In his famous interviews with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock insisted that while many of his thrillers concerned some piece of information or object, around which all the intrigue and energy of the film swirled, it didn't matter if that object was never identified, that it could even turn out to be nothing at all, of no serious importance in itself. Borrowing from some Kipling stories, he called such an elusive object of attention a “MacGuffin” and went on to say,

In 1987, the great twentieth-century intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, in a supremely backhanded compliment, noted the effectiveness of Heidegger's “question about the meaning of Being” in functioning in just this Hitchcockean way. In a clever rejoinder to Heidegger, Blumenberg titled his article, “Das Sein – Ein MacGuffin,” thereby deliberately invoking Hitchcock's own description of the MacGuffin, “boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all.”

The cleverness of this invocation of the nothingness of the Heideggerean MacGuffin, Sein, derives from the enormous if infamous and elusive importance that Heidegger himself ascribes to “the nothing,” das Nichts.