THE REGION OF THE STRANGER

Abstract

In the wake of the recent publication of Heidegger's posthumous writing Beitriige zur Philosophie, this paper offers a meditation about the sense of Western Civilization, after the Second World War, seen as the manifestation of a destiny. Such a destiny discloses the defeat of the conjugation of the Jewish-Christian tradition, the Greek tendencies and modern science: Truth, Way (the teleology of Being), and Life. That defeat does not reveal a simple nihilistic reversal of those leading words, but the hidden ground of their affirmation and negation: Recusation (Verweigerung), Country (Gegend) and "Occisio" (Abgeschiedenheit). Too late for hope and too late for pain, Celan and Trakl go along this margin, already present in the precise and ambiguous Latin word "Occidens", whose derivatives point at once toward the victim and to the carnifex. So are the Beitriige the warning of the impossibility of "doing" philosophy (as one does, for instance, Computer Science or Genetical Engineering), even before Auschwitz.