For some reason I felt compelled the stop reading this book, last month : Chapter 6 Mysticism , Ontotheology, Anti modernism, on page 118. Even the reading of  the history of Heidegger’s thought can be a challenge to the readers patience, with his re-description of the History of Philosophy, or more accurately a re-write of that History.  Theodor Adorno offers a key critical evaluation of German existentialism in his  The Jargon of Authenticity

I’ve been reading about Heidegger since the publication of a review by Thomas Sheehan of  Richard Wolin’s ‘The Heidegger Controversy’ published  by MIT Press. In the pages of The New York Review of Books, provocatively titled ‘A Normal Nazi’

In the interim I read Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ :  earlier I had read Michael Wood’s ‘On Empson’ out of curiosity. Christopher Norris’ ‘William Empson And The Philosophy of Literary Criticism’  ,  ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac. I succumbed to the temptation of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle: Book One’. I just wanted to ‘taste it’! I wanted to throw it up against a wall, as he droned on about death.  Now on page 99, and his Rock Band Failure.

Yesterday, I was feeling guilty about not finishing the Young Heidegger, and that it hadn’t met my expectations, about that myth of ‘The Hidden King’, and his hold on generations of students- why not skip to page 133 and Chapter 7 ‘Demythologizing Metaphysics‘ to see if it offered more of what I actually wanted? I’d forgotten that Heidegger can exhaust my patience, so much so, that I simply have to put him and his commentators/historians down, and return at a later time.

StephenKMackSD