In coming to words, language “reserves” itself: it holds back its event, keeping it illegible and silent. It is possible to see much of modern innovative or “experimental” poetry as such an experience of reticence and stillness, an experiment of language listening to itself “speaking” in order to allow the force of the illegible to come to speech. How this silence both limits what can be said and holds what has been written open to the possibilities of saying otherwise comes (...) from the “restraint” characteristic of the specific way in which language “speaks,” that is, arrives each time singularly as words precisely by withholding this very arrival from signification. Myung Mi Kim’s poetry stands out among contemporary American poets precisely for its specific attentiveness to this simultaneously “generative” and “constraining” force of silence. To understand better the workings of this force of silence, I examine Kim’s poetry in the context of Heidegger’s reflection on language, specifically his point about the withdrawal and restraint “essential” to the unfolding of language. I suggest that this withdrawal marks the poietic momentum of language, which can be traced, though, only by way of a listening response. This listening response becomes in turn a kind of constraint under which poetic thinking operates, a holding back of assertions and statements in favor of a listening which responds precisely to how the saying withholds itself from what comes to be said. Exploring the proximity between Kim’s poetry and Heidegger’s thinking, this essay examines how this withdrawal—a restraint at play in language itself--necessitates the attitude of poetic “reservedness.”. (shrink)

The essay develops a parallax between Lispector and Heidegger with regard to the question of being: being not as an idea or a concept, or as anything substantive, but being in the spatio-temporal sense of being in being, of the event which lets each instant of “in being” take place. Instantiating this proximity, the essay focuses on dis-humanization and the role that openness to nothingness plays in this context. Lispector’s writings, especially Passion, illustrate how what hinders the true humanity of (...) human beings is not barbarity or animality but what she calls “false humanization,” which sets humans apart from all other beings as if separate from life and nature. Heidegger’s critique of humanisms and their machinational approach to things and the world opens a similar perspective on being. Although presented in markedly different tonalities of writing, Lispector’s and Heidegger’s texts concern the “same” of the passion/pathos of being. (shrink)

The majority of the contemporary literature on Schelling and Heidegger focuses on the direct connection between the two philosophers – Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling’s Freedom essay. This paper, however, explores an implicit link between them on the topic of creation by reading Schelling’s Ages of the World alongside Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. It brings God’s creation in Schelling together with artistic creation in Heidegger and argues that the two have similarities in their structures, sources, and aims: (...) both creations are dependent on a two-fold struggle, the sources are either the absolute (in Schelling) or being (in Heidegger), and the aims are to reveal the divine principle (in Schelling) or the truth of being (in Heidegger) in the world. In making these comparisons, I argue that, in spite of Heidegger’s esoteric neologisms, his account of artistic creation is not as radically new as he himself claims. It can be read and better comprehended in the light of a Schellingian metaphysics of creation and, more broadly, in the light of the history of philosophy in general. Eventually, Heidegger’s philosophy remains committed to the tradition of philosophical theology, despite his own attempt to move beyond this tradition. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in (...) Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between academic and public philosophy through the lens of Heidegger studies. Specifically, this essay: shows how Heidegger uses technical terminology within the context of the academy to break new philosophical ground; explains how suitably clarified technical terminology can be used to introduce people to Heidegger’s philosophy and to apply Heidegger’s ideas to current affairs; and illustrates how the application of Heidegger’s ideas to contemporary issues results in new forms of academic research. Ultimately, this essay argues (...) that there is a dialectical relationship between academic and public philosophy: i.e., public philosophy translates esoteric ideas developed in the academy into publicly accessible prose and then applies those ideas to daily life; but in doing so, public philosophy inspires new lines of academic inquiry. (shrink)

