Addressing Departure

Addressing Departure
Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús
Discourse, Volume 41, Numbers 2-3, Spring/Fall 2019, pp. 287-318 (Article)
Published by Wayne State University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/761056
[ Access provided at 29 Jul 2020 17:35 GMT from University Of Southern California ]
Addressing Departure
Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús
Der Untergang ist die Enstasis der Zeit,

das Letzte, der Abschied “des” Anfangs.
Aber Abschied ist nie Nichts. Er ist jenes
Anfängliche des Anfangs in dem erst die
äußerste Einzigkeit des Seins erdenkbar
wird.
—Martin Heidegger, GA 70:
Über den Anfang
Nietzsche s’en doutait bien mais Zara-

thoustra en était sûr: “Me voici entouré de
tables brisées et d’autres à demi gravées
seulement. Je suis là dans l’attente.
Quand viendra mon heure, l’heure de
redescendre et de périr . . .” “Die Stunde
meines Niederganges, Unterganges.” Il faudra
descendre, travailler, se pencher pour
graver et porter la Table nouvelle aux val-
lées, la lire et la faire lire. L’écriture est
l’issue comme descente hors de soi en
soi du sens: métaphore-pour-autrui-en-
vue-d’autrui-ici-bas, métaphore comme
possibilité d’autrui ici-bas, métaphore
comme métaphysique où l’être doit se
cacher si l’on veut que l’autre apparaisse.
Discourse, 41.2–3, Spring/Fall 2019, pp. 287–318.

Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
288 Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús
Creusement dans l’autre vers l’autre où le

même cherche sa veine et l’or vrai de son
phénomène. Submission où il peut tou-
jours (se) perdre. Niedergang, Untergang.
Mais il n’est rien, il n’est pas (lui-) même
avant le risque de (se) perdre. Car l’autre
fraternel n’est pas d’abord dans la paix
de ce qu’on appelle l’intersubjectivité,
mais dans le travail et le péril de l’inter-
rogation; il n’est pas d’abord certain dans
la paix de la réponse où deux affirmations
s’épousent mais il est appelé dans la nuit
par le travail en creux de l’interrogation.
L’écriture est le moment de cette Vallée
originaire de l’autre dans l’être. Moment
de la profondeur aussi comme déché-
ance. Instance et insistance du grave.
—Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence
Two Confessions
I must begin by avowing a certain lack of taste, if not outright

imprudence or even impudence, in my choice of title. I am aware
that my title errs on the side of explicitness: it exhibits, perhaps
obscenely, the fact that we are here to mark and celebrate Peggy
Kamuf’s retirement from the University of Southern California
(USC), where until May 2017 she held the Marion Frances Che-
valier Chair in French Studies, with joint appointments in com-
parative literature and English. Without wanting to give an excuse
to justify my choice of title, I should say that the phrase “address-
ing departure” came to my mind from the very moment in which
Erin Graff Zivin asked me to say something on this occasion. This
phrase was no doubt dictated to me by both the circumstances that
determine our gathering—namely, Peggy’s departure from USC—
and the impact that Peggy’s thinking on the concept of “address”
has had on my own thinking about this “linguistic” structure. That
said, if I decided to retain this phrase as my title, it is also because
of the questions that assailed me as soon as the phrase “addressing
departure” came to mind, beginning with the issue of whether it
is possible to address departure. Although it seems obvious that
departure is not only a possible topic of discussion that one could
address in different discursive contexts but also an experience
we undergo on a regular basis, there is something aporetic about
departure that, moreover, becomes more salient when departure
Addressing Departure 289
is examined in terms of its addressability. This aporia could be

stated in the following terms: though departures occur, whenever
one addresses a departure, the very apostrophaic gesture implicit in
address renders the absence that is conditio sine qua non of depar-
ture into a presence—even if in the mode of a present absence. In
other words, though I may address the concept of departure in my
remarks, I may not be able to address a movement of departure in
its singularity without retaining both departure itself and whoever
or whatever is departing within the field of presence, thus keeping
departure and the “departed” from actually departing. Moreover,
since settling on this title, I have also been pondering the implica-
tions of the strange doubling that befalls this aporia in the context
of an occasion as singular and, in principle, unrepeatable as this
gathering. If addressing departure seems in general problematic,
this question becomes even more questionable when it is raised
in the context of an attempt to address Peggy’s departure from a
university to which I was drawn by her presence, like so many of
us gathered here. Could we speak of departure when whoever is
taking leave—in this case, Peggy—continues to encourage those
who remain in this university to occupy this space in such a way that
it may be said with all legitimacy that the work, the oeuvre of this
corps enseignant, is the pursuit of “justice and resistance to injus-
tice,” as Peggy puts it in “Event of Resistance,” her introduction to
Jacques Derrida’s Without Alibi?1 Is it appropriate for me to address
myself to you and to her by addressing both departure in general
and her singular departure, when whatever is happening here may
not belong to the type of experiences that are supposed to be sub-
sumed under this concept?
There is, however, another reason why it is especially impru-
dent and impudent of me to put the word “departure” in the title
of my essay. To explain why this is so, I must share with you the
content of two confessions that Peggy and I exchanged in conversa-
tion yesterday during a small gathering in preparation for today’s
event (and, coincidentally, to mark my own birthday). At one point
in the evening Peggy shared with me her apprehension about the
funereal feel that permeates retirement celebrations—dominated,
as they tend to be, by the theme of “departure.” “Departure” was
Peggy’s word, and our conversation made it clear that she would
prefer if we avoided this word altogether, even if she did not turn
her preference into a demand, at least not explicitly. This left me
with no choice but to tell her that I intended to do precisely what
she most feared we would all do: namely, bring our attention not
only to her departure but also to the motif of “departure” itself.
And to make matters worse, I told her that I would address both
Derrida Seminars Translation Project at UC Irvine’s Special Collections.
departure and her departure by enlisting a German sentence, “Was

geschieht, ist Abschied,” which recurs at least twice in the writings
of Werner Hamacher, an old friend of Peggy who passed away in
July 2017. I will say more in a moment about the translation of
this German phrase; for the time being, however, I will simply limit
myself to telling you, as I told Peggy in our conversation yesterday,
that what I would like to do in this essay is show how Peggy’s think-
ing on translation can help us to read this phrase of Hamacher in
such a way that we may be able to clarify so as to better endure the
aporia that is implicit in the oxymoronic phrase “addressing depar-
ture.” Still, as you can see, what I am going to say today may appear
to be not only unseemly in its insistent foregrounding of Peggy’s
departure but also goes against the wishes of my friend—and for
that I ask her to forgive me.
The Question of Address or the Address of the Question
I said before that I decided to address the theme of departure today

in part because the very experience of addressing departure seems
questionable, if not even aporetic. And yet, given how quotidian
departure seems to be, you may wonder what about this experi-
ence could be found to be aporetic. After all, departure is said in
many ways and is used in a variety of contexts and situations within
which the word makes perfect sense, such as when it appears on
the signs that distinguish the “departures” level in airports from

that of “arrivals,” or when something occurs in such a way that we
say it departed from how it was expected to happen according to
custom or law, or even in the more limited and somewhat obsolete
nautical lexicon, where the noun “departure” can be used to des-
ignate the measurement that is taken from the shore by relying on
a known object at sea and serves as the basis for the initial “dead
reckoning” prior to setting sail. Using the word “departure” not
only seems unproblematic in all these cases but also appears to
constitute a rather unified semantic phenomenon, since they all
implicitly or explicitly refer to the meaning of “going away,” of part-
ing or separating, that is inscribed in the very letter of the word “de-
parture,” which comes to English from the Latin dispartıˉre, via the
French départir, and which has in its root the verb partio, meaning
to divide, to apportion, to distribute, to part, or to share. That said,
the sense of “going away” that is dominant in most uses of the verb
“to depart” is less predominant in the verb “to part,” in which what
prevails is the sense of division that characterizes both its Latin and
French etymons, though the latter, unlike the former, also have the
sense of sharing or distributing, meaning a division that not only
separates but also allocates or apportions, a division that, at the
same time, shares—a nuance that is missing from the common uses
of the verb “to part” in English. If we attend to the ways in which
“departure” has departed from its etymological roots and lost the
sense of both splitting, which is still present in the verb “to part,”
and sharing, which the French départir and, in general, the lexicon
of the pars in Romance languages (the Spanish com-partir, the Ital-
ian spartire) retains, the following suspicion arises: isn’t the aporia
of “addressing departure” (or at least the semblance thereof) the
result of the contingent vicissitudes that have befallen the Latinate
lexicon of the pars in and through its English trans-lation? To put it
the other way around, could there be an aporia about addressing
departure—which, as suggested above, would consist in the com-
ing together of the banal possibility of addressing departure and
its enigmatic impossibility, since to address departure would be to
retain within the field of presence the very movement that ought
to render something absent—in languages where the negativity of
parting is more explicitly conjoined to its positivity, in which the
idea of a division or a separation can hardly be separated from
the idea of sharing? It seems unlikely that such an impasse could
emerge in contexts in which to depart appears less as a suspension
of relation than as a relation that persists in spite of any distance.
The singularly English character of this aporia would become
even stronger when we consider it from the side not of departure
but instead of address. As Peggy herself remarked in the brilliant

