For Heidegger, Antigone’s dying is a “becoming homely” that is unhomely in the proper way, that is, “out of a belonging to being” rather than a being unhomely in the improper way, by being “driven about amid beings without any way out”. By taking on, enduring suffering Antigone becomes supremely uncanny, she makes the uncanny fitting, that is, she is at home with “being unhomely”. As such, for Heidegger, she embodies the truly human, which is to make herself at home in that in which one is not at home, the not-human in the sense of that which is of “no avail”. In championing Antigone’s uncanniness, her way of abiding in the uncanny, Heidegger recognizes her extraordinariness, yet is too quick to convert this into an exemplary trait of humanity. For Heidegger to elide the difference between the way in which Antigone is not at home in the polis, and the ways others are not at home, short-circuits the question of sexual difference and ignores Antigone’s radical exclusion from the polis, ignores that she is not at home in the way that free men are, since they are citizens. Heidegger eclipses this difference, and with it sexual/racial difference, by making Antigone’s uncanniness representative of human’s uncanniness in general.

Pp. 446-7

¶ 2:42 PM 0 comments

Ἀντιγόνη: ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον Ἰσμήνης κάρα, ἆρ᾽ οἶσθ᾽ ὅ τι Ζεὺς τῶν ἀπ᾽ Οἰδίπου κακῶν ὁποῖον οὐχὶ νῷν ἔτι ζώσαιν τελεῖ;

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.
Ismene: Who said that?
Antigone: Hegel.
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett.
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel.
Ismene: I don't think so.
Antigone: Whoever it was, whoever we are, dear sister, ever since we were born from the evils of Oidipous, what bitterness, pain, disgust, disgrace or moral shock have we been spared?

¶ 6:05 PM 0 comments

So when, in his reading of the famous chorus from Antigone on the "uncanny/demonic" character of man in the Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger deploys the notion of "ontological" violence that pertains to every founding gesture of the new communal world of a people, accomplished by poets, thinkers, and statesmen, one should always bear in mind that this "uncanny/demonic" dimension is ultimately that of language itself:

Violence is usually seen in terms of the domain in which concurring compromise and mutual assistance set the standard for Dasein, and accordingly all violence is necessarily deemed only a disturbance and an offence...The violent one, the creative one who sets forth into the unsaid, who breaks into the unthought, who compels what has never happened and makes appear what is unseen--this violent one stands at all times in daring...Therefore the violence-doer knows no kindness and conciliation (in the ordinary sense), no appeasement and mollification by success or prestige and by their confirmation...For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest Yes to the Overwhelming...Essential de-cision, when it is carried out and when it resists the constantly pressing ensnarement in the everyday and the customary, has to use violence. This act of violence, this de-cided setting out upon the way to the Being of beings, moves humanity out of the hominess of what is most directly nearby and what is usual.[Pp. 160, 172, 174, again, & 179]

As such, the Creator is, hupsipolis apolis (Antigone, line 370): he stands outside and above polis and its ethos; he is unbounded by any rules of "morality" (which are only a degenerative form of ethos); only as such can he ground a new form of ethos, of communal being in a polis...Of course, what reverberates here is the topic of an "illegal" violence that founds the rule of the law itself. Heidegger hastens to add how the first victim of this violence is the Creator himself, who has to be erased with the advent of the new order that he grounded. This erasure can take different forms. The first is physical destruction--from Moses and Julius Caesar onwards, we know that a founding figure has to be killed. But there is also the relapse into madness, as in the case of great poets, from Hölderlin to Ezra Pound, who were blinded by the very force of their poetic vision. Interestingly, the point in Antigone where the chorus bewails man as the most "demonic" of all creatures, as a being of excess, a being who violates all proper measures, comes immediately after it is revealed that someone has defied Creon's order and performed the funeral ritual on Polyneices body. It is this act which is perceived as a "demonic" excessive act, not Creon's prohibition. Antigone is far from being the [;ace-holder of moderation, of respect for proper limits, against Creon's sacrilegious hubris; quite the contrary, the true violence is hers.

