Heidegger, the Japanese and the Death of Dialog

NZSTh 2024; aop Elad Lapidot* On Not Speaking Heidegger, the Japanese and the Death of Dialog https://doi.org/10.1515/nzsth-2024-0037 Abstract: This article explores the challenges of intercultural dialogue between European and non-European epistemologies through a study of Heidegger’s conversation with a Japanese thinker. It discusses the inherent challenges and potential failures in such dialogues, emphasizing the differences in language and thought systems, and concludes by considering the ethical implications of these dialogues and the necessity of an “ethics of not speaking”. Keywords: Dialogue, Heidegger, Logoclasm, Colonialism, Japan Zusammenfassung: Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit der Problematik interkulturellen Dialogs zwischen europäischen und außereuropäischen Erkenntnistheorien anhand einer Untersuchung von Heideggers Gespräch mit einem japanischen Denker auseinander. Die solchen Dialogen innewohnenden Herausforderungen und ihr potentielles Scheitern werden unter Hervorhebung der Unterschiede in Sprache und Denkweise erörtert. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Betrachtung der ethischen Implikationen dieser Dialoge und der Notwendigkeit einer „Ethik des Nichtsprechens“. Schlüsselwörter: Dialog, Heidegger, Logoklasmus, Kolonialismus, Japan Introduction – Not Speaking I begin with hermeneutics, namely by referring my beginning to another beginning, by positing my intervention within an already on-going conversation. This special issue is dedicated to “dialogue and relational ontology” – this is the name, theme and beginning of our conversation. I begin by reading this title, this inaugural speech, as bespeaking the relation between knowledge and language, both understood as praxis, as performances: knowledge as ontology, language as practice of dialogue. The underlying, hinted at rather than explicit question – so I read it– is *Corresponding author: Prof. Elad Lapidot, University of Lille, Pont-de-Bois, 59000 Lille, France, E-Mail: elad.lapidot@univ-lille.fr 2 Elad Lapidot practical, not only in the sense that it concerns intersubjective praxis, but because it concerns “relations”, namely, it concerns the ethics of knowledge and language.1 The ethical question revolves around the practice of dialogue. The notion of “dialogue” carries today an evident ethical, moral significance within theories of knowledge. Dialogue names a certain contemporary ethics of knowledge and thought. More specifically, the notion of dialogue is intimately related to the normative idea of epistemic or ontological difference, namely the idea of knowledge, of practice of knowledge, which resists unity and totality, resists the totalization of knowledge and of being, both in theory and in politics. In the terminology of this special issue, we can say that dialogue presupposes a second-person perspective. “Dialogue” in contemporary discourse stands for the epistemic virtue of difference and otherness, or, otherwise formulated, for the ontological virtue of relation. Dialogue – the logos that is more than one, dual or plural – both guarantees and performs pluralism in knowledge, relation in being. In this sense, dialogue is an onto-logical practice that counters other, monolithic and totalizing practices, such as monologue, dialectics or logics. It takes two to dialogue. My basic ontological attempt is to think about dialogue in the broader perspective of what may be called the break or rupture of logos as a contemporary epistemic device, which is not vice but virtue. We can talk about a contemporary practice of logo-clasm, a normative breaking of logos, which may be contemplated in relation to notions and historical movements of iconoclasm, the breaking of idols and visual representations, and perhaps also of the specific image and story of Moses’ breaking the tablets carrying the iconoclastic law itself, a certain Mosaic nomoclasm. We will return to the Bible. At the moment, I simply I suggest to situate the ethico-ontological question of dialogue within a broader contemporary discourse concerning the practice or ethics, also the politics, of resistance to logos, a resistance to the practice of logos, namely to logein – to speaking. It is in this sense that I speak of “not speaking”.2 Can we speak of dialogue as a practice of “not speaking”? I do think the notions of dialogue and of dialogical thinking are currently deployed within a logoclastic discourse. Nonetheless: does dialogue really counter logein – isn’t dia-logein the very performance and dissemination of logos? And if so, wouldn’t dialogue not so much contradict monologue as complement it? Is dialogue really the guarantee of epistemic difference? Wouldn’t the existence of dialogue already signify the funda- 1 For a discussion of relational ontology, see Benjamin, Relational Ontology. 