Thomas Sheehan on being uncivilized.

(Seyn, often translated by the barbaric “beyng”)

From "What, after all, was Heidegger about?"



  ¶ 1:52 PM 1 comments

  Alexander R. Galloway on Heidegger versus Sontag on interpretation.

Such is the great divide straddled by Martin Heidegger and the special kind of phenomenology espoused by him. From one perspective Heidegger is devoted to the cult of Hermes. Truth is an ambling Weg that must be followed. Nothing is immediate about being; it appears only in a relationship to those who seek it. Yet from another perspective Heidegger is devoted to the cult of Iris, for his version of phenomenology does not entirely accept the perpetual deferral of exchange and circulation associated with Hermes. Being is mysterious in Heidegger. But it is also illuminated. It is far away, like Hermes, but it is also clear, transparent, and immediate like Iris. “Being is farther than all beings and is yet nearer to man than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from man.”

ose lines were wri en by Heidegger shortly a er World War II. Several years later, in 1964, a young Susan Sontag penned one of the great indictments levied against Hermes and his style of mediation. “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today,” she wrote. “Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” “Against Interpretation” was the title of her manifesto, but the identical titles “Against Hermes” or “Against Hermeneutics” would have served just as well.

P. 47

  ¶ 12:46 PM 0 comments

  Kate Withy on the un- in unheimlich.

Dasein's essence is to be open or revealing; the reverse-revealing un- is this unconcealing. So what is proper to Dasein (heimlich) is the reversing-releasing un-; the un- is Dasein's heimlich. It is not that the unheimlich is species of the heimlich, as on Freud's story, but that the power of the un- belongs to the heimlich that it modifies. So the un- that opens Dasein's openness is already a mode of openness.

Further, it is already an uncanny mode of openness. To see this, consider an alternative reading: that what Heidegger is trying to capture with the notion of turning or reversal is what I have called the 'imperfection' of the operation of the un-'s. As we saw, the negating un- does not simply exclude and the reversing-releasing un- does not entirely unconceal. It is such an 'imperfection' that drives Freud's uncanny affect and Heidegger uncanniness. Recall that Dasein's uncanny exclusion from its essence is not a straightforward privation, as if being excluded from openness rendered Dasein not open. Heidegger marks this distinction in HI by contrasting the uncanny human being with the adventurer. The adventurer "remains homeless on account of his lack of rootedness"; he is characterized by a "not being within the homely, a mere departing and breaking free from the homely". The adventurer is not uncanny but "merely not-homely [nicht heimisch]" in the sense of the negating un-. The uncanny human being is not homeless in this way; if anything it is homesick because precisely in being expelled from the home, the human being remains related to it. This persisting relation—that is, the imperfect operation of the un-—seems to be what Heidegger holds is distinctively counter- in out uncanniness.

Pp. 223-4

  ¶ 9:16 PM 0 comments

  In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah Kendzior on the academy's insularity from furthering human knowledge.

The economic collapse of 2008 and corresponding breakdown of the academic job market created a backlog of Ph.D.’s unable to find tenure-track positions but still attempting to stay active in their fields. While their financial struggle is well-documented, less noted is a different kind of deprivation: lack of library access. With tenure-track jobs had to come by, many scholars today occupy a grey area – one they share with NGO employees, journalists, and other intellectuals toiling outside the ivory tower and its paywalled digital resources. These intellectuals share an inability to access academic works on their own areas of specialization. They are part of “the conversation” – often cited within it – but blocked from some of its premium sources.

The academy has moved on from Μηδείς άγεωμέτρητος είσίτω μον τήν στέγην to "Let no one bereft of wealth enter here".   ¶ 9:39 AM 0 comments

  In Triple C, Christian Fuchs orders the likes and dislikes in Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), GA 97.

All of the following are among the phenomena that Heidegger in the Black Notebooks’ fourth volume sees negatively and as expression of what he called the machinations (Machenschaften) and the forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit): abstract art, America, anthropology, anti-fascism, Asia, Christianity, cultural philosophers, democracy, directors, existentialism, film, Georges Braques, Great Britain, historians, Jean-Paul Sartre, journalism, Juan Gris, Jews, Karl Jaspers, Karl Marx, magazines, mathematics, modern technology, museums, news, novels, Pablo Picasso, philology, psychology, radio, records, researchers, Russia, socialism, surrealism, television, tractors.

The few phenomena that he, in contrast, discusses positively taken together are an expression of Deutschtümelei (German jingoist ideology): Adalbert Stifter, Bauer (=farmer, but also builder/creator in German), customs, Ernst Jünger, fatherland, forests, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, German language, handwriting, heroism, homeland, hut, keeping silent, Meister Eckhart, Oswald Spengler, peasantry, poetry, South West Germany, teachers.

  ¶ 7:22 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Stone (Lawrence Berger) on presence.

We have come up against a deeply ingrained view of what it is to be a human being (which lends credence to views that our experience ultimately does not matter), which is that subjective experience takes place in a private realm that is cut off from the rest of reality. But Heidegger does not even make the distinction between the mental and the physical; for him our experience is an event in the world. The experience of the stone that I come to is part of the process of its manifestation in all of its possibilities. In this manner we are intimately related to the stone in our worldly presence, which is the site of its more profound manifestation. The claim is that the being of the stone itself is not independent of such an event.

  ¶ 7:07 AM 0 comments

  Kate Withy on the happening of originary angst.

Dasein's foundational openness can be understood as an event. It is an event of opening, or the becoming manifest of the world. Recall that I suggested that Dasein itself can be understood and an event—the event of sense-making, which takes place in us. Originary angst would then be the inaugural and inaugurating episode of this event. It is the curtain rising on the stage, the floodlights illuminating the field, or the conductor raising her baton. This event is not only the first but that which makes all subsequent events possible. The openning of openness, or the becoming manifest of the world, is what first allows any happening of sense-making at all.

This event, of course, does not happen in time—or if it does, this is not what Heidegger is interested in. To call it the 'first' is to say that it is the most basic or most foundational. The event language is thus in a sense metaphorical since it implies a temporal ordering that does not apply here. But this metaphor is at least familiar: in philosophy, we often use temporal or dynamic metaphors to lay out relationships of ontological dependence and grounding. In any case, just as you can tell the story of the experience of angst in time, so too we can tell the story of the becoming-manifest of the world (the happening of originary ansgst) in the time of the a priori. This is the story of what it takes for there to be openness to being rather than not—an origin myth, if you will.

The key event in this story of the becoming manifest of the world is the sudden flaring up of ontological insight. As we have seen, the mood of angst provides ontological insight into what it takes to be an understander of being, specifically by revealing what it takes to be and to have a world. The original becoming manifest of the world is Desein's coming to have a world, or the world coming to be (because, recall, the world is not apart from its manifestness). Originary angst is thus Dasein's opening onto being—its opening to the fact that things are and to what they are. So there is not some particular ontological insight at stake here; it is the bursting forth of ontological insight per se: the understanding of being. This 'moment of clarity' is the granting of being, which Heidegger will later call 'Ereignis.'

Pp. 88-9

  ¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments

  Plotting the Seynsvergessenheit through the centuries.
  ¶ 8:51 AM 2 comments

  In LARB, Santiago Zabala and Gianni Vattimo on the metaphysical organization of the EU.

According to Heidegger, thought is metaphysical when it tries to determine Being as presence, that is, as a simple set of descriptions of the present state of affairs, thus automatically privileging terms of temporal, spatial, and unified presentness. This is why Heidegger believed that “insofar as the pure relationship of the I-think-unity (basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relationship, the present that is present to itself becomes the measure for all beingness.”[P. 140] Even though these sets of measurable descriptions took diverse approaches throughout the history of philosophy (from Aristotle’s motionless true substances, to Kant's transcendental conditions of experience, to John Searle’s ontology of social functions), philosophers were always directed to consider Being as a motionless, nonhistorical, and geometric object or fact. Truth, in this form, became a correspondence that adapts or submits to Being’s descriptions; thought dissolves itself into a science, that is, into the global organization of all beings within a predictable structure of causes and effects.

