There is Heidegger. There is Heidegger, the Nazi, and afterward as his only defence he quoted Paul Valéry: “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.” There are his “black notebooks,” which reveal his anti-semitism. There’s the way Heidegger’s literary estate censured his work, hiding the extent of his racist views. There is Hannah Arendt, his student, lover, and life-long friend. There is Hannah Arendt, who defended him, who smoothed the way for him. There is that line in You’ve Got Mail said by Parker Posey’s character: “He’s always talking about Heidegger and Foucault. And I have no idea what any of it is about, really,” followed by a giggle. There is phenomenology, which began with Husserl, and was taken up by Heidegger, which is “the study of things as they appear,” or consciousness as experienced from a subjective first-person point of view. There is the way phenomenology influenced Claire-Louise Bennett to write Pond. There is the way a stove knob in Pond is an object known through the senses, through experience—a phenomenon. There is Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. There is Heidegger’s influence on Bachelard. There is Claire-Louise Bennett reading Great Reckonings in Little Rooms and then The Poetics of Space. There is the book Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement and its influence on me, leading me to connect objects and language. There is my literary theory anthology from college with Heidegger’s essay “Identity and Difference”: “What in your opinion is difference if both Being as well as Existence each in their own way appear through difference?...” There is the Holocaust. There is Hitler’s Germany. There is Heidegger’s involvement, which can’t be undone, and can’t be thought away. There is phenomenology, in which a phenomenon is “a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question.”
-Morgan English