---

Shane Montgomery Ewegen
Trinity College

Volume 17, 2025

---

GA 99—Heidegger’s so-called “Four Notebooks [Vier Hefte]” from 1948 to 1950—carries out a gesture of almost limitless withdrawal.¹ As a self-described continuation and transformation of the project of “sigetics”that Heidegger had attempted in Contributions to Philosophy², GA 99 attends to the way in which beyng, in the contemporary moment, has sent itself as not sending itself, has given itself as concealing itself, has thrust itself forward as withdrawing itself into oblivion. By attending to this given withdrawal, the text itself, according to Heidegger, eventuates the turning from the forgetfulness of beyng (that has characterized the history of metaphysics) toward the thoughtful commemoration of beyng, where such commemoration takes the form of an experience of the concealment, or withdrawal, at the dark heart of beyng. For Heidegger, GA 99 carries out the manifesting concealment of beyng, in this way serving as the Ereignis of beyng as it opens up a world of meaning behind which it withdraws. 

Such a project poses special challenges to thinking and, above all, to language. Not only does the assertoric language characteristic of metaphysics fail in the face of such a project, but even poetic saying, insofar as it remains a saying, falls short: for when attempting to say the silence at the heart of beyng, language recoils, and the expressive power of even poetic words withdraws. There is, simply, an ineluctable opacity to what GA 99 tries to draw us toward, an unutterable silence to which the text paradoxically tries to make our ears attentive. As a result, the text is written in a unique style, a style unto itself, one that approaches the aphoristic in form but resists the universalizing that even aphorisms depend upon.³

Owing to the topic of the text—i.e., beyng as it manifests its withdrawal—and the style of the text—i.e., words that mirror or intimate this withdrawal—GA 99 is almost impossible to talk about: for any scholarly exegesis operates by way of theses and assertions, arguments and evidence, which are precisely the relics of representational thinking that Heidegger goes to such grand lengths to move beyond. As a result, any attempt to understand GA 99 is bound to fail: for the text itself is an attempt, as Heidegger at one point puts it, “to think the incomprehensible incomprehensibly.” Talking or writing about the text risks committing irremediable violence to it, breaking the silence so crucial to beyng’s concealing withdrawal.

There is thus something radically idiosyncratic about this text—or maybe even idiotic, in a Greek sense—as it withdraws away from public discourse, away from public exposition, away from conversation. This is all the stranger given that the matter of conversation, of Gespräch, is of principal concern within the text, indeed serving as a focal point of Heidegger’s attempt to name the withdrawing gathering of the eventuation of beyng. GA 99 is a text concerning conversation that it is almost impossible to converse about.

It is with this mention of “conversation” that I want to bring Katherine Davies and Charles Bambach into the conversation. Davies and Bambach have each written extensively and compellingly about Heidegger and Gespräch; and while neither of them, to my knowledge, have written about GA 99, their work can nonetheless help us understand just how strange, how idiosyncratic or idiotic, this text is. By bringing their work on conversation into this conversation about Heidegger’s thinking of conversation within GA 99, we can better see just how much of an outlier the latter is when seen within the broader trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking. 

I begin with Davies, who has written an outstanding book on what she calls the “conversational” aspects of Heidegger’s thinking, a book that demonstrates the extent to which conversational thinking animated Heidegger’s work not only in those few texts of his that take the actual form of dialogues or trialogues (such as Country Path Conversations, etc.), but throughout his corpus. Davies’ book compellingly shows the manifold ways in which conversation characterized Heidegger’s thinking, both as he carried out sustained conversations with various interlocutors from the history of the west, but also as he worked to develop a non-metaphysical thinking, a poetic thinking, whose very nature was characterized by a non-assertoric, conversational openness to alterity.⁴ Davies helps us see that such thinking was necessary on Heidegger’s part as he moved ever closer toward thinking beyng itself as it unfolds as language. To quote just two interrelated passages from Davies’ book:

As Heidegger emphasized in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” language itself is conversational in essence. This means that not only is language already speaking with itself and with us, but that listening and hearing are also integral to language itself.⁵

[…]

