Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
2 total works
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction argues that Heidegger's question of being cannot be separated from the question of nature and culture, and that the history of being describes the growing predominance of culture and technology over nature, resulting in today's environmental crisis. It proposes that we turn to Heidegger's thought in order fully to understand this crisis.
In doing so it is necessary to retrieve those elements of his thought which are most maligned by Derridean deconstruction: the pastoral, the homely, the local. In a world coming to terms with the destructive nature of 'globalisation' and the networks of distribution and travel which lacerate the globe, we are witnessing a gradual return to the 'locally produced', the 'organic', the 'micro-generation' of energy unplugged from the national and international grid: in other words, a return to the 'near'. The necessities and problems inherent in this return, which the 'environmental movement' must address, are already to be found in Heidegger's thought.
Lewis confronts this thought with that of Lacan, Levinas, Zizek, and Marx in order to reinvent the element to which deconstruction usually confines it and bring it into a position from which to confront the most pressing ethical and political questions of today.
In doing so it is necessary to retrieve those elements of his thought which are most maligned by Derridean deconstruction: the pastoral, the homely, the local. In a world coming to terms with the destructive nature of 'globalisation' and the networks of distribution and travel which lacerate the globe, we are witnessing a gradual return to the 'locally produced', the 'organic', the 'micro-generation' of energy unplugged from the national and international grid: in other words, a return to the 'near'. The necessities and problems inherent in this return, which the 'environmental movement' must address, are already to be found in Heidegger's thought.
Lewis confronts this thought with that of Lacan, Levinas, Zizek, and Marx in order to reinvent the element to which deconstruction usually confines it and bring it into a position from which to confront the most pressing ethical and political questions of today.
Despite Heidegger's identifying his own thought with 'ethics' in the most original sense, his understanding of ethics has been criticised both for its supposed ignorance of the role of the other human being and for its relation to politics. This book contends that, in fact, it is Heidegger's own notion of 'being-with' -his rethinking of intersubjectivity- which demonstrates precisely what is wrong with his early work and demands that the place of ethics be rethought. Heidegger and the Place of Ethics shows how this rethinking occurs in Heidegger's own laterwork. In particular, the crossing out of the earlier work in the turn to the later allows us to think 'being-with' as essential to a Heideggerian ethics and to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics which previously issued in Heidegger's engagement with Nazism.
This rethinking of ethics and politics in light of the originality of 'being-with' brings us before a hitherto unnoticed proximity between Heidegger's later work and the Lacanian political thought of Slavoj Zizek among others; it thereby opens up the possibility of a politically progressive Heideggerianism, and many unexpected encounters with thinkers generally considered to be separated from Heidegger by an abyss.
This rethinking of ethics and politics in light of the originality of 'being-with' brings us before a hitherto unnoticed proximity between Heidegger's later work and the Lacanian political thought of Slavoj Zizek among others; it thereby opens up the possibility of a politically progressive Heideggerianism, and many unexpected encounters with thinkers generally considered to be separated from Heidegger by an abyss.