Beyond the Human: Heidegger’s Self-Interpretation of Being and Time in the Black Notebooks.

This paper examines Martin Heidegger’s own interpretation of Being and Time in the Black Notebooks. The opening part addresses Heidegger’s singular notions of “thinking” and “questioning” which suggest a critically reflective stance, but involve an initiatory call to surrender to the hidden powers of Beyng. The second part addresses Heidegger’s lament in the Black Notebooks that Being and Time has not produced a “great enemy”, and his critique of the initial existentialist or “anthropological” receptions of his magnum opus. The third part looks at how Heidegger’s thought moves beyond Being and Time, in light of the central role the thinker assigns to the German people in repeating the first “inception” of preSocratic thought, in order to overcome the legacies of Roman universalism, and what Heidegger as early as 1932 was calling “Jewish Christianity”. The final part addresses Heidegger’s conception of “the history of Beyng” as it is developed in the Black Notebooks of the early 1940s, from out of the account of “temporality” in Being and Time: a “history” in which Heidegger’s postulation of a need for the “annihilation“ (Vernichtung)” of the essential enemy of the Volk become the lens through which Heidegger can read the Shoah as the “the peak of self-destruction in history”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]