The Prague Writers' Festival director Michael March interviews playwright Howard Brenton in today's Guardian, asking:

MM: Martin Heidegger, not an ideal theatre critic, believed that "the light of the public obscures everything".

HB: Some of the great liberating ideas of the 20th century - the whole existentialist tradition - have a very dark side. Heidegger did get very near describing what existence actually is and, at the same time, threw in his lot with an evil regime. You think, "what does this mean and why?".

That's a good quote, about the public's light. It's so good that Marsh used it on Irvine Welsh at last year's Vienna Writer's Festival. It's so good that it's an official festival quote.

Where does the quote come from? From Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times. It's her translation of Das Licht der Offentlichkeit verdunkelt alles. I believe it's what a decade later would appear as:

By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone.

P. 165

and

...the publicness of the "they" supresses everything familiar.

P. 237

But Arendt didn't reference her sources. I'm not familar with "the light" or "brightness" of the Offentlichkeit. It might arguably (says my ready-over-the-shoulder expert) be translated as "openness", but Heidegger uses Offentlichkeit when referring to the public, and "publicness" is used by most translator.

This bit of the Contributions has a similar focus.

In what is the nearest and the ordinary and the continual, beings will always outdo and chase away beyng. And this occurs, not when a being itself gathers unto itself and unfolds, but when a being has turned into the object and state of dissembling machinations and is dissolved into non-being. Here, in the most ordinary publicness of beings that have become all the same, the utmost squandering of beyng occurs.

P. 168

  ¶ 7:58 PM