Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living Edited by Vrasidas Karalis Cambridge Scholars Publishing Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living, Edited by Vrasidas Karalis This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Vrasidas Karalis and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-506-1, ISBN (13): 9781847185068 THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO CATHERINE RUNCIE, THE PRESIDENT TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction...............................................................................................vii Vrasidas Karalis 1. Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation......................................1 Gianni Vattimo 2. Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Hölderlin, Rilke...............................8 Anthony Stephens 3. Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World........25 Jeff Malpas 4. Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art....................45 Elizabeth M. Grierson 5. The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s Philosophy of Terror to Account...............................................................65 Peter Murphy 6. Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity.............................79 Paolo Bartoloni 7. The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic and Ethical Being.........................................................................................................95 Jane Mummery 8. Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”............................................112 Peter Williams 9. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question of Heideggerian Cinema..........................................................................126 Robert Sinnerbrink viii Table of Contents 10. Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying: “The way what is questioned essentially engages our questioning belongs to the innermost meaning of the question of being”.........................................................................142 George Vassilacopoulos 11. Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial Vision.......................................................................................................157 Colin Hearfield 12. The Work and the Promise of Technology........................................165 John Dalton 13. The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living....................................................................189 Ashley Woodward 14. Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks..............................208 Vrasidas Karalis Contributors.............................................................................................228 Index of Names........................................................................................232 INTRODUCTION VRASIDAS KARALIS In December 2005 the Sydney Society for Literature and Aesthetics organised the first ever international conference in Australia on Martin Heidegger. The present volume contains a selection of the papers given in revised form. They address a wide range of issues without aiming to be exhaustive. What connects them is the unifying theme of the consequences of Heidegger’s mode of philosophizing for the way we understand philosophy today. Most of the contributions avoid the well-known controversies on his political involvement with Nazism, and offer a critical but ‘post- politicized’ interpretation of his work. Indeed, the issue with Heidegger today is not primarily to discuss his personal involvement with the political ideologies of his era. In general, the papers address the issue of what is “livable” within Heidegger’s work and what constitutes the aesthetics that emanate from his work as a new breathing space for philosophical inquiry. One might claim that, after his connection with one of the most brutal regimes in the history of humanity, what is “livable” in his work is of extreme importance for the understanding of his past impact and his continuing influence. Indeed the main problem his philosophy has at the beginning of the 21st century is that it suffers from an excess of uncritical exegesis, especially in the English-speaking world. Because of approaches which verge on the hagiographical it might be said that Heidegger is everywhere except in his own philosophy, since his own way of philosophizing has been idolised and fetishised, losing its radical character in the process. The scope of this volume is thus to present a general overview of the consequences of Heidegger’s philosophy for various disciplines, notably cultural studies, literary interpretation, aesthetic discourse, ethics, theatrical performance, film studies, philosophy and, more precisely, the history of philosophy. The need for such a detached and dispassionate assessment of his work is evident today after the intense debates of the 80s and 90s about his political involvement, which tended to obscure the intricacies of his work and to create instead the mutually contradictory x Introduction myths of an ‘evil philosopher’ – or else of a cult-figure in the mould of the Gnostic Demiurge or even a philosophical super star. The collection represents a moderate and cautious de-mythologisation of Heidegger’s hermeneutics – not based on the notoriety of the man but on the complex nature of his work. Its main purpose is to elucidate its complexities and insights and present their significance for thinking today in various fields and disciplines. Certainly, it is a conscious departure from the aim of such volumes as The Heidegger Case (eds. Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis), Heidegger toward the Turn (ed. James Risser), Heidegger and the Greeks (D.A. Hyland & J.P. Manoussakis) and A Companion to Heidegger (H. L. Dreyfus & M. A. Wrathall) that aspire to addressing aspects of his philosophy in an exhaustive and systematic way. In our perception individual contributions should engage in a creative dialogue with specific texts, aspects and problems discussed or delineated in Heidegger’s own work with the conscious intention of avoiding the trend to enforce harmonies on it, but rather of detecting the creative ruptures his philosophy contains. With this in mind, the essays in the volume are extremely diverse in their approach, addressing Heidegger’s work from various disciplinary standpoints. Some of the articles are written by scholars who have published extensively on 20th century philosophy in other languages (German, Greek, and Italian) and analyse the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to these specific traditions without the mediation of translations – although the authors have provided them for this volume. Their freedom from dependence on the standard English versions helps shed new light on Heidegger’s own interpretation of various texts and directs the reader towards a fresh approach to his sources. As mentioned above, the book is focused on a conscious effort to de- politicize Heidegger’s hermeneutics and promote a nuanced appreciation of the structure of his philosophy. The structure of his thinking is so multi- layered that contradictory readings may lay claim to equal validity. Yet one must try to identify the dominant structures and trans-textual configurations that give his thinking cohesion and continuity. The early Christian Heidegger appears in direct conflict with the idea of ‘Dasein’s thrownness’ for example, although one might claim that Heidegger’s thinking is in many ways a translation of Christian concepts into the realm of secular apocalyptics. Yet the translation itself changes the meaning of what is translated: the semantic fields that surround specific terms develop unexpected connections with apparently unrelated ones, so that in the new text that results, the same terms indicate completely incongruous realities. The same can be claimed about his ideas of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘fallenness’,