Ian Moore

This text, touching on the problem of the ontology of the image from a political-theological perspective, focuses on Reiner Schürmann’s philosophical reading of the pictorial art of Louis Comtois. While placing it in the context of post-World War II modernism, he nevertheless underlines its special spiritual quality that, far from any theorization of messianic abstractionism or any affirmation of artistic sovereignty, shows all the anarchic simplicity of painting. It is a form of modernity still to be imagined but one that is already in some way active in the unpredictable meeting of matter and light, which Comtois’s pictorial act and Schürmann’s thought contemplate in the inseparable connection between history and immortality.

Translators’ Abstract: In this introduction to his Italian translation of Reiner Schürmann’s, Gianni Carchia offers a short yet incisive interpretation of the compelling originality of Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger. Carchia points out that, contrary to much Heidegger literature, Schürmann insists on a three-tiered temporal difference rather than on a simple dichotomy between beings and being as the driver of the deconstruction of metaphysics, and it is only through this distinction that the an-archic as the evental and ahistorical origin of being comes into view. What this displacement affords is a certain historicization of Heideggerian philosophy that brings out the anarchic, polymorphous, and protean nature of being and restores to acting its spontaneity and innocence. Observing that this anti-humanist naturalization of an-archy may indeed be closer to Eugen Fink’s cosmology, which grants autonomy to the extra-human, than to Heidegger’s history of Dasein, which confines us to “the prison of the human,” Carchia locates the contribution of Schürmann’s work in its deconstruction of the Idealist remnant in Heidegger.

Hacia fines de 1967, poco después de salir de un hospital psiquiátrico, el poeta Paul Celan se interesó por los escritos en alto alemán medio del filósofo, teólogo y místico Meister Eckhart. El compromiso de Celan con Eckhart dio lugar a los tres poemas que concluyen el último volumen de poesía que Celan pudo presentar para su publicación antes de suicidarse en 1970. Así pues, podría decirse que estos tres poemas marcan una cierta culminación de la obra del propio Celan. Esta idea, empero, puede parecer extraña. ¿Cómo se relacionan un dominico alemán de finales de la Edad Media con un poeta judío posholocausto? Celan, que tiende puentes y desafía numerosas tradiciones y lenguas en su actividad poética, se habría sentido atraído por la obra mediadora del corpus eckhartiano. Eckhart es el único teólogo importante de la Edad Media, cuya obra sobrevive sustancialmente tanto en latín como en lengua vernácula, a la vez que combina y transforma movimientos de diversa índole con consumada creatividad y facilidad lingüística: escolástica y misticismo, aristotelismo y neoplatonismo, exégesis maimonídea y metafórica beguina, por nombrar algunos. Sin embargo, a Celan también le perturbaba el concepto central de Eckhart de abegescheidenheit (Abgeschiedenheit, en alemán moderno) o «desasimiento», especialmente en la estela de la Shoah. El objetivo de este artículo es proponer una tentativa acerca de la apropiación creativa de Eckhart por parte de Celan ofreciendo comentarios sobre sus tres poemas eckhartianos. Me centro en los temas de la memoria y el desasimiento, y en cómo Celan se ve compelido a traducir poéticamente, a transmitir, palabras clave o contracifras de una tradición o lengua (en este caso, el misticismo eckhartiano en alto alemán medio) de un modo tal que adquieran sentidos nuevos, radicalmente distintos. Celan desfigura el concepto clave de Eckhart del desasimiento para subrayar la necesidad del encuentro con el Otro.

This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recently discovered 1952 Berlin speech. The speech includes several themes that reappear in Truth and Method, as well as in Gadamer’s later writings such as Reason in the Age of Science. For example, Gadamer criticizes positivism, modern philosophy’s orientation toward positivism, and Enlightenment narratives of progress, while presenting his view of philosophy’s tasks in an age of crisis. In addition, he discusses structural power, instrumental reason, the objectification of nature and human beings, the reduction of both to mere means, and the colonization of scientific-technological ways of knowing and being—all of which continue to impact our social and political lives together and threaten the very existence of every living being. This speech is essential reading for Gadamer scholars interested in the social, political, and ethical dimensions of his thought and for those interested in bringing Gadamer into conversation with critical theory.

In his recently published Donner le temps II, Derrida raises, but does not develop, the possibility that Heidegger's notion of Gelassenheit (‘releasement’, ‘letting-be’) might escape the economic confines of exchange, debt, and repayment and therefore qualify as a pure gift. In this paper, I explore this possibility, explaining that Gelassenheit would have to be understood, first, not primarily as a human comportment but at the level of being itself, second, beyond appropriation, and third, as ‘without why’. If Heidegger's focus on appropriation in ‘Time and Being’ remains entangled in the economy of exchange (as Derrida insinuates in the final session of Donner le temps II), Heidegger's anarchic treatment of ‘letting’ (laisser, Lassen) in the final session of his 1969 seminar in Le Thor opens instead onto a ‘pure giving’ (pur donner, reines Geben).