This depiction of language as inherently conversational relates to Heidegger’s contention that Hölderlin is a historical figure, one who stands out yet ahead and who grants that which is outstanding in what has-been as a properly futural possibility. Hölderlin’s poetizing allows the realization, “[w]e have been one conversation since the time when there ‘is time.’ Ever since time arose and was brought to stand, since then we are historical” (GA 4: 39/EHP 57). Conversation and the historical are thus selfsame; Hölderlin’s poetizing is the occasion to come to terms with this relationality.⁶

In short, Davies’ book shows that Heidegger’s conversational thinking is an attempt to let the conversational character of language itself, as the house of beyng, come to light. In this register, Davies helps elucidate the essential connection, for Heidegger, between conversation and history, where the latter is to be thought as nothing other than the conversation that the human has with beyng, the conversation that, as Hölderlin had already said, we ourselves, as human, always already are. 

It is with this mention of Hölderlin and history that I want to bring Bambach directly into the conversation. Bambach has written what is probably the best book on the crucial and enduring importance of Hölderlin to Heidegger’s philosophical (and political) project, in general, and to his being-historical-thinking in particular.⁷ As Bambach helps us see, Hölderlin became a fate for Heidegger, a herald for Germany, a destiny for humans at the end of the first inception awaiting the transition to the second, a transition from humanity to mortality, from being (with an ‘i”) to beyng (with a “y”). For Heidegger, a proper reception of Hölderlin’s poetry, and a proper reckoning with the eschatological outlook it embodies, was an essential part—indeed, perhaps the most essential part—of Heidegger’s beyng-historical narrative. 

As part of his reconstruction of this narrative, Bambach offers a detailed and insightful analysis of the “Western Conversation,” Heidegger’s final dramatic dialogue (from 1946-1948), the principal focus of which is Gespräch, where this is understood as

an originary gathering (Ge-) of language (Sprache) whereby the participants in the conversation become gathered in the event of language itself [….]⁸ For Heidegger, what comes to language here is the possibility of a turning within the history of the West as a movement that might bring with it a saving turn toward that which is coming.⁹

This turning toward what is to come, possible only (it seems) through an attentiveness to Hölderlin’s poetry, serves as the culmination of the history of being, the pivot-point in the Kehre away from the forgetfulness of being endemic to modernity toward . . . whatever it is that comes next. 

With Davies’ and Bambach’s work on Gespräch in mind, we turn back to GA 99. As we will see, GA 99 breaks, in certain fundamental respects, with the path of Heidegger’s thinking leading up to the late 1940s that Davies and Bambach help us understand so well. Or, perhaps it is better to say that GA 99 takes that path to its outermost boundary, to its very limit, to a place beyond any eschatology, beyond any history, and beyond—if one can even say such a thing—any conversation. Simply put, the text withdraws to a place of absolute singularity beyond, it seems, the spacing of conversation or the timing of history. 

***

Like “The Western Conversation,” and written at roughly the same time, GA 99 is preoccupied with the theme of Gespräch. This becomes evident within the very opening lines of the text: 

The saying of the deployment [Brauches] requires a different style of thinking. “The Deployment [Brauch]” is a forename for the setting-apart [Unter-schieds]. The saying eventuates [ereignet] the Gespräch of the setting-apart. The Gespräch is the deploying gathering-forth of language to which the unspoken comes in order to remain unspoken within it.¹⁰

In the pages that follow, Gespräch is of principal concern as Heidegger attempts to describe the unfolding of world, as language, as which beyng eventuates itself in a withdrawing dispensation: indeed, the word Gespräch will come to name precisely this dispensation of beyng. 

And yet, despite Heidegger’s preoccupation with Gespräch within GA 99, the text cannot be called “conversational” in any sense. Although Heidegger at one point describes the nature of conversational dialogues, stating that they are meant to “constitute the liveliness of a speaking-with-one-another [and] take the form of various intentions, from chit-chatting and the exchanging of opinions, to expressions of promise and obligation and deliberative discourse,”¹¹ the text of GA 99 does not present such a form of writing: there are no characters, no setting, no conversation. Indeed, not only does this kind of staged conversation not take place within the text—it is expressly rejected as a viable path toward grasping beyng in its full aspect: 

The pathway is not some contrived conversation [erdachtes Gespräch], but rather the language of thinking: a destiny of the suddenness of the turning-around [ein Geschick der Jähe der Kehre]. The way into the fre[y]e of the suddenness of the turning-around. The Gespräch is the gathering-forth of the eventuating gathering of the expropriating deployment into the worlding setting-apart.¹² 

GA 99 does present a Gespräch, then, but precisely not as a contrived (erdachtes) conversation, not a made-up or fictionalized conversation such as one finds in Heidegger’s “five” conversational texts.¹³ Rather, the text carries out the gathering of world that follows upon the event of expropriation (the Ereignis of Enteignis), that event whereby beyng sets itself apart from the beings to which it gives rise. Such a Gespräch, such a gathering (Ge) of language (Sprache), is said to be the very “language of thinking.” 

