ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the elucidation of the notion of origin as it affects practice in general and political action in particular. Martin Heidegger’s writings on the phenomenological Destruction of the history of ontology have been said to be harmful for public life since they deprive political action of its ground. The realm of the political is only the most revelatory of the pollachos legetai that belongs to the origin: the arche of a commonwealth appears as the founding deed that begins and then dominates a polity. In Heidegger’s Destruction, on the contrary, one has to speak of the establishment of a principle, and that in the double sense of its founding at the beginning of an epoch and during its reign. If the epoche is thus not the method but the matter of the phenomenological Destruction, principles appear in quite a new light.
