Philosophy Today

published on October 10, 2023

Anti-Racism and Releasement
Anti-Blackness, Calculation, and the Provocation of Gelassenheit

This paper explores the selective uptake of Martin Heidegger’s work in critical philosophy of race and in black studies. While scholars have drawn from Heidegger’s thinking on technology to offer accounts of the technological production of race in general and of blackness in particular, few have engaged with Heidegger’s response to technology: his discussions of Gelassenheit or “releasement.” This paper analyzes this avoidance of Gelassenheit, arguing that its interpretation as passivity points to broader anxieties about the need to act that are symptomatic of Heidegger’s account of technology itself. These anxieties lead to a potentially damaging tacit prioritization of action at the expense of thought, and a reduction of black people to their value as actors or workers, even among thinkers like Saidiya Hartman who valorize a resistant waywardness.