On Style and Space:

Heidegger’s Handy Figurality

Karen Feldman (German, UC Berkeley)

Thursday, March 12^th

5:00 p.m.

Phelps 6320

Sponsored by the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies and the Consortium for Literature, Theory and Culture

Description:

In Being and Time Heidegger famously subordinates space to time, emphasizing at each turn the temporality of our way of being. On the other hand, Heidegger concedes that spatial representations permeate our language. In this paper I offer an interpretation of temporality and and the language of spatiality in Being and Time in order to argue that Heidegger’s literary and rhetorical strategies are essential to his philosophy. I will suggest that the language of Being and Time is highly figural and points to its own figurality, thereby evoking the eventlike, dynamic disclosure that is at stake in Heidegger’s formulation of the question of being.