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At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when
our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to
redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political
theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play,
and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of
poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology
of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings
on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its
communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian
"promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of
humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of
universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays,
novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite
inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett
redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new
possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying
Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world,
Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly
ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in
the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that,
after all, meaning is still possible.
In volume I, Kleinberg-Levin interprets five key words in
Heidegger's project. In this second volume, he illuminates their
significance for Heidegger's phenomenology of perception and his
philosophy of history. At stake is the possibility of a new
experience and understanding of being. Taking us beyond the
metaphysical understanding of being, Heidegger proposes to
introduce a new key word Seyn (beyng). Beyng is the
Da-sein-appropriating event in which a clearing occurs as an open
dimension for the time-space interplay of concealment and
unconcealment, an interplay within which beings are experienced in
regard to the various modes and inflections of presence and absence
that the grammar of temporalities articulates. Concentrating on the
appropriation of seeing and hearing as capacities and capabilities
bearing promising potentialities that could be developed,
Kleinberg-Levin examines seeing and hearing in the context of
Heidegger's critique of the history of metaphysics, wherein vision
has served as paradigm for knowledge, truth, and reality. He shows
that, in Heidegger's philosophy of history, seeing and hearing are
given a role in the transformation of the character of humanity,
redeeming their own inherent potential. Perceptual experience has
undergone accelerating processes of deformation and reification,
encouraging a disposition that makes it serve technological and
technocratic imperatives; but we might begin to redeem the
promising potential in seeing and hearing, turning their damaged
and dehumanized character, and their violence, towards the creation
of a new planetary existence-what Heidegger imagines through the
topology of the fourfold: earth and sky, mortals and the gods who
embody our ideals. In this project, we are put in question by a
responsibility that summons us, in our seeing and hearing, to the
response-abilities most befitting our historically shared sense of
an achieved humanity.
In volume I, Kleinberg-Levin interprets and defines the five key
words in Heidegger's project. In this second volume, he makes use
of these words, illuminating their specific concrete meaning and
significance for Heidegger's phenomenology of perception and his
philosophy of history. At stake in Kleinberg-Levin's project,
coming after Heidegger, is the possibility of another experience
and understanding of being. Concentrating on the appropriation of
seeing and hearing as capacities and capabilities bearing promising
potentialities that could be developed, he shows how these modes of
perception should be understood in the context of Heidegger's
critique of the history of metaphysics, wherein vision has served
as paradigm for knowledge, truth, and reality. He also shows that
seeing and hearing need to be understood in the context of
Heidegger's philosophy of history, in which seeing and hearing are
both given a role in the transformation of the character of our
humanity, redeeming their own inherent potential. Kleinberg-Levin
shows how and why, in the world of today, the formation of the
perceptual Gestalt has undergone an accelerating process of
deformation and reification, encouraging a disposition for violence
that makes perception serve unrelenting technological and
technocratic imperatives; and he shows how we might begin to redeem
the promising potential in seeing and hearing, turning their
damaged and dehumanized character, and their violence, into ways of
taking part in the creation of a new planetary existence-what
Heidegger imagines through the topology of the fourfold, the
gathering of earth and sky, mortals and their gods, around all the
things we live with. Retrieving the latent potential in our seeing
and hearing for the sake of a better, more benevolent world,
another epoch in the history of being, Kleinberg-Levin proposes
important new ways to experience and think about the fundamental
disposition of these capacities and capabilities, emphasizing our
responsibility, not only for the beings that pass through our
world, but for being itself, namely, the opening of a perceptual
field, a universe of discourse, a world: the necessary conditions
for experiencing beings in regard to their being. This
responsibility, he argues, summons us to the response-abilities
befitting our true humanity. Thus, the subtitle for this volume:
"Learning to See, Learning to Hear." Concentrating on the
development of our natural capacities, Kleinberg-Levin explores the
question of our potential for growing in our humanity, growing in
our sense of what it means to be human. In this way, he connects
his thinking, after Heidegger, not only to the history of European
thought, but also to the philosophical contributions of Emerson and
Dewey, the best among the Americans to continue the Enlightenment
Project.
