Intimations of Mortality

Heidegger&;s thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. &;The theme of mortality&;finite human existence&;pervades Heidegger&;s thought,&; in the author&;s words, &;before, during, and after his magnum opus, Being and Times, published in 1927.&; This theme is manifested in Heidegger&;s work not &;as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism&; but rather &;as a thinking within anxiety.&;Four major subthemes in Heidegger&;s thinking are explored in the book&;s four parts: the fundamental ontology developed in Being and Time; the &;lighting and clearing&; of Being, understood as &;unconcealment&;; the history of philosophy&;with emphasis on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Nietzsche&;interpreted as the &;destiny&; of Being; and the poetics of Being, explicated as the &;fundamental experience&; of mortality.Neither an introduction nor a survey, this book is a close reading of a wide range of Heidegger&;s books, lectures, and articles&;including extensive material not yet translated into English&;informed by the author&;s conversations with Heidegger in 1974&;76. Each of the four subthemes is treated critically. The aim of the book is to push its interrogations of Heidegger&;s thought as far as possible, in order to help the reader toward an independent assessment of his work and to encourage novel, radically conceived approaches to traditional philosophical problems.