introduction to her Book of Addresses (one of the few theory books
that is both a remarkable scholarly achievement and something
else, something for which the adjective “literary,” understood in
the strongest sense possible, would not be a bad term), the term
“address” in English is unique among the lexica of direction in
modern European languages (dirección/dirigir, address/addresser,
Adresse/ansprechen, to mention just a few) because of the ambigui-
ties it admits. Peggy’s account of the difference between the English
and the French “address” is particularly instructive in this regard,
not the least because English gained this word family from French:
French is quite fussy about the way it uses adresser and adresse. One
addresses oneself to another (on s’adresse à quelqu’un), but no one can
ever be simply or directly (?) adressée by another, in the passive voice (at
least not grammatically). Nor can I say that I delivered an adresse, mean-
ing a talk, a lecture, a plenary address, and so forth. All these strictures
keep tighter reins over the direction of addressing (“address” and “direc-
tion” both derive from rectus, directus: right, a straight line, etc.), especially
as regards personal address, which is buffered with a reflexive construc-
tion, as if to make things less direct, thus more polite, if you see what I
mean. So, at least in grammatical French, the ambiguity I just called the
condition of address (as in “they are addressed”) has generally to signal
itself elsewhere and otherwise than directly in this lexicon of address.
But the English idiom signals the indirection in the very saying of direc-
tion, that is, of address. It can say the indirection more directly. Or more
indirectly, as you like.2
If French keeps the lexicon of adresse on a tighter leash, if it

is more straightforward and less ambiguous about who is it that
at any moment may be addressing someone, we might say that
address in the English idiom functions in a queer mode, if we hear
the term “queer” in close proximity to its plausible etymology in
the German word “quer,” meaning “transverse,” “oblique,” “cross-
wise,” or “athwart.” The queer indirection of the English lexicon
of address is evinced by (a) its capacity to “suspend the certainty
of voice: active or passive”3 in the condition of address, so that I
can be both addressed by someone as well as address someone;
(b) the broader range of metonymic displacements that the word
admits, which is not only restricted to address as the location to
which something is sent but also extends to address as the name
for the type of speech that is addressed to a specific audience as
well as an interpellation, an appeal, or a personal approach more
sexual or romantic in tone, as in the idiom “to pay” or “to make
With Valeria Campos Salvaterra, Chile, 2018.
one’s addresses”; and (c) its ontological malleability, which admits

entities other than beings capable of language to the condition of
address (for instance, the concept of “address” itself, which I am
addressing here). As an instance of this queer invagination of the
English lexicon address, consider the following description of what
is currently happening in my address: Peggy’s departure, through
Erin’s mediation, has placed me in the condition of address, more
precisely in the mode of being addressed. Being in this condition,
I am both incited and compelled to address you by addressing the
concept of address and, more specifically, by addressing the ques-
tion of whether departure can be addressed at all. As you can see,
if there is an aporia implicit in the phrase “addressing departure,”
if the coming together of address and departure exhibits a certain
impossibility at the heart of the experience of departure that would
otherwise remain unseen if departure is not placed in what Peggy
calls “the condition of address,” one may have to speak English in
order to address this possible impossibility of addressing departure.
And yet, if we follow Peggy in according a certain privilege
to the English idiom because it expresses more directly the indi-
rection, the queerness of address, it remains the case that English
achieves this by expanding the conditionality of address so that
address appears to be capable of encompassing everything within
its limits. Address would thus be unconditional in its conditioning
force. Now, it is precisely this ultraconditioning power of address

that, I would like to suggest, may encounter a limit in the experi-
ence of departure and, more precisely, in that which remains per-
haps unaddressable in all farewells.
One way of beginning to approach the limits of the address in
and through the aporia of addressing departure would be to inter-
rogate the philosophical view of “address” as the ur-structure of
language and of experience. Doing so would force us to leave the
pragmatics of the English idiom for the Franco-German landscape
of post-Heideggerian thought, where the most radical notions of
address as the very core of language and experience have been
developed. We could take as our point of departure the following
remarks of Martin Heidegger, which appear near the end of his
1950 essay “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” (“Science and Medita-
tion” or, as it stands in the published English translation, “Science
and Reflection”):
In contrast to the merely questionable and to all that is question-less, the

questionworthy alone bestows from out of itself the clear occasion and
the free hold through which we are able to call to and to call forth that
which addresses itself to our essence. Wandering in the direction of what
is questionworthy is not adventure, but homecoming.4
Notice how the motif of address (Zusprechen, literally “to speak

to”) appears in this passage in close proximity to another impor-
tant motif in Heidegger’s thinking, namely that of questionability
or, to be more precise, questionworthiness, “Fragwürdigkeit.” I will
return to this question of the question in a moment; for now, it is
enough to remark that for Heidegger, there is an intimate rela-
tion between what we may call, with Derrida, a “question worthy
of this name” and the address, since these “experiences” consti-
tute two of the sources of what we may call, for lack of a better
word, a “dialogue” or a “correspondence” between the essence of
the human and that which addresses itself to it (which Heidegger
does not identify here but which we could plausibly construe as
being “being”). As is well known, the stakes of this dialogue are
high; in fact, for Heidegger, they are nothing less than the possi-
bility of another beginning in the history of being through which
the essence of the human may be transformed into Da-sein and the
event of truth—the disclosure of world—may be experienced in its
proper simplicity. The experience of being addressed constitutes
the origin of both “vocability” and respons-ability, two essential pow-
ers of Da-sein, since it is through their exercise that Da-sein may
come to its own by calling out to what addresses its essence in a
responsive manner. Notice, then, the strict co-rrespondence that

Heidegger establishes between the “calling out” (entgegenrufen)
to that which addresses our essence and the human’s “summon-
ing” (herbeirufen) of that which addresses it. Exceeding the realm
of passivity and activity, what befalls the address in this passage is
Heidegger’s version of Peggy’s elaboration of the idiosyncrasies of
the English phrase “condition of address,” since the first thing that
comes undone at this moment in Heidegger’s essay is the “certainty
of voice” that would grant agency to the addresser (i.e., being) and
position the addressee (i.e., the human) in the realm of passivity.
“Vocability” and “respons-ability” are thus two modes of the same
originary vocative power that is bestowed to Da-sein when the essence
of the human becomes the address—in the sense of location, of the
place of residence—to which being’s address is directed as well as
the address that summons the being that addressed it. Both address-
ers are thus in the condition of address before they could be said
to become separated into addressee and addresser. And even if that
were to arrive, they would remain at the same time an addressed-
addressee and an addressed-addresser, since their power to address
each other is bestowed by the other’s address. We could think of
this suspension of the distinction between active and passive voice
in terms of the grammatical paradigm of the middle voice, but we
would have to keep in mind that in many of the languages in which
this possibility is to be found, the middle voice is often used in ways
that are translated into languages that do not have this possibility—
such as English—by recourse to reflexive constructions. Contrary
to this, we must note that what befalls the address in this moment
of Heidegger’s text is far removed from the most common or basic
notion of grammatical self-reflexivity, which implies the identity of
the subject or the doer and the object of the deed. Rather, if the
lexicon of reflection is to be retained to characterize the condition
of address that Heidegger has in mind, we would have to think of
this suspension of activity and passivity in terms of a heteroreflection
that precedes any autoreflection. It is only as a reflection of them-
selves that, paradoxically, comes from the other and is directed to
the other that either Dasein or being could come to their own, that
is, arrive at the condition of address—I’m tempted to say at the
address of address—in its “active” and “passive” modes, at once as
addressed-addressers and addressed-addressees.
Along with the displacement of the passive/active distinction,
an analogous undoing of the subject/object distinction takes place
in this passage that is not limited to the grammar of address but has
implications that are historical, in Heidegger’s sense of the term.
In displacing the grammatical subject as the agential instance of
an address, the condition of address as Heidegger understands it

here also implies the displacement of the ontologico-historical cen-
trality of the subject as the epochal garb in which the essence of
humanity presents itself to us—a subjectivity that, for Heidegger,
would have been prepared since the zoological interpretation of the
essence of the human being in Aristotle gave way to the interpreta-
tion of the logos in the logos ekhoˉn as the idiosyncratic determination
of an animal among other animals and of the ekhoˉn as the objecti-
fied having of a capacity or a habit at the disposal of a free-willing
animal rationale.5 Translating Heidegger’s thinking of address in the
language of the passage from Heidegger’s esoteric manuscript Über
den Anfang (alternatively translatable as On Inception, On Beginning
and On Commencement), which I quoted as my first epigraph, would
reveal the extent to which the thematic of “the other beginning”
or of “the other inception” of the history of being from the late
1930s and early 1940s already requires and thus announces the
reinterpretation of address that Heidegger would undertake more
explicitly in the 1950s. What I am calling, with Peggy, the condition
of address in Heidegger would constitute one of the privileged sites
for the transformation of the essence of language and thus of the
very being of the human and its relation to being. The heteroreflec-
tive condition of address would be a historical index of what Hei-
degger calls in Über den Anfang “the departure ‘of’ the beginning”
(“der Abschied ‘des’ Anfangs”), which coincides with the descent or
“the going under,” the “Untergang” of the metaphysics installed in
and through the oblivion of the question of being.6 The departure
of the beginning is also the beginning of a departure from that
which characterized the beginning of Western philosophy accord-
ing to Heidegger, which finds itself at its eskhaton, its time fulfilled in
a movement of enstatic retraction, of a “return within.” The condi-
tion of address—understood as the language in and through which
the human morphs into Da-sein—would be one of the major indices
of the transition from the first beginning of Western philosophy
to another beginning in which what was and remained unthought
in the first inception would become thinkable: the “singularity of
being” (“Einzigkeit des Seins”) and the necessity of Dasein for the sake
of grounding the truth of such singularity.7
As I mentioned at the beginning of my commentary of this
passage from “Wissenschaft und Besinnung,” address is one of two
sources of this dialogue between the essence of the human and
being, the other being what Heidegger calls “questionworthiness”
(“Fragwürdigkeit”). If the question is also at the origin of the vocative
power that traverses the human and being in their irreducible rela-
tion, it is because questionworthiness is a linguistic “form” in excess
of any semantic determination and thus in excess of any form: the

