Peter Trawny

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century philosophy but his reputation was tainted by his associations with Nazism. The posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks, which reveal the shocking extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, has only cast further doubt on his work. Now more than ever, a new introduction to Heidegger is needed to reassess his work and legacy. This book by the world-leading Heidegger scholar Peter Trawny is the first introduction to take into account the new material made available by the explosive publication of the Black Notebooks. Seeking neither to condemn nor excuse Heidegger’s views, Trawny directly confronts and elucidates the most problematic aspects of his thought. At the same time, he provides a comprehensive survey of Heidegger’s development, from his early writings on phenomenology and his magnum opus, Being and Time, to his later writings on poetry and technology. Trawny captures the extraordinary significance and breadth of fifty years of philosophical production, all against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. This concise introduction will be required reading for the many students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory who study Heidegger, and it will be of great interest to general readers who want to know more about one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy.

A Critical Introduction

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.

Heidegger's Anarchy

Freedom to Fail

Richard Lambert

Technology, Capital, Medium

On Freedom

Liebe ist Sprengstoff, Heil, Unglück, Trost, Ekstase, Fluch, Sicherheit, Gnade, Hass, Wärme, Schönheit, Wahnsinn, Sehnsucht. Vielgestaltig wie sonst nichts, durchdringt sie alle Poren der Welt, überall hinterlässt sie ihre Spuren wie ein ungeschickter Dieb im Dunkel der Nacht. Wer kann sie fassen? Peter Trawny versucht es. Nicht mit einem nüchternen System, sondern in funkelnden Denkbildern. Er befragt die Philosophen, untersucht die Phänomene, spürt der Vielgestaltigkeit nach. Denn Liebe, so zeigt er, kennt viele Formen: Gottesliebe, Nächstenliebe, große Liebe, Weisheitsliebe, romantische Liebe, Hassliebe. Sie ist ein Geschenk, das zum Fluch werden kann, ein Mysterium, das Dasein ermöglicht. Liebe ist Nuance, einzigartig wie Wolken. Dies muss das Philosophieren aufnehmen und sprechen lassen. Literarisch, denkerisch, fragend. Wie dieses Buch.

Philosophie der Liebe

Andrew J. Mitchell

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.

Responses to Anti-Semitism

Heidegger's Black Notebooks

I primi Quaderni neri di Heidegger, da poco parzialmente disponibili anche in traduzione italiana, ci pongono di fronte a un tragico affresco dell’epoca a loro contemporanea (1931-1948). In questo saggio, Peter Trawny – curatore dell’edizione tedesca dei Quaderni – propone la riflessione sul nesso tra la produzione storica della verità e l’umano errare, insistendo sulla drammatizzazione della storia dell’Essere che si fa storia globale (motivo che attraversa i Quaderni). Il cuore di tenebra della «libertà anarchica» che Trawny attribuisce al pensiero heideggeriano è forse lo scoglio più aspro da superare per accostarsi a questi importanti documenti.

Smarrimenti. Heidegger e la fuga nell’erranza nei Quaderni neri

Was ist wahr, was falsch? Aus philosophischer Sicht erklärt Peter Trawny die gegenwärtige Krise der Wahrheit. Es tobt eine Riesenschlacht um die Wahrheit: Fake News, Alternative Fakten, Verschwörungstheorien, Lügenpresse, Great Reset, Geschichtsklitterung, postfaktisches Zeitalter – die Situation ist unübersichtlich. Gibt es einen gefährlichen Anschlag auf die Wirklichkeit, eine Krise der Wahrheit? Peter Trawny meint: Nein! Was wir heute erleben, ist nichts anderes als das, was Wahrheit von Anfang an ist: eine Krise. Denn was ist eine Krise? Eine Entscheidung auf Leben oder Tod. Und genau das ist die Wahrheit: eine Macht, die unser Leben in vielen Bereichen bestimmt. Folglich durchdenkt Trawny die Rolle der Wahrheit auf den Feldern Medien, Politik, Öffentlichkeit, Kunst, Geschlecht. Denn es geht nicht ohne Wahrheit: Wir sind Wahrheitswesen durch und durch, unser Leben steht und fällt im Licht und im Schatten der Wahrheit. Mit ihr entscheidet sich, was ich denke und wer ich bin.

Krise der Wahrheit

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kamikaze musike

The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or more specifically "world Judaism." As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges for Heidegger as a racialized, destructive, technological threat to the German homeland, indeed to any homeland. Trawny pinpoints recurrent anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger's adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philsophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his especially damning endorsement of a Jewish "world conspiracy" (such as that proposed by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers under the troubling aegis of a Jewish "self-annihilation." Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger's achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets of his thought.

Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

How do we challenge the structures of late capitalism if all possible media through which to do do is inescapably capitalist? This urgent political question is at the heart of Peter Trawny's major new work. With searing precision Trawny demonstrates how our world has become wholly determined by technology, capital, and the medium. In this world of the 'TCM', we universal subjects remain in a state of apathy that is temporarily punctuated, but also reinforced, by the phantasmatic dream of difference offered us by the 'Hollywood machine.' Our sole motivation is to gain money and the power it brings. The only meaningful difference in the world of the TCM universal is the difference between wealth and poverty. Freedom is then only the freedom to dispose of things (particularly technological objects) and to gain pleasure. It makes our relation to our surroundings essentially 'touristic,' and our relation to the earth an essentially exploitative one. The notion of personal or societal freedom has never been more controversial or, seemingly, more far from our grasp. While exploring in details the difficulties we face in our attempts to be free, Trawny builds a vision of how to break out of the mediums in which we operate and experience a new kind of freedom. Escape from the TCM universal is impossible. Yet philosophy itself is the impossible. So when Trawny writes that "escape-the other-is impossible,†? we can read this both as "escape is impossible†? and as "escape is the impossible," that is, the only possible escape is through philosophy.

Peter Trawny

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