Bakhtin says, “Thus, in the system of grotesque imagery death and renewal are inseparable in life as a whole, and life as a whole can inspire fear least of all,” RABELAIS, pg. 50. This would be a contribution to understanding Heidegger’s basic project of searching out the “grounding question” of being as opposed to the “guiding question” which is the historically metaphysical project (see NIETZSCHE II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, pp. 190-95:

4c1. The question “What is being?” . . . The more this question becomes the guiding question, and the longer it remains such, the less the question itself becomes an object of inquiry. Every treatment of the guiding question is and remains preoccupied with the answer, preoccupied with finding the answer . . . ¶ The question is not unfolded along the lines of its own articulation . . . ¶ The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which the one who poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded . . . ¶ The guiding question of Western philosophy is, “What is being?” To treat this question as stated and posed is simply to look for an answer. To develop the question as it is formulated, however, is to pose the question more essentially: in asking the question one enters explicitly into those relationships that become visible when one assimilates virtually everything that comes to pass in the very asking of the question. When we treat the guiding question we are transposed forthwith into a search for an answer, and to everything that has to be done on behalf of that search. Developing the guiding question is something essentially different – it is a more original form of inquiry, one which does not crave an answer . . . Here the (metaphysical) development assumes such proportions that it transforms the very question bringing to light the guiding question as such in it utter lack of originality. For that reason we call the question “What is being?” the guiding question, in contrast to the more original question which sustains and directs the guiding question. The more original question we call the grounding question.

¶ Whenever we present the development of the guiding question “schematically,” as we are now doing, we easily awaken the suspicion that here we are merely making inquiries concerning a question. To question questioning strikes sound common sense as unwholesome, extravagant, perhaps even nonsensical. If it is a matter of wanting to get to beings themselves – and in the guiding question this is surely the case – then the inquiry into inquiry seems an aberration. In the end, such an attitude, asking about its asking, seems nothing short of noxious or self-lacerating, we might call it “egocentric” and “nihilistic” [1] and all the other nasty names we so easily come by . . .

¶ We only wish to keep in mind the full range of the area we are approaching when we ask the question “What is being, being as a whole, this unity that admits no other?” Let us resolve not to forget in anything that follows what it was that rose to meet us in our first tentative step in the question concerning being, namely, the incontrovertible happenstance that we stumbled across the nothing [2] . . .

¶ And if we may say that the nothing looms at the border of this question, then, in accordance with the reciprocity of the field and the goal of the question, we may experience the proximity of the nothing in the goal, that is, in the Being of beings; provided, of course, that we are actually inquiring, that our aim is true, that we are on target. To be sure, the nothing seems to be an utter nullity; it is as though we were doing it too great an honor when we call it by name. Yet this utterly common affair proves to be so uncommon that we experience it only in unusual experiences [3]. The meanness of the nothing consists precisely in the circumstance that it is capable of seducing us into thinking that our empty chatter – our calling the nothing an utter nullity – can really shunt the matter aside.* [4] The nothing of being follows the Being of being as night follows day. When would we ever see and experience the day as day if there were no night! Thus the most durable and unfailing touchstone of genuineness and forcefulness of thought in a philosopher is the question as to whether or not he or she experiences in a direct and fundamental manner the nearness of the nothing in the Being of beings. Whoever fails to experience it remains forever outside the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry. (Martin Heidegger, NIETZSCHE II, vol. 2 THE ETERNAL RECURRANCE OF THE SAME, “25. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position: The possibility of Such Positions in the History of Western Philosophy,” trans. Krell, Harper-Collins, 1984, pp. 190-195)

It is fear that determines the shape and intent of ‘all’ intellectual projects, though in the distant past in a person ‘love’ may have had something to do with starting such a project. This includes fear of ridicule, fear of loss of status and respect, fear that others are better at one’s chosen endeavour, and most especially fear of not doing what one should do, etc., etc. Though this should be perfectly obvious, it is never ever accounted for in intellectual projects (prove me wrong).

4c2. The images of Romantic grotesque usually expresses fear of the world and seek to inspire their reader with this fear. On the contrary, the images of folk culture are absolutely fearless and communicate this fearlessness to all . . . The high point of this spirit is reached in Rabelais’ novel; here fear is destroyed at it very origin and every thing is turned into gaiety. It is the most fearless book in world literature. RABELAIS, pg. 39

Heidegger says, “ . . . being as a whole can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation,” NIETZSCHE II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, pg. 62

Bakhtin says, “Thus, in the system of grotesque imagery death and renewal are inseparable in life as a whole, and life as a whole can inspire fear least of all,” RABELAIS, pg. 50. Heidegger says, “ . . . being as a whole can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation,” NIETZSCHE II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, pg. 62. People read Rabelais as a harmless clown, forgetting the holocaust of deaths he jokes about were going on around him in his own life within eyesight. And in seeing Heidegger only as a mean spirited Nazi, which indeed he is, but also much more, and that “much more” completely changes the understanding, or rather its total lack on all parties’ part including my own, of who and what Heidegger is and means. Heidegger becomes an open text, and such openness becomes terrifying because both the quantity of deaths surrounding him in the twentieth century become a joke as well as the very meaning and quality of death itself.

