Meillassoux/Dundee

In response to Graham's post here I just want to make clear that it was not the keynotes themselves who disliked Meillassoux but other people they had known - including a number of reviewers who simply dismissed it as a bad reading of Kant. But I suspect, and it was suggested, that this was something of the old guard being suspicious toward a young philosopher intent on upsetting the apple cart.

Things I learned at Dundee

I learnt a lot at Dundee and not all of it will be going in this post, but there are some things I wanted to put down because I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

For one if understanding Hegel was a computer game it is now clear to me that I have about a 10% completion rate. The sheer rigour, depth of knowledge, and expertise held by relatively young scholars of Heidegger at this conference blew me away. It has made me reassess to what extent I should even be talking about Hegel – enough to remove a section in my thesis on Hegel, and to rework a paper I am collaborating on. I do not see this as a terrible thing, but a chance to now take Hegel at a slower, more humble pace. For this insight I owe Pete a nod because it is clear the guy really knows his stuff, and that his ability to formulate his position and responses is something we can all learn from. The guy is a bit of a modern day Socrates and you had better know your stuff if you want to discuss philosophy with him. I envy his students who are surely getting a proper education in the history of German philosophy. Add to this the long list of other people interested in German idealism that I encountered and I can safely say that I have picked up more about how to address this area in two days that in the past year or so.

Secondly I learned that phenomenology is slowly coming to be seen as a kind of passé, outdated position and that perhaps my future papers should really only draw on my knowledge of phenomenology – an area that I did not exploit enough in my paper and that perhaps left me grasping for the right words when I needed them. Whilst it is fun to lose one’s safety net from time to time I think the audience is better served when a paper comes from a more secure, balanced position.

Third: The hidden thinkers of ‘whatever was going on at Dundee’ [speculative realism? Object oriented philosophy? Lacan-Zizek-Badiou-Deleuze-Sartre?] are Hegel and Meillassoux.

Fourth: That After Finitude is, according to the keynotes I got to speak to, not considered a great book at all, and when it came for review was considered a woeful misreading of Kant! The keynotes seemed baffled by this young generation of Meillassouxists.

Fifth: Having listened to Graham Harman’s paper, and in discussion with him, I tend to agree that we do live in the ‘age of the subject’ and that I find points of convergence with OOO on this point. I also agree with Graham about the autonomy/sovereignty of philosophy and metaphysics from the natural sciences – and I did not expect it to arise, but also from mathematics. I found myself abusing mathematics in the paper – not something I expected to happen, but it came out of my musing on my favourite graduate paper at the conference by Nathan Coombs.
Sixth: The conference might be a kind of ‘first’ in terms of blogging. If I listed all the bloggers I met over the two days then I would spend the next hour linking to blogs, but suffice to say that I think the number is close to ten bloggers that I regularly read.

Seventh: Academics, as I long suspected, make up the majority of dubstep fans.

Miguel Beistegui confirmed for the Dublin Heidegger Conference

We have confirmed out first speaker for the Twenty-First Century Heidegger conference Dublin (Sept. 10-11th 2010). Miguel Beistegui (Warwick) will be our first keynote speaker. Details of the second speaker should arrive soon. He will speak on Heidegger's relation to Chilida, sculpture, space, and place.

Dundee and other announcements

I'm more than a little zonked today after the Dundee conference which involved not only the best collection of papers I have ever had the privilege to sit through, but also a fun social side that was far more inclusive than any conference I have ever attended. Everything seemed to go right from the spot on questions, quality of keynote speakers (Harman, Hallward, Johnston, Williams), and right down to who turned up. I've taken the time to post the paper I had originally intended to give because I ended up doing a bit of a freelance paper on the day that I was not happy with in retrospect. I'm actually a little horrified that it will be online in audio format for all to hear. Here is a link to the paper - incidentally Meillassoux has agreed to read the paper and comment on it so the whole thing has been immensely helpful even if I am ultimately dissatisfied with how I delivered it on the day.