question declines language as an interrogative movement in which
the logos ceases to function according to its semantic, referential,
apo- or kataphatic functions or even in terms of the logos apophan-
tikos. Referentiality unfulfilled by any referent and inexhaustible in
any act of reference, the movement of the question is the opening
of a path that does not take the form of a scientific method, mark-
ing the excess of the hodos of thinking over the methodos of science.
As a kinetic reading of the particle meta- in the word “methodos”
would suggest, the constitution of science, seen from the viewpoint
of the question and its path, would involve traversing a path of
inquiry completely so as to reach a destination that is beyond it. It
is this point on the other side of the path of scientific inquiry that
marks the peras of any specific hodos, the limit of any scientific path.
If reflection or meditation, if Besinnung is the name for a practice
that, unlike science at its most normative, enjoins us to remain
within the interrogative path that is being broached, it is because
meditation seeks to co-rrespond to the movement of the question
and, above all, to its structural unanswerability. What is question-
worthy in every question—including any scientific question, pro-
vided it evinces questionworthiness—lays a claim on us to which
we can only correspond responsibly by responding without answer-
ing, by questioning back, by entering the space of what Derrida, in
“Force et signification” (“Force and Signification”) calls the “travail
en creux de l’interrogation” (the carving work of interrogation).8
And yet, notice that in spite of his constant affirmations regard-
ing the dignity of the question and its excess beyond any stable
grammatical or semantic form, Heidegger nonetheless reinscribes
the question in a movement that is ultimately determined in its
arkheˉ and telos by the motif of the Heimkehr, “homecoming,” or,
more literally, “the homeward-bound turn.” Although the path
of “questionworthiness” is a wandering, the question itself is the
home of the human, so much so that to wander toward the ques-
tion is for Heidegger to turn toward or return to one’s home
rather than embark oneself on an “adventure” (“Abenteuer”). Here
we encounter an analogous structure to that which we find in the
passage from Über den Anfang: to wander from the safety of domes-
ticated, answerable questions is to return to the proper address of
Da-sein just as much as the departure of the inception of the his-
tory of beyng amounts to a more incipient return to that begin-
ning, which now opens the possibility of thinking what could not
have been thought in the first beginning—the singular event of
being’s appropriation, that is, Ereignis, and Da-sein’s role therein.
Conversely, in both departure and wandering, the leeway of their
movement still submits to the strictures of archeoteleology. This

explains why, for Heidegger, both the departure of the beginning
and the question in its questionworthiness are supposed to avoid
arriving at already-known destinations while remaining nonethe-
less destined to return to their origin, which thus becomes their
own telos: the home address of being, which excludes the perils of
wandering adventurously into the void.
Heidegger probably did not fail to register the strangeness
of the Germanic word “Abenteuer.” If we open the Deutsches Wörter-
buch of the Grimm Brothers—which Heidegger himself may have
done—we find the brothers trying to settle the matter of this
word’s etymology: they state that the German “Abenteuer” comes
straight from the Romance lexicon of “adventura,” against the
claims of prior philologists, who tried to grant the word more Ger-
manic roots by speculating, for instance, that the sense of the term
in German was constructed out of its parts: for instance, out of
“Abend” or “evening” and “teuer” or “expensive,” “of high value.”9
The Romance “adventura” itself is a direct importation of the Latin
term “adventu ˉ ra,” which is constructed out of the suffix “ad-,” mean-
ing “at,” “to,” “toward,” and “ventura,” the future participle of verb
“venio,” whose present infinitive, “venire,” could be rendered as “to
come,” “to arrive,” “to reach.” Though almost lost through its incor-
poration as a patently foreign Romance body within Germanic lan-
guages, the German voice “Abenteuer” retains an affinity with the
noun “Zukunft,” the most common German noun for the future, in
that, taken literally, they both mean “to come.” And yet, in spite of
this affinity, we could surmise that Heidegger’s decision to remove
questionworthiness from the reach of the Abenteuer may have some-
thing to do with the semantic history of the latter, which retains the
trace of a chance event, of a contingent happening, of something
like Fortuna. This is well attested by the range of its everyday con-
temporary uses in which the noun “adventure” encompasses events
that range from a romantic or sexual affair—where it is used espe-
cially when one or both parties are monogamously committed and
thus have a partner waiting for them at home, to whom they might
return as soon as the adventure is over—to a wandering movement
characterized by not being entirely determined by its destination.
Rather than to the dignity of the future or Zukunft—more digni-
fied, in Heidegger’s eyes, if that future is understood properly, that
is, as ecstatically bound to the past (das Gewesen, not die Vergangen-
heit) as the telos is joined to the arkheˉ at all its seams—“Abenteuer”
would be closer to the German “Zufall,” that is, to a contingent
happening, to the occasion of what arrives or befalls per accidens, as
a matter of chance. It is precisely against the possibility of getting
lost, of not being able to return home, of losing one’s home to such
an extent that “home” could no longer figure as the archi-address
of all wandering—it is against the chance of a suspension of the
horizonal structure of the question and thus against the chance of
a transformation of the movement of questioning—that Heidegger
plies the excessive, “incessant,” rudderless wandering of the ques-
tion to the circular movement of a being-historical nostos.
Heidegger’s denial of the chance possibility that what is ques-
tionworthy in the question may lead to a wandering adventure,
rather than a return home, has grave consequences for his think-
ing of the relation between the question and address. As a way of
bringing this section to a close, allow me to sketch out only one of
these consequences, which Heidegger himself draws in the con-
cluding paragraphs of his essay, namely the neutralization of the
very opening of the question. In the last two paragraphs, Heidegger
reintroduces the lingual (the words “discursive” and “linguistic” are
inappropriate here) motifs of “Zuspruch” (“address”), “Entsprechen”
(“co-rrespondence”), and “Sagen” (“saying”) in order to reinscribe
at a deeper level what he now calls the “incessant question” in a
movement through which the questionworthy, now understood as
“co-rrespondence,” is destined to “lose the character of the ques-
tion and become simple saying.”10 The simplicity of saying, heˉ hapleˉ
phasis, is the character that language—the interplay of address and
response or what we have been calling, with Peggy, the “condition
of address”—would gain when the infinity of its questioning move-
ment has explored all that is questionworthy, turning language’s
adventure into a movement of returning home. In spite of talking
about the necessity for this dialogical correspondence to “forget
itself” (“sich vergißt”) and, as it were, get lost in “the inexhaustible
of the questionworthy” (“das Unerschöpfliche des Fragwürdigen”), we
might say that Heidegger still wishes to neutralize any traces of the
possible link between the unanswerability of the questionworthy
and the movement of adventure, which does not yield to the cir-
cular shape of appropriation and of the return home that would
enable Da-sein to come to its own in and through this co-rrespond-
ing address. The possibility of an impossibility more impossible—
because radically contingent—than the impossibility assigned to
us by our essential mortality, the chance of an adventurous depar-
ture that may sever the ties with the postulation of finitude as the
concealed horizon of our homebound movement, this chance-pos-
sibility is both opened up and neutralized by the movement of Hei-
degger’s address and its domestication of the “almost nothing” of
the question. In the interplay between the question and address,
Heidegger finally takes the side of address and of its home-bound
movement of approximation—which he calls in Feldweg-Gespräche