Terrance Malick's film _The Thin Red Line is notable for its inexorable tendency to undermine the ontological status of the very times, places, and people it portrays. The film consists in an unrelenting questioning of cinematic reality. Such questioning does not lead to definitive truth or thematic resolution but only to more questions, more incredulousness at the continual disclosure and withdrawal of difference and multiplicity in their own accord. The film thus adopts what one might call a Heideggerian posture of (...) questionableness without the expectation of answer. Far from striving to depict a truth, meaning, or moral that allows it to achieve a verisimilitude with some reassuring dimension of reality, _The Thin Red Line labors to intricately destructure the ontological ground of every such unifying principle, and thus every correspondence with an external reality. In doing so, it meticulously questions the material status of every filmic pretense to coherent and natural representation, thereby striving to affirm in cinematic space the irreducible difference and multiplicity that conventional cinematic productions typically negate. (shrink)

F.W.J. Schelling’s late distinction between negative and positive philosophy correlates negative philosophy with critical philosophy, which delimits what could be said of things without yet actually being able to do so. Positive philosophy, however, is able to make assertions about the actual existence of such objects without transgressing Kant’s prison of finitude, i.e., without moving from an immanent, subjective and transcendental position to a transcendent object. Schelling’s later positive philosophy rather asserts that one begins outside Kant’s prison. This is not (...) a dogmatism or, more properly, a dogmatizing philosophy, that attempts to reach the transcendent from an immanent locus, transcendental subjectivity, but it is a “doctrinal philosophy” that begins in transcendence and then has as its task the consequent construction of the domain of transcendental subjectivity. By this means, Schelling’s positive philosophy, which he also deems a “historical” and “progressive” philosophy, exposes what Quentin Meillassoux has termed “the great outdoors.” Schelling, however, does not show how one might acquire access to this absolute outside, but he argues that one should depart from it. Transcendence is not the aim of knowledge but the absolute prius from which positive, i.e., progressive, philosophy begins. (shrink)

Philosophy of religion, in both its analytic and Continental streams, has been undergoing a renewal for some time now, and I seek to explore this transformation in the fortunes of the discipline by looking at how truth – and religious truth in particular – is conceptualised in both strands of philosophy. I begin with an overview of the way in which truth has been commonly understood across nearly all groups within the analytic tradition, and I will underscore the difficulties and (...) shortcomings of the analytic approach by comparing it with a Continental, and specifically Heideggerian, approach. I then proceed to a conception of truth that is even further removed from the analytic tradition, one that is prominent in the theology of Christianity and which identifies truth with Christ. The point of this detour through divergent understandings of truth is to show how philosophy of religion, whether analytic or Continental, remains entrenched in forms of thinking that will need to be overcome if it is to have a credible future. (shrink)

In his lecture course on Hölderlin's hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger makes a striking claim about translation which implies that the paradigm of translation can never be encapsulated by a passive substitution of one linguistic signifier for another, for what is involved is no less than the stance the translator takes within his original language as unconcealment, and how he ex-sists toward the other language as the site of another revelation. If the human being and Being belong together by the happening (...) of Ereignis in the way beings presence through language, the hermeneutical event of translation as unfolding, not only within history but also toward that which opens up historical understanding, grounds his entire authentic comportment toward this unconcealment. This article will argue that translation provides a useful correlative through which we can understand Ereignis as appropriative event. (shrink)

This article proposes a new interpretation of the ontological significance of the Biblical statement ‘I am that I am’ that focuses on the relationship between the Heideggerian notion of the being that is beyond all entities and the German Idealist concern with the irreducibility of subjectivity. This focus is put forward as an effective way of philosophically elaborating what are argued to be the twin aspects of the statement—the being that transcends predication, and an irreducibly first person ontology. This elaboration (...) is performed by discussing the way in which these two themes have been approached at certain pertinent points in the history of metaphysics. With regard to the theme of transcendent being, an overview of the medieval Scholastic debates on the issue precedes a direct discussion of the Heideggerian position. As for the theme of the irreducibility of first person ontology, an overview of the relevant theories of the various German Idealist philosophers precedes a direct engagement with what Heidegger has to say on this issue. The overall argument here is that it is possible coherently to conceive of the pure being that transcends all entities in terms of the ‘I’ of an absolute subject without eliding the difference between being and entities, without succumbing to what Heidegger regards as an onto-theological oblivion of being. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to enact a creative confrontation between Heidegger and Sikh spirituality. Heidegger’s idea of confrontation did not stay the same throughout his career. It goes through multiple transformations. The earliest iteration of this idea in the 1930s can be linked to his ethno-centrism. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger performs a confrontation with himself, which marks his attempts to go beyond his prior position. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Heidegger gets a glimpse of what a different confrontation might (...) look like. However, he fails to enact it. This failure can be located in his inability to build a profound connection between his quest and non-European traditions. The article concludes with a fleeting glance at what such a connection between Heidegger’s quest and Sikh spirituality might look like. (shrink)

In his book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, Peter E. Gordon attempts to reconstruct the historical circumstances which shaped Martin Heidegger’s and Ernst Cassirer’s debate at Davos in 1929, as well as outline the key points of contention in their arguments. Gordon argues that the primary source of disagreement between Heidegger and Cassirer lies in their different concepts of what it means to be human. In this review essay, I argue that rather than a “conceptual” or “thematic” divide, the divergence (...) between them is primarily methodological, and, in Heidegger’s case, unfolds on two fronts: first, by shifting the focus of philosophy away from the modern concern for “man” in favor of the question of being, and, secondly, by pioneering a new strategy for reading the history of philosophy that emphasizes the “historical [geschichtlich]” as the recovery of the past in terms of its relevance for the future, versus providing a “historically [historisch]” accurate record of what has been. (shrink)

The essay explores the possibilities afforded by Heidegger’s thought for addressing the question of the reality of the phenomenon within the framework of the theory of quantum mechanics. Heidegger’s conception of the task of phenomenology is seen to provide a crucial axis along which the phenomenon of quantum physics can be connected both to its appearance in language and to the historical unfolding of the horizon that grounds the possibility of an encounter with the phenomenon itself. The determinations of this (...) horizon, i.e. of the order of “phenomenality” that makes the appearance of the phenomenon possible, are analyzed in the instance of quantum mechanics, and compared to the ones presented by Heidegger in his considerations concerning the appearing of the phenomenon in Aristotelian and classical physics. The three main directives that structure the analysis of this order of phenomenality are the determinations of the conditions of experience of the phenomenon, of the function of language that makes this appearance possible, and of the subject function that constitutes, and is in turn constituted by, this experience. (shrink)

This essay examines Jean-Luc Nancy's re-posing of the question of freedom in The Experience of Freedom in relation to three issues—what he calls the “thought of freedom,” the reality of evil, and the closure of metaphysics. All three elements that he discusses point directly to Heidegger's engagement with Friedrich Schelling's attempt to establish a system of freedom. My intervention into the discussion between these three thinkers will address several issues. The first part draws out the implications of Nancy's argument that (...) the thought of freedom, not the question of being as Heidegger would have it, is the ultimate matter for thinking that arises at the end of metaphysics. This in turn has important implications for Nancy's understanding of evil. The next part confronts and criticizes Nancy's contention that there is an “ontodicy” in Heidegger's thought that lends a certain justification to evil. The final part aims to show how Heidegger's engagement with Schelling and the reality of evil has to be understood within the context of the question concerning technology. This leads to a second confrontation with Nancy, who proposes a quite different interpretation of technology according to his own ontology, which he calls “being singular plural,” which amounts in effect to a liberation of technology from the being-question. (shrink)

In his work, Being Given, Jean-Luc Marion calls for a phenomenological investigation of the givenness (donation) of the phenomenon. As a phenomenologist of religion, Marion aims to give a philosophical account of the possibility of revelation, something which by definition is unconditionally given. In Being Given, he contends that his phenomenological reduction to unconditional givenness (in the figure of the saturated phenomenon) can account for religious phenomena in a way that respects the subject matter, all the while remaining philosophically neutral. (...) In this paper I argue that Marion's aim to maintain strict philosophical neutrality interferes with his attempt to respect the subject matter of his own investigation, i.e., the givenness of revelation, since revelation is recognizably given, even as possibility, only in the non-neutral context of an interpretive tradition. I establish the latter claim with recourse to Heidegger's early hermeneutic sketches of ‘primordial Christian religiosity.’ In turn, I call for a phenomenological Destruktion of Marion's work in order to release its potential as a non-neutral investigation of a distinctively Catholic religiosity. (shrink)

