SHADOWS OF BEING : encounters with heidegger in political theory and historical reflection

In a review of the work of Karl Jaspers composed several years before the publication of his book Being and Time, Martin Heidegger suggested that the philosophical orientations of his period had made a wrong turn and skirted by the fundamental path of thought. He suggested that instead of taking up a heritage of original questions, his contemporaries had become preoccupied with secondary issues, accepting as fundamental what was in fact only incidental. In the years that followed, Heidegger's promise to reorient philosophy in terms of the Seinsfrage, the question of Being, exercised a well-known influence on successive generations of thinkers on a global scale. The present book delves into the philosophical sources of this influence and raises the question whether Heidegger indeed made good on the promise to reveal for thought what is truly fundamental. In proposing this investigation, the author assumes that it is not sufficient to take Heidegger at his word, but that it is necessary to scrutinize what is posited as fundamental in light of its broader implications–above all for ethico-political judgment and for historical reflection. After addressing this question in the first part of the book, the second part examines the significance of Heidegger's reorientation of philosophy through the prism of its critical reception in the thought of Hannah Arendt, Ernst Cassirer, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricœur. Contents 6 Introduction 8 Part I: Politics, Myth, and History in Heidegger 12 1. The Legacy of Martin Heidegger in Contemporary Perspective 14 2. Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Memory 54 3. Saint Paul, Spinoza, and the Ethical-political Implications of Heidegger’s Thought 64 4. The Question of Race in Heidegger’s Thought 78 5. And What can Catastrophes Do? The Second World War in Heidegger’s Interpretation of the History of Being 92 6. Politics and Mythology in Martin Heidegger’s History of Being 106 Part II: Politics, Myth, and History: Aspects of the Critical Reception of Heidegger’s Thought 116 7. Politics and the Public World: Martin Heidegger in the Critical Perspective of Hannah Arendt 118 8. In Heidegger’s Shadow: Ernst Cassirer, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Question of the Political 136 9. Gods without Faces: Emmanuel Levinas and the Question of Myth 150 10. The Reality of the Historical Past: The Heideggerian Turn in Paul Ricoeur’s Reflection on History 160 Conclusion 180 Bibliography 192