This paper examines Heidegger’s largely ignored interpretation of the Alemannic poet Johann Peter Hebel in the 1950s. Taking its point of departure from “Gelassenheit,” it argues that Hebel is the poet who best exemplifies what Heidegger means by the “rule of mystery.” Focusing on Heidegger’s analysis of Nature, it addresses how Hebel’s orientation toward “the invisible” (das Unscheinbare) allows him to reciprocally see “calculable Nature” and what Heidegger describes as a “newly experienced naturalness of Nature” in terms of one another. The mirror-play operative in this ‘reciprocal seeing in terms of’ effects a poetic recuperation of the lived world as enchanted––one that makes concrete what it means to say “yes” and “no” to technology.

“The fate of poiesis” raises the question of whether poetry is a thing of the past that now must be resigned to lamenting its lost vocation. This sense of loss can be understood through the devocalization of language, i.e. the historical movement from oral to literate cultures, or from language as an event to language as a sign, that alters the space of poetry, making it a place of fictions rather than aletheia. Yet poetry and politics both confront the limits of the sayable that determine our historical being-in-the-world. The ability of poetry to seek a different reality and a different language mean we must submit to the poem and take its challenge of ‘making’ into our own lives.

The question that I pursue in this paper is this: How are Heidegger’s entrenched ethnocentrism and his profound interest in East-West dialogue related? While neither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, I show how, starting in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he begins thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what in 1953 he comes to call “the inevitable dialogue with the East Asian world.”

Beginning especially in the 1930s, Heidegger’s ontology famously and frequently used a great deal of obscure technical terminology. His use of this terminology has contributed to confusion in Heidegger scholarship and has been a target for many analytically minded philosophers. In this paper, I have two correlated goals. First, I hope to establish certain elements of a reconceived methodology for interpreting Heidegger, such that a consistent reconstruction of many of his seemingly bizarre concepts becomes possible. Rather than the dominant chronological approach according to which Heidegger’s various renditions of the ontological problematic are understood in relation to their position on the timeline of his career, I argue that these renditions should be arrayed along an axis of ground or what I call a “diagenic axis.” Making good sense of Heidegger’s obscure concepts requires reconstructing them in terms of their position in the methodological evolution of his project along a diagenic axis. Second, I hope to show why on the basis of this methodology a particularly obstinate line of critique of Heidegger goes wrong – the Carnapian critique, which captures the spirit of many who dismiss Heidegger on the basis of his difficult terminology. Accomplishing both of these goals, I argue, is dependent upon clarifying the methodological operation by which Heidegger’s ontology evolves and the role of the concept of ground in this evolution. In his early work, Heidegger provides a way of making sense of this evolution in terms of a “produktive Logik” characterizing his ontology.

The aim of this paper is to consider ways that Heidegger’s thinking relates to some main lines of traditional Jewish thought. Following Heidegger’s own hermeneutical principle of trying to think what an author leaves unthought, Marlene Zarader took up a similar line of consideration in her aptly named work, La dette impensée: Heidegger et l’heritage hébraique. Zarader’s work has come in for at least two sorts of criticism. She has been criticized for (a) leaving the impression that there is a single Hebraic tradition to which Heidegger’s debt can be traced and (b) largely restricting her account of that tradition to twentieth century scholars (notably, Scholem). In my opinion, these criticisms, though not without merit, overreach. Still, while such considerations mitigate the force of these criticisms, they do so by conceding that they have a point. Accordingly, the present paper is meant to serve as a complement to Zarader’s project, in light of these criticisms. In the interest of indicating how Heidegger’s thinking echoes various Hebraic traditions, I discuss three distinct sources of those echoes: Maimonides’ negative theology, Mendelssohn’s conception of language (as it contrasts with Solomon Maimon’s conception), and the messianic idea of the Lurianic Kabbalastic tradition.

The idea that Husserl’s phenomenology is a kind of reflective philosophy inspired by the Cartesian tradition has become a commonplace in the philosophical literature. Heidegger was one of the first thinkers who criticized the Husserlian emphasis on reflection and transcendental phenomenology. Since then it is easy to find the affirmation that Husserl and Heidegger developed two different, even antagonistic concepts of phenomenology. Here is not the place to continue embracing this discussion. Based on the complex development process of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology in the course of his early lectures in Freiburg, the present paper weighs up some of Heidegger’s critical remarks regarding the reflective nature of Husserlian phenomenology in the light of important textual evidences ignored not only by Heidegger, but also by a surprising number of specialists in the fields of philosophy, cognitive sciences, and philosophy of mind.

The relation of Heideggerʼs philosophy to theology is a problem that remains of current interest, particularly because Heideggerʼs later philosophy offers some hints towards an interpretation of religious language between theism and non-cognitivism. According to this post-theistic reading, the talk about god neither refers to an existent being, nor simply expresses religious feelings. Instead, religious language can be interpreted as describing in its own way the groundlessness of the world. This paper discusses Heideggerʼs later philosophy against this background. In what follows, I will draw upon the work of Wittgenstein and refer to the cosmological argument to read Heidegger in terms of a post-theistic account of religion. This not only contributes to a philosophical understanding of religious language, but also yields a new interpretation of Heideggerʼs later philosophy, which, in spite of its hermeticism, has a specific relevance to the philosophy of religion that still needs to be explored.

The Heidegger/Deleuze affiliation is a rhizomatic crisscross of ontological, aesthetic and political paths. Both restore philosophy to ontology, re-positing the inceptive question of the relation of being and thinking by conceptualizing difference at the heart of being, identify a double movement of Being, propose theories of the event, and posit a people-to-come. Though their lexical and procedural similarities are alluring, Deleuze maintains that Heidegger’s ontological difference is too fixed, his conception of Being too formally and categorically bound to the powers of representation and that Heidegger introduced a necessary shame into philosophy. In this paper, I treat theirs as an encounter of provocation and productivity, attending to this relationship where it is articulated most extensively. Through the analysis of concepts such as the fold, difference, and event, I develop the political and ethical complications of Deleuze’s thought.

In the reading of Heidegger presented in Aporias, Derrida thematizes a number of issues that are central to his work, early and late: temporality (waiting), undecidability (the im-possible), and humanism (animality). Here, we examine the oddly neglected Heideggerian context of these Derridian questions in Sein und Zeit. We propose to examine the textual articulation of Derrida’s argument, attempting to draw attention to neglected aspects and unseen consequences in that reading. We will ask how these consequences, in the final analysis, complicate Derrida’s larger argument. Our aim is not to subvert the latter, but rather to unfold the tensions that it contains and the difficulties that it quietly negotiates.