The fruit borne of the debate concerning the economy of the gift carried out between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in the 1990s continues to ripen into the present with publications like Anthony Steinbock’s lucid It’s not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving. I challenge and qualify the fundamental argument of this book in dialogue with two principal French proponents of givenness, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion, against whom Steinbock promotes his strategy of the gift. While Steinbock wishes to (...) displace our relation to the other from giving to loving, I suggest that the discourse of givenness remains the very movement of loving as such. Steinbock occupies a position reminiscent of, but not reducible to, gift-exchange theory, rooted in reciprocity between lover and beloved, whereas I am inclined to move near to the terrain of the unconditioned gift in which loving need not entail reciprocity. My position is not so much a counterclaim as it is a clarification of the inextricable unity between giving and loving. The final section contends that the I enlarge my horizon when I give myself because I do not grasp the other, nor do I expect or obligate the other’s givenness in return; rather in my growth beyond my own self-interest, I allow the other to be given just as the other likes to be given. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s radical critique of technology has fundamentally stigmatized modern technology and paved the way for a comprehensive critique of contemporary Western society. However, the following reassessment of Heidegger’s most elaborate and influential interpretation of technology, The Question Concerning Technology, sheds a very different light on his critique. In fact, Heidegger’s phenomenological line of thinking concerning technology also implies a radical critique of ancient technology and the fundamental being-in-the-world of humans. This revision of Heidegger’s arguments claims that The Question Concerning (...) Technology indicates a previous unseen ambiguity with respect to the origin of the rule of das Gestell. The following inquiry departs from Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and connects it to a reassessment of ancient technology and Aristotle’s justification of slavery. The last part of the paper unfolds Heidegger’s underlying arguments in favor of continuity within the history of technology. According to these interpretations, humans have always strived to develop modern technology and to become truly modern in the Heideggerian sense. The danger stemming from the rule of das Gestell is thus not only transient and solely directed toward contemporary Western society, but also I will argue that humans can only be humans as the ones challenged by the rule of das Gestell. (shrink)

While Jacques Derrida’s influence on posthumanist theory is well established in the literature, given Martin Heidegger’s influence on Derrida, it is surprising to find that Heidegger’s relationship to posthumanist theory has been largely ignored. This article starts to fill this lacuna by showing that Heidegger’s writings not only influences but also has much to teach posthumanism, especially regarding the relationship between humanism and posthumanism. By first engaging with Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and related critique of anthropocentrism, I show that, while (...) rejecting Heidegger’s conclusions for being too humanist, posthumanism shares, and indeed is largely unreflectively defined by, Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic underpinning anthropocentric humanism. With this, posthumanism aims to go beyond Heidegger by overcoming all forms of humanist understanding, an attempt that brings us back to the relationship between humanism and posthumanism and Heidegger’s notion of trace. With this, I not only show that Heidegger influences posthumanism through his destruction of metaphysics, critique of anthropocentrism and notion of trace, but also point towards an understanding of posthumanism that distinguishes it from humanism and transhumanism. (shrink)

