Reading Of Heidegger Research Articles

Auto-affection and the Curvature of Spacetime: Derrida Reading Heidegger Reading Kant

ABSTRACT This paper has a twofold objective. First, it engages with the interrelation of time, space, and matter in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida and questions whether and how this interrelation effects the possibility of self-relation. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger suggests that the very structure of subjectivity is constituted by what he calls the ‘pure self-affection’ of time and thus the possibility of self-relation is intimately bound up with the temporalizing of time. In his 1964–65 seminar, Heidegger: the Question of Being and History, Derrida translates this pure affection of time into the more generic term ‘auto-affection,’ which will remain a pivotal reference point for his deconstruction of the metaphysical privileging of time as presence. Derrida shows how the (im)possibility of auto-affection is bound up not only with time but also with space, or rather with the ‘spacing of time’ that he also refers to as ‘the trace.’ Second, the paper moves across the frontiers of philosophy and physics posing anew the question concerning the interrelations of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. With reference to what in general relativity is called ‘the curvature of spacetime,’ the efficacy of materiality in the movement of auto-affection is called into question.

Philosophy of change in Catherine Malabou and in Martin Heidegger: The fantastic of childhood or the childhood of the fantastic

This paper is concerned with Catherine Malabou’s reading of Heidegger’s forgotten triad of change; indeed, in connection to her own notion of the ‘plasticity of meaning’. The paper focuses on the emergence of meaning, on its figuration, and on the moment during which a new image of meaning comes to be seen. In light of this pursuit, the paper will attest to change and to the plasticity of meaning through different images; the first being the plasticity of reading; the second, the plasticity of metaphysics; and third, the plasticity of the ‘motor scheme’ – and especially that of writing. All these cases will be tied together through the notion of the fantastic; namely, through that which instantiates the figuration of meaning, its formation into an image and its visibility. After considering these plastic instances – and revealing some unimagined aspects of the fantastic, like the process of material-metaphoricity, I will relate the plasticity of meaning to the notion of childhood and to the ways through which this notion can be reconfigured.

How Not to Translate—the Untranslatable

This essay proceeds from the assertion that Derrida’s work has consistently been concerned with translation. This has been clearly evident since “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968). This concern comes to the fore in Geschlecht III, where countless features of Heidegger’s language are underscored as untranslatable. This does not prevent Derrida from proposing re-translations, of doing what he describes as “harassing” Heidegger’s language “with wave after wave of touches, caresses, and blows.” Untranslatability, as he argues here and elsewhere, is simply a matter of economy, of the one-word-for-one-word principle, according to which standard every text is untranslatable. But translation is also for Derrida a touchstone for the broadest questions posed by or to philosophy. One such important question or problem is hospitality, which, as he asserts in his 1995–1996 seminar on the topic, is “basically the same problem” as translation. This confluence of the questions of hospitality and translation is particularly relevant for his reading of Heidegger’s essay on Trakl, “Die Sprache im Gedicht.”

“The Great Burden” of Religion

This article aims to reread Jonas’s famous lecture on “Heidegger and Theology” linking it with a still unpublished lecture course on Being and Time Jonas held in 1967 at the New School for Social Research. From the reading of Heidegger’s masterwork, Jonas takes the idea of the “burdensome” character of the existence, which he interprets in terms of a “polarity” between man and his “other” (other men, God, world). Such a polarity is for Jonas the very essence of “religion” (as religamen) and of responsibility. From this vantage point, “Heidegger and Theology,” with its sharp criticism of the theological appropriation of Heidegger’s post-turn philosophy, appears to be a strong defense of the burden of “polarity,” as developed in Being and Time, against its removal by the thought of Being: a Being which is nothing but a mirror image of Dasein. Partially reconsidering his views on Heidegger’s Gnosticism, Jonas turns (the earlier) Heidegger against (the later) Heidegger himself.

