In-der-Blog-sein

Ought Never Be Daunted on rating dating:

So, in conclusion, it was a good date. On the scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is what results from my signing up to be on that terrible Blind Date show, and 10 is oh my god, it turns out my blind date is Orlando Bloom and Heidegger has just made a huge impression on him, I rate it a 7.3.

Ork! Ork!  ¶ 12:52 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

At the Virtual Agora, Tweety says Irigary says there's not enough air in the four-fold:

She says that as a grounded metaphyscian Heidegger is not concerned with the sky aspect for much beyond it being a seperation between earth and the Gods. She proposes that if we really think about air we will realize that it keeps us alive and is a material transcendental. This makes air even more important then other aspects.

Time to privilege aerologocentrism.  ¶ 11:48 AM 0 comments

  From David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress. Giving it that title is surely some naughty irony, because Wittgenstein was reputedly more inclined to have a mister than a mistress. I guess the position avec Heidegger was already taken.

Our narrator is going on about sending letters to famous people (à la Herzog) along with conveniently stamped reply postcards, and she is musing about pet names and her cat, Argos. Yes, before it was Argus, but is that her error, or the author's, or the publisher's?

Argos was also an Achaean city in the Peloponnesus. Funny they would name their city after Odysseus's dog.

    What with only one of the people to whom I had sent the letters ever taking the trouble to return the postcard in either case.
    This having been Martin Heidegger.
    And who in fact spoke quite impressive English after all.
    Even making use of the subjunctive, as it happened.
    Although when I say spoke, I should really be saying wrote, of course.
    What I should wish to suggest as a name for your dog is the splendid classical name of Argos from the Odyssey by Homer, having been what was written in English on the postcard from Martin Heidegger.
    For some period I was farily annoyed with Martin Heidegger.
    Well.
    Even if I did finally come to realize that doubtless philosophers had more important items on their minds than names for other people's pets.
    Ach, here I sit with such important items as Dasein on my mind, surely being what Martin Heidegger must have said to himself, and there is that person in America requesting a name for her foolish animal.
    So that in the final analysis it was actually quite kind of Martin Heidegger to have taken the time to write at all, in spite of having made a mistake when he did so.
    And even though it had taken almost seven months before the postcard came back, additionally.
    But which may have also very well been the reason for Martin Heidegger's mistake, now that one stops to think about it.
    Which is to say that very possibly Martin Heidegger was busily writing one of his books through all of that time.
    Very possibly the book he was so busily writing was one of the very books in the carton in the basement of this house, in fact, and which only goes to show how astonishingly small the world can be.
    But in either case not until Martin Heidegger had finished writing his book would he have found my letter again.
    Or rather what he more likely would have found was only the postcard, having doubtless discarded the letter as soon as he had read it.
    Certainly having had no doubts at all that he would remember what he was supposed to write on the card.
    Well, and being a famous philosopher having had even fewer doubts that he would remember the difference between a cat and a dog, surely.
    Unless on second thought there is a subtle possibility here that Martin Heidegger did not make a mistake after all?
    Granting that this has only this tardily come into my head. But still, why couldn't Martin Heidegger have perhaps known that whole story about Rembrandt and his own cat?
    And why couldn't Susan Sontag have indicated while she was dictating my letter that I was a painter myself?
    Surely in writing to total strangers one would have shown the courtesy to identify one's self in either event.
    So that what would have gone really gone through Martin Heidegger's mind, then, would have been something like, ach, so what I will tell this painter person in this SoHo place to name her animal is what Rembrandt named his.
    And which would thus call for a rather different explanation as to why Martin Heidegger still happened to write dog instead of cat, obviously.
    The other different explanation being obviously that Martin Heidegger's English was hardly so impressive as one had thought.
    Still, what I am finally almost sorry about is that I never did write to Martin Heidegger a second time, to thank him.
    Well, and I certainly would have found it agreeable to tell the man how fond I am of his sentence, too, about inconsequential perplexities now and again becoming the fundamental mood of existence?

Anxiety, the mood? Or rather it might just be what you find in cartons in the basement. When I root around the garage I find cartons of cassettes. I probably have all the Fall's Peel Sessions--although the more recent ones on MP3s, burned to CD, and also cartoned--somewhere in the garage. I could avoid the whole finding the cassettes in random cartons anxiety thing and just order the new boxed set; 30 Quid minus VAT plus S&H. The explanation for the cassettes is the kindness of anoraks, who when not trainspotting, would remember to record the shows off the radio, then edit the session tracks, and mail off copies, setting off the tape duplication tree. It's as if the post office were complicit in illegal media duplication. There, I wanted to make use of the subjunctive.  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

AnnMarie Eldon evokes Duchamp with her poem 79 steps, which lists the first 80 sections of Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) in lower case. Which one is not a step? Why not the whole thing? There are 281 sections. Aren't the other sections sufficiently poetic? Incipient carpal tunnel syndrome? Saving the rest for the sequel?  ¶ 11:35 PM 0 comments

  My mate Yopper has a new music blog, tekINVADERS (not faders?). He has the deepest know-how of Detroit Techno of any one I know, so you should drop by for a future shock.  ¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the movie, opens tonight at midnight in my mostly harmless corner of the universe.

Martin makes an appearance in the Douglas Adams corpus (specifically in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul) as a partner in a firm.

    'Well, this name here is Dennis Hutch, isn't it? See?'
    'Oh yes. Yes, I do,' said Dirk, examining it for himself. 'Er, should I know that name?'
    'Well,' said Kate slowly, 'it depends if you're alive or not, I suppose. He's the head of the Aries Rising Record Group. Less famous than the Pope, I grant you, but - you know of the Pope I take it?'
    'Yes, yes,' said Dirk impatiently, 'white-haired chap.'
    'That's him. He seems to be about the only person of note this envelope hasn't been addressed to at some time. Here's Stan Dubcek, the head of Dubcek, Danton, Heidegger, Draycott. I know they handle the ARRGH! account.'
    'The...?'
    'ARRGH! Aries Rising Record Group Holdings. Getting that account made the agency's fortunes.'

