Translators’ Abstract: In this introduction to his Italian translation of Reiner Schürmann’s, Gianni Carchia offers a short yet incisive interpretation of the compelling originality of Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger. Carchia points out that, contrary to much Heidegger literature, Schürmann insists on a three-tiered temporal difference rather than on a simple dichotomy between beings and being as the driver of the deconstruction of metaphysics, and it is only through this distinction that the an-archic as the evental and ahistorical origin of being (...) comes into view. What this displacement affords is a certain historicization of Heideggerian philosophy that brings out the anarchic, polymorphous, and protean nature of being and restores to acting its spontaneity and innocence. Observing that this anti-humanist naturalization of an-archy may indeed be closer to Eugen Fink’s cosmology, which grants autonomy to the extra-human, than to Heidegger’s history of Dasein, which confines us to “the prison of the human,” Carchia locates the contribution of Schürmann’s work in its deconstruction of the Idealist remnant in Heidegger. (shrink)

The text presented here is an edited transcription of a thirteen-page unpublished typescript titled “Heidegger and the Mystical Tradition” by Reiner Schürmann. It dates back to the time following the completion of Schürmann’s book on Meister Eckhart and exhibits the preliminary conception of the former’s famous ‘practical a priori.’ Focusing on the relation between Heidegger’s meditative thinking and a mystical tradition inaugurated by Meister Eckhart, the text retrieves the steps of the latter’s path to Releasement as a practical transformation of (...) existence (Part I). In so doing, it provides a detailed account of Releasement as the condition for a peculiar experience of thinking “in which one fundamental attitude manifests itself throughout an itinerary of human existence and which tends to make this itinerary the very condition for the understanding of truth.” By hinging on Heidegger’s different acceptations of ‘letting-be’—as well as on his verbal understanding of Being as Anwesen (presencing) and Ereignis (appropriation-event)—the text indicates Releasement as the coincidence of Being’s and man’s ways to be and shows how it is in the very “urgency of a new existence and thought” that the proximity between Heidegger and Meister Eckahrt’s mystical tradition comes to the fore. (shrink)

This text, touching on the problem of the ontology of the image from a political-theological perspective, focuses on Reiner Schürmann’s philosophical reading of the pictorial art of Louis Comtois. While placing it in the context of post-World War II modernism, he nevertheless underlines its special spiritual quality that, far from any theorization of messianic abstractionism or any affirmation of artistic sovereignty, shows all the anarchic simplicity of painting. It is a form of modernity still to be imagined but one that (...) is already in some way active in the unpredictable meeting of matter and light, which Comtois’s pictorial act and Schürmann’s thought contemplate in the inseparable connection between history and immortality. (shrink)