On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Peter Kosenko wrote:
> 1. If there are "Heideggerian Marxists" out there who believe that
> Heidegger's concept of the history of "Dasein" (in "Sein und Zeit")
> actually has anything to offer, maybe you could try to enlighten me.
It has something to offer, a theory of meaning and perception in the broad sense of both terms that is more applicable to social life and cultural phenomena than that proferred by the Anglo-American tradition. The best no bullshit reconstruction of those ideas I've found is in an unpublished dissertation deposited at Columbia in 1972 by Thomas William Bridges called _The Concept of Meaning in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit_. Unfortunately I don't believe he ever made it into a book. But perhaps it is available on inter-library loan.
But if you are more concerned with the ideas than in their origins in Heidegger, I'd skip ahead to Merleau-Ponty's _Phenomenology of Perception_, for my money the best book in that tradition the 20th century has to offer.
Although, if for some reason you feel like reading it again, I hasten to mention that _Sein and Zeit_ was retranslated in 1996, and the difference is astonishing. Sometimes I think everyone who struggled through the Macquerie translation should be able to band together and mount a class action. Years of life were lost pondering difficulties that weren't actually part of the book. Open the new version at random and you'll be shocked to see that it's no more complicated than, say, Habermas. In retrospect, it would have been less work to learn German and read the original with a dictionary that to squeeze sense out of that translation.
> One might call Bourdieu's book a "deconstruction" of Heidegger, except
> that it exhibits very little of the waffling word-play of a Jacques
> Derrida.
I think less ambiguous description of the book would be that it's one of the few very succesful extended essays in the sociology of knowledge. In some ways it reminds me of nothing so much as Karl Mannheim's essay "Conservative Thought," which is about the same length, and which made a similar argument about the Junker roots of Lebensphilosophie from Hegel onwards.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com