Suchergebnisse

This article provides a political reading of Martin Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). One of the central themes of the Beiträge is crucial to understanding why Heidegger moved into a position of critical distance from the Nazi regime, because it is an attempt to comprehend what lies behind the events of the time. This is the notion of the politics of calculation, the issue of measure, which relates closely to Heidegger's late concerns with technology. Through readings of Heidegger on Protagoras and Descartes, the role of calculation in the forgetting of being, and the notions of machination, race, and worldview, I show how the Beiträge, and particularly its explicit political context, is valuable in evaluating Heidegger's own career, his political position and politics more generally.

Henri Lefebvre's intellectual biographies, especially his (1947; 2001a [1955]) works on Rene Descartes & Francois Rabelais, are studied. Overviews of Lefebvre's involvement with the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) during the 1940s & 1950s, & the PCF's motivations for expelling Lefebvre from the organization in 1958 are presented. An analysis of Lefebvre's various intellectual biographies of various French writers revealed an overwhelming concern with the historical & intellectual contexts within which these authors produced their works; indeed, it is noted that Lefebvre contented that a proper dialectical materialist approach to French philosophy & literature necessitated heavy consideration of the intellectual contexts surrounding these writers' works. After discussing Lefebvre's contention that the rise of the bourgeois class & Rabelais's association with the peasant class strongly affected Rabelais's writings, the appearance of "the fantastic" in Rabelais's & Cervantes's respective works is compared. In addition, differences between Lefebvre's & Mikhail Bakhtin's respective readings of the contexts that affected Rabelais' works are considered. The implications of adopting Lefebvre's "fantastical approach" to studying the everyday reality of the material world are also pondered. 61 References. J. W. Parker