What becomes immediately evident is that the “language of thinking” unfolds not as a conversation between people—either fictional or actual—but as the between of language itself that first makes any conversation possible:¹⁴ 

Gespräch is an inter-locuting [Unter-Redung] in the strict sense of a speaking within the apart and the between of the setting-apart [im Unter und im Zwischen des Unter-Schieds]. The Gespräch of language occurs between the speakers; it is inter-locution as in-scription [In-Schrift]. The inter-locution operative within the setting-apart: neither dialectical nor dialogical [weder dialektisch, noch dialogisch].¹⁵ 

Gespräch, then, is the initial gathering/opening of world (as language) that sets the ground, so to speak, for any subsequent conversation or dialogue (whether real or invented), though it itself, Heidegger has said, is neither dialectical nor dialogical. Because it is not conversational in any traditional sense, this Gespräch, understood as “inter-locution,”

does not establish anything; [it] does no work; but [it] also does not instruct and lead astray toward representations; it does not strive toward the construction of a dialogue—rather, the inter-locuting, as passage, makes the path of world [….]¹⁶  

In other words, nothing is accomplished or effected by this interlocution: there is no communication, no instruction, taking place. (To phrase this in a way that will be important below: nothing is sent through this Gespräch.) The problem with traditional conversations is that they tend to operate within the perimeters of representational thinking: a person says something about something and the auditor represents what is said to herself; in this way, conversation directs the attention of each speaker to what the other has said (i.e., to the specific being about which they are speaking). In the Gespräch underway within GA 99, an attempt is instead made to draw the attention of the reader to world, that is, to the originary setting-apart of beings and beyng, without reference to any specific being within that world.

Rather than giving us anything like a traditional conversation, then, the text, as the very between that makes conversation possible, instead gives us a conversation between the thinker (i.e., Heidegger) and beyng. And yet, given that no communication or instruction, no sending, is taking place, everything depends upon how we understand the word “between” here: for the relationship “between” beyng and the human is such as to call into question whether there is anything like a distance—a spacing that a Gespräch would then traverse—between them. We see this problematized in the following:

Thinking, obeying the essence of beyng, dwelling in this essence, lends its hand to beyng. What is the hand of beyng? The self-eventuating reaching-out of its essence, handing over into the deployed custody […] of the true-keeping of its essence. This watching-over is thinking as the preserving saying of the setting apart. It corresponds [entspricht] to the reaching-out; it proceeds correspondingly to the hand of beyng. Accordingly, thinking itself, insofar as it itself essentially belongs in beyng, lends itself a hand. As correspondence, thinking helps itself enter into its own essence, into the hand. – This lending a hand is the authentic activity [Handeln] arising from out of the essence of the Event and is thereby essential.¹⁷ 

Thinking obeys beyng, lending its hand to beyng so that beyng might hand over its essence and find protection within the thinking of the thinker. The thinker does this by attending to the concealment, the withdrawal, the silence, operative within beyng. (We can glean this, I think, from the fact that “beyng” is crossed out in each instance in the above passage.) When thinking attends to the withdrawal of beyng in this way, it corresponds to the manner of beyng’s sending. The language of “correspondence” perhaps initially leads us into thinking about two separate entities communicating across a distance so as to come into agreement, a kind of relating or correlating between the human and beyng. Yet, Heidegger later explicitly states that this correspondence is not to be understood as a relation (Relation), but rather as a Ver-hältnis, a “for-bearing.”¹⁸ Although such for-bearing requires a reticent surmising (Vermuten) on the part of the thinker—a comportment that, incidentally, Davies writes insightfully about in her book¹⁹—Ver-hältnis cannot simply be understood as a gesture or comportment on the part of the human: rather, Ver-hältnis is the carrying out, or the bringing to term, of the ontological difference itself:  

