SubStance

“No one goes looking for sorrow.”

—Juan Rulfo¹

In the most influential ontology of human being in the last century, Martin Heidegger emphasizes the temporal structure of Dasein as constituted out of the future. My existence, my being here now, is radically unfinished, an open site of possibility, a situatedness that is at once, already and always, toward the future. Existence, according to Heidegger, has the character of project, my practical involvement in the world structured by an in-order-to that develops the sense of Da-sein as care. But ultimately my futurity concerns my being-towards-death. For Heidegger, death is not one possibility among others, but the possibility most determinative of my being, that which belongs to me and no one else. Death individuates. Authentically or inauthentically, the relation to death gives shape to my existence and marks the way I bear my temporality, the manner in which the future crashes in upon me and dislodges the present from its static representation within linear time. Ecstatic existence is the concrete correlate of the ontological claim that possibility is higher than actuality (Being and Time, 38, 262).

The analytic of Dasein that develops this thought, however, belongs to the larger project announced in Being and Time, that of the recovery of the meaning of being. If the nothingness of death individuates, according to Heidegger, the oblivion of being concerns the destiny of the entire West. Unlike my death, then, that destiny is not mine, but ours. And in this respect, recollection is social. Mark the words of the Eleatic stranger from Plato’s Sophist, which serve as the epigraph to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed” (BT xix, my emphasis). If this past is to be reawakened, rediscovered and developed, this is possible only because our factical situation is already hermeneutical, because its interpretation is rooted in our ecstatic [End Page 8] ontological condition (BT 148–53). Existence and history, futurity and the past, projection and recollection, perplexity and oblivion, individuality and sociality—Being and Time sustains these relations, gives them articulation, develops itself across their tenses and tensions. A remarkable effort of comprehension.

For Heidegger and the philosophical tradition to which he belongs, recollection sets out to uncover what is hidden, what has been forgotten: memory is an effort of retrieval. But we are claimed by the past in ways excessive to the problems of oblivion, perplexity and the efforts of clarification. The past wells up in our being every time we speak, think, act, breathe, desire, lament, or hope, and often when we simply sense. The past besets us when awake and when asleep, takes hold of us when we are visited by those left behind, those who appear to us in dreams without having aged: childhood friends, parents and grandparents, lovers and teachers, older siblings we now surpass in years. The oblivion of the past may be perplexing, but the insistence of the past is vexing and obsessive. The past makes claims upon us and for that reason we are responsible to it, responsible even if we are unable to respond. It follows us around, and when we turn to address it, it does not answer: it arrives unbeckoned and disappears when confronted. It is populated by those we have cared for and harmed, those who have loved and damaged us. This is the past that suspends the work of project, which is so often an evasion of the responsibility born in being claimed (we work in order to forget). It is a past that insists: I am not only, and certainly not fundamentally, drawn out by the future, oriented toward my death, my most proper possibility. No, I am inhabited by the dead and the dying of others, shot through with deaths that are not mine, visited by ghosts in fever.

In our responsibility to the past, in our being claimed by faces and smells and feelings from another time, memory functions like a vector...