bodies may allow us to listen and be open to what calls to be thought. What we see or hear when walking through the streets of a city is determined by (disclosive) attunements that dispose us toward looking up, or looking in a certain direction, or not looking at all as we are absorbed in our thoughts. In turn, what calls our attention and makes us move in determinate ways or say determinate things is at the same time dependent on the openness and orientation of our lived body. Places, cities, institutions, gardens, mountains, living beings, and groups of people carry attunements that dispose our bodies, not only how we feel but also how we find ourselves to be oriented and what we are able to hear and to say. Lineages and histories—mixed with “the news”—predispose our bodies also in determinate ways such that an event does or does not spark our attention, our attraction or aversion, or such that we can hear or not what a friend or a stranger has to say. Violence suffered through racial or gender discrimination attunes and disposes bodies in ways that determine how one moves, what calls one’s attention, and, again, what one hears and has to say. Heidegger’s own anti-Semitism is rooted, I would say, in attunements and dispositions associated with lineages he incorporated that disposed what he thought and wrote in his Black Notebooks about world Jewry.
Another possibility of thinking with and beyond Heidegger that has impacted my thinking is one that brings into play his notion of Dasein. In Being and Time, Dasein designates human existence, but in his non public writings of the 1930s, Heidegger attempts to think Da-sein (now written with a hyphen) in terms of a not-only-human site of being in which a world discloses itself in a fuller way. He thinks of Da-sein as a concrete time-space in which truth occurs. Such a time-space (Da-sein) happens only with beings, with words, works of art, or deeds that “shelter” truth and configure a concrete site of being, something that Heidegger elaborates, for instance, in his essay from 1936 “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Thus, we may be struck by words or works of art that open up for us a fuller sense of being or a fuller sense of world. In essays from the 1950s (for instance, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing”), Heidegger writes how things “gather” the world understood as the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals (humans), and divinities. His meditations on how in partaking in the configuration of a concrete site of being, things may occur in a way that they shelter truth or gather a world—these meditations occur against the backdrop of his experience of how currently in the West, things don’t really happen in this way, how they don’t shelter truth and don’t gather a world but are encountered in advance as disposable commodities swallowed up in the demand for calculability, productivity, and enjoyment. In other words, Heidegger’s thinking of the relation between being and beings, between truth and things, is determined by his account of the history of beyng as a further and further withdrawal