Still (Un)Born: Derrida, Heidegger, Trakl

This essay traces the pivotal—although largely unspoken—relation between the mother and language in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. Derrida’s gloss of the “idiom” in Heidegger’s text leads to a reflection on the language of gestation through the family of words linking “tragen” (carrying) to “austragen” (carrying to term). Following Derrida, the essay proposes that Heidegger’s conception of the time of the “unborn” in his essay “Language in the Poem” is the time of the promise and the promise of a future that would not be conceived according to a vulgar conception of time. Heidegger’s idiomatic use of the prefix “un-” in the terms “unspoken” and “unborn” can be read as a temporal inflection that opens up another kind of thinking about birth. The essay concludes by asking how the place of the mother is inscribed otherwise in this unthinking of birth.

Geschlecht pollachos legetai

At an important moment in his reading of Heidegger in Geschlecht III, Derrida wields a pair of semi-technical terms (“polysemia” and “dissemination”) from his own earlier work, and uses them to identify a classical, indeed Aristotelian, vein in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl. This gesture is complex, both in that, in spite of appearances, the Mehrdeutigkeit Heidegger identifies in Trakl is not essentially to do with the term Geschlecht, and in that Derrida’s presentation of Aristotle’s views about polysemia is perhaps over-simplified, or at least leaves open the possibility of a more generous reading. Derrida’s notion of dissemination is shown not to entail a mere exacerbation of polysemia, but a quasi-semantic re-marking of the “syntax” that allows for any semantic effects at all. It is suggested that the fact that this marking can be described by Derrida as “monotonous” might open onto a slightly different reading both of Aristotle’s understanding of pollachos legomenon and pros hen, and Heidegger’s understanding of the Einklang of Trakl’s poetry.

Which Way Back (way back)?

This essay considers together two recent posthumous publications by Derrida: Geschlecht III, and La vie la mort, both of which raise questions concerning translation. In Geschlecht III that is first of all the problem of how to translate the German word, how Heidegger’s reading of Trakl profits from, or loses in its translation, and how Derrida’s reading of Heidegger either does or does not translate Heidegger’s own interpretive practice. Reference to La vie la mort enables analysis of Benjamin’s concept of translation as a form of life that is “not limited to organic corporeality,” and consequently allows me to understand how Derrida’s thinking, very different from that of either Benjamin or Heidegger, takes us way back to something like originary inorganic lifedeath.

Derrida, Heidegger, and the Magnetism of the Trakl House

Derrida’s seminar “The Phantom of the Other” (1984–1985), reads Heidegger’s “Language in the Poem” (1953), which has the poetry of Georg Trakl at its center. Among the principal themes of Derrida’s seminar and/or of Heidegger’s essay are Heidegger’s effort to “place” Trakl’s presumably single, unsung poem; the relation of pain (Schmerz) to poetry; the two “strokes” of Geschlecht, a word that in part means the sexes, the first stroke being neutral, the second being evil; the German language and the Heideggerian idiom; philosophical nationalities and nationalisms; Derridean double-reading.

Perder el sýmbolon. A propósito de un allanamiento

En este trabajo se analiza el apartado “a” del parágrafo 72 del curso de Heidegger Los conceptos fundamentales de la metafísica. Mundo, finitud, soledad de 1929-30, interpretando que la lectura de Heidegger del problema del “suceder símbolo” en Aristóteles puede ser un recurso para exponer en qué sentido nuestro punto de partida para la reflexión sobre el lenguaje tiene que ser el de la lingüística, a pesar de que esta reflexión termine mostrando que esta ciencia no puede constituirse como fundamento último del problema del lenguaje. A tal circunstancia la llamamos “perder el sýmbolon” por cuanto nuestro punto de partida presupone que no hay “secuencias lingüísticas” marcadas de antemano, siendo justamente esa marca lo que indica el “suceder símbolo”. Este trabajo interpreta, a modo de conclusión, que el problema del lenguaje se nos presenta como un fenómeno de allanamiento simbólico.

