Heidegger,Communal Being,and Politics

There are two critical,but opposite interpretations of Heidegger's understanding of being as a social ontology.One charges Heidegger with adhering to an anti-social"private irony,"while the other charges him with promoting a"self-canceling"totality.The current essay replies to these two charges with a discussion of Heidegger's understanding of being as"communal being,"which is implicated both in the early Heidegger's concept of"being-in-the-world-with-others"and in the later Heidegger's keyword of Ereignis.It argues that Heidegger's understanding of being as communal being is neither identical with totalitizing publicness nor the same as voluntaristic egotism.According to Heidegger,both the publicness of das Mem and voluntaristic egotism are the real threats to humanity at present.Because of them,we human beings are in danger of being uprooted from the earth upon which we-as communal beings-have already and always dwelled and lived with others from the very beginning of human history.

The Marginality of Phenomenology

The essence of Husserfs intentionality does not lie in any object,but in the marginal horizon presupposed by intentional acts.This characteristic can be seen whether on the level of intensional act or that of noema(intentional object).The reason is that all intentional act and noema come from the stream of internal time consciousness,and thus have Zeithof(time halo or time aureole),while the original meaning constituted by such a halo is prior to the object they are concretized into,and the noema that contains the possibility of meaning will also be intuited together with the perceived adumbration.Using Husserl9 s idea that the meaning of non-objectification is prior to the object,Scheier breaks through HusserPs dogma that the presentation of an object must precede the giving of value to the object,and thus puts forward the new train of thought that the feeling of value is not later than the objectification,or even prior to it.Heidegger deepens and expands the sense of the marginal horizon,revealing in all human behaviors and world presentation such an ontological structure,that is,halo-like meaning or the act of Being itself precedes objects and beings created by the separation of subject and object.Maurice MerleaPonty states that the body field is prior to the separation of body and mind,and the body's perception of external phenomena is first carried out in the manner of field rather than definite objects,therefore,it must have the original ambiguity and be realized in the fonn of body schema instead of a causal chain.So,the philosophical vitality of phenomenology does not significantly lie in the explanation of the levels and functions of intentional objects,but in the construction premise of such objects,namely,the spatio-temporal halo manifested as marginal horizon,time stream,and the displaying of existential vista.

Hunger, World, the X: On Ghosh and Miller's Thinking Literature Across Coltinents

This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J.Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature Across Continents:instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole,I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text:the first concerns the question of hunger,for which I take as my starting point Ghosh's own starting point in the first chapter of the book,namely Rabidranath Tagore's reflections on a brief episode on the river Ganges.I excavate the transcontinental provenance of these reflections for western,particularly Kantian,aesthetics before I focus on two aspects within the episode that such a framing misses or remains silent about:the paradoxical tendency of material satiation to demote the importance of hunger(as paradigmatically exposed in Brecht);and the indeterminacy of the kind of hunger that is involved in the boatman's response within Tagore's text(as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings).Finally,I demonstrate the importance of taking these complications into account when reading Ghosh’s own extensive interest in foregrounding hunger within the literary phenomenon and its hermeneutic reception.In the second part of the essay,I dwell on Ghosh’s critique of prevailing notions of“world literature”in the fifth chapter of the book by demonstrating the ontological(Heideggerian)rather than empirical meaning of world in his writing,and,by extension,the subtractive and absence-centered meaning of what he calls the“more than global.”Finally,I turn to J.Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s“The Motive for Metaphor”in the fourth chapter as an exemplary site for the exploration of the interface between poetics,hermeneutics and ontology that is central to Ghosh's theory of the literary,and thus serves to highlight,in Miller's very engagement with the failure of language as an issue of concern in the poem,the possibility of dialogue between the two critics:indeed,as I show,Stevens’s figure of the“X”serves both as a signifier of the ineffable and as one for criss-crossing,for the“across”involved in“thinking literature across”authors,continents and traditions.