I was greeted with some other good news today which is that I have been accepted to take part in the International Summer School in German Philosophy at Bonn this summer (14-25th June). I have lots of work to do if I am to get a grip on what is required for such an intensive seminar but hopefully all will be in place by then. Sadly I had to turn down an acceptance for a paper on Aliens (the movie) for the Warwick Film Philosophy conference due to a kind of over-commitment to things on my part, but I am sure they will get by without me!

I will have more to say about Dundee tomorrow especially in how much it revealed my overall ignorance of German idealism and the general humbling effect it had on me to be surrounded by so many sharp minds for a weekend.

On a final note the date for the Dublin Heidegger conference is the 10-11th September 2010 so if you want to submit keep those days free! More details in the next few days. Things are quickly coming together for it so I hope to have the CFP out by month's end if all goes well.

Heidegger and the Social

This is a response to this thoughtful and excellent post by Chris Vitale arising from our discussion of Heidegger, politics and addressing social inequality.

I suppose this arises because of how I see philosophy and I have some small criteria that I like to work within: one’s philosophical position must be consistent and unless one is doing first philosophy, i.e. metaphysics, then it is perfectly fine, I think, to work on a small issue, to limit one’s scope, and to see whether one’s position can remain consistent and that what one intends to address from this position, post-critique, is actually entailed by what one says. Since my own concern is generally with the nature of the real, with attendant concerns regarding technics, nature and mind, then ethics is not something I feel fits into my limited remit. This does not mean that one day I do not want to address ethics. I do, but for now I am nowhere near reaching a complete standpoint that could do this issue justice. So Chris is right that my position could never be seen as complete. At the moment I operate with a specific set and that set has its own generality, but it would need to expand the set to fit Chris’s criteria.

And I guess, for the moment, this puts me at odds with Chris’s question: “why did I as an individual and the socio-historic conditions that created me, make me want to write this sort of philosophy? What does the philosophy I produce say about my place within history? What are the conditions of production of my thought?”

I may be wrong but these seem to be Deleuzian questions. This is the philosopher as conceptual engineer produced and producing. I don’t think I am in a position to answer these questions at the moment. The first question seems to require an almost bird’s eye view of one’s own development that comes with age. Maybe I am a bit too young to see the contours that would make the answer clear to me. Ditto for the second question, but here perhaps I can offer an idea of what I think I am contributing to and how that contribution is sort of pre-destined according to the broader intellectual developments I find myself in. To be interested in the ‘real’ is a fairly contemporary question about finding oneself in a hyper-deflated world of cosmological, deep time evolutionary vastness where one no longer has recourse, not even negatively, to the tools of the trade that philosophers once took for granted.

Paradoxically this has created a kind of new mini-tradition developing alongside the broader one with roots, I would argue, in German idealism (transcendental method) and proceeding toward an increasingly immanentist account of the empirical and the subjective (always for philosophy semi-transcendental) and it culminates in Deleuze, Badiou and some others that I am still grappling with – thinkers who often rewrite the tradition themselves (Stoics moving up the scale for Deleuze, the Cartesian lineage re-emerging in Badiou – and Lacan). All of this can also be seen as a push away from phenomenology which to me has taken on the hue of a necessary enemy to be overcome meaning that one is also always post-phenomenological (something I struggle with but am fine with overall).

All of this has a political side too – and personally I think politics can tend to skew the [philosophical] progress at work here. Badiou is a case in point – I struggle to understand the basis of the ‘event to come’ – even with the mathematics in mind it just seems odd to me and ditto for the latest turn to category theory. But I do like his emphasis on truth, a very old school metaphysics, and commitment to the idea that philosophers can reach the real (even if his real is a little bit ‘empty’) and so on. I suppose this is where my psychology would come in. I’m not a big fan of Nietzschean/Freudian/Lacanian trends in continental philosophy. Maybe this is the phenomenologist in me speaking (against psychologism!), but in another way I enjoy reading them all (Nietzsche was my entry point to philosophy and Lacan has served me well in understanding Badiou and Zizek and I must address their notion of the real too of course). I also have a lot of respect for Deleuze’s radical empiricism which returns to philosophy an important sense of the world working on us (which can be considered social I think but also in a more epistemological sense of sensibility and so on).