In Of Spirit, Jacques Derrida claims that Heidegger's attempted deconstruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism remains anthropocentric and, as such, is inherently authoritarian. This paper takes up these charges to engage with whether Derrida is justified in coming to this conclusion. To do so, it briefly outlines Heidegger's critique of anthropocentrism and subsequent re-thinking of human being in line with the question of being, before suggesting that Derrida is correct to suggest that Heidegger's thinking remains anthropocentric. It then engages with whether Heidegger's (...) defence of this continued anthropocentrism is authoritarian by engaging with the nature of what it is to be authoritarian. By engaging with three senses of authoritarianism, termed authoritarian in the sense of the author, sovereign, and dogmatic, it suggests that, while Heidegger can indeed be thought of as being authoritarian in the senses of the author and sovereign so too can Derrida, and, indeed, by pointing to passages whereby Derrida links the sovereign author to democracy, I show that, on Derrida's terms, it is possible to conclude that Heidegger's thinking is inherently democratic. I then engage with the third sense of authoritarian, authoritarian in the sense of the dogmatic, and by discussing the relationship between being and time, the nature of provisionality in Heidegger's thinking, highlighting a number of statements he makes on animality that confirm this provisionality, and pointing to the openness inherent to meditative thinking, conclude that, while Derrida is correct to maintain that Heidegger's thinking is anthropocentric and can be thought of as being authoritarian in the senses of authorship and sovereignty, it is not authoritarian in the sense of the dogmatic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper examines Heidegger’s remarks about the worldlessness of Judaism in his Black Notebooks. In the first part of the paper I examine Heidegger’s concept of the world in Being and Time and subsequent writings. In the second part, I analyze a distinction that Heidegger draws between mere human actuality and genuine human existence in a 1932 lecture course on The Beginning of Western Philosophy. This distinction, I suggest, relates to the development of Heidegger’s thoughts on nihilism and what (...) he conceives as its gravest danger. In the third part, I argue that the above-mentioned distinction can help us to better understand Heidegger’s remarks on Judaism. In particular, I suggest that the Jewish figure comes to symbolize for Heidegger a kind of unessential human actuality that is irredeemably detached from the question of Being. (shrink)

Phenomenology as Qualitative Research: A Critical Analysis of Meaning Attribution has attracted the attention of Max van Manen, who has published a highly critical review article. Anyone reading this article, but unfamiliar with the book, will get a distorted view of what it is about, whom it is addressed to, what it tries to achieve, and how it goes about presenting its arguments. Not mildly distorted, in need of the odd correction here and there, but systematically misrepresented. One problem is (...) that van Manen appears to have an idée fixe which prevents him from recognizing that the book is not about a certain philosophical tradition (known as “phenomenology”), but about a particular type of qualitative research (also known, unfortunately and confusingly, as “phenomenology”). A second idée fixe disposes him to misread an earlier article of mine and (much more seriously) three works by Heidegger. My aim in this article is to describe these two idées fixes, and exhibit their consequences. In doing so, I will examine what van Manen has to say on four crucial topics: meaning, lived experience, empathy, and Heidegger's analysis of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. (shrink)

In this text, Heidegger's notion of the event is understood as a rupture on an ontological level. From this follows the aporia of whether the event concerns the coming about of being itself, or of beings. To address the ontological as well as the ontic aspect of the event, the article suggests to understand the event in a subjective framework, in line with transcendental conditions of experience, specifically as a "receptivity" to the event. The main part of the article considers (...) existing phenomenological approaches to the event and the possibility or impossibility of a receptivity to the event expressed therein. In conclusion, the article suggests that the subjective event can be conceived as a rupture within subjective experience, as being tied to the necessary coming about of experience. (shrink)

Heidegger’s ‘serious idealism’ aims at capturing the realist impulses of our natural consciousness whilst avoiding a collapse into metaphysical realism. This idealism is best conceived as a form of transcendental empiricism. But we need to distinguish two varieties of transcendental empiricism, corresponding to Heidegger’s early and later work. The latter, transcendental empiricism2, is superior. Here, Heidegger’s ontology of gift gives full, conceptual shape to the two-way dependency between man and world characteristic of transcendental empiricism as a whole. In exemplary forms (...) of inspired experience, marked by the 'animation' of our conceptually-structured natural powers, things call on us in a speech that is their very own. This moves us decisively beyond not only early Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism1 but also the picture of experience presented in McDowell’s Mind and World. (shrink)

In this essay I focus on the idea of the univocity of being, championed by Duns Scotus and given prominence more recently by Deleuze. Although I am interested in how this idea can be established, my primary concern is with something more basic: how the idea can even be properly thought. In the course of exploring this issue, which I do partly by borrowing some ideas about logical syntax from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I try to show how there can be dialogue (...) between analytic philosophers and those of other traditions. (shrink)

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests, and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands, I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be (...) viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject-matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 65-78, Spring 2021.