(Country Path Conversations), following a fragment of Heraclitus,
“ankhibasieˉ,” “In-die-Nähe-Gehen,” or “going-into-nearness”11—over
the structural indeterminacy of the question and the danger of
its permanent parabasis, which would entail the risk of a wander-
ing more distant than the distance that the nostos and its ankhibasieˉ
would be able to endure.
Interlude: On the Coming Adventure
In a recent text titled L’avventura (The Adventure), Giorgio Agam-

ben has challenged the etymology of this term “adventure,” implic-
itly challenging Heidegger’s own dissociation of the question and
the adventure:
An investigation of the possible etymology of the term aventure should

begin by calling into question Meyer-Lübke’s simplistic hypothesis, which
traces it back to the supposed Latin *adventura. Not only is the term not
attested in classical Latin, but the oft-repeated interpretation—which
sees in the term the plural neutral of the future participle of advenio—
has no rational basis, at least since it has been demonstrated that Latin
nouns ending in -ura do not necessarily derive from the future participle.
Whether it derives from the classical and Christian Latin adventus (the
advent of a prince or a messiah), as is likely, or from eventus, as the late
Du Cange suggested, the term designates something mysterious or mar-
velous that happens to a given man, which could be equally positive or
negative.12
Without wishing to launch a full-fledged polemic against Agam-

ben’s argument on this issue, confronting his claims regarding the
lexicon of adventura will nonetheless help us to see what is at stake
in Heidegger’s exclusion of this conceptual figure as a schema for
the movement of the question. First, it is ironic that Agamben,
throughout L’avventura, relies heavily on the philological work of
one of the Grimm Brothers, namely Jacob, who a decade before
the publication of the first edition of the dictionary wrote a treatise
on the allegorical character in medieval romances titled Frau Âven-
tiure. The irony here is that, as we saw, the Grimm Brothers had
already attested the link between the Germanic “Abendteur” and the
Romance lexicon of “adventura” half a century before the publica-
tion of Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke’s Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
in 1911. Even if a philological inquiry into the sense and the history
of an allegorical figure may not overlap with the task of producing
a plausible etymology of the word on the basis of which said alle-

gory was constructed, we might still ask whether Jacob Grimm’s
insights into the allegory of Âventiure are not compromised, from
Agamben’s point of view, by their tacit reliance on an etymology
that he claims to be false or, at the very least, questionable. This
would in turn compromise Agamben’s own analyses, which seems
to ignore that the Grimm Brothers would be as much to blame as
Meyer-Lübke for spreading what he regards as an oversimplified
etymological cliché.
But posing these questions earnestly would imply that we agree
with Agamben on this basic point, which we find difficult to do, for
Agamben’s claims are at best dubious and at worst fallacious. Con-
sider the illegitimate logical move that Agamben makes in this pas-
sage when he adduces a morphological feature of classical Latin,
namely “that Latin nouns ending in -ura do not necessarily derive
from the future participle,” in order to affirm that “there is no ratio-
nal basis” for the etymology that links “adventura” to “advenio” via
the latter’s future participle.13 How could an impossibility (“there
is no rational basis for x”) follow from that thing’s contingency (x
is not necessary), if not through the deployment of a pseudoneces-
sitarian argument that would commit Agamben to the view that all
possibles must necessarily be actualized? Moreover, when Agam-
ben proposes his own, presumably more plausible, etymologies for
the modern European lexicon of “adventure,” he settles on the
nouns “adventus” and “eventus,” failing to remark on what is appar-
ent to the naked eye, namely that the affinities between “adventus,”
“eventus,” “adventura,” and, we must add, “advenio” are largely deter-
mined by the presence, in all these words, of same root, namely
veni-, from which is built the verb “venire,” “to come.”
At this point, we would have to raise the question of what is it
that pushes Agamben to contest in such a dubious way the etymol-
ogy of the term “adventure,” only to settle then on another term
from the same lexical family as the etymology that he contested. To
do so would be to enter inevitably into the terrain of speculation.
That said, such speculation would not be simply uninformed, since
the definition of “adventure” that Agamben gives (“something mys-
terious or marvelous that happens to a given man, which could be
equally positive or negative”)14 gives us a clue as to why he privi-
leges an etymological (and thus diachronic) procedure that would
seek to reconstruct the chain of derivations that begot the modern
European term “adventure” over a more structural approach to this
problem, which would emphasize the differential set of relations
among the morphological variables that obtain within the limits of
this lexicon and lend value to each term. Agamben’s procedure is
ultimately meant to secure the proper sense of adventure—which,

paradoxically (given his etymological investments), would have
come to its own not in antiquity but instead through the role that
this word acquires in medieval European romances—from “mod-
ern conceptions of adventure,” which betray modernity’s “obscura-
tion and devaluation of adventure.”15 According to Agamben, what
has been devalued in modernity is the way in which the adventure,
as the name for the marvelous event that befalls “a given man,”16
unites the senses of res gestæ and rerum gestarum, combining life and
story in a form of unity whose implications are not only poetological
but also historical and ontological:
Insofar as it expresses the inseparable unity of event and tale, thing and
speech, the adventure cannot but have a properly ontological mean-
ing beyond its poetological value. If being is the dimension opened to
humans in the anthropogenetic event of language; if being is always, in
Aristotle’s words, something that “is said,” then the adventure certainly
deals with a specific experience of being.17
The ontological stakes of Agamben’s thinking of adventure

become even higher when, in the next chapter—aptly titled
“Event”—he proposes the word “adventure” as
the most correct translation of Ereignis. The latter is thus a genuinely onto-
logical term, which names Being insofar as it happens (is manifested to
man and language) and language insofar as it says and reveals Being. For
this reason, in chivalric poems it is impossible to distinguish adventure
as an event from adventure as a tale; for this reason, encountering the
adventure, the knight first and foremost encounters himself and his most
deep-seated being. If the event at stake is nothing other than anthropo-
genesis, that is, the moment when—thanks to a transformation whose
modalities we cannot know—the living being separates his life from his
language only to rearticulate them, this means that, by becoming human,
he has devoted himself to an adventure that is still in progress and whose
outcome is difficult to predict.18
By translating Ereignis as “adventure,” Agamben both con-

firms and challenges Heidegger’s thinking of the question and the
address that we examined in the previous section. As a way of con-
cluding this interlude, let us examine more closely the nature of
this confirmation and of this challenge.
On the one hand, we might say that Agamben’s thinking of
adventure as Ereignis amounts to an extension of Heidegger’s
thinking of Ereignis and, in this way, confirms the centrality of this
historico-ontological motif for contemporary thought. It is telling,

moreover, that Agamben extends Heidegger’s thinking via transla-
tion, that is, through his interesting and counterintuitive claim that
“adventure” is the best way to go about translating Ereignis—perhaps
Heidegger’s most difficult-to-translate term. Adventure translates
Ereignis better than, for instance, appropriation, since according to
Agamben what characterizes the proper sense of adventure before
its modern devaluation is the fact that by uniting the life to which
the adventure befalls and the story that narrates this adventure in
an indivisible (though not indistinguishable) whole, the adventure
already exhibits the strange form of unity that characterizes Hei-
degger’s rethinking of Ereignis as the name for the appropriation
of the human essence in and through the transformation of its
lingual relation to being. Ereignis names both the advent, the hap-
pening or arrival, of being and the very becoming-human of the
human, since both events only happen in and through their mutu-
ally adventurous determination. If read this way, we are then autho-
rized to extend Agamben’s translation of Ereignis as “adventure” to
what we have been calling, with Peggy, “the condition of address”
in Heidegger. Agamben’s notion of adventure brings together the
sense of topological location and the lingual sense of direction that
characterize Heidegger’s thinking of address while also enacting
the same “suspension of voice” between the passive and active, for
Ereignis, understood as adventure, is as much what brings forth the
becoming adventurous of the human as it is brought forth by such
becoming—and vice versa. Conversely, Agamben’s adventure can
also stand as a translation of Heidegger’s question. Just as the ques-
tionworthy exceeds the realm of any given answer while still being
destined to bring Da-sein back home, the arrival of Ereignis as avven-
tura places the human in an adventure “whose outcome is difficult
to predict”19 but that is still determined by the unquestionable fact
of anthropogenesis as the event in which the human arrives at its
proper address, namely its own being, now thoroughly transformed
into the there of being itself.
On the other hand, Agamben’s thinking of adventure seems
to be as far away as possible from Heidegger’s insofar as the latter
would have been unable (Agamben might say that this is because
he remained constrained by the modern concept of adventure or
because he did not take seriously the ontological import of medi-
eval knight stories) to see the structural affinities between his own
thinking of Ereignis and the experience of adventure. Although
Agamben never quotes Heidegger’s remarks on the adventure in
his book, by turning to this word—which, as we saw, Heidegger
devalues—in order to render such a fundamental concept in
Heidegger’s thinking, Agamben could be seen to be challenging

