Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 62 页

This passage works with a twofold conception of the limit. On the one hand, death is the limit of all limits: the limit as such, the collective singular limit which grounds every limit of the understanding (the limit of the ability-to-be which ontologically grounds every limit of every ability-to-be). As Dasein’s purest and ownmost possibility, this is the meaning of death as the absolute limit within the multitude of every limited experience. In this regard, the ‘possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’ is the possibility of complete nonexistence, the possibility of the utter lack of existence. On the other hand, there is a radical situatedness at the heart of this passage, such that each and every act is existentially structured by a limit specific to that act. This limit is not death, but rather the factical domain of being-towardsdeath. The limit as such (death) ontologically grounds the specificity of the limit of each and every act, but it only does so because there is a specificity – a facticity – to the limit of each and every act. Hence the ‘possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’ also registers the simple fact that Dasein cannot be in any particular way (this is equally evident within the doubled meaning of the ‘possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting towards anything, of every way of existing.’) Existentially speaking, every act is constituted by a limit particular to that act, and, because of this, Dasein cannot be – it is not free to be – any existence whatsoever. This dimension of the limit is central to Heidegger’s later analysis of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, wherein the resolution is ‘precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time’⁹⁰, and that through which Dasein’s ability-to-be-awhole has ‘existentiell authenticity’. As being-towards-death, there is no measure to what Dasein cannot be: no measure to both the limit as such (death) which it cannot avoid but which it can never actualise, and no measure to the factical limit which structures each and every act. The ontological meaning of the possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole takes in both of these measureless impossibilities of existence.⁹¹

⁸⁹ Heidegger, SZ, 348. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation of this passage (Heidegger, BT, 306- 7) includes a ‘one’ (‘The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility’) and a ‘oneself’ (‘the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything’) which, as previously mentioned (footnote 51), effectively compels the English-language reader to grasp Dasein as already and only an individual entity, and as already and only an individual person at that.

⁹⁰ Heidegger, BT, 345. This analysis of resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] figures conscience as the ‘call’ of care, whereby an appeal is made – from Dasein to Dasein – to ‘summon’ it out of its fall into ‘the one’ and towards its ‘ownmost ability-to-be’. Heidegger, SZ, 369 (BT, 322).

⁹¹ At the end of her analysis of Heidegger’s conception of death, White points out that the prefix ‘Un’ of Unmöglichkeit (impossibility) denotes both ‘excessive amount’ as well as ‘non/not’. She advances the notion that Heidegger might be playing with a doubled meaning of Unmöglichkeit, and that, in the anticipation of death, what is ‘measureless’ about the measureless impossibility of existence is both

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