This speculative essay develops a unique understanding of Socrates by reading Heidegger in relation to contemporary Platonic scholarship arising from the Continental tradition, which embraces Plato’s Socrates as a non-doctrinal philosopher. The portrait of Heidegger’s Socrates that emerges is related to contemporary education and its drive toward emphasizing an academic focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at the exclusion of the Liberal Arts, with the goal of showing that other forms of “knowledge,” such as the philosophical “truth” emerging (...) from the relationship between the human and the unfolding of Being, while stifled or neglected in STEM curricula, are also crucial to our continued development as human beings. Ultimately, the essay seeks to draw out an authentic vision of paideia by turning to the valuable, albeit limited, writings of Heidegger focused specifically on the historical philosopher Socrates, as opposed to Plato. (shrink)

(2011). ‘What Is, Is More than It Is’: Adorno and Heidegger on the Priority of Possibility. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 31-57. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2011.539357.

Heidegger's treatment of 'machination' in the Beiträge zur Philosophie begins the critique of technological thinking that would centrally characterize his later work. Unlike later discussions of technology, the critique of machination in Beiträge connects its arising to the predominance of 'lived-experience' ( Erlebnis ) as the concealed basis for the possibility of a pre-delineated, rule-based metaphysical understanding of the world. In this essay I explore this connection. The unity of machination and lived-experience becomes intelligible when both are traced to their (...) common root in the primordial Greek attitude of techne , originally a basic attitude of wondering knowledge of nature. But with this common root revealed, the basic connection between machination and lived-experience also emerges as an important development of one of the deepest guiding thoughts of the Western philosophical tradition: the Parmenidean assertion of the sameness of being and thinking. In the Beiträge 's analysis of machination and lived-experience, Heidegger hopes to discover a way of thinking that avoids the Western tradition's constant basic assumption of self-identity, an assumption which culminates in the modern picture of the autonomous, self-identical subject aggressively set over against a pre-delineated world of objects in a relationship of mutual confrontation. In the final section, I investigate an important and illuminating parallel to Heidegger's result: the consideration of the relationship between experience and technological ways of thinking that forms the basis of the late Wittgenstein's famous rule-following considerations. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of the current “geological turn,” the article sheds light on the ways in which the earth has been articulated through strategies of temporalization and territorialization in the context of modern philosophical race discourse. The author first reconstructs the constitution of a “geographic imagination” as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first part focuses on the role of geography in Kant's theory of race, and Alexander von Humboldt's project of plant geography. In the (...) second part, the author discusses Henrik Steffens's account of race. In the third part, the author turns to Heidegger, who rearticulated the “geographic imagination” in the first decades of the twentieth century. The article concludes that a critical theory of nature relations needs to overcome the semantic connections between conceptualizations of the earth and the modern race discourse that haunt contemporary ecological thinking. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the turning that occurs within the work of Martin Heidegger. In particular it seeks to reveal it as a turning that takes place within the notion of history as it is ela...

Heidegger’s discussion about the rise of the arbitrary power of “machination” in his late 1930s writings does not just echo his well-known later thinking on technology, but also affords a profound insight to the ontological mechanism of oblivion behind the history of Western thinking of being. The paper shows how this rise of the coercive power of ordering signifies an emergence of historically and spatially significant moment of completion: outgrowth of the early Greek notions of tekhne and phusis in terms (...) of globally expanding systems of calculative orderings. The paper thus aims to show how the condition of machination marks a fundamental implementation of the hidden consummation of the mechanism of oblivion now being re-adopted into the operational clarity of calculative rationality. It is argued that the rise of machination became possible through the historical process of replacing the early Greek disposition of existence, the wonder, with calculative rationality of ordering. (shrink)

