In-der-Blog-sein

Mormon Philosophy & Theology on the Ontological Difference:

When Heidegger often talks about how Being is forgotten really what is he talking about is how this difference between the two senses of being is forgotten. The difference between Being and beings. Because people forgot about the difference metaphysics was born. With metaphysics basically treating Being as an entity.

In addition to becoming another entity, being was also used as a boolean property of an object. An object could have the property of existing or not. And classes could also have a being property, the property could be true and class real (e.g. horse) or false and the class not exist (e.g. unicorn).  ¶ 6:01 PM 0 comments

  A new Being and Time Reading Group hosted by Unfogged.  ¶ 4:55 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Nothing terribly compelling about the blog-o-sphere recently, so why not pick on some of the perennial drivel? Tonight, from the Theory Reading Group we have this nugget of nonsense:

Heidegger's "getting-back" to authenticity, an extratemporal primordiality that allows Dasein a moment of authentic Being-in-the-World?

Que? Extratemporal primordiality? Out-of-time first-happening-ity? Neither of those are even proper words. How in-authentic can you get? When were "you" ever, to be in a state of getting-back-to-ness?

Off camping until next week.  ¶ 7:52 PM 2 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

Heidegger, Mysticism and Gnosis

The Meaning of BEING is to BE.
BEING, we can feel the Truth of BEING
Shining forth through every single being.
Filling us with the Meaning of ITS Being;
The shimmering, quivering radiance of its own
Unique way of BE-ING,
Of standing out and EX-isting,
Of being borne forth and of
Bearing itself forth as a being.

Beings -- not owning but Enowned by BEING.

  ¶ 6:59 PM 0 comments

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The People's Republic of Rock and Roll considers being-not-at-home-with-words.

These rather idle musings made me wonder whether it isn't the apparent "rootedness" of Germanic languages that makes them particularly fertile for existential philosophy. Are Nietzsche and Heidegger the fathers of philosophies of existence partly because Germanic creates this semblance of physicality and there-ness? Besides his fascination with Greek, Heidegger in particular often reads like a playful dissection of the German language. It is almost as if German had to become unhomely for Heidegger in order to realize that Dasein (existence) literally means Being there.

I think that capitalizing nouns in German just makes them seem more important.  ¶ 6:52 AM 0 comments

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Body Parts on Dasein for dogs. Really.  ¶ 1:23 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

The Annoying T-Shirts of the Philosophers

Heidegger: Philosophers do it Mitdasein

I'd have gone with: Philosophers philosophize.  ¶ 1:15 PM 0 comments

  From Mark Cohen's mystery The Fractal Murders:

A terrorist bomb in the Middle East, Republicans and Democrats blaming each other for the nation's ills, and an assortment of murders, kidnappings, floods, and droughts. Who wouldn't have a little depression? I turned off the TV, leaned back in my recliner, and picked up Heidegger's Being and Time.
    When I left the practice of law two years ago, I purchased a home in the mountain town of Nederland and began a new life. As part of that I promised myself I'd spend time each day studying philosophy or eastern religions. Those subjects had captivated me in college, and my hope was that immersing myself in them once more might give me some insight into how to deal with my existential pain. So far it hasn't, but at least I'm well read.
    The problem is that I am one of those unlucky souls condemned to forever ponder life's unanswerable questions. I don't know whether this is the cause of my depression or the result of it. Either way, traditional religion never worked for me. I've always had a bit of an authority problem, so I have trouble with the concept of God. I go through life with the nagging suspicion that it's all meaningless, but I read philosophy hoping to prove myself wrong.
    I began my self-study program by reading the pre-Socratics and had since worked my way well into the twentieth century. Consequently, I now found myself trying to understand one of the most incomprehensible philosophers of all time. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, has been variously classified as a phenomenologist, an existentialist, and a mystic. For Heidegger, the fundamental mystery of life was that something, rather than nothing, exists. He spent most of his adult life attempting to develop a philosophy based on this rather obvious fact. Of course, I had spent most of my adult life as a lawyer billing people for my services in in six-minute increments, so who was I to judge?
    As often happens when I read philosophy at night, I soon found myself half asleep and skimming the same paragraph again and again. Something about "Dasein"-Heidegger's term for man, or being. I put the book down. "C'mon, boys," I said to the dogs, "time to hit the hay."

