on noir periods

I was just reading a reference to “Frank Sinatra’s noir period.” It was not specified which period this was, though it’s so obviously an accurate term that I think I know exactly what songs were meant. And perhaps the phrase is already well-known to musicologists specializing in popular genres.

But then something else occurred to me… Philosophers ought to have noir periods as well. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were already a few quirky treatises that gave us the “noir” Kant or Hegel?

The closest we have to this, of course, is probably the later Heidegger. “Die Sprache im Gedicht” on Trakl is fairly noir (and you can’t even really touch Trakl without being in a noir mood to begin with). “The Question Concerning Technology” is noir enough. Actually, most of Heidegger’s stuff in the 1950’s is even blacker than Sinatra at his most bleak.

The problem is that Heidegger never really escaped this period. If he’d bounced back with something a little more straightforward in the vein of the Marburg Lecture Courses, then we could speak of a noir “period” in Heidegger. But it was more than a period, and the seeds for it were obviously there.

Whose noir period would you most like to read? I think Aristotle would be my choice.