Thinking Through Sound: Martin Heidegger and Wallace Stevens

ABSTRACTHow is it that things come to sound in language? What demands does the sound of language make on the disposition of thinking? This article motivates and addresses these questions by turning to two thinkers who insist upon the sonorous character of language: a philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and a poet, Wallace Stevens. Rather than subordinate poet to philosopher or philosopher to poet, I attempt to read the two together in tension. Heidegger's resistance to anthropocentric conceptions of language reveal in Stevens the otherwise understated importance of attunement and disposition. Similarly, Stevens's insistence upon the sound of words reveals a significant and neglected aspect of Heidegger's famous etymological analyses. Together, these two authors draw poetry and philosophy closer together by revealing that thought, as language, always involves a poetic, sonorous element and that the poetic sound of language is already an incipient thinking. On the basis of a careful reading of Heidegger's “Language” lecture and Stevens's poem, “Of Mere Being,” I argue that words can be fruitfully understood as the “acoustic gestures” of things and that philosophy, at its best, is able to cultivate a disposition attentive to these gestures.

Approaching Heidegger’s History of Being Through the Black Notebooks

ABSTRACT This essay explores the importance of the Black Notebooks (GA 94-99) beyond their contribution to Heidegger’s political biography. While attention has up to now focused almost exclusively on other matters, the Black Notebooks offer new perspectives on Heidegger’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, and beyond. The essay argues, that any reading of Heidegger’s later work that tries to ignore the question for the History of Being, as it moves from a consideration of the Meaning of Being to the History of Being, is doomed to misunderstand the whole of Heidegger’s thought. Therefore, if one wants to mobilize Heidegger’s thinking as a response to the great questions of our age, which this essay identifies as those of Global Warming, Globalisation, Nihilism and the Nightmare of the Manipulated Human Being, then one needs to force the question of history as the central problem underlying any future potentiality of Heidegger's philosophical impact.

The Reification of Aesthetics: Reading Heidegger’s Destructive Critique of Modernity in Light of his Early Philosophy

The Reification of Aesthetics: Reading Heidegger’s Destructive Critique of Modernity in Light of his Early Philosophy

Heidegger’s Socrates: “Pure Thinking” on Method, Truth, and Learning

This speculative essay develops a unique understanding of Socrates by reading Heidegger in relation to contemporary Platonic scholarship arising from the Continental tradition, which embraces Plato’s Socrates as a non-doctrinal philosopher. The portrait of Heidegger’s Socrates that emerges is related to contemporary education and its drive toward emphasizing an academic focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at the exclusion of the Liberal Arts, with the goal of showing that other forms of “knowledge,” such as the philosophical “truth” emerging from the relationship between the human and the unfolding of Being, while stifled or neglected in STEM curricula, are also crucial to our continued development as human beings. Ultimately, the essay seeks to draw out an authentic vision of paideia by turning to the valuable, albeit limited, writings of Heidegger focused specifically on the historical philosopher Socrates, as opposed to Plato.

Las huellas de Heidegger en La condición humana. Una disputa soterrada en torno de la praxis aristotélica

El artículo muestra que La condición humana de Hannah Arendt puede leerse como una disputa soterrada con Martin Heidegger en torno de la praxis aristotélica. Por una parte, se reconstruyen las huellas de la lectura heideggeriana de Aristóteles en la obra de Arendt, para esclarecer esta presencia invisibilizada en la que se cifra uno de los puntos nodales de discusión con quien fuera su maestro. Por otra, se analiza la reconceptualización de la praxis que Arendt lleva a cabo, lo que supone una crítica a la interpretación de Heidegger y el despliegue de un marco conceptual propio que va más allá de la perspectiva aristotélica.

