Here and Elsewhere

Abstract

Sudden removal, transport, Entruckung, ekstasis. Time takes us and seizes us—we are finite and, thus, to some extent, impotent. But we must not fail to note that time takes us places. These places are landscapes that while virtual are no less real. This issue of the virtuality of landscape, of the reality of world(s) to which one travels is something of a mystery, a mystery that is shared in common between unlikely bedfellows: Heidegger and Latina feminist phenomenologists María Lugones and Mariana Ortega. As the first airing of a work long in progress, I hope to discuss Lugones’ provocative claim regarding the descriptive import of travel between worlds over and above the ontological justification of the reality thereof in light of both: 1) Ortega’s reading, which deploys tools from Heidegger’s Being and Time while leaving Lugones’ claim intact; and 2) a critical enrichment of the conversation Ortega opens that functions by linking her “multiple self” to Heidegger’s development of Dasein in the human being (GA 29/30), such that: a) “world travel” earns ontological distinction by way of radical finitude (and thus by way of time) and b) Heidegger’s myopic account of need circa 1929 can be diagnosed as such and extended beyond the limits of his intentions to make space for an ontico-ontological manifold that demands recognition.