If we were to look for a fitting image of today's already global but still spreading desert of death, we would not find it in the mushroom clouds above nuclear explosions such as those that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the United States bombed them to bring about VJ-Day. We would instead find a fitting image of today's ever growing desert in such images as the icons for Microsoft or Apple, Google or Facebook, Walmart or Amazon.
Read moreWaiting for Politics to Begin Again (2)
Politics as Hitler and the Nazis practiced it by no means came to an end with the end of the Nazis, nor did it start with them. It was practiced in nation-states well before the rise of Hitler, and it continues to be all too operative in nation-states down to the present day. Indeed, in one form or another it is actually constitutive of what passes for politics under the dominance of the nation-state in general.
Read morePoetry, Prayer, and Memory (4)
n 1967, just three years before he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine River in Paris, Paul Celan paid his one and only visit to Martin Heidegger, whose writings had had a major impact on Celan’s thinking and his poetry. Celan went to visit Heidegger in the latter’s ski-hut on the slopes above the little Black Forest town of Todtnauberg-im-Baden, the very place where Heidegger wrote most of Being and Time and many later works. There was a little well near Heidegger’s hut, with a star carved into the crosspiece above the opening. Heidegger also kept a guest-book in the hut for visitors to write a line or two in when they visited.
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