2 For a broader discussion of logoclasm, see Lapidot, Politics of Not Speaking; see also Dudiak, Intrigue of Ethics. On Not Speaking 3 mental overcoming of difference, the reproduction of logos in dia-logos? Isn’t dialogue the enactment of speaking as establishing the coherence of logos, the unity of language – the abolition of relation? Wouldn’t the encounter with, and the relation to, real difference, with real alterity – deep epistemic, linguistic, cultural alterity – imply, in contrast, the impossibility of dialogue, the end of speaking? Wouldn’t therefore the embrace of epistemic difference require something like what I called an ethics of not speaking, a logoclastic practice of silence? To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s famous title, can the second-person speak?3 I will now reflect on these questions hermeneutically, once again, by intervening on and in an already ongoing conversation, by entering a dialogue with a dialogue of sorts, or more precisely, by speaking with a Gespräch. What I refer to is Heidegger’s text “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache, zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden.”4 I suggest a reading of this text, of this extract – “aus einem...” – namely a text that is both a fragment and a protocol, a transcript of conversation, I read this speech act as a logoclastic exercise, as an attempted practice and enactment of “not speaking” in the name and for the sake of epistemic difference. In a nutshell, my claim is that this attempt ultimately fails; yet, at the same time, before the ultimate, before the eschaton – it does provide valuable insights into what may be called the practice of logocalstic speech. Heidegger’s Conversation of Language A first logoclastic speech that arises from the inter-linguistic performance of Heidegger’s text is its English translation by Peter Hertz. As we shall see, the English title “A Dialogue on Language” both renders and distorts, namely erases, and silences the German title, “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache”, “From a Conversation of Language”. Translation as silence by speech. But as I said, Heidegger’s own speech act, his text, is a logoclastic performance, a staging of not-speaking. A fundamental element of silence lies already in the staging that constitutes the literary genre of “dialogue”: the philosophical text, the logos, is not delivered directly, in conceptual immediacy, but (consider the inversion of Hegel) mediated through individual speakers, broken in particular bodies, namely in non-logical, non-linguistic 3 For an analysis of the Platonic dialogue as an interruption of reasoning in the form of monologue and as the origin of dialectics, see Nikulin, Dialectic and Dialogue; see also Tracy, The Other of Dialectic, 105–113. On the relations of speech and silence in the dialogue, see Mendes-Flohr, ed. Dialogue. 4 Heidegger, Aus einem Gespräch, 84–155; translated by Peter Hertz as “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1–54. The references below are to the German edition. On this text, see Maly, Heidegger’s Possibility, 42–57. 4 Elad Lapidot entities. The dialogue is not only an exchange of words, but a happening that takes place between and through persons, a drama, a play, which consists in silent acts, in – this is a central word in this text – Gebärde, gestures. The drama of Heidegger’s text is a performance of difference, an encounter between individuals that embody different cultures, as we say today, or different epistemes, as I suggest, or, as Heidegger writes, different worlds, languages and Sprachgeister, different “thinkings” and Daseins. The text is a fiction inspired by a real meeting that took place in the mid-1950s between Heidegger and the Japanese professor Tomio Tezuka.5 The two different epistemes that the two interlocutors represent are identified in the text as, on the one hand, “European” or sometimes Abendländisch, that is “Occidental” or “Western” – never “German” –, and on the other hand, “Japanese” or “Eastasian”. Note, in passing, that this specific constellation of difference, within a postWWII German text, already signifies within a historical, political, cultural and even scientific logos, Europe’s Eastasian other, which is deployed as alternative, replacement and effacement of Europe’s other other, namely the West-Asian, the Semite. The more explicit European, German framing of the conversation “zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden”, beyond the obvious fact that it takes place in German, is also evident in the identification, vis-à-vis the Japanese speaker, of the European speaker, namely Heidegger himself, not as a “European” but as a Fragende, an “Inquirer” or “Questioner”. This is translatable also by more dire intercultural figures from Europe’s colonial archives, such as the “Interrogator” or the “Inquisitor”, or also the “Explorer”. Be that as it may, whereas “the Japanese” is a particular cultural identity, “the Questioner” is a mode of logos, a general form of speech. Finally, notwithstanding the symmetrical form of the dialogical exchange, the dramatic event of this inter-cultural encounter is clearly driven and moved by the European party, “the Inquirer”, the verb, whereas the named “Japanese” is mostly moved, responding, reacting. The basic plot, as I wish now to show, is the collapse or crisis of logos in the inter-epistemic difference. What I will call the First Act of the play features the logoclastic event, the end of speaking, that is the break or death of dialogue; the Second Act features resurrection. We are never far from theology, and from the Bible. Indeed, and this is perhaps a basic mode of Heideggerian speech in general, the entire text offers a sort of eschatology, a discourse of absence in view of ultimate presence, more precisely: a conversation between different languages in the absence of common logos but in view of its coming. 5 See the note in Heidegger, Unterwegs, 269. On Not Speaking 5 I quote – as a motto – the messianic epistemo-logical vision that Heidegger, “the Inquirer”, formulates at one point of the exchange, when he wonders – I quote – “whether in the end – which would also be the beginning – an essence of language can arrive in the thinking experience and offer the assurance that European-Western saying and Eastasian saying will enter into a conversation to sing something that wells up from a single source.”6 Compare to “Then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that all of them may call on the name of JHWH and serve him shoulder to shoulder” (Zephaniah 3:9). Act I: Death of a Dialogue The Inquirer’s conversation with the Japanese fashions itself as a memory, commemoration or Andenken of another, earlier conversation, between Heidegger and another Japanese thinker, Count Shuzo Kuki, who in 1933 published the first Japanese book on Heidegger. The exchange begins symbolically with a contemplation of Kuki’s death, which announces the demise or failure – in retrospect – of the Japanese’s historical dialogue with Heidegger. Kuki’s inter-epistemic attempt in approaching Heidegger, we are told, was to conceptualize the essence of Japanese art, which he designated by the Japanese word Iki, by using European aesthetics. It is this project, this historical dialogue that Heidegger now, in the 1950 s, harshly criticizes. Aesthetics, he says, “both the name and what it names, originate in European thought, in philosophy. For this reason, aesthetical contemplation must remain fundamentally foreign to Eastasian thought.”7 Any attempt to understand Japanese art with European aesthetics must fail. The problem is not just aesthetics. Heidegger’s critique concerns the very foundation of dialogue, namely language. Conversation between European and Eastasian thought is impossible not only because they have different aesthetics, but because they speak different languages. To understand the problem we must recall Heidegger’s conception of language, which resists a common understanding of language as a system of arbitrary signs for non-linguistic reality, and instead conceives language – to use Heidegger’s famous phrase – as “the house of being”, namely language as the matrix of our world. Note that Heidegger’s conception is in fact not attached to the perception of language as a specific system of signs – German, French, English, Japanese etc. – but refers to the system of signified meanings – at 6 Heidegger, Unterwegs, 94. 7 Ibid., 86. 6 Elad Lapidot one point he writes Sprachgeist –, which defines not a system of signs but a system of existence, of being: a world, a culture, a civilization, which may be common to multiple semantic systems. The problem in Kuki’s attempted dialogue was not the semantic or grammatical differences between the Japanese and the German tongues. Rather, it was the epistemic, categorical gap between the European and Eastasian discourses and worlds, between their different “houses of being”. “We Europeans,” Heidegger says, “probably live in a completely different house than the Eastasian man.”8 The houses, the languages, are most fundamentally different in their understanding of what language is at all, of its essence or being, the Wesen of language. The different languages are therefore different in their very existence, in their way of being language. European language, Heidegger argues, arises from the basic European episteme, “metaphysics”: European language is based on the “metaphysical distinction between sensuous and suprasensuous”, namely between the material, physical sign – the sound or the script – and the ideal, metaphysical signification.9 Since the European and Eastasian languages are not just semantically but existentially, ontologically, different, Heidegger concludes, “a conversation from house to house remains almost [almost!] impossible.”10 This impossibility of inter-cultural dialogue is not merely theoretical but ethical. The attempt to enter into this – almost – impossible conversation is not only doomed to fail – it is also dangerous. The Inquirer’s Gespräch with the Japanese is imbued with a sense of danger, Gefahr, and a feeling of fear and apprehension, Befürchtung, namely from some catastrophe, destruction – death. The danger lies in the conversation itself, in the impossible but nonetheless attempted dialogue between the ontologically different European and Eastasian languages. Count Shuzo Kuki’s exchanges with Heidegger were held in German, in European language. Accordingly, so Heidegger’s hindsight, the “language of the conversation destroyed the possibility of saying what was spoken of”11, namely the essence of Japanese art, Iki. The dialogue did not simply fail to bring to light what was discussed – it actively pushed it into oblivion, concealed and erased, silenced it. Kuki’s silencing speech, like an act of translation, had effaced the Japanese essence of Iki by understanding the tension between its two elements, Iro and Ku, as the metaphysical tension between the sensuous and the super-sensuous. The First Act of the Gespräch between Heidegger and the Japanese therefore consists in a devastating critique – and self-critique – of the earlier Gespräch be- 8 Ibid., 90. 9 Ibid., 103. 