Pp. 68-70

¶ 12:25 PM 0 comments

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.

¶ 2:30 PM 0 comments

The Greek dramatist Sophocles (who does not often feature in the Post) wrote a play called Antigone (pronounced “Antigony”) which concerned a daughter’s struggle to have her father buried in the earth (and hence, symbolically, reconciled with nature). His enemy is preventing his burial by force, laying him out like game meat in the sun. When she eventually succeeds in her mission she cries: “Weep not for those to whom the night of earth gives benediction”, one of finest translated lines of poetry in the English language. Greek tragedy features the device of a “chorus” – we would probably call it a choir – which chants at various junctures. The chorus in Antigone has this to say about agricultural-military men:

There is much that is strange but nothing
Surpassing these men in their strangeness;
They set sail for war,
in windy night-winter;
Returning they attack with their ploughs
The very earth, their mother, first of all gods.

I have translated the chorus through the German of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who also does not feature much in the Post. Agricultural economists, five-year planners, repetitive politicians, purveyors of concessionary finance who think that “agriculture must be the future”, pay heed. There is much that is strange….You do not need to have read a word of Sophocles or Heidegger, but you should understand about the numbers, and also try to be aware how peculiar the animal is that you are trying to raise and herd; how difficult to simply create from raw materials at hand.

¶ 6:27 AM 0 comments

[F]irst of all, we are going to discuss Heidegger's "translation" and "interpretation" of the stasimon {choral song} from Antigone—the one that opens with the famous words polla ta deina. His "translation" horrendously violates Sophocles' text. It supports and depends upon an "interpretation" that, as almost always in Heidegger, is but a projection of Heidegger's own schemata. It may be true that, by themselves, these schemata can push the often lazy reader to reflect on ancient texts and can "stimulate" her in a fruitful way. In this precise case, however, they lead to an artificial and frail construction that, all the while presenting Sophoclean man as an incarnation of Heideggerian Dasein, is characterized to an incredible and monstrous degree (like everything Heidegger writes about the Greeks) by a systematic ignorance of the city, of politics, of democracy, and of their central position in Greek creation. The inevitable result of this ignorance is obviously a twisted "understanding" of Greek philosophy, which is indissociably connected with the city and with democracy, even when it is hostile to them. Even Plato, and especially Plato, is not only unthinkable and impossible without the democratic city but quite simply incomprehensible as a philosopher without his persistent struggle against democracy. That is something the National-Socialist Heidegger (1933-1945) is neither willing nor able to see.

In his arbitrariness, Heidegger goes so far as to combine an alteration in the text's obvious punctuation with a setting aside of the very words that would show the absurdity of this alteration. Thus, for example, from lines 360-361 of the stasimon from Antigone, pantoporos; aporos ep' ouden erchetai to mellon, "capable of going everywhere, of going through everything, of finding the answers to everything, he advances toward nothing of what is to come without having some resource," he reads—in a shameless violation of the text—pantoporos aporos, ep' ouden erchetai, so as to translate "Everywhere on the road having experience, inexpert with no way out, he gets nowhere." And in order to grant a superficial plausibility to his translation, Heidegger is obliged to omit surreptitiously the words to mellon {the future, what is to come}.