I suppose, as they say, self-knowledge is the hardest thing, and to discover the drives and forces operate through one seems immensely hard, but I like the idea of the subject shot through with drives and forces but this seems to me a job for perhaps psychoanalysis or the psychologist [and I am neither by a long shot!].

I agree with Husserl that logic has its own remit or domain separate from psychological operations and that we can build knowledge across our own affected states of mind to reach genuine knowledge [in many ways this is what drives me personally: how is knowledge about the real reached – is it intersubjective or something different?]. And like Heidegger this to me would be the sovereignty of philosophy – its ability to generate knowledge that might (might!) transcend all those manipulations that are being worked on you [this would be to me the essence of human freedom and I find affinities with German idealism here and its empty subject].

I do however think that one can legitimately argue that by studying the liberal arts we are supposed to be against all forms so illiberalism. This is probably a social position that I operate with without making it explicit and clearly your questions have allowed me to get an idea that in some way I am, in fact, guided by some social position although maybe against inequality is not the right way of putting it – maybe against all forms of dogmatism [my point is that you have shown how philosophy can be made to include the social via questioning and where I think we all come to agreement would be around something like the simple important of questioning]. It also tends to happen that I encounter dogmatism on the right far more than the left –so in a way I would be happy to say I am sympathetic to the left.

But I feel all this is straying from philosophy and bringing me more to my own personal feelings on politics which I try to exclude from philosophy. Regarding phenomenology and whether it can restore questions of history and psychology well I think both Husserl (the Crisis does indeed go beyond the epistemological toward intersubjective knowledge and ethics) and Heidegger do bring history back into the picture. I don’t know if Husserl ever had a positive thing to say about psychology but Heidegger did have a long engagement with the psychoanalyst Boss (Zollikon Seminars) and there was even the development of Dasein-analysis (still practised by Miles Groth I think who is also in New York – I have not contacted him in some time, but he knows more about this than anyone else I know – plus he has some great translations of Heidegger would checking out).

Oddly enough I would never have even considered understanding Deleuze via ’68 and this must be something to do with our different outlooks! So perhaps I am, as you say, making a kind of statement by not even thinking about this aspect to Deleuze. And as a side note as I also realized, and this I cannot justify with evidence, that the American philosopher is also faced with a very direct social and political world, to be, as it were, in the heart of some astonishingly authoritarian impulses etc. In Ireland I don’t really have to think about politics because it is not only a small stage but we don’t have a strong right wing here really – corruption, ineptitude, racism, and sexism sure, but nothing as drastic or pressing as in the States. So maybe it is easy, all too easy, for me to avoid all this and to operate at a distance. These are just some vague thoughts of course.

As to Hegel well as I am sure you know I am somewhat of a Hegelian at heart. You say:

“How can we write about philosophy when the world is so fucked up?”

“Are we thinking (our context)?”

Of course I must say that for me Heidegger does not consider thinking about the social or the context to be thinking proper. For him it is always thinking what is essential and what is essential can often be indifferent, cruel and brutal. Hence his callousness on social issues and stubborn refusal to address his Nazism. Hegel I think is also true to this way of thinking (they are both phenomenologists in this crucial sense) which recognizes that history is a slaughter bench, but this is but a facet of history and to know history philosophically would be a knowledge that required a form of quietism. But we do not need to be Hegelians or Heideggerians on this – by any means! They are both peculiar to their time (context) and less aware, as we are, about the ‘global’ – and tellingly Heidegger is an ant-global village type. He just wants the old village to remain intact and we can also include Heidegger’s hostility to technics and communication to be a misstep (since here we are talking about Heidegger online).