This important new book offers an introduction to Heidegger's
phenomenology of perception, interpreting and explaining five key
words, 'Sein', 'Dasein', 'Ereignis', 'Lichtung', and 'Geschick'.
David Kleinberg-Levin argues that, besides preparing the ground for
a major critique of metaphysics and the Western world, Heidegger's
phenomenology of perception lays the groundwork for understanding
perception-in particular, seeing and hearing, as capacities the
historical character of which is capable of overcoming and
significantly ameliorating the most menacing, most devastating
features of the Western world that Heidegger subjected to critique.
He proposes that the development of these capacities is not only a
question of learning certain skills, but also a question of
learning new character and that Heidegger's critique of the Western
world suggests ways in which we might learn and develop new, more
sensitive, poetic and mindful ways of relating to the perceived
world.
This book boldly crosses traditional academic boundaries, offering
an original, philosophically informed argument about the nature of
language, reading and interpreting the poetry of Wallace Stevens
and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Redeeming Words and the Promise
of Happiness is a work both in literary criticism and in
philosophy. The approach is strongly influenced by Walter
Benjamin's philosophy of language and Theodor Adorno's aesthetic
theory, but the other philosophers-notably Plato, Kant, Hegel,
Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein-figure
significantly in the reading and interpretation. Kleinberg-Levin
argues that despite its damaged, corrupted condition, language is
in its very existence the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise
of happiness. Moreover, he argues, by reconciling sensuous sense
and intelligible sense; showing the sheer power of words to create
fictional worlds and deconstruct what they have just created; and
redeeming the revelatory power of words-the power to turn the
familiar into something astonishing, strange or perplexing-the two
writers in this study sustain our hope for a world of reconciled
antagonisms and contradictions, evoking in the way they freely play
with the sounds and meanings of words, some intimations of a new
world-but our world here, this very world, not some heavenly
world-in which the promise of happiness might be redeemed.
Reflecting on the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that
the poet defies the correspondence theory of truth so that words
may be faithful to truth as transformative and revelatory. He also
argues that in the pleasure we get from the sensuous play of words,
there is an anticipation of the promise of happiness that
challenges the theological doctrine of an otherworldly happiness.
And in reading Nabokov, Kleinberg-Levin shows how that writer
inherits Mallarme's conception of literature, causing with his word
plays the sudden reduction of the fictional world he has just
created to its necessary conditions of materiality. The novel is
revealed as a work of fiction; we see its conditions of
possibility, created and destroyed before our very eyes. But the
pleasure in seeing words doing this, and the pleasure in their
sensuous materiality, are intimations of the promise of happiness
that language bears. Using a Kantian definition of modernism,
according to which a work is modernist if it reveals and questions
inherited assumptions about its necessary conditions of
possibility, these studies show how and why both Stevens and
Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.
This important new book offers an introduction to Heidegger's
phenomenology of perception, interpreting and explaining five key
words, 'Sein', 'Dasein', 'Ereignis', 'Lichtung', and 'Geschick'.
David Kleinberg-Levin argues that, besides preparing the ground for
a major critique of metaphysics and the Western world, Heidegger's
phenomenology of perception lays the groundwork for understanding
perception-in particular, seeing and hearing, as capacities the
historical character of which is capable of overcoming and
significantly ameliorating the most menacing, most devastating
features of the Western world that Heidegger subjected to critique.
He proposes that the development of these capacities is not only a
question of learning certain skills, but also a question of
learning new character and that Heidegger's critique of the Western
world suggests ways in which we might learn and develop new, more
sensitive, poetic and mindful ways of relating to the perceived
world.
At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when
our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to
redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political
theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play,
and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of
poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology
of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings
on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its
communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian
"promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of
humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of
universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays,
novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite
inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett
redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new
possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying
Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world,
Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly
ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in
the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that,
after all, meaning is still possible.
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