ILX vs. Heidegger (And Can We Eat Him?)

I have lost any impact my lameness may have had, with my html ineptitude. Woe is me.

Who will be first to provide an alternate, more concise response to the question Heidegger struggled with: What is a Thing?

A: Everything!

i was just reading the introduction to being and time today on the plane, its VERY HARD and not great for getting chicks to talk to you

i need to re-think my plane-reading choices

I spent 6 months reading and re-reading the first half of Being and Time, at the end of which I was firmly convinced of the ultimate futility of continental philosophy.

The entire Husserlian experiment is a repulsive charade today: Foundationalism has been firmly rejected, so why does Heidegger receive so much slack?

because heidegger was a strident critic of foundationalism...?

or am i not understanding your question?

a few weeks ago i ran into my advisor on campus, and asked him "what's happening?" and said, "well... ill just say this: the being of being is becoming."

Being and Time is very much foundationalist, small f.

i was just reading the introduction to being and time today on the plane, its VERY HARD and not great for getting chicks to talk to you

-- max, Saturday, December 15, 2007 5:38 AM

dude in my experience this is not true like @ all. hippie types think yr deep and harper's-subscribing types are all impressed. that's like my key girl demo.

i once had a conversation with one of my fave philosophy profs that went something like this:

*prof walks into room*
HOOS: What's going on, Dr. Bernstein?
Berns: Does it ever surprise you that we exist at all?
HOOS: Yes.
Berns: Me too.
*prof walks out of room*

Dude one time I was on this city train and this girl gets on and makes a big show of pulling a copy of NAKED LUNCH out of her bag. She holds her copy of NAKED LUNCH (the yellow one with the giant title, hence the all caps) at a completely unnatural book-reading angle, perpendicular to her lap. "NAKED LUNCH," she said to herself.

This lead me to believe it is kind of a silly business to try to impress others with your choice of public reading.

***

HOOS' & max's college mentors: hilarious folks. Those're some fucking great stories.

"NAKED LUNCH," she said to herself.

ok lolz to the point that my cats are like "wtf dude"

the other funny story about my advisor... another prof in the department, a young guy who's up for tenure, was walking around campus under some trees in the quad, wondering if he really wants to spend the rest of his life at the same institution, when he runs into my advisor, whos been here for 20+ years. the younger dr. asks the older one, "whats it like to spend a career here? how do you deal with seeing these same trees every day?" my advisor sort of looks around and turns back to say "what trees?"

ok maybe thats only funny if you know the guy

This lead me to believe it is kind of a silly business to try to impress others with your choice of public reading.

otm til you're next to the dude who's taken this idea too far and is looking at porn on an airplane

in my defense however it was a long flight

lol

Haw @ Abbott's Naked Lunch story.

What trees?

There was a guy on the train today reading this:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/411WZ626QJL._AA240_.jpg

One of these guys?

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/2201/2160014390517954f318md7.jpg

Somehow that reminds me: after my friend loaned me the Enterprise Blueprint book, I couldn't watch Star Trek for about four years.

Also I am reminded of a certain scene in Reality Bites and a certain thread where we hated on that movie and some funny story about omar little leaving a party for some reason relating to that movie.

Here it is Defend the Indefensible: "Reality Bites", but somehow we never even needed to mention the cafe-sitting Heidegger-reading aspect of the Ethan Hawkes character.

Ethan Hawkes, he is not related to the author of The Lime Twig.

overstrike s looks like regular s

so... this new book

what is a book?

do u mean blog

nu book saying that Heidegger was an way bigger Nazi than we thought? That someone told me about but then I didn't look up?

good thing I did that 'nu' or I'd look stupid for saying 'an way'.

yeah big new book saying essentially, and sort of bizarrely imo, that heideggers philosophy arises out of his naziism. has reignited the heidegger debate in the US among CHE subscribers and the kinds of people who have academic blogs, and spawned a truly irritating essay by ron rosenbaum in slate that tries to drag arendt down w/ heidegger.

