In The Truth in Painting , Derrida insists that Heidegger's treatment of “a famous picture by Van Gogh” marks “a moment of pathetic collapse.” While we would agree, we would insist that this example does not render Heidegger's entire philosophy of art suspect. Instead, if his reading of Van Gogh's painting is “derisory and symptomatic,” it is nonetheless “significant,” if only insofar as it provides an indication of Heidegger's underestimation of the plastic arts in favor of the elevation of poetry—an (...) underestimation that may be corrected in light of what we might regard as his true philosophy of art. Our aim, then, is to see (with some help from Derrida) what Heidegger could have seen in looking at Van Gogh's Old Shoes were the work not reduced to an illustration in a presentation whose destination is poetry, not painting. What, in other words, would Van Gogh's painting look like were we to view it in light of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” assuming that the latter does not require insistence on the priority of linguistic work but on the creation of a truth that belongs to the Earth, in the case in point, as the ground of painting? (shrink)

Through a free reading of Heidegger's Zur Seinsfrage, we propose - with the help of the reader - to scribe into being the space of an opening; in fact, to transcribe it with the drawing of an ×. The point of this writing and thinking "Over the Line" is neither to draft a new structure nor to mark a new center but, as a sign of nothing, to inscribe a hole in the text of philosophy. In view of a topological (...) sketch of the original opening of Western ontology, the unfolding of a complete nihilism may finally be described, in a thinking that marks its own vanishing point. (shrink)

This is a long and difficult book from which, however, a good deal can be learned if the reader is able to devise strategies to stay with an always turgid and sometimes pedantic text. First published in 1965 as Die Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart and reissued in 1977 with the inclusion of further material, its translation by Christopher Macann brings to us an already established work in German philosophy which, I am afraid, is not likely to meet with (...) the same success among an English audience that it has enjoyed in Europe. In a word, its thoroughly "Germanic" style may discourage all but the most devoted reader, especially given such sheer length. And this is unfortunate, since under it all Theunissen has a number of profound and even simple points to make. (shrink)

An attempt to argue that the introduction of the category of the absurd into Kierkegaard's discussion of truth as subjectivity in the Postscript is an altogether rigorous and logical move.