Richard Polt, "Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
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What is the main focus of the episode and who is the guest?
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Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Stephen Dozman, here today with Richard Polt to discuss his recent book, Time and Trauma, Thinking Through Heidegger in the 30s. For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi Party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the publication of the Black Notebooks. private journals he kept throughout the last several decades of his life. Diving right into the core of Heidegger's philosophy, Polt starts by taking a close look at Being and Time, published in 1927, followed by a close analysis of his philosophical developments in the 1930s. He shows through a close textual analysis that Heidegger's political engagement stemmed from certain philosophical commitments,
The book then ends with an attempt to see what, if anything, can be salvaged from Heidegger's philosophy for political thinking. Richard Poult is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University and is the author of, among other things, Heidegger and Introduction and The Emergency of Being on Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. He is co-editor with Gregory Freed of the book series, New Heidegger Research. And together they have translated a number of Heidegger lectures, including Introduction to Metaphysics, Nature, History, State, and Being and Truth. So Richard Poult, welcome to the New Books Network.
Thank you very
much. So before we dive in, we like to ask our guests to kind of introduce themselves to listeners. So could you tell us a bit about yourself and what your main interests are?
Yes. Well, as you said, I've published a number of things about Heidegger, and I've also collaborated with Gregory Freed on translating some texts of Heidegger's, especially rather political texts from the 1930s. And together we also edit a book series called the New Heidegger Research Series, in which my book Time and Trauma is published. As a teacher, I get into a lot of other topics. I teach a lot of Plato and Descartes and other ancient philosophy. More recently in my writing and research, I've gotten into questions of philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy that have sort of branched out from Heidegger.
All right, great. So before diving into your book in detail, we'll be looking at Heidegger's development roughly from the publication of Being and Time in 1927 to the end of World War II in 1945. So at the beginning of this period, Heidegger was kind of a rising philosophical star, having just published this really groundbreaking new book. And by the end, he is banned from teaching and has a severe mental breakdown. for which an extensive recovery was needed. So can you give us a brief summary of this time period for Heidegger just to help contextualize things for us?
Sure. So as you say, it's a pretty dramatic, almost tragic collapse, but it's also a very creative period. And it's a period, you said a lot of people are skeptical about Heidegger's politics. That's a very polite way of putting it. He joined the Nazi party in 1933 and was the first National Socialist Rector of the University of Freiburg. He stepped down after a year, but of course, people ever since then have had a lot of doubts about him, at least so. Intellectually, philosophically, there's a lot going on. He's doing things like reading the Presocratics and Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger. He's teaching on all sorts of topics. He's also writing a whole series of private texts. He's incredibly productive, and it's a period of ferment
It's a period where he's very experimental. Personally, I find being in time to be really quite persuasive as a description of the human condition. After about 1930, he gets into things that are much more questionable, but very creative and interesting.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main focus of the episode and who is the guest?
0:00–6:17
2
How does Richard Polt introduce his own background and research interests?
6:17–13:32
3
What was Heidegger’s philosophical and political trajectory from *Being and Time* to the end of World War II?
13:32–21:07
4
Which three themes (self‑hood, emergency, and inception) does Polt trace through Heidegger’s 1930s thought?
21:07–29:25
5
How does Polt explain Heidegger’s concept of ecstatic temporality and authenticity?
29:25–38:02
6
What are the Black Notebooks, and why have they reignited controversy over Heidegger’s politics?
38:02–44:09
7
How does Hannah Arendt’s distinction between work, labor, and action reshape Heidegger’s political ideas?
44:09–50:49
8
What is ‘traumatic ontology’ and how does it propose a new way of thinking about political agency?
50:49–57:29
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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