In Being and Time, Heidegger situates "anxiety" as the fundamental attunement or mood of Dasein. As we know from the reading group over The Open, however, Agamben makes a good case that in later writings, boredom comes to seem more fundamental even than anxiety. What I propose in this post is to make a crucial clarification to Heidegger's existential analytic, one that may well lead to a complete rewriting. My contention is that while he was right to move away from anxiety as the fundamental attunement, Heidegger overshoots the mark in the shift toward boredom. We cannot fully understand the meaning of Being until we grapple with the truly fundamental attunement of Dasein, that attunement that is located between boredom and anxiety: namely, awkwardness.

¶ 11:57 AM