David Kleinberg-Levin – författare

This book boldly crosses traditional academic boundaries, offering an original, philosophically informed argument about the nature of language, reading and interpreting the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness is a work both in literary criticism and in philosophy. The approach is strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language and Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but the other philosophers—notably Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—figure significantly in the reading and interpretation. Kleinberg-Levin argues that despite its damaged, corrupted condition, language is in its very existence the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness. Moreover, he argues, by reconciling sensuous sense and intelligible sense; showing the sheer power of words to create fictional worlds and deconstruct what they have just created; and redeeming the revelatory power of words—the power to turn the familiar into something astonishing, strange or perplexing—the two writers in this study sustain our hope for a world of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions, evoking in the way they freely play with the sounds and meanings of words, some intimations of a new world—but our world here, this very world, not some heavenly world—in which the promise of happiness might be redeemed. Reflecting on the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that the poet defies the correspondence theory of truth so that words may be faithful to truth as transformative and revelatory. He also argues that in the pleasure we get from the sensuous play of words, there is an anticipation of the promise of happiness that challenges the theological doctrine of an otherworldly happiness. And in reading Nabokov, Kleinberg-Levin shows how that writer inherits Mallarmé’s conception of literature, causing with his word plays the sudden reduction of the fictional world he has just created to its necessary conditions of materiality. The novel is revealed as a work of fiction; we see its conditions of possibility, created and destroyed before our very eyes. But the pleasure in seeing words doing this, and the pleasure in their sensuous materiality, are intimations of the promise of happiness that language bears. Using a Kantian definition of modernism, according to which a work is modernist if it reveals and questions inherited assumptions about its necessary conditions of possibility, these studies show how and why both Stevens and Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.

At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word—and the word’s power to redeem—has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin’s political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno’s critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism, and Derrida’s writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett’s plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett’s nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

This important new book offers an introduction to Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception, interpreting and explaining five key words, ‘Sein’, ‘Dasein’, ‘Ereignis’, ‘Lichtung’, and ‘Geschick’. David Kleinberg-Levin argues that, besides preparing the ground for a major critique of metaphysics and the Western world, Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception lays the groundwork for understanding perception—in particular, seeing and hearing, as capacities the historical character of which is capable of overcoming and significantly ameliorating the most menacing, most devastating features of the Western world that Heidegger subjected to critique. He proposes that the development of these capacities is not only a question of learning certain skills, but also a question of learning new character and that Heidegger’s critique of the Western world suggests ways in which we might learn and develop new, more sensitive, poetic and mindful ways of relating to the perceived world.

This important new book offers an introduction to Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception, interpreting and explaining five key words, ‘Sein’, ‘Dasein’, ‘Ereignis’, ‘Lichtung’, and ‘Geschick’. David Kleinberg-Levin argues that, besides preparing the ground for a major critique of metaphysics and the Western world, Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception lays the groundwork for understanding perception—in particular, seeing and hearing, as capacities the historical character of which is capable of overcoming and significantly ameliorating the most menacing, most devastating features of the Western world that Heidegger subjected to critique. He proposes that the development of these capacities is not only a question of learning certain skills, but also a question of learning new character and that Heidegger’s critique of the Western world suggests ways in which we might learn and develop new, more sensitive, poetic and mindful ways of relating to the perceived world.

In volume I, Kleinberg-Levin interprets five key words in Heidegger’s project. In this second volume, he illuminates their significance for Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception and his philosophy of history. At stake is the possibility of a new experience and understanding of being. Taking us beyond the metaphysical understanding of being, Heidegger proposes to introduce a new key word Seyn (beyng). Beyng is the Da-sein-appropriating event in which a clearing occurs as an open dimension for the time-space interplay of concealment and unconcealment, an interplay within which beings are experienced in regard to the various modes and inflections of presence and absence that the grammar of temporalities articulates. Concentrating on the appropriation of seeing and hearing as capacities and capabilities bearing promising potentialities that could be developed, Kleinberg-Levin examines seeing and hearing in the context of Heidegger’s critique of the history of metaphysics, wherein vision has served as paradigm for knowledge, truth, and reality. He shows that, in Heidegger’s philosophy of history, seeing and hearing are given a role in the transformation of the character of humanity, redeeming their own inherent potential. Perceptual experience has undergone accelerating processes of deformation and reification, encouraging a disposition that makes it serve technological and technocratic imperatives; but we might begin to redeem the promising potential in seeing and hearing, turning their damaged and dehumanized character, and their violence, towards the creation of a new planetary existence—what Heidegger imagines through the topology of the fourfold: earth and sky, mortals and the gods who embody our ideals. In this project, we are put in question by a responsibility that summons us, in our seeing and hearing, to the response-abilities most befitting our historically shared sense of an achieved humanity.