But can one think about philosophy and still know that the world is fucked up and by extension bracket (!) the social in order to focus on the essential content of philosophy? I am sure it is possible; people do it all the time, and with coherent results. But I see no reason why anybody who begins with this focus cannot at some point reintegrate their social vision on this basis. But this does not mean that the previous thinker is not thinking – they are thinking within their criteria and the potential is always open to expand upon their groundwork.

I already feel that there will be responses, strong ones, that I cannot do justice to. Here I must open myself up to dialogue and with a bit of humility allow myself to be taught by those who have undergone a process of commitment to inequality.

So am I forced to end a kind of appeal to my ‘being on the way.’ I feel that there exists an almost impossibly difficult bridge to cross from my purely epistemological, occasionally ontological, interests and the whole world of ethics, social justice and all that entails. So I will simply relay an experience I had with an older lecturer on a similar issue not too long ago. I attended his lecture on literature and philosophy and remembering asking a kind of muddled question about how he now sees his older work [he had worked on mind for decades but had turned to literature within the past few years] and especially whether the older work had any kind of effect on his new concerns.

So he gave me a kind of explanation about how he had always wanted to work on literature but by sheer chance he had been offered a place in philosophy at grad school and so forces had sort of led him down this path, but he did add that enjoyed his time i.e. he didn’t exist in some kind of hellish career doing the wrong thing. Later in the bar he asked what I was working on and I told him about my interests in the nature of the real, some stuff on mind, and phenomenology. He politely nodded and gave some advice and reading recommendations, but I could see that each response required that he ‘go into himself’- as if channelling a younger more philosophically inclined version of himself. I then asked, perhaps bluntly, whether he now considered these issues somewhat pointless. His answer was that at some point one must pass through a kind of necessary over-emphasis on epistemology because it allows one to grip on the contours of the...not philosophical life...but intellectual outlook – that you kind of have to seek out impasses for a while before you synthesize your doubts and develop a more positive form of thinking that recognizes what you can do (in his case tease out the philosophical content embedded in much poetry).

So I think I might be still trapped in the first stage, but I do hope to get to the next and perhaps it will allow me to doggedly pursue the social angle, but for now I do not recognize any kind of event signalling from ahead that this is my likely direction. I simply do not know where I will go next, but I do suspect the path will become clearer within philosophies' purest form: dialogue – just as Chris’s response has cracked open the door a little bit.

anotherheideggerblog on tour (Sweden)

Here is the poster for the Nordic Society for Phenomenology conference 2010 in Stockholm in April. I'll be giving a paper on what anti-correlationism means for the contemporary phenomenologist - by complicating the themes of death, extinction, time, temporality etc. via the principle of unreason. I'll have a short paragraph on it in the Dundee paper but for obvious reasons the Dundee paper will be more overtly Meillassouxesque.
My panel is called History and Death! Very dark stuff indeed.

If you are a phenomenology scholar you really ought to go. Not only are the keynote speakers awesome (Malpas!) but you would get to also see, from my own department, Dermot Moran and Tim Mooney (of the Phenomenology Reader and Intro to Phenomenology fame).

Kaufmann

There is a bit of discussion going on about Walter Kaufmann by Peter and Graham. This came up via a discussion of Popper which made me think of an essay by Kaufmann that I read a few years back in relation to Hegel. Graham provides us with some info about Kaufmann being in Egypt [there must be an article in there about philosophers and Egypt. I think one of Plato's dialogues begins with a story about the origin of Athens relayed by someone who has just been to Egypt so it is, in a way, the source or philosophy proper and we also get a lot of talk about geometry coming via Egypt].

But it is what Graham says about his influence on Nietzscheans that brought me back to my first encounter with philosophy:

''He was the academic hero of every young Nietzschean, and perhaps even the first scholar many of them ever read.''

