Ian Maley

In response to Sean Kirkland’s recent book Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle (2023), this paper examines Kant’s role in Heidegger’s phenomenology. The overall goal of the paper is to distance Heidegger’s mature phenomenology from the Greeks and show how Heidegger’s engagement with Kant is indispensable for his overall project and destructive hermeneutic. By drawing Heidegger’s reading of Kant into relation with Destruktion, Zeitlichkeit, and Temporalität, this paper argues that Kant is the foremost historical reference point for Being and Time and for the lineage from Destruktion to deconstruction. Kant alone offers Heidegger with a model for a groundlaying for metaphysics from the ground up, that is, from the co-primordiality of being and time.

In reply to Hagi Kenaan’s recent book Photography and Its Shadow, this essay argues for a theory of photography informed by Nietzsche’s perspectivism. It argues that Nietzsche’s perspectivism offers tools for a theory of photography as a way of life and for a positive conception of the inherent nothingness and artificiality of the photographic image. The first part examines Kenaan’s criticism of photography as an agent of post-modern malaise and nihilism in line with Nietzsche’s theory of the death of God. In response, the second part explores perspectivism as a visual and literary mode of thought for creating new horizons for understanding self and world, new relationships between desire and images, and a new conception of truth and falsity. The third part examines the writings of American artist Andy Warhol, who I argue exemplifies a perspectivist approach to photography and cinema in dialogue with the groundlessness and artificiality of images.

Reading literature allows for an experience of the Other1 that necessarily implies distance, blindness and unsurpassable separation. The writer reaches the reader through text, the sole means for the reader to encounter the writer in her work. Writing and reading are essentially and inescapably mediated activities where the two poles reach each other through a curtain or a screen, a mask without a face. A writer may read her own text, or she may give it to others, but she can never read it in their place. Rather, they encounter one another through a written text, a representation of a representation of the writer's thoughts, which translates their speech into a purely graphic representation devoid of intention and...