This page contains links to items on the internet about Post-Modernism, its thinkers, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
The links below are ordered chronologically with the most recent additions at the top.
The trace then, leaves one to ponder on Heidegger’s question of the distinction between Be-ing and beings (Da-sein und das-seindes), and in this pondering between these distinction, one will imagine Derrida positing the question itself of différance on Heidegger’s question: why is it that we need to make a distinction between Be-ing and beings in the first place?
Hyper-Heidegger, then, a thinker who makes of himself both a 'danger' and a 'saving-power,' who makes of the effort of reading Heidegger both a form of 'unconcealedness' and 'openness'.
Both Heidegger and Derrida enact the thing's release from the confines of conscious representation, but whereas the former wishes to reclaim the independence and the self-identity of the thing, the latter conjoins, hinges and unhinges, the plentitude of the thing on the abyss.
'Letter on Humanism' is Heidegger's response to the thinking which implicitly or explicitly poses the theory/practice relation as a problem (or which resolves it, as in existentialism, with the privileging of 'action'). It draws attention to what such thinking fails to think and upon which the theory/practice distinction is based, or becomes ontologically grounded in, the common sense, everyday, understanding of the difference between them. In Heideggerian terms, this represents the failure to think the Being of language.
The indebtedness of differance to unconcealment and opening, then, opens up also a field of conscience, of guilt, in which the realm of the gift, the power embedded in the offering - which Heidegger's text as well as the tradition actualizes for Derrida, and his text for his readers - is played upon by the very notion of play, being at stake but also being there in the game.
For Heidegger the story to be told would speak to the condition of the possibility of understanding, or thought, per se. Irigaray's aim is more specific than this: to bring the philosopher to an understanding of the limits that he imposes upon his own subjectivity through a process of exclusion (of corporeality, amongst other things).
[H]ere Derrida is interpreting Heidegger's notion of Ereignis, "en-ownment," the coming-together of Being and human being according to which human intelligibility "happens." According to Heidegger's thinking of Ereignis, beings become intelligible once tacitly interpreted as something; beings show up according to a pre-existing (ontological) understanding of Being ("the clearing") which tacitly filters their showing-up.
[T]he events of September 11th. I call them 'events' because this word seems best to condense and to complicate the two meanings of the term with which I am familiar. First, the usual use of the term in English, to designate a spatio-temporally localizable occurrence. And second, the Heideggerian meaning of Ereignis, designating an unpredictable, uncontrollable outbreak that disrupts spatial and temporal continuities and dislocates and transforms frames of reference. What happened on September 11th was an event in both senses.
The logic of presence is critical to Heidegger's account of meaning. Being involves presence. Presence therefore entails meaning, understanding, as located materially in the time-space settings of being-in-the-world. Since presence is specific to a time-space setting, meanings can be expected to alter through alterations in presence and, hence, in time-space.
Derrida does not pay enough attention to the play of impropriety and the uncanny in Heidegger's discourse on Ereignis and the question of man. In this vein, one could criticize Derrida for completely neglecting Heidegger's reading of Heraclitean ethos in the "Letter" which discloses man's proper dwelling site as anything but proper. From this perspective, man's relation to being should be understood not in terms of proximity or propriety but as radically ex-propriating, unheimlich.
The name Situationism, for example, a name which, in the claim implicit in its naming, "the claim of its name," as Heidegger puts it, invokes the free decisions inherent in the existential "situation" (which Heidegger first described in Being and Time and which the Situationists appropriated from him by way of Sartre.)
[H]ere we encounter the end of philosophy, God is dead, and so on, which Adorno, too, understood as the danger that the programme would turn against itself. This is what so depressed Adorno in his renunciation of the Enlightenment.
'While non-human animal being is subjective and not "worldless" like the being of the stone, the non-human animal is capable of only a limited range and depth of experiential relationships-unlike human Dasein, who is the only being constitutionally able to relate to anything "as such."'
'Heidegger's project in 'Language' seems to be not merely to debunk traditional notions of language, but to try and discover - re-cover, perhaps - what language really is. The latter involves a Phenomenological angle in Heidegger's train of thought, which I will elaborate on further in the course of this essay.'
'In arguing that different ethics are at issue here - the poetic and the strategic - I invoke an argument more complicated than I will be able to develop in full since it relies on an account of the poetic that is indebted to Heidegger and to the pre-Socratics. This qualifies the traditional Aristotleian distinctions between poiesis and praxis while nonetheless recognising that the poetic is a form of making. As a form of making it is however a form of disclosure, a form of making inclined to adopt a non-strategic relation to the anteriority of radical relationality that complexity and postructuralism share.'
'While Heidegger began his writing with a deconstruction of conventional ontology in Being and Time, his lasting gift to the tradition of critical metaphysics was to perform in advance an intense, unforgiving and unremitting deconstruction of his own life in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. After the latter book, having nowhere to go other than to wander in the shadowland between a reflection on Being that in its retreat into forgetfulness was admittedly impossible to concretely realize and a future driven forward by the "will to technicity," Heidegger was the one thinker who literally deconstructed his own project to a point of self-nihilation.'
A good explanation of how the term is used by Heidegger and Derrida.
30 Cyber-Days in San Francisco 1.3
musing about Heidegger, anxiety, and the cyber generation.
Arthur Kroker
Review of RUATV? Heidegger And The Televisual, edited by Tony Fry, Power Institute of Fine Arts, (Sydney: Australia, 1993).
From an Interview with Richard Beardsworth, with questions on Of
Spirit and Heidegger.
From the Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994)
Remarks on Heidegger's call, Ronell's phone book, and
Baudrillard.
From The
Baudrillard Project
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