The for-bearing [Ver-Hältnis] is the essence of the setting apart. The for-bearing eventuates itself in the event of expropriation [Enteignis]. The (for)bearing is the bearing-out [Austrag] of difference.²⁰

Through reticent surmising, the thinker lets beyng, as the withdrawing sending of world, occur. There is an indissoluble intertwinement, an inseparable intimacy, between the thinker and beyng such that the very sense of the word “between” is called into question: there is no spacing, no gap, that separates them. The thinker, through way-making thinking, bears beyng forth (in its withdrawal), carrying it to term, consummating its eventuation. In this coming to term, it is difficult if not impossible to tell where the hand of beyng ends and the hand of the thinker begins.

Or, rather, it would be almost impossible to tell where the one ends and the other begins if Heidegger did not go on to downplay and diminish the role that the thinker plays in the bearing out of this conversation. Just after noting the connection of the text to the “sigetics” he carried out in Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes the following: 

Without the name of the author; but not in order to dissimulate or play a fatuous game with anonymity, but rather to make it clearer that the author must be forgotten.²¹

In other words, Heidegger himself withdraws behind the text of GA 99, letting beyng itself write itself, using Heidegger’s hand in order to bring itself to word. He will later say that this withdrawal, this “doing without a name,” is precisely an instance of for-bearing, of Verhaltnis.²² It is through such a for-bearing withdrawal that beyng itself shows itself in its withdrawal. 

The Gespräch underway in GA 99 is thus not a conversation between thinkers, nor even really a conversation “between” the thinker and beyng. Rather, the text is the occasion of beyng’s conversation with itself which it carries out by using the human hand (i.e., the thinker’s thinking).²³ In this way, the human—even “the thinker”—is almost entirely effaced. GA 99 is the event of beyng—and beyng alone—as it writes itself on the page, a kind of soliloquy or monologue of beyng. 

Indeed, as comes to light within the text, beyng is to be understood as “the lone,” die Einsamen, and the text understood as “an abode for the loneness of stillness.”²⁴ Whether such thinking of the lone is even possible seems, even for Heidegger, to be an open question: 

How do you save the One [das Eine], i.e., that which is to be thought: the difference between beings and being as the Event of the setting-apart—in its Loneness [Einzigkeit]?²⁵

In other words: How can thinking stand in relation to what is truly and solely alone? And how could one ever speak about it? The possibility of communication falters in the face of the loneness of beyng: “Communication fails to materialize because saying passes eventfully into the locality of the event and first only says world.”²⁶

As Heidegger goes on to show, the collapse of communicability—which is to say, of transmissibility—has stunning consequences for the possibility of history:

However, communication is not absent on account of there not being any space into which it could speak. This is the case only as the final consequence of desolation and machination, which deny everything that is not of their own kind any and all possible realms of existence. This is not only why historical history [historische Geschichte] is coming to an end, but also why the very possibility of any transmission of this history [Geschichte], and above all the transmissional safeguarding of all that has already expropriated as the turning-around of forgettability, collapses. This loneness of beyng is essentially thought within the experience of the turning-around.²⁷

When the thinker thinks the loneness of beyng, or beyng as the lone, the possibility of history—not just Historie, but Geschichte—collapses.²⁸ The Gespräch underway within GA 99, in withdrawing from communicability and conversation, breaks also with transmissibility, marking the very end of history: “The Gespräch in the sense of the pathway is not a form of speaking. It is the event of the worlding essence of language. The destiny [Geshick] of the event speaks. Everything historical has fallen away [Alles Historische ist abgefallen].”²⁹ 

Not only does the loneness of beyng usher in the end of history—it also, remarkably, ushers in the end of the history of beyng:

The history of being [die Geschichte des Seins] (as the being of beings) is founded in beyng as the fateful-sending [Ge-Schick] of the Event of the setting apart. The history of being [Seinsgeschichte] is limited; it eventuates itself only within the fateful sending of the forgettability of the setting apart. With the turning of forgettability, the fateful sending has reached its culmination: the Event eventuates itself as such; this means that it essences in expropriation and departs in the foregathering into fateful sending.³⁰

The history of being, in other words, belongs to the era of the forgettability of being (i.e., metaphysics). As beyng turns from the forgetfulness of that forgettability toward a manifestation of that forgettability (which is the very turning borne out by GA 99), the history of being comes to an end:  

Only in the fateful sending of world [Welt-Geschick] does world-history [Welt-Geschichte]—which gathers together every history, without the need of historiography—eventuate itself. Or has history [Geschichte] come to an end with the fateful sending of world [Welt-Geschick]? Is the worlding within the fourfold of the setting-apart denied a happening? Does it deny history [Geschichte] as decisively as it does nature?³¹

Precisely because it tries to think the pure sending of beyng (Geschick) without regard for what is thereby sent as history (as Geschichte), GA 99 marks the closure of the history of beyng.³²

With the end of the history of beyng comes also the end of being-historical-thinking (seinsgeschichtliche Denken), a thinking that was structurally bound to the epochal sendings of beyng. Instead, in thinking the suddenness, the Once, of Ereignis, GA 99 carries out what Heidegger calls “beyng-destinal thinking [das seynsgeschickliche Denken],” a thinking of the pure sending of being (as world), a thinking that attempts to “preserve the suddenness [Jähe] of the turning-around.”³³ To think the event of world means uncoupling Geschick from Geschichte and thinking the former purely on its own terms, thinking the sending without reference to what is sent. Such thinking, Heidegger will say, is not simply “commemoration,” since history has fallen away, nor is it simply a “presaging” of what is to come, since such anticipation all-to-easily takes the form of calculative thinking.³⁴ Rather, beyng-destinal thinking, in thinking the sudden Once of beyng, bears out what Heidegger calls “the Nigh [Nähe],” which is to be understood as the fourth (but, really, the principal) dimension of time: namely, the clearing or opening, the flash [Blick] of time-space itself. In thinking the Nigh, beyng-destinal thinking bears out this temporality—I think we can call it authentic ecstatic temporality—and broaches the singularity of beyng: 

All thinking gathers itself forth suddenly and at all times [jäher und jeher] into the singular suddenness [einzige Jähe] of the “the fact that” [des ‘Dass’] of the event of the setting apart.³⁵ 

Beyng, as event, is to be thought as “the singular,” as the always and at all times singular “fact that” there are beings rather than nothing: 

This singular that: namely, that beyng is [Dieses einzige Dass: dass Seyn ist]— This “that” stills itself in the “is.”³⁶

In thinking this singularity, beyng-destinal-thinking thinks the sudden flash of beyng as the always already that is yet to come, an unforeseeable but unforgettable moment, a prehistoric and post-futural event of the bare fact of beyng’s withdrawing opening.³⁷ This is a thinking that thinks the “lone” of being and that, in doing so, itself becomes lone, becomes alone, becomes “the proper—and thereby lone—experience.”³⁸ Beyng-destinal-thinking is the lonely thinking of the loneness of the singular Geschick of beyng, beyond the timing of history. 

Because the thinking of the pure Geschick of beyng breaks with beyng-historical-thinking, the destinal-thinking underway in GA 99 also breaks with the poetic thinking that characterized Heidegger’s work of the 1930s and 40s. As Heidegger at one point claims, such poetic thinking—including his extensive engagements with Hölderlin—belongs to a “regressive” stage of his thinking, a stage that remained, despite its best intentions, entrenched within the perimeters of metaphysics.³⁹ He does not say much more about how his engagement with Hölderlin remained “regressive,” but, given what we have seen, perhaps it did so to the extent it remained too bound to Geschichte, too eschatological, and thus too guided and regulated by an inauthentic experience of time; at the very least, such thinking failed ultimately to let the singularity of beyng shine forth. In any case, it is clear that Heidegger now seeks, in GA 99, to abandon the eschatological thinking that characterized the history of beyng:  

But the saying of the setting apart only corresponds purely to the turning-around if that saying abandons the history of being [die Geschichte des Seins verlassen] and has left behind the eschatology of beyng….⁴⁰

Suffice to say, beyng-destinal thinking requires a unique style meant to capture the suddenness of the flash of beyng,⁴¹ a thinking without recollection or presaging, without history or future, that “conserves the suddenness of the turning-around as the locality of the event.”⁴² Such thinking is no longer to be understood as “poetic,” offering instead “poems of thinking, outside of every poesy.”⁴³ Beyng-destinal thinking is thus what we might call “post poetic thinking,” a thinking free “from the confrontation with metaphysics, but also, above all, from the dialogue with Hölderlin [Gespräch mit Hölderlin].”⁴⁴ 

Such thinking takes the form of what Heidegger calls “furrows [Furche]”: grooves, channels, pathways that hold apart, and thus hold together, earth and world. Such furrows of thinking, Heidegger says, mirror the “furrow-like” character of language itself: 

The versification [Verswesen] found here originally has the furrow-like [Furchecharakter] character of saying. The language structure of the furrows has its own essence, comparable neither to poetic versification nor to philosophical syntax (i.e., to the statements of metaphysical representation).⁴⁵

Thinking must learn to think at the threshold of beings and beyng, thinking the originary setting-apart between them, a thinking that thus cultivates the heretofore forgotten attentiveness to beyng in its withdrawal. To think or to write such furrows, to draw them in language, is to traverse the jointures of language itself, i.e., the jointures between world and thing, beyng and beings: it is to think and write this difference itself. To think in this way is to let the for-bearing of beyng (i.e., its self-differentiation) come to language: 

The furrows of language, drawn as corresponding in the saying of the setting apart, are the joints of the world-acres [die Fuge des Weltackers]. They are the joints as which the fourfold, dignified, spares the setting apart into the (for)bearing. Verses of thinking are traces [Spuren] in the furrows. They are, in the same way, without poetry and without philosophy [poesielos und philosophiefrei].⁴⁶

Such furrows of thinking are also, to an almost absolute extent, without sounding: the furrows of thinking bear-forth the silence at the heart of beyng.⁴⁷ According to Heidegger, thinking the lone of beyng entails “listening to its telling silence” and “silently whisper[ing] world-stillness into the dwelling of mortals.”⁴⁸ Beyng is thus “said” by not being said, and “the poems without poesy” of GA 99 are beyng’s attempt, by way of Heidegger’s hand, to silently whisper the truth of beyng’s withdrawal to a listening attuned to such silence, an attempt, therefore, “to keep silence in the unspoken Gespräch.”⁴⁹ 

The Gespräch of GA 99 is thus a Gespräch beyond any traditional notion of Gespräch, beyond the Gespräch with Hölderlin, beyond the Gespräch that has characterized the history of beyng, beyond the Gespräch of humans with one another. It is a conversation without beginning and without end, without history or future, carried out by beyng itself alone with itself, uncertain and ungrounded, lonely and incommunicable, silent and inexpressible, immersed in the sudden Nigh beyond the spacings of distance and the timings of history: a strange conversation, indeed.

Nonetheless, and despite the almost hermetic solitude of the thinking that GA 99 carries out, Heidegger at one point indicates that there remains a certain kind of community operative within the experience of beyng: 

The ecstasis [das Ekstatische] of existence is no transport which snatches us up and transfers us somewhere into a transcendence. To the contrary, the ecstatic delivers us over [übereignet] to ourselves, insofar as it properly lights up for us our essence as the for-bearing of the Nigh [Nähe]. We are thus even a self as which world eventuates itself. Beyng is we [Seyn ist wir].⁵⁰

The work of bearing beyng forth thus remains, in some strange sense, a collective enterprise: a silent, noncommunicative, ahistorical, solitary “we,” but a “we” nonetheless.  

***

During an email Gespräch with Drew Hyland regarding GA 99, Hyland pointed out that writing about this text—making claims and theses about it—risks “interrupting the silence that is so crucial” to Heidegger’s project and sullies the originary Gespräch of beyng by dragging it into traditional conversation.⁵¹ In other words, to write about beyng-destinal thinking, and to discuss it in oral or written conversations, is to break the silence most essential to the singular, lone character of beyng. Most remarkable, then, is the way in which GA 99 sends to us a conversation of beyng about which we cannot properly converse, not, at least, without losing the very thing about which we would converse. The very topic of GA 99—namely, Gespräch as the unfolding of beyng as language—withdraws from Gespräch. 

However, it is worth considering the possibility that forcing us to undergo this loss is precisely the point of GA 99. If nothing else, the text brings language to its breaking point, using words in a manner that breaks with representational thinking and (thus) communicability. As these words break apart, we undergo the experience of the withdrawal of sense, the withdrawal of meaning, the withdrawal of intelligibility: the words have no clear referent, and it is never clear what Heidegger is trying to say, what he is trying to mean. However, such breakage is precisely the withdrawal of beyng from beings, the differentiation between the two: for above all what we experience in such breakage is the withdrawal into the Nothing that characterizes the dark heart of beyng understood as un-concealment. In this way, the “poems without poesy” that comprise GA 99 serve as furrows or pathways into the Nothing, which is nothing other than beyng properly understood.⁵² The more we try to converse about this Nothing—i.e., the more we fall back into normal conversation and the representational metaphysics that undergirds it—the further away the Nothing withdraws…and the further we are drawn along in that withdrawal. 

At one point in her inquiry into Heidegger’s conversational texts, Davies broaches the idea of what she calls the “excessive” character of beyng:

For Heidegger, being is excessive; it exceeds our representations of it [….] Demonstrating the limits of metaphysics requires attending to that which remains unsaid within the terms of representational thinking that metaphysics puts forth during any historical epoch.⁵³

In GA 99, the breakage of words discloses to us the limits of the metaphysical understanding of language, thereby forcing us to undergo an experience of beyng’s excess; but it is also our failed conversations about GA 99 that, perhaps most of all, can help us experience the excess of beyng. One can talk or write all day about GA 99 and will never exhaust the riches of that which it strives to bring to language: namely, beyng itself in its radical withdrawal. Heidegger at one point definitively marks this failure of language to say beyng: 

[…] all language declines and fails to serve as the rigidification (or fossilization) of the matter. All language declines into the emptiness of chatter, an emptiness that fills all things. Despite this fullness of emptiness, people nonetheless renounce the nihilating nothing. In language as the Gespräch of world, the near is brought to language. When language comes to language, pure stillness eventuates itself.⁵⁴ 

Our ordinary use of language, insofar as it remains preoccupied with beings, remains disconnected from the nihilating Nothing at the core of beyng. Thus, any conversation that we have loses touch with the underlying matter of all conversation, namely, beyng itself.⁵⁵

Thinking must thus come to sacrifice its connection and commitment to conventional discourse, to traditional conversation, and, indeed, to all convention and history as such. Such sacrifice (Opfer), Heidegger will later say, “serves as correspondence within the Event” and “attains to the experience of the setting apart”⁵⁶: that is, such sacrifice is the for-bearing by or as which beyng comes to bear itself out. This sacrifice occurs, Heidegger goes on to say, through the “bringing-into-ownership of the eventuating mortality of mortals”—that is, it occurs through the human’s coming into contact with the Nothing, a contact that brings limitation and finitude to human knowing. It is this contact with the Nothing that brings the originary setting-apart—i.e., beyng itself—to language. 

With such sacrifice, we relinquish all that we typically think of as characterizing human life and experience: e.g., straightforward communication, traditional conversation, speech as a human activity, the self or “I” as an agent of saying, mastery over intelligible concepts and thus the orderability of what is ready-to-hand, history, future, the present. In a word, we sacrifice everything, every being, as it is given to us in the contemporary world, i.e., as it is given to us in metaphysics and enframing.⁵⁷ 

And what do we—if we still even are a “we” anymore, cut off as we are from communication and conversation—gain through this sacrifice? That which only beyng, in its absolute withdrawal and singular loneness, can truly send: 

Nothing. 

---

Notes

1. All translations of GA 99, Vier Hefte I und II, are by me and Julia Goesser Assaiante. ↩︎
2. GA 99, 154; see also GA 65, Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis)/ Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), 78/62 ff.  ↩︎
3. GA 99, 87-88; 121; 145. ↩︎
4. See, for example, Davies, Heidegger’s Conversations, 172. ↩︎
5. Davies, Heidegger’s Conversations, 75. ↩︎
6. Davies, Heidegger’s Conversations, 139. ↩︎
7. Bambach, Of an Alien Homecoming: Reading Heidegger’s ‘Hölderlin, 289. ↩︎
8. Bambach, Of an Alien Homecoming: Reading Heidegger’s ‘Hölderlin, 255. ↩︎
9. Bambach, Of an Alien Homecoming: Reading Heidegger’s ‘Hölderlin, 256. ↩︎
10. GA 99, 7. ↩︎
11. GA 99, 8. ↩︎
12. GA 99, 8. ↩︎
13. See also GA 99, 17: “But the Gespräch of language, owing to the manner in which it stills, precisely does not let itself be said in the form of ‘conversations.’” See also GA 99, 18: “The true preservation and harboring of the Gespräch preserves itself when the latter does not take the form of ‘conversational conversations.’” ↩︎
14. See GA 99, 7: “The speaking-to-one-another carried out by thinkers speaks out of the Gespräch and subsists in it. Not the other way around.”  ↩︎
15. GA 99, 80. ↩︎
16. See also GA 99, 105: “The Gespräch remains austere; concerned with worlding; without any immediate explanation, without any linear progression of communication and answer.” ↩︎
17. GA 99, 174. See also GA 79, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge/Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 71/67. ↩︎
18. GA 99, 151. See also GA, 99, 93. ↩︎
19. See Davies, Heidegger’s Conversations, 28, 39, 51, and 83. ↩︎
20. GA 99, 172. ↩︎
21. GA 99, 155. ↩︎
22. GA 99, 109. ↩︎
23. In GA 55, Heraklit: Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos/
    Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’ Doctrine of the Logos, 279/211, Heidegger describes history as consisting of this “conversation of the essential with itself.”  ↩︎
24. GA 99, 102.  ↩︎
25. GA 99, 143.  ↩︎
26. GA 99, 23. ↩︎
27. GA 99, 23.  ↩︎
28. See GA 81, Gedachtes, 240; trans. modified: “In the streaming of the stream | The source dwells deep and true | Without history, but rich in event.” ↩︎
29. GA 99, 8. ↩︎
30. GA 99, 131. ↩︎
31. GA 99, 132. ↩︎
32. See GA 79, 69/65, where Heidegger states that sendings (Geschick) of beyng cannot be predicted or inferred as though they are the result of a logical or historical (Geschichte) process.  ↩︎
33. GA 99, 18. See also GA 99:39, where it is suggested that beyng is to be thought as this “sudden” itself: “This suddenness is beyng itself: What is being? The fact that beyng is. But with this ‘that,’ the ‘is’ determines itself first from out of beyng. In the ‘that,’ the suddenness of world essences.” ↩︎
34. See GA 79, 76/72. ↩︎
35. GA 99, 67.  ↩︎
36. GA 99, 80. ↩︎
37. Regarding this “suddenness” of beyng, see GA 79, 74/70. ↩︎
38. GA 99, 107. ↩︎
39. GA 99, 154. ↩︎
40. GA 99, 134. ↩︎
41. GA 99, 87-88. ↩︎
42. GA 99, 18.  ↩︎
43. GA 99, 122.  ↩︎
44. GA 99, 156. ↩︎
45. GA 99, 159.  ↩︎
46. GA 99, 175. ↩︎
47. See GA 99, 110.  ↩︎
48. GA 99, 135.  ↩︎
49. GA 99, 104.  ↩︎
50. GA 99, 131. ↩︎
51. Email from Drew Hyland, August 31^st, 2024.  ↩︎
52. GA 99, 64: “Once, the following will be thought by some: the nothing is beyng.” ↩︎
53. Davies, Heidegger’s Conversations, 14.  ↩︎
54. GA 99, 22.  ↩︎
55. See GA 99, 125: “Beyng is ungrounded: this means not only that our representations do not attain to its essence and are unsuccessful in their attempts to depict it, in this way doomed to failure. Philosophy of this sort of failure is negative theology.” ↩︎
56. GA 99, 117.  ↩︎
57. See GA 79, 71/67, where thinking (in the authentic sense) marks the twisting free from the ascendency of Gestell. ↩︎

---

Works Cited

• Bambach, Charles. Of an Alien Homecoming: Reading Heidegger’s ‘Hölderlin.’ New York: SUNY Press, 2022.
• Davies, Katherine. Heidegger’s Conversations. New York: SUNY Press, 2024.
• Heidegger, Martin. GA 55. Heraklit: Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. 1979. Translated by J. Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen as Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’ Doctrine of the Logos. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 
• —. GA 65. Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1989. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu as Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 
• —. GA 79. Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Edited by Petra Jaeger. 1994. Translated byAndrew J. Mitchell as Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: “Insight into That Which Is” and “Basic Principles of Thinking”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 
• —. GA 81. Gedachtes. Edited by Paola-Ludovika Coriando. 2007. Translated by Eoghan Walls as Thought Poems. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.
• —. GA 99. Vier Hefte I und II. Edited by Peter Trawny. 2019.