This is true even now. The first book of philosophy that I owned was Kaufmann's Portable Nietzsche of . I utterly devoured that book and I quoted it in almost every essay I wrote as an undergrad (which seems rather cheesy now). So I am eternally grateful to Kaufmann for turning me onto the German philosophical tradition and for rescuing Nietzsche from a reputation as a Nazi philosophy and trying to reintegrate a presumed Nazi philosopher must have appeared odd, but he did an excellent job at picking apart the fantasy Nazi Nietzsche [without leaving aside Nietzsche's obvious elitism etc. but this is a different, far less dark matter than being a philosopher in line with NS].

It is weird that Kaufmann is from Freiburg. That is one of those really interesting connections for me since my life is tied up so oddly with Freiburg. This is not just a philosophical matter for me due to Husserl/Heidegger but my girlfriend was born and raised near enough to Freiburg that she now attends University there. My supervisor did his PhD there. The connections are many. I first went there to attend language classes and I am spending a semester there from October. So it is nice that things will come around full circle - that is I will likely finish my PhD in the home town of the very man who first brought me to philosophy!

Post-Continental Voices

Here is the cover for Post-Continental Voices. I think it looks pretty nifty:

Heidegger as the Phenomenologist's Philosopher

This is partially a response to Chris Vitale and partially a response to discussions I’ve been having on twitter about Heidegger and National Socialism.

First it seems to me that the Heidegger Chris encounters can be considered a particularly language-based Heidegger (a post-structuralist Heidegger). This seems to have been reinforced by reading Heidegger in the German with all the wonderful wordplay that comes with that experience and certainly there are thinkers who have seen in Heidegger a potential in language itself – Heidegger as a kind of defence of the manifest image. And I must admit to being a little saddened that people are turned off Heidegger on this basis since, at least personally, language is nothing more than a tool in Heidegger’s kit, but by no means his methodology and certainly no more than the starting point or impetus to the questions.

So I must admit that it is not Heidegger’s language that appeals to me as a phenomenologist. I agree with Chris that following up language to a kind of excessive level is not the best path. It leads to a kind of group code that is to be transmitted among ‘those in the know.’ And Heidegger does indeed take on a kind of holy scribe persona here - to be venerated and repeated and veiled in obscure language wrapped in impenetrable tomes on some equally obscure part of his thinking. All of this is to be vigorously avoided and I think most new or young Heideggerians would agree with this. For example take Gary William’s explanations of Heidegger: reasoned, clear and to the point. Or take Harman’s deflation of Heideggerian scholarship. There are many others such as Miles Groth who tries to translate Heidegger in a pretty direct way.

As for Heidegger as Cartesian I must admit this is not something I have heard before in relation to Heidegger, but perhaps it looks this way if you have read more radically non-Cartesian thinkers such as Bergson or Whitehead. In fact I began my thesis working on how Heidegger’s anti-Cartesian stance had helped influence deep ecology. But I think this is better dealt with by Gary who is far more in tune with Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism suffice to add that the first phenomenological accomplishment in SZ pivots upon seeing ‘worldliness’ via a contrastive procedure with the ‘innerworldly being’ of Cartesian metaphysics.

What I am in a better position to address is the critique of Heidegger as cutting himself off from history and context. It is clear that Heidegger does not have much time for many ‘everyday’ and social problems (labelling them as idle, ontic, inessential matters) and he can be extremely callous in dismissing issues such as homelessness (making talk of dwelling seem perhaps odd – to dwell one must have a dwelling...). I must admit that since I am not personally a Marxist or committed to the idea that philosophy should address inequality it is perhaps easier to overlook Heidegger’s indifference than for someone who is (though I would note that I do think inequality should be addressed I personally do not think philosophy has much to offer in this regard).