¶ 4:57 AM 2 comments

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter in the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course is governed by this insight into deficient excess together with his specific concern for the German “national.” Though Heidegger does not cite Hölderlin’s “Remarks to Antigone,” he interprets the Letter in terms of a passage that directly resonates with its basic structural framework in contrasting the “primary tendency” – here described by Hölderlin as a “weakness” (Schwäche) – that distinguishes the Greek and German styles of representation: “…our poetic art must be patriotic such that its materials are selected in accordance with our view of the world, and its representations patriotic, differing from Greek representations insofar as their primary tendency is to be able to grasp themselves [sich fassen] because their weakness lies therein; whereas, in contrast, the primary tendency in the modes of representation in our time is the ability to hit on [treffen] something, to have destiny, since the lack of fate, dusmoron, is our weakness.” Notably, however, and in a way that directly anticipates his own 1935 interpretation of Sophocles, Heidegger not only approaches the Letter through the terminology of this passage, he approaches this passage through Hölderlin’s early translation of the opening lines from the second choral ode of the Antigone in which Hölderlin translates the Greek word deinon with “gewältig” (violent). That is, Heidegger translates back into the Letter what Hölderlin’s translation and commentary on the Antigone enact as the German confrontation with the Greek foreign, which is, of course, informed by the Letter. In this terminological crossing over, the Greek endowment of the “fire from heaven” becomes for Heidegger “the having become struck by the violence of be-ing and “the passion for the overpowering,” while the Greek’s task is the “taming of the untameable in the struggle over the work, grasping, bringing-to-stand.” The “Western Junonian sobriety” first captured by Homer is thus here being conceived in terms that Heidegger subsequently takes up in the Introduction to Metaphysics as τέχνη (techne).

Pp. 261-2

¶ 4:46 AM 0 comments

This word πόλις, in its root, identical with the ancient Greek word for "to be," πέλειν:" to emerge, to rise up into the unconcealed" (Cf. Sophocles, Antigone, πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ...πέλει). The πόλις is neither city nor state and definitely not the fatal mixture of these two inappropriate characterizations. Hence the πόλις not the notorious "city-state" but is, rather, the settling of the place of the history of Greek humanity--neither city nor state but indeed the abode of the essence of this humanity. This essential abode gathers originally the unity of everything which, as the unconcealed, comes to man and is dispensed to him as that to which he is assigned in his Being. The πόλις the abode, gathered into itself, of the unconcealedness of beings. If now, however, as the word indicates, ἀλήθεια possesses a conflictual essence, which appears also in the oppositional forms of distortion and oblivion, then in the πόλις as the essential abode of man there has to hold sway all the most extreme counter-essences, and therein all excesses, to the unconcealed and to beings, i.e., counter-beings in the multiplicity of their counter-essence. Here lies concealed the primordial ground of that feature Jacob Burckhardt presented for the first time in its full bearing and manifoldness: the frightfulness, the horribleness, the atrociousness of the Greek πόλις. Such is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence--ὐψίνολις--ἂπολις--far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man. It is not by chance that man is spoken of in this way in Greek tragedy. For the possibility, and the necessity, of "tragedy" itself has its single source in the conflictual essence of ἀλήθεια.

P. 90

¶ 4:53 AM 0 comments

[Heidegger, in The Ister lectures (1942),] undertakes a second reading of the choral ode, in which he develops the complex ambiguities of the “fundamental word,” to demon, while seeking, at the same time, “the original and essential unity” of its opposed significations (which are taken to attest to the contrariety of truth and essential untruth). The oppositional structure in terms of which Heidegger understands to demon may be diagrammed as follows:

Apart from rendering to deinon as “the fearsome,” Heidegger translates it, in a more fundamental sense, as “the unhomelike” (das Unheimische). He defends this translation as “more truthful” than a literally correct translation (including Hölderlin’s “the uncanny”), in that it indicates, for him, what underlies the term’s opposed significations as their hidden unity. “The unhomelike” is here a name for being’s enigma.

Among the opposed significations of to demon (for which Heidegger gives no Greek terms), “the universally skilled” needs some elucidation. Heidegger comments that the skillful mastery at issue is extraordinary (deinon) in that it admits nothing which exceeds its own capacities, so that it insists inflexibly on reducing all things to a common denominator, putting them into a position of mastery. To deinon as “the universally skilled” is evidently a figure of technicity and of its reductive posit or reductive totalization.

Although Heidegger’s second reading of the Antigone remains focused on the first stasimon, he now embeds the latter in the tragedy as a whole, with particular concern for the figure of Antigone and the essential character of the polis. The tragic conflict is no longer played out between technë and dikë, but rather between two modalities of homelessness and homecoming; and, in keeping with this shift, the entire rhetoric has changed from a rhetoric of power to a rhetoric of alienation. Homelessness or homecoming characterize the human being which is now the locus of contrariety.

Pp. 171-3

¶ 4:05 AM 1 comments

Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and the later Gadamer

Heidegger's slow, slow readings of Hölderlin and Antigone show how focussing on the singularity of the text makes the text uncanny, makes it say not what one might think. But more than this (which looks, in summary, like 'Deconstruction 101'), they show how texts think: how, for example, Antigone makes real 'a non-violent revolution in ethics and politics'. This is at the core of the book, and of the New Aesthetics. Michael Wood writes that 'every poem and novel' holds a 'decisive (but speculative) thought … in a unique and unalterable form, every reading or rereading [is] another moment among the essays of our life": it is only by working it through in relation to texts that these can emerge. (Yet to say this is already to make a method of what is an engagement). It is Heidegger's thought -- which saw so clearly the bonds of Western life, and 'almost suppressed but still legible' the escape from these to a future - that underlies the others Clark discusses. If there were time, it might be possible to speculate on the hope that lies in Clark's Romantic Heidegger, a hope signed by Clark's adoption of Arendt's 'natality'. I find this one of the most interesting aspects of the book, in fact: Clark does not forget the Rectoral Address and Heidegger's acts of anti-Semitism, but, like Derrida and others, against the grain, finds resources in Heidegger against Heidegger. Clark argues that Heidegger has no 'school of followers in literary reading' (though critics like Paul Bové tried): this is in part because he 'set the intellectual stakes so high' and because so few in the field read him but also because his work cannot be reduced to a method, and so can't easily be taught.

¶ 1:35 PM 0 comments

Here, the voice-overs by Hegel, Virginia Woolf and Bertolt Brecht are a facile diversion. Kreon’s “new powerboat”, Antigone’s “Bingo”, her desire “to lie upon my brother’s body thigh to thigh” are vulgarities which subvert this most adult, unsparingly formal and radiant of masterpieces. Inspired by Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic but incomparable rendition, Heidegger declared the famous choral ode on the nature of man to be the foundational statement in Western civilization. Elizabeth Wyckoff’s version, one among so many, is lucidly attentive. Why Carson’s “customers” instead of “man”? Why this “hilarious cantering” or the all but total omission of the cardinal theme, that of the unhoused wanderer (apolis), outcast from the civic hearth – a theme which crystallizes the Sophoclean reading of the human condition?

¶ 2:00 PM 0 comments

According to Heidegger, the First Chorus of Antigone presents a vision of the essence of man, of man in relation to the cosmos, a vision that “resonates” within Hölderlin’s poetry. This vision is encapsulated in the word deinon, which occurs at the beginning of the chorus: “Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing/more uncanny towers or stirs beyond the human being.” Unheimlich--“uncanny”-—is Heidegger’s, as he recognizes, unexpected translation of deinon, the “fundamental word of this tragedy and even of Greek antiquity itself”.

What does this crucial word mean? Its meaning is, suggests Heidegger, “manifold”. It is ambiguous, ambivalent, Janus-faced, an ambivalence that revolves around four polarities. With respect to each, one pole represents human nobility, the other a “counter turning,” a tragic turning of the human being against its own essence. The first polarity is between fear and awe; the “uncanny” may be be the object of either. Second, while the uncanny one may be merely “violent” (das Gewaltätige), she may also be “powerful” (das Geswaltige), as a river or a mountain may be spoken of as powerful or mighty. As the latter, but only as the latter, the uncanny “can be something that towers above us and then it approaches what is worthy of honour.” As the violent, it is merely “frightful”. The third polarity is a matter of being “inhabitual” (ungewöhnlich). This may be a matter of being merely exceptionally skilled within the sphere of the ordinary—-skill being a matter of one kind of world “mastery” or another--or else of being genuinely extraordinary. (Schopenhauer calls this a distinction between “talent” and “genius.”) The final polarity Heidegger introduces via a German pun: “unheimlich” (uncanny) is, he suggests, equivalent to “unheimisch” (unhomely). So, the uncanny one is one who is not at home. Yet this notion, too, contains a polarity; one may be “unhomely” either in relation to beings or to Being.

