In this wide-ranging and thoughtful study, Michael Allen Gillespie explores the philosophical foundation, or ground, of the concept of history. Analyzing the historical conflict between human nature and freedom, he centers his discussion on Hegel and Heidegger but also draws on the pertinent thought of other philosophers whose contributions to the debate is crucial—particularly Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche.
A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation "Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis's landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it."--Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
This book explores the idea shared by Derrida, Hegel, and Heidegger that the value of their thought is not found in its results or conclusions, but in its "movement." All three describe the heart of their work in terms of a pathway, development, or movement that seems to deprive their thought of a solid ground. Johan de Jong argues that this is a structural vulnerability that is the source of its value, tracing Derrida's indirect method from his early to later works, and critically considering his engagements with Hegel and Heidegger. De Jong's analysis locates an affinity among Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida in a shared distrust of externality and, against the grain of some Levinasian commentaries, argues that Derrida's indirectness results in an ethics of complicity. The Movement of Showing answers a central question that many polemics about continental philosophy and postmodernism revolve around, namely: with which methods does one philosophize responsibly? It shows the difference between critique and polemics, and why simply taking up a position for or against is insufficient in order to think responsibly.
There is a gap in the literature for an investigation of the shared themes between Heidegger's thought and that of the ideologists of National Socialism. The author reads Heidegger's writings from 1933-45 in historical context, showing his engagement with the National Socialists.
Hegel, History, and Interpretation is a collection of essays that extends critical discussions of Hegel into contemporary debates about the nature of interpretation and theories of philosophical hermeneutics. Essays by Susan Armstrong, John D. Caputo, William Desmond, Robert Dostal, Shaun Gallagher, Philip T. Grier, H. S. Harris, Walter Lammi, George R. Lucas, Jr., Michael Prosch, Thomas Rockmore, and E Christopher Smith explore difficult issues concerning historical interpretation, the nature of hermeneutics at the end of metaphysics, the social and critical function of reason, and the inadequacy of Hegel's interpretation of the experience of otherness. In the course of these essays Hegel is made to converse with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger as well as with contemporary theorists such as Gadamer, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida. Thus the contributors explore both the themes that form the common ground between Hegelian philosophy and contemporary interpretation theory and the mixed reception of Hegel's philosophy into contemporary discussions about history, deconstruction, critical theory, and alterity.
Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida’s primary conceptual concerns—indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word “deconstruction”—but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy. Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger’s prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger’s Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into “solicitation” and “deconstruction”) of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger’s thinking. This is a rare window onto Derrida’s formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we’ve come to recognize—one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his.
Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges? In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.
This “excellent translation” of Heidegger’s writings on Hegel shows an essential engagement between two of the foundational thinkers of phenomenology (Phenomenological Reviews). While Martin Heidegger’s writings on Hegel are notoriously difficult, this volume provides a clear and careful translation of two important texts—a treatise on negativity, and a penetrating reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In these stimulating works, Heidegger relates his interpretation of Hegel to his own thought on the event, taking up themes developed in Contributions to Philosophy. While many parts of the text are fragmentary in nature, these interpretations are considered some of the most significant as they bring Hegel into Heidegger’s philosophical trajectory.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.
