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 cap...

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 ...

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 Plat...

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-Levi...

Original reading of Heidegger suggesting what his project could mean for building an ethical way of life now and in the future.In these boldly original studies, Heidegger's thought is carried critically and constructively beyond its original limitations, re-presenting his project in terms of an emerging body of understanding, making sense of this project not only in its historical, cultural significance but also in its bearing on the emergence of future possibiliti...

Probing study of how literature can redeem the revelatory, redemptive powers of language.In this probing look at Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and the stories of W. G. Sebald, Redeeming Words offers a philosophical meditation on the power of language in literature. David Kleinberg-Levin draws on the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno; the idealism and romanticism of Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling; and the nin...