Someone's been murdering math profs, and the dame's hired Pepper Keane to find out why.  ¶ 6:28 AM 0 comments

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The Pangrammaticon argues that less is more, at least as far as philosophy is concerned:

Indeed, even Heidegger's project of "leading our attention from beings back to being", which he called "phenomenological reduction" seems to resonate with this conception of philosophy.

Philosophy is a matter of reducing texts, of editing them.

But not too short. If it fits on a bumper sticker, it's not philosophy.  ¶ 5:49 PM 0 comments

  Last year's summer Bookforum had an essay on Giorgio Agamben from which this is taken:

Between 1966 and 1968, he studied with Martin Heidegger in Le Thor, France. He describes his early experience in Idea of Prose (1985): At Le Thor, Heidegger held his seminar in a garden shaded by tall trees. At times, however, we left the village, walking in the direction of Thouzon or Rebanquet, and the seminar then took place in front of a small hut hidden away in the midst of an olive grove. One day, when the seminar neared its end and the students crowded round him, pressing him with questions, Heidegger merely remarked: 'You can see my limit; I can't.' Years before he had written that a thinker's greatness is gauged by his fidelity to his own internal limit, and not to know this limit--not to know it because of its closeness to the unspeakable--is the secret gift that being, at rare times, can make.

This may sound like a pietistic and hagiographical description of Heidegger's own greatness. But Agamben actually invites us to think through and beyond Heidegger. It is an invitation he leaves open--wide open--throughout his work.

You can see my limit; I can't: Do not ask me how I know because I do not. Just accept that I believe in your ability to witness. Have faith that I am calling on you to believe in my blindness no less than my insight. This is probably closer to what Heidegger means to say, even if he did not know how--but does anyone?--to say what he means. Heidegger is speaking to those who will survive him; those he may have affectionately named his students; those who have been called on; you. Acknowledging this vocative address means listening to a call that cannot be heard otherwise. It is a call that, to use Heidegger's argot, stretches across time as it calls its calling. To hear it means accepting it as one's Bestimmung, or vocation. In German, Bestimmung is one of those words that just sounds preordained for philosophy. It can be found, for example, throughout the writings of Kant, Hegel, and their contemporaries. Philosophers rarely, if ever, attempt to gather together all its different valences of meaning: determination, mission, goal, destiny, fate. Heidegger did.

This blog: my vocation? Your call.  ¶ 12:36 PM 0 comments

  Londonist interviewed Iain Sinclair a week before the William Burroughs tribute curated by Patti Smith yesterday at London's Meltdown Festival.

Alan Moore took part in the tribute, and his travails with the the film and comic industries have taken various entertaining and sad twists and turns recently. He's disassociated himself from the Wachowski brothers' V for Vendetta movie and Paramount has cancelled the Watchmen movie--both of those titles were amongest the best comics of the 1980s. He's also taken control of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen back from DC comics.  ¶ 7:44 AM 0 comments

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World Of Dung considers Lacoue-Labarthe grappling with Heidegger's comparison of industrial agriculture with the death camps.

i'm a little perturbed by this statement...Not because its offensive to me personally, but because it sounds like Mr. Lacoue-labarthe is presumeing this statement of Heidegger's as negative..what perturbes me is that it sounds rather commonsensical and makes complete sense to me. What scares me about it, is that maybe I think i should be offended. When i read this statement i hear Heidegger thinking to himself that technology not only has unsettled humanity its thrown consumption from a paradigm of survivial into a paradigm of hording in a nonsensical John Locke sort of way. That is, argiculture is a self commodifying vehicle to rampant distruction.

