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in place, ordering them into place, securing their place within a system of placement where everything has its place. But this "placing" and delimiting of everything within the system entails precisely a displacement from the immediate field of presencing or actuality.

It is presumably no accident that the dynamic of the technological system of presencing bears a resemblance to the temporality of curiosity that Heidegger had outlined in his earlier work, although it is also different in certain decisive respects. In curiosity, we recall, Dasein manifests a desire to escape its own proximity and the vicinity of things around it, to direct itself, in its displacement (Entfernung), toward a "distant and foreign world"; it manifests a seeking to disown its being alongside the ready-to-hand in seeking "merely" to have seen, a "non-tarrying" (Unverweilen) and restlessness amid the excitement and excitation caused by the "ever new"; a constant distraction and dispersion into new possibilities and a "never dwelling anywhere," a being "everywhere and nowhere." Curiosity itself was described as "a new way of being pertaining to everyday Dasein" (SZ, 173).

We have already examined in chapter 4 something of the temporality of curiosity as described in Being and Time. In the 1925 course, Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger had already given a preliminary analysis of the temporality of curiosity in terms that closely parallel those of his remarks on the temporality of technology, and that can help us to examine that temporality more incisively. There he remarked that curiosity, in the desire "merely to have seen," is not concerned with a binding or thematic presence:


The end [Worumwillen] of curiosity is not any determinate presence, but rather the possibility of a constant exchange of presence [des ständigen Wechsels der Präsenz]. In other words, the non-tarrying that pertains to curiosity is fundamentally concerned with not having to intervene [zugreifen] and with merely being entertained by the world.... the presence of whatever is to be seen by the concern of curiosity is constantly exchanged in accordance with its essence, because curiosity itself is concerned with precisely this exchange. (GA 20, 382–83)


The German Wechsel implies change in the sense of exchange or alternation, as distinct from alteration or change as Veränderung. The end of curiosity, that for the sake of which it is undertaken as an activity, is not any determinate presence at all, but "the possibility of a constant exchange of presence." The desire for the new is enacted on the basis of a prior projection, an understanding that has posited the end of desire in advance, and that regulates and determines its entire activity. Unlike the


The Glance of the Eye by William McNeill