Daimon Life

David Farrell Krell

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.

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 décembre 1992
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253114808
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DAIMON LIFE
Studies in Continental Thought
John Sallis, general editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
William L. McBride
Rudolf Bernet
J. N. Mohanty
John D. Caputo
Mary Rawlinson
David Carr
Tom Rockmore
Edward S. Casey
Calvin O. Schrag
Hubert L. Dreyfus
Reiner Sch rmann
Don Ihde
Charles E. Scott
David Farrell Krell
Thomas Sheehan
Lenore Langsdorf
Robert Sokolowski
Alphonso Lingis
Bruce W. Wilshire
David Wood
DAIMON LIFE

Heidegger and Life-Philosophy
DAVID FARRELL KRELL
1992 by David Farrell Krell All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krell, David Farrell.
Daimon life : Heidegger and life-philosophy / David Farrell Krell. p. cm. - (Studies in continental thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-33147-1 (hard : alk. paper). - ISBN 0-253-20739-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 2. Life-History-20th century. 3. Biology-Philosophy-History-20th century. I. Title. II. Series. B3279.H49K739 1992
193-dc20
91-47493
1 2 3 4 5 96 95 94 93 92
for id for life
In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.
-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
CONTENTS
PREFACE
KEY TO PRINCIPAL WORKS CITED
An Introduction to Za-ology

Greater Nearness, Abyss of Essence
-, Zer-, Zu: Too Far Afield
The Unified Field of ; the
PART ONE ADVANCED ZA-OLOGY
ONE.
I Call It Death-in-Life . . . : Reading Being and Time

The Facts of Life

From Factical Life to Dasein

Some Body Is Alive
TWO.
. . . Life-in-Death : Reading Being and Time (II)

Vanus hebesco

The Anxious Animal

Compulsion

The Spending Star

The Life-Philosophical Background: Dilthey, Husserl, Scheler

Death, Demise, and Animal Perishing
THREE.
Where Deathless Horses Weep: The 1929-1930 Biology Lectures

Horses?

Mourning Becomes Life

Sleep

World Poverty

The Being of Beeing

The Touchstone

Which Horses?
PART TWO TOWARD A POLITICS OF LIFE
FOUR.
You in front of Me, I in front of You : Heidegger in the University of Life

The Silence

The Noise

The University of Life

Addendum: On the Hard Geschlecht
FIVE.
Shattering: Heidegger s Rhetoric in the 1930s

Scheitern

Ersch tterung

Plenipotence: The Overpowering

Bestrewal

The Cleaving of (Finite) Beyng

A Difficult Birth
SIX.
Paranoetic Thinking: Life in the 1936-1938 Contributions to Philosophy ( Of Propriation )

The Fissure of Life

(De)gradations of Beyng

The Other Reverberation of Da-Sein

The Croaking of the Earth
PART THREE VITAL SIGNS
SEVEN.
Lifedeath: Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud

The New Interpretation of Sensuousness

Chaos and Ash

Nietzsche s Alleged Biologism

Reading Chaos

Immanent Death, Imminent Death: Beyond the PP


EIGHT.
Something like Sexes, Something like Spirit: Heidegger and Derrida

Four Generations of Geschlecht

One Generation of Spirit

Of Sisters
NINE.
Final Signs of Life: Heidegger and Irigaray

A Sublimity Lived in Life Itself

Stirrings of Languorous Divinity

: The Daimonic Site

Sirensong

What Bestirs in the Showing of Saying?

Addendum: Cristy s Mortality
NOTES
INDEX
Preface
Daimon life? Does that mean that life is a demon? And that we are going to involve ourselves in something diabolical? Or does the title mean to suggest Heidegger s anathematization of Lebensphilosophie , the tradition of life-philosophy from Dilthey and Bergson through Nietzsche and Scheler? What precisely does Heidegger s thought, whether elaborating a fundamental ontology of Dasein or meditating on a poetics of being and propriation, have to do with something as vague as life ? Who or what is this ?
Diotima of Mantinea opens the classic space of the daimon. To be sure, she invokes the daimon called ; yet we may be safe in assuming that Eros has something to do with daimon life . Diotima instructs young Socrates in Plato s Symposium (202ff.) concerning the nature of love as a lack or deprivation of the good and beautiful. Love lacks the very qualities that the gods above all possess. Diotima then draws the daimonic consequences:
You see, even you don t regard Eros as a god.
What can Eros be, then? A mortal?
Far from it.
What, then?
As in the other examples, something between a mortal and an immortal.
And what is that, Diotima?
A great daimon, Socrates [ , ]. For the daimonic [ ] is midway between what is divine and what is mortal.
What power does it possess?
It acts as an interpreter and means of communication between gods and mortals. It takes requests and offerings to the gods, and brings back instructions and benefits in return. Occupying this middle position it plays a vital role in holding the world together. It is the medium of all prophecy and religion, whether it concerns sacrifice, forms of worship, incantations, or any kind of divination or sorcery. There is no direct contact between god and mortal. All association and communication between them, waking or sleeping, takes place through Eros. This kind of knowledge is daimonic; any other kind (occupational or artistic, for example) is purely utilitarian. Such are many and varied, and Eros is one of them. 1
In a lecture course on logic in 1928 Heidegger for the first time (as far as I am aware) mentions , the realm of the daimonic. For a number of years, certainly through the mid-1940s, it serves as a figure that integrates an entire range of themes and subjects that persist in his thought: the finite transcendence of Dasein or human existence, temporality, freedom, anxiety, the overpowering, language, and the holy. My thesis is that these themes and issues all touch on the phenomenon of life as it appears in Heidegger s thought from the very outset of his path; further, that however much Heidegger inveighs against life-philosophy his own fundamental ontology and poetics of being thrust him back onto Lebensphilosophie again and again; and, finally, that the most powerfully gathering figure of his thinking during the years 1928 to 1944, the figure that plays a role in holding the world together, is that of the daimon- daimon life .
Life would therefore be a word that hovers about Heidegger s thought even more hauntingly than the spirit with which we have all been so preoccupied of late. That does not mean to gainsay the insights Jacques Derrida s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question has opened up for us. Nor does it mean to deny that Heidegger s response to the daimon, to life and life-philosophy, invite critical reflection on his politics. The present book, especially in its second part, wants to initiate a new kind of discussion concerning Heidegger s political debacle, a discussion that takes the daimonic as its point of departure. Finally, the great daimon of life should enable us to expand the horizons of our interrogation of Heidegger-back to Plato, then forward to German Idealism, on through Nietzsche and Freud, and onward (beyond Heidegger) to Derrida and Irigaray.
For the most part, this book is a close reading of a number of Heideggerian texts, principally from the late 1920s through the mid-1940s, including Being and Time (1927), Contributions to Philosophy ( Of Propriation ) (1936-1938), and the lecture courses of 1928 (on Leibniz, logic, and the daimon), 1929-1930 (on theoretical biology), 1942-1943 (on the daimonic site in Heidegger s Parmenides lectures), and 1943-1944 (on the Greek sense of life, as , in the Heraclitus lectures). It allows the larger horizon of daimon life to remain in the background. That horizon, as I have indicated, would encompass Plato s Timaeus and all the thinkers and poets of German Romanticism and Idealism, to name but two possible landmarks on the horizon. Only in its introductory and concluding chapters does the present book venture beyond or outside Heidegger s texts, suggesting a number of paths for future research and thought.
Several chapters of the book have appeared earlier in altered form in journals and anthologies, and I would like to thank the editors for permission to use these materials here: John Sallis, editor of Research in Phenomenology , XVII and XVIII, for material in the Introduction and in chapter 8