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THE POST-HEIDEGGERIAN AGE

Review products

RyanCoyne, Heidegger's Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)

David FarrellKrell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2016

NITZAN LEBOVIC*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Lehigh University E-mail: [email protected]

Extract

What is it in the drama of Heidegger's existential query that keeps us so busy, nearly a century since its introduction into the philosophical discourse? Is it its darkness? Or is it the absolute demand for a dangerous “opening to the world” while shutting down any possibility for self-disclosure? Or maybe, just maybe, it is Heidegger's critical self-reflection, a stance as remarkable as his refusal to take responsibility and practice self-restraint when considering his own biased views and complacency with the Nazi regime?

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Hannah Arendt Karl to Jaspers, 20 July 1963, quoted and translated in Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, 1982), 304–5Google Scholar.

2 Krell, David Farrell, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks, 1931–1941,” Research in Phenomenology, 45/1 (2015), 127–60, at 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Trawny, Peter, Freedom to Fail: Heidegger's Anarchy, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Cambridge, 2015), 7 Google Scholar.

4 Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), 9, quoted in Trawny, Freedom to Fail, p. 8Google Scholar.

5 Derrida, Jacques, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, 1989), 70 Google Scholar.

6 Scott McLemee, “Back in Black: A philosopher's Commitment to Fascism Raises Controversy . . . Again,” Inside Higher Ed, 30 Sept. 2015, available at www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/09/30/commentary-heideggers-black-notebooks, accessed 7 March 2016. After a first wave of publications about the reception of Heidegger in Germany, the past two decades seemed to extend the history of reception to France and the United States. See, for example, Kleinberg, Ethan, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Berkeley, 2007)Google Scholar; Baring, Edward, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Janicaud, Dominique, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington, 2015)Google Scholar; Woessner, Martin, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2011); and othersGoogle Scholar.

7 Marion, Jean-Luc, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar. For a lucid explanation of this system see the preface to this volume, written by David Tracy.

8 Marion, Jean-Luc, In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, 2012), 132, original emphasisGoogle Scholar. The original was published in French in 2008.

9 Heidegger, Martin, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewifz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, 2012), 125 Google Scholar.

10 Forthcoming in English this year, as Derrida, Jacques, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The French original Krell translated from is titled Heidegger: La question de l’être et histoire, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Marguerite Derrida (Paris, 2013).

11 Trawny, Freedom to Fail, p. 2.

12 As Heidegger argues, already at this early stage, “We call the grounding question of philosophy [what is being itself] . . . because in it philosophy first inquires into the ground of being as ground, inquiring at the same time into its own ground and in that way grounding itself.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1980), 67.

13 Peter Gordon contextualized such themes in relation to the Heidegger–Cassirer debate in Davos. See his Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, 2010).

14 In his “The Concept of Time in the Science of History” from 1915 Heidegger is speaking about the recent “metaphysical drive” which “has awoken in academic philosophy,” and which he identifies with “the will of philosophy to power,” the science of physics, historicism, and the “concept of official character.” See Heidegger, Martin, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. van Buren, John (Albany, 2002)Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 58.

16 Ibid, 60.

17 Szondi, Peter, “Schleiermachers Hermeneutik heute,” in Szondi, , Schriften II (Frankfurt, 1978), 106–30, at 112 Google Scholar. For a more thorough discussion of the topic see chapter 5 of my The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (New York, 2013).