The Inconspicuous God: Heidegger, French Phenomenology & the Theological Turn by Jason W. Alvis

Reviewed by: The Inconspicuous God: Heidegger, French Phenomenology & the Theological Turn by Jason W. Alvis Chad Engelland Alvis, Jason. W. The Inconspicuous God: Heidegger, French Phenomenology & the Theological Turn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. 249 pp. Cloth, $65.00 Nearly three decades after Dominique Janicaud's 1991 criticism of "the theological turn in French phenomenology," Jason Alvis delivers a sustained defense of the phenomenological viability of the turn by elucidating Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of the inconspicuous. In Being and Time, Heidegger says there is need for phenomenology only because the phenomena for the most part do not show themselves as they are in themselves. The later Heidegger becomes even more attentive to this theme of elusiveness or nonappearance of phenomenology's subject matter. Alvis's book exploits the resources of this Heideggerian emphasis and draws on some of the voices that comprise the theological turn in French phenomenology in order to explore the ordinary inconspicuousness of God. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a different "inconspicuous" theme. The first chapter examines inconspicuous revelation by arguing that Jean-Luc Marion's saturated phenomenon can apply not only to the spectacular but to the inconspicuous as well. The second chapter focuses on inconspicuous phenomenology by offering a reading of Heidegger's later talk of a phenomenology of the inapparent (Unscheinbarkeit). Alvis prefers translating this as "inconspicuous" rather than "inapparent," because he wants to emphasize, against Janicaud, that the concept cannot be identified with the invisible as such. By Alvis's count, there are three possible interpretations of inconspicuousness: first, it may name the hiddenness that characterizes all of phenomenology's phenomena; second, it may name a hiddenness that in principle could be registered in any and all phenomena; third, it may name a hiddenness characteristic of one class of phenomena in particular. Alvis acknowledges that the first interpretation is generally favored, but his own preference is for the third. In this way, the divine would count as one of those classes of phenomena that are peculiarly marked by inconspicuousness. The third chapter attends to the inconspicuous lifeworld of religion in light of Heidegger's focus on world and with reference to Michel Henry's claim that the affectivity of life is prior to the world. For Alvis, the tension between life [End Page 127] and world opens the place for inconspicuous revelation. The fourth chapter focuses on inconspicuous liturgy and the reduction to the inconspicuous place of the Absolute that Jean-Yves Lacoste wields against Heidegger's closed conception of world. The fifth chapter turns to inconspicuous adoration present in Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity. Alvis notes that Nancy's atheism shields him from Janicaud's censure even though his project exploits Heidegger's phenomenology of the inapparent to develop religious motifs, in this case the praise of the ordinary. The sixth chapter joins William Alston, Merold Westphal, and Anthony Steinbock in arguing against William James's reduction of religious experience to the realm of private feeling; the notion of inconspicuous evidence allows for an element of paradox concerning the question of warrant in religious experience. The seventh chapter details an inconspicuous faith by charting senses of forgetting at work in Jean-Louis Chrétien and in Heidegger, including the forgetfulness of being and the flight of the last gods. Alvis then suggests that such forgetfulness operates in the way that the act of faith recedes into the background of the life of faith, an experience he likens to the way the car recedes into the background while driving. The eighth turns to the inconspicuous God by examining Heidegger's explorations of hiddenness in the introduction to Being and Time. Alvis argues that inconspicuous phenomena and inconspicuous givenness provide an alternative to the idolization of incomprehensibility that marks much of the contemporary philosophical discussion of the divine. The Inconspicuous God exploits a central if ambiguous concept in phenomenology to provide a thematic treatment of the mode of ordinary religious phenomena with reference to recent French phenomenological authors. God, the book argues, is not to be found in the spectacular but in the inconspicuous. This is a welcome emphasis in the contemporary conversation about the relation of God to...

Martin Heidegger, Reiner Schürmann. Destrucción de la teo-onto-antropología y post-humanismo

El trabajo de Reiner Schürmann sugiere una praxis teórica anárquica y ateológica para pensar la política en la época de la consumación/agotamiento técnico de la metafísica principial: la destrucción de la metafísica política ontoteológica (pars destruens) y la apertura de una politicidad no ontoteológica (pars construens) para habitar de un modo no sacrificial en la época de la anarquía. En este ensayo abordamos la parte destructiva de su analítica, aportando primero algunas indicaciones sobre el desmontaje de la estructura ontoteológica de la metafísica que opera Schürmann a partir de su lectura de Heidegger: su interpretación fenomenológica de la “verdad” como fantasma hegemónico (nómos hermenéutico-normativo fantasmático y excepcional). Luego intentamos exponer la lógica del gobierno implicada en el carácter nómico de la economía política ontoteológica –la conversión del singular/plural en particular/universal– a la luz de una remisión a la metafísica de Aristóteles, específicamente a su doctrina de las categorías y sobre la relación finalísticamente mediada entre potencia y acto. El horizonte de este ensayo es la consideración de una bifurcación ontológico-política en la fenomenología, en relación con la espectralidad, la cuestión del fundamento metafísico principial del habitar y el humanismo que deriva de ello.

