Susanne Claxton - Böcker

Heidegger, Dasein, and Gender takes Heidegger to task on gender by assessing his views on women as thinkers and exploring what his work offers to contemporary LGBTQ+ and women’s studies. Scholars come together whose Heidegger research engages bioethics, pregnancy, motherhood and maternal Dasein; whether Dasein can be gender neutral or non-binary, and what it means when ‘neutrality’ and gender are defined by patriarchy rather than the spectrum of lived genders; the question of human capacity for transcendence in the immanence of flesh; and the possibility of re-imaging Dasein as gendered, i.e., born into embodiment and bound to memory, and the capacity to create new futures by transitioning the present as it slips into history. Authors ask who and what, including animals, can be Dasein and bring Heidegger to issues of sexual abuse and violence, men’s experience when thrust into women’s daily (and not so daily) routine, and the intersection of queerness and death. The book aims not to provide final answers, but to open possibilities for further thinking with, on, against, through and because of Heidegger.

This highly original new book highlights the importance and significance of Heidegger's engagement with the Greeks, the ways in which his views are commensurate with ecofeminism, and the insights that a study of that intersection provides for both the diagnoses of our world’s ills and possible curative prescriptions. Susanne Claxton defends the thesis that a proper return to myth and art as a means by which the transcendental realities that constitute the phenomenology of our embodied existence may be better understood is also the means by which we may come to truly dwell in the Heideggerian sense and thus find solutions to the myriad global and personal crises that plague us. By examining key concepts in Heidegger’s thinking and their role in ancient philosophy, Claxton establishes an alternative conception of truth and explores what that concept reveals. Employing the ecofeminist critique, Claxton highlights the relevant intersections with Heidegger, and lays out criticisms raised by Nietzsche, comparing the differences in thought between Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to demonstrate the supremacy of the ecophenomenological approach and show the ways in which Nietzsche falls short. The book also explores the mythological figure of Lilith and how the thought of Giorgio Agamben, especially in regard to his concept of the state of exception, provides further insight and an undeniable co-incidence of relevant concepts which further solidify the common goals and projects of both Heidegger and Ecofeminism.