10 Ibid., 90. 11 Ibid., 89. On Not Speaking 7 tween Heidegger and the Japanese, as an event of destruction and obliteration of Japan by Europe. Note that the conversation explicitly contextualizes this inter-personal drama within the history of European colonialism. The encounter between the Eastasian and European worlds, albeit dangerous and destructive, has become at the same time, the interlocutors indicate, “inescapable” due to the “total Europeanization of the earth and the human.”12 “Europeanization” is the imperial, colonial inter-cultural encounter, in which the uninterrupted progress of the dia-logos simultaneously spreads destruction and silence. More concretely, the text speaks of “modern technologization and industrialization”13, through which the non-European world takes the shape, adopts the language, of Europe. Just like Kuki erased Iki by presenting it in the terms of Western aesthetics, the film Rashumon wiped out the Japanese world by rendering it visible as the “object of photography”.14 Act I brings forth the logoclasm: the death of dialogue, the death that is dialogue. The climax is the actual enactment of the logoclastic moment, the enactment of silence within the dialogue. This enactment takes place as Heidegger, the Inquirer, having contemplated the disaster of his earlier dialogue with Kuki, nonetheless attempts to renew the European-Eastasian conversation by putting an inter-epistemic question to the Japanese, which addresses the most contentious matter, that is, the essence of language: “Do you have in your language a word for what we call language, Sprache?”15 After all that has been said by Heidegger about the impossibility, danger and destructiveness of the historical European-Eastasian conversation, the Japanese cannot but be taken aback by this new and direct question. He begs for some moments of reflection and then stops talking, falls into silence. This silence is inscribed in the text as the cessation of the direct dialogical exchange and the conversation breaking into silent, individual, non-communicative gestures, which are rendered like stage directions, in a parenthetical, external and distant voice: “(The Japanese closes his eyes, lowers his head, and sinks into a long reflection. The Inquirer waits until his guest resumes the conversation.)”16 12 Ibid., 103. 13 Ibid., 87. 14 Ibid., 105. For a discussion of colonial heritage and its decolonization, see Knudsen et al., eds. Decolonizing Colonial Heritage. 15 Heidegger, Unterwegs, 113. 16 Ibid., 114. 8 Elad Lapidot Act II. Kuki Resurrected The question concerning the essence of language which brings to light the epistemic difference silences logos. Yet, “the Inquirer waits until his guest resumes the conversation”: as already noted, Heidegger tells not just the story of death, but of resurrection. We already heard the logo-eschato-logy: “whether in the end – which would also be the beginning – an essence of language can arrive in the thinking experience and offer the assurance that European-Western saying and Eastasian saying will enter into a conversation to sing something that wells up from a single source.”17 It is precisely this messianic vision, this end of end, the break of silence by voices joined in song, which Act II of the drama now sets out to stage. To the silent Japanese interlocutor, rendered apprehensive, speechless by Heidegger’s threats of destruction and the memory of Count Kuki’s failure in Act I, Heidegger in Act II offers a way out, a salvation or redemption, in the form of a “lösendes Wort”, a solving, saving and liberating word; a word to redeem the conversation from silence, without breaking silence; a word for a conversation of silence. The saving word that Heidegger offers is Wink, that is, a hinting gesture, a wave or a nod, a speechless saying.18 It is in fact by a series of gestures that the dialogue between the Japanese and the Inquirer is resurrected: The first redeeming gesture is the very question that brings forth the silence, namely the Inquirer’s question about the Japanese word for language, to which the Japanese withholds his answer. This withholding, this non-speech, however, is itself already an answer, a response, a communicative reaction to the Inquirer’s question, which, notwithstanding the failure of the previous dialogue with Count Kuki, now gestures the possibility of recommencing the European-Eastasian exchange. The Japanese’s silent response to this prompt is accordingly inscribed in Heidegger’s text as a new moment in the dialogue: “The Japanese closes his eyes, lowers his head, and sinks into a long reflection. The Inquirer waits until his guest resumes the conversation.” The second redeeming gesture is offered by the Inquirer, the Heidegger persona, in view of the Japanese’s hesitation to answer the question on Japanese language, by regaining agency over the exchange and switching the direction of the inquiry, such that the Inquirer becomes the Respondent. In an attempt to unburden the Japanese from the responsibility of resuming a conversation with European thought that Heidegger just argued is disastrous, Heidegger suggests that the fiasco of Count Kuki’s project of translating Japanese Iki into metaphysical terms nonetheless arose from a more fundamental, more genuine question that had originally 17 Ibid., 94. 