I think Heidegger comparison wasn't so much that with technological progess humans have moved from needing food to survive to merely hording food. I recall a Nova program that investigated the engineering firm that got the contract to build the crematoria. In the documents and interviews with the engineers it was apparent that this was just another contract for them. They were concerned with doing a good job, building the right tool for the given requirements, but never concerned with its purpose. I interpret that as Heidegger's point, that technology can be applied blindly, irrespective of the purpose towards which it is used.  ¶ 4:10 PM 0 comments

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Humuhumunukunukuapua'a on a fish called humus?

I am not so sure Heidegger would have liked humus as much - he was German national socialist so he did not like many things, particularly France and Jews. He was not a nice man - I think his parents probably didn't hug him much as a child. Paul Celan, the German Jewish poet even wrote a poem which was in many ways about Heidegger - Todt is ein meister von Deutschland - death is a master from Germany. The thing that Heidegger had going for him was that he liked technology and saw technology as one of the saving forces of the modern age. He is in many ways correct - it was after all the German electrician Emmanuel Tunze who is credited with inventing the first power heads, protein skimmers, and other aquarium products that help keep humus happy. I would not go so far as to say that technology is salvation, which is a major idea from Heidegger, but for a humu, it is a darn nice thing to have. Heidegger thought that art was grounded in it's age, it was like a revealing of the times and even being, so in theory humu art would just be awesome. I own some humu art, and I will definitely say it is cool - it definitely is another way of looking at humus, so it does give some access their being I think.

Ork? Tunze is a brand of aquarium products.  ¶ 9:57 AM 0 comments

  A German newspaper yesterday carried this bit:

Martin Heidegger brought Nazism into philosophy, argues Emmanuel Faye in his book "Heidegger, l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie", which has already received much critical attention in France. Historian Kurt Flasch welcomes Faye's "clever and elaborate provocation", because it forces Heideggerians to get down off their high horses and engage in basic textual work. "Heidegger emphatically restated essential tenets of National Socialist doctrine as his own philosophy: a folkish vision of the historical mission of the German people, the metaphysics of blood and soil, the role of the Führer as the sole law governing German life, and the right of the German Volk to expand its territory."

It's certainly excellent marketing by Faye's publisher, but from the information available to date, there is no indication that Faye has uncovered any documents or produced scholarship that adds anything new to the mountain of literature already produced on this subject. On the whole it merely confuses those not already familiar with Heidegger's thinking on ontology (Why the fuss?) and leads to a bunch of additional polemical flailing about--witness this bosh from Amolosh. Only the innumerate would judge a mathematician's maths by how politically correct he is. Flasch is correct in seeing Faye's work as a provocation, but much textual work has already been done and I expect that the true intent here is to distract from the philosophy. Also note that anyone familiar with German history knows that notions of the German Volk, blood and soil, paternalism, and so on, have long been part of German culture. They were appropriated, and not invented, by the Nazis.  ¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments

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Analogies in the Theory Reading Group:

I've been thinking about whether it was Heidegger's duty to say something to the Nazi's... It makes me think of Aristophanes "The Clouds", in which Socrates spends all his time inside his think tank, measuring the length of flea feet in proportion to their jumping distance (and other useless pursuits). Eventually, one of his students lights the hut on fire, with an overall moral lesson to Socrates that he coudn't just sequester himself away from society. He needs its protection, just as society needs his thought. Although the philosopher wants to escape the cave, he has to be drawn back in, to teach and enlighten those still facing the wall. So, was it Heidegger's duty to speak out?

In Plato's allegory, the philosopher returns to the cave to enlighten the cave dwellers, and they kill him.  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 comments

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Long Sunday comments on a bungle by Heidegger in Le Thor:

But what struck me is a strange parapraxis which Heidegger makes. At one point during his exposition he quotes Hegel's famous aphorism about the old sock, "A torn sock is better than a mended sock." But immediately, as the notes to the seminar record, there is embarrassed whispering from his auditors. Heidegger had got it wrong. Hegel, they know, says something different: he says, "A mended sock is better than a torn sock; not so with self-consciousness". Heidegger, blushing (if one can read between the lines) defends himself with an elaborate story that Hegel's editor had changed the manuscript of the Wastebook (where the aphorism occurs) at the last minute, and what he has quoted was what Hegel originally said. His audience are clearly unconvinced.

