This recoding of transgression as anticipation – this reworking of the transgression of the limit as what might be called ‘being-towards-the-limit’ – forms the background to the most consequential passage within Heidegger’s analysis of death:
The closest closeness of being towards death as a possibility is as far as possible away from anything actual. The more undisguisedly this possibility gets understood, the more purely does the understanding penetrate it as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all [überhaupt]. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualised’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting towards anything, of every way of existing. In the anticipation of this possibility it becomes ‘greater and greater’; that is to say, the possibility reveals itself to be such that it knows no measure at all, no more or less, but signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence.
<sup>84</sup> Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science [1783], trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103-4 (§57). Translation modified to register Grenzen as ‘limits’ and Schranken as ‘barriers’. <sup>85</sup> Ibid. 104.
<sup>86</sup> Heidegger, BT, 293, ft. vi (494-95). See also William Blattner, ‘Heidegger’s Debt to Jasper’s Concept of the Limit-Situation’, in Heidegger and Jaspers, ed. Alan M. Olson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 153-65.
<sup>87</sup> Heidegger, BT, 295. Emphasis in the original.
<sup>88</sup> ‘That in the face of which there is anxiety is being-in-the-world as such.’ Heidegger, SZ, 247 (BT, 230).
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