to a literary scholar who felt stalked

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Today, Americans are avoiding what Weimar couldn't prevent, I pray. 

No, praying won't exorcise preyers. We teach. That was Heidegger's "politics," i.e., his extending the emancipatory interest of Being and Time by exempli-
fying critical phenomenology through ways of therapeutic thinking. (Don't mistake critical mirroring for Self expression.)

I thought of you again when recently I read (re-read, I forget) Heidegger's 1949 "Introduction" to "What Is Metaphysics?" He writes that separating one’s sense of being from becoming is invalid (ref.2.10, p. 285). It’s symptomatic of the metaphysicalism which he variably deconstructs in terms of others’ phenomenality.

A feature of metaphysicalist “thinking” is that it destines itself, whereas authentic openness loves to see chances for re-thinking.

Therefore, Heidegger may have let others’ stubborn attachments (and academic vanity) have its way (groupthink)—there being schadenfreude, fer sure—while he continued his own precursory appeal for ones to come.

a hallowing day

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A feature of the Classical mind, as well as Cartesian subject, was intolerance for irreverence. It insults the vanity of the traditional self (the lorded “subject”).

That kind of thought came back to mind today when I was looking at the Britannica article on “Romanticism,” which includes “…a predilection for…the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.”

writing life, a gain

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For some persons, life becomes text: aural, visual, written.

So it went in the fabulous film, “Anatomy of a Fall” (2023) which is so French in concept: exhibiting a certified copy of an era of a marriage brought into cohering sense through “documentational” art.

The author overcame tragedy through finding narrative enclosure whose deeper, farther, higher implicature remains a mystery for listeners, viewers, readers to prospect: How love of one’s artistic partner betrayed itself.

marks, letters, history

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email to an art exhibit reviewer:

I’m thrilled to see Heidegger remembered as inquirer into art, especially as entrance into your review [of an exhibit of ancient and contemporary ceramics in Malta]….

Heidegger implicitly distinguishes between the Work which eventually results in an artwork and the artwork itself. So, “the work of art” has the artist-at-work (the Work) in mind (“setting forth" toward the artwork). Indeed, the artwork doesn’t “set itself to work” [quoting reviewer] “The truth of an entity” [ibid.] is intentional, which only living “entities” show. (What may be the “truth” of a gloriously-colored bird showing, unwittingly, its evolved excellence?).

mis-addressed postcard

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So, he says, “…I read myself as a narrative character, an authorship, who sometimes seems strange to me, and worthy of sardonic framing or dismissive meta-narrative….,”

O, don’t worry. You just want to imply some self-effacing postmodern plight. That was very well worn decades ago.

“So it goes for the conceptualist mind: a chronic sense of surreality.”

No, you actually love playing philological glyph.