I normally read the LRB when its delivered, but for immediate access to their Ponderings review I did just that, pondered and recollected my password. From behind the elite paywall, more on Trumpo:

In his rectoral address, Heidegger concurs: greatness is standing in the storm, but to do that you first have to go out into the storm. Or as Trump puts it, you will never discover the greatness within if ‘you plan to spend your time in a café, sipping cappuccino and watching life go by’.

It may be tempting to dismiss these parallels as an example of the way in which vacuities converge under the pressure of megalomania. But there is a little more to it than that. The spectre of a Heideggerian Trump has already been raised by the endorsement Trump received from Alexander Dugin, the Russian occultist and political theorist sometimes referred to as ‘Putin’s Rasputin’. Dugin, unlike conventional Heidegger scholars, recognises Heidegger’s work from the mid to late 1930s (represented by such works as Introduction to Metaphysics, Contributions to Philosophy, History of Beyng and now Ponderings) as a bold attempt to construct an original political philosophy of enduring relevance.

Although it was conceived within the context of National Socialism, Dugin sees Heidegger’s philosophy as a template for a ‘Fourth Political Theory’: an alternative not just to the failed politics of liberalism and Marxism, but of fascism as well. In appropriating Heidegger for the present, Dugin takes Heidegger’s claim that the consummation of the essence of power can be seen in ‘planetarism’ as a reference to contemporary globalisation – a moment when, as Heidegger prophetically described it, ‘the furthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically.’ In this context, the Fourth Political Theory offers the only viable alternative for all those who, like the Russians, ‘suffer their integration into global society as a loss of their own identity’.

Thus the deplorables vote for a tyrant; Republic, Book VIII.   ¶ 1:32 AM 0 comments

  In the LRB, Malcolm Bull reviews Ponderings II-VI.

[T]he truly shocking question posed by the Black Notebooks is not: was Heidegger a Nazi? Or: was Heidegger an anti-Semite? But: would Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher have endorsed Donald Trump?

“Education does not matter. You should just see his wonderful hands!”   ¶ 3:00 PM 0 comments

  Today I got the new translation of Heidegger's Shadow (Feinmann's La Sombra de Heidegger, not David Cherrill and Carroll Jacobs's play) and immediately started comparing it to my The Shadow of Heidegger.

First thing I noticed is that it's not as literal a translation. I tried to keep or express as much of the style, voice, and cadence of the original in my English. The original is written by an Argentinian in Spanish, who is writing in the persona of a student of Heidegger's at Freiburg. Feinmann imitates the style of European novelists and philosophers of the time, filtered through Hollywood movie scenes from the 1960s-70s. This new translation is in idiomatic American English, which makes it breezy to read, but loses some of what I found interesting and entertaining in the original. This translation is more of an adaptation for a different audience. It's not as long as the original; entire sentences were dropped. There's a four page translators' introduction. I was surprised that a university press edition didn't do more to provide context to story elements that readers won't recognize in a few decades. Unlike Feinmann's generation's shared Hollywood culture, amongst millennials, only film obsessives will recognize borrowings from Cabaret and Judgement at Nuremberg. My translation includes movie stills, pictures of historical characters, etc. Of course, being free, my translation didn't need to license anything.
  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments

  Figure/Ground interviews Peter Wolfendale.

I have always found Deleuze’s willingness to present his metaphysics as an attempt answer to the question of Being to be quite refreshing, given how many of those influenced by Heidegger, and eventually even Heidegger himself, seem to be uninterested in actually answering the question.

  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 comments

  In the Spectator, a discussion of the scholars who support the Trumpista Gemeinschaft.

academics who are at the top of their fields, such as the philosophers Scott Soames, Robert Koons, Daniel N. Robinson and Daniel Bonevac. Predictably, the list elicited outraged and snarky social-network comments suggesting comparisons with a few other philosophers, notably the Nazis Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

¡Presente! [with a Falangist accent] are First Things, the New Criterion, the Claremont Review of Books, the American Spectator, and the American Conservative. Sad, really. I've read some interesting articles on the likes of Strauss, Plato, in those, in the past.

  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 comments

  In The Chron of Higher Ed, Faustian desires.

The problem with the physical sciences — or with the catchall that Faust called "medicine" — is that when it comes to the difficulties of mortality, scientists are committed to a particular methodology, which necessarily avoids satisfying existential answers. End-of-life issues are subjectively felt; there is a singular quality of experience to each passing life. This is what Heidegger means when he claims that death is a person’s "ownmost possibility." When an old man asks, "What is the meaning of life?" he simultaneously queries the infinitely more particular question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Which is also the question: "What might be the meaning of my death?"

  ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments

  In 3AM, Richard Marshall interviews Jan Slaby.

Heidegger is in many respects a problematic thinker, first of all politically, of course, but also philosophically. There is something assholy, off-putting, painfully self-obsessed about his style of thought and the way he writes – don’t do it at home, folks. Still, I prefer philosophers who have worked themselves through Heidegger over those that haven’t, but you cannot stay there and think it’s just okay to ‘be a Heideggerian’. I plan to work more on an immanent critique of Heidegger, especially his views of the subject, how he keeps adhering to the image of a stratified, hierarchical subject, even where he avows to abandon any sort of subject-thinking altogether. We had critiques of this kind within French philosophy, but there is little in English so far. In effect, this would about using Heidegger like a ladder one has to climb in order to reach a certain level of thinking on the subject, but then, once atop, one is well-advised to kick, or better still: burn that bloody ladder.

  ¶ 7:24 AM 0 comments

 

Considered with respect to truth as disclosedness, concealment is then un-disclosedness and accordingly the un-truth that is most proper to the essence of truth. The concealment of beings as a whole does not first show up subsequently as a consequence of the fact that knowledge of beings is always fragmentary. The concealment of beings as a whole, un-truth proper, is older than every openedness of this or that being. It is older even than letting-be itself, which in disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself toward concealing.

P. 148

As old as the Jurassic?   ¶ 9:19 PM 0 comments