Heh. All too human. Read the whole thing.  ¶ 8:24 PM 0 comments

  Continuing yesterday's post on William Barrett's The Death of The Soul

    This is a radical proposal indeed, and there is no doubt of the originality of Heidegger's basic insight. Yet it often happens with a philosopher who has had an original perception that he rides it too intensely and exclusively, while shutting off other and more usual points of view. You can go through the history of philosophy and tick off the philosophers who became blinded by the brilliance of their original insight. And this, I think, is what happened to Heidegger: We do not need an either-or here--either the tradition or his insubstantial approach--but a both-and. His insight should be added to the tradition and not seek to replace it. Otherwise we get a philosophy that tends to become insubstantial and vaporous.
    Consider, for example, his treatment of human being in his greatest work, Being and Time. The analysis proceeds by exhibiting the various modes of our being--that is, the ways in which we are in the world. In each of our moods, the world is disclosed to us in a certain way, and the way of its disclosure is that particular mode of our being. But then we ask the question: Who is the being who is undergoing all these various modes of being? (Or, in more traditional language: Who is the subject, that I, that underlies or persists through all these varying modes of our being?) And here Heidegger evades us.
     Not that he does not have an answer, but his answer is evasive because he merely turns the question back upon itself in an endless circle. The "I" here is not to be understood as a subject, but, in Heidegger's expression, as Ichsein (I-being), just another mode of being, another way in which we are, along with the others. We are nothing but an aggregate of modes of being, and any organizing or unifying center we profess to find there is something we ourselves have forged or contrived.
    Thus there is a gaping hole at the center of our human being--at least as Heidegger describes this being. Consequently, we have in the end to acknowledge a certain desolate and empty quality about his thought, however we may admire the originality and novelty of its construction. Much has been made of the criticism that he lacks an ethics, and that his picture of man is without any significant ethical or moral traits. But how could this be otherwise? How could a being without a center be really ethical?
    All of this is not meant to dismiss Heidegger. Indeed, he cannot be dismissed; that desolate and empty picture of being he gives us may be just the sense of being that is at work in our whole culture, and we are in his debt for having brought it to the surface. To get beyond him we shall have to live through that sense of being in order to reach the other side.

In this posting on intentionality, Clark Goble describes subjective and objective descriptions, as in the 1st and 3rd person. Or, to put it another way, things can be described poetically or scientifically. Heidegger didn't privilege either. Somethings are best said poetically and other scientifically, and each has its own limitations. Clark says that Levinas adds the 2nd person, a you, and perhaps there is one answer to Barett's demand for ethical traits.  ¶ 3:29 PM 1 comments

  In the mid-1980s William Barrett wrote The Death of The Soul, about what is lost in modernism. It remains a model of clear philosophical writing.

    Every significant thinker, Heidegger tells us, has one central intuition that runs through all his work, and he himself is no exception. Heidegger does have a single original insight, bold but surprisingly simple, that is basic to all his thinking about being. This insight has to do with the nature of truth. And as we should expect from a thinker of Heidegger's style, it starts with the materials of the traditional view that you will find in Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas.
    In this traditional view, truth consists in "correspondence" or "agreement": A statement is true when it agrees or corresponds with fact or reality. Thus I judge that there is a tree outside the window; I look and I see that there is indeed a tree there, and my statement, accordingly, is true: It agrees with fact. Heidegger does not disagree with this simple explication of the nature of truth. Indeed, who could one? It is the meaning of truth as it figures in the humblest walks of ordinary life as well as in the most abstract and theoretical assertions of the sciences. Instead, Heidegger pushes his question into the basis, or ground, of this correspondence: How is truth possible? How is it possible that thought and its object can coincide?
    And his answer here is of such direct and overwhelming simplicity that we are not likely to grasp its significance at once. Statement and thing can correspond because there is an open realm in which they can meet. If I am to match statement with thing, there must be this open space where the two can be put together. It is in this realm, or field, of the open that things show themselves, and truth comes to be.
    There is nothing esoteric or "mystical" about this field of the open. On the contrary, we live and move through and within it all the time, so much so in fact that we hardly note that it is there. And yet it is the condition for anything like truth coming about. And therefore, with it, says Heidegger, we must take up our search for being. We do not begin our study of being with things or substances, in the ordinary and traditional way, but with something less substantial yet more pervasive: the open field or region in which such entities manifest themselves.

