One reads with Heidegger of the first beginning [Anfang], the Ereignis, the originating event of the West through which the great names physis, aletheia, logos appeared etc., etc. What then of the event called Auschwitz – or for which the name ‘Auschwitz’ is a synecdoche? Did it give us a new set of primal words, or does it exacerbate the ones we already have? Did it accomplish a glorious new Dichtung, bringing names forward in the fire of a new experience of the logos, or did it, rather, mock that same Dichtung and that same fire?
Adorno on Beckett, in the famous ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’: ‘Understanding it can mean only understanding its intelligibility [Unverständlichkeit], concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’. It has no meaning? It is set after an indeterminate disaster; the apocalypse has happened. In postwar Europe, ‘everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state [Zerschlagenheit] useless’. They talk, the characters, they repeat lame jokes, they babble and mutter. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to do. Movement is ritual without meaning. What happens will happen again. Dead time.
In the face of this, understanding cannot, as for Kant, bring intuitions under concepts. Do not try to understand Endgame – but do not try, likewise, to grasp it under the heading of Heideggerian Dichtung (which itself bestows understanding, bringing beings to a stand). Does it call for a new beginning – for us to dream of a new Dichtung, a new happening of the Ereignis? Or does it attest, rather, to the impossibility not only of such a happening but of the ‘first’ beginning [Anfang] of which Heidegger writes?
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