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  • Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future
  • Pamela McCalum (bio)
Nikolas Kompridis. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. MIT Press 2006. xvi. 338. US $37.50

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement recently, George Steiner notes the astonishing flowering of a ‘Heidegger industry.’ In Germany, the editing of Heidegger’s works continues with an expectation that the final version of the collected works will exceed eighty volumes. Eminent French critics such as Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have drawn Heidegger into deconstructivist philosophy. He is a growing presence in the writings of influential Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari. And Heidegger’s impact extends beyond formal philosophical studies and cultural criticism to poetry (Paul Celan and René Char) and to art (Anselm Kiefer). Indeed, Steiner comments, the designation of the twentieth century as ‘“the century of Martin Heidegger” has become almost a cliché.’ At the same time, Heidegger’s legacy is haunted by his disheartening and offensive associations with anti-Semitism and Nazism. Appointed as rector of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger acquiesced in National Socialist policies for universities, including the firing of Jewish colleagues. More importantly, he saw in the new German state an opportunity to concretize issues to which he had repeatedly returned in his philosophical writings: a necessity for a renewal of national spirituality and honour, an opportunity to challenge the brutalizing effects of industrialization, and a revitalizing of the state sustained by the language of Being.

No scholar writing on Heidegger in the twenty-first century can fail to engage the problematic questions raised by his legacies. Nikolas Kompridis’s Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future negotiates with admirable attention to details and nuances, both the socio-cultural resources within Heidegger’s thought and the troubling political complications. The overall project of Critique and Disclosure is a retrieval of what is valuable in Heidegger, specifically the act of disclosure and what it can bring to both cognition and ethics in the act of thinking towards the future. As Kompridis writes, ‘We are the ones who must self-consciously renew and correct our forms of life, who must repair what is broken, or break with what seems irreparable.’ Such a process certainly has roots in the Enlightenment and in Immanuel Kant’s conception of critique, a process of rethinking that challenges individuals and societies to interrogate deeply held assumptions and to be willing to reconsider the foundations of cultural and political traditions. Kompridis is well aware of the sheer difficulty of Kantian-inspired critique: such questioning necessarily takes place within the very institutions that are put in question, within an intricate tension between involvement and distance. In his words, ‘[B]ecause they shape and sustain our identity and self-understanding, [End Page 338] our relation to our cultural traditions, even when scrupulously critical, remains one of inescapable dependence.’ A crucial issue for Kompridis is the recovery of Heidegger’s concept of disclosure, a process closely connected with the human condition of ‘throwness’ into a world already constituted. Kompridis argues that disclosure involves both ‘receptivity and activity, both openness to and engagement with, what is disclosed.’ By defamiliarizing deeply held assumptions and engaging with possibilities for different futures, disclosure has the potential to throw light on new modes of perception, sharpened self-clarification, and altered ways of living. According to Kompridis, disclosure offers a critical alternative to Jurgen Habermas’s focus in his widely read book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) on developing the established legacies of the Enlightenment – social justice, human rights, and civic responsibilities.

Kompridis does not claim that Heidegger’s concept of disclosure can be adopted wholeheartedly without the critical reflection that it inspires. Specifically, he suggests that Heidegger failed adequately to consider the relationship between disclosure’s challenge to a pre-reflective understanding of existence and the important question of ‘how we might transform our relation to one another.’ Put differently, Heidegger ‘failed to connect the normativity of disclosure with the normativity of intersubjectivity.’ In Kompridis’s account, any appropriation of Heideggerian disclosure would have to be tempered with a reintegration of critical reflection and ethics, with a rethinking of how...

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