There's something interesting to say about the connection between Heidegger's philosophical thought and his politics, but my impression from talking to people who work on Heidegger is that this "new" book (new only in English; it was published in France a few years ago) doesn't do the job.

cards on the table i admire & am invested in a lot of heideggers ideas, though im not the kind of stan who cant handle criticism--guy was after all a disloyal & dishonorable anti-semite, chauvinist, also ugly, wore lederhosen.

but the ppl who keep writing these essays about the book--i havent read the book yet so ill leave it out--always seem to hit the trifecta of annoying writing about continental philosophy, i.e., 1) dismissing the work out-of-hand because its difficult (i cannot tell u how much this annoys me), 2) dismissing the work out of hand b/c of its associations to unfashionable or outright terrible political movements (from naziism to various flavors of communism) and 3) dismissing the work out of hand b/c of the kinds of people and writing who are associated with it (i.e. terrible pomo journals and tedious adjunct professors.) i know i shouldnt let it get to me but, fuck all these dudes forever.

There's something interesting to say about the connection between Heidegger's philosophical thought and his politics, but my impression from talking to people who work on Heidegger is that this "new" book (new only in English; it was published in France a few years ago) doesn't do the job.

― Yah Kid A (Euler), Tuesday, November 10, 2009 7:35 AM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

based on my really brief & not particularly deep survey of the literature a lot of interesting things have already been said abt heideggers naziism & its relationship to his lifes work--and a lot of interesting things will continue to be said--and yes i think probably this book will not say anything interesting based on what i know about it--but i will tell you this, the people in this country who are writing about it, are sure as hell not contributing anything of any kind of value to the discourse

xpost Levinas already did the Heidegger's philosophy reflecting Heidegger's Nazism thing in a pretty good way, I'd say that I don't know why this book is such a big deal but then I guess I should read it first or something.

1) dismissing the work out-of-hand because its difficult (i cannot tell u how much this annoys me)

example of this most likely to rile me: taking a random quote with a few technical terms defined elsewhere and saying LOL BULLSHIT UNREADABLE NONSENSE INNIT LOL.

can't say i know much about him beyond a couple essays and a doc i saw once, but The Origin of the work of Art is pretty foundational 4 me

iirc, the deal w/ the new book is that it presents a different genealogy of the naziism, i.e., instead of it being that the naziism arose out of or in concert w/ the philosophy (cf levinas, blanchot), its that the philosophy arose directly out of the naziism. so instead of it being, "this philosophy has interesting intersections w/ fascism," or "these ideas lead to fascism," its "these ideas are fascist at their very core and are therefore incredibly dangerous and need to be banned from libraries"

ikr, heidegger would be totally up yr alley

For secondary reading on Heidegger, check out Zizek, specifically the first section of The Ticklish Subject and in an essay from In Defense of Lost Causes.

"Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933" by Slavoj Zizek

http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/64/129 [.pdf opens automatically]

ikr, heidegger would be totally up yr alley

― max, Tuesday, November 10, 2009 12:56 PM (4 minutes ago)

wait whatr u basing this on? cos i swear i didn't look that closely at that guys t-shirt before they took the photo

Here's the Chronicle of Higher Education article a lot of people have been talking about http://chronicle.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806/

I haven't read all of it, but the commentary I've seen on the article about the commentary has been harsh.

CHE article is regular CHE 'controversial' garbage. same w/ slate. i dont know why i bother reading them.

wait whatr u basing this on? cos i swear i didn't look that closely at that guys t-shirt before they took the photo

― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, November 10, 2009 8:01 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

arent u all about ""post"" ""modernism""

lol

""

Why wouldn't CHE hire someone who actually does work in the field to comment on the book? Page views, y'all.

neway i'm reading this nietzsche reader just cos u were all up on his dick on some other thread, but yeah was wondering if there has ever been any major stuff done connecting u know heidegger's "becoming" with like queer indentity construction, probably but I've never come across it.

max 100% OTM upthread about this:

but the ppl who keep writing these essays about the book--i havent read the book yet so ill leave it out--always seem to hit the trifecta of annoying writing about continental philosophy, i.e., 1) dismissing the work out-of-hand because its difficult (i cannot tell u how much this annoys me), 2) dismissing the work out of hand b/c of its associations to unfashionable or outright terrible political movements (from naziism to various flavors of communism) and 3) dismissing the work out of hand b/c of the kinds of people and writing who are associated with it (i.e. terrible pomo journals and tedious adjunct professors.) i know i shouldnt let it get to me but, fuck all these dudes forever.