Translators’ abstract: This article considers the concept of originary dissension in Reiner Schürmann’s. The ultimate conditions of experience are natality and mortality, which universalize and singularize respectively. These conditions are in originary dissension with one another in the sense that they cannot be resolved into a unified whole. But natality institutes the universal precisely by denying the mortal singular. Recognizing and sustaining the originary dissension therefore requires prioritizing mortality over natality.

Translators’ Abstract: This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recently discovered 1952 Berlin speech. The speech includes several themes that reappear in Truth and Method, as well as in Gadamer’s later writings such as Reason in the Age of Science. For example, Gadamer criticizes positivism, modern philosophy’s orientation toward positivism, and Enlightenment narratives of progress, while presenting his view of philosophy’s tasks in an age of crisis. In addition, he discusses structural power, instrumental reason, the objectification of nature and human beings, the reduction of both to mere means, and the colonization of scientific-technological ways of knowing and being—all of which continue to impact our social and political lives together and threaten the very existence of every living being. This speech is essential reading for Gadamer scholars interested in the social, political, and ethical dimensions of his thought and for those interested in bringing Gadamer into conversation with critical theory

In his recently published Donner le temps II, Derrida raises, but does not develop, the possibility that Heidegger's notion of Gelassenheit (‘releasement’, ‘letting-be’) might escape the economic confines of exchange, debt, and repayment and therefore qualify as a pure gift. In this paper, I explore this possibility, explaining that Gelassenheit would have to be understood, first, not primarily as a human comportment but at the level of being itself, second, beyond appropriation, and third, as ‘without why’. If Heidegger's focus on appropriation in ‘Time and Being’ remains entangled in the economy of exchange (as Derrida insinuates in the final session of Donner le temps II), Heidegger's anarchic treatment of ‘letting’ ( laisser, Lassen) in the final session of his 1969 seminar in Le Thor opens instead onto a ‘pure giving’ ( pur donner, reines Geben).

The aim of Dimitris Vardoulakis’s paper, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, is to provide the foundation for a critique of aimless action by tracing its genesis to Heidegger’s putative misinterpretation of Aristotelian phronēsis (practical wisdom) in the 1920s. Inasmuch as ‘the ineffectual’—the name Vardoulakis gives to action devoid of ends—plays a crucial role in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, he thereby seeks to diagnose and to provide an aetiology of an illness afflicting contemporary thought. In my response, I will first argue that, while Vardoulakis is right to identify an emphasis on the ineffectual in Heidegger, he is mistaken about its origin. Heidegger does not strip phronēsis of instrumentality, nor does he mistranslate Nichomachean Ethics 1139a31–32. Second, I trace an alternative source for the ineffectual, which is not simply a negative alternative to technological machination but stems from a positive experience of what Meister Eckhart, and Heidegger in his wake, called life without why. Finally, I look at a couple of texts, including one discussed by Vardoulakis, in which even the later Heidegger is not entirely dismissive of calculative instrumentality but instead assigns the latter to a secondary, restricted site of competence.

Martin Heidegger wrote one and only one preface for a scholarly work on his thinking, and it was for William J. Richardson’s study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first published in 1963. Ever since, both Heidegger’s Preface and Richardson’s groundbreaking book have played an important role in Heidegger scholarship. Much has been discussed about these texts over the decades, but what has not been available to students and scholars up to this point is Richardson’s original comments and questions to Heidegger that led to the famous Preface. These are published here for the first time both in the German original and in our English translation. In our commentary we 1) discuss how Heidegger’s Preface came about, 2) explain the source and status of the materials published here, and 3) pair selected passages from Richardson’s text with Heidegger’s reply in his Preface to highlight the consonance of their thinking.

In this article, I analyze Heidegger’s marginalia in his personal copy of the 1946 Zurich edition of poems by Georg Trakl, which I discovered several years ago while conducting research in the castle of Heidegger’s hometown of Meßkirch. Although Heidegger’s marginalia in this volume are not extensive, they are significant for three reasons: they provide valuable insight into his reading of the spirit of Trakl’s poetic work and into the place in which Heidegger situates it; they frequently shed light on topics often left in the shadows by Heidegger and his expositors, topics such as biography, sexual difference, and Christianity; and they bear on Heidegger’s lifelong engagement with the status of being and even, at times, seem to call into question his published positions on it.