I'll post the rest of what Barrett has to say about Heidegger in this book tomorrow.  ¶ 12:52 PM 0 comments

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The Old Revolution on Heidegger in Miyazaki's animations:

Miyazaki's portrayal of technology as magic, at least for me, resonates with Heidegger's emphasis of technology as that which reveals a poetic truth.

He doesn't explore that specific aspect of Miyazaki further in his post on the politics behind his animations. But I thought I'd mention it anyway as I'm taking the critters to see it today.  ¶ 8:49 AM 2 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Being-in as Such  ¶ 9:39 AM 0 comments

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opendoorexit comments approvingly on an Agence France Press piece yesterday on new fashion man that said:

Instead today's males are turning more towards "creativity, sensitivity and multiplicity," as seen already in recent seasons on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.

Arnold Schwarznegger and Sylvester Stallone are being replaced by the 21st-century man who "no longer wants to be the family super-hero", but instead has the guts to be himself, to test his own limits.

opendoorexit quotes Heidegger on Nietzsche to support multiplicity as necessary. Me, I'm no fan Arnold or Sylvester, but I agree with Lileks:

I hate to break it to these theorists, but it does not take guts for a young man to want to have multiple sex partners. It takes guts to settle down and have a family

Though I suppose it would take guts to dress like a clown off the catwalk.  ¶ 9:34 AM 0 comments

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The Guest of Time votes for van Gogh's shoes as the most wildly over-interpreted painting:

Think about it. Heidegger wants to claim immense ontological previlege for art: art as the setting-into-work of truth, etc. But couldn't he, just by looking a real pair of peasant shoes, spin the same story about the "rugged heaviness of the shoes," " the accumulated tenacity" of the peasant woman's trudge, the "far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows in the field," the "dampness and richness of the soil," and all the rest—the vibrating but silent call, the ripening grain, the impending childbed, etc., etc.? Why would this fantasy be more substantial if occasioned by a painting than by a real pair of shoes...?

"The Origin of the Pair of Shoes"? Doesn't quite have the same ring to it. My money's on Velazquez's Meninas, though.  ¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments

  Who's the greatest philosopher? The BBC wants to know. Vote now!  ¶ 5:26 PM 0 comments

  Near the top of the new CD pile is the Go-Betweens's latest, Oceans Apart, which is also probably their best album to date. A rare event for a group that's been releasing new material for around a quarter century. Many bands that started after them have already moved to the next stage of the typical pop band career, merely regurgitating the hits in new greatest hits albums and from state fair stages. The Go-Bets's greatest hits album may be the best place to start, but this release shows that they continue to improve. For a decade they disbanded and the songwriting core of the band, Robert Foster and Grant McLennan, released lackluster solo albums. Their fans are glad they reunited, and presumably they are too, because this is their third album since they got back together. Although the two appear to write their own separate songs that mix the transcendent with ordinary things, being in the same band produces a unique chemistry.

I was square into the hole
there was something in my soul

What could I do
but follow the calling

  ¶ 12:04 PM 0 comments

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MelbournePhilosopher is back with a self-described very long rant.

Heidegger attacks everything which I hold valuable about philosophy. He travels from observation not toward meaning but away from it. Not toward meaningful statements but toward statements which are so general as to have no meaning - to make no claim.

Good luck to MP with his future philosophical studies and opinions, but it's unlikely that Heidegger could be as popular with philosophers as he is if he made no meaningful statements.

If Wittgenstein were alive today, he might well accuse the big H of playing an enormous language-game, the result of which is to confound the truth so completely that one no longer recognise it.

