This document gathers together and translates Heidegger’s notes on Paul Klee that have been published up to now.

This article gives an account of the material on the art of Paul Klee found in the Nachlass of Martin Heidegger and indicates ideas central to Heidegger’s encounter with Klee.

This article is a translation of the third chapter of Part Four of Günter Seubold’s Kunst als Enteignis, 2nd ed. (Bonn: DenkMal Verlag, 2005). It discusses Martin Heidegger’s notes on Paul Klee.

On May 18, 1958, Martin Heidegger led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking” together with Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the Japanese philosopher and Buddhist scholar. The protocol of the colloquium, published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, presents a conversation among the colloquium participants about art in the East Asian world. In this conversation, Heidegger is particularly interested in hearing from Hisamatsu about the conception of art present in the East Asian world prior to the introduction of Western aesthetic concepts and about the relationship between form and formlessness in East Asian aesthetics. The conversation allows Hisamatsu to clarify for the participants what he takes to be the most essential features of Zen art and how these features compare with those found in modern Western abstract art.

On May 19th, 1958, the day after Martin Heidegger and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking,” the two men came together to discuss the success of the colloquium. The conversation soon turned to the work of Paul Klee, the Swiss artist, and from there to the newest developments in Heidegger’s thinking about language. Heidegger had just presented some of this new thinking during his lecture on Stefan George’s poem “Das Wort” in Vienna a week earlier. Having attended the lecture in Vienna, Hisamatsu used the opportunity of the conversation to ask Heidegger for elaboration on this new thinking and to clarify connections between it and language in the Zen tradition. The conversation was transcribed and later published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe.

How is anxiety the source of knowledge? How can Heidegger identify death as nothingness? How does anxiety engender resoluteness?

This essay conceives ecological life as radically dependent, vulnerable, and horrific. Epistemologically speaking, we are quite ignorant of the web of dependency that sustains our lives. Our ecological condition often prevents us from locating and identifying our dependencies and the many ways our actions impact the environment. This is the terror and danger that plagues the Anthropocene. Our ignorance bears an ontological weight that can be drawn out with the concept of trust. Trust, I argue, is not a choice. Trust is a necessity to which we are riveted, and one that is always conditioned by our vulnerability and ignorance. The picture of ecological trust that I paint is not a hopeful one: it is dark, pessimistic, and urgent. It opposes visions of our future that are superstitious and optimistic about our ability to respond effectively to climate change.

This paper has three interwoven aims: (1) to demonstrate the constitutive role of style in deconstruction, which, when not entirely misconstrued, has yet to be rigorously appreciated; (2) to develop the notion of ‘de-distancing’ (Ent-fernung, é-loignement) as a necessary but overlooked notion for understanding not only the ontological stakes of Dasein in Being in Time but also Derrida’s intervention in the relation between Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the limits of metaphysics; (3) to demonstrate that Derrida’s recourse to de-distancing as the spatiality of woman in Spurs punctures the horizon within which Heidegger attempts to situate the notion for essential reasons and, in the same stroke, instances the constitutive role of style in deconstruction.

The objective of this paper is to critically revise the anthropocentric perspective that conditions the Heideggerian philosophy of animality. I shall criticize this theoretical assumption as shared by Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1929–1930) and in some of Heidegger’s later reflections on animality following the Kehre, such as the Letter on Humanism (1946) and the Zollikon Seminars (1959–1969). Hence, the main issue I am raising here is that Heidegger’s reflection on animality is revealed as a theoretical strategy aimed at exorcising the presence of the animal in the human and the presence of the natural-biological in the linguistic-spiritual. In my opinion, rather than outlining a withdrawal from the humanist perspective pertaining to metaphysics, Heidegger’s philosophy marks its radicalisation in a hyper-humanist sense. Indeed, Heidegger reveals himself as being incapable of understanding the deep ontological nexus that unites animality and humanity.