It's rather sad these days that most "comedians" are really puerile political hacks, because the dearly departed Douglas reminds me of a time when humorists were really funny, blogs were really fanzines, and small brown furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were really small brown furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.  ¶ 6:12 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

K-punk investigates the what-ifs of man's place in the world:

Zizek is concerned to refute 'the notion that there is a home, a 'natural' place for man: either this world of the 'noosphere' from which we fell into this world and for which our souls long, or Earth itself. Heidegger points the way out of this predicament: what if we effectively are 'thrown' into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated, 'out of joint,' and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no previous 'home' out of which we were thrown into the world, what if this very dis-location ground man's ex-static opening to the world?'

What if we were thrown-projekt-iled out of Eden? Here we (there) are (being).  ¶ 6:02 AM 0 comments

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Sam's Bubble explains how to explain stuff in an oral exam:

luckily the psychology course i took in gr. 10 actually paid off and i BSed heidegger. they asked me "what's heidegger referring to when he mentions the essence of truth?" my answer: "by the essence of truth, he is referring to freedom. and when he refers to freedom, he is referring to a state/process of uncovering the truth. we are individuals that are intergrated into the world in such a way that we're not seperate. with this in mind, the truth is not found in us, but around us, and it is done through our actions. this uncovering is freedom, and therefore is the essence of truth. he wants us to take things as they are, and not BS our way out of things."

I love the humanties. I got through several classes in this manner. Unfortunately this technique does work for courses steeped in partial-differential equations.  ¶ 6:56 PM 0 comments

  More Heidegger v Picasso:

The Why/The Why Not:

Heidegger's Why? Picasso's Why Not?: Heidegger calls this the first question of Metaphysics: "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Picasso's "Why Not?"--reported as a favorite phrase, expressing his stance towards experience--may be heard as the artist facing a task which may require a 'leap of the imagination,' even a fall 'into the unknown.' Comparing the two then: Why asks to be explained. Why is to "look before you leap." Why Not seeks surprise & discovery--expects the random & wayward as part of "calculated risk"--accepts the presence or absence of casual connection as a given: whichever it is, belongs to the "new territory."

  ¶ 3:00 PM 0 comments

  From David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress.

    Conversely if I had named my own russet cat Argus I am next to positive that not one solitary person I knew would have made the connection with Odysseus's dog at all.
    As a matter of fact the only individual I can recall personally who ever did make this connection was Martin Heidegger.
    I have perhaps said that badly.
    In saying that I can personally recall Martin Heidegger having made this connection very likely what I have implied is that I once spoke with Martin Heidegger.
    Martin Heidegger is not someone I once spoke with.
    As a matter of fact annother implication in that same sentence would presumably be that I might have understood such a conversation if it had occurred.
    Which I would not have, obviously, not speaking one word of German.
    Not that it is of course impossible that Martin Heidegger spoke English on his own part, although I did not ask him that, either.
    Ah, me.
    Possibly I had better start over.
    I am starting over.
    What happened was that I once wrote Martin Heidegger a letter.
    It was in answer to my letter that Martin Heidegger indicated his familiarity with the Odyssey.
    Even though my own letter had had nothing to do with that topic.
    Although in fact what I now believe is that I wish to start this whole thing still one more time.
    I am starting this whole thing still one more time.
    What really happened, once, was that I wrote letters to a considerable number of famous people.
    So that to tell the truth Martin Heidegger was not even the most famous person I wrote to.
    Certainly Winston Churchill would have been considered more famous than Martin Heidegger.
    In fact I am positive that Picasso would have also been considered more famous than Martin Heidegger.

As a matter fact Odysseus's dog was named Argos. Argus was Hera's 100 eyed giant who guarded Io, one of Zeus's friendly maidens disguised as a cow, and who was decapitated by Hermes, after lulling him to sleep with his lyre.

Apart from the name of the dog everything else in the passage above is true. Gogglefight scores prove it:
Picasso - 5,050,000
Winston Churchill - 2,410,000
Martin Heidegger - 750,000  ¶ 6:27 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The American Thinker decries the anti-Semitism in British academia:

A dirty little secret is that totalitarian ideologies always empower intellectuals. The best name for all the bloody-minded professors of the last hundred years comes from a Frenchman named Julien Benda. It is the title of his book, The Treason of the Clerks. The treasonous "clerks" are the intellectuals of Europe, who directly inspired all of its mass-murdering ideologies, ever since Lenin and Hitler.
In light of this well-known history, it came as stunning news last week that the union bosses of Britain's colleges have decided to boycott Israel's university teachers - unless those teachers denounce their own country. The clerks of Britain are at it again.

They note the ominous historical precedents including:

One of today's celebrated heroes in philosophy, Martin Heidegger, was an enthusiastic Nazi. Even the New York Times showed a photo of Herr Doktor-Professor Heidegger in Nazi uniform, proudly showing off his Hitler salute for the camera.

Of course he's not celebrated for his contributions to politics, but the tendency is ominious. I regularly read two philosophy magazines that are mainly written by British academics, and have sadly noted over the last few years that they almost unanimously opposed the liberations of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples. Philosophers, interesting to chat with on the omnibus, but you wouldn't want to vote for them.  ¶ 11:39 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

From a poem by Annmarie Eldon:

Outpouring, Gushing, Holding, Taking, Keeping, Stilling, Building, Calling
"We call the gathering of the twofold holding
into the outpouring,
which,
as being together,
first constitutes the full presence of giving"

  ¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Interbreeding notes that Martin Heidegger beats Ludwig Wittgenstein in a Googlefight (cute new animation there), but can any philosopher TKO Ayn "Shrugger" Rand?  ¶ 7:04 AM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Tao of Poker, has an Existentialist Conversation with Strippers.

There's something very sexy, yet surreal, when a naked woman debates Heidegger with you while you desperately try to drown out a Britney Spears song that's blasting in the background.

I know what he means, it's hard to hear people when there's load music playing.  ¶ 9:14 PM 0 comments

  Suzanne Fields, a newspaper columnist, praises Benedict XVI for having tutored her Jesuit educated son-in-law in the canon, during a 15 day retreat in Munster.

[Ratzinger] had him read Aristotle and Plato, the novels of Thomas Mann, the philosophy of Heidegger, and the most critical think piece of all, 'The Grand Inquisitor,' that powerful legend embedded in a single chapter of 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Dostoevski.