Wittgenstein did comment briefly on the big H, but didn't make that accusation.  ¶ 11:43 AM 2 comments

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Hearty welcome to new blog Enowned by Bipolar. Not terribly busy yet, but nice name.  ¶ 11:29 AM 0 comments

  In Slate Jody Rosen nails Chill as a musical genre. I'm not sure exactly where its going but I have half the albums he mentions. Cause for concern?

As altered states of coolness and hipness go, it's hard to beat incipient middle age. For millions of record buyers, chillout offers an antidote.

I've been feeling that incipient obsolescence, but I'm not too worried because there's that bulge of boomers ahead of me making fuddy-duddies the trend setting demographic group. Still, much of this music appears to have been covered in David Toop's Oceans of Sound some time ago, so I wonder how much of a new trend it is, but I'm always glad to see Illbient name checked.  ¶ 7:38 AM 0 comments

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Ignacio at The Web of Belief claims we're already mutants:

Furthermore, our real problem is that we are not ready to confront this twinly defined mutant aspect of ourselves. We have only just, as Heidegger himself might put it, begun to move towards the question of what our own mutanthood entails for us as self-conscious beings. How should one live in this world in which we are thrown? As there are no formulae currently available for answering this question or even knowing what it really asks, it seems like a good place for philosophers to contribute via a use of their special skills of careful argument, clarification, and attention to important distinctions. I therefore invite you, as other intentional systems fastened to dying animals and living in a half silicon life-world, to join me in the attempt. . .

I've noticed this demand or request that philosophers come and solve or explain things making the rounds. Caveat: Be careful what you ask for!  ¶ 7:01 AM 0 comments

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A Day In The Life Of A Chamber Pot discovers one of a potentially long line of being-in-a-specific-being:

I want to play my guitar. It occurred to me only moments ago how sexual the guitar is for me. It allows my animus and anima to express themselves in unison. It is a very Dionysian and self-celebratory experience, but the self is without any sense of static identity. It's being-in-and-for-itself-in-the-guitar, something Heidegger never mentioned.

Totally with you, dude. I ordered my Roland Micro Cube yesterday.  ¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments

  The Chronicle of Higher Education has made their article on The Ister available online. Well worth a read because they asked people who know something of the subject matter about the film.

Mr. Thomson, for instance, says that "the film might help show viewers that the questions at stake in Heidegger's work are not incomprehensibly abstract but rather real, immediate, and pressing: How is technology shaping our sense of reality? How does our relationship to the past shape our relationship to the future? What role should philosophers play in the culture? How could someone so philosophically intelligent be so politically stupid? What is the relationship between philosophy and politics?"

It's a real pity the movie is only being marketed to academia.  ¶ 6:22 AM 0 comments

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Fey Accompli reviews the Hannah and Martin in Washington, D.C., and it's a more interesting review--with many thought provoking allusions--than any I've read in the main stream media.  ¶ 7:44 AM 0 comments

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There's been an uptick in Heidegger related blog posts because of the Emmanual Faye hullabaloo in France. Most of it doesn't rise above the level of chatter, but I found this bit about domesticising Heidegger on the Observing the Observer blog pertinent:

So how do we make the 'Heidegger debate' relevant? Simple: In the words of Bourdieu, we need to not domesticise the exotic, but exoticise the domestic. We might not just be surprised about our own "blind faiths" and how they come about. We might also discover that we waste time and energy with irrelevantly handled "debates" and rather uselessly phrased questions that distract ourselves from more rewarding and pressing ones.

But specifically what are the rewarding or pressing questions?  ¶ 12:14 PM 2 comments

  Frank Herbert's son has written a biography of his father titled Dreamer of Dune. Here's a bit about Herbert's novel The Santaroga Barrier.

In 1966, Dad was working on a new novel, The Santaroga Barrier- about an unusual, insular northern California town. The book had a framework based upon the thinking of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his classic 1927 work, Sein und Zeit, Heidegger presented a theory of man's existence in the world, which he called "dasein." The protagonist of The Santaroga Barrier was Gilbert Dasein. His girlfriend was Jenny Sorge, and in the Heideggerian view, "sorge" represented "care"-things that were within the care of mankind or dasein. Heidegger believed that man became disoriented and drowned himself in the vastness of the world and in the minutiae of following society's rules. Each man's experiences were too small, too parochial, for him to develop a proper philosophy of existence.

