ABSTRACTThis paper examines Martin Heidegger’s own interpretation of Being and Time in the Black Notebooks. The opening part addresses Heidegger’s singular notions of “thinking” and “questioning” which suggest a critically reflective stance, but involve an initiatory call to surrender to the hidden powers of Beyng. The second part addresses Heidegger’s lament in the Black Notebooks that Being and Time has not produced a “great enemy”, and his critique of the initial existentialist or “anthropological” receptions of his magnum opus. The third (...) part looks at how Heidegger’s thought moves beyond Being and Time, in light of the central role the thinker assigns to the German people in repeating the first “inception” of preSocratic thought, in order to overcome the legacies of Roman universalism, and what Heidegger as early as 1932 was calling “Jewish Christianity”. The final part addresses Heidegger’s conception of “the history of Beyng” as it is developed in the Black Notebooks of the early 1940s, from out of the account of “temporality” in Being and Time: a “history” in which Heidegger’s postulation of a need for the “annihilation“ ” of the essential enemy of the Volk become the lens through which Heidegger can read the Shoah as the “the peak of self-destruction in history”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper examines Heidegger’s remarks about the worldlessness of Judaism in his Black Notebooks. In the first part of the paper I examine Heidegger’s concept of the world in Being and Time and subsequent writings. In the second part, I analyze a distinction that Heidegger draws between mere human actuality and genuine human existence in a 1932 lecture course on The Beginning of Western Philosophy. This distinction, I suggest, relates to the development of Heidegger’s thoughts on nihilism and what (...) he conceives as its gravest danger. In the third part, I argue that the above-mentioned distinction can help us to better understand Heidegger’s remarks on Judaism. In particular, I suggest that the Jewish figure comes to symbolize for Heidegger a kind of unessential human actuality that is irredeemably detached from the question of Being. (shrink)