Abstract

Logocentrism in Heidegger’s thought; language as proximity to Being; the privileging of the phonic; Being/the voice of Being as the transcendent signified; metaphorics of the voice as expressing man’s relation to Being; the hand and the thing: human action as bringing about presencing; the hand and the gaze as the site of the disclosure of Being; theoretical and practical comportment toward Being; equipmental totality, concerned engagement with equipment, utilitarian purpose; work, handwork, and world; theoretical gazing attunement vs. practical manual attunement; the hand as the locus of humanness; the hand and the word; language and poetry as paradigmatic presencing; signification as pointing toward presencing; handwriting as a manual gesture of sending forth into presencing; handwriting as imparting form without reification; condemnation of machine-writing as derivative, concealing, and alienating; technology and the forgottenness of Being; mechanization, imprintment, reification, contamination; the logocentric divide between handwriting and mechanical printing; the encountering gaze, with its emphatic limitation, vs. the conquering gaze’s un-emphatic limitation; writing as the conquering gaze, as reifying representation, as contamination of the aletheic space; writing as human doubling of Being that causes loss of Being; the other consciousness and the other writing afford access to Being; the possibility of the infinite’s appearing within the finite; writing as limitation, as the masking of beings; giving and taking: openness to the Gift; authentic and inauthentic handiwork and thought; proper thought gives Being the freedom to bestow its Gift; metaphysical man and pre-/post-metaphysical man; openness to the Gift, humanness, animality.