  Heidegger’s most famous presentation of Van Gogh’s painting pivots again on an ambiguous use of “nothing,” to which Heidegger now adds an elliptical, intimating locution (“And yet…”) in order to encourage his audience to hear a subtle shift and so notice the meaning suggested by his otherwise superfluous addition, “and nothing more.” Heidegger’s use of this ambiguous locution (“and nothing more”) was a well-established rhetorical trope for him by 1935; it was his preferred method for introducing the idea of that “nothing” we encounter when we move beyond the totality of entities toward that which makes it possible to encounter these entities the way we do. Heidegger had established the pattern in 1929’s “What Is Metaphysics?” by deliberately employing just such ambiguous locutions seven times in a row, referring to “the entity itself—and nothing besides [und sonst nichts],” “the entity itself—and nothing further [und weiter nichts],” “the entity itself—and beyond that, nothing,” etc., and then driving the point home with the rhetorical question: “Is this only a manner of speaking—and nothing besides?” (P 84/GA9 105)