This article traces the development of how the early Heidegger tried to integrate the structures of social life into phenomenological ontology. Firstly, I argue that Heidegger's analysis of the three elements of the lifeworld—the with-world (Mitwelt), the environing world (Umwelt), and the self-world (Selbstwelt)—is ambiguous, because it shifts between defining sociality as a domain of entities and a mode of appearance. This is untenable because the social as a mode of appearance constantly overflows the definition as a domain by implicating (...) social structures in phenomenological explications of entities that, formally, belong to other domains. Secondly, I argue that Heidegger realized this and subsequently changed his terminology from Mitwelt to Mitsein in order to avoid confusing the mode of appearance with the innerworldly entities. The systematic consequence of this line of argument is that the object of social ontology must be the world as such rather than a particular domain. Lastly, I respond to the common worry that this position is unable to explain the significance of interpersonal encounters by arguing that the world not only makes the appearance of others possible but also that the world is itself at stake in these encounters. (shrink)

This article provides a detailed analysis of the function of the notion of _Volk_ in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. At first glance, this term is an appeal to the revolutionary masses of the National Socialist revolution in a way that demarcates a distinction between the rootedness of the German People and the rootlessness of the modern rabble. But this distinction is not a sufficient explanation of Heidegger’s position, because Heidegger simultaneously seems to hold that even the Germans are characterized by _a (...) lack of identity_. What is required is a further appropriation of the proper. My suggestion is that this logic of the _Volk_ is not only useful for understanding Heidegger’s thought during the war, but also an indication of what happened after he lost faith in the National Socialist movement and thus had to make the _lack of the People_ the basis of his thought. (shrink)

This article argues that Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of kairos and messianic time are essentially to be understood in terms of experience. This becomes clear when we identify the methodological similarities between Agamben’s reading of Paulus in The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s lectures on Paulus from 1920-21: the doctrine of kairology is different from any eschatology, insofar as it involves an instantaneous modulation of our factical conditions, rather than a removal of them to come. In this way, I argue that (...) Agamben echoes Heidegger’s conception of formal indication and enactment-sense. But whereas Heidegger understood this modulation as an anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein identifies itself with its calling, Agamben emphasizes the very impossibility of such an identification. This is indeed a decisive difference between Agamben and Heidegger. I show, however, that Agamben phrases this difference in a language that recalls Heidegger’s thought, thus implicitly suggesting that the emancipatory potential of his philosophy is to be understood as the experiential enactment of an impotentiality that undermines any factical condition and any social identity. (shrink)

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are (...) shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)