Heidegger

For those who are prepared, this text makes for absorbing reading. . . . Because it dates from the early years of Derrida's career and because it is a series of classroom lectures, this book serves as a helpful preparation for reading the more intricate and playful texts that he published in the late 1960s and beyond. It also shows just how indebted Derrida is to Heidegger. --Los Angeles Review of Books Heidegger: The Question of Being and History certainly (re)familiarizes Anglophone readers with the essentially historical orientation of Derrida's philosophical project. Given at the start of his remarkable career, at the age of thirty-four, and originally delivered over the course of nine sessions during the 1964- 1965 academic year at the cole Normale Sup rieure (ENS), Derrida's seminar offers a wealth of insights into the ways his published views on history fundamentally emerged out of a critical engagement with the introduction and the final sections of Martin Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time. --H-France Review A good biography, [Orwell] asserted, needed two things: piety and wit. John Sutherland's extraordinary new book, Orwell's Nose, abounds in both . . . As with Orwell's writing style, very little goes to waste here, and the book is a remarkable achievement of synthesis. His demeanour and habits are subjected to an examination that, despite its brevity, is in some ways as forensic as those offered by the lengthier investigations of Sutherland's predecessors. . . . As one would expect from a writer of Sutherland's stripe, there's an easy familiarity with Orwell's output, the reams of criticism in print, and also the countless literary allusions found in his writings, all of which make it an effortless read. --Popmatters The publication of Derrida's 1964-65 seminar on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is a philosophical event of great significance. Despite dozens of detailed analyses, Being and Time remains one of the most misread books of the twentieth century. Humanist, anthropological, analytic, and transcendental-mystical readings have occluded the profoundly atheistic, 'ek-sistent' thing that is Dasein. Derrida's penetrating reconstruction of Heidegger's revolutionary 'aporetic style' illuminates Being and Time and the entirety of Derrida's own oeuvre. Although Derrida did not publish this seminar, its traces pervade the issues that dominated his thinking. Derrida's greatest insights into Heidegger's thinking are announced here: being is neither a 'cosmic ground' nor 'the highest being, ' the metaphors for being can never be stabilized by a logic, the 'mystery of Geschehen [originary movement]' marks an absolute temporal concealment, the 'destruction of ontology' is the work of ontology itself, the history of being is history itself. Derrida's focus is on the opening and closing sections of Being and Time, Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, his 'Letter on Humanism', and texts by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. This brilliantly translated seminar is required reading for students of Heidegger and Derrida. . . . Summing up: Essential. --Choice