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There may be something contingent about inheritance, besides the way it can never be settled in advance, if it is to proceed. For would not at least a touch of uncertainty color each instance of inheriting what may subsist of others' matters—and perhaps of matters that were never an issue of belonging or possession in the first place? Inherence and subsistence: the pairing that, in metaphysical or transcendental terms, describes a relation of accidents or variable appearances to the substance that bears them and perdures throughout their alterations, breaks down differently when one changes the subject. In signifying, "I join in, I fasten on, I cling," the Latin in-haereo cannot but testify simultaneously to my separation from whatever I would fasten onto, while the striving it implies simultaneously suggests that no efforts—however tenacious or restless they may be—could overcome this separation without remainder or guarantee that the object in question may not escape my grasp.1 At the same time, who could say how I might be altered, affected, or lost in the attempt? Reading another, related word for "inheritance," Gerhard Richter traces the German heritage of "Erbe" to "Arbeit," as well as to the "orphan" (ὀρφανός) from which both "Erbe" and "Arbeit" derive (Verwaiste Hinterlassenschaften 16–19). In elaborating the relations among these terms, he works through the breach that inheritance structurally presupposes, remarking "dass die Situationen des Erbens 'eine Zäsur voraussetzen,' durch die es erst zur 'Unterbrechung in der Kette der Wesen, Dinge oder Ereignisse' kommen kann, die zur Möglichkeit eines Erbes erforderlich ist und zur Übertragung desselben führen kann" (11). Such breaches are what occasion the labors of transmission and translation; they are what create the openings for those interventions and interpretations that Richter emphasizes and enters into in his readings of writers such as Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin, among others.2 But precisely insofar as they are ruptures of successions, progressions, and trajectories—insofar as each opening also marks the end of a line—such breaches can in no way offer a method for determining how inheritance, interpretation, or reading should or could go on. Aporetic through and through, they therefore confront anyone who should attempt to encounter and inherit a legacy with the possibility that he may not only be incapable...