Verfallenheit

I was looking again through Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity and the Phenomenology of Religious Life, and thinking about the various critiques Derrida and others levy against a distinction Heidegger makes between the proper and the improper. One can't understand these critiques as just critiques of the distinction between the two or a taking apart of a binary opposition (which some would call a "deconstruction" but that, without what follows here, does not get at the sense of the word as Derrida and others like Nancy mean it), because it is a critique that is really an investigation of a problem very internal to the nature of the phenomenon that Heidegger was (in an unbelievably amazing manner) attempting to investigate in Being and Time and elsewhere that he names Verfallenheit, fallingness (a coinage I prefer over "fallenness," the standard translation). This is the spirit of the account and explanation Nancy makes that I quote in an earlier post: one needs to understand the complications of the distinction between the proper and the improper within the phenomenon of their meeting, in fallingness and in the other phenomenon of anxiety before one can start critiquing the distinction--or rather, understanding the critiques of the distinction (by Derrida, especially), because they are indeed thinking precisely about this phenomenon when they critique it.

So what is Verfallenheit? Nothing more (and nothing less) than absorbtion in the world, the withdrawing of the possibility of access to something in the face of one's actual process of accessing it, even when one is trying to investigate or discern the reasons for one's ability to encounter it (in fact, falling shows up really concretely there). The process is quite simple, actually, because we encounter it every day:

During the course of a factically experienced day, I deal with quite different things; but in the factical course of life, I do not become aware of the different hows of my reactions to those different things. Instead, I encounter them at most in the content I experience itself: factical life experience manifests an indifference with regard to the manner of experiencing. It does not even occur to factical life experience that something might not become accessible to it. This factical experience engages, as it were, all concerns of life. The differences and changes of emphasis are found entirely in the content itself. The self-sufficiency of factical life experience is, therefore, grounded upon this indifference, an indifference which extends itself to everything; it decides even on the highest matters within this self-sufficiency.

-from The Phenomenology of Religious Life

But of course its simplicity does not extend to its ramifications or even in the reasons for its constitution as such. And this is the same spirit in which we should encounter the critiques that Derrida (and others) levy against this: the fact that for Derrida the experience of falling is also interrupted all the time, that in fact it is always interrupted prior to its being constituted as such and from outside what it distinguishes itself from (authentic projection of oneself into the future as the future and as oneself), is also just a simple phenomenon--with of course vast implications, since it is the structure or non-structure in which we (and more than we) encounter and are able to encounter anything.