Fail Slow, Fail Hard – The Los Angeles Review of Books

Martin Woessner (CUNY) reviews Peter Trawny’s Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy (Polity, 2015), which I just recently read. In fact, I wrote up a review to send the LARB on it, but wanted to wait a few days to look at it again to copy edit, which is all for the best since Woessner does an excellent job with it. Trawny’s book is essentially a reading of Heidegger’s Nazism through the prism of Heidegger’s thinking, or at least one interpretation of it. Thus great thinking leads to errancy, and so on. I honestly had a hard time to know what to make of it, since it seemed at once greatly critical and on the other is written in such Heideggerese as to ennoble repeatedly the greatness of the very thinker in question. I’ll get that out soon and post a link (I don’t think I’ll publish a book review again that isn’t open access) but Woessner’s review here hits on my own response and is well worth a read:

How tolerant you are of this kind of thinking [Trawny’s repeated turn back to Heidegger’s claim that only great thinking could lead to errancy]  will determine how persuasive you find Trawny’s defense of Heidegger’s errancy, which entails accepting at least three interrelated things: first, that Heidegger’s errancy was a necessary component of his thinking; second, that his thinking was destined by the history of being going back to Ancient Greece; and third, that this tragic narrative exists not just beyond good and evil, but also beyond guilt and responsibility, in an “abyss of freedom.” In other words, true thinking means never having to say you’re sorry.

Source: Fail Slow, Fail Hard – The Los Angeles Review of Books

Poster Sessions at Philosophy Conferences | Daily Nous

Daily Nous has a post up on the use of posters at conferences. I’m quite skeptical of their use–I’d feel somewhat akin to an animal in a zoo awaiting visitors–but I’m sure not that the American Philosophical Association has started accepting proposals for them, other conferences aren’t far behind.

 

Source: Poster Sessions at Philosophy Conferences | Daily Nous

Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense, Reviewed at Symposium

Largley on my (almost skimming) read, an application of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology (there is no whole) to mostly analytic metaphysics, Markus Gabriel’s Fields of Sense is reviewed at Symposium.

The order of the Homo Sacer series | An und für sich

Adam Kotsko has put up the slightly revised order of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series. I’ve largely let the last few published volumes go without much of a look–I published a long (if too complicated) chapter on him in The State of Sovereignty and since then just have avoided him for lack of time (or a compelling article that tells me there’s much of particular interest).

My review of Janet Roitman’s Anti-Crisis

at Symposium’s open site here.

First Volume of English translation of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ to appear in 2016

Progressive Geographies

The first volume of the English translation of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ will appear in 2016 with Indiana University Press.

Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks.” In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931–1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger’s year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed light on Heidegger’s philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the “Black Notebooks”…

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First Volume of English translation of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ to appear in 2016

Progressive Geographies

The first volume of the English translation of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ will appear in 2016 with Indiana University Press.

Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks.” In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931–1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger’s year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed light on Heidegger’s philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the “Black Notebooks”…

View original post 31 more words

Willful Subjects reviewed at Hypatia

Here

Coming out of and refocusing parts of her earlier work, in Willful Subjects, Ahmed’s “willfulness archive” draws new attention to what remains one of the most pervasive phenomenological challenges of feminist, queer, and queer feminist lives.  Using an inter-imbricative[i] style of writing and thinking, Ahmed “follows” will around, collecting various ways of will by noting when will arises (and is judged to have arisen), in what form, and through its relations of allegiance and opposition. Will emerges as often unexpected and pressing, as that which at once draws attention to itself, unbidden by others, unintended by oneself, and–potentially–highlighting the background against which it appears. Ahmed’s “following” reveals why and how will is so intimately related to selfhood and individuality, all the while troubling orthodox Western views of selfhood and individuality as expressions (and suppressions) of will as intention.

via Willful Subjects | hypatia reviews online.

Figure/Ground interview with Günter Figal on his work and his recent resignation as president of the Heidegger society in the wake of the ‘Black Notebooks’ | Progressive Geographies

Figure/Ground interview with Günter Figal on his work and his recent resignation as president of the Heidegger society in the wake of the ‘Black Notebooks’ | Progressive Geographies.

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed on the Ethics of the Posthumous Foucault

Here:

“Don’t pull the Max Brod [the friend who refused to burn all of Kafka’s materials upon his death] trick on me,” Michel Foucault is said to have admonished friends. The philosopher and historian did Kafka one better by including a blunt, categorical line in his will: “No posthumous publications.”

Be that as it may, in late spring the University of Minnesota Press issued Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, a volume of short texts by Foucault originally published in France two years ago and translated by Robert Bonnono. The same press and translator also turned the surviving pages of an autobiographical interview from 1968 into a little book with big margins called Speech Begins After Death. The title is kind of meta, since Foucault, like Kafka, seems to be having an unusually wordy afterlife.

via Essay on Michel Foucault’s posthumous publications | InsideHigherEd.