P. 94

¶ 4:48 AM 0 comments

This interpretation of "The Ister" allows Heidegger to form a bridge to Sophocles' Antigone and to revisit its second choral ode. He reworks some of his previous points from the Introduction to Metaphysics lectures pertaining to the "Ode to Man" chorus, especially those having to do with the homelessness of human existence. He reiterates the importance of two different word couplets within the choral song for understanding what it means for humans to be most uncanny (to deinotaton) among beings. Heidegger translates Sophocles' hupsipolis-apolis to mean "towering high above the site, losing the site." In a process of ontological hubris, the community loses sight of its being at the same time that it springs forth from its native origin. Heidegger translates pantoporos-aporos to mean, "venturing forth in every direction, without experience." He claims that a "counterturning" (Gegenwendigkeit) takes place within the essence of the human being whereby one dwells, ecstatically, in a perpetual state of being beyond oneself. Heidegger understands the double axis of the rising polis and the polis wanderer to constitute "the site of the abode of human history," the primordial ground of being human. The two descriptions nearly form the image of a carousel for Heidegger, or at least that of a twister: the polis requires a pole, an axis mundi, around which all the activities of the community swirl (Wirbeln). He suggests that the driving force behind the whirlwind could be the activity of questioning itself, even to the extent that the polis becomes its own question—one that the Greeks were willing to ask, without ever arriving at a definitive answer.

In the Ister lectures, Heidegger adopts an approach to Greek tragedy that waits upon the mystery of Being instead of forcing a polemical confrontation. The poet must remain vigilant in order to catch the first signs of the "holy enigma" (heiliges Rätsel) of the opening of new possibilities for thinking. Long gone are the heroic overtones of the Introduction to Metaphysics lectures where the poets and other creators of the polis violently crash against the prevailing fugue of appearances. Heidegger's treatment of tragedy in the Ister lectures already embodies what he later calls Gelassenheit, the releasement that lets the being of beings be. This explains why Heidegger develops the terminology of the whirlwind for the polis instead of retrieving his earlier image of a polemos between oppositional forces. "What truly stands steadfast must be able to sway within the counter-turning pressure (gegenwendigen Andrang) of the open paths (der offenen Bahnen) of the storms. What is merely rigid shatters on account of its own rigidity." At first glance, these statements resemble the quote from the Republic at the close of Heidegger's 1933 Rectoral Address, "All that is great stands in the storm." The critical difference, however, has to do with the way that Heidegger abandons the heroism that stands firm against the storm. He now advocates following the paths of storms and allowing the rigidness of prevailing thought structures to shatter on their own accord.

The intellectual revitalization of a community depends upon its ability to first recognize what is foreign within what is proper. For this reason, Heidegger identifies "the fatherland" of the German people as their own unique ground, simultaneously haunted by a primordial Greek past. In order to arrive at the home of being German, the community must experience an appropriative event (Ereignis), a festival, whereby their other origin, namely that of the Greeks, provides the conceptual resources necessary for a fresh beginning.

¶ 5:36 AM 0 comments

Hölderlin’s Dec. 4, 1801 Letter to Böhlendorff was written on the eve of his departure for Bordeaux and towards the end of what, in retrospect, would prove to have been one of his richest creative years. While the letter is clearly intended to praise and congratulate his friend Casimir Böhlendorff on the successful execution of his tragedy, Fernando, by in part supplying the terms for that success (“you have achieved so much in precision and suppleness, and not lost anything in warmth”), Hölderlin scholars have read the Letter as addressed more to Hölderlin himself than to Böhlendorff. In falling more than 2 years after his Sophocles translations (and likely shortly before his great Pindar translations), the Letter serves as the articulation of the poetic theory Hölderlin came to work out in the context of those translations. And, as his 1803 “Remarks” to the Oedipus and the Antigone further reveal, it continues to guide Hölderlin’s increasingly radicalized attitude towards translation whose logical, if also eccentrically extreme, extension is to “correct” the Greek original as this is possible only through its translation into German.

