of the word "spirit" but, sometimes yielding to the emphatic mode, in the name of spirit?
Could it be that he failed to avoid what he knew he ought to avoid? What he in some sense had promised himself to avoid? Could it be that he forgot to avoid? Or else, as one might suspect, are things more tortuous and entangled than this?
Here one could get into writing a chapter destined for a different book. I imagine its title: "How to Avoid Speaking."1 What does "avoid" mean, in particular in Heidegger?—and it is not necessarily avoidance or denegation. These latter categories are insufficient insofar as the discourse which habitually puts them to work, that of psychoanalysis for example, does not take into account the economy of vermeiden in those places where it exposes itself to the question of Being. The least one can say is that we are very far away from this taking into account. And all I should like to attempt here is to approach it. I'm thinking in particular of all ,those modalities of "avoiding" which come down to saying without saying, writing without writing, using words without using them : in quotation marks, for example, under a non-negative cross-shaped crossing out (kreuzweise Durchstreichung), or again in propositions of the type: "If I were yet to write a theology, as I am sometimes tempted to do, the word 'Being' ought not to appear in it,"2 etc. Now we know well enough that, at the date at which he said that, Heidegger had already made this word disappear while allowing it to appear under a crossing-out—which had thus perhaps set him going, and a long time since, on the path of that theology he says he would only like to write but which he does not not write at this very point, saying it's not that at all, saying that that's the last thing he's doing and that he would have to shut up his thinking-shop if one day he were to be called by the faith.3 In saying this, is he not showing that he can do it? And that he could easily, even, be the only one who could do it?