4d. If feeling and will are grasped as “consciousness” or “knowledge,” it is to exhibit most clearly that moment of the opening up of something in will itself. But such opening is not an observing; it is feeling. This suggests that willing is itself a kind of state, that it is open in and to itself. Willing is feeling (state of attunement) . . . ¶ . . . Thus [Nietzsche] grasps “joy” (normally an affect0 as a “feeling-stronger,” as a feeling of being out beyond oneself and of being capable of being so . . . This is a reference to that “consciousness of difference” which is not knowledge in the sense of mere representation and cognition [“ . . . being as a whole can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation”] . ¶ Joy does not simply presuppose an unwitting comparison. It is rather something that brings us to ourselves, not by way of knowledge but by way of feeling, by way of an away-beyond-us. Comparison is not presupposed. Rather, the disparity implied in being out beyond ourselves is first opened up and given form by joy. NIETZSCHE I, The Will to Power as Art, pp. 52-3

And—

4e. Nor does the anticipatory resoluteness [for death] stem from “idealistic” expectations soaring above existence and its possibilities [‘knowledge’ of afterlife]; but arises from the sober understanding of the basic factical possibilities of Da-sein. Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility. In it Da-sein becomes free of the entertaining “incidentals” [war, plague, famine, mass death] that busy curiosity provides for itself, primarily in terms of events of the world. B&T, Stambaugh 286/M&R 358/SuZ 310)

This echoes Bakhtin’s “the living present,” “in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries,” “a zone of familiar contact with the open ended present.” They are innocuous enough phrases standing by themselves, but if they must justify themselves in using such big words – “big” in the sense of encompassing all “life” and “reality” in its present and personal (your) act of existence, they either must be a) empty bombast, or b) truly philosophical statements defining a fundamental way of acting toward and in the world, that is, doing exactly what Heidegger has done. So either we are involved with ‘literary criticism’ as an overly self-important bombastic silliness or we are concerned with how we should live or even if should has rational meaning. Bakhtin has struck above straight to the real point in

3., “the subject of serious (to be sure, at the same time comical) representation.” It is seriousness itself that is brought into question, not any ‘type’ or style or specific verbal representation. It is not a linguistic analysis but an analysis of “experience”:

5. The second characteristic is inseparably bound up with the first: the gendres of the serio-comical do not merely rely on legend and do not sanctify themselves through it, they consciously rely on experience (to be sure, as yet insufficiently mature) and on free invention; their relationship to legend is in most cases deeply critical, and at times resembles a cynical exposé. Here, consequently, there appears for the first time an image almost completely liberated from legend, one that relies instead on experience and free invention. This is a complete revolution in the history of the literary image. (PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, pg. 108)

Thus, paradoxically, the serio-comical becomes, in a sense, more serious than the great tragedians and epic writers. This is specifically and precisely reflected by Heidegger’s discussion of the reappropriation of tradition, the retrieval of history, as truly “mine”:

6. Retrieve is the explicit handing-down, that is, going back to the possibilities of the Da-sein that has been there. The authentic retrieve of a possibility of existence that has been – the possibility that Da-sein may choose its heroes – is existentially* grounded in anticipatory resoluteness; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle to come, and the loyalty to what can* be retrieved. The handing down of a possibility that has been in retrieving it, however, does not disclose the Da-sein that has been there in order to actualise it again. The retrieve of what is possible* neither brings back “what is past,” nor does it bind the “present” back to what is “outdated.” Arising from a resolute self-projection, retrieve is not convinced by “something past,” in just letting it come back as what was once real. Rather retrieve responds to the possibility of existence that has-been-there. But responding to the possibility in a resolution is at the same time, as in the Moment [Augenblick, see Macquarrie & Robinson, B&T, 376/SuZ 328, footnote 2], the disavowal of what is working itself out today as the “past.” Retrieve neither abandons itself to the past, nor does it aim at progress. In the Moment, authentic existence is indifferent to both of these alternatives. (BEING AND TIME, Stambaugh 352-353/M&R 437-438/SuZ 385-386)

This ‘indifference’ of ‘authentic’ Dasein in Heidegger is, in its own way, far more extreme than Bakhtin’s “relationship to legend [that] is in most cases deeply critical, and at times resembles a cynical exposé.” But Bakhtin did not have the latitude of philosophical expression that Heidegger had. Bakhtin had to have had a deep understanding of Nietzsche, intensely popular in Russia in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, and though it is improbable but not impossible he knew about Heidegger (via Lukacs in some fashion?), as he said of Dostoyevsky and menippean satire, “Speaking somewhat paradoxically, one could say that it was not Dostoyevsky’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked . . .,” the phenomenological observation of existence itself as one’s ownmost, as the most present, as experience as far as possible non-discursive, beyond words, existential and ontological (the asterisked words in the B&T are technical and literal terms):

7. Carnival itself (we repeat: in the sense of a sum total of all diverse festivities of the carnival type) is not, of course, a literary phenomenon. It is a syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort . . . Carnival has worked out an entire language of symbolic concretely sensuous forms – from large and complex mass actions to individual carnivalistic gestures . . . This language cannot be translated in any full or adequate way into a verbal language, and much less into a language of abstract concepts, but it is amenable to a certain transposition into a language of artistic images that has something in common with its concretely sensuous nature; that is, it can be transposed into the language of literature. We are calling this transposition of carnival into the language of literature the carnivalization of literature . . . ¶ . . . Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, by live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life. Because carnivalistic life is drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent “life turned inside out,” “the reverse side of the world” (“monde à l’envers”). ¶ The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is non-carnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it – that is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people

(including age). All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people. ¶ . . . Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid . . . ¶ . . . These carnivalistic categories are not abstract thoughts about equality and freedom, the interrelatedness of all things or the unity of opposites. No, these are concretely sensuous ritual-pageant “thoughts” experienced and played out in the form of life itself, “thoughts” that have coalesced and survived for thousands of years among the broadest masses of European mankind. This is why they were able to exercise such an immense formal, genre-shaping influence on literature. (PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, pg. 122-123)