Heidegger first cites the Letter to Böhlendorff at the conclusion of his 1934–1935 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” echoing its words in the concluding lines of the course by calling on the Germans to “learn the free use of the national.” While Heidegger is generally unconcerned with the larger context that situates the Letter (and this includes the debt it owes to Herder’s conception of a people and the answer it issues to Schiller on cultural formation), it is central to how Heidegger comes to understand his own encounter with the pre-Socratics and Sophocles, beginning with the 1935 Introduction into Metaphysics. Thus, although Heidegger does not make general statements that connect translation to the specific language of the Letter as, for example, he does in “The Ister” lecture course, his interpretative “translation” of Sophocles’ Antigone with its emphasis on “violence” (Gewalt) carries through on the conceptual framework first developed in the Letter. Heidegger first starts translating in what might be called a “Heideggerian manner” beginning with his infamous translation of the Greek word deinon with “unheimlich” (uncanny, unhomely).

Pp. 257-8

¶ 4:18 AM 0 comments

In order to illustrate Ereignis as the temporal sense of comportment to-the-primal-something (it-worlds-for-me) and as the temporalizing of situations, Heidegger's lecture course of KNS 1919 set up still another contrast in his phenomenological kindergarten. He first described the theoretical experience of a sunrise in astronomy. Next to this he held up the experience of sunrise from a mountain top (for example, in an outing in "the 'free-German youth movement'") and after a battle in Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles's Antigone:

Let us transplant ourselves into the comportment of astronomers who in astrophysics investigate the phenomenon of the sunrise as a mere process in nature and, indifferently comporting themselves to it, merely let it run its course before them. And let us hold up before this the lived experience of the chorus of Theban elders in Sophocles's Antigone who, on the first friendly morning after the victorious counteroffensive, look toward the rising sun...O glance of the sun, you most beautiful one, who / upon seven throned Thebes / ever shine...

In the theoretical experience of the sunrise, whether in astronomy or traditional philosophy, the pretheoretical Ereignis of the it-worlds/breaks-forth-for-me is objectified into a Vor-gang, a pro-cess. Theory thereby dedistoricizes it in two basic ways. Frist, not only are the worlding of the world and the personal I designified and delived into naked and discrete "things," but simultaneously their flowing circular Ereignis put of an unavailable future is "reified" into a "thing-time," into the static presence of an available pro-cess that runs its course before one's all-seeing gaze. "[The situation] contains no static moments, but rather 'Ereignisse,' [events/enownments]. The happening of the situation is no 'process'--as this is observed, for instance, in the physicist's laboratory in a theoretical attitude, e.g., an electrical discharge."

P. 272

¶ 9:29 PM 2 comments

Rainer was getting clumsy. One should, here, ask oneself about the costs of partisan militancy. You will have noticed, or you could not but have done so, cautions, distances between the events, naked and brutal, and the thinking they will be submitted to before taking sides. When I speak of submitting I am not referring to a tyrannic reason that will judge from within itself and doesn't know how to open itself to nothing. The courage of the Greeks to their possibilities, the opening of temporality was a genuine state of openness. The state of openness allows the unhiddenness of the truth, she unveils (a-letheia) for me, I don't push her; I don't subjugate her to the instrumental guns of reason. Truth is no longer the adaequatio between the subject and the object (intellectus-res). Truth presents itself, it unhides and this unhiddenness reaches me through my state of openness. Modernity has razed this away. It has understood reason as technique for controlling entities. It is abominable techno capitalism.

