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This chapter questions whether there is a reason to maintain that the focus of Heidegger at the time under discussion is on the ontological difference as such. The formula of 1943 emphasizes the primacy of Being and implies the ontological difference but does not name it as such. The formula of 1949 names it as such. The discussion argues that the second formula expresses better what the author considers to be the insight that is proper to him. Thus the chapter concludes that Heidegger had a right to alter the first formula.

This chapter substantiates the main thesis — according to which the political difference must be understood as symptomatically pointing at the crumbling grounds of foundationalism — by analysing its elements step by step, starting with an account of the notion of post-foundationalism itself and of the quasi-transcendental argument by which post-foundational thought proceeds. It then examines the Heideggerian roots of post-foundationalism (around the four concepts of event, moment, freedom, and difference) in order to better understand left Heideggerianism. It also shows how the ontological difference is implicated in the radical notion of contingency, which lies at the (negative) ‘core’ of current post-foundational thinking. The term ‘foundationalism’ can be used to define — from the viewpoint of social and political theory — those theories which assume that society and/or politics are ‘grounded on principles that are undeniable and immune to revision and located outside society and politics’. Finally, the chapter explores how Martin Heidegger proceeds regarding the question of the ontological difference.

Kant’s “transcendental aesthetic” is a touchstone of modern philosophy regarding affect, sensation, and space and time, as well as aesthetic theory. It postulates that the mind senses space and time without the presence of any external object. Space and time are the mind’s self-affection. Maurice Merleau-Ponty contests the disembodied nature of Kant’s postulate by examining the ambiguities of touching/being touched/touching oneself. Intriguingly different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty by Daniel Heller-Roazen and Judith Butler are shown to address the otherness in self-affection. It is then argued that self-arousing passions such as jealousy are turned outward in Aristotle but inward in modern settings; Harold Pinter’s Betrayal dramatizes jealousy’s involuted rage, an affecting of oneself rather than a violence inflicted on another. A juxtaposition of Poe and Freud brings to light the question of affect and self-affection in aesthetic theory itself. Does reception retrace the artwork’s creation, or are the motives and gratifications of creation radically divergent from the gratifications and affects in reception? Heidegger’s approach to mood, emotion, or state-of-mind as attunement questions the Kantian inside/outside in perception and feeling. Beyond that, it sits at the heart of such central concepts as the “ontological difference,” “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand,” and the temporality of Angst.

This chapter explores the problem of Being and the problem of thought. In discussing the problem of being, it also cites the grounding of metaphysics and the ontological difference between them. The problem of thought is explored in two ways: negatively and positively. During the course of Heidegger's development, he uses the word “philosophy” sometimes in a narrow sense, by which it identifies with metaphysics, and sometimes in the broad sense, as a response to Being's appeal. There is only one philosophical question that interests Heidegger—the question about Being and its truth.

This chapter engages with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s analysis of the war machine, suggesting that it contradicts Arendt’s analysis and offers the most radical critique within the radical-juridical paradigm. Premised on the notion that we must rethink sovereignty from ontological difference rather than unity, Deleuze and Guattari radically undermine the indivisibility that defines the classic-juridical conception. Far from being located in one individual or point, sovereignty is always tied to the State, which is a multiplicity that expresses the constantly moving, fluid, and dynamic field of difference. By thinking the social world in terms of heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari undermine the hierarchical conception of sovereignty underpinning the classic-juridical model, but continue to implicitly insist that State sovereignty is tied to the maintenance of juridical order; an order that is always threatened by or in conflict with the war machine that disrupts it. As a consequence, they conclude that sovereign order is always far more unstable and disordered than it appears to be.

This essay compares the work of Jacques Derrida and Henri Birault. Birault was one of the most important French readers of Martin Heidegger in the 1950s and 60s and his work was an significant influence on Derrida's own. Placing Birault's work in the broader reception of Heidegger in France, the essay examines his analysis of finitude and appeal to the ontological difference, showing how Birault related his reading of Heidegger to his Christian beliefs. In showing how Derrida drew on this work in essays and unpublished courses from the early 1960s, the essay provides insight into his early readings of Heidegger and Nietzsche, his understanding of the relationship between ontology and theology, and his concept of “play” [jeu].

Martin Heidegger is an absolutely essential figure for all the thinkers treated in the second and third parts of the book. None of the contemporary “religious” phenomenologies would be possible or coherent without Heidegger’s thinking. This chapter does not survey Heidegger’s entire philosophy, but it explains certain fundamental concepts that are assumed by all the later thinkers, such as the notion of “ontological difference” and of metaphysics as “onto-theo-logy.” It deals with Heidegger’s contention that theology is an “ontic” science that is absolutely distinct from phenomenology or philosophy as an “ontological” thinking, as put forth in his early essay “Phenomenology and Theology.” It also considers the significance of Heidegger’s language of Being and his claim that the term has no place in a “theology,” especially as the status of ontological language becomes significant for several of the later thinkers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia and some of his late writings on the holy, the gods, and the Fourfold.

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger regarding worldliness and mortality. For Fink, the problematic of finitude was inseparable from the problem of the worldliness of the world—that is, from the recognition of the non-thingly status of the world and of what he called “cosmological difference,” which is both different from and similar to Heideggerian ontological difference. Fink also developed the idea that death, along with work, the battle for domination, love, and play, properly characterize the humanity of humans. The chapter considers the difficulty of thinking the cosmological difference on the model of the ontological difference, along with Fink's argument that the relations to being and the relations to the world are not the same thing—in other words, cosmology must encompass ontology rather than the inverse.

Being, as this chapter shows, is the most difficult existentialist concept to define, and it is on this topic that the existentialists are most diverse and often obscure. Being encompasses the dimensions of self, others, world, and earth considered in previous chapters, and yet according to existentialists evades objective thought. This chapter considers the problem of Being in light of Heidegger’s notions of being-in-the-world and the ontological difference, Marcel’s conception of the ontological mystery, Jaspers’s account of the encompassing. It considers Levinas’s turn against existentialism in rejection of its fascination with Being, while also pointing out the persistence of ontology in his own post-existential ethics.

This chapter outlines the modern theoretical framework in which the conscious mind is discussed. It discusses the distinction between primary and secondary properties; the link between primary properties and quantity, and between secondary properties and quality; and the claim that the former are real while the latter are “mere words” that “exist only in the sensitive body.” Galileo’s ontological claim is also presented here, positing that the “real” world is made only of quantitative aspects, and that all the other empirical aspects, like quality and form, are somehow created by the “living organism.” On the basis of an epistemological difference—what can be described by quantities and what cannot—Galileo put forward an ontological difference that led to a dualistic view.

This chapter demonstrates that in spite of the importance of the notion of function for engineering practice there is no common interpretation of it. It proposes a device-oriented definition of function that is related to device behaviors. It defines “function” as a role played by a behavior in its use context. It describes the definition of the function of technical artifacts from the device viewpoint. It uses local functions as the base-functions in order to realize composability of device models. This chapter suggests that a generic reference ontology of function can clarify the ontological differences between functional vocabularies and thus enhance the interoperability of functional knowledge.

This chapter argues that in the Black Notebooks Heidegger assigns Jews or Jewishness a specific and essential ontohistorical role in the history of being and world history. It is argued that Heidegger, in a fashion reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, attributes to Jews a world conspiracy, in the course of which Germany is dragged into a planetary war, where Germany sacrifices her soldiers in a war against other nations, while World Jewry, as the enemy of Germany, remains elusive and keeps out of actual warfare. Moreover, it is shown that within the ideologically recast ontological difference, Heidegger assigns Jews the role of uprooting beings from being, ultimately issuing in the self-annihilation of Jewry. It is further argued that despite his ontohistorical interest in Jews Heidegger passes over in silence the real persecution and annihilation of the Jews in the Shoah, demonstrating Heidegger’s refusal to accept the unconditional moral meaning of the Shoah.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks show anti-Semitism as taking on a new philosophical relevance. The Jew appears at the heart of Heidegger’s thought, and as central to his philosophy. Yet, to the Jew, inscribed in the history of being, is also ascribed the greatest fault, the oblivion of being. Metaphysical anti-Semitism as it appears in the Notebooks sheds new light on Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism, which can no longer be considered a mere political interlude, but rather as a key philosophical moment in his work. Since Heidegger’s choice for Nazism is a philosophical one, the ’Heidegger case’ must be discussed first in its philosophical context. The Black Notebooks provide an opportunity to think philosophically about, not only about the Third Reich, nor only about Auschwitz, but also about the place of the ’Jewish question’ in the history of the West.

Wittgenstein characterizes his investigations as ‘grammatical’ and emphasizes their difference from factual or empirical investigations. In particular, he claims, philosophical confusion arises when we regard philosophical questions as questions of fact. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on keeping distinct grammatical and factual investigations echoes Heidegger’s emphasis on what he calls the ‘ontological difference’, namely the distinction between ontic investigations of beings and ontological investigations of being. For both philosophers, keeping their investigations distinct from factual investigations means that they understand themselves not to be discovering and expressing novel truths but to be retrieving and clarifying an understanding that we already have. And for both of them, this retrieval calls for a careful examination of our everyday practices.