​Chapter 21

Jug separates the jug from everything that is not the jug, and this separating is the entire work the word performs; any word performs it, and language is the apparatus of separation. What performs the cut cannot be cut by the same cut: were it cut it would lie on either side of the division it drew, and whatever is there belongs to the division. Try to name it — say the differentiating — and in the saying it has become differentiated from other processes, an object among objects, where the naming placed it. The definition finds a result where it sought a source, and better vocabulary is no remedy, since better vocabulary means more words, and words are what the difficulty consists in. Setting a limit posits what lies past it — Hegel's point, and it holds without the machinery he built on it. The line between A and B is in neither, and it is what makes them two.

Heidegger asked what the jug is as jug, when its being has not yet come forward. Predication offers a sum — fired clay, hollow, of a certain capacity, made for drinking — and the list extends indefinitely without approaching what was asked. Jugness is not a further item on it; it is what gathered these cuts into this jug. His answer, that the emptiness that holds is not a property present alongside the properties, presses at the right place, and the pressing survives any judgment about the fourfold that follows from it. Enumeration works with what has been differentiated, and the question asks after the differentiating.

A distinction operating in a language, in a practice, in a person's seeing began at some point, and before that beginning the ground it divides was not divided in that way. The passage from no-cut to cut will not be converted into a nature, nature being the repeatable and a first cutting occurring once. A cut drawn for the first time has no earlier instance of the same cut behind it; if it did, that earlier cut would be the first. Singularity alone does not establish that the cut was underived — that comes with the postulate, as it did at John's table.

The birth of a grasp and the birth of a free act are one thing. A free act posits what does not follow from what came before, which is a cut cutting for the first time; a grasp divides the ground into this and not-this, and in the moment of its birth it cuts as well. The differentiating is the positing. Nothing is handed over divided into parts and then navigated by a will that selects among them: the field in which options appear has been cut before any option can be chosen, and the cutting was not an option.

Kant felt this and called it the spontaneity of the understanding, blind and necessary, performing its synthesis beneath any awareness of the performing. Heidegger moved it into being and called it the clearing, the opening in which a thing can first show itself as what it is. Neither drew the consequence that the cutting which makes a world and the settling which initiates an act are two registers of a single move.

A cut can also die. The grasp lets go; what was differentiated falls back into the ground, a distinction that organized a practice stops organizing it, and the sides are no longer distinct. A cut may also fail or be destroyed, and neither is a withdrawal: what makes the last cutting a border is that it was performed, and performing it derives from nothing in the duration it ends. Between the two borders lies what has been differentiated and persists: repeatable, hardened into a nature. There language lives, and lives well, since there the jug is a sum of properties and the man is a set of traits, and everything sayable is said about this middle stretch.

The empty place left by speech can now be located. Negation says not this, not that, and leaves it lying somewhere outside speech in general — an unsayable nowhere in particular, which is what allows it to be sanctified. It sits at the birth and death of a grasp, before and after the duration of a cut. The missing is temporal rather than mystical: a word is a cut that has been drawn, while freedom is in the drawing, and the word belongs to the after the cut instituted. Speech arrives late by structure, and the lateness cannot be corrected by speaking faster or more carefully. The phrase "the differentiating before the grasp" slips away as it is written, and the slipping is no defect in the phrase: were the words to seize what they name, the phrase would have said something false.

Heidegger stops here. Being holds sway; world worlds; the thing things — verbs, and inside them the same nouns in new clothing, the jug set down where the idea used to stand. Whoever touches the clearing enters myth-making, and entering it is legitimate; the alternative is a silence that points nowhere. The fault is in dressing the myth as rigor and calling it the thinking of being, more exact than the metaphysics it displaces.