I found the novel a bit diappointing because, rather than the Santarogans being exceptional because they have overcome Cartesian metaphysics, they instead owe their special qualities to a psychedelic from their food cooperative, the coop and drug are both called Jaspers no less. Apparently the drug boosts your confidence, makes you feel more social, dehydrates you, leaves you with a nasty hangover, and is addictive. I guess science fiction writers hadn't yet got around to experimenting much way back in 1966, and were somewhat unclear on the difference between psychedelics and beer.  ¶ 12:28 PM 0 comments

  David Markson's novel This Is Not a Novel is sort of like the books of lists that became popular a few decades ago. It's basically a collection of one or two sentence anecdotes about artists, or quotes from their works. Most of them are about the death of artists. Four of them concern Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger, in 1933:
The Führer, and he alone, is the sole German reality and law, today and in the future.

Wagner was five months older than Verdi.
Wittgenstein was five months older Heidegger.

Paul Celan's visit to Todtnauberg.

The friendship of René Char and Martin Heidegger.

My reactions to the novel were:
1) Did I miss the underlying pattern that supports a narrative structure?
2) Is the missing conjunction, in the second bit above, significant or a typo?
3) I could do this, but thank goodness I have a day job.  ¶ 7:44 PM 0 comments

  In the stack of new CDs is Lydia Lunch's latest, Smoke in the Shadows. Lydia's moved on from dishing out aggressive transgressive spleen and settled into the persona of a film noirish siren. Her songs have evolved from litanies of complaints and rants into, well, songs with real singing and an ecumenical desperation.

Running to daddy, he can't help you
Praying to Jesus, didn't save you
Calling on Shiva, did he hear you
Summon a witch, she can't protect you

Overall it sounds like Lydia has moved into the LA of sleazy motels that Tom Waits used to haunt. She's helped by Nels Cline's contributions on the musical side--following the same groove set by their earlier Anubian Nights collaboration. It is easily her most enjoyable musical outing since mixing it up with assorted members of the Birthday Party in the early 80s. The music here is consistent enough to cohere as an album, while at the same time having some surprising, for her portfolio, variety. There's a mambo rhythm, vibes, stand-up bass, and contributions from ex-Contortion Adele Bertei and ex-Geraldine Fibber Carla Bozulich. At this point in her career, which I guess started with Eno's 1978 w York album, most people know wheteher they like or hate her. If you're partial, check it out.  ¶ 4:55 PM 0 comments

  On blustery days, after playing pooh-sticks and debating with owl, one can entertain bears of very little brain with Tigger Nominalism.

In 1926 A.A. Milne asked the following question: 'When Tigger, having left Eeyore's Gloomy Place and rounded the west side of the 100-Akre Wood and bounced by Piglet's house and past the Heffalump trap and below the Six Pine Trees, comes across Rabbit and his many relations, what does Tigger see?' Notoriously, Milne himself never answered this question.
...
After bright beginnings with A.A. Milne, animal metaphysics passed through a period of 'continental adolescence' (the Angst period), during which it stagnated under terminological obscurity and the destructive blurring of boundaries between animal metaphysics and literature. Characteristic of this period are the well-known comments by Martin Heidegger in his 1929/1930 lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. (These remarks were apparently intended as an outline for some sort of anti-naturalist conception of the status of animal metaphysics. But nobody knows for sure what they mean.)

Well, Christopher Robin, it's like this: stuffed bears are world-poor.  ¶ 4:52 PM 0 comments

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Jane-Blog on the dificulty of reading:

Anything the man wrote. He makes no sense. My professor was like, 'Read it in German, he makes more sense.' Oh, whatever. In German he uses the same words to describe his two main concepts: SEIN and SEIN. Way to go, Heidegger.

Hence the later clarifying use of SEYN.  ¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments