ABSTRACT
Here.—Or here. Now. Or now. Nothing more banal, nothing more philosophical and more banal than
to begin ‘here and now’ with here and now. Almost the whole repertory of the classic themes and questions of philosophy is collected in this commonplace of the hic et nunc. Whoever affirms that they speak ‘here and now’, in this determinate place, at this determinate time, now, here, and as this unmistakable particular, is already placing themselves in a community, in a long history and in a place defined by this history, which disavows any claim to singularity, to determinateness and to presence. Instead of speaking here and now, they speak in quotation. Instead of speaking themselves, they let others speak. Instead of beginning, they continue. The formula which is supposed to break through the vague generality of time and space, and concentrate attention on a determinate point, on this here and now of the speaker and the spoken to, this formula for concentrating and communicating, is itself only a vague generality. Whoever uses the formula doesn’t pierce the generality but corroborates it. They corroborate it and continue it. They continue-that means: they go on, they hand on what has been handed down, they repeat repetitions, they stabilize the enthralling [Bann]2 by history and by the society which has stamped the expression hic et nunc with its ‘hic et nunc’. They continue-but that also means: they distance, they remove, they desist. Whoever speaks here, they speak here-they further the here, the talk about here and the talk of the here, in that they pass it on, they reproduce and strengthen it; and they separate themselves from this talk about the here, this here say; they take up distance from it, they draw off its power, they no longer speak it, and no longer allow it to speak unchanged. For whoever speaks here, they are already speaking in another, incomparable, and unmistakably other here, in which the here and whoever says it is lost. They speak and they do not speak-and it is the impossible connection between these two, which articulates itself in every now and every here; the impossible connection between that enthralling and its breaking, between the repetition and its interruption,
between the connection and the break. Whoever begins thus, with a here and how, has, by continuing, by desisting, already made a start on stopping, on what is leaving him or her.
