Tuesday, November 5, 2024
to a literary scholar who felt stalked
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. 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.
He also writes, 1949 (three years after "Letter on Humanism"), that "God is, but God does not exist." Indeed, that kind of difference is clear from philosophy's Linguistic Turn, which framed my own introduction to Heidegger's thinking, 1971 onward—when I first read Duino Elegies, i.e., 1971, too (Spender trans.).
(Psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé saw an incestuous bond between Rainer and herself—Plato's cosmic egg re-synergized?
Eve brought back into brother Adam's arms?
C.G. Jung thinks kindredly of our longing for androgyny, which is integral
to romantic appeal....
But I'm only interested in scholarly themes, though archetropal overtones are fun.)
I sometimes recall you saying via email (last November) that my interest in your thinking feels like "stalking.” It's funny, because scholarship is that.
When I first contacted you—Professor [name deleted]—about your [2011 book title], you said call you [first name]. And over the years, from time to time when I sent a note of interest, you signed off “[first name]“ (while never giving time for discussion). When I praised your endearing desire to echo string theory in poetical philosophy via your [2004 book], you replied that you got tears. But again, had no time. Time!
But last November, you said I was "being too familiar."
Oh, some of these days, some of those days still being.