The essential hint of this event to come...

The essential hint of this event to come, according to Heidegger at this time, is provided, not by any possible expression or word of language, but by the paradoxical experience of a withdrawal or refusal of language that at the same time reveals, in negative mode, something of its positive character.

The connection he thereby draws between being and the obscure possibility of its linguistic expression, leads him, at the same time, to interrogate the far-ranging connections, deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, that exist between the structures of ordinary language and the metaphysical determination of the kind of being that has, since ancient times, been specified as the animale rationale or the zoon logon echon , the “animal having language.” In the 1930s, the experience of language thus came to determine, for Heidegger, the possibility of a futural event of being, and with it the possibility of expression that belongs to it.

It was not always so. In Being and Time , Heidegger’s attempt to formulate the long-forgotten question of the meaning or “sense” of being through a preparatory analysis of the constitutive structures of human Dasein or “being-there” repeatedly alluded to the question of language. Nevertheless Being and Time did not (as later texts would) make the being of language itself central to the possibility of…