Results 1 - 10 of about 22,500 for heidegger queer studies. (0.49 seconds)

max, I don't know if you follow any of the recent developments in the Speculative Realist offshoot of continental philosophy, but I think you'd find it interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism

Gr4ham H4rman specifically builds off of Heidegger. And R4y Br4ssier's work is mindblowing too.

I kind of want to read this, knowing it's going to be terrifyingly bad: http://www.amazon.com/Digimodernism-Technologies-Dismantle-Postmodern-Reconfigure/dp/1441175288

This might be one of the worst articles on postmodernism I've ever read: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. . . . You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.

wau

To say that Heidegger's ideas are identical with fascism is silly. Fascism involves the fusing of the military-industrial complex with the state. I don't recall seeing that in An Introduction to Metaphysics. German fascism involved German-soil-is-special-nationalism and that's connected with Heidegger's thought. You find related ideas in Herder and other German idealists in the 19th century. How those may have helped lead to German fascism is interesting, and their nexus with Heidegger's thought and German fascism is also interesting. But if Heidegger's thoughts need to be banned, so does a lot of German thought in the 19th century (not to mention Rousseau).

i cant believe that youre accusing the chronicle of higher education of printing a silly essay

haha I know! That guy who wrote the article we're talking about is especially silly, having written other silly "philosophical" essays for CHE before. I wonder if they pay well; maybe I should send them something (not on Heidegger though).

i guess max will hate this but the daily howler quotes the nytimes review:

"His prose is so dense that some scholars have said it could be interpreted to mean anything, while others have dismissed it altogether as gibberish. He is nonetheless widely considered to be one of the century’s greatest and most influential thinkers."

and remarks:

"Nonetheless," Cohen wrote. Did she perhaps mean "therefore?"

sigh

There shd probably be a whole 'nother thread about kneejerk hatred of dense prose (and maybe a counter-kneejerk respect for dense prose?) but that's a bunfight I cd stand to avoid this week.

i just cant stand people who steadfastly refuse to even try to engage with the text theyre, like, being paid to write about

good response in tnr:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/damon-linker/why-read-heidegger

'being and time' is so amazing. rereading it now.

but max is right, hoos is rong:

i was just reading the introduction to being and time today on the plane, its VERY HARD and not great for getting chicks to talk to you

-- max, Saturday, December 15, 2007 5:38 AM

dude in my experience this is not true like @ all. hippie types think yr deep and harper's-subscribing types are all impressed. that's like my key girl demo.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, December 15, 2007 1:27 AM (5 years ago)

the one time i met a woman who wanted to talk heidegger she was dragged into other conversations with people with more famous advisors than me : /

you have to position it so that the title "BEING AND TIME" is prominently displayed. preferably the black cover with the plain white text.

i have a book called "INFINITY AND THE MIND" that i keep around specifically for the impressiveness of its title.

also max's story about his advisor and the trees is structured like a brilliant mel brooks joke or something.

but i like the one with the leaves

actually the orig. stambaugh, one green leaf is more cool than three little autumn leaves

the best way to get people to think you're smart (but not a weird intellectual) and want to talk to you is probably to read malcolm gladwell or something :-/

i started the stambaugh translation but after working my butt off through the original translation it just felt jarring to encounter small changes in terminology.

yeah that's why i've never read m+r. when i looked (way back) it seemed pretty bizarre/clunky. grammatical and terminological weirdness aside the stambaugh often reads as 'natural' to me and seems to track the german faithfully enough re morphology/etymology to serve as a solid foothold. (or maybe that's pure rationalization. after all i invested so much in making sense of the stambaugh!)

sadly Infinity & the Mind is not a very strong book

i was walking down the street once reading norman mailer's the executioner's song and a girl with huge blue eyes suddenly stuck her head out the window of a hostel and said I LOVE THAT BOOK but this has not recurred

i got one of those once for reading gloria anzaldua. i think what she actually said was 'i love you for reading that book!'. that was the best thing that ever happened to me from reading gloria anzaldua. even if she didn't mean it. i choose to count it as a vindication for reading dozens of other books as well, for which i have never properly been credited in the form of sexy personal admiration.