  ¶ 8:27 AM 0 comments

  The cause of the latest man-machine catastrophe: "Copilot Andreas Lubitz was mentally unstable". Clearly an acute case of originary Angst leading to a controlled descent into the abyss. In a century, folks will look back and be amazed we entrusted passenger aircraft to humans. I for one welcome our autopilot overlords.   ¶ 8:12 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Critical Review of Academic Philosophy on more nazi nastiness in Die Zeit.

He was well informed about everyday politics and recommended to his brother to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf as well as several other books from the antidemocratic and nationalist far right.

  ¶ 2:54 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Catholic Herald on localism versus universalism.

Take a word like Geworfenheit. Not one, I admit, that you will ever overhear in a supermarket queue, even in Berlin or Cologne, but a key existential concept that greatly informs the current debate on marriage (or should). Geworfenheit means the state of being thrown, or “thrown-ness”. It was coined by Martin Heidegger who was, as every one knows, a very bad man; but though he had all the wrong answers, he did ask some very interesting questions. And then there is Angst, and Sorge… deep down this marriage debate is about these existential concepts. I believe in Geworfenheit: we need to live with, and embrace the fact that there is a great gap between ourselves and the truth of Christ; and we need to hold to that truth at all costs, lest we drown in a sea of cares.

...

The relationship between particular and universal, local Church and the See of Peter, is a symbiotic union that is to the enrichment of both. Communion with Peter remains a safeguard against seeing local custom as normative, when local custom has to be evaluated through the prism of the universal nature of revelation and the universal nature of morality. Put bluntly, you cannot insist that “this is our way of doing things here, and we don’t care about what others do in other countries”.

Cosmopolitan nomads make better Daseins, as their opposite exemplifies (ob. cit., Überlegungen).   ¶ 9:40 AM 0 comments

  Eleven days left to sign Markus Gabriel's "Save Phenomenology and Hermeneutics in Freiburg" petition.   ¶ 8:00 AM 0 comments

  Today and tomorrow, in Athens, GA, catch Przemyslaw Sanecki's The Source of the Work of Art (2013).

This piece is a semantic space visualization/sonification of philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (often translated as The Origin of the Work of Art), with AI-generated text derived from analysis of the work.

Or preview it on YouTube. Or get the words of art from GitHub. Hard to believe that quatrograms file -- more odd numbers make better fourfolds.  ¶ 7:24 PM 0 comments

  In Philosophy Now, beefeater mocks French philosopher.

Badiou says that French philosophers in the Twentieth Century looked for something in German philosophy. We could say that, lacking an emperor themselves, they decided to steal imperial clothes from the Germans; but the German Emperor of Philosophy, Martin Heidegger, had no clothes. So they stole his lack of clothes instead, and now wear that lack proudly – and feel irritation if any rosbif laughs at them.

  ¶ 5:47 PM 0 comments

  Kate Withy on the Dasein that you are.

As Heidegger uses it, 'Dasein' is a difficult term to understand and to translate. In ordinary German it means the same as 'existence,' but Heidegger uses it to pick out specifically human existence. Further, it picks this out in a specific way. Heidegger says that 'Dasein' picks out the entities that we are and that it picks us out with regard to our being: "we have chosen to designate this entity as 'Dasein', a term which is purely an expression of its being" (SZ12). So 'Dasein' is a peculiar, ontico-ontological term: it designates an entity but with regard to its being.

Insofar as 'Dasein' refers to the entities that we ourselves are, we might be tempted to mentally substitute for it a term like 'person' or 'human being.' The problem is that, while these words designate the same entity, they pick it out in ways that Heidegger wants to avoid. 'Human being' picks us out with regard to our humanity as opposed to animality or divinity, and 'person' picks us out in terms of our agency, consciousness, and/or personality. While these ways of understanding us do get at genuine features of us, they nonetheless obscure that aspect of us that Heidegger is interested in: our openness to being. Heidegger uses the term 'Dasein' to pick us out as being (Sein) there (da), where by 'there' or 'da' Heidegger means what we might call the space of intelligibility or meaningfulness. Calling us 'Dasein' thus names us as entities who essentially make things intelligible or who dwell in a meaningful world. Dasein is the entity that understands being. The story that we tell about Dasein is thus not a story about agency, consciousness, animality, or divinity, but a story about sense-making.

Pp. 69-70

  ¶ 2:45 PM 0 comments

  Stephen Galt Crowell's lecture "We Have Never Been Animals: Heidegger’s Posthumanism".
  ¶ 1:54 AM 0 comments

  Tom Sparrow on ontology, from Plastic Bodies.

If Heidegger’s ontology represents a form of correlationism—it would seem that this is how Levinas understands it, although the point is contentious—then Levinasian metaphysics challenges correlationism in the name of an infinity which exceeds the subject-object relation. The challenge operates as a response to what Levinas perceives as the inability of Heideggerian ontology to accommodate otherness, infinity, alterity—that is, to think beyond being. This may not be a failure of ontology in general, however, but a failure only of correlationist ontology. An ontology that surpasses correlationism might not meet the usual Levinasian criticism. Indeed, what Levinas provides, I think, is a non-correlationist ontology, although he is reluctant to call it ontology for fear that his work will be read too closely to Heidegger’s. Putting this worry aside, we may surmise that ontology is not intrinsically reductive, violent, or unethical.

There's hope then.   ¶ 9:09 PM 0 comments

  The program for this year's Heidegger Circle is now available.   ¶ 7:13 AM 0 comments

  I've just uploaded the first update to my Gesamtausgabe app this year.

The improvement I find most useful is that the search box now provides hints as you type:

It also automatically diacriticizes certain words. It'll convert "Zizek" into "Žižek" for those of us without a Slovenian keyboard. It does fuzzy searches when there isn't an exact match.

If you're not already using the app, there's more information about it here.  ¶ 8:59 PM 0 comments

  Old boy stops carrying on.

Harry Beckhough who died last Sunday aged 101, was a colonel in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, a code-breaker at Bletchley Park and was also thought to have been the oldest member of the Conservative Party, which he joined when he was 15 in 1929.

During his lifetime he enjoyed secret chats with Winston Churchill, studied briefly under the philosopher Heidegger, intercepted personal messages between Hitler and Rommel, hung out with the Beatles in Carnaby Street, and even set up fashion guru Paul Smith with his first shop.

He was in Freiburg in 1933. He was "dismayed" to hear Heidegger.   ¶ 7:32 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Public Seminar on Markus Gabriel's objection to dropping a philosophy chair from Freiburg U.

“German Geist now resides in America!,” [Markus Gabriel] quotes, with lament, a former American colleague as having said. The scandal apparently is that German Geist is in exile, “dwelling” — the choice of Heidegger’s technical terminology is unfortunate — in American rather than German universities. In this narrative of the German Geist (what is that, actually?), German spirit has been deposited in American elite universities and, apparently, the American spirit has colonized the black forest: “People believe, that in [American] universities everything is done better, so that we can just dispense with Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, and instead write articles about current American philosophers”.

  ¶ 12:36 PM 0 comments

  No men on suspects list.

Not for the first time, vandals are wreaking havoc in central Europe. Russian police say they're looking for the intellectually minded miscreants who graffitied "Kant is a moron"—along with a flower and heart—on the philosopher's home outside Kaliningrad. With Arthur Schopenhauer dead for 155 years, however, authorities start off with few strong leads.

Round up the usual Randians.   ¶ 6:30 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

INSIGHTS: Think Differently on ontological hermeneutics.

In the philosophy of Heidegger, by virtue of the concept of the Dasein, meaning and understanding are always embedded in world. Hence, the world serves as “the realm where the temporality and historicality of being are radically present, and the place where being translates itself into meaningfulness, understanding, and interpretation.” Understanding orients itself towards what is meaningful. Moreover, meaningfulness resides in being. In other words, understanding orients itself to being for being contains meaning, which is the object of understanding, while nothingness does not. “Understanding and meaningfulness together are the basis for language and interpretation.”

