Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London
Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London
Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London
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eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies<br />
Issue 1 (2011)<br />
In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has<br />
already fallen-away […]. [It] has fallen into the world, which itself belongs to its<br />
being. […]<br />
In the kind <strong>of</strong> handling and being-busy which is “absorbed in the thing one is<br />
handling” […] the essential structure <strong>of</strong> care — falling — makes itself known. (BT<br />
226 ff.)<br />
The care structure <strong>of</strong> Dasein’s skilled coping makes falling a necessity. Only as result<br />
<strong>of</strong> its fallenness can something like a subject (‘factical Being-in-the-world’) emerge<br />
within the pre-subjective clearing <strong>of</strong> Dasein. This subject, or self, which emerges in<br />
Dasein, is given identity by the inherited ‘for-the-sake-<strong>of</strong>-which’ 17 upon which Dasein<br />
takes a public stand. This possibility gives meaning to the ‘handling and being-busy’<br />
<strong>of</strong> Dasein’s daily concerns, and provides the identity upon which it publicly takes a<br />
stand. That is, in falling, Dasein interprets itself in terms <strong>of</strong> the care structure that<br />
reveals the ‘there’ into which it has fallen, the situation into which it is ‘thrown’<br />
[geworfen]. This situation is the nature <strong>of</strong> Dasein’s facticity. Dasein can never recover a<br />
grounded essence. It is always already ‘thrown’ [geworfen] into Being in that its being<br />
is always already an issue for it. Dasein’s ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit] is the content <strong>of</strong><br />
its ‘facticity’ [Faktizität], or worldly situation, flavoured by its ‘state-<strong>of</strong>-mind’<br />
[Befindlichkeit], or ‘attunement’ [Stimmung]. Because it is thus fallen, and hence not<br />
grounded, Dasein is “interpretation all the way down.” 18 It did not choose the<br />
thrownness <strong>of</strong> its existence but must inexorably take a stand on it.<br />
As it is ungrounded in this way, occupying only public stations <strong>of</strong> Being,<br />
Heidegger speaks <strong>of</strong> Dasein having fallen into the ‘one self’ [das Man] (an agreed upon<br />
way <strong>of</strong> public being). Unless Dasein comes to awareness <strong>of</strong> its existential thrownness,<br />
and chooses to inhabit the one with resolute authenticity; that is, in a way which<br />
recognises its groundless nature but heroically presses towards a public identity<br />
nonetheless, Dasein obscures the anxiety <strong>of</strong> its own thrownness. In <strong>Finnegans</strong> <strong>Wake</strong>,<br />
Shem poses the question, “when is a man not a man?” and answers “when he is<br />
sham.” When is he “sham”? When he “yeat the abblokooken” (FW 170) (eats the<br />
17 Dasein’s ‘for-the-sake-<strong>of</strong>-which’ is the particular existentiell modality into which, as a possibility, it<br />
projects itself. Dasein projects itself towards its possibilities by enpresenting [gegenwärtingen] beings<br />
in its world as the ‘towards-which’ [das Wozu] <strong>of</strong> an ‘in-order-to’ [das Um-zu]. In being a student, for<br />
example, Dasein enpresents the ready-to-hand <strong>of</strong> a computer towards typing in order to write an essay<br />
for the sake <strong>of</strong> being a student.<br />
18 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world (cf. note 17), 300.<br />
9