Heidegger

Well Michael,
As anticipated, you’ve rendered this list nonplussed. After all,
despite its yearnings this is a gathering of philosophers with teeth
cut in exegesis. So, my question remains: What does the opposite of
exegesis even look like? How do we proceed and not think *about*? By
looking away?

My Mom has Macular Degeneration. It’s an insidious eye condition that
causes a fog at the very center of her vision — but leaves the
periphery clear. So, she can see her visual context — but it’s the
very thing that she wants to see that is obscured. What must be seen
keeps itself turned away. However, what cannot be seen also attracts
her and draws her along by its very withdrawal. And she can
eventually build the thing she wants to see by taking in its context
through several passes — that is, by chasing the thing she wants to
see by looking away from it.

I have many questions, and found the Long walk helpful. You’ve made a
good start of it, Michael.
Admiringly,
Ron

> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:58:54 +0100
> From: “michaelP”
> Subject: gelassenheit/gestell — part 1
> To: Discussions pertaining to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger
>
> Message-ID:
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”US-ASCII”
>
> Thus, gelassenheit must be grasped first (if you like): Heidegger’s
> seminal
> ‘Conversation on a country path’ {part of ‘Gelassenheit’) should be
> consulted for this — anyone interested in a close reading?
>
> Thus spoke I a little whiling ago; I got a response off-list from a
> list
> member, Ron Jelaco, who (for better or worser) encouraged me to
> attempt to
> carry this reading through, so here goes…
>
> “I can go anyway, way I choose
> I can live anyhow, win or lose
> I can go anywhere, for something new
> Anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose
> …
> Nothing gets in my way
> Not even locked doors
> Don’t follow the lines
> That been laid before
> I get along anyway I dare
> Anyway, anyhow, anywhere”
>
> [from ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, The Who, 1960s]
>
>
> “…But I’m livin’ in a foreign country,
> But I’m bound to cross the line.
> Beauty walks on a razor’s edge,
> Some day I’ll make it mine.
> If I could only turn back the clock,
> To when God and her were born.
> “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give ya,
> Shelter from the storm…”
>
> [from ‘Shelter from the storm’, Bob Dylan]
>
> I want to begin by walking at some distance (apparently) from
> Heidegger’s
> path by ambling with the artist Richard Long a while as he walks his
> (not
> laid before) line along a razor’s edge, his representational
> difference. In
> 1982 Long produced a close-up photograph of his over-walked boots
> calling it
> ‘Shelter from the storm’: a reference to Dylan’s song, Van Gogh’s ‘A
> pair of
> shoes’, and thus to Derrida’s playful pairing (and paring?) and un-
> pairing
> of both Heidegger’s peasant boots (in his ‘Origins of the work of
> art’) and
> Shapiro’s artist’s shoes. And thus we are in the same (though not
> identical)
> region; resonances echo and ring in the stillness of the dusky
> evening for
> both artist and thinker.
>
> I am choosing, initially, to walk this parallel path with the artist
> rather
> than simply (!) alongside Heidegger’s thinking path because of the
> extraordinary difficulty in making the first steps with Heidegger
> and his
> walky-talky illustration of gelassenheit. Both Long and Heidegger
> step out
> on a landscape far from human habitation: and that means far from
> human
> habituation too; for both the very stepping out and forward, step by
> step,
> is the ‘point’ of the path-making; for both the work (whether
> thinkerly
> discourse/drama or artwork/event) is non-representational; for both
> souvenirs (text and photograph/caption resp) accompany the work. For
> Long
> the artworks are the walks and the more or less ephemeral traces and
> tracks
> accumulated in the very walking and tracking (like an animal’s foil
> for the
> hunter/tracker) some ever-so-slightly-not-quite accidental/
> vicissitudinal,
> some rather more deliberate/willed/placed. For the sake of the
> exhibitions
> he produces the photographic souvenirs that display the traces and
> tracks
> and placements as images. But the artworks are not the images
> rendered for
> the art markets, are not the representational mementos, are not the
> traces
> of the traces of the walks: they are the walks as such, the
> walkings, and
> *as such*, they can not be represented, they can only be walked
> (exquisitely, of course, these are the walkings of a sensitive
> artist).
>
> The exquisite difficulty faced in Heidegger’s thinkerly walk is that
> he
> seeks a thinking path that is not representational, that is not an
> act of
> will; and the initial ‘problem’ is how to not even will the not-
> willing (how
> to not represent the non-representational). Long’s walking helps us
> because
> he accompanies his non-representational artworks with representational
> souvenirs (comings with/before, underlying/accomanying). For the
> thinker
> this might mean that the post-metaphysical thinking that Heidegger
> seeks in
> the Conversation can be accomapanied by metaphysical
> (representational,
> calculative) souvenirs; that the restitution of thinking when
> thinking is
> brought into the region of the non-representational can be realised
> without
> the total abandonment of the calculative (will). Although the
> Conversation
> begins far from human habitation, it is nontheless walked/talked by
> human
> walkers/talkers. For both Long and Heidegger the ‘aim’ with each
> footfall of
> their paths is to listen sensitively to that which calls for each
> footfall,
> the eros of walking and stalking and talking. The Conversation is
> enacted as
> a conversation in the soul (Plato’s path in the Socratic dialogues)
> and thus
> is just as solitary as Long’s long walks and traipses into the
> deserted (by
> productive/calculative/mobilised civilisation).
>
> That’s all for now; next time, in part 2, I’ll begin looking at the
> Conversation itself in order to get a handle on the wayward path and
> so
> begin walking with Heidegger without getting dizzy or lost in the
> crepuscular pathways sited along the way of the thinker. Long’s path
> might
> even intersect at times…
>
> regards (and special thanks to Ron who posed the question of the near
> impossibility (non-pass-ability?) of representing/analysing such a
> thinking
> of the non-representationality of gelassenheit (as illustrated in the
> Conversation); this labyrinthine task can only be unthreaded by
> walking the
> path with Heidegger.
>
> michaelP

Posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 6:00 am
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