I hope he didn't have to read The Magic Mountain in 15 days, but what struck me was that last week, in another column, William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, launched this attack:

Ironically, it was Joseph Ratzinger's fellow Germans who gave us the diabolical idea that moral absolutes are nonsense - nihilists such as Nietzsche and Nazis such as Heidegger.

So where are we? Heidegger, worthy of being taught to the young by the Pope, or diabolical moral relativist? Perhaps Mr. Donahue is overdue at Jesuit re-education camp.

BTW, Iris Murdoch also considers Martin diabolical in Sovereignty of Good:

Possibly Heidegger is Lucifer in person.

Perhaps there are too many judges in purgatory.  ¶ 3:14 PM 0 comments

  From David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress.

    Although what this for some reason now reminds me of is that I do know one thing about Martin Heidegger after all.
    I have no idea how I know it, to tell the truth, although doubtless it is from another one of those footnotes. What I know is that Martin Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.
    I have no doubt that this is a fact either, incidentally. Especially since it may have been Martin Heidegger who made the very statement I mentioned a long while ago, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.
    So that what he surely would have admired about Van Gogh to begin with would have been the way Van Gogh could make even a pair of boots seem to have anxiety in them.

Unlike the claim about the foot-wear footnote, the statement about the mood anxiety is true. Anxiety reveals, if not the fundamental, at least, "a fundamental experience of the nothing":

    In anxiety, we say, “one feels uncanny.” What is “it” that makes “one” feel uncanny? We cannot say what it is before which one feels uncanny. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in their very receding, things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole, closing in on us in anxiety, oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains.
    Anxiety makes manifest the nothing.
P. 88

But Van Gogh's boots are not about nothing. Instead the boots are useful, the painting shows shoes that have been used, the equipmental being of the boots as equipment is revealed, and thus the "shoes are in truth". No anxiety there.  ¶ 8:14 PM 0 comments

  An article on Benedict XVI during the 60s:

Tübingen became the intellectual Mecca of the radicals, however, mostly because Ernst Bloch was there. Widely seen as the father of the 1968 student movement, Bloch's Marxist analysis of Christianity and social change provided much of the intellectual architecture for the radicals, and he personally offered support for their protests. At one point, radicals spray-painted 'Ernst Bloch University' over the Tübingen sign on the campus's old assembly hall. In Milestones, Ratzinger testily acknowledges Bloch's influence, saying in passing that Bloch "made Heidegger contemptible for being petty bourgeois."

Bloch who? The essential problem with these petty Marxists and their attempts to sidle up to Christianity, AKA Liberation Theology, is that Marxists' belief in the absolute system of history is irreconcilable with the absolute authority of the Apostolic church.  ¶ 3:39 PM 0 comments

  A book review at FindLaw says that the Leo Strauss decided that the personal is the political, and the political the philosophical because of Heidegger's actions in the 1930's:

Strauss was among the great 'University in Exile' of Jewish academics and intellectuals that formed in the aftermath of the rise of Nazism. Intellectually, he is a direct descendant of the eminent Martin Heidegger; he was, along with Hannah Arendt, chief among Heidegger's acolytes. Betrayed, and also informed, by Heidegger's accommodation with the Nazis, Strauss saw that the political was personal, and that the political and the philosophical could never be separated. And so Strauss emphasized that personal actions were political and that value-laden political philosophy was essential to an understanding of the political.

So then if philosophy is reasonable or logical, so then must be politics and the personal too? I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.  ¶ 3:27 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Brad's World, is up for some fan-blogging, with yesterday's post: Heidegger is the MAN! [das Man?].

You're probably wondering about the title of this post. And you're probably wondering who this guy named Heidegger is. Well, I'll tell you. Heidegger is a German philosopher who is probably one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. He makes Einstein look like a mentally challenged school boy. Anyway, his ideas about metaphysics is pure genius! If anyone wants to get a taste of Heidegger's philosophy, go to the library and pick up his book called 'Introduction to Metaphysics.' He explains things in very easy-to-understand way, but still gets to the meat of his philosophy.

I think one of the best things Heidegger wrote was the common misconception of philosophy as being something only useful to professors and academics. For example, he says one of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to give philosophy an everyday usefullness that a hammer (for example) may have. But, the problem is that philosophy isn't something that can be contained in a temporal manner.

Something only an Einstein could understand, that manner of time's that contains (spatial metaphor) things, that are not philosophy. Or an artist, as Alan Moore capably demonstrates in The Map Drawn on Vapour:

These are the towns of light, built from remembered brick,
conjectured beam, that stand in Hilbert Space,
a plane of concept and idea where thought is form.

  ¶ 7:46 AM 0 comments

  The book review section of today's NYTimes has an appreciation of Jorie Graham, a poet very popular with poets.

Graham's work combines two qualities not generally found together -- first, it's often sumptuously ''poetic'' (''in a scintillant fold the fabric of the daylight bending''); second, it's ostentatiously thinky (typical titles: ''Notes on the Reality of the Self,'' ''What Is Called Thinking,'' ''Relativity: A Quartet''). The former quality appeals to lovers of operatic lyricism; the latter quality not only pleases certain parts of poetry's largely academic audience, but it soothes the art form's nagging status anxiety (anything involving this much Heidegger must be important).

Hence the must-be-important-ness of this blog.  ¶ 7:13 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Cyrus Translation Cornucopia recaps the history of thoughts on and the principles of translation, with several interesting quotations.  ¶ 10:07 AM 0 comments

  From David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress. Our narrator, Kate, finds cartons of books in the basement of a house she is staying at by the beach.

 On the other hand there were no less than seven books by Martin Heidegger.
    I have no way of indicating the titles of any of these, of course, short of returning to the basement and copying out the German, which it would certainly seem pointless to trouble myself with.
    When I say it would seem pointless, naturally what I mean is that I would still not understand one word of the german in any event.
    A word that certainly did catch my attention was the word Dasein, however, since it seemed to appear on practically every page I opened to.
    Martin Heidegger himself remaining somebody I know no more about than I know Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the other hand.
    Except for now knowing that he was certainly partial to the word Dasein, obviously.
    Then again as I believe I have said one is frequently apt to come upon a name such as Martin Heidegger's in one's reading, even if one is scarcely apt to be reading any books by Martin Heidegger himself.