Heidegger’s decision to remove the question and the address from
the purview of adventure.
And yet, I would argue that Agamben’s own implicit critique of
Heidegger leaves intact—and indeed reinforces—Heidegger’s ges-
ture of retracting the question from the uncertainty and the con-
tingency that is associated with the motif of adventure.20 To put it
bluntly, Agamben’s translation of Ereignis as adventure neutralizes
the radicality of adventure’s contingency—something Heidegger
recognized, albeit negatively. To see how this occurs in Agamben,
we need to interrogate his statement that the adventure consigns
the human to an experience “whose outcome is difficult to predict.”
If Agamben embraces a certain contingency as part and parcel of
the anthropogenetic adventure, he nonetheless refers this contin-
gency and this uncertainty to a prior instance that conditions it and
would be in itself immune to this uncertainty: Ereignis/Avventura.
Introducing, as it were, a split within the very structure of adven-
ture, Agamben implicitly separates the contingency that is assigned
to the human adventure qua ontological event from the necessity of
Ereignis understood as the adventure that opens and grounds the
human adventure in the first place. This is not to suggest that for
Agamben or Heidegger Ereignis cannot fail to happen but rather
that their way of thinking the structure of this happening fails to
reckon with the chance of contingency and a questionability that
would be of a different order than that which the human becomes
in and through Ereignis’s adventurous event. If Ereignis itself were to
be marked by what Friedrich Nietzsche would have called a “dan-
gerous perhaps” (“gefährliche Vielleichts”),21 if Ereignis itself were to
be contingent in the sense that, for instance, Hamacher gives to
this term in his 95 Thesen zur Philologie (95 Theses on Philology)—
”What touches a ‘not’ is contingent” (“Kontingent ist, was ein Nicht
berührt”)22—then the indeterminacy that determines the becom-
ing-human of the human would find itself irreducibly exposed to
a contingency far more radical than that which characterizes the
human essence in its unfolding within the time-space of Ereignis/
Avventura. The contingency that would afflict Ereignis itself would
turn this all too human adventure into a contingent occasion, a
chance happening. Such a contingency would therefore threaten
the human with the chance of losing even the indeterminacy and
open-endedness that characterize its proper form of life. Moreover,
the chance of the becoming-contingent of this human contingency
must remain inexhaustible (like the questionworthiness of an
adventurous question that resists being brought back home), since
the fulfillment of Ereignis through the appropriation of the human
essence into being would actually signal the end of Ereignis itself,
which not only is the ground of human contingency but also must
remain itself contingent if it is to be an event that remains to come
in its coming. The complete advent of the adventure would be the
end of the adventure. For Ereignis/Avventura to be, there has to be
a contingency prior and posterior to the anthropogenetic event,
which thus becomes itself irrevocably uncertain as to whether it has
happened or not. What an adventure.
Such a notion of adventure, however, is not explicitly thought
as such by Heidegger or Agamben. If the former retracts the ques-
tion and the address from the adventure, the latter ups the Hei-
deggerian ante by taking the adventure as the cipher of Ereignis
without actually registering the dangers that such a move might
entail. And just as the question in Heidegger was destined to lose
its questioning character and become “simple saying,” the adven-
ture in Agamben ceases to harbor the threat that it may condemn
Dasein to wander ceaselessly into the void. What Agamben fails to
register is that the contingency of adventure is at play not only inso-
far as the “outcome” of Dasein’s adventure can hardly be predicted
but also that this very unpredictability may include among its pos-
sibilities the chance that there will not be anything like an outcome
to this adventure. The contingency of adventure destines existence
to being incapable of securing its possession of the return ticket to
its proper address, namely, to the humanity that emerges through
its determination with regard to a language that is not simply the
possession of homo sapiens sapiens but is also the very site for the
advent of the event of being: an experience that may always lose its
final destination and remain in this sense “to come.” This would be
the adventure of adventure.
Address Expropriated
We embarked on this long excursus through Heidegger’s think-

ing of address as it crystalizes in his essay “Wissenschaft und Besin-
nung” in order to flesh out the philosophical matrix out of which
the figure of address has emerged as what we called an, if not the, ur-
structure of language and experience. By considering how Agam-
ben’s recent translation of Ereignis as adventure could be extended
to encompass also the motif of address as it emerges in Heidegger’s
decisive rethinking of language, we tried to not only clarify further
this matrix but also expose some of its most problematic conse-
quences, beginning with a certain reduction of a radical thought
of contingency or of the necessity of accidentality that seems to
be implicit in the very postulation of address as the unconditional

arkheˉ of language and experience.
In the last two sections of this essay, I want to think through
how Derrida, Peggy, and Hamacher have implicitly or explicitly
addressed the neutralization of contingency that marks a cer-
tain thinking of the event of Heideggerian inspiration, insisting
on thinking an address and a departure that would depart from
the Heideggerian schema that subtends, for instance, Agamben’s
thinking on these motifs (who is here taken as an emblem for a
certain trend in contemporary European thought whose main fea-
ture, roughly sketched out, lies in its disavowal of the experience
and the thought of the impossible).
Derrida devoted a significant amount of attention to the con-
dition of address in Heidegger’s thinking, though he does not,
to my knowledge, work on the texts that I discussed above, focus-
ing instead on the most direct address of Heidegger’s thinking of
address, namely the collection of essays titled Unterwegs zur Sprache
(On the Way to Language). Crucial for our purposes is Derrida’s long
and well-known note in De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Of Spirit:
Heidegger and the Question) dedicated to Françoise Dastur. This note
was spurred by Dastur’s objections to Derrida’s presumable lack of
attention throughout De l’esprit to all that, in Heidegger, would also
seek to limit the originality of the question as an eminent move-
ment of language and thought in favor of a thinking of language
as a response to an address that would be older or more originary
than the question. In a move typical of a certain Heideggerian
resistance to deconstruction, Dastur’s objection amounts to telling
Derrida that what he was trying to do in these lectures was already
thought by Heidegger. To this Derrida responds by agreeing with
Dastur, within certain limits:
Thought about Ereignis takes its bearings from this acquiescence which
responds—en-gages—to the address. And the proper of man arrives only
in this response or this responsibility. At least it does this when, and only
when, man acquiesces, consents, gives himself to the address addressed
to him, that is to his address, the one which only properly becomes his
own in this response. After naming Ereignis in this context, Heidegger
recalls that the Zusage does not wander around in the void. “It has already
touched.” (Sie hat schon getroffen). Who else but man? (Denn der Mensch ist
nur Mensch, insofern er dem Zuspruch der Sprache zugesagt, für die Sprache, sie
zu sprechen, gebraucht ist).23
The tone of Derrida’s note is acquiescent with regard to Dastur

and thus, by extension, Heidegger: indeed, both Heidegger and
Derrida refer the question to something that is older than it—an

affirmation that enjoins responsibility and decision, begging for, if
not demanding, a countersignature. And yet, Derrida’s choice to
bring his long note to a close by dealing with Heidegger’s thinking
of Ereignis already indicates the place in which Derrida would depart
from Heidegger’s thinking, affinities notwithstanding. Those famil-
iar with Derrida’s long-term engagement with Heidegger will not
fail to recognize that the responsibility Derrida wanted to think
as prior to the question could not be retained with the schema of
Heidegger’s thinking of Ereignis as appropriation, which in spite of
Heidegger’s insistence on the fact that expropriation belongs to
appropriation nonetheless constitutes itself as a thinking of what is
proper to the human and to its essence, namely being the “there” in
which being in its singularity can be thought and experienced.24 It
is for the sake of this propriety that the address takes hold of the
assent, the Zuspruch lays claim to the Zusagen that should co-rre-
spond to it, so that “wandering around in the void” can be avoided.
Still, a letter may always not arrive at its address—and it is by
taking more seriously the necessity of such an accident, the possi-
bility that the address may not have the power to secure the arrival
of a sending, that Derrida’s thinking of address departs from Hei-
degger’s.25 In her compelling analyses of love and jealousy in the
first part of Book of Addresses, Peggy has been even more explicit
than Derrida himself on this point. Speaking of the tenuous rela-
tion between love and address by commenting on a passage from
Jean-Luc Nancy’s “L’amour en éclats” (“Shattered Love”), Peggy
writes in “Deconstruction and Love” that love is
an address without home, without the property of a subject from which

it is sent and to which it returns, love always brushes up against the
uncanny, the unheimlich, which might also be translated for the occasion
as “un-homelike.” Love brings with it the un-homelike because it is the
experience of the sudden or not-so-sudden arrival of the other who expro-
priates address, which is to say, appropriates it, exappropriates it: when I say “I
love . . . ,” it is always the declaration of the other at my address.26
The loved other speaks in me and for me, at my address that is

far away from the place of any possible “mineness” that could ever
go by the name “home.” In addressing me so, the other renders
such a “mineness” impossible not just as a property or as any deter-
mination of my subjectivity, since it corrodes even the basis of my
own power-to-be who I am, my own ipseity, “Seinkönnen,” or, simply
put, my own Da-sein. The advent of love in its sending destines me to
err, exiles me from the realm in which everything that would have
taken place could have been turned into a possible possession, into
a possible possibility of my being, itself determined as a possibility-
to-be. Likewise, the very event of love’s sending is itself deprived of
the character of an event of appropriation or of Agamben’s adven-
ture: in love, as in departure, it is not the case that “expropriation
belongs to appropriation as such” (“Zum Ereignis als solchem gehört
die Enteignis”).27 The latter schema is still oriented to the preserva-
tion of the property of appropriation: “Through it [expropriation]
appropriation does not give in but rather preserves its property”
(“Durch sie gibt das Ereignis sich nicht auf, sondern bewahrt sein Eigen-
tum”).28 The thinking of Ereignis—with or without adventure—ten-
dentially turns the ex-proper into a function of the consolidation
of what is properly one’s own. Rather, in love as in departure, the
other arrives by parting me, by splitting me at my very “I,” rendering
this most natural “home address unknown,” uncanny, un-homely,
im-possible. The arrival of the other, the impossible unconditional-
ity of its gift, is what is most eventful in any event as well as what is
most occasional in every occasion, because it is a departure that has
never arrived as such, not even in a split second. Its happening is
an un-happening before it is ever registered as a happening, since
this event can only unfold in the blink of the eye, at the moment in
which the lids are closed, in that “instant of blindness that assures
sight of its respiration” (“instant d’aveuglement qui assure à la vue sa
respiration”).29 It is one of Peggy’s many merits to have insisted, per-
haps more than anybody else in the wake of Derrida’s thought,
on the fact that deconstruction, if it is to be anything, must be the
rigorous unfolding of the iterable singularity that persists as “a sin-
gular force of insistence,”30 that breathes in and through the always
generalizable text of “exappropriation,” that beats like the heart
of the other in me, like the only possible heart that I could ever
address as a loved one and miss at the moment in which even its
departure departs.
Departing Address
To conclude, I want to return to the sentence of Hamacher that I

mentioned in the beginning of my essay, “Was geschieht, ist Abschied.”
We will consider the sentence from the point of view of its trans-
latability and for the sake of explicating Hamacher’s thinking
of departure as an aporetic experience that might question the
unconditionality of address.
This sentence occurs at least twice in Hamacher’s corpus. It
appears for the first time—that I am aware of—in a short and still
untranslated essay published in 1985 with the rather long title

