a joke from the past

We all had a chuckle about this a few years ago, but it’s still funny: the RANDOM SPECULATIVE REALISM BLOG generator.

My favorite today so far is “Dwindling Quiddity.” That blog ought to exist.

sunrise in central France

Lac de Vassivière at sunrise, this morning.

enbeckoning and enquivering

A passage from the original English version of Heidegger’s Beiträge, as cited (derisively) in an article by Theodore Kisiel:

“Time-space is the enowned encleavage of the turning trajectories of enowning, of the turning between belongingness and the call, between abandonment by being and enbeckoning (the enquivering of the resonance of be-ing itself!)” (GA65 372/260).

I think my favorite part may be the exclamation point at the end. (Which is presumably Heidegger’s own, though it looks much funnier at the end of English like this than it does at the end of any German sentence by Heidegger.)

The translation is bad, but some of the absurd effct of this passage is simply Heidegger’s own fault. I felt some sadness when reading Simon Blackburn’s famous (and funny) review of the book. I don’t know Blackburn personally and so have no idea whether he’s an open-minded person or not. But I really felt that if I could just sit with Blackburn for 20 minutes and get him in a reasonably receptive mood, I could explain to him why Heidegger is important, despite frequent outbreaks of Heidegger Kitsch from Heideggerians and even Heidegger himself.

The first translation didn’t help a bit, but let’s face it– even the German original of the Beiträge sounds quite a bit like this at times. Heidegger is perfectly capable of being his own worst enemy.