Then again as you've probably surmised you are also apt to come across that name in this blog.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a Mexican nun and poet in the late 17th century. Today she is discussed because she was of the female gender in a colonial patriarchal situation, but she is remembered because of her poems.

As an In-der-Blog-sein-ish aside, I should note that Pas au-Delà blogged a more extensive extract of the passage last month, including another bit I will get to later. When I say I should note, naturally what I mean is that I didn't know before I keyed in the above, but I will, when I paste in that other bit. The blog post notes with respect to the Martin in the Markson:

Significantly perhaps, Kate's mood never veers into the experience of Angst, shame (homo sacer?), or radical boredom; she remains on the plane of the everyday. In short, Markson does not grant her any ontical confirmation of Heidegger's ontology.

I don't think that Heidegger appears in the book to invoke that mid-XXth-century mood of existential angst. Instead he's there because Dasein is a creator of worlds, and we're never sure if Kate is really the last person on earth, or merely creating her own world, like all novelists.

Homo sacer, literally: sacred man, was sort of the Roman version of someone ostracized. A term popular with recent contenders for the title of PoMo-di-tutti-PoMi Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.  ¶ 7:19 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Sein und Zeit, a new blog on, yup, Being and Time.  ¶ 11:00 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Silliman's Papers takes a serious look at the knotty problem of nothing:

The greater problem in understanding nothing, the problem that Carnap doesn't touch and the question that really concerns Heidegger, is the question of how to understand "it" (nothing) without "it" (nothing) becoming an "it" (an object, a thing). We think about something as something but to do this with nothing is to negate the essence in the question. The question, Heidegger says, deprives itself of an object. This "formal impossibility" and "ostensible absurdity" of the question of nothing seem to again bar us from the important questions.

Not to be naughty, but is this related to the question of whether naught is nothing? Is zero just another number? To a compiler or assembler it is just another state (as opposed to null), but I recently read a philosophy paper that made a big deal about the digital world world being reduced to zeros or ones, or, in their words, nothing and something. Truthfully though, digital 1s and 0s, merely represent two different states, they are mere signifiers, and can be reversed. What is relevant in the digital world is whether data represents something or is random (nothing).  ¶ 7:34 AM 0 comments

  From Iris Murdoch last novel Jackson's Dilemma.

After that, and when hew was about to leave the room, he looked down at what he had been writing earlier in the day, not upon a typewriter or word-processor, machines which he despised, but upon the inky foolscap pages of his book on Heidegger. Benet had intended for some time to write, or attempt to write, that book. However, he found it difficult to plan the work and to decide what he really, in his heart, thought of his huge ambiguous subject. He had made a great many notes, with question marks, in fact his book so far consisted largely of notes, unconnected and unexplained. Benet found himself accusing himself of being fascinated by a certain dangerous aspect of Heidegger which was in fact so deeply buried in his own, Benet's soul that he could not scrutinise or even dislodge it. Of course Benet admired Sein und Zeit and loved (perhaps this was the point) the attractive image of Man as the Shepherd of Being. Later Heidegger he detested; Heidegger's sickening acceptance of Hitler, his misuse of the Pre-Socratic Greeks, his betrayal of his early religious picture of man opening the door to Being, his transformation of Being into a cruel ruthless fate, his appropriation of poor innocent Hölderlin, his poeticisation of philosophy, discarding truth, goodness, freedom, love, the individual, everything which the philosopher ought to explain and defend. Or was the era of the philosopher nearly over, as Pat used mockingly to tell him? Benet wished now that he had talked more with Uncle Tim about the Indian gods. How close had Tim come to those gods whom Benet himself knew only through Kipling and Tim's rambling talk? Was it too late to learn the Hindu scriptures -- was it all too late? A big bronze dancing Shiva, dancing within his ring of fire, forever destroying the cosmos and re-creating it, had stood upon Tim's desk, which was now Benet's desk. I wish I had started all this up earlier, though Benet, I kept putting it off until I retired, I should have held on to philosophy, instead of going into the Civil Service, as Pat insisted. Of course, Benet had never believed in God, but he had somehow believed in Christ, and in Plato, a Platonic Christ, an icon of goodness. Pat had not believed in God, indeed he hated Christianity. Eleanor had been a silent Christian. He recalled now how he had intuited her Christianity. Of course he never thought of such things then. And now -- well, Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the century? But what was Benet thinking somehow so deeply about when he turned his mind to that remarkable thinker? It seemed to him that after all his philosophical reflections, there was a sound which rang some deeper tremor of the imagination. Perhaps it was his more profound desire to lay out before him the history of Heidegger's inner life, the nature of his sufferings: the man who began as a divinity student and became a follower of Hitler, and then --? Remorse? Was that the very concept which sounded the bell? What had Heidegger said to Hannah Arendt after it was all over? What had that pain been like--what had those millions of pains been like? A huge tormented life? Was Heidegger really Anti-Christ? 'The darkness, oh the darkness,' Benet said aloud.

Jackson's Dilemma was Murdoch's last novel before her mind succumbed to Alzheimer's. Rude critics suggest the disease afflicted her before she wrote the novel. Like Benet, Murdoch was also writing a book about Heidegger, believed in a Platonic goodness, and also preferred to write in ink--word processor: "a glass square which separates one from one's thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness."

I'm tickled by the radical difference the author finds between the early Heidegger of the Shepherd of Being and the later Heidegger. The Shepherd of Being comes from the Letter on Humanism; i.e. the later Heidegger.  ¶ 10:32 PM 1 comments

  From David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress.

    Incidentally, there is an explanation for my generally speaking of Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard, but of Martin Heidegger as Martin Heidegger.
    The explanation being that Kierkegaard's first name was Søren, and in typing that I would repeatedly have to go back to put in the stroke.
    There would appear to be no way of avoiding the two dots in over Brontë, however.

What? Calling them Charlotte and Emily doesn't work? Calling Hölderlin Freddy works for me.  ¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The TrueTalk Blog examines that Left/Right brain thing.

But, where are we going to find people who know how do all this right-brained thinkings?
Then I remembered Heidegger.

I spent a lot of time in the 70s reading existential and phenomenological philosophy while studying psychology at Duquesne University (we were an odd bunch). A good many of those hours were spent reading the work Martin Heidegger. Very interesting thinking; very difficult going. One little book, Discourse on Thinking, was particularly interesting, and difficult.
In it, Heidegger makes a distinction between calculative and meditative thinking. The former is our typical 'right brain' oriented approach, in which we view the world as objects to be analyzed and manipulated.
Meditative thinking is a more difficult and cryptic enterprise. It requires patience (not 'waiting for' exactly, since that puts us into a mindset that is anticipatively anxious and very close to calculative), and a lingering persistence; the courage to 'dwell' in the presence of the world. Heidegger called this releasement towards things and openness to the mystery. It is 'focused' on the transcendent; a way of getting to the invisible side of the visible.

It is usually right around here that modern readers find themselves getting very queasy.

Queasy, or uneasy, or uncanny?  ¶ 9:02 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ignatius Insight Scoop reprints an interview with Benedict XVI:

Did you have something like flashes of illumination—or something like illumination—at a later time?

Well, I haven’t had illuminations in the classical sense, if by that you mean something half-mystical. I am a perfectly ordinary Christian. But in a broader sense faith certainly gives one might. As one reflects on that faith, one certainly seems, to say it with Heidegger, to get a glimpse of the clearing from the various paths through the woods.

Lichtung, the site of un-mystical insight.  ¶ 9:32 AM 0 comments

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BLOGthenticity, in a wide ranging post on blogging, says that a 'vulgar concept of time'

designates, at the end of Being and Time, a concept of time thought in terms of spatial movement or of the now, and dominating all philosophy from Aristotle's Physics to Hegel's Logic.
This concept, which determines all of classical ontology, was not born out of a philosopher's carelessness or from a theoretical lapse.
It is intrinsic to the totality of the history of the Occident, of what unites its metaphysics and its technics.

  ¶ 9:12 AM 0 comments

  From David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress.

Though it fact perhaps it was Kierkegaard who said that, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.
If it was not Kierkegaard it was Martin Heidegger.
In either case I suspect there is something ironical in my being able to guess that something was said by Kierkegaard, or by Martin Heidegger, when I am convinced that I never read a single word written by Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger.

In the novel someone, who is apparently the last person on earth, travels about Europe, visits Troy, sleeps in museums, and prattles on.  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Martin's friend: Do you like her?
Martin: Heidegger.

  ¶ 10:50 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mormon Philosophy & Theology has another post on Heidegger and Freedom, this time with an emphasis on Kant, and concludes that the Libertarian notion of freedom is something else entirely.  ¶ 10:45 PM 0 comments

  The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church

Relying upon the thinking of Heidegger, Bultmann insisted that it is not possible to have an exegesis of a biblical text without presuppositions which guide comprehension. "Pre-understanding" (Vorverständnis) is founded upon the life-relationship (Lebensverhältnis) of the interpreter to the reality of which the text speaks. To avoid subjectivism, however, one must allow pre-understanding to be deepened and enriched--even to be modified and corrected--by the reality of the text.

Bultmann asked what might be the most appropriate frame of thought for defining the sort of questions that would render the texts of Scripture understandable to people of today. He claimed to have found the answer in the existential analysis of Heidegger, maintaining that Heideggerian existential principles have a universal application and offer structures and concepts most appropriate for the understanding of human existence as revealed in the New Testament message.
-- Bendict XVI

  ¶ 10:04 PM 0 comments

  On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today

If Rudolph Bultmann used the philosophy of Martin Heidegger as a vehicle to represent the biblical word, then that vehicle stands in accord with his reconstruction of the essence of Jesus' message. But was this reconstruction itself not likewise a product of his philosophy? How great is its credibility from a historical point of view? In the end, are we listening to Jesus, or to Heidegger, with this kind of an approach to understanding? Still, one can hardly deny that Bultmann seriously grappled with the issue of increasing our access to the Bible's message. But today, certain forms of exegesis are appearing which can only be explained as symptoms of the disintegration of interpretation and hermeneutics.

If one were allowed to characterize somewhat roughly Bultmann's solution for a contemporary appropriation of Jesus' message, one might say that the scholar from Marburg had set up a correspondence between the nonapocalyptic-prophetic and the fundamental thought of the early Heidegger. Being a Christian, in the sense Jesus meant it, is essentially collapsed into that mode of existing in openness and alertness which Heidegger described. The question has to occur whether one cannot come by some simpler way to such general and sweeping formal assertions.

-- Benedict XVI

  ¶ 9:04 PM 0 comments

  Michael March interviews Irvine Welsh in the Guardian before this year's Vienna Writers' Festival:

MM: According to Roberto Calasso, 'loss proceeds presence. Every image must abide by this rule'. What about the loss of hair?
IW: To lose a few hairs is careless, to lose the lot is truly a blessing.
MM: For Hannah Arendt, 'mercy insists on inequality'. Do you feel equal to the task?
IW: Yes, mercifully.
MM: Martin Heidegger said: 'The light of the public obscures everything.' Does this confirm 'the unbearable lightness of being'?
IW: I never really got on with Heidegger, although probably shouldn't say that as I'm headed to Vienna. Sometimes I think the light of the public illuminates what might be better kept hidden.

I'm not sure whether to shave my head or not, but will definately skip Vienna.  ¶ 5:20 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

In The Social Affairs Unit blog Peter Mullen says about the late Pope and the Enlightenment's privileging of thought:

John Paul II -- aided I must admit first by Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas and then by the unlikely character Martin Heidegger -- stopped this suicidal nonsense. He proclaimed that more important than thought is Being -- because thought must be about something. And all being is derivative -- a gift from the Being of God.

I believe that idea came into the church via Karl Rahner, the architect of Vatican II and Heidegger's student.  ¶ 5:56 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Encounter says as if about appropriation and expropriation that:

Heidegger highlights that every posit inherently contains the absence of what it is not. Hence in proposing to do something you are proposing to not do everything else (that is mutually exclusive). As we are getting older we realize that we do not have much opportunity in this short life.

