[.ca] Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (ISBN 0253206022)

A Life-altering tour de force:
Reiner Schürmann's anarchic reading of Heidegger provides a formidable response to the hermeneutical dilemma of how to read Heidegger. In reading Heidegger backward, from "topology of being" back to "history of being" back to the "Existential Analytic," Schürmann gives us a Heidegger that, admittedly, the man Martin Heidegger would not have approved of. The humble title of the English translation (altered from the original French, "La princile d'anarchie: Heidegger et la question d'agir") does not really mark the originality of Schürmann in setting to work an epochal theory that announces the withering of normative-legislative-predicative holds of metaphysics. What is in fact more important about this book is that Schürmann provides us an "actable" theory, not in the sense of ideological prescriptions or revolutionary cookbooks, but in a way that resuscitates within us a sensibility toward the irreducible plurality of manifestations of being and prepares us to respond to such irreducibly varied manifestations in an anarchic way, in the spirit of freedom that denounces hegemonic principles. The delicate complexity of the arguments made in this book does not allow for profound reflections on its merits in such a limited space. Let it just be said that the book provides an excellent opportunity for thinking beyond the tedium of "what is," the matter-of-factness of the actual. It allows us to think and act based on the clearing of the possible. Schürmann calls us to prepare for modes of thinking and acting that have not founding First--and as such remain forever an-archic (without a First).

A Life-Altering Tour do Force:
Reiner Schürmann's anarchic reading of Heidegger provides a formidable response to the hermeneutical dilemma of how to read Heidegger. In reading Heidegger backward, from "topology of being" back to "history of being" back to the "Existential Analytic," Schürmann gives us a Heidegger that, admittedly, the man Martin Heidegger would not have approved of. The humble title of the English translation (altered from the original French, "La princile d'anarchie: Heidegger et la question d'agir") does not really mark the originality of Schürmann in setting to work an epochal theory that announces the withering of normative-legislative-predicative holds of metaphysics. What is in fact more important about this book is that Schürmann provides us an "actable" theory, not in the sense of ideological prescriptions or revolutionary cookbooks, but in a way that resuscitates within us a sensibility toward the irreducible plurality of manifestations of being and prepares us to respond to such irreducibly varied manifestations in an anarchic way, in the spirit of freedom that denounces hegemonic principles. The delicate complexity of the arguments made in this book does not allow for profound reflections on its merits in such a limited space. Let it just be said that the book provides an excellent opportunity for thinking beyond the tedium of "what is," the matter-of-factness of the actual. It allows us to think and act based on the clearing of the possible. Schürmann calls us to prepare for modes of thinking and acting that have not founding First--and as such remain forever an-archic (without a First).