“Über einige Unterschiede zwischen der Geschichte literarischer
and der Geschichte phänomenaler Ereignisse” (On Some Differ-
ences between the History of Literary and the History of Phenom-
enal Events).31 It then resurfaced more than two decades later in
Hamacher’s remarkable 95 Thesen zur Philologie (95 Theses on Philol-
ogy), in which this sentence occupies the space allotted to Thesis 34
in its entirety.32 For the moment, I will leave this sentence untrans-
lated, if such a thing is possible. I said “if such a thing is possible,”
for I may have already begun to engage in translation from the
moment in which I took this sentence out of its rather complicated
contexts and put it at the beginning of this essay. This would be
especially true if our concept of translation registered the possibili-
ties that open up as soon as one translates the letter (and perhaps
also the spirit) of the Latinate English word “translation” back to
its etymon, namely the Latin noun translatio, which is defined in
Charlton Lewis and Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary as a “carrying
or removing from one place to another, a transporting, transfer-
ring.” And yet, it may well be that, as Peggy suggests in her essay
“Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation,” “il ne se passe rien when
translation is figured as a passage,”33 since the very conception of
translation as a form of passage is part and parcel of logocentrism
in all its permutations. With regard to the matter at hand, Peggy’s
claim would suggest that a translation of this passage of Hamacher
that would be worthy of this name would not have begun simply
because this sentence has been “translated,” in the sense of being
transferred, transported, transplanted to this “foreign” context.
And yet, as Peggy also reminds us in this essay, this “il ne se passe
rien” may not be merely negative. In fact, it may be that only when
the definition of translation as the passage that enables a meaning
that is presumed to preexist and be independent from its inscrip-
tion within a natural language to traverse seamlessly the space that
separates so-called natural languages comes to an impasse that the
possibility of a different understanding of translation emerges—
translation as a “strange medium . . . that suspends a meaning and
its contrary and in which the very possibility of passing a meaning
enters an impasse.”34 The becoming impossible of the possibility
of passage, the experience of translation as an aporia, harbors the
chance of another possibility for translation, for a translation that,
this time, would be attuned to “the impossibility of a faithfulness
without reserve,” to the demand that would be placed before the
translation by its unconditional law of hospitality.35
Since the first text of Hamacher in which the sentence in ques-
tion appears hasn’t been translated yet, let us begin by examining
how the English translators of Hamacher’s theses on philology

rendered this sentence. “Was geschieht, ist Abschied” becomes “What
happens is parting.” I would like to formulate an alternative trans-
lation, since, to borrow from Peggy, something “passes strange” in
this translation—or rather, something fails to pass strange, instead
passing too smoothly here. (Let it also be said in passing that Peg-
gy’s way of turning idioms, especially English idioms such as “to
pass strange,” into compelling sites for a thinking that is always
vowed to the singular is one of the key features of her signature as
a thinker and, dare I say, a poet.)
At first sight, the translation of “Was geschieht, ist Abschied” as
“What happens is parting” seems to be correct both semantically
and syntactically. From a semantic point of view, the choice of
the English verb “happens” and the noun “parting” to translate
the German “geschieht” and “Abschied” is more than justified, espe-
cially since choosing other possibilities—for instance, “occurs”
and “departure”—would not seem to make much of a difference.
Moreover, the word “parting”—the gravitational center of this the-
sis—retains a reference to the two major semantic areas that the
German “Abschied” covers: on the one hand, like the German verb
“scheiden,” which is at the basis of “Abschied,” the English word “part-
ing” refers to the action of separating, of splitting something from
something else, or of establishing a division within a whole, as in
the “parting of the Red Sea.” On the one hand, the English word
also conveys what is perhaps the most common sense of the Ger-
man noun, namely the action of leaving someone or of being sepa-
rated from something, as in the famous lines from Romeo and Juliet
“parting is such sweet sorrow that I’ll say good night until tonight
becomes tomorrow.”36 Finally, examined from the point of view of
syntax, the English translation reproduces the exact order in which
the German sentence unfolds. Hamacher’s phrase thus seems pre-
disposed to pass smoothly into English.
And yet, the smoothness of this translation becomes question-
able the moment we examine more carefully both the semantic
morphology of the terms Hamacher uses in this phrase as well as
its syntax. Take the relation between the German “Abschied” and
the English “parting.” Unlike the former—which, since it is capital-
ized, is clearly a noun—the latter can be read both as a noun and
as the present participle of the verb “to part.” This ambiguity is
further emphasized by the way in which the translators rendered
the syntax of the German. As I noted already, they seem to be abso-
lutely faithful to the syntax of this short German sentence, repro-
ducing the exact order of its four terms. And yet, by choosing to
render “Abschied” as “parting” and by keeping the original order of
Hamacher’s sentence, the translators introduce a reading that is

not present in the German, namely the possibility of taking “is part-
ing” together as a verbal phrase that would be composed of not the
copula and a noun but rather the finite verb “is” and the infinite
verb “parting.” This reading, in turn, yields a verbal tense in Eng-
lish—that is, the present progressive or present continuous, as in
“he/she/it/they is parting”—that is not only absent in the German
but also runs counter to what is most aporetic and thus compelling
about Hamacher’s understanding of the event or the occasion as
a departure. I will return to this issue in a moment, but first I have
to emphasize another aspect of this sentence’s syntax that, though
easy to miss (indeed, the translators seem to have missed it), is cru-
cial for understanding Hamacher’s gesture. I am referring to the
comma that separates the “Was geschieht” from “ist Abschied” in
the original German. Although this comma could hardly have a
place in the English translation, this does not mean that it is irrel-
evant. The English translation “What happens is parting” implicitly
reads Hamacher’s phrase as if the first two words—“Was geschieht”—
constituted the subject nominal phrase of the sentence, followed
by a verbal phrase—“ist Abschied”—composed of the copula and a
noun (which, as we saw, in English can be read as a noun or a
verb or even as a specific tense, that is, the present progressive).
And yet, from a syntactic point of view, the presence of a comma
separating these two parts of the sentence suggests that the sen-
tence’s order should not be taken at face value, since it may not
coincide with a standard linear reading of the sentence in which
the first term is in the position of the subject and what comes after
the verb is the predicate. To grasp the relevance of this comma,
recall that the finite verb in regular German sentences can only
occupy the second position in a main clause or the last position
in a subordinate clause. Recall also that German is stricter about
commas than English. In the context of the phrase in question, the
presence of a comma before the copula suggests that what comes
before the copula—”Was geschieht”—is either a subordinate clause
of “ist Abschied” or is related to it by apposition. If this is so, then
the reading of “what happens” as the subject nominal phrase of the
sentence and of “is parting” as the verbal phrase is at the very least
compromised, since the syntactic structure of the sentence would
be the reverse of how it is actually written. It is for this reason that
I would suggest that Hamacher’s sentence can be read more faith-
fully, if less smoothly, as “Parting is what happens” or as “What hap-
pens is departure”—or, my personal favorite, “Departure is what
occurs”—than if we translate it as “What happens is parting.”
At this point, you would be justified in saying that I am splitting
hairs. What difference could it make if we hear the phrase as “What

happens is parting” or as “Departure is what happens”? I would
briefly respond with the following claim: what Hamacher is invit-
ing us to think in this thesis is not the continuous parting of what
occurs but rather that departure constitutes eventhood itself, the
very condition of what may be called an event. Occasions, hap-
penings, and events are not merely parting because they begin
to drift away as soon as they take place within the ever-receding
line of time. Parting is not a predicate of the event or a quality
of eventhood—departure is the way in which the event itself hap-
pens for Hamacher. In other words, it is not simply that parting
or departing belongs to everything that happens by virtue of it
having happened, which would make of Abschied a predicate of all
events insofar as they are considered as happening, in their event-
character. Rather, departure is the happening of an event in itself.
Hamacher’s phrase thus places the accent on the structural irony
of eventhood itself, which is not to be thought of on the basis of any
modification of presence, however minimal. The eventuality of the
event does not happen at some point and immediately begins to
part ways with itself and from us, but its very happening is a parting
of ways, as a splitting off from within, a retraction from any notion
of event as appropriation.
This reading would find support in the first text in which Ham-
acher formulated this phrase, namely his 1985 essay on the dis-
tinction between literary and phenomenal or phenomenological
events. It is telling that this phrase appears as part of Hamacher’s
stunning commentary of Book 8 of The Odyssey, more specifically
of the famous scene in which Odysseus cries twice after hearing
the bard Demodokos sing his own deeds in the Trojan War. This
passage has been submitted to multiple commentaries. In his 1964
lectures on the language of literature, Michel Foucault saw in the
mirroring effect that obtains between Demodokos’s song and
Odysseus’s life a doubling movement that he regards as “probably
constitutive of the very being of literature, if not in general, at least
of Western literature” (“probablement constitutive de l’être même de la lit-
térature, sinon en général, du moins de la littérature occidentale”).37 Han-
nah Arendt, in turn, locates in this scene the very “metaphorical”
origin of the classical concept of history in general, since Odys-
seus’s confrontation with his own deeds now externalized into an
epic narrative signals the transformation of a mere occasion or
happening (“bloses Geschehen”) into history (“Geschichte”).38 Closer
to Arendt than to Foucault, Hamacher’s reading of this moment in
Odysseus emphasizes the disidentification that obtains between Odys-
seus and his own story:
Confronted with his own history of suffering in the narration of another,