Heidegger is not on about merely the either/or nature of choices. His is an existential point, that things alternately come into existence for or get hidden from dasein.  ¶ 5:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Possepeccare quotes from the QCT and asks:

What is technology? Hardly a simple question, for it is not good enough just to say that technology is toasters, computers, and blessed coffee makers.

Last year I heard an explanation that a technology is a technique that can be passed on from one generation to another, like an axe itself, or the know-how to make more axes. Sounds reasonable to me.  ¶ 5:42 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Caterina.net on why it's better to dwell on the internet than TV, and the connection with Roxy Music via their heartache for inflatable doll.

The cottage is pretty
The main house a palace
Penthouse perfection
But what goes on?

--Bryan Ferry

You probably don't want to know.

In the comments, someone defends TV

Some of the idiotic stuff is worth watching to understand idocity too.

But is the unidiotic so exhausted, that we're reduced to studying the dumb? The dumb dumbs.  ¶ 12:33 PM 0 comments

  A post by Stuart Elden to a mailing list, preserved at Foucault.info, notes the connection between Ereignis and authenticity:

My preferred translation of Heidegger's term Ereignis would be 'propriation'. The term links to Eigentlichkeit and Uneigenlichkeit as used in _Being and Time_. These are usually translated as 'authenticity' and 'inauthenticity', due to the existentialist interpretation - i.e. that of Sartre. But the word eignen has the sense of 'to own', in terms of property, but also 'to be proper', 'to be suitable'; eigen is 'own'. The most felicitous translations of Eigentlichkeit and Uneigenlichkeit, suggested by David Krell in _The Purest of Bastards_ almost as an aside, may be 'proper' and 'inappropriate'.

The bastard in the title of Krell's book is Derrida, who refers to himself as the purest of bastards in The Postcard, leaving new bastards in his wake.  ¶ 11:33 AM 0 comments

  It's not often that philosphers get this kind of scientific confirmation of their postulations.

Heidegger asserted that prior to any propositional knowledge of an object, such as a tool, it is ready-at-hand and that it will only emerge as present-at-hand, that is, as a ‘thing’ with properties, when there is a disruption to the act of using it. Compare this idea to the theory of Melvyn Goodale which distinguishes two streams of visual processing, a ventral stream concerned with visually guided motor behaviour, and a dorsal stream for “identifying objects in the visual world and attaching meaning and significance to them.” Subjects with a lesion interrupting the dorsal stream cannot recognise even the most familiar of objects, yet are able “to grasp that object under visual control as accurately and as proficiently as people with normal vision.” For instance, one victim of anoxia could not recognise a pencil when she saw one, yet could still pick it up and draw with it. For her, it did not exist as an identifiable object, yet it was ready-at-hand.

What next, empirical proof that nothing nothings?  ¶ 4:47 PM 0 comments

  Appropriating mathematical theorems via the Lichtung in John 1:5 that shines in Hexagram XXIX:

K'an represents...
the principle of light inclosed in the dark.

Also noted in Koestler:

By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us.

Not too sure about that Stephen King though.  ¶ 4:30 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Aletheia is a new blog, whose first post is about Martin and his disclosed truth:

Truth, aletheia, is disclosedness. This is not merely a definition, but a sign of an ontological feature of Dasein. It belongs to the nature of Dasein to disclose. In fact, Dasein is this to the extent this too is disclosed. Dasein is discloseness and it is to the extent it discloses itself to itself. The discloseness of Dasein also points to Dasein as a "thrown-project": as always already belonging to a definite place and time and as always disclosing its own possibilities.

In my a career in software I encountered many thrown projects. And truthfully, many deserved it.  ¶ 3:47 PM 0 comments

  I found this anecdote on being resolved this morning:

There is a story of a German pupil of Martin Heidegger having proclaimed in all solemnity that he was resolved. He had learned from his master the importance of 'the resolve'. But he did not know what he was resolved to do. 'Ich bin entschlossen, ich weiss nur nicht wozu!' It would be no less absurd for a man to say he was free and not to know from what.

I'm not convinced all freedoms are about being 'free from' something, but instead they may be about being 'free to' do.  ¶ 9:40 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Clark Goble over at Mormon Philosophy & Theology has posted some stimulating bits from The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic:

Originally I was just going to put up a few excerpts. But there's about six pages that are simply fantastic for discussion. Some of the terminology presupposes a bit of familiarity with Heidegger. But he's actually introducing here one of his more important concepts from this era, the for-the-sake-of. I've discussed that notion many times before, as I think it is one of the more valuable contributions Heidegger gives us.

I especially like this emphatic excerpt:

The world does not mean beings, neither individual objects nor the totality of objects standing opposite a subject. Whenever one wishes to express transcendence as a subject-object relation, especially as in the movement of philosophical realism, the claim is frequently made that the subject always already presupposes the “world” and, by this, one means objects that are. We maintain that this claim is far from even seeing the real phenomenon of transcendence and even further from saying anything about it.

Go read them all.  ¶ 8:15 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Apparent Horizons is reading Allen Scult's book and remarks on how hermeneutics is a route towards philosophy happening:

[T]he sacred text happens. As we explore the sacred text we need to come to it in a certain way to allow it to speak to us. It's something more than just giving the text the benefit of the doubt. By looking at how approaching a sacred text as sacred changes the experience we have with it, we come to understand something about how sh*t and philosophy happen.

Meanwhile Pas au-Delà quotes B&T on how history happens and remarks that

[T]he blogosphere could use a bit more Heidegger.

Bring it on.

The Corner Place obliges by noting a difference between how the human condition happens for Arendt and Heidegger, and between the humanities and science.

For Arendt, the who of the individual human being is disclosed primarily in the act, in the event of speaking or doing. For Heidegger, the who may be best understood in terms of meaning and interpretation, neither being applicable to the animal. (answer to Pavlov? Cause and effect is empirical meaning, Heidegger speaks of hermeneutic meaning, see notes). The who is best revealed in philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, art, the what in science. Both have their places, neither should be shunned.

Philosophy is happening every which way.  ¶ 8:27 AM 0 comments

  Last weekend we went to Ocean Shores. A dismal place, but not the most dismal in Washington. I know that because we drove through Aberdeen, home of the late Kurt Cobain, to get there. We passed one family unloading a ratty couch from a pickup, then a block later another group loading another couch onto a truck. Reminded me of Kipling Road

a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other's houses with each other's property all day.

