Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties [Hardcover]

In this important new book, Richard Polt takes a fresh approach to Heideggers thought during his most politicized period, and works toward a philosophical appropriation of his most valuable ideas. Polt shows how central themes of the 1930ssuch as inception, emergency, and the question Who are we?grow from seeds planted in Being and Time and are woven into Heideggers political thought. Working with recently published texts, including Heideggers Black Notebooks, Polt traces the thinkers engagement and disengagement from the Nazi movement. He critiques Heidegger for his failure to understand the political realm, but also draws on his ideas to propose a traumatic ontology that understands individual and collective existence as identities that are always in question, and always remain exposed to disruptive events. Time and Trauma is a bold attempt to gain philosophical insight from the most problematic and controversial phase of Heideggers thought.Richard Polt is Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University. With Gregory Fried he has translated Heideggers Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth, and edited A Companion to Heideggers Introduction to Metaphysics and Nature, History, State: 1933-1934.

Polts threefold interpretation of thinking through proves to be a useful catalyst not just for understanding Heidegger, but for understanding our roles as philosophers who exist in a world after Heidegger. His approach is deeply Heideggerian, in that it echoes the way early Heidegger thought through the problems
present in the history of philosophy, but it is also something new, in that it takes a daring step beyond Heidegger, into what Polt calls traumatic ontology. History of Science Society

For this reader, the value of Time and Trauma lies in the painstaking and judicious tracing of the 1930s Heidegger. Polt accomplishes an amazing balancing act, charitable and properly philosophical in understanding from within HeideggerslÓ7