Heidegger

> The reason my book didn’t didn’t sell is because people thought
> either it’s an intended joke, or the person who wrote it a bigger
> one. I should have hidden my message better in a title of total
> dissemblement as did Spinoza in the “Theological-Political Tractate.”
> This blazenly irreverent critique is written by a Jew–really could
> have only been written by a Jew. What Spinoza does is shows how the
> literature/philosophy of the religion of the Old Testament can be,
> indeed must be read by any reasonable person as a passionate act of
> universalizing Judaism: Judaism , stripped of ridiculous
> literalisms, is a universal religion. If Marx is the last Jewish
> prophet, Spinoza is the last Jewish rabbi.
>
> Allen

Allen, more prosaically, one might find the reason for lack of sales lying
with your publisher… but the notion of a (somewhat) dissembling title for
works is itself somewhat relevant vis-a-vis Heidegger(’s thinking).

I found most subversively enjoyable my first reading of Heidegger’s
‘Parmenides’: you’d have thought that the book would be about Parmenides and
his thinking from the title; well, it starts off seemingly in that direction
also mentioning Heraclitus in the same breath, but rapidly it becomes
obvious that the title’s meaning is not obvious. The book is really an
extraordinary thinking path that traverses the itinerary of a single
word/concept _alethia_; and although the word is famously articulated and
philosophically presenced by Parmenides, the book is rather a tracking of
the careering of the notions of truth and falsity, of showing and hiding, of
assembling and dissembling, etc, as they presence in philosophy. Heidegger,
the se-ducer. And, isn’t that what you are talking about here, Allen?
Moreover you also mention this slightly subversive tactic of Heidegger’s
when discussing, in your book, a (Heidegger) course entitled something like
‘Aristotle’ [sorry, I can’t lay my hands on your book right now for the
actual reference] but is very quickly about something else that is
suggested/indicated by bringing Aristotle to mind but not really about
Aristotle at all.

My opera will be entitled ‘A Certain Silence…’. Will it be obviously to do
with Heidegger? Is it a selling point, the title? What does Heideggerian
music sound like? The Heidegger scholar/translator/film-maker Terence Malick
produced, for me, an example of Heideggerian cinema in his masterpiece, ‘The
Thin Red Line’, but it wasn’t about Heidegger, it was a war film, but… a
certain questioning, a certain flair, a certain clearing in the mess of
war…

For the record, Allen, I found your book to be refreshingly inspiring, as
did a friend of mine (in whose hands the book still lies, a favourite with
her) and most incisive. The bringing into conversation Heideggerian thinking
and Jewish practice is a brave piece of work, especially given that very
‘certain silence’ and the controversy that has raged ever since…

I apologise about the rambling nature of this post but I’m rambling on
anyway. The fern at the back of my garden looks on at me, the look of it is
the look it gives me; it’s something that is…

regards

michaelP

Posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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