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At the conclusion of Heidegger on Being and Acting, Reiner Schürmann points to the undertow, the expropriation at work in the appropriating event of being. Being, he argues, preserves time as epoch while at the same time cancelling and superseding it. Originary temporality, then, is always broken, fissured, and in dissension with itself. Indebted to the Greek notion of arche, meaning both origin and principle, Schürmann argues that while the archaic event of Being carries its principle with it, this principle is, nonetheless, always in the process of being undone, being otherwise than what it is. Paradoxically, the principle of the arche is the principle of anarchy.1 In his extraordinary and still too much neglected tour de force, Broken Hegemonies, Schürmann continues to think the archaic event of being in dissension with itself. The origin and its principle is the ravaged and tragic site of being wherein human beings try to console themselves by ordering what ultimately remains...

DOI: 10.1007/s11007-007-9061-6

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