Heidegger's Call

' "it" calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.'

Crucially, we understand that the Call signifies without understanding what; we grasp the fact of being addressed but not the content of that address (your country needs you! do the right thing! Stop, thief!).

And perhaps this is because in order to apprehend a specific content we must first become a different subject, i.e., in this case, attune ourselves to the frequency of the call; orientate ourselves towards the place from which the call is coming. Perhaps the Call is the call to become this different subject, a subject for whom truth could then appear.

We attune ourselves to the place of the call, but this place, however, H. suggests, is ourselves, or a place in ourselves. This is the difficulty. For it is not a place already there like the family home. it is the empty place - or void - of our inmost potential. It can only 'reached' by continued fidelity to it: that process of fidelity towards it will gradually cause it to come into being.

Now it seems to me that one thing that marks this as different from interpellation in the Althusserian sense, is that the latter involves a moment of recognition. And this moment typically comes as reassurance. The Althusserian interpellation is a jubilant 'that's me!'. This reassuring recognition has in it, surely, nothing uncanny.

In the Heideggerian call, we register the fact of the address before any content. In the Althusserian address their is an illusion of coincidence between the address and its content. There is the 'coupling' of our self to the content of the interpellation. The Heideggerian call is first of all an uncoupling. And it is the antonym of reassurance.

The Heideggerian call is not spoken by a speaker - not a policeman, not even the inner policeman. (Te footnote to my translation glosses Heidegger's words thus:
'' "Es" ruft': Here the pronoun 'es' is used quite impersonally, and does not refer back to the call itself). Heidegger:

'In its "who", the caller is definable in a worldy way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the "not at home". A commentator writes: 'This is why the one who calls through the voice of conscience is definable by nothing more concrete than the fact of its calling.') It is not an 'embodied' voice. Again, does not the Althusserian interpellation bring off the illusion that the voice is incarnate, reassuringly localised.

And perhaps also, the Heideggerian call is not a discrete event, but a constant 'bias' within us, in contestation with the more familair and persausive bias of the They: 'Conscience summons Dasein's self from its lostness in the They'. Now for Heidegger, this 'lostness' comes first. The 'subject' who emerges from and against this lostness, who is won from it, is in a sense radically New, and yet at the same time has answered a possibility which is absolutely primary.