Martin Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event. Heidegger opens up the essential dimensions of his thinking on the historicality of being that underlies all of his later writings. Contributions was composed as a series of private ponderings that were not originally intended for publication. They are nonlinear and radically at odds with the (...) traditional understanding of thinking. This translation presents Heidegger in plain and straightforward terms, allowing surer access to this new turn in Heidegger’s conception of being. (shrink)

While recognizing its origins and scope, Alejandro A. Vallega offers a new interpretation of Latin American philosophy by looking at its radical and transformative roots. Placing it in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, Vallega examines developments in gender studies, race theory, postcolonial theory, and the legacy of cultural dependency in light of the Latin American experience. He explores Latin America’s engagement with contemporary problems in Western philosophy and describes the transformative impact of this encounter on contemporary thought.

One of the great virtues of the book is its impeccable clarity and readability." —Peter Warnek In her concise introduction to Martin Heidegger’s second most important work, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Daniela Vallega ...

What is the effect of light as it measures the seasons? How does light leave different traces on the terrain—on a Pacific Island, in the Aegean Sea, high in the Alps, or in the forest? John Sallis considers the expansiveness of nature and the range of human vision in essays about the effect of light and luminosity on place. Sallis writes movingly of nature and the elements, employing an enormous range of philosophical, geographical, and historical knowledge. Paintings and drawings by (...) Alejandro A. Vallega illuminate the text, accentuating the interaction between light and environment. (shrink)

As the only full-length treatment in English of spatiality in Martin Heidegger's work, this book makes an important contribution to Heidegger studies as well as to research on the history of philosophy.

This essay invites the reader to engage in a path towards understanding philosophy in terms of “world philosophies” rather than mapping out thought to the already operative westernizing conceptions of what “philosophy” is. The question of “world philosophies” is taken up through the way that Latin American thought is situated inbetween lineages and traditions. The essay focuses on the transformative encounter between Heidegger’s thought during the period of Being and Time and the Argentine thinker Rodolfo Kusch. In contrast to Heidegger, (...) Kusch finds a distinct path of thinking grounded in Latin American Indigenous thought, a thinking that remains to date in the pre-reflexive living of the popular classes in Latin America. Ultimately, the task of world philosophies arises from the concrete situation of the thought being developed, an attentiveness required that is found in aesthetic sensibilities rather than in reflexive rational thought alone or rationalist pragmatic subjectivism. (shrink)

Comparisons between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the body tend to focus on the earlier works of these philosophers, i.e. on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars in the context of Being and Time. This paper focuses on their later works in order to show how each philosopher respectively opens venues to think the human body non-subjectively and as emerging from being, where being includes the being also of other bodies, things, or events. This thinking of bodies “from (...) being” articulates them in terms of spatio-temporal events. The article shows that in thinking from being, both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts harbor a sense of being with a unifying force, which is tied to meaning or sense. The article ends by questioning the possibility of accounts of bodies as spatio-temporal events not bound by a unifying force of being, bodies that may carry both sense and non-sense. (shrink)

Takes Heidegger’s later thought as a point of departure for exploring the boundaries of post-conceptual thinking.

For Anselm Kiefer, his painting shows that, that something exists “shows that there is also nothingness.” The moment of visibility is also the moment of our exposure in/with/through nothing (in a gerundive sense) elemental in the happening of the visible. Painting bears ways of exposing the becoming of the visible and ultimately of consciousness, both sensible and intellectual, in/through/with emptying and nothing, i.e., in the happening of the seer and the seen, in that coming into being of existing, we are (...) exposed to the insight that “there is also nothingness.” The paper offers a series of transpositions, a series of ways of experiencing visibility and vision found in looking at specific images and paintings. The transpositions expose us to blindness, emptying, gaps, and loss in the happening of the visible, which, in displacing the certainty of rational subjective seeing/consciousness, lead to the quickening of vision and the visible anew. (shrink)

Using as guiding thread the difference between being and beings, this article traces and questions the movement of Heidegger’s thinking in his non-public writings from Contributions to Philosophy to The Event and ends with references to the thought of Gelassenheit. In 1941–42 this movement takes the form of a “downgoing” into the abyssal, withdrawing dimension of being. Heidegger rethinks the event in terms of inception as he attempts to let go of any form of representational thinking more radically than in (...) Contributions and seeks to respond in imageless saying to nothing but the silent call of beyng. Heidegger’s downgoing brings with it a transformed relation to history and to what he calls “machination,” as well as a shift from dispositions marked by decision, strife, and endurance to thinking in terms of releasing, following, and thanking. (shrink)