Ocean Shores, a place one might feel in the heartland, if it wasn't on a sandy spit, battered by Pacific storms. The supermarket had cheerful photos of the locals serving in the war, so we knew we were in the red part of the country. In the blue bits of the country the local PBS or NPR affiliates' websites would instead display similar photos in their sombre tributes for the fallen relatives of their domestics. The storms and rain were OK by me as I had come prepared with Iain Sinclair's Downriver and Stewart Home's Come Before Christ and Murder Love--which never, incidentally, mentions Christ. They're both part of the growing corpus of works about esoteric London; along with Michael Moorcock's Mother London, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, and Alan Moore's From Hell. A mutually supportive group, in whose works knowledge bleeds in knowingness. You must know your Ripper mythology, Templar/Masonic conspiracies, and the politics behind the anarchist groups in Conrad's Secret Agent before you can begin to appreciate the analogies, allusions and random synchronicities in these works. They are so tight, beyond sharing similar subjects, that Home's book actually refers to a passage in Sinclair's,

Penessa woke from her trance and I led her from the fort to the World's End, where I ordered whisky on the rocks for both of us. The pub was a queer sort of place, and I felt less than than welcome, sitting by a window well away from the locals who huddled at the bar. I remember a book dealer once telling me about some mighty strange goings on in Tilbury.

Sinclair, ex-bookdealer, describes the locals at the World's End in Tilbury.

The dockers were rigid, severe; breathless. One of them mimed danger, by fingering a kiss curl; while the other excited a detumescent bicep.

Sinclair's the more poetic of the lot and you read him and his pals for the many strange goings on in the area. Stewart Home, in his contribution to this coterie, writes a pulp genre, and, though a bit repetitive--and charmless to the knowingnessless who won't enjoy all the references dropped through out--by and large succeeded in entertaining me. Quite unlike another novel I took along, Erica Jong's Sappho's Leap, which intends to be erudite and poetically about the poet in the title, but is instead full of purple prosaic cack.  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments

  Last weekend we went to Ocean Shores. A dismal place, but not the most dismal in Washington. I know that because we drove through through Aberdeen, home of the late Kurt Cobain, on the way there. We passed one family unloading a ratty couch from a pickup, then a block later another group loading another couch onto a truck. Reminded me of Kipling Road

a typical East End Street, people were in and out of
each other's houses with each other's property all day.

Ocean Shores, a place one could call in the heartland, if it wasn't on a sandy spit, battered by Pacific storms. The supermarket had photos of the locals serving in the war, so we knew we were in the red part of the country. In the blue bits of the country the local PBS or NPR affiliates' websites would instead display similar photos in their tributes for the fallen relatives of their domestics. The storms and rain were ok by me as I had come prepared with Iain Sinclair's Downriver and Stewart Home's Come Before Christ and Murder Love, which is not about Christ. They're both part of the growing corpus of works about esoteric London; along with Michael Moorcock's Mother London, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, and Alan Moore's From Hell. A close group, with whom knowldege bleeds in knowingness. You must know your Ripper mythology, Templar/Masonic conspiracies, and the politics behind the anarchist groups in Conrad's Secret Agent before you can begin to comprehend the analogies and allusions in these works.  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

in-fraction has an
audio blog post on Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?" part 1b.

A great idea, for when your eyes are tired.  ¶ 7:41 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

King Oberon bring us the 2004 Martin Heidegger Memorial Lecture, wherein:

[Heidegger] 'depsychologizes' hermeneutics by dissociating it from the empathetic perception of other beings. Understanding now appears as a no-longer-conscious component of Dasein; it is embedded within the context of specific situations and plans, with, in effect, finite computational resources. Therefore, interpretation (Auslegung) which depends on such existential understanding (Verstehen) is not the general logical method found in classical philology, but refers to a conscious recognition of one's own world.

  ¶ 7:31 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

What do you get if you cross an aesthete with a phenomenologist?
An interior daseiner.

  ¶ 2:18 PM 0 comments

  Saul Bellow's death has revived my favorite quote from Herzog:

Dear Professor Heidegger, I would like to know what you mean by the expression "the fall into the quotidian." When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?

Maybe this will help. If you stand in summer, you fall into winter. So then, if you would stand extraordinarily, you'll fall into the commonplace.  ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments

  Over the years I've come across papers and dissertations on nursing and Heidegger, and I remember it being a topic at the Applied Heidegger conference at Berkeley, but this was a surprise. Ereignis is the second link on the Concept Analysis In Nursing's resources page. Should I feel safer convalescing in a hospital? At least I'll having to talk about with the nurses.  ¶ 6:39 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Maximum Red brings us Juan Carlos Rodriguez on Althusser on the metaphysical hitman:

Heidegger, in a European context, had liquidated the whole of Western metaphysics. And he had done so not simply in Being and Time but earlier on, and in a very emphatic manner, in his Letter on Humanism (written in 1946 and published in 1947).

My colleague, Dr. Watson, could tell you B&T could not by any manner, emphatically or otherwise, appear later than the earlier Letter, as B&T was published in April 1927.

By the same token, my reading of Heidegger has little in common with that conducted by Derrida

No shyte, Sherlock, or as Conan Doyle actually put it himself, in this reading

Heidegger, the German master, was missing.

--The Adventure of the Priory School

  ¶ 6:39 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The portable-infinite finds the essential in The Kills:

The Kills make a certain type of music. This music is what I call "inquisitive" music. It is a look in a mirror and maybe that look is too long. But it is a necessary process. Sometimes the focal center of any study of phenomena must be "inquisitive." This is so because as Heidegger says, "It is essential: because it is prompted by an original ontic ignorance which does match the scope of an ambitious project that outstrips all realistic possibilities...."

I better get some Kills. The significant other told me last week she'd enjoyed some cuts on the radio.

