Ennis Reviews Lee Braver’s Late Heidegger book

See here.

It is worth devoting some space here to Braver’s style. For one it is immensely difficult to discuss Heidegger in a clear style and without lapsing into Heideggerian jargon. The ability to render Heidegger’s concerns concisely, but without subtracting from the power of Heidegger’s ideas, is the key strength of this book. This strength is closely tailed by a sense of fairness to the subject matter and an ‘off-handedness’ that does not attempt to provide the reader with the author’s own interpretation. Although this would be an achievement in any work, it is an immense achievement in a work on the later Heidegger and I do not think that is a superlative claim—as anybody exposed to the later work can attest. Before looking at a representative commentary from this book there are a few small points worth mentioning. The first is the way that Braver structures the book. Braver hopes that his book can act as a “roadmap” rather than a simple translation of Heidegger from obscure to clear. The hope is that once the reader has been impelled to read the essays they can throw away the “ladder” and I will judge the book on whether this is
the result.5 Something that might easily be missed in this book is Braver’a footnotes which delve into the matters at hand in detail. The reason they are worth mentioning again is that although the book is clearly aimed at introducing new readers to the later Heidegger there is a lot that can be gained by the experienced reader via the footnotes and, of course, the book is also useful as a way to refresh one’s memory of the later Heidegger.