In the interview conducted with Giovanna Borradori, after the attack on the World Trade Centre, in September 2001, Jacques Derrida is pressed to specify connections between his own thinking, Heidegger's deployment of the term ‘event’, and the use of the term ‘event’ to pick out the unprecedented character of that attack. Derrida intimates that the attack is, perhaps, not as unprecedented, not the ‘wholly other’ which it has been framed as being. His reading of that event is to move it (...) from a naive status, as ‘wholly other’, to a philosophically inflected thinking of the political, in the mode of the ‘wholly otherwise’, that is, in a sense to be made out here, whereby politics takes precedence over physics, as the originator of the basic components to be thought, and whereby the future takes precedence over the past, as the site at which what is arrives. The principal aim of this article is to consider how to think this counter-factual ontology, in the mode of a future anteriority. The article will set out Heidegger's move from affirming a fundamental ontology, of Dasein, to an ontology in parentheses (vom Ereignis) but will show how both of these are objectionable, on different counts, to Derrida and to Levinas. Derrida explores the options of supplementing an inadmissible thetic stance, with respect to the future, and therefore with respect to what there is, by developing the notion of the prosthetic, that which stands in for the impossible, timelessly asserted thesis. Levinas invents a new mode of phenomenology which opens a route into this ‘wholly otherwise’. These two strands of enquiry contribute to an analysis displacing these versions of ontology, in favour of a reformulation of political ontology. A subsidiary aim is to clarify Derrida's reservations with respect to the Heideggerian notion of the event. These reservations about Heidegger's usage throw light on his reluctance to deploy the term, within an analysis of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. (shrink)

This essay locates Jean-Luc Nancy's analyses, developed in relation to three invented terms, expeausition, excription, sexistence, in a threefold context: between Immanuel Kant on experience and Heidegger on existence; with Derrida on rethinking life and death ( lavielamort); and as a response to the alteration in phenomenology consequent on a transposition of key themes out of the German speaking context of the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger into the French language context of the French reception. An intensification ( survie) of (...) life forces may arrive in a ‘living on’ ( survivre) where thought processes only partially brought to expression in the lifetimes of their originators acquire precision and definition in moments of extremity, danger and horror, adding a fourth dimension to the initial three. (shrink)

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision (...) the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. 1. (shrink)

The style of weak thought associated with Gianni Vattimo involves positing that we are living after the death of God in an age of nihilism that is our ‘sole opportunity’. Nihilism, the lack of highest values, frees one from the ‘violence’ of metaphysics that silences one by reducing everything back to first principles. This article focuses on Vattimo’s return to Christianity, analysing in particular his use of terms found in the New Testament, kenosis and caritas. Vattimo sees the history of (...) the West as the secularisation of Christianity, reaching its culmination in the nihilism of late-modernity through the liberation of a plurality of interpretations from metaphysics. By analysing Vattimo’s notion of Being and use of Joachim of Fiore’s historical schema in relation to Paul’s distinction between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, it shall be argued that Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity does not involve the religion ‘superseding’ Judaism. However, this resolution comes at the cost of highlighting the lack of importance of Christianity for Vattimo if a broader understanding of Heidegger than Vattimo deploys is used to put Vattimo’s understanding of Being under scrutiny. (shrink)

Following the publication of the Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness and the History of Being, the question of the significance of Heidegger’s later work has been widely discussed. However, th...

The importance of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's development of ‘encounter’ is brought into sharp relief as key to the notion of ‘athleticism’. Here, each is developed as indispensable to the other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself. This nuanced encounter produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. In an age of massifying systems, drone warfare and horrific migrations, where corporate tentacles bend the rules akimbo, one finds that this turn to (...) a Deleuzian athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Black Notebooks, Heidegger ascribes in 1938/9 to the Jewish race an “empty rationality and calculative ability,” in his view the cause of its “worldlessness.” To assess this characterisation, I present Heidegger’s theories of history as a decline in Being and Time and in his later history of Being. For this purpose, I discuss his notions of Rechnen, Machenschaft, and Geviert, several existentialia from Being and Time, and Heidegger’s identification of modern machination and modern technology. Furthermore, I examine Heidegger’s (...) attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust. I present his alignment of the unconcealment of modernity and the Jewish race, and compare his theory of machination with the texts “Positionality” and “The Question concerning Technology”. Heidegger’s notes about the Jews in the Black Notebooks after 1944 confirm that he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently,” as I already argued in a paper from 1995. (shrink)

