Abstract

In the first section of the project, I introduce Martin Heidegger's notions of fundamental attunement , which he reads both as a mode of pre-cognitive understanding characteristic of individual existence, and also as associated with historically determined "epochs" of communal thinking; and specifically "the fundamental attunement of deep boredom---die Grundstimmung der tiefen Langeweile." Using a Heideggerean 'template,' I offer brief analyses of; the ataraxia which is the goal of the Hellenistic sceptical program; the functions of acedia and apatheia in Monastic thought; the Ennuy of Pascal; and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche's observations concerning boredom in relation to modernity. Heidegger's ontologies of attunement and boredom allow me to read ataraxia, acedia, Ennuy, etc., as attunements that signal a crisis in ordinary, everyday experience, manifested through these moods which, on Heidegger's term, disclose a profound but ambivalent indifference to ordinary, everyday practices, situations, and ways of thinking characteristic, of particular historically situated "worlds." ;In the final two sections, I offer an in depth analysis of Heidegger's own conception of deep boredom; its function as one of several Grundstimmungen within Heidegger's existential and historical/epochal analytics, its relation to technological modernity, to other fundamental attunements that he associates with different historical epochs, and to the possibility of a transformation both in our ordinary ways of thinking about ourselves and our world, and in the very conditions of our lives, as these have been formed within, and limited by, the epoch of technological modernity. I finish by evaluating Heidegger's explicitly historical analysis in relation to the work of Walter Benjamin, who also analyses alterations in experience brought about by developments within technological modernity; in relation to the possibility of a transformation in everyday life, and in relation to what has been called Benjamin's "melancholy subjectivity." I argue that Benjamin offers a more fruitful and productive analysis of the experience of modernity than does Heidegger, with regard to the attempt to theorize a persistent languor or indifference that is endemic within modern experience in relation to the possibility of a transformation in the conditions of everyday life