Heidegger’s “Phenomenology of Failure” in Sein und Zeit

Abstract

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Failure speaks, in its own way-as an adman and therefore with little importance-the crucial logic, or rather it inscribes discourse in that logic. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies Heidegger's Sein undZeit is replete with silent keywords that underwrite unfolding of existential analytic of Dasein in particular and project of fundamental ontology in general. One such keyword is that organizes, among other things, phenomenality of conscience in a crucial second chapter of Division II-Dasein's attestation of an authentic potentiality-for-being, and resoluteness-but also transition from Zuhandenheit to Vorhandenheit and practical-methodological orientation of phenomenology as an impossible praxis above actuality. And yet, when it comes to Heidegger's even most sympathetic of Heidegger's commentators cannot resist temptation to convert it, without hesitation, into or, rather, failures of Heidegger. Besides more substantial failures to account for body and for life of Dasein within boundaries of fundamental ontology, conversion to which I am alluding hardly needs to be explained two decades after noisy controversy. Suffice it to say that another keyword that never fails to surface next to the of Heidegger is silence. Two general, though closely linked, variations theme are exemplified, one hand, in debate between Dominique Janicaud and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and, other, in work of David Pareil Krell. While I do not intend to follow path of conversion of I will merely catalogue least futile of its outcomes. What drives first debate is question of ground for something like a in Heidegger's case. In Heidegger, Art and Politics Lacoue-Labarthe writes: To speak of moral failing \faute] presupposes that there exists an ethics, or at least an ethics is possible. Now, it is probably case today that neither of these conditions is fulfilled.1 He further justifies his doubts regarding actual existence and even possibility of ethics within Heideggerian problematic itself, referring to the general exhaustion of philosophical possibilities that must affect ethical, delimitation of ethics and humanism, etc. It is this very justification that Janicaud finds difficult to accept, despite praising Lacoue-Labarthe's prudence and acknowledging historical caesura that governs his theoretical position. For Janicaud, the only politics liable to unmask Nazism as profoundly criminal is a politics that demands that one 'bend a knee' in front of ethical principles.2 Rejecting such politics in name of Heidegger, we deepen closure of metaphysics, but also augment thinker's concrete moral failure, repeating it. In spirit of Lacoue-Labarthe's approach, David Krell undertakes an immanent critique of Heidegger, which is rather refreshing, notwithstanding Janicaud's justifiable rejoinder: I shall say what I believe would hurt most-that his silence concerning fate of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945 is a of ein Versagen des Denkens. ... I still believe that in Heidegger's texts there is and that when thinking fails an abyss opens right there page.' It turns out that failure of thinking, for Krell, is simultaneously narrower and broader than moral failure. It is narrower than latter because (assuming that hermeneutical violence and physical violence are still radically discontinuous, though this assumption may not be entirely warranted in Krell's case) abyss he spots opens only on page, in internal contradictions of thought, such as inclusion of human beings in category of a standing reserve-the inclusion that challenges tenets of existential analytic of Dasein. …