Graham Harman has a post here about Heidegger’s Marburg years. He suggests that a biography just focusing on those years – 1923-1928 – would be fascinating for all sorts of reasons. The reasons are all good, although I’d suggest that the roots of Heidegger’s political involvement can be found in many of those earlier discussions. But it seems to me that much of the work Graham is calling for has already been done. The 1920s have been pretty exhaustively studied in the literature. If you want a biography of a book, drawing on the lecture courses, there is Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. There is John van Buren’s Rumor of the Hidden King. There’s lots on the Heidegger/Arendt relation. So, although there may be problems with some of that work, it seems to me to have at least been done in some respects.

But for the 1930s, which I do think is extremely important and interesting, there don’t seem to me to be comparable studies. I find the lectures on Nietzsche and Hölderlin absolutely crucial, and both encounters are mainly worked through in that decade. There’s loads of stuff on the Nazi link, of course, but not the same kind of intellectual engagement with the ideas that there is for the 1920s. When I spoke to him at a conference a few years ago, Kisiel was planning on two followup books to Genesis called Demise (when Heidegger still thought he could finish it) and Destruction (when he was beginning to challenge its positions) of Being and Time. The thing I really liked about his work was the way that it provided a map to what was there, even if my destination was different.