winter 2019

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What do you read in a text’s silence? “For a sound silence” is about others’ “Heidegger.”

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March 4, 2019 | What do you read in the silent, attentive listener? Or the silent, attentive therapist? “Thinking of Heidegger teaching” is precursory (occasioned by a letter to someone), but a good introduction to my employment of Heidegger. I’ll perform some close reading of Heidegger-in-English, eventually; but probably not this spring. (I did so much close reading—from decades back to recent years of the “Heidegger affair”—that he’s part of the way I am. Yet, I don’t live in the middle of the 20th century.)

for a sound silence

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expanded November 29, 2021

I’m saddened that Heidegger’s texts are still objects for broad stroke journalistic polemic, rather than opportunities for philosophy.

Dec. 29, 2020: This posting was motivated by the appearance of a book that I won’t name, by an Assistant Professor who belongs to an academic group of Heidegger readers who prevalently believe that Heidegger owes them something unsaid—“prevalently” relative to the prevailing voices of the group.

Heidegger wasn’t being poetic when he appealed to the unmet need for thinking. He appreciated the realities of European nihilism that had led the German university to appease, if not vocally support, the transition of Germany into another war, leading to the Holocaust, echoing in Cold War tendencies toward military-industrial disaster.

Dec. 29: That’s a sweeping scale of comment, but exactly The Issue for Heidegger was the scale of “onto-theological constitution of metaphysic[al]” power that “rationalized” (naturalized) what became a juggarnaut of unfathomable, epochal tragedy.

These days, an air of continuing scandal about Heidegger is useful for academic careers that weren’t alive when the “Silence” in Europe was deafening.

In the face of what could not be stopped—and unfathomable disorientation by the scale of inexplicability—a horrified German saw that neighbors had so profoundly betrayed their own humanity that empathic capability left one stunned silent with sorrow.