Satisfied for now, perhaps, with the account I have given here of myself, my Google-searcher now turns to ontological questions: what does it mean, Dominic? What does it mean? What does it mean?

As if I should know.

Following the boy Kotsko’s suggestive identification of the Ereignis of Being with the Es gibt of Capital, one could I suppose reply that It means Business…

Supplementary observation: isn’t this question (“what’s it all about, then?”, as the cab-driver purportedly asked the celebrated analytic philosopher - surely the very sort of person from whom one would least expect an answer) always addressed in the vocative, to some other person? One would not even be able to ask “what it all means” without interpellating some real or imagined respondant, someone who could answer for “it”. This is one way of approaching Levinas’s perhaps puzzling assertion that ethics precedes ontology: “it” can only “mean” in a dialogic situation. Hence, the answer “it’s wholly up to you: it means whatever you decide it means” is radically lacking, in its refusal of dialogue - no meaningful decision about meaning could ever be made in such a vacuum.