not sufficient for thinking the end of the "stampings of being,"90 nor, put positively, "the possibility of a path toward presence."91 This question of the possibility of wresting entities from absence points beyond the epochs. What responds to that question is the event of clearing. Under the name of 'clearing', the economies , which are ontic and describable, are explicitly thought of as a function of ontological and transcendental presencing. 'Clearing' is a category of a transcendental phenomenology that can dispense with the 'history of being' as the systematic link to descriptive phenomenology. The retrospective category, the eternal return , was unfit even for suggesting such a condition of possibility, so exclusive was the reference to man around whom technology orders all things into a circle of availability. The fixity of that circle makes concealment in general unthinkable. It makes it even impossible to understand how entities can remain shut out, absent, from any economy. The pretense to total presence thus proceeds under the trait of eternal return, not of clearing.92 If 'clearing' is the word by which Heidegger seeks to think presencing independently of its epochal scansions, this category stresses precisely the movement of absencing in presencing, the undertow away from constant presence, and thereby originary time or the event. "Time . . . is the clearing of being itself."93
It is not the least of ironies that such a transgression of the epochal regime in its entirety should be made possible by the technological danger or peril: "The essence of the danger conceals the possibility of a turning in which the forgottenness of being's essential unfolding so turns about that, with this turning, the truth of the essence of being properly turns in—turns homeward—into entities."94 When, with technology, the thought of the event of appropriation and of the clearing becomes epochally possible, the epochs wither away. This decay provides thought with what will henceforth be its sole issue: "instead of 'Being and Time,'" "clearing and presenc[ing]." "The task of thinking would then be to relinquish all thinking until now to the determination of [that] issue for thinking."95 Under the reign of epochal principles the absence that characterizes the event remains unthinkable. To work through the philosophy born under their aegis, to surrender the epochē to the 'clearing', is to espouse the precarious in place of the principial, the phenomenal surface in place of unshakeable foundations; it is to permeate presencing with absencing.
The prospective category ἕν designated, on one hand, the supreme entity, the divine One, and, on the other, the unity of a phenomenal constellation, the economic One. However, these two notions , while they were mutually exclusive, in no way exhausted the categorial scope ensuing from the conjunction of ἕν with λόγος and ἀλήθεια. This conjunction revealed the differential One as the henological category proper. The recapitulatory