BCDU (2014) – Kehre e derivados

(BCDU  )

Let us take, as an extreme illustration, the case of Heidegger. In Die Technik und die Kehre, he sets forth his philosophy of technology on the basis of a small group of words whose treatment illustrates perfectly the mechanisms under discussion: the concept is dissociated from ordinary language in accord with principles of combination and re-marking. The word Kehre, which was used from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and meant “turn,” “return” ( like the plow at the end of the furrow ) or, in a Pietist context, “( spiritual ) conversion,” has disappeared from ordinary language, which uses the forms of kehr- only in the form of a combinatory element—for example, Rückkehr, “return from,” Abkehr, “the act of turning away from,” Verkehr, “commerce, traffic,” Wiederkehr, “return, comeback,” etc.—or of kehrt- ( for example, kehrtmachen, “make a U-turn, turn back” ). The linguistic “turn” represented by die Kehre, the “twist” that Heidegger gives language, thus consists in fabricating a word, die Kehre, by analogy with die Wende, “the turning point, the reversal,” with the strong connotations of temporality that the word implies, especially in the sense of “historical turning point” or “reversal of the sequence of events.”

The twist to which Heidegger subjects the language leads him to a deliberate overdetermination: die Kehre is a return( ing ), a turning like returning. Heidegger designates thereby the return/anamnesis of Being manifested and concealed by technology, or a new way of conceiving technology in its nontechnological essence.

The two other verbs that provide the linguistic core of conceptualization in this text are bergen and stellen. Bergen, stellen, Ge-Stell, Kehre, to which is added Bestand ( from the verb bestehen, “exist” ), form a constellation of words on the basis of which Heidegger conceptualizes technology’s relation to Being.