and which, the more it is rooted in misrecognition, is all the more universal in its applications (like the opposition between the ontic and the ontological) - the founding opposition, itself subject to taboo. In so doing, they constitute that opposition by inscribing it in Being (the ontologizing effect) while denying it symbolically, either by reducing an absolute, total and clear-cut opposition to one of the superficial and partial secondary oppositions that can be derived from it, or even one of the most easily manipulated terms of a secondary opposition (as in the example above of the non-essent), or, by a strategy that does not exclude the former, simply and purely by denying the founding opposition through a fictitious universalization of one of the terms of the relation - in the way that
infirmity’ and ‘powerlessness’ (Ohnrnacht) are inscribed in the universality of Dasein, grounding a form of equality and solidarity in distress. The puns on the non-essent harness these effects and achieve a reconciliation between opposites that can only be compared with what occurs in magic: rendering absolute the established order (conjured up only by its opposite, in the way that, in dreams, clothes can signify nudity) which coincides with the symbolic negation, through universalization, of the only visible term in the relation of domination which establishes this order.2*
