Laurence Paul Hemming

A Transcendental Hangover: Lévinas, Heidegger and the Ethics of Alterity

This paper examines two claims currently made of Heidegger and Lévinas: (1) that Heidegger, work and man, had no adequate ethics; and (2) that Lévinas draws attention to this both in his own work and in the ground for ethics that he sought to give through the assertion of an explicitly Platonic ethics of transcendence to the ‘Good beyond Being’. The paper takes as a statement of Lévinas ethics his text ‘Alterity and Transcendence’ and shows, by relating what he says to Plato, Aristotle and Heidegger, that Lévinas’s ethics are themselves shaped by a commitment to intersubjectivity which fails to achieve a genuine orientation to the ‘other’ of contemporary discourse, and that results only in the self-positing of the subject. Finally it examines Heidegger’s own discussions of alterity, ethics and being-with-one-another to show how Heidegger’s work does in fact point to what an ethical discourse of the other is seeking to achieve.

Work as Total Reason for Being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter 1

This article examines Heidegger’s reading of Ernst Jünger’s 1932 Der Arbeiter by making appeal not only to Heidegger’s remarks on the work (and its associated text “Die totale Mobilmachung”) scattered in various texts, but by concentrating on Heidegger’s now‐available seminar notes and marginal notes to his actual copy of the text. Heidegger held two seminars on Der Arbeiter, one shortly after its publication and one in 1938, which show his close confrontation not only with Jünger’s reading of Nietzsche, but also Heidegger’s own Nietzsche examination. The article shows how Heidegger distinguishes himself from Jünger by, on the one hand, seeing Der Arbeiter as very much a product of its time and, on the other, identifying a prescience in Nietzsche of a Europe and planetary phenomenon (globalisation) yet to come. This is accomplished in the naming of the triad of Bolshevism, fascism (Nazism), and Americanism metaphysically as the singularity of “world democracy”, and as an entirely nihilistic phenomenon. The article therefore relates the confrontation of these two thinkers with the third (Nietzsche) to issues of the demand for justice, democracy, and the will to power in contemporary economic and political developments, as well as to wider themes in Heidegger’s thought of the end (or consummation) of metaphysics, the will to power, and valuation. 1. This paper was first given for the Research Seminar in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology of Lancaster University Management School. I must here express my sincere gratitude to Bogdan Costea and Martin Brigham for their generous invitation to offer this paper in January 2008, for their hospitality, and above all for their profound thoughtfulness in provoking enquiry into these research questions.

The Undoing of Sex: The Proper Enjoyment of Divine Command:

This paper examines the way in which divine law and divine command have in cases been commandeered for the purposes of demonstrating fidelity to religious orthodoxy. It takes the example of one theologian’s investigation into the tradition and asks whether, in the very name of producing an orthodox theology of sexual difference, the debate does not end up being cast in contemporary, sexualised terms. It then takes the example of how contemporary understandings of sexual difference can be read back into ancient texts by examining a reading of Parmenides, and by comparison with Aristotle’s reading of sexual difference shows how that reading can be questioned. It concludes with an examination of a reading of a text of St. Augustine to show (1) how the traditions of celibacy and marriage have not been commensurate in the Christian tradition and (2) what goes wrong when they are asserted to be commensurate.

Heidegger’s claim “Carl Schmitt thinks as a Liberal”

This paper examines Heidegger’s critique of Carl Schmitt during the Nazi period, focusing on Heidegger’s notes for seminars on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Taking up Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s critique of Hegel, Heidegger argues that the friend/enemy distinction Schmitt makes is still grounded in a humanistic liberalism, and so in the very Hegelian subjectivity that Schmitt claims to reject. Heidegger then turns to the question of dikē, and shows how there is a more originary grounding for the polis and the state in a concept Heidegger develops from his analysis of Anaximander. Grounding this is the question which concerns which God (or which goddess) grounds any past, present, or future “political theology”.

The Place of Zeno's Paradox

This paper begins by examining the recent history of interpretations of one of Zenos paradoxes of motion, the paradox of dichotomy. It then returns to the record of antiquity to ask how Aristotle ‘solved’ the paradox and what decisions about place and motion were assumed in that solution. After appealing to Heideggers readings of the Aristotelian text, the paper then proceeds to offer an entirely original interpretation of Zenos paradox of dichotomy, which has important implications for a contemporary understanding of motion and place (rather than space). Instead, the paradox is read as a provocation to ‘see’ something which Zeno, it would appear, believed was ‘missing’, or had been forgotten and had disappeared, and to review all over again what Parmenides might have meant in his claim that being is one, singular, and indivisible.