As scholars have recently suggested, rhetoric has long been remiss when it comes to nondiscursive concerns beyond its traditional purview. While many have sought to broaden rhetoric's scope, no one has yet undertaken a nondiscursive rhetorical investigation of social change in an effort to reconcile the tension between a critique of agency and the perception of human responsibility. This article undertakes such a critique through Alain Badiou's concept of the event, a concept that, I contend, offers the discipline a means (...) of rethinking the opposition between relativism and flat ontology. Analyzing the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi through the frame of the event, I regard Bouazizi's act as an ontic occurrence exerting influence over protestors across the Arab world while demanding collective recognition to emerge as an event. (shrink)

Heidegger’s Manichaeism: Comments on Peter Trawny’s Heidegger and the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy. In the book Heidegger and the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy, Peter Trawny convincingly shows that anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s thought does not have the shape of the Nazi call for racial discrimination, but rather is a stereotypical and unfortunate element of Heidegger’s call for a transformation of thinking so that philosophy and the human attitude to life would be focused on Being itself instead of (...) beings. Despite the advantages of Trawny’s book, I think that Trawny unlawfully tries to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is the main ethical and political problem of Heideggerian philosophy, while in my opinion the main problem is Heidegger’s “being-historical Manichaeism” — a phenomenon which is only marginally evoked by Trawny. This Manichaeism brings Heidegger to criticize the values of human subjectivity, personality and social and economic self-security as the en-emies of Being. These views not only can have severe political collectivist implications, but — to put it in the terminology of Sein und Zeit — they also make Heidegger speak in the manner of the conservative variant of “idle talk” of “the they”. (shrink)

Philosophy prides itself on beginning with Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, this death is transfigured into an entry into truth. One can...

Phenomenological approaches to space have consistently made a distinction between a plurality of inhabited spaces and the single homogenous extendedness of Euclidean space. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty postulate unique spatial wholes pertaining to human life that pose a counterpoint to objective space and provide the necessary context for understanding all our spatial relations. However, the spatial wholes that are posited to clarify these relations are themselves far from univocal. Specifically, differences exist regarding what precisely unites various entities into a (...) meaningful spatial whole and how any such whole relates to others. Showing how Heidegger’s idea of Ort and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of espace vécu rely on multiple senses of nearness, this paper argues that the privileged sense of nearness in each case fails to delimit the spatial context, thereby putting into question the very possibility of a unified and distinct spatial whole. (shrink)

This article accounts for Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of violence from the period of Being and Time. Violence is relevant for Heidegger in two different contexts: (i) methodological, where we speak of hermeneutic violence, and (ii) thematic, where we should speak of existential violence. The former is grounded in the latter. In the first part of the article, I analyze hermeneutic violence, showing that this concept is ambiguous, and one has to distinguish between two different meanings of it. In the second (...) part of the article, I show that at the core of the original sense lies the existential violence of bursting out of senselessness. In the final part, I contextualize Heidegger’s concept in light of the contemporary phenomenological developments of the phenomenon of violence, showing that existential violence is constitutive and has the peculiar character of being at the same time sense-destroying and sense-making. (shrink)

The starting point of this article is the undeniable experience of conscious willing despite its rejection by scientific research. The article starts a phenomenology of willing at the level of the phenomenon of willing itself, without assuming its embeddedness in a faculty of the soul, consciousness and so forth. After the introduction, a brief history of the philosophy of willing is provided, from which the paradoxical conclusion is drawn that, according to phenomenologists like Heidegger and his followers, the dominance of (...) the will is the main characteristic of the current age, whereas scientists deny the existence of a conscious will at all. Then, four structural moments of the phenomenon of willing are explored in contrast to traditional characterizations in order to rehabilitate and appreciate the phenomenon of willing in contemporary philosophy: the interconnectedness of the one who wills and that which is willed, the transcendence and demand character of that which is willed, the self-involvement of the one who wills and the ampliative nature of the act of willing. To this end, not only sources from the phenomenological tradition but also the affordance theory of the ecological psychologist James Gibson are critically discussed. (shrink)

The following reflections examine the new translation of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie in relation to the former one. These reflections assess the relative merits of both translations and attempt to show how this relation illustrates specific issues in Heidegger’s text concerning the first and other beginnings of Western thought.