Progressive Geographies

Peter Gratton’s response to the Heidegger posts is thoughtful and balanced. He is surely right that any book on the 30s would have to deal with the Nazi question in a way that would dominate the rest of the story.

It’s such a narrative blot (to say nothing of its political blot) that it would cast a pall on everything else. It’s here we could flip it: more work on the bio of the 1920s and more of a Kisiel-type biography of a book on the Nietzsche lectures. (But, please, not one on the Beiträge, though there is an interesting story of its dormancy…)

That sounds a good compromise. The Beiträge is overrated, certainly, but the dormancy is definitely an interesting story. Think of it this way: Heidegger was only in his late 40s when he wrote the material, but made the decision to leave its publication to after his death. It appeared in 1989, but even then it was earlier than he’d wanted: I think his direction was that it should appear only after all the lecture courses, since he thought readers needed to work through all that material before they’d be ready for it.

Graham responds to my earlier post on Heidegger here. I don’t think it’s as much of a disagreement as he thinks. Basically there seem to be three issues.

– Graham wants a biography for that period, and says that the books I’ve mentioned don’t do the job. I think that’s an entirely fair judgment. I did say Kisiel’s was a “biography of a book” which I’d stick to as an assessment. Personally I’m more interested in the ideas than the person, but I can obviously see the basis for a disagreement or difference of view there. I do know that Alfred Denker was writing a biography of Heidegger which I don’t think is finished yet. Maybe that would be closer to what Graham wants – the Safranski surely didn’t fit the bill.

– I do think the Heidegger of the 1930s has substantial merit as a thinker. I’m not sure I’d say it has more or less than the 1920s, though the work of the 1930s was certainly more productive in terms of what I took from Heidegger. But I’d definitely agree that Being and Time is the most important work, and without it we wouldn’t be reading Heidegger today.

– To my mind the scholarly work on the 1920s is better than that on the 1930s. That’s a judgment call, of course, but I don’t see an equivalent of a Kisiel, van Buren, or even Daniel Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth for that later period.

From his website, it does appear Dahlstrom is working on later Heidegger, though not sure if the 1930s counts in that. There are the Kisiel projected books I mentioned before. So it may improve, but my general point was that the 1930s is worthy of attention, and that it hasn’t yet received the kind of quality work that I think the 1920s has.

Perhaps the more general point, and one worth underlining, is that with over eighty years of scholarly work on Heidegger we’ve still yet to exhaust the possibilities his work, life and ideas provide. Within that there is a lot of room for the focus to be on different aspects, timeperiods, etc.

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.