So far this week I've been enjoying albums from M.I.A.--for the faux-revolutionary attitude; one reason the Clash were so much fun--and from LCD Soundsystem for its retro knowingness. LCD track Movement is my fave homage to the The Fall so far this year. Also in the new releases pile is the Nick Cave and Bad Seeds Rarities box set. Beats having to go into the vault for b-sides, and there are some really hard to find tracks on there, including encore fave Leadbelly's Black Betty. Ram Jam's cover was a party favorite in the 70s. There's so much to mine from that era that I'm a little disappointed that bands like LCD revive the 80 without anyone doing a proper mining of so many of the previous decade's one-offs. There are enough Seasons in the Sun already. Where's the Paperlace tribute band, and how come no one covers Babe Ruth's The Mexican or even Mamy Blue? Oh, Celine Dion did? Nevermind then.

Also in the new pile is Robyn Hitchcock's collaboration with Gillian Welch Spooked. Gillian Welch fans be warned that their voices are only heard in harmony, and the album sounds like the Hitchcock acoustic album it is.  ¶ 8:45 PM 0 comments

  My favorite line from Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line comes from Sargeant Welsh

Everything is a lie. Only one thing a man can do, find something that's his, make an island for himself.

Welsh is played by Sean Penn, whom I normally can't stand, with the exception of this flick and the Woody Allen one where he plays a simpatico Django Reinhart type character. He also says that

In this world, a man himself is nothin', and there ain't no world but this one.

Nothing worlds man like nothin'.

It's a great flick, regularly arranged, like a normal curve. There's a prologue and the troops land in Guadalcanal, and then leave at the end via the same landing craft, changed by their experiences. The key scene for me is in the middle, in the heat of battle. Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte in his best role ever) orders Captain Staros (Elias Koteas, playing a character that is almost the exact opposite to the Vaughan he played in Cronenberg’s Crash) to take a Japanese bunker on a strategic ridge. Staros, a lawyer in civilian life, refuses to sacrifice his men, so Tall, career military, goes down to the line to take command and teaches Staros two lessons. (1) Leaders sometimes have to make sacrifices for the greater good, to win battles, and win wars, or perhaps merely for the good of their own careers. (2) There are right and wrong ways to get things done. Whereas Staros had understood his orders as calling for him to sacrifice his men, there are other means of executing the command. That Tall demonstrates by standing over the GIs cowering in a culvert. Tall has figured out the lines of sight from the Japanese machine guns and knows where the enemy can't see him. He asks for volunteers and the next morning a squad approaches the bunker by staying out of sight, and takes the ridge.

To me Tall's calm assessment of the situation is a manifestation of the meaning Simon Critchley gets from Malick's movie.

For I think this calm is the key to the film and, more widely, to Malick's art. The metaphysical issue of the reality or otherwise of immortality obviously cannot be settled and that is not the point.

By figuring out the firing angles Tall is also employing his know how of military technology, so my take away is different from the understanding Adrian Gargett got

[I]t is in the poetic form that we are less disposed to manipulate things or reduce them to our own technical/scientific, quantitative frames of reference; we are encouraged to let things be what they are and in this show their many-sidedness.

Then again, Tall, without the fear that overwhelms the less experienced, can see things as they are, the many sides up the ridge to the bunker.  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 comments

  Back from Syracuse, a Poem by Jerry Monaco:

The fading grasp of being always falls
Into that mirror which is his mask;
What question is ultimate enough for him to ask?

  ¶ 7:41 PM 1 comments

  Revelations at PittsburghLIVE let the cat out of the bag, translating what them intellectuals have been saying:

Code phrase: 'I find Heidegger's works disappointingly unoriginal, relying far too heavily on Kierkegaard's groundbreaking views on despair.'
Secret meaning: "Can someone have my mom and dad go on TV again and claim people are unfairly persecuting me? I'd do it myself, but I'm busy thinking up dog names for my enemies."

If this keeps up, parents will stop shelling out serious money to send their kids off to college to learn to speak po-mo. Then what, eh? Kids would be learning engineering and such, and wouldn't need politicos to defend their jobs from better educated foreigners. Why, they might even learn to think for themselves!  ¶ 7:32 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ereignis gets the Relevant link for the gigantos filosofos germanicos. P.S. I just made that up. Don't use those declension on your classics final.  ¶ 9:24 PM 0 comments

  I enojoyed this sympathetic assessment of Derrida's Influence on Philosophy and on his own work by Simon Critchley, in the German Law Journal:

There is no doubt that Saussurean structuralism enabled some stunning intellectual work, particularly in Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropology, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud and Roland Barthes's brilliant and enduring literary and cultural analyses. But that doesn't mean that Saussure was right. Therefore, Derrida's early arguments in this area, particularly the critique of the priority of speech over writing in the hugely influential Of Grammatology, left me rather cold. Talk of "post-structuralism" left me even colder, almost as cold as rhetorical throat-clearing about "post-modernism."
...
Although, contrary to some Derridophiles, I do not think that he read everything with the same rigour and persuasive power, there is no doubt that the way in which he read a crucial series of authorships in the philosophical tradition completely transformed our understanding of their work and, by implication, of our own work. In particular, I think of his devastating readings of what the French called "les trois H": Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, who provided the bedrock for French philosophy in the post-war period and the core of Derrida's own philosophical formation in the 1950s.

Read the whole thing.  ¶ 1:39 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Postcolonial Feminists Meet Internet Research, the blog, expands on access to technology and the question regarding it:

He invokes technology's Greek root, techne, the arts and skills of a craftsman, as well as the arts of the mind and fine arts (poiesis).

Mind? Fine arts? Poiesis merely means producing. At least to those with access to a dictionary.

"Staring at the technological" when considering technology, Heidegger asserts, reinforces the fallacy that "everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct" and that "man everywhere and always encounters only himself". This is a remarkable statement about the necessity to question objectivity, to use alternative strategies for seeing and interpreting, like, perhaps, feminist, gender, race or postcolonial theories to understand technology as open, revealing, challenging.

On the other hand, recent history would caution one that feminism, race, and postcolonial theories instead lead to closure, obscurantism, and conformism.  ¶ 12:02 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Meetingbrook Hermitage quotes Steiner quoting Heidegger on why it's all just like Sisyphus:

At one moment in Identitat und Differenz --unique, so far as I am aware, in Heidegger's whole writings --the master concedes with brusque humor that the ontological quest, the attempt to separate Being from beings, is a sort of futile game, a circular catch-as-catch-can.

Aren't all games futile?  ¶ 12:21 PM 0 comments