ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its inspiration and point of departure from Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘Sharing voices’. It is conceived as a parallel reading of Heidegger’s ‘A dialogue on language’ in On the Way to Language. While Nancy’s essay brilliantly demonstrates the role Plato’s Ion plays in Heidegger’s dialogue and the way a certain conception of interpretation on the margins of Plato’s text accords with Heidegger’s own conception, this work attempts to illuminate the very same issues of interpretation and the originary sharing out of voices by focusing on a reference on the margins of Heidegger’s text-Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. The following is thus a philosophical experiment, an interpretive performance in thirty-six takes, that tries not only to demonstrate and analyse but to exhibit the originary sharing out of voices and the ‘grounds’ for the inoperative community to which Nancy’s entire oeuvre bears witness. No words could better set the stage for such a performance than the following from ‘Sharing voices’:
Thus, one analyzes all the details of the staging (and from the very first the choice of the genre of the dialogue, which presupposes a staging) in order to end in this: that which is staged is hermeneutics itself, in its infinite presupposition and in its ‘enigmatic’ character, which has been announced by Heidegger in his first response on this subject. He does not respond to the question because the dialogue —the text-is itself the response. It is the response insofar as it offers itself as the interpretation, as the deciphering of these figures, signs, or symbols, which are figures, signs and symbols of interpretation itself. The dialogue is both enigma and the figure of enigma.1