Women always ask me what I'm reading but I find I have an easier time making conversation about novels than I do philosophy or crit theory books. The main exception to this was one time i got to talk with this gorgeous, well-dressed, really glamorous and intelligent woman about specters of marx. I think she was 35 or do though and i was an undergrad so i dont think she was flirting with me though. :-(

*or so.

I only hang out with pretentious single-minded philosophers so I impress people by reading Gawker and listening to R Kelly.

*rmde @ all of you*

I just use my enormous penis as a bookmark

that's impractical.

wait so which translation of HEIDEGGER should i get if i have never read heidegger

i find the schmidt revision of stambaugh quite readable but you should be warned that it's riddled with typos, looks like they had an accident at the copysetter's or farmed out proofreading to estonia or something.

ok ahm readin baot THANGS

from time to time one has the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingliness of the thing and that thinking has had something to do with it.

everyone knows what shoes are like.

OI:

how widespread is it to treat H's characterization of his methods in BT as phenomenological, in terms of husserl's account of phenomenology?

i realize there is probably a potential for doing so, but i was always under the impression that what H says about phenomenology constituted a deliberate break with, or at least motivated misunderstanding of, 'orthodox' phenomenology. surprised to read someone acting as if 'bracketing' made clear sense in application to H. (but this same someone uses this characterization of H-as-husserlian to essentially misread EVERYTHING H does to self-select as anti-cartesian, so maybe this is just an example of sheer stupidity / ignorant interpretation.)

been a long time since i've looked at B&T but im with you on Heidegger positioning it as constituting a break with phenomenology (at least the husserlian stripe), particularly in terms of the intentionality of consciousness. i actually thought B&T was quite explicit on this point but maybe i misremember.

I think thats the main point of it... that dasein's "living with" objects precedes its definition of them, or to put it another way that our attempts to impose meaning on the world grows ouy of our experience of living in a world that is in some sense always already "meaningful" to us. This seems anti-cartesian, and also very different from what I understand to be husserl's project, which is to delineate the structures of perception. What Heidegger is after is something more primordial than this.

i'm 100% confident about that. the q. is more about unacknowledged debts, e.g. insofar as the whole idea of intentionality or of bracketing goes undiscussed. my impression was that any attempt to hang that stuff on H would require some pretty heavy lifting. but given that husserlians are always going around saying things like 'no don't u see CONSCIOUSNESS MAKES CONTACT WITH ITS OBJECTS SKEPTICISM IS A MISTAKE', i can believe that there's a deeper compatibility there that heidegger is masking/avoiding/presupposing.

btw i was hoping you would answer this! ilx as consult-on-demand.

i can believe that there's a deeper compatibility there that heidegger is masking/avoiding/presupposing

would not be surprised at all if there's readings out there like this! seems possibly quite interesting. heidegger tends to exaggerate his breaks with previous philosophers, i tend to think (doesn't everyone?)--and i think perhaps such a reading might have support in the sense that Heidegger departs from B&T in his later, post-Dasein, thinking as perhaps too subjectivist itself?

i thought one of the departures was more 'too conceptualist', but i don't know much abt teh tuuuurn

i like to think of his progress as: Dasein --> Being --> Being --> ???? --> "only a god can save us"

you fyrgot about beyng

naked lunch + "what trees" are two best stories i've heard in weeks

i can believe that there's a deeper compatibility there that heidegger is masking/avoiding/presupposing.

ya i think so, and one of the problems with working out how heidegger relates to his predecessors is just how much he creates his own little world. because of that i think looking at merleau-ponty would be useful for this question, as someone so heavily indebted to heidegger but also with a much more explicit relation to husserlian phenomenology. though i don't really know what the answers are.