Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy

Description

"Daimon Life is life-enchancing. To read it is to become richer in wor(l)d." –John Llewelyn Disclosure of Martin Heidegger's complicity with the National Socialist regime in 1933-34 has provoked virulent debate about the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. Did Heidegger's philosophy exhibit a kind of organicism readily transformed into ideological "blood and soil"? Or, rather, did his support of the Nazis betray a fundamental lack of loyalty to living things? David Farrell Krell traces Heidegger's political authoritarianism to his failure to develop a constructive "life-philosophy"―his phobic reactions to other forms of being. Krell details Heidegger's opposition to Lebensphilosophie as expressed in Being and Time, in an important but little-known lecture course on theoretical biology given in 1929–30 called "The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics," and in a recently published key text, Contributions to Philosophy, written in 1936–38. Although Heidegger's attempt to think through the problems of life, sexual reproduction, behavior, environment, and the ecosystem ultimately failed, Krell contends that his methods of thinking nonetheless pose important tasks for our own thought. Drawing on and away from Heidegger, Krell expands on the topics of life, death, sexuality, and spirit as these are treated by Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Irigaray. Daimon Life addresses issues central to contemporary philosophies of politics, gender, ecology, and theoretical biology. Cover Half title Studies in Continental Thought Title Copyright Deidication Epigram CONTENTS Preface Key to Principal Works Cited An Introduction to Za-ology PART ONE Advanced Za-ology ONE "I Call It Death-in-Life..." Reading Being and Time TWO "... Life-in-Death" Reading Being and Time (II) THREE Where Deathless Horses Weep The 1929-1930 Biology Lectures PART TWO Toward a Politics of Life FOUR "You in front of Me, I in front of You" Heidegger in the University of Life FIVE Shattering Heidegger's Rhetoric in the 1930s SIX Paranoetic Thinking "Life" in the 1936-1938 Contributions to Philosophy (Of Propriation) PART THREE Vital Signs SEVEN Lifedeath Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud EIGHT Something like Sexes, Something like Spirit Heidegger and Derrida NINE Final Signs of Life Heidegger and Irigaray Notes PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. "I CALL IT DEATH-IN-LIFE..." 2. "...LIFE-IN-DEATH " 3. WHERE DEATHLESS HORSES WEEP 4. "YOU IN FRONT OF ME, I IN FRONT OF YOU " 5. SHATTERING 6. PARANOETIC THINKING 7. LIFEDEATH 8. SOMETHING LIKE SEXES, SOMETHING LIKE SPIRIT 9. FINAL SIGNS OF LIFE Index