I thank Pete Ferreira and Lee Braver for the opportunity to participate in this conversation, and of course Daniel Fidel Ferrer for providing the translation.  It corresponds to a conversation in Zurich on November 6, 1951, with a number of Swiss academics and critics.  We know little else.  There are internal indications to previous conversations on Hölderlin, presumably to a lecture Heidegger had delivered in Darmstadt in August of the same year, that is, only three months earlier, titled “Building Dwelling Thinking,” but almost certainly to another lecture, “Poetically Man Dwells,” first delivered in October at Bühlerhöhe.  

I will use the time initially allotted to me by referring to what is only one of the strands in the text—a very rich text, needless to say, where everything is interrelated in subtle ways.  But I need to get into it in some partial way.  And since it just so happens that I was a participant at a meeting in Granada earlier this month (organized by Gerardo Muñoz and Daniel García López and entitled “Desecularización y teología”) where the issue of an “other beginning” in the Heideggerian sense was discussed, I will take it from there.  The reason is that people directly and indirectly connected to Giorgio Agamben were present at the meeting, and that only two days after the end of the meeting Agamben published a short blog note attacking (is that too strong a word?) the very notion of an “other beginning” as naïve.  In any case, this is a vexed and vexing issue where sometimes opinions are rather preposterously rushed and uninformed.  It almost works, sometimes, as if people reacted only to the phrase, now turned into a mere ideologeme without depth.  Presumably because they come at it from alternative cheap ideologemes.  So the gigantomachia concerning the other beginning becomes what old Aesop designed as the occasion for the production of a tiny mouse: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Of course I have no idea whether Agamben was even remotely referring to the Granada discussions.  Never mind: with all due respect, I think what he says in that note is rather misleading.  Let me quote him first and then proceed to elaborate on why it is misconceived on the basis of Heidegger’s text.   Agamben titles his note “A Way Out,” and he says: “Often, in the diffuse awareness that we are witnessing the end of a culture, the need—or hope—for a new beginning arises, meaning that after the collapse of a long tradition, a new and more vibrant one will eventually come into being. Against this naive expectation, it is necessary to remember that what we need is not a new beginning, but a way out” (Agamben, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-una-via-di-uscita).  But the problem is: how can you find a way out without cutting a path for it, and how is that new path not in some strong sense necessarily a new beginning?  Whether it lasts or not, whether it is solid or silly, whether it can provide the very ground for a passage or not.  Agamben goes on: “After the collapse of Western history, the last thing we want is a new historical era; rather, we want to put an end to eras altogether, to get out once and for all and not just start over. Out towards where? We can’t say, but that’s a good thing.”  Is it?  You can’t get out of anywhere if you do not have some idea of what the outside might offer, whether such an idea is correct or stupid.

I will now focus on the sections of the Zürich seminar conversation where Heidegger says something relevant concerning this issue.   The seminar starts emphatically on the notion of learning how to read, which is consistent with remarks made in the black notebooks.  It is necessary to learn how to read because, Heidegger says, “one cannot think without thinking historically” (4).  This already throws a clue: thinking means thinking historically, which necessarily means that there is no other beginning to be understood as tabula rasa.  Any notion of an other beginning is still, Heidegger says, a form of philology: “Once this has been recognized can one affirm philology.  And insofar as this is so, I too practice philology” (4).

We have read insufficiently, even blindly.  We do not yet know how to read.  And “destruction” has ensued (5).  “We shall not emerge from this situation by constructing yet another theology behind it, but rather through eventually attaining a new fundamental relation to that which is.  What is at issue is entering into a new relation to Being” (6).  There is no new theology in the other beginning, because the other beginning is only a “turn,” not a proclamation “in the manner of a prophet” (6).  “Preparing the turn” is “the unspoken sense of my entire thinking” (6), Heidegger says, not idle words.  But preparing the turn, please note, is itself a function of learning how to read.  How to read historically.  And when one learns how to read, one learns to read what has been thought, namely, by also unconcealing what is unthought in the thought.  “I see in the fact that what I call the ontological difference, or simply ‘the difference,’ has remained unthought—not a failure on the part of humanity, but rather  . . . indeed . . . simply the event that here something had not yet become manifest, and that accordingly something has been reserved for the human being insofar as the human being stands in relation to Being (eksists)” (8).  The other beginning, in the Heideggerian usage that Agamben cannot but be very familiar with, is simply a re-inception of the beginning of thinking in historical humanity on the basis of a remembrance of the unthought, a remembrance of what was and has remained unthought in the thought.  One can of course naively reject this, but one should refrain from calling it naïve.

What is at stake is the preparation of a “fundamental disposition” that would oppose the fallenness of the contemporary distribution of knowledge, notably in the sciences, whose disposition is that of “an assault upon Being itself” (8).  “Here there prevails a process grounded in the essence of technology, namely that within it—if one may say this in the sense of destiny—the essential destruction occurs” (8).

Warding off the essential destruction is the paramount interest of the other beginning, by revising—remembering, through reading—what has been left unthought in the thought.  Heidegger calls it “recollective thinking” (8), itself a sufficiently clear indication that he is not proposing any new technical invention, any gadget or ideological rocket that would enable us to find an exit—a via di uscita— from the world in Agamben’s sense. 

In Granada I mentioned, following an indication made to me by Peter Trawny, that Heidegger is the first decolonial thinker.  This apparently caused some consternation.  But the point is clear enough.  If the history of being initiated in archaic Greece has led us to “an age in which transformations must prepare themselves, or in which initially only this enormous process of the Europeanization of the planet comes to completion” (9), the other beginning radically interrupts destructive global Europeanization through recollective thinking. 

At the end of the text, responding to the penultimate question addressed to him, Heidegger says: “my private opinion is that the turning of the destiny of the human being can presumably only proceed from the very place from which this terminal condition of the contemporary planet has arisen” (13). 

We are here, all of us are here.  It doesn’t look good, nothing is very promising.  But we should not just look to abandon things, we have to think what has been unthought in history, history as it has been.  It is just a matter of learning how to read in order to prepare a turn: an other beginning.