Centre of German Studies
JNU
Invites you to a lecture by
Adam Knowles
Drexel University and IIT Delhi
Heidegger and the Question of Silence
According to the philosophical doxa, Martin Heidegger is first and foremost a thinker of being. Indeed, Heidegger himself seemed to confirm this well-established assumption by referring repeatedly to the question of being as the sole question that drives his thinking. In this talk, I seek to counter this basic assumption about Heidegger by arguing that a different question holds together the many paths of his thinking. Heidegger, I will argue, is first and foremost a thinker of silence, i.e. a thinker for whom the fundamental ontological questions cannot even be posed until philosophy has reoriented itself in its relationship to language. By inhabiting a space of silence carved out within words, Heidegger’s philosophy is rooted in the failure not to communicate itself.
As a thinker of silence who himself was unresponsive to or even contributed to structures of silencing, there are significant ethical stakes to casting Heidegger as a thinker of silence. This is only intensified by the fact that the silence is the predominate theme which holds together Heidegger’s often diffuse Black Notebooks from 1932 to 1945, which wind through many forms of unsayability, withdrawal, and stillness. How do we read Heidegger’s silences? Did Heidegger merely cultivate a practice of philosophical silence directed towards nothing, or was there something which his thinking sought to be silent about?
Adam Knowles is Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University (USA) and Visiting Faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. His book Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence will be published by Stanford University Press in March 2019. He is translating Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 1942-1948 for Indiana University Press.
Date & Time
Monday,25thFebruary 2019,4 p. m.
Venue
Committee Room (331), SLL & CS New Block
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi