Letting the Riddle of Being Be: On Gianni Vattimo, Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek and Martin Heidegger

Letting the Riddle of Being Be: On Gianni Vattimo, Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek and Martin Heidegger offers a new perspective on truth by systematically reconstructing the ontological frameworks of Gianni Vattimo, Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek, situating them in dialogue with each other and with Martin Heiegger’s middle-to-late thought. The research argues that each thinker encounters the same ontological impasse as Heidegger: the impossibility of grounding truth as an absolute, speculative determination of Being. This deadlock is framed against the backdrop of postmodern thought, where the figures of relativity, contingency and historicity dominate the conditions of how far truth goes today. The thesis develops three lines of argumentation. First, it reconstructs how Vattimo’s hermeneutic nihilism, Zupančič’s Lacanian reading of Nietzsche, and Žižek’s dialectical materialism all respond to the collapse of metaphysical certainty, foregrounding the role of the concept of refutation as a key character unifying their own ontological understanding of what they see as the specific parameters of absolute truth. Second, it shows that this shared deadlock mirrors the decisive move made by Heidegger in his middle period, where for a while the truth of Being was theorised as the event (Ereignis) of an originary nothing that disrupts historical continuity. Third, this work proposes that the way out of this deadlock towards an entirely richer understanding of truth follows Heidegger’s later turn to the experience of letting-be. As it will be seen, truth becomes the inapparent but experiencable event of not only allowing beings to be what(ever) they come to be—beyond metaphysical closure yet without falling into pure relativism—but the experience of seeing how Being is ‘that’ which is always and already allowing beings to be in the first place, in an open and gift-like quality in the first place. By bringing Vattimo, Zupančič and Žižek into contact with this seemingly mysterious trajectory of Heidegger’s thought, the thesis reframes the postmodern problem which results in nihilism. It shows that Heidegger’s concept of letting-be is far from the confines of contemporary mysticism, for letting-be as an experience shines a light upon an entirely clear and concrete experience of the gracefulness of Being—beyond the confines of ontologising nothing(ness) according to confines of postmodern thought. It shows that letting-be is not a resignation to indeterminacy, but a way of experiencing all things, events and moments—and even the lack of them—in what is most true about them: the experience of a gift, a determinable truth which bypasses the deadlock of refutation completely and enables us to respond by dwelling in the possibility to also let beings be in their freedom. In pointing to the concept of letting-be in Part Three, this work offers a new way out from the philosophical deadlock of modern and postmodern ontology. In fact, it will be seen how letting the riddle of Being be due to the seeming impossibility to grasp absolute truth discloses not simply a nothing, but the continuing giving of everything, as a gift of history in its freedom that can be actualised for a new way of being.