Odysseus cries not for his past pain and the loss of his companions, but
rather as a woman who has lost her husband, who until now stood as
the protector of the integrity and security of her house—as the compari-
son, spun into an allegory, suggests. Thus, Odysseus cries for the loss of
his own history, which is no longer in his power, but has gained inde-
pendence as an epic, becoming alienated; he is, as it were, torn from
Demodokos’s song, which leaves him behind as the “widow” of his history.
Odysseus does not experience the narration of his deeds and speeches as
the objective confirmation and enrichment of his subjective experience
and he does not indulge in this encounter as the reappropriation and
internalizing recollection of his life, externalized into an epic—as Hegel
would interpret the act of historical self-exposition. Rather, he experi-
ences the narration of his deeds as an enemy attack on his proper per-
son, which was determined to secure the economy of his life and gender.
The narration of history is a deprivation on the life of those to whom it
occurs. What occurs in the narration of history is a departure from the
experienced history. And only in this way is the experience of the narra-
tion of history the experience of history once more: not as lived-experi-
ence [Erlebnis], in which one could again relive, feel, and empathize with
oneself, and that would let itself be reproduced again and again in its
presence, rather, as the departure from a proper life, and always only as
the semblance of a proper life from out of its revocation, which occurs
first in the pain of departure and is experienced first in the danger of
its loss, thus always primarily post festum and under the conditions of its
disappearance, as is therefore never presentable as such. What occurs is
departure.39
For Hamacher, Odysseus’s tears indicate that he has lost the

capacity to co-rrespond to the address directed to him by his own
story. This particular event within this literary adventure is thus not
to be seen as a function of literary self-referentiality (à la Foucault),
since the intensity of Odysseus’s response to Demodokos’s song
reveals that the confrontation with “his own past” has deprived
Odysseus of the power to appropriate Demodokos’s song as his
own history. This is clear from Odysseus’s “gender troubles,” which
the extended metaphor or the allegory of Odysseus as a widow
whose husband has died in battle and who faces exile and slavery
conveys. The tears that flood Odysseus’s face are like the tears of
a warrior’s widow—say, Andromache—because Odysseus can only
experience his own story as the story of another. Although Odys-
seus is bound to this other, he remains incapable of relating to this
other in such a way that he might ever come to recognize himself in
and as this other. His “becoming-woman” is also a becoming-widow
to himself: Odysseus cries for himself (the dead husband) from the
position of another (the wife), positioning himself both as the part-
ner of a fallen other and as that other, which is both himself and yet
not himself—a self-as-other that haunts the time and the space of
Demodokos’s song as heard by Odysseus while remaining radically
inaccessible to him.
If Odysseus encounters his own deeds as such a widow, then
the confrontation with the history of his own past does not follow
the logic of the unification of life and story, as Agamben’s notion
of adventure would suggest. What Hamacher calls in this essay a
“literary event” breaks with the logic of historical appropriation
and identification that underlies traditional historical schemas
from historicism to Hegelian philosophies of history and up to
Heidegger’s history of being and Agamben’s history of anthro-
pogenesis. Configuring a history of missed experiences, literary
events cut across the first disjunction mentioned above and turn
both the experience and the narration of an event into “literary
historical” events. Hamacher’s literary history disables the old
distinction between historiam rerum gestarum and historia res gestæ,
where the former corresponds to a dimension of history that is sup-
posedly “literary” or “rhetorical”—history understood as a mode of
narration or representation, a genre of Erzählung—and the latter
refers to history understood as something that actually happened,
as a Geschehen or an occurrence that would be historical regardless
of its representation. Displacing this traditional distinction, Ham-
acher suggests that both the experience and the narration of liter-
ary events are historical, since being-historical is itself to be seen as
the specific mode of occurrence that brings about a “tearing of the
continuity of life” (“Geschichte ist, . . . als Zerreißen der Kontinuität des
Lebens”).40 Literary history itself occurs; its occasion is indicated by
the interruption of the epic circle of reappropriation that allows a
life to continue on its proper trajectory toward self-recognition. The
literary event is historical precisely because it brings to a halt any
attempt by any subject or any life to appropriate the past for itself
by transforming any moment within a series of temporal moments
into its own autoreproductive reflections.
It is in this sense that, I would suggest, Hamacher’s thinking of
departure intensifies the radicalization of the unconditionality of
address at work in the writings of Derrida and of Peggy, suggesting
that the experience of Abschied exceeds the reach of the mode of
address that is accompanied by the demand to respond and that
determines its addressee as structurally responsible. Departure thus
names the very possibility that something might happen to the very
structure of happening that is structured by the desire to return

home.
To conclude, we must note that the phrase “Was geschieht, ist
Abschied” admits another translation: “Farewell” or “Goodbye is
what happens.”41 To say goodbye to the exigency of a proper life,
isn’t that the condition of the address of love as Peggy has taught
us to hear it? If so, then, to be in love, that is, to have one’s address
exapropriated by an other, would also require that we leave the
question open, that we make it so that the other’s address is accom-
panied at all moments by the “travail en creux de l’inter-rogation,” so
that the other’s exapropriation may not congeal into the rigidity of
a sovereign law, so that its address may not become the hyperaddress
from which the command to obey is issued. A certain imprudence
or impudence—a certain impropriety—must guard the experience
of love. Likewise, to love, one must learn to say goodbye, sans retour,
sans au revoir, sans à bientôt.
I could say, in all modesty, that something of the first condi-
tion, of being improper, may have been met in this essay. As for the
second one, I do not want to know or learn to know how to respond
to Peggy’s departure without an attending au revoir et à bientôt.
À bientôt!
Notes
The epigraphs are from Martin Heidegger, GA 70: Über den Anfang, ed. Paola-Ludovika
Coriando (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 84, and Jacques Derrida, L’écriture
et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 49.
1. Peggy Kamuf, “Introduction: Event of Resistance,” in Jacques Derrida, Without
Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 21.
2. Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 3.
3. Ibid., 2–3.
4. Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 179–80
(translation modified).
5. For his most famous analyses of this question, see Martin Heidegger, “Letter
on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, 239–76
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
6. Heidegger, GA 70, 84.
7. Ibid., 84. Heidegger’s thinking of the “singularity” (Einzigkeit) and the “once-
ness” (Einmaligkeit) of being remains still largely unexamined, at least by English-
speaking Heidegger scholars with the notable exception of Krzysztof Ziarek, “On
Heidegger’s Einmaligkeit Again: The Single Turn of the Event,” Gatherings 6 (2016):
91–113.
8. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 49.

9. Allow me to cite in extenso from the entry on the term “Abenteuer” in the
Grimm Brothers’s Deutsches Wörterbuch: “ABENTEUER n. früher f. aus dem romanischen
adventura, aventura, aventure, woher es schon die mhd. dichter entlehnten und häufig in
verschiednen bedeutungen verwandten, die Benecke 1, 67–72 vorträgt; nicht zu schreiben
abentheuer, noch weniger abendtheuer, obgleich manche dabei an abend und theuer
(tiure), andere gar an affe und eben (affenteuer, ebenteuer), ohne dafür einen grund zu
wissen, gedacht haben werden; einige bezogen ebenteuer, ebentheuer vielleicht auf eventus.
das nnl. avontuur nahm offenbar bezug auf avond. Weiblich gebraucht taucht es noch hin
und wieder im 16. 17. jh. vor: seiner abenthür. Keisersb. brosamlin 73 ; die wigoleisisch
abenteur. Fischart Garg. 102 ; dise abentheur. das. 239 ; auch öfter in der verdeutschung
des decamerone, Frankf. 1580; mit unerhörter abenthewer. Weckherlin 859; du wagest
eine grosze ebentheuer. Gryphius seugamme s. 876; bald aber galt allgemein das neutrum.
Mit diesem abenteuer nun verknüpft sich stets die vorstellung eines ungewöhnlichen, seltsamen,
unsichern ereignisses oder wagnisses, nicht nur eines schweren, ungeheuern, unglücklichen,
sondern auch artigen und erwünschten. Auch mich hat ein liebes abenteuer erwartet.
abenteuer? warum brauche ich das alberne wort, es ist nichts abenteuerliches in
einem sanften zuge, der menschen zu menschen hinzieht. unser bürgerliches leben,
unsere falschen verhältnisse, das sind die abenteuer, das sind die ungeheuer. Göthe
16, 206. von einem edelhofe zum andern, wo er manches vergnügen erregte, manches
genosz und nicht ohne die angenehmsten und artigsten abenteuer blieb. 19, 121. sie
haben heute gewis ein abenteuer gehabt? sagte Jarno, und zwar ein angenehmes. wie
sie sich auf ihre leute verstehen, versetzte Lothario, ja es ist mir ein sehr angenehmes
abenteuer begegnet. 20, 73. hätte Clavigo nicht einmal ein abenteuer mit ihr gehabt?
10, 99. weil du dich mit einem abenteuer beschäftigst, das nichts fruchtet und die
schöne zeit verzehrt. 10, 224.” “Abenteuer, n., früher f.,” Der deutsche Wortschatz
von 1600 bis heute, https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/abenteuer.
10. Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” 182 (translation modified).
11. See Martin Heidegger, Country-Path Conversations, trans. Brett Davis (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 102. I am grateful to Alberto Moreiras’s
work for exposing me to the importance of this Heraclitean motif in late Heidegger,
even if my approach to this constellation of issues in Heidegger and beyond differs
from his. See note 40 in Alberto Moreiras, “Infrapolítica marrana. Cercanía contra
comunidad: la errancia y el ojo de más,” in De otro modo que político, special issue of
Pléyade: Revista de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales 19 (January–June 2017): 113–43. To
state my difference with Moreiras as briefly as possible, I would say that although he
argues that Heidegger never truly leaves behind the idea that we are never at home
and instead conceives of nearness or proximity as an infinite task (here Moreiras is
arguing against Richard Capobianco, who claims that Heidegger seems to abandon
the motif of “not-being-at-gome” [“nicht-zu-Hause-sein”] in his later work), Moreiras
continues to move within the same fundamental set of presuppositions as Capobi-
anco. What I take to be decisive to understand the limits of Heidegger’s thinking
concerning the being-at-home of Dasein and of the motif of “language as the house of
being” is not whether Dasein ever actually arrives at its proper address or only remains
destined to approach this address, in a movement of nearing that does not ever
abolish the distance between being Dasein and a putative being-at-home that would
be devoid of any trace of uncanniness. What is most crucial in my view is the very fact
that existence remains so determined by the movement of turning home that any
possible deviation from this trajectory can only be thought by Heidegger under the
conceptual figures of impropriety (Uneigentlichkeit) or “inessence” (Unwesen). In this
respect, I agree with Alberto that if we are to follow Heidegger’s most explicitly stated
intentions, we cannot think of existence except as a movement of proximity, of infinite