There is, for Heidegger, a crucial difference between the historical (geschichtlich) as a happening (das Geschehen) and the historiographical. The latter tends to view history through as lens, often social or political, and seeks to find in history something to confirm its theses (i.e. a Marxist analysis that wants to show that history operates with upheavals). I don’t think Heidegger has a problem with the latter approach, but I also think he views it as slightly un-philosophical since it does not want to let the phenomena of history emerge (what he really means is that it is an un-phenomenological stance but Heidegger tends to conflate the two and many Heideggerians do this as well which would be my own personal gripe). That is the philosopher is not supposed to tell us how historical facts can be marshalled into ideas and put to use, but should be able to tell us (philosopher as phenomenologist) what the essence of history is itself. And yes this does tend to rely on a certain degree of abstractness, but it all depends on how one comes to philosophy. As a phenomenologist I am not supposed to allow assumptions to filter in and activism would certainly commit me to a position that was not presuppositionless so that I could get a grip on how the phenomena emerges in its own right. I suppose this makes Heidegger the phenomenologist’s philosopher.

Where does Meillassoux stand?

Find out!

Update

I just wanted to provide a quick update on why I have been posting so little. The long and the short of it is that I have been feeling a little worn down. The past few months have brought about a kind of breakthrough – the point that people who have completed PhDs talk about where one can see the end in sight, have established their question and know what needs to be filled in. There are a few projects I intend to tie up: I need to complete my papers for Dundee and Stockholm (March and April respectively), write two articles (one on Deleuze, the other on Heidegger and technology), organize the Dublin Heidegger conference (coming in September, if you are interested do drop me a line), get the first issue of Speculations out, and complete the sole authored book (end of April). I hope to have the bulk of this work done by the end of April or May at which point I will make a long run toward completing my PhD by September with a hopeful submission then to coincide with the submission. Then I’m off to Freiburg for a semester as part of the collaboration project we have here where I’ll work on the Heidegger-Schelling connection (a project I have wanted to complete for some time), and I am not sure what this will evolve into but it will give me time to survey the job market and so on.

So I am not sure what role the blog will play over the coming months. I have some stuff on Meillassoux coming up for the Latour blog, and a litany of others promised posts on Hegel, Derrida and others. But I will be posting longer, more engaged pieces rather than regular tidbits for the moment. Of course I will also be using this space to inform people about the projects listed above.

Another Defense of Heidegger

This time from the always excellent Mind and Brains. Gary shows Heidegger's importance in relation to contemporary debates of mind.

The New Book (with zero)

So I have just sent off the contract for the book I will be publishing with zero sometime this year. I’m not really sure what it will be called but I do know what it contains. Perhaps readers can help suggest a relevant title. The subject matter of the book will be ‘the real’ or the realism/antirealism debate, but the argument of the book is that there have never been many philosophers who can be considered antirealists – especially if one takes as the criteria for realism a commitment to mind-independent reality. I intend to set up the ancestral argument in the second chapter and then show how various post-Kantian thinkers would have answered it should they have had the chance (and I include Meillassoux himself among the realists). In chapter 3 (the response chapter) I plan to line up a bunch of ‘correlationists’ including Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and McDowell and defend them as realists. I will end by situating Meillassoux alongside the correlationists.

In Defense of Heidegger

This is a response to Chris Vitale's excellent post on Heidegger as most overrated philosopher. I've left a comment over there but this seemed long enough to warrant a post here too.

“That is, there’s so many folks online whose thought I DO respect that like Heidegger, that I’m probably missing something. And I’m curious what that is, and figure you all can help key me in a bit. I’m curious, that’s what it comes down to. Was Heidegger essential as a path to where you are now, or do you think he has something lasting to say to us today? That’s my question.”

