...The epigraph of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda immediately raises questions of foundation: “the make-believe of a beginning” is both the make-believe that there is a beginning and the make-believe that constitutes a beginning. It is itself the foundation that eludes it; its fiat, self...

...Heidegger’s thought begins with a questioning of being, of the difference between being and beings. He intends this thinking of being to provide a new beginning of ontology, or something other than an ontology. This thinking need not have any connection with anti-Semitism, and yet in Heidegger’s...

...For Heidegger, the first beginning is Greek. The beginning is thus brought about by a people, whereas the decline is brought about by the mixing and indistinction of peoples. But this too is for Heidegger brought about by a figure-people, a caricature of a people, drawn from the vulgarity...

...Heidegger’s thought absorbed the lesson of a very ancient history: any true beginning always fails to be such, to truly begin, and must struggle to reinstantiate itself without going astray or breaking down. The thinking of the beginning is thus burdened with a banal metaphysical doxa...

... evocation of a “beginning,” to be found solely in Greek thought, that has been covered over but whose destiny must be renewed in “another beginning,” and he links this to the impulse in European thought, and especially in Christianity, toward ever more initial foundations of “self.” The rejection of Judaism...

... and the Swan, Leonardo, Michelangelo maternal seduction and the reverse Oedipus Mona Lisa, Leonardo St. John the Baptist, Leonardo sublimation, dynamics of, from the beginning, original, second, deviant Virgin and Child with St. Anne (St. Anne with Two Others, Louvre) Virgin and Child with St. Anne...

...This chapter discusses the sovereigns who are demanded to eliminate all presupposition as it is exercised in the absolute beginning. It also points out the sovereignty's demand to suspend (epokhé) presupposition, heteronomous regulation. It explains how there is no prince or sovereign beginning...

...Discussions of Keats's poetry often focus on his prescient awareness of his early death, his preoccupation with what he calls his “posthumous existence.” This chapter focuses instead on Keats's thinking about beginnings. An interest in beginnings may appear far from an investigation...

...This chapter addresses the co-dependence of people's conceptions of end and of beginning. To comprehend the beginning, one must think of it from the perspective of futurity, from the perspective, that is, of the ultimate end. Consequently, the beginning lies not in the past but, rather...