  ¶ 7:51 AM 0 comments

  Nicola Masciandaro on the sorrow of definition.

This problem (being’s being a problem for itself) concerns above all the split between quiddity and haecceity, the what and the that, as the irresolvable terms through which being both appears and remains inconceivable in itself or as a whole. Heidegger explains:

The distinction does not happen to us arbitrarily or from time to time, but fundamentally and constantly. . . . For precisely in order to experience what and how beings in each case are in themselves as the beings that they are, we must—although not conceptually—already understand something like the what-being [Was-sein] and the that-being [Dass-sein] of beings. . . . We never ever experience anything about being subsequently or after the event from beings; rather beings—wherever and however we approach them—already stand in the light of being. In the metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the commencement of Dasein itself. . . . Man, therefore, always has the possibility of asking: What is that? and: Is it at all or is it not?(FC, 357)

Sorrow and definition trace contrary movements across this fundamental distinction. They toss, with symmetrical trajectories, the same coin of this always possible double-sided question. Where definition gives the what of a that (the bird is a robin), sorrow experiences the that of a what (the robin is dead). Accordingly, definition entails a kind of sorrow, elicits a refusal of something that happens against our will, namely, of the substance of the definition that, however proper, we disagree with as not providing the thing defined.

  ¶ 1:58 AM 0 comments

  Andrew Galloway on lighting the Lichtung.

When Heidegger evokes the lumen naturale of man he is making reference to one of two kinds of light. The light of man is a terrestrial light. When bodies with their anima (their vital force) are vigorous and alive, they are illuminated with the light of the lumen naturale. Lumen is the light of life, the light of this world, the light that sparkles from the eyes of consciousness.

But there is another kind of light. Being carries its own kind of light that is not the light of man. This light is a cosmological light, a divine light, the light of the phenomena. Light as grace.

So just as there are two Heideggers, there are also two lights. One light is the light of transparent bodies, clear and mobile. This light is the light of this world, experienced through passage and illumination. But the other light is the light of opaque bodies. It is the light of color, a holy light, experienced only through reflection and indirection.

  ¶ 9:45 AM 0 comments

  Freiburg University remains the same non-drama.

No professorship at the Department of Philosophy will be dropped, and the W3 professorship in question will continue to be funded as previously. The fact that logic and philosophy of language are included in the description of the professorship does not mean that it will be devoted to the analytical tradition of philosophy: There is also a tradition that is compatible with the Freiburg profile, as it includes classical logic as well as classical philosophy of language while at the same time prominently featuring contemporary topics extending to Heidegger and Husserl.

Heidegger taught logic too.  ¶ 10:16 PM 0 comments

  In NDPR, Christopher P. Long reviews Aryeh Kosman's The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology.

Kosman suggests, and rightly, that "the choice of substance as the primary mode of being is not as arbitrary and tendentious as it sounds. . . . It is [ousia's] translation as substance that is the tendentious move". This can be heard, however, only if we attend to the word in its ancient sense, as what is most one's own -- not only one's property, though also that -- but more significantly, the conditioned habits of being what one really is. Heidegger is helpful in this regard: "What is characteristic of the customary meaning is that not only does it express a being, but a being in the how of its being." Thus, the direction to which Aristotle points at the beginning of his inquiry into being is toward a being in the how of its being, toward a determinate being doing what it does, being what it is -- ousia.

  ¶ 11:10 PM 0 comments

  Thinkphilosophy has a podcast on §69 of B&T.

Labels: podcast

  ¶ 6:37 PM 0 comments

  In the LARB, Santiago Zabala and Gianni Vattimo on European nihilism.

Now, if science today has become an instrument of oppression, it’s not simply because its technicians pose as respected officers who organize Europe’s political, economical, and cultural life, but also for metaphysical reasons, because Being has been forgotten, discharged, and annihilated. This is probably why Heidegger was able to predict already back then that “Europe will one day be a single bureau, and those who ‘work together’ will be the employees of their own bureaucracy.” This bureaucracy has become the essence of EU measures, or better, science in Heidegger’s terms.