I know you will read this letter for the first time with barely fourteen years of age. I will try to be desperately clear. I know, on the other hand, that you will continue reading it your whole life. I don't want then, to set aside the difficulties of what is not easy. Wherever you don't understand me, read me again. And again. And once again. And if you don't understand, continue. Sometime you will understand. But don't hate the difficulties or fall wounded by them. They are not for attacking nor disdaining you, nor signaling your limitations. They are there because they need to be. Because philosophy (and it is here, despite its author never having reached the peaks that others did, where Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, reached; definitely yes, this is the letter of a philosopher) claims our intelligence and our will, and also our pride. Don't give up. Don't allow yourself to be defeated by obstacles. There are things that are difficult because they are so. Because a letter like this, in which are scheming history, reflection, passion, individual and collective destiny, the relation between a political Führer and a Führer of thought, or between an atrociously ingenious Master and his flustered disciple, between a father and son, between a father and son to whom that father explains the ultimate reasons of ultimate decisions, a letter written to shine some light on extreme situations, cannot have the transparency of the immediate. Everything immediate is incomplete. Everything that doesn't fold on itself, that doesn't break, doesn't endure any ruptures, doesn't grow. One grows, always, between storms, between irreparable breaks, painfully. There isn't "the bad" like there isn't "the good". The just and unjust are confused. Tragedy is not the struggle of good against evil, or justice against injustice. Antigone and Croesus, Martin: that was tragedy, the confrontation between two true legal systems. You will already recognize Hegel in these tumults, in these seditions against the plain, the mediocre. Listen: "But life is spirit, and not the life that scares itself before death and keeps itself pure form desolation, but that which knows to confront and preserve itself. Spirit only conquers its truth when it is capable of finding itself in the absolute withdrawal."

This letter is the story of an absolute withdrawal, of the unhiding of truth, and of its consequences.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:24 AM 2 comments

Those are so many manners in which the incongruity of death is adjoined to life. Strictly speaking, the undertow it exerts no longer gives rise to a differend, but to a discordance—if at least by differend one understand the confl ict of disparate laws calling for an impossible common authority. I speak of a differend only to describe this call and the referents that are posited to fulfill it in an illusory manner. “What will I do?” Antigone asks, caught between the laws of the family religion and those of the city. The generic law is lacking. “What then is electromagnetic force?” asks Heinrich Hertz, caught between two incongruous yet equally useful models. The answer to the question of Wesen is lacking.

Is it reading too much into Heideggerʼs sudden awakening in the mid-1930s to
view it as the attempt to think a discordant originary condition without any affinity with some ultimate nominative-normative authority? He would then be echoing the Sophocles of Oedipus at Colonus. In this tragedy, the most difficult for us moderns to understand, all questioning has ceased. Discordance has been accepted, even affirmed, and it breaks the hero. Something analogous happens to Heidegger after his failing. Concerning the entry into the singular “momentary place,” he asks: “In what way [does this occur] in Greek tragedy?” (BzP 374). He seeks to accept and to assert in being the discordance of appropriation-expropriation. But to learn to retain the labor of subtraction that breaks them, “‘rational animalsʼ must first become mortals.”

P. 551-2

¶ 4:30 AM 0 comments

Capobianco sees a restaging of the basic alternatives of the possibility to “find our place or regain our lost place in the world”, on the one hand, or a fundamental unsettledness, on the other. He associates this latter reading with Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. This basic opposition between a Heidegger that would find a home in the world, as against one that valorizes transgression, is most emphatically staged in the final chapter, which returns to Antigone’s ‘Ode to Man’ in order to discuss commonalities in the readings of Heidegger and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Capobianco’s afterword emphasizes maturation in Heidegger’s thought, from anxiety and homelessness to awe and humility.

In Slavoj Žižek’s view, it is actually a failing of Heidegger to claim that man can be at home. This defense of Lacan is in keeping with a variety of commentators who locate Heidegger’s error not in an awareness of transgression and death, but rather in a complicitous outlook that is not anxious enough.

¶ 7:48 AM 0 comments

Art can change worlds, but art understood as a larger historical event which alone makes possible the existence of individual art works or artists. In short, the first translation is individualist and decisionist while the second is historicist and anti-humanist. It is this first translation, I would claim, that is in sharp tension with Heidegger's work before and after the terrible period of the early and mid-1930s.

¶ 10:49 PM 0 comments