This article identifies temporality as a constructed and elemental level of aesthetic experience, and exposes the elemental role of such aesthetic experience in the unfolding of contemporary Latin American liberatory thought. This particularly with regard to the sense of temporality that underlies the unfolding of the development of modernity, a development that occurs throughout the colonization of the Americas in the construction of a rational European ego cogito and its "other." Temporality in the westernizing linear sense figures a projective horizon (...) for the perception and understanding of existence and its coming. The key aim and meaning of all existence under this linear temporality is order and progress. However, ultimately in looking at Latin American thought and experience one finds a distinct sense of history and temporality beyond the possible determination of that sustaining westernizing European thought. In the recognition of distinct temporalities space-times open for rethinking modernity and the accompanying senses of humanity, life, freedom, and philosophical thought's issues and ways of articulating beings. (shrink)

This essay traces the movement of Heidegger’s thinking first from Contributions to Philosophy to The Event and then in the latter volume itself as a downgoing movement Heidegger performs through language, i.e. in how he thinks and speaks. The essay highlights a shift in attunement and in the relation to history that occurs in The Event, which is a shift from a resistance to the epoch of machination to letting it pass by as thinking ventures into the most concealed dimension (...) of the event and attempts an “imageless saying.” The last part of the essay focuses on the issue of language in The Event, both in relation to how Heidegger thinks language and in view of the performative aspects of Heidegger’s writing. (shrink)

Engaging the development of Heidegger's non-public writings on the event between 1936 and 1941, Daniela Vallega-Neu reveals what Heidegger's private writings kept hidden. Vallega-Neu takes readers on a journey through these volumes, which are not philosophical works in the traditional sense as they read more like fragments, collections of notes, reflections, and expositions. In them, Vallega-Neu sees Heidegger searching for a language that does not simply speak about being, but rather allows a sense of being to emerge (...) in his thinking and saying. She focuses on striking shifts in the tone and movement of Heidegger's thinking during these important years. Skillfully navigating the unorthodox and intimate character of these writings, Vallega-Neu provides critical insights into questions of attunement, language, the body, and historicity in Heidegger's thinking. (shrink)

This article juxtaposes Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign with Heidegger’s The Event in order to question Derrida’s reading of the notion of Walten in Heidegger’s texts in relation to the themes of sov­ereignty and death. It draws out different senses of Walten depending on whether Heidegger thinks Greek φύσις or the other beginning and it points out the importance of constancy for the notion of Walten. In each case Walten shatters in relation to death or to the (...) notions of the “beingless” and “expropriation” that Heidegger introduces at the beginning of the 40s. At the same time, there emerges a strange proximity between an originary differencing Heidegger thinks in relation to the notions of “the beingless” and “expropriation” on the one hand, and Derrida’s notion of différance on the other hand as well as a strange proximity in the circular character of both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s writings that has to do with how death informs their writing. (shrink)

This essay engages Scott’s Living with Indifference by inquiring how we may understand experiences of indifference as occurring in our bodily being. It brings together Heidegger’s notion of being-there (Da-sein) and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of world and body as flesh. With respect to Merleau-Ponty, the discussion highlights his thought of a “dehiscence” of body and world, which opens the idea of a hollow in the flesh that “echoes” indifferent dimensions accompanying the happening of things and events. The essay concludes with the (...) insight that we can be attuned to indifference because we carry indifference with us in our bodies. (shrink)

For Heidegger, to experience and think being as such in its finite temporality necessitates that one exist in exposure to one’s own possibility of death. In the thirties, when he thinks of being in...

This essay proposes a reading of Scheler’s work that puts into question the separation of principles he claims for life and spirit, or body and thought. After considering how Scheler opens possibilities to think the body non-objectively when he conceives it as an analyzer that determines if and how one perceives something, the essay moves to a discussion of his late work Man’s Place in Nature. Here Scheler thinks the mutual penetration of life and spirit while still maintaining their distinction (...) by claiming that they have separate principles. By focusing on the performativity of Scheler’s thought, the essay aims at uncovering a dimension of his thought that undermines this distinction and allows for new possibilities of understanding the lived body. (shrink)

This essay proposes a reading of Scheler’s work that puts into question the separation of principles he claims for life and spirit, or body and thought. After considering how Scheler opens possibilities to think the body non-objectively when he conceives it as an analyzer that determines if and how one perceives something, the essay moves to a discussion of his late work Man’s Place in Nature. Here Scheler thinks the mutual penetration of life and spirit while still maintaining their distinction (...) by claiming that they have separate principles. By focusing on the performativity of Scheler’s thought, the essay aims at uncovering a dimension of his thought that undermines this distinction and allows for new possibilities of understanding the lived body. (shrink)