approximation to itself, a movement of self-approximation determined by home as
the existential horizon par excellence—a proximity that, as Heidegger himself makes
clear in his Feldweg-Gespräche, does not abolish distance but rather releases it to its
proper relation of belonging to the nearing of Da-sein. Still, it is this archi-investment
in a proper distance that would be liberated only by the movement of self-proximity
that I am trying to question by turning to the motif of departure and adventure and
seeing whether these two motifs can be fully domesticated by the unconditionality of
the condition of address in Heidegger. If there were a distance that could not be
reduced to the distance that belongs to self-proximity without leaving a residue that
resists this movement of appropriation and if this other distance were not simply an
accident that prevents us from having a proper relation to ourselves as Da-sein but
betrayed the marks of a “general” contingency or accidentality that should not be
relegated to one of the poles that delimits the place of the movement of existence,
the question becomes why does Heidegger continue to hypostatize the autarchic
nostos, which may be but one way of going about one’s life, as the very archi-movement
of life and existence? Shouldn’t an attempt to rethink existence in its opening and
freedom from any sort of capture also take issue with the being-historical nostalgia
that often marks the Heideggerian text?
12. Giorgio Agamben, The Adventure, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2018), 22–23.
13. Ibid., 23 (my emphases).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 44.
16. It is telling that Agamben’s translator chose the masculine common noun
“man” to render the equivalent in Italian instead of the gender-neutral term “human,”
which he uses elsewhere (see, e.g., the passage cited immediately after this note).
This could be explained, among other reasons, by recourse to the medieval literary
and cultural context that Agamben privileges in L’avventura. Said historical context
would make it difficult, if not even anachronistic, to say that in the Romances the
adventure befalls humans rather than men. That said, the translator’s choice belies
the phallogocentric strictures of Agamben’s thinking of the adventure, as does his
insistence on the necessity of approaching this motif by privileging the explicitly
feminine allegory of Frau Âventiure, which functions, as it were, as the double of
the ladies whose love motivates the actions of the knights in a medieval romance.
Regardless of Agamben’s intentions vis-à-vis the ontological reach of the motif of
adventure, thus construed the adventure remains an affair of men—or, at the very
least, of a certain type of men.
17. Agamben, The Adventure, 42–43.
18. Ibid., 81–82.
19. Ibid., 82.
20. To be sure, Agamben himself makes the connection between Avventura and
Tuche—the Greek concept for chance or accidentality—in his book. But even when
he does this, his notion of chance remains a destined chance, destined precisely to
efface the very resistance to destination that, for instance, Heidegger himself saw
in this motif. For Agamben’s remarks on the adventure as a figure of chance and
destiny, see Agamben, The Adventure, chap. 3.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Die Gebürt der Tragödie (Ham-
burg: Meiner, 2013), 9.
22. Werner Hamacher, “33,” in Minima Philologica, trans. Catherine Diehl and
Jason Groves (New York: Fordham, 2015), 36; “33,” in 95 Thesen zur Philologie, ed. Urs
Engeler (Frankfurt: roughbooks, 2010), 34.
23. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Ben-
nington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 135–36.
24. For Derrida’s earliest remarks regarding the need to displace the lexicon of
appropriation in order to think différance, see “Note 1” in “La différance,” in Marges
de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 27–28. See also “Note 26” in “Ousia et gramme:
Note sur un note de Sein und Zeit,” in Marges de la Philosophie, 74.
25. Geoffrey Bennington has recently offered a provocative formalization of
this most basic idea of Derridean deconstruction through the phrase “the necessary-
possibly-not.” See Geoffrey Bennington, Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault,
Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham, 2016), 275–81.
26. Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 31.
27. Heidegger, GA 14: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007) 28.
28. Ibid.
29. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris:
Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), 38.
30. Kamuf, Book of Addresses, 57.
31. Werner Hamacher, “Über einige Unterschiede zwischen der Geschichte
literarischer and der Geschichte phänomenaler Ereignisse,” in Texte zur Theorie und
Didaktik der Literaturgeschichte, ed. Marja Rauch and Achim Geisenhanslüke, 163–82
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012).
32. Hamacher, “34,” in 95 Thesen zur Philologie, 35.
33. Peggy Kamuf, “Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation,” Profession (2010): 64.
34. Ibid., 65.
35. Ibid., 70.
36. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114.
37. Michel Foucault, “Littérature et langage: Bruxelles, décembre 1964,” in
La grande étrangère: À propos de la littérature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert,
Mathieu Potte-Boneville, and Judit Revel (Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013) 116–17.
38. Hannah Arendt, Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft: Übungen im politischen
Denken I, ed. Ursula Ludz (München: Piper, 2004), 61–62.
39. Hamacher, “Über einige Unterschiede,” 168–69.
40. Ibid., 169.
41. I am grateful to Mauricio González Rozo for his insightful comments on the
nuances of translating “Abschied” as “departure” or as “farewell.”

Addressing Departure

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Addressing Departure

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús

Der Untergang ist die Enstasis der Zeit,

Nietzsche s’en doutait bien mais Zara-

Discourse, 41.2–3, Spring/Fall 2019, pp. 287–318.

Creusement dans l’autre vers l’autre où le

—Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence

I must begin by avowing a certain lack of taste, if not outright

is examined in terms of its addressability. This aporia could be

Derrida Seminars Translation Project at UC Irvine’s Special Collections.

departure and her departure by enlisting a German sentence, “Was

The Question of Address or the Address of the Question

I said before that I decided to address the theme of departure today

the signs that distinguish the “departures” level in airports from

but instead of address. As Peggy herself remarked in the brilliant

If French keeps the lexicon of adresse on a tighter leash, if it

With Valeria Campos Salvaterra, Chile, 2018.

one’s addresses”; and (c) its ontological malleability, which admits

force. Now, it is precisely this ultraconditioning power of address

In contrast to the merely questionable and to all that is question-less, the

Notice how the motif of address (Zusprechen, literally “to speak

responsive manner. Notice, then, the strict co-rrespondence that

an address, the condition of address as Heidegger understands it

of any semantic determination and thus in excess of any form: the

movement still submits to the strictures of archeoteleology. This

movement of approximation—which he calls in Feldweg-Gespräche

Interlude: On the Coming Adventure

In a recent text titled L’avventura (The Adventure), Giorgio Agam-

An investigation of the possible etymology of the term aventure should

Without wishing to launch a full-fledged polemic against Agam-

a plausible etymology of the word on the basis of which said alle-

ultimately meant to secure the proper sense of adventure—which,

The ontological stakes of Agamben’s thinking of adventure

By translating Ereignis as “adventure,” Agamben both con-

historico-ontological motif for contemporary thought. It is telling,

Heidegger’s thinking, Agamben could be seen to be challenging

We embarked on this long excursus through Heidegger’s think-

be implicit in the very postulation of address as the unconditional

The tone of Derrida’s note is acquiescent with regard to Dastur

Derrida refer the question to something that is older than it—an

an address without home, without the property of a subject from which

The loved other speaks in me and for me, at my address that is

To conclude, I want to return to the sentence of Hamacher that I

untranslated essay published in 1985 with the rather long title

how the English translators of Hamacher’s theses on philology

Hamacher’s sentence, the translators introduce a reading that is

hairs. What difference could it make if we hear the phrase as “What

Confronted with his own history of suffering in the narration of another,

For Hamacher, Odysseus’s tears indicate that he has lost the

structure of happening that is structured by the desire to return

8. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 49.

intentions, we cannot think of existence except as a movement of proximity, of infinite

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