Seinsverlassenheit / Abandonment of Being

Heidegger's name for the abandonment of Being — a key motif of his later thought (esp. Contributions to Philosophy and the Letter on Humanism). Nancy retranslates it (délaissement de l'être) and gives it a double sense: (a) Being is left behind as cause / ground / condition of possibility — abandoned; (b) Being withdraws into the thing itself, not behind it — also abandoned. The Nancean shift from Heidegger is captured in the figure of the garden à l'abandon — an overgrown garden, marked by expenditure-without-reserve and overabundance, not by neglect. The shift has substantial consequences for the reading of ontological-difference.

Key Points

Heideggerian Verlassenheit: in Der Spruch des Anaximander ("Anaximander's Saying," in Off the Beaten Track 254), Heidegger characterises Being's disclosure as an Ansichhalten (keeping-to-oneself). In the Letter on Humanism (Heidegger Pathmarks 252, 260), the connection extends to hüten (guarding) and hirten (shepherding) of the truth of Being. The cluster gewähren / wahren / währen (granting / watching-over-keeping-safe / enduring) connects to Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" 28–34 — Gewährendes binds disclosure to a granting that necessarily conceals itself.
Nancy's double-sense reading (BP 36–37, 40, 43): the abandonment is (a) Being abandoned as cause / ground (the metaphysical-foundational role) AND (b) cause / ground withdrawing into the thing, not behind it. The shift is captured at BP 43: "since there is something, and not everything, it is because this thing is in abandonment, it is because everything is abandoned."
The garden à l'abandon figure (BP 36–37): Nancy contrasts the connotation of abandon in French with the Heideggerian Verlassenheit. À l'abandon can mean "left to itself" / "neglected" — or "overgrown," marked by availability and overabundance. A garden à l'abandon is overgrown, not just neglected. Nancy reads the Heideggerian Verlassenheit via this richer second sense: abandonment is expenditure without reserve, not retreat into mystery.
Diagnosis of Heidegger as ontodicy (EF §12; Roney, "Evil and the Experience of Freedom: Nancy on Schelling and Heidegger," Research in Phenomenology 39.3 [2009]: 374–400 — Morin 2022 Ch 7 fn 32 misprints the volume as "9.3"; the actual volume is 39.3): Heidegger's thought of the concealing of Being is "a justification of evil." Evil is enabled by the withdrawal of Being but does not ruin Being as such; Being holds itself back, "in this way enabl[ing] both das Grimmige and das Heile, fury and grace." Even where evil does not reverse into good, evil is justified by the saving power of the withdrawal — Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" 28–34 (the Patmos lines: "But where danger is, grows / The saving power also").
Nancy's critique of the Gewährendes: an opening cannot be guarded without being closed off (Nancy FT 184). The "guard of the open" can happen only through its opening without protection or guarantee. Heidegger's gewähren / shepherding-of-Being risks turning the open into something to be protected, undermining the opening as opening.
The ontological-difference consequence: per Nancy's reading (and per ontological-difference / *rien*), the abandonment is annulled-not-confused; the step back from the ontological difference is "the identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom" (EF 167).

Details

Heidegger's two-stage abandonment

For Heidegger, Seinsverlassenheit is the condition of the history of Being as errancy: Being abandons beings (= turns away from them, conceals itself) and beings forget Being (= live in the ontic without thinking the ontological). This is not a negative abandonment but the structure of how Being-as-Being is given in the history of metaphysics. The free gesture of disclosure — letting beings be encountered meaningfully — is at the same time a holding-back responsible for the errancy.

Nancy's two redirections

Nancy redirects Heidegger's reading in two ways:

From withdrawal to overabundance: the garden à l'abandon figure replaces the Ansichhalten (keeping-to-oneself). Abandonment is expenditure-without-reserve, not retreat-into-mystery.
From guarded mystery to open exposure: Nancy refuses gewähren / wahren / währen as the proper relation to the disclosure; FT 184 — what is "guarded" risks being closed off, so the proper relation to the open is its opening without protection.

The first redirects the temporal-structural sense; the second redirects the practical-attitudinal sense (how we should relate to the truth of Being).

Why this matters for the freedom of the stone

Per Morin Ch 7 §5 + Ch 6 §1, the redirection authorises Nancy's freedom-of-the-stone: if Being is not withheld but overflows into beings without reserve, then each being is free — without ground, without "why" — and there is no Dasein-privileged-access to its mode of being. The Heideggerian distinction (BT H. 55; FCM §47) between Dasein's facticity and the stone's factuality collapses, because the gift that previously privileged Dasein-as-receiver is no longer a gift-to-someone but a free dissemination of being (EF 13).

Connections

retranslation of Heidegger's Seinsverlassenheit with the à l'abandon / expenditure-without-reserve reading.
connected to *rien* — the annulment of ontological-difference.
foundational for freedom-of-the-stone — the stone is free because Being is abandoned-as-expenditure, not abandoned-as-withheld.
connected to creation-ex-nihilo-materialist — the ex nihilo and the abandon are structurally parallel: world without ground, being-as-expenditure.
contrasted with Heideggerian gewähren / Geheimnis / Wahrnis / hüten — the guarding-cluster Nancy critiques.
read alongside Derrida's deconstruction of the gift (Given Time 20–22) — gift without giver, without given, and without property/propriety; Heidegger thinks the first two but fails on propriety.

Open Questions

Does the redirection from "guarded mystery" to "open exposure" lose something Heidegger correctly captured — namely, that not every disclosure is for-the-taking, that some openings are not available for use? Nancy's overabundance reading risks evacuating the epochal structure of the history of Being.
Is the garden à l'abandon figure too poetic to do the philosophical work Nancy needs? The shift from Ansichhalten to à l'abandon relies on French connotations that don't transfer well to German or English.
What is the political analogue? Nancy's being-with / being-in-common / Inoperative Community deploys structurally similar abandonment-as-exposure figures; whether the political domain follows the same logic is open.

Sources

morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 7 §5 (the foundational deployment + critique of Heideggerian gewähren / shepherding); references to BP 36–37, 40, 43; EF §12, 167; FT 184; Letter on Humanism in Pathmarks 252, 260; "Question Concerning Technology" 28–34; "Anaximander's Saying" 254.
nancy-2021-fragile-skin-of-the-world — Nancy's late synthesis (Ch I §§5–6) re-deploys the Heideggerian Brauch / Gebrauchtsein couplet in the à-l'abandon register: "the use of man by his own ex-istence — and thus the use of use itself, of its utilization, of its utility and its erosion (usure) as the erosion of sense itself" (I §5 raw 307). The diagnosis is consistent with the abandonment-as-expenditure reading: man's being-used-by his own existence is not a deficiency but the condition of sense-as-interruption-and-revival. The Augustinian frui (enjoy) / Heideggerian Gebrauchtsein (being-used) alignment at I §6 raw 322–325 extends the late-Nancean à-l'abandon into the political-civilizational register of investment-as-civilizational-principle.