I must admit that when Harman asked this question I had the nagging feeling that everyone was going to say Heidegger. Like most ‘Heideggerians’ (and no matter how far I stray this is always how people discuss me in the real world) I often find myself in a position where I am either defending Heidegger (to non-Heideggerians) or trying to call in the jargon (among Heideggerians). To the question as to whether Heidegger was the essential path to where I am now I would go even further (to the end!) and say that it is quite possible I would not even being studying philosophy if not for a lure of Heidegger. The odd thing is, and here I have to be careful, Heidegger has nothing to say to us today – as such. For me, and this is just a personal stance, Heidegger is a via negativa. He leads you down every dark path imaginable and you keep coming back for more. But I should say a few negative things that I think about Heidegger before defending his more positive aspects:

Heidegger is a elitist, Heidegger is immensely conservative leaving aside the obvious for a moment, he has little or no concern for social issues, there is no ethics in his work (despite god knows how many attempts to find them there), he is a fetishist for of the rural, he uses a horrible etymological method from time to time that barely passes the standards of intellectual honesty, he is in thrall with some obviously nonsensical connection between the ‘Greek’ and ‘German’ people, his jargon (which can be understood with effort) alienates many younger/newer readers making dialogue difficult, he is a monologue style thinker, and I could go on…
And yet Heidegger is also, and I am absolutely certain of this, the greatest thinker I have ever read. I will get to why in a moment, but first I want to address some of the tangential points.

‘’So, its with that in mind that I followed Paul Ennis’ recent post, and read a nice recap by Dreyfus and Wrathall of Heiddegger’s ’greatest hits’ that he recommended, to see if a contemporary take would re-remind me what’s so cool about the guy. And I’ve studied Heidegger with some pretty Heideggerrean folks, like a semester long seminar I took once on Heidegger and Nishida by Chris Finsk, in addition to lectures by Dreyfus and seminars that addressed him by folks like Avital Ronnell, etc., in addition to all the requisite reading on my own on the side during grad/undergrad.’’

Just on this I would say that the Heidegger you have been exposed this is a Heidegger that, for the most part, leaves out precisely the good bits in Heidegger in an attempt to make him palatable to an Anglo-American audience. In fact I would go as far as to say that Dreyfus and Ronnell miss exactly what is essential in Heidegger and spend far too much time trying to make him a thinker of the ‘everyday’ or ‘public space’ or worldhood etc.

‘’For those of you who took the Heideggeran path, do you think its because of the contingent formations of the programs of study you were in? An emphasis upon the Heidegger path? Would you have preferred a different one now in hindsight? Do you still see Heidegger as so essential, or was he simply a stepping stone in your development, and if so, why? Will we still be talking about Heidegger in 100 years, and if so, why?’’

To the first question I took the Heideggerian path because having read B&T I couldn’t imagine writing about anything else. So in a way the path was prescribed contingently in that the department did teach Heidegger and in a very old-school way since my department is a classic phenomenology department to the core (and not as I hear in America a comparative lit. department –and I immensely respect how they have managed to hold against the Anglo-American dominance of the philosophy departments). Heidegger was not the way we were pushed though. It was far more likely that’d I’d have ended up doing Husserl or even critical social theory but there was enough Heidegger there to allow me to follow him up. I couldn’t ask for a better basis than Heidegger for (tellingly) post-Heideggerian philosophy. I watch friends working on Derrida or Adorno struggling to read Being and Time because they need that background, that relating back to Heidegger that marks the contemporary battleground (admittedly less and less everyday) and I am glad that I have that basis in place. For example at the moment I am working on Deleuze and I can see how DR comes out of a kind of atmosphere of difference relating to Derrida who relates back to Heidegger and to his essay Identity and Difference or Heidegger’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics and the framework is always there. If for nothing else starting with Heidegger has relieved me of some heavy lifting down the line. For instance I would argue that in order to understand Derrida you must understand the later Heidegger. Like anything else context matters and Derridean themes have as their context in the later Heidegger (amongst many others of course including Husserl for sure).