Dynamic mental images are co-constitutive of the determinations of reality and possibility under which our senses of life open and unfold. Ultimately, this dynamic sense of images introduces the difficulty of thinking in light of their role in the configuration of human knowledge and their power over interpretations and determinations of the many senses of beings. This relationship between images and philosophical knowledge is further complicated when one looks at it from the perspective of a colonized consciousness. In such cases (...) self-knowledge and the very possibility of philosophical knowledge depend on images that are not one's own. This makes the articulation of the senses of distinct existences an impossible project. By looking at the work of Fanon, Anibal Quijano, and Alfredo Jaar, this article discusses how such pernicious images occur in spite of one's distinct sense of existence, and how the distorted displacement of existence may be challenged and overcome. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 1 - 18 This essay addresses time’s dissemination both in the sense of an undoing or fracturing of unifying conceptions of time, as well as in the sense of ‘scattering seeds’ by conceiving of manifold temporalizing configurations of living beings, things, and events without an overarching sense of time. After a consideration of traditional conceptions of time, this essay explores the notion of duration in Bergson in order to make it fruitful for thinking (...) duration without centering it in human consciousness. The author suggests that we can begin to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms of different temporal configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity that may be occasioned by chance, whereby chance is understood as the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or manifest themselves. 1. (shrink)

In 2010, Charles Scott gave a course at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy titled “Bordered Americans.” The course followed his concern with understanding philosophical thought given our concrete cultural dynamics today. The lectures addressed the question of the limits and delimitations of borders as dynamic transformative events, which occur in encroachments between distinct and ever moving and shifting cultural configurations and borders. Scott emphasized the possibilities of thinking in such spaces, and ultimately situated Continental American philosophy in such disclosure. This (...) essay is the fruit of long conversations with Scott about these issues; in it I aim to add a Latin American voice to his incisive analysis. (shrink)

Available in English for the first time, this much-anticipated translation of Enrique Dussel's _Ethics of Liberation_ marks a milestone in ethical discourse. Dussel is one of the world's foremost philosophers. This treatise, originally published in 1998, is his masterwork and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop. Throughout his career, Dussel has sought to open a space for articulating new possibilities for humanity out of, and in light of, the suffering, dignity, and creative (...) drive of those who have been excluded from Western Modernity and neoliberal rationalism. Grounded in engagement with the oppressed, his thinking has figured prominently in philosophy, political theory, and liberation movements around the world. In _Ethics of Liberation_, Dussel provides a comprehensive world history of ethics, demonstrating that our most fundamental moral and ethical traditions did not emerge in ancient Greece and develop through modern European and North American thought. The obscured and ignored origins of Modernity lie outside the Western tradition. _Ethics of Liberation_ is a monumental rethinking of the history, origins, and aims of ethics. It is a critical reorientation of ethical theory. (shrink)

Liberatory thought in Latin American philosophy leads to the question of the reinterpretation of historical time consciousness. In the following pages I first introduce the challenge as articulated out of Latin American thought, particularly with reference to Enrique Dussel and Aníbal Quijano, and then I develop a reinterpretation of historical time consciousness in its happening as understood through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion of effected historical consciousness in Truth and Method. As already marked by this trajectory, this essay is not comparative, but, (...) through a dialogue with these thinkers, seeks to rethink the temporalizing-historical movement that is historical consciousness as a possible path to engaging in and understanding liberatory philosophy. (shrink)

In 2010, Charles Scott gave a course at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy titled “Bordered Americans.” The course followed his concern with understanding philosophical thought given our concrete cultural dynamics today. The lectures addressed the question of the limits and delimitations of borders as dynamic transformative events, which occur in encroachments between distinct and ever moving and shifting cultural configurations and borders. Scott emphasized the possibilities of thinking in such spaces, and ultimately situated Continental American philosophy in such disclosure. This (...) essay is the fruit of long conversations with Scott about these issues; in it I aim to add a Latin American voice to his incisive analysis. (shrink)