I couldn't find the source for that quote.  ¶ 4:14 AM 0 comments

  In Spiked, Tim Black explains the enduring appeal of Heidegger.

Environmentalists and avowed lefties love to spew out sub-Heideggerian theses on the irrational rationality of economic development, of people’s duped immersion in an unsustainable way of life, and of our impending climate-driven comeuppance. But is there not another echo of Heidegger’s thought in that strange, obsessive antipathy towards Israel which is so prevalent among the right-on and left-leaning? If there’s a stench of anti-modernity among too many of today’s self-styled radicals, is there not also a whiff of that peculiar brand of Heidegger-style anti-Semitism, too? Strangely enough, then, the Heidegger case sheds light on a contemporary species of anti-Semitism. It’s not the biological version, in which certain races are deemed superior to others. It’s not even the ‘Jews control the world’ one, although that persists. No, it’s the sense that at some level, Jews, in the form of Israel, embody modernity, embody, that is, the very things – the cruel rationality, the uprootedness, the technological ambition, the comfort with capitalism – that so many just love to loathe. Hating Jews, then, still goes hand in hand with an intense disillusionment with modernity.

  ¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments

  In The New Inquiry, Kurt Newman reviews Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism.

The Universe of Things also attends concertedly to the work of Graham Harman. In particular, Shaviro shines a light on the usefulness of Harman’s Heideggerian insight that the image of the “broken tool” grants us access to the inner world of objects. “When a tool, or a thing, fails to function as expected,” Shaviro writes, “the excess of its being is suddenly revealed to us.”

What is this “excess of being?” It might be easiest to think of it as a mathematical remainder. The “excess of being” is what is left after we subtract things from themselves. In the aftermath of the many revolutions of modern physics, we know that if you take, say, a chair, and subtract from the universe that chair, you are not left with nothing. The “something” that is left over—however resistant it is to analysis—is the “excess of being.” A scientist would likely tell us that the “something” merely alerts us to a problem with the way we have framed the question. A psychoanalyst might situate this remainder at the level of fantasy or invoke the language of object relations. A deconstructionist might point to the “hauntological” traces of the chair and its ghostly afterlives.

  ¶ 2:14 AM 0 comments

  Tristan Garcia on death, the end of presence.

Unlike the materialist or naturalist, the idealist makes death the end of being. Death no longer has anything to do with living things, but everything to do with the Idea. Death becomes the condition by which existent things, and not merely living things, can situate themselves outside their identity as human animals. Here, death belongs only to those who think about death, who are conscious of it, or who have an Idea of it. Other entities, like beasts, plants, and amoebas, merely ‘perish’ (according to Martin Heidegger).

But whoever contrasts death with life or with subjective being forgets that death is neither the end of a life nor the end of an individuated subject, but the end of an individuated life’s presence. Dying is irreducible to an operation of organised living things, which come undone, decompose, and recompose. Dying cannot be elevated to the idea of the end, nothingness, or the absolute. Neither a function of the living nor an ontological end, death is the event of an absence of life’s presence.

Death is what can only be absent.

Pp. 410-11, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things

  ¶ 7:59 AM 3 comments

  Yesterday in the Comical of Higher Education, Richard Wolin, an American (ethnic cleansing of natives, racial slavery, mass incarceration of poor and uneducated) intellectual, judges the mauvaise foi of others.

The most recent act of bad faith on the part of Heidegger’s defenders has been to claim that anti-Jewish elements are present in the work of earlier German thinkers as well, such as Kant and Hegel, suggesting that it is unfair to single out Heidegger for harboring anti-Semitic convictions that were widespread. However, such claims are misleading in two important respects: (1) The Black Notebooks make clear that anti-Semitism occupies a systematic position in Heidegger’s thought, which was not the case with Kant and Hegel; and (2) Kant’s and Hegel’s thoughts were predicated on the notion of the "autonomy of reason," and, therefore, unlike Heidegger’s, remained unserviceable for the ends of National Socialism.