It is important to situate Heidegger in order to defend him. He only makes sense as a thinker of and within the tradition. He is self-consciously an ‘inheritor’ of the tradition – hell he even seems to be putting himself into it as it were. Now if you don’t agree with Heidegger that the subject matter of philosophy is being then you will never find him all that interesting. If you are unwilling to bracket all other questions in the name of this pursuit them you might even find him tedious. And if you find yourself talking like a Heideggerian you might find yourself saying things like ‘the thesis of Heidegger’s philosophy is that being is no thing or Nothing’ or ‘Against the charge that philosophy is useless I say Yes!’ etc. So why is this worth exploring? Well you can learn a lot from how Heidegger does philosophy.

Because he is a slow and attentive writer, who refuses to be dragged along by trends or currents, he brings you, in the best phenomenological style, to the matters at hand – and nothing else besides. He also teaches one that at best a thinker can only properly unearth the contours of a single problem/question and that all answers are, at best, provisional. This has a way of forcing you to discover precisely what it is that you are concerned with personally and how to unfold the problem you must first find the right way to pose the question (you can think of Heidegger as a more traditional version of Deleuze i.e. in the same way Deleuze seeks out thinkers on the edge of philosophy Heidegger seeks out the edges of the thinkers at the heart of philosophy).

But there is no reason why you should take this defence from me since I am personally someone who reads Heidegger in an odd way (although I am discovering like-minded souls thanks to the internet) i.e. as a realist. This would put me at the fringe of phenomenological orthodoxy somewhat – Heidegger wise but perhaps not with say Husserl and others – but again this is what makes Heidegger interesting. He is a spur to thought. Just think and here I am going into rhetoric, of his influence: Derrida, Levinas, Sartre, Marion, Gadamer, Arendt, Sloterdijk, Stiegler, Nancy, Henry...hell even Dreyfus! And with regard to politics think about just how many of these thinkers are Jewish and then add to this the influence on people like Celan. What they all find in Heidegger, I would wager, is a form of doing philosophy that takes philosophy immensely seriously and refuses to be swept up by ‘idle talk’ and allows one to treat the fringe issues: moods, place, dwelling, landscape, etc. in the ‘purest’ form (and not exactly content). Heidegger is kind of like an immense mooring that you can always rely on for inspiration – especially negative impetus [I can’t believe he just said that and before you know it you’re engaged in some deeply obscure, albeit pleasurable, aspect of existence that had been closed off to you due to the dry formalism of many other thinkers.

So properly understood Heidegger is a thinker who makes one self-aware of their slumbering – he forces you to be alert to the downright oddness (throwness) that you find yourself in. He says ‘here is the world’ – is it not the most immensely interesting phenomenon? And why would you not dedicate your life (your only life!) to uncovering its secrets? This is beautiful stuff for those of a meditative disposition. And even better Heidegger tells you this is hard work – that perhaps as Hegel says – the task of philosophy is to aid consciousness in the violence it enacts on the self. I want to end on a quote, one of my personal favourites, that depicts what I take to be the essence of the Heideggerian form of thinking which could be condensed as follows: be alert, be awake, and be vigilant!
“Hermeneutics has the task of making the Dasein which is in each case our own accessible to this Dasein itself with regard to the character of its being, communicating Dasein to itself in this regard, hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten. In hermeneutics what is developed for Dasein is a possibility of its becoming and being for itself in the manner of an understanding of itself. This understanding which arises in interpretation cannot at all be compared to what is elsewhere called understanding in the sense of a knowing comportment toward the life of another. It is not comportment toward... (intentionality) in any sense, but rather a how of Dasein itself. Terminologically, it may be defined in advance as the wakefulness [das Wachsein] of Dasein for itself.” (Hermeneutics of Facticity, 11)*

* das Wachsein – here too I am fond of Heidegger’s way with words. Consider how one might translate this? Vigilance would be my personal choice but it misses out on some nice connotations. Maybe alertness would work? No wakefulness is better because it makes us think about the connection to waking up etc. Even this to me is the joyful aspect to Heidegger. You find yourself looking at words in a whole new light.