Essence of Technology and Ecological Disaster: A Heideggerian Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

In his criticism about modern technology, Martin Heidegger etymologically examines the word “Technē” and points out that, technology, as a mode of revealing, does not solely refer to the bringing forth of truth through machine-based experiments and exploration, it also contains the poetic revealing inside which a saving power can be found. Following this argument, this paper conducts a textual analysis of Margaret Atwood’s 2009 novel The Year of the Flood and argues that the Compound elites are so delivered over to technology that they have turned everything into standing-reserve, and thereby have fueled the impending ecological disaster in their pursuit of bioengineering innovation. By contrast, a Heideggerian meditative person – Adam One, the leader of God’s Gardeners, illustrates the practice of “arts of the mind” by his words and his deeds, exemplifying the possibility of poetic revealing in an emblematic way. Although the trajectory of environmental deterioration cannot be reversed, the ending of the novel does strike a promising note by referring to music, an old form of fine arts.

What is accounting? The “being” and “be-ings” of the accounting phenomenon and its critical appreciation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reflect a critical perspective drawing from phenomenology, especially informed by a reading of Heidegger, to enhance and extend appreciation of the need to question accounting’s meaning or delineation and how research might be undertaken into the accounting phenomenon and related areas.Design/methodology/approachTo illustrate and clarify argumentation in terms of accounting mobilization and the domain of accounting research, the mainstream and strongly positivistic accounting perspective adopted in the USA is critically assessed. At the same time, the authors elaborate how much of interpretive research (including much of that labeled critical) is also lacking in terms of the perspective articulated here.FindingsThe paper stresses the case for questioning the taken-for-granted and conventional. It promotes reflexivity, cautious pragmatism, attentiveness to the value of the existing, responsibility to difference and otherness and openness to new possibilities as part of a deeper critical orientation.Originality/valueThe paper draws from phenomenology, especially in Heideggerian terms to open-up new conversational domain to debate accounting.

Reading Heidegger.

Heidegger's philosophy is a significant contribution to understanding the meaning of lived experience. Recognizing this, nurses and other health professionals have taken on the research approach of Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology. This requires reading the writing of Heidegger. Philosophers themselves acknowledge this writing is dense, difficult to grasp, uses language for which there is no easy translation, and leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Drawing on commentary from philosophers who seek to read Heidegger and from a research study which interviewed doctoral students who were "reading Heidegger," we seek to show the nature of the experience of pursuing such a challenging quest.

“Become This Whole World”: The Phenomenology of Metaphysical Religion in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6–8

Implicit in Heidegger’s 1920–1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a radical transformation of the very structures of experience. This article seeks to apply that account to a classical Indian discourse on reality and the self, Chāndogya Upaniṣad chapter six. This classical source-text for two thousand years of Hindu theology advocates a new ‘religious life’ achieved through phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of cognition toward the broadest truths of reality, rather than the finite features of the world. The goal is to create a new form of primordial subjectivity with an altered relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. The article proceeds in two parts: The first section brings out Heidegger’s theory of religion through a reading of Heidegger’s 1920 Phenomenology of Religious Life with the help of his lectures, On the Definition of Philosophy, from the previous year. The second section tries to demonstrate the value of integrating traditional textual/historical scholarship in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad with Heidegger’s method. The juxtaposition aims to both (1) foreground the phenomenologically transformative goals of this influential Indian text, and (2) challenge Heidegger’s scepticism about the religious value of metaphysical reflection.