Levinas rarely speaks about non-human animals directly, but his texts and his interviews are saturated with animal rhetoric. Levinas’s most ubiquitous gesture is to cast non-human animals as beings whose striving to live is a form of violence. These images constitute violence as endemic to nature, and provide the essential contrast to what Levinas regards as the strictly human event of ethics. In order to sufficiently interrogate the fate of non-human animals in Levinas’s philosophy, we must address the manner in which this animal imagery functions in Levinas’s rhetoric. What conceptions of the human are sustained, and what possibilities for an ethical comportment toward non-human animals are foreclosed, as a result of this oppositional imagery? How do essential vulnerabilities appear only as violence, and what forms of violence remain unacknowledged through their veiling by related vulnerabilities? What philosophical consequences result from Levinas’s relegation of violence, including human violence, to the figure of the animal or to animality? How might Levinas’s philosophy be transformed if we were to address ourselves to his imaginative acts of segregation and complementarity vis-à-vis human beings and non-human animals?

My aim in this essay is to show that Edith Stein’s influence on Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception is predominantly through her early work On the Problem of Empathy. Though he does not give Stein due acknowledgement, Merleau-Ponty is closer to her philosophically than to her near contemporary Max Scheler, who receives much more attention. Whilst Stein’s influence is in the main difficult to disentangle from that of Husserl, some of her reformulations of and additions to the latter’s ideas are taken up recognisably in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. I focus on her accounts of bodily ownership and embodied willing and acting, and on her view of how the ownness of conscious human life is a condition of explicit self-awareness and empathic experience. I conclude by showing how her contributions are developed further by Merleau-Ponty, most notably in his reworking of the representation, decision and implementation model of human action.

This article argues that the works of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman are complementary, specifically in their analyses of disciplinary power. This analysis would be what Foucault calls a ‘micro-physics’ of power. Micro-physics is an important concept even in Foucault’s later lectures, but it remains a sub-discipline of genealogy Foucault himself never pursues. Goffman’s works, which rely upon notions of social performance, personal spaces, and the construction of the self through these, fulfill the conditions of micro-physical analysis well. Using Goffman’s works, I argue that his style of ethnographic analysis helps clarify certain fundamental questions about disciplinary power left unquestioned in Foucault’s works—namely, the ‘internalization of the gaze’ and its ‘spontaneous’ efficiency. I conclude that disciplinary power is not actually a process of internalization at all, but a systematic divestment of the subject’s access to the external processes and spaces on which the production and performance of his ‘self’ depends.

Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology has received much attention recently, both critical and constructive, but much less work has been done looking at the relationship between Marion’s work on Descartes and his phenomenological project. The present article begins by making a point of clarifying Marion’s understanding of the meaning of Descartes’s cogito, and contrasting it with the standard understanding as found in Leibniz, Kant, and Heidegger. Following the discussion of these various interpretations of the cogito, we examine some of the similarities between Marion’s particular interpretation of Descartes’s cogito as a performative exercise and Marion’s particular phenomenological analyses of givenness and the saturated phenomenon. Notably, in Marion’s view both the cogito and givenness overcome incorrect conceptions of objectness and being, both of them exceed the limits of syllogistic logical formulations, and both are irreducible to their apparent constituting parts.

This paper critiques Adorno’s interpretation of Paul Celan’s poetry, as well as some of the philosophical ideas that motivate it. For Adorno, Celan’s poetry is “hermetic”—it refuses aesthetic representation; and, by virtue of this hermeticism, it expresses the horror of the Holocaust—a horror whose content is that it refuses aesthetic representation. I give a reading of Celan’s “Tenebrae,” from his 1959 collection Sprachgitter, and show that it uses aesthetic representation; that this use expresses the horror of the Holocaust; and that, in comparison to this, Adorno’s concept of hermeticism is a way of concealing this horror.

The concept of intellectual equality dominates Jacques Rancière’s prolific (and ever increasing) bibliography and remains fundamental to his aesthetic philosophy. Whereas equality’s relationship to Rancièrean pedagogy, politics, and literature has been discussed at length in recent years, however, I argue that translation represents a sustained and specific focus in Rancière’s political-aesthetic framework, one that scholarship has so far overlooked. This article considers the important but rarely-cited essay “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” alongside several of Rancière’s more canonical works in order to trace the role of translation as a metonymy, a scholarly style, and a political activity in his philosophical thought. The intersection of translation with ways of “doing, being, and saying” clarifies Rancière’s elegant elision of poetics and politics and ultimately sheds new light on his specific contribution to literary studies.