Heidegger and Politics
The Ontology of Radical Discontent

This book traces Heidegger's influence on a variety of political movements to fundamental ambiguities in his understanding of everydayness and nihilism.

Alexander S. Duff (Author)

9781107441521, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 May 2018

226 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.2 cm, 0.36 kg

'In a manner that seeks neither to reduce Heidegger's thought to fascism nor to drive a wedge between that thought and the politics that ensues from it, Duff's study constitutes (to my mind) the first real engagement of Heidegger's thought of philosophical relevance for political scientists and theorists.' Jeffrey A. Bernstein, The Review of Politics

In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander S. Duff explains Heidegger's perplexing and highly varied political influence. Heidegger and Politics argues that Heidegger's political import is forecast by fundamental ambiguities about the status of politics in his thought. Duff explores how, in Being and Time as well as earlier and later works, Heidegger analyzes 'everyday' human existence as both irretrievably banal but also supplying our only tenuous path to the deepest questions about human life. Heidegger thus points to two irreconcilable attitudes toward politics: either a total and purifying revolution must usher in an authentic communal existence, or else we must await a future deliverance from the present dispensation of Being. Neither attitude is conducive to moderate politics, and so Heidegger's influence tends towards extremism of one form or another, modified only by explicit departures from his thought.

1. What's the matter with ethics? Ethics and the problem of theory
2. Surpassing ethics: the formal indication of existence
3. The ambiguous everyday: on the emergence of theory from practice
4. The dictatorship of the they and the clearing of the everyday
5. Disclosive occlusion and the promise of nihilism
6. Heideggerian politics: the past is not dead, it's not even past.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX], Theology [HRLB], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]