Scenes from the History of Poststructuralism: Davos, Freiburg, Baltimore, Leipzig

This paper tracks the proximate emergence of postructuralist theorizing to a series of receptions and transformations of the post-Kantian German university metaphysics elaborated by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It approaches this metaphysics not as a body of doctrine but as a practice of attuning the self to a privileged way of acceding to truth. This permits the paper to focus on a series of contingently related historical contexts in which the spiritual self-transformation programmed by this practice is incorporated into an array of paraphilosophical disciplines—giving rise to poststructuralism—and used occasionally as an instrument of social and political mobilization.