Copyrighted Material
x Tracking a Hypothesis
priority relative to the praxis of interpretation, which ascribes meaning to an object. This is not the case because presence is “more important” than the operations of consciousness and intention, but rather because, perhaps, it is “more elementary.” At the same time, the German title betrays something resembling the mild oedipal revolt of a man already over fifty. Relegating interpretation and hermeneutics to a restricted academic terrain (so to speak) was my small—and perhaps even petty—revenge against an overwhelming tradition of intellectual “depth,” which I had found embodied in some heroes of profundity among my academic “fathers.” Because of my background and (dis)inclinations, I had never felt entirely adequate to such depth. Almost naturally—should, indeed, this be possible in the intellectual world—and without any particular programmatic objective, my intuition of presence developed in three directions. In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time, which preceded Production of Presence, I had asked what consequences attention to the dimension of presence might hold for our relationship to the past. An essay on the beauty of athletics addressed the same question with regard to aesthetic experience. Finally, in The Powers of Philology I tried to show that the dimension of presence invariably factors into encounters of a textual kind. Afterward—and I still have not abandoned this hopeful ambition entirely— I wanted to see if I would enjoy the good fortune of striking upon a second idea. (In this I was prompted by Jorge Luis Borges and imagined that what is intellectually decisive does not consist of “discovering” or “producing” ideas so much as “stumbling upon” and “grasping for” them—intercepting ideas and giving them form.) Unfortunately, I have not yet “caught” a second idea, and all the projects I have pursued in recent years are clear extensions of my intuition concerning presence. I have attempted to describe Stimmung, the relationship we entertain with our environment, as a presence-phenomenon—the “lightest touch that occurs when the material world surrounding us affects the surface of our bodies.” At the moment, I am working on a book about the decade following the Second World War because I believe that in this period a form of “latency” predominated—a presence, to be understood as a kind of “stowaway,” that can produce effects and radiate energy while escaping efforts to identify and apprehend it. After the books on presence had appeared, friends whose opinions I take very seriously surprised me by urging me to reflect systematically on, and write about, the existential and, indeed, the ethical consequences of these publications. The task, I suspect, would have demanded too much of me—or did I, half-consciously, feign modesty only to hide a visceral disinclination to “ethics” and other kinds of prescriptive “self-help” literature? At any rate, my reservations