18 Ibid., 114. On Not Speaking 9 driven Kuki to Heidegger – and which is still open, still alive. To overcome the death of the dialogue in Heidegger’s question to the Japanese, Heidegger rehabilitates the memory of the late Kuki by resuscitating the Japanese’s original question to Heidegger – and by offering an answer. As it turns out, Japan’s original question to the German philosopher concerned the meaning of Hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, Heidegger now explains, is Europe’s theologically inspired reflection on the relation between the Word and Being, that is, Europe’s reflection on the essence of language. It thus transpires that Heidegger’s question to the Japanese, about the essence of Japanese language, is the same as the Japanese’s original question to Heidegger. Heidegger’s third gesture is to offer an answer to what now transpires as the common European-Eastasian question on the essence of language. The main thrust of the conception of language offered by Heidegger to the Japanese is that it is not metaphysical: it is not based on the distinction between material sign and ideal meaning, it is not originally a language of signs, in which speaking is separated from being, in which we speak about or on being.19 Rather, Heidegger’s non-metaphysical language, not Sprache but Sage, consists in speaking that is being, namely in saying not through signs and ciphers, but through gestures, Gebärde, such as nods and waves – saying in winken. In a revealing moment of the conversation, which announces the coming redemption, the Japanese indicates the manifestation of Heidegger’s non-metaphysical language of gestures in the Japanese traditional Noh theatre, an indication that is once again inscribed in the text in the form of a parenthetical description of a silent gesture: “(The Japanese raises his hand and holds it in the described manner.)”20 The Inquirer’s gesture towards the Japanese thus consists in signaling an internal European self-critique and disengagement from the language of metaphysics. This gesture is extended by Heidegger’s signaling to his Japanese interlocutor his own logoclastic situation within the European conversation, namely Heidegger’s own inner-European silence or conditions of not-speaking. This logoclasm appears in the confusion of Western thinkers with respect to Heidegger’s language, for instance concerning his use of words such as Nichts or Being. The break of logos is also enacted actively by Heidegger himself in his reluctance to publish his famous lecture on language, so he tells the Japanese, precisely due to his fear – which the existing English translation confirms – that it will be read metaphysically, as “speaking on language”, sprechen über Sprache.21 19 “We”, 117: Wissenwollen, Selbstbewusstsein, Vernunft. 20 Heidegger, Unterwegs, 117. 21 Ibid., 149. 10 Elad Lapidot What Heidegger would like to offer in contrast, as the Inquirer explains to the silent Japanese, his non-metaphysical vision, consists in “speaking of language”, sprechen von der Sprache,22 namely in speech that arises from and enacts or performs being. Such “speaking of language”, sprechen von der Sprache, Heidegger says, can only take place as an explicit event of Sprechen, in a Gespräch, namely as conversation, which must remain an ongoing event, must remain – note the messianic verb – “in coming”. For a conversation to remain in coming, so Heidegger’s gesture to the silent Japanese, it must consist in “more silence than talk”, or, as the Japanese immediately adds: in “silence on silence”.23 This series of gestures offered by the Inquirer finally reassures the Japanese, who was reduced to silence by the radical alienation effected by the opening act, and now senses in the non-metaphysical thinking of Heidegger – as he says – “a deeply concealed kinship with our thinking, precisely because your path of thinking and its language are so wholly other.”24 The reassured Japanese now finds the confidence to finally answer the Inquirer’s question as to the Japanese name and essence of language. The Japanese word that he offers is Koto Ba, which he translates to the “leaves or petals” (Ba) of the “event of lightening message of grace” (Koto).25 The Japanese essence of language would consist in the living beauty arising from the event of speech, inseparably intertwining speaking and being, word and flesh, similarly to Heidegger’s theologically inspired hermeneutics. Heidegger’s eschatological vision – “whether in the end – which would also be the beginning – an essence of language can arrive in the thinking experience and offer the assurance that European-Western saying and Eastasian saying will enter into a conversation to sing something that wells up from a single source”26 – is thus, unexpectedly soon, materialized. The dialogical “thinking experience” arrives at a common European-Eastasian, non-metaphysical conception of language, and this harmony expresses itself in the conversation in a number of key moments towards the end when the two interlocutors complete each other phrases in perfect continuity such that the dialogical exchange transforms into a monologue à deux, a duet singing: “The Japanese: Saying, then, is not the name for human speaking . . . The Inquirer: . . . but for that essential being to which your Japanese word Koto ba waves [erwinkt]: the fabulous [das Sagenhafte] . . . 22 23 24 25 26 Ibid., 149. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 94. On Not Speaking 11 The Japanese: . . . and in whose waving I only now through our conversation have come to be at home [heimisch], so that now I also see more clearly how well-advised Count Kuki was when he, under your guidance, tried to reflect his way through hermeneutics.”27 Epilog I conclude by pointing out how the conversation with Heidegger brings the Japanese back to himself and to Japanese language and thought, the original intention of Count Kuki. In the last pages of the conversation the Japanese thinker is led to reflect for the first time on the Japanese word for language, koto ba, “a word to which so far no thought has been given.”28 What begins as a logoclasm, a sober break of dialogue, with anti-colonial tones, ends with a romantic hymn of postcolonial redemption, where Europe once again plays the savior. Ultimately, one gets the impression that in this text “the Japanese” – similarly to Hölderlin or Anaximander – is just another literary figure in Heidegger’s internal monologue, more precisely a figure for Heidegger’s own quest for breaking with metaphysics and his alleged alienation from European philosophy. Nonetheless, I do find important Heidegger’s acute sense of the epistemo-political danger of inter-cultural and inter-epistemic conversation, and his ensuing formulation and performance of logoclastic communicative action. Most particularly, I highlight in this text the performative notion of speechless speech, a conversation of silences, which could be a model for something like an inter-epistemic ethics of not speaking.29 This indication serves as an intervention within the broader scholarly discussion concerning Heidegger’s role in the development of intercultural philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries, and more specifically, in the development of different attempts, both within Western philosophy and beyond it, to develop an understanding of the limits of Western thought and of the possibilities to engage in non-Western paths of thinking.30 In particular, understanding Heidegger’s thinking about language as logoclastic promotes the reading of his work as an important source for 27 Ibid., 145 28 Ibid., 146. The idea that the encounter between two different civilizations – the encounter with the foreign – brings each one of them somehow back to itself was also formulated by Heidegger in the context of his readings of Hölderlin, with respect to the encounter between the Greek and the German cultures. See Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen, 290–292. 29 For a discussion of the task of inter-epistemology, see Lapidot, Decolonizing epistemic justice, 1–21. 30 See for instance the discussion of Heidegger in Ma and Van Brakel, Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy. 12 Elad Lapidot later attempts within continental philosophy of problematizing Western logocentrism and of elaborating conceptions and performances of language that go beyond the logocentrisic horizon.31 Bibliography Benjamin, Andrew. Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015. Dudiak, Jeffrey. The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache. Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden.” In: Unterwegs zur Sprache, 84–155. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003, translated by Peter Hertz as “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer.” In On the Way to Language, 1–54. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” Gesamtausgabe 39, herausgegeben v. Susanne Ziegler. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999. Knudsen, Britta Timm, John Oldfield, Elizabeth Buettner, Elvan Zabunyan, eds. Decolonizing Colonial Heritage: New Agendas, Actors and Practices in and beyond Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 2022. Lapidot, Elad. Politics of Not Speaking. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2025. Lapidot, Elad. “Decolonizing epistemic justice: on inter-epistemology.” Inquiry (2024): 1–21. Lapidot, Elad. „Die Versammlung: über Heideggers Logopolitik“. In Martin Heidegger – die Falte der Sprache, edited by Michael Friedman, Angelika Seppi & André Scala, 227–252. Wien: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2017. Lapidot, Elad. Etre sans mot dire: La logiqe de “Sein und Zeit”. Bukarest: Zeta Books, 2010. Ma, Lin, and Jaap Van Brakel. Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016. Maly, Kenneth. Heidegger’s Possibility. Language, Emergence – Saying Be-ing. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Mendes-Flohr, Paul, ed. Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue and its Contemporary Reception. Berlin/Munich/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2015. Powell, Jeffrey, ed. Heidegger and Language. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013. Tracy, David. “The Other of Dialectic and Dialogue.” In Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Difference, edited by Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr., 105–113. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015. 31 For a discussion of such contemporary attempts, see Lapidot, Politics of Not Speaking. For a broader discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy of language, see Powell, ed., Heidegger and Language, and Lapidot, Etre sans mot dire; see also Lapidot, Die Versammlung, 227–252.