Heidegger's Kehre

Heidegger's Kehre (literally "the turn") is a structural-historical concept designating a fundamental reorientation within Heidegger's thinking, but Žižek's deployment in Less Than Nothing foregrounds its internal multiplicity rather than treating it as a single event. Three distinct senses are distinguished: (1) the biographical-philosophical turn in Heidegger's own work from the analytic of Dasein and the question of Being (Sein) toward Ereignis (the event of appropriation); (2) the world-historical epochal turn in Being's own sending (Seinsgeschick), specifically the possibility of a passage from the technological enframing (Gestell) to Ereignis; and (3) the immanent strife within Ereignis itself, between the event of propriation and its counter-movement, Ent-Eignis (de-propriation or expropriation), figured as Unwesen (un-essence or counter-essence). This triple articulation is not merely taxonomic—it reveals that the Kehre is not a clean teleological resolution but contains an irreducible antagonism at its very core.

The theoretical motive for Žižek's enumeration is contrastive: by mapping Heidegger's epochal historicity as an inversion of Kant's transcendental framework—where it is Being's own historical self-sending that conditions what can appear, rather than a fixed transcendental structure of subjectivity—Žižek sets up the contrast with the Lacanian Real. The Real, defined as a "given without givenness," the ontic without the ontological, introduces a dimension that cannot be accommodated by any of the three senses of the Kehre: it is the remainder that resists both Heidegger's phenomenological horizon of disclosure and his epochal narratives of appropriation and de-propriation.

In slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v, Heidegger's Kehre functions as a critical foil rather than a constructive resource. Žižek's broader argument in this text is that the Lacanian Real marks what is structurally unthinkable from within Heidegger's ontological framework: the "given without givenness," the ontic that never opens onto an ontological horizon, corresponds to none of the three registers of the Kehre. This aligns the concept with the cross-referenced canonical notion of the Real — specifically the second-order Real (R2) produced by the Symbolic's own impossibilities — which is precisely what Heidegger's phenomenologically-inflected account of disclosure, propriation, and epochal sending cannot register. The Kehre remains within the horizon of Phenomenology as Žižek characterizes it: a framework that trusts the disclosure of Being (even if that disclosure is historically variable and finite), whereas the Lacanian Real designates the structural point at which disclosure itself breaks down.

The concept also bears an indirect relation to the cross-referenced Vicissitude: just as Freud's Schicksal names the structured fate or destiny of the drive as it navigates the psychic apparatus, Heidegger's Kehre names the structured fate of Being as it traverses its own epochs. Žižek's tripartite enumeration implicitly shows that, like the drive's vicissitudes, the Kehre is not a single linear transformation but a field of possible fates — biographical, world-historical, and immanently antagonistic. The contrast with Original Sin as Philosophical Typology (cross-referenced but without a full synthesis supplied) likely situates the Kehre within Žižek's broader typological mapping of how different philosophical traditions handle the originary split or antagonism: Heidegger's Ent-Eignis would represent one such figure of originary negativity, distinguished from the Lacanian-Hegelian account Žižek favors.

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown)

Attentive interpreters have noticed the multiplicity of meanings of Heidegger's Kehre; the three main ones are: (1) the shift in Heidegger's thought from Being to Ereignis; (2) the shift in the world-history of Being from technology to Ereignis; (3) the strife in Ereignis itself between it and its Unwesen, Ent-Eignis.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it refuses to unify the Kehre into a single narrative, instead decomposing it into three structurally distinct levels — subjective (Heidegger's own thinking), historical (Being's epochal movement), and immanently antagonistic (the strife between Ereignis and Ent-Eignis). The appearance of Unwesen and Ent-Eignis in the third sense is especially significant: it introduces a counter-movement or un-essence internal to the event of appropriation itself, which is precisely the kind of immanent negativity Žižek will claim Heidegger cannot fully theorize — and which the Lacanian Real names more rigorously.