In 2010, Charles Scott gave a course at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy titled “Bordered Americans.” The course followed his concern with understanding philosophical thought given our concrete cultural dynamics today. The lectures addressed the question of the limits and delimitations of borders as dynamic transformative events, which occur in encroachments between distinct and ever moving and shifting cultural configurations and borders. Scott emphasized the possibilities of thinking in such spaces, and ultimately situated Continental American philosophy in such disclosure. This (...) essay is the fruit of long conversations with Scott about these issues; in it I aim to add a Latin American voice to his incisive analysis. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 3, pp 390 - 404 This article puts into play the ghostly horizon of “death” as it follows its semblances through Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in the French thinker’s last seminars as published in _The Beast and the Sovereign_ Vol. II. The moments I underscore are three, always marking the playing out or releasing of death’s ghost, its sovereignty over life, while the readings, drift off driven by other forces: 1. In Session IV, Derrida’s enjambment (...) of Heidegger’s sense of _dasein_ and _Welt_ with Celan’s line from _Atemwende, “Die Welt ist fort, Ich muß dich tragen”_ ; 2. The mutual displacement of the question of the other and the question of death at the beginning of Session V ; and 3, the unfolding of Crusoe’s desire and fear of “living a living death” in Derrida’s discussion of _survivance_, also in session V. The discussion closes with the interpolation of Latin American thought through the introduction of the temporalizing movement of _différance_ read in light of the non-linear simultaneous asymmetric temporality one finds constitutive of Latin American consciousness. Thus, the reading moves from the deconstruction of various figures of death that permeate in an almost transcendental manner the organizing of the meaning of Derrida and Heidegger’s thought, to a thinking with the temporalizing movement of _survivance_ or living-dying, in which the binomial reasoning and teleological structures of temporality held by the figures of life and death are released to a thought beyond their supposed mutually exclusive timeline. (shrink)

Paul Klee’s sense of modern art and his own painting as the channeling of the originary movement of life leads to an insight beyond modern art, and back towards such dynamic cosmological experiences as that of the Onas people of Patagonia. In their daily life and their rituals their painted bodies expressed the living force of their cosmos, an originary energy that occurred at the limit of what one may call art and nature. In engaging Klee’s painting and drawing, one (...) is brought to such an open space of living transformative movement; one finds a place wider than our present imagination, a time-space that in our being exposed to his works and experience remains for us to inhabit. (shrink)

This article aims at making Heidegger’s understanding of history fruitful for a consideration of history that both takes into account the complexity and multitude of historical lineages and also pays attention to smaller historical events. After revisiting Heidegger’s understanding of history in terms of a history of being and our being-historical, the author brings into play the notion of rhythm. She thinks of rhythms of history in terms of durations of historical configurations of things and events in relation to their (...) beginnings and endings (their rhythmic caesura), and in relation to other historical confi gurations. This leads to an understanding of history in terms of being-historical that does not simply indicate things happening in time, but instead focuses on the happening that determines how things appear and are deployed. (shrink)

Abstract If the question of the humanity of “the other“ may become a question, and not be reinscribed into Western colonizing patterns of thought, then its issuing must concern a limit (always arising beyond Western thought), a delimitation of existence that is risked and put at risk without recourse to the project or operation of that colonizing thought that situates it. Ideas of subjectivity, agency, and power-knowledge potential for progress, as well as rationalist instrumental thought used to recognize those peoples (...) and cultures excluded and oppressed under the Western Modern tradition, must be put into question by the very agents claiming recognition, as well as the epistemic structures that sustain these concepts and the dispositions and subconscious expectations constituted by the colonizing practices of bodies and imaginaries that project the very horizons of one's existence. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s thought arises out of thinking through the concrete negativity or ungroundedness figured by “life” as understood under the sovereign exception. His work is sustained by the continuous exposure of philosophical concepts to what remains excluded, silenced, and to an extent unsayable for philosophy: Thus, disfiguring, decentering, and violating the temporality of Western history and philosophy as well as the concepts that order it. This means that Agamben thinks out of the ungrounded occurrences of language and history, and that (...) the transformative potency of his thought arises from sheer negativity and yet, in his engagement of thought’s concrete situation. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s thought arises out of thinking through the concrete negativity or ungroundedness figured by “life” as understood under the sovereign exception. His work is sustained by the continuous exposure of philosophical concepts to what remains excluded, silenced, and to an extent unsayable for philosophy: Thus, disfiguring, decentering, and violating the temporality of Western history and philosophy as well as the concepts that order it. This means that Agamben thinks out of the ungrounded occurrences of language and history, and that (...) the transformative potency of his thought arises from sheer negativity and yet, in his engagement of thought’s concrete situation. (shrink)

In her work on decolonial feminism María Lugones expands and strengthens the task of decolonial thinking. On the one hand this occurs as gender becomes explicitly part of the very ways of being under modernity, and this means that gender, race, and labor are always entangled in the coloniality of power. As a result decolonial thought may only occur by the critique of one's concrete situation in the living intersectionality in which identities and power relations are founded. This turn to (...) concrete intersectionality occurs as Lugones thinks in light of cosmological indigenous lineages in América,1 and with this turn engages not only the logical, epistemic, and conceptual levels of coloniality but, in a turn that makes possible the affirmation of subjugated knowledges, she turns to the aisthetic dimensions of the coloniality of power and knowledge: Most significantly, in this way, she is able to begin to think with the liberatory rhythms, movements, practices that are our lives as sites of resistance and contestation never subsumed by the coloniality of power, modernity, and capitalism. (shrink)