Heidegger Martin - PHILOSOPHY OF FINITUDE: heidegger, levinas and nietzsche

Philosophy of Finitude

To Mira and Salom,

And to the memory of my mother

Also available from Bloomsbury

Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited by Chiara Alfano and Simon Morgan Wortham

Heidegger and the Emergence of the Question of Being, Jess Adrin Escudero

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon OBrien

Heidegger and Nietzsche, Louis P. Blond

Between Levinas and Lacan, Mari Ruti

Lacan Contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, and Politics, edited by Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel

Foucault and Nietzsche, edited by Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall

Nietzsche and Political Thought, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson

Contents

I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to a good number of people who have seen this project through, both in part and as a whole, since its inception in the winter of 2015 at a retreat in a lodge in Magaliesburg, South Africa. These include: Babette Babich, Dan Dahlstrom, Joanna Hodge, Ulli Haase, Dermot Moran, Paul Patton, John Sallis and Miguel de Beistegui. I owe a special thanks to Thad Metz who generously offered to organize a reading group on an early draft of the book. A thanks is also due to the participants whose contribution improved the book a thousandfold: Jaco Kruger, Gary Beck, Jimmy Kyriacou, Marquard Dirk Pienaar, David Martens, Anton van Niekerk, Pete Wolfendale, and David Mitchell. I also owe thanks to my parents, Jean-Pierre Winkler and Simone Hellebosch, for their continued support.

Lastly, I would like to thank my partner, Katlego, and my daughters, Salom and Mira, for having seen me through the completion of this project. Life has, since I have known them, become light, a dance and a joy.

Heideggers works:

This book attempts to justify, perhaps not always very successfully, the belief that the unique is everything or, to put it more precisely using one of Platos expressions, that the unique is to ontos on, thereally real.

By the unique I do not mean that which responds to the question who are you?, that is, the first person whose identity constitutes itself as it narrates its life to the other.

The dominant theory of experience from Descartes to Husserl, including Kant, either conflates the uniqueness of experience with the first person or it accounts for the former by reference to the latter. A Kantian or a phenomenologist, the difference does not matter in this regard, will say that my perception of the red cube is incommensurable with yours because that first perception is mine.

I argue in of this book that uniqueness is prior in meaning to and that it makes possible the constitution of the first person. An experience can be unique and anonymous at the same time, that is to say, it can be left unclaimed by the self.

That is especially true in the case of limit experiences or traumas of different sorts where someone suffers the complete collapse of their personal identity. The sense of that persons life grows dark. She is no longer capable of referring to herself as I. Nevertheless, that does not mean that her experience has become qualitatively indistinguishable from someone elses whose personal identity has also broken down. As I put it in this book, a life is and remains non-replaceable, singular or unique, even when the unity of the first person has broken down, and it is no longer possible to think in the first person or ascribe experiences to the I.

To justify that position, I argue in in What is Metaphysics?, I show that the collapse of the unity of the self is a possible experience and that possible experience, consequently, does not depend on the unity of the first person as a necessary condition of possibility.

What accounts for the non-replaceability of a life if not the unity of the first person? Uniqueness is not a feature that descends from heaven (the immortality of the person). Or at least I dont believe that it does.

Like the word being, uniqueness is not a predicate with an empirical or eidetic content. It does not pick out an accidental property or essence. It tells us nothing about who or what one is. Uniqueness is not the essence of the human being. It is a purely formal feature of existence. One is non-replaceable just by virtue of existing (that is, of being to the measure of Dasein).

Consequently, the haecceity of a being, that is, someones