Wolin's notion that the core of Heidegger's contribution is contained in the Black Notebooks's anti-semitic remarks merely indicates that after decades of criticizing Heidegger, he still doesn't get what's original about Heidegger's way of thinking.

Wolin is right that Heidegger was a part of the "convenient rationalization for German nonresponsibility". As such, Heidegger is a banal and idiotic figure, just like the characters Fassbinder staged in his BRD trilogy, Lili Marleen, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, who shirk responsibility and so are complicit in the horror.

Heidegger's writings on German-ness aren't of much interest to anyone who is not a German. No one else but specific Germans would think Germans are a master race with some special historical destiny. Nor do most readers of Heidegger think that Bavarian peasants are ontologically privileged, despite the meister's prejudices for his location. Commenting on German-ness is a feature of most German philosophers' works. Once you get past what's noteworthy and original about them, and read the source materials, they are all concerned with defining German-ness. And similarly, they all have trouble fitting Jews into their national narratives. Heidegger's anti-semitisms is not a particularly acute case in that company.

The notion that Kant and Hegel "remained unserviceable for the ends of National Socialism" is easily disproven. Alfred Rosenberg, the actual Nazi philosopher (hanged at Nuremberg), praised Kant ("The euthanasia of Judaism is the pure moral religion.", Streit der Fakultaten, 1798). Alfred Baeumler, the Reich's director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy wrote his dissertation on Kant. Reichsminister Hans Frank spoke of Hegel ("The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck His [Christ] attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill", The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, 1799) as Germany's greatest political philosopher. Shouldn't a historian know that?
  ¶ 1:58 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Not Philosophy on the framing of the Black Notebooks.

Despite any allegiance he gave to the regime in 1933, despite any enduring belief in the principles of National Socialism as he saw them or wanted to see them, and despite his refusal to take responsibility in the manner of apology, the Holocaust was for Heidegger the furthest thing from a celebration of Being that one can imagine, representing a categorical lack of understanding of human freedom; and thus it is not “compatible,” if we must use the word, with his “philosophy.” Being totally withdrawn, absent in the sense of the greatest of that which is possible for the human in their being to be, denied. The natural and human forces of life squeezed through the technological machinery of war. The Jew was deprived of a natural, human death, and thus of life, by being forced into death by technological conversion. It is, indeed, an assault upon humanity and a violence done to the beings that were already present there with their own purposes for their lives.

  ¶ 2:52 PM 1 comments

  Christian Fuchs on implications for the reception of Heidegger in media and communication studies.

There is a logical link between the Black Notebooks' anti-Semitism and the analysis of technology in Being and Time and The Question Concerning Technology. The first publication provides the missing link and grounding for the second and the third. Heidegger’s works have had significant influence on studies of the media, communication, and the Internet. Given the anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks, it is time that Heideggerians abandon Heidegger, and instead focus on alternative traditions of thought. It is now also the moment where scholars should consider stopping to eulogise and reference Heidegger when theorising and analysing the media, communication, culture, technology, digital media, and the Internet.

Political correctness über alles.  ¶ 1:49 AM 1 comments

  Where to spend May day.

The 33rd North Texas Heidegger Symposium

Friday and Saturday, May 1 and 2, 2015
The University of Dallas, Irving, Texas   ¶ 10:41 PM 0 comments

  The LARB interviews Žižek, who has written a new version of Antigone, to be staged next year.

At the climactic moment of the ferocious debate between Antigone and Creon, the chorus steps forward, castigating both of them for their stupid conflict, which threatens the survival of the entire city. Acting like a kind of comité de salut public, the chorus takes over as a collective organ and imposes a new rule of law, installing people’s democracy in Thebes. Creon is deposed, both Creon and Antigone are arrested, put to trial, swiftly condemned to death and liquidated.

Uncage the chorus! Uncanny the daimon!   ¶ 2:30 PM 0 comments