Babette Babich on the ‘new’ Heidegger.

Tom Sheehan, who has already earned his anti-Heidegger stripes in earlier scandals on this same theme, is today insisting that all Heidegger studies convert to what Sheehan names a ‘new paradigm,’ reducing being to meaning, a call that Sheehan already published as such more than a decade ago. Don Ihde—who years ago also stopped engaging Heidegger in his own work in technology studies—has similarly issued a call for a post-phenomenological move, which would bracket Heidegger even more than Husserl. So what is stopping Sheehan’s ‘new paradigm’ or Ihde’s post-phenomenology? Perhaps only the trivial or ontic detail that we continue to lack what might count as a genuinely ‘new’ Heidegger, assuming indeed that what we mean by the rubric of the ‘new’ is not merely a desire to shift a paradigm from the concerns of others to the concerns of a single scholar (no matter whether Sheehan or Ihde). Any talk of the ‘new’ should hold at least to the standard set in continental philosophical convention not with respect to Heidegger but Nietzsche, the thinker Heidegger claimed the most decisive for his thinking, in David B. Allison’s collection, The New Nietzsche. What made Allison’s Nietzsche ‘new’ was nothing other than the same Heidegger who infl uenced every other author in Allison’s collection: Derrida, Deleuze, Klossowski, Blanchot, Lingis, etc. To date, there is no comparable programme of reflections on Heidegger.

P. 168

It's a shame this paper is locked up in a $100+ book. Would make a great video.

[UPDATE 5/29/15: The paper is now on available here.]  ¶ 8:34 AM