Hakhamanesh Zangeneh

Was Heidegger a phenomenologist? Can his work be considered phenomenological? Can he be affiliated with phenomenology in some way beyond biographical contingencies? The answer to these questions is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. In the following, I propose to address these questions by starting from a typology of the literature on Heidegger. My hope is that with such an overview it will become easier to identify a specifically phenomenological (as opposed to hermeneutical, deconstructionist, etc.) development in and of his work.

In this paper we examine the key phenomena associated with the notion of kairos in Heidegger’s pre‐Being and Time writings and show that they all fall short of the methodological constraints and conceptual requirements placed on authentic presence in 1927. Though Heidegger’s early studies of Aristotle and the New‐Testament are broadly suggestive of the notion of temporality that is presented in his systematic treatise, none of those earlier texts carry the differentiations within which the Augenblick of Being and Time is situated. We thus claim that the ekstasis of authentic presence is neither reducible to an eschatological nor to a phronological kairos and furthermore, that the successor to kairos in Being and Time is more likely to be Jemeinigkeit than Augenblick. Establishing these distinctions gives us greater insights into the fundamental orientation of Heidegger’s inquiry in Being and Time.

This essay proposes to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s references to creation ex nihilo as both an intervention in the French debate concerning eventness, and as a transformative rethinking of the status of phenomenality. Nancy’s position is roughly triangulated relative to key remarks from other thinkers and, above all, its distinctive components (temporality, negativity, spatiality) are elucidated through historical glosses. Articulating the overall architecture of this theory serves to illustrate the Heideggerian access to the event debate. It also deepens aspects only elliptically alluded to in Nancy’s own writing