Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. The sea cradles and soothes us, ...we visit it often for solace and inspiration, it is familiar, being the place where life ultimately began. Yet the sea is also dark and mysterious and often spells catastrophe and death. The sea is a set of contradictions: kind, cruel, indifferent. She is a blind will that will ‘have her way’. In exploring this most capricious of phenomena, David Farrell Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hölderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud. The Sea explores the significance in Western civilization of the catastrophic and generative power of the sea and what humankind’s complex relationship with it reveals about the human condition, human consciousness, temporality, striving, anxiety, happiness and mortality.
The essay reflects on Nietzsche's second
Untimely Meditation
, ‘On the Use and Disadvantage of the Study of History for Life’, especially as Heidegger reads it in section 76 of
Being and Time
and as ...Derrida reads Heidegger's reading of it. Derrida's concludes his first seminar on Heidegger,
Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l'Histoire; Cours de l'ENS-Ulm 1964–1965
, by reflecting on Heidegger as a Nietzschean antiquarian.
Jacques Derrida's final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty-the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this ...relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida's late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life.
Abstract
The article pursues the theme of "the unborn" in the poetry of Georg Trakl and in the commentaries on Trakl's poetry by Heidegger (in Unterwegs zur Sprache) and Derrida (in Geschlecht III). ...It continues a decades-long conversation with Trakl, Heidegger, and Derrida developed most recently in Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida's Geschlecht (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) and in "Derrida, Heidegger, and the Magnetism of the Trakl House," Philosophy Today, 64:2 (Spring 2020), 1-24.
The Hands of the Man Krell, David Farrell
Oxford literary review,
12/2014, Volume:
36, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Considers French philosopher Jacques Derrida's fascination and contempt for the "fetishism of the pen" and the "singularity of the hand" as championed by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Among ...topics discussed are Heidegger's disdain for the typewriter and fear that it would destroy the individuality of the written script (or "fetishism of the pen" as the author puts it), and Derrida's apparent scorn for the singular writing hand through his dismissal of Geschlecht papers where he repeatedly insists that "lovemaking requires two hands of each participant".
Three Last Dubious Projects Krell, David Farrell
Research in phenomenology,
10/2020, Volume:
50, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
The article discusses three research projects that I may never undertake: (1) a genealogy of Nietzsche interpretations devolving from Bataille and Heidegger; (2) a discussion of Derrida's ...strange mix of biology and biography in his work on Nietzsche; and (3) an account of meetings I had on various occasions with Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida.
