Desire, Beyng, event

Heidegger’s philosophy no longer provokes us today as it once did. In this essay, I outline three principles of a minimal Heideggerianism – psychoanalytically inflected and stripped of all dubious mysteriological imagery – that brings Heidegger’s thought up to date and allows it to speak to the exigencies of the present. These principles are as follows. First, the historical ‘destiny’ of humanity has unfolded along a single trajectory culminating in modern techno-capitalism qua total world-picture that corresponds most perfectly and completely to the internally self-defeating structure of desire. Second, what Heidegger calls Beyng is the master name for the general loss or lack that drives this destiny inexorably onward; Beyng thus has no positive content other than its irrecoverable absence. Third, the event cannot be understood as the promise of an ultimately fulfilling reunification with Beyng à venir, but only as a traversing of the fundamental fantasy of such unification.