In section 68 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we read about machination and lived experience reciprocally drive each other to the extreme (thereby extending the deformations of beingness), how the discovery of “nature” was prepared for by the supernatural, and how the attitude of imitating and continuing the same “believes itself to be…

In sections 62-63 we read about machination concealing itself through the prescriptive force of “lived experience” as actuality, objectivity, and correctness. This uncovers how the addiction to lived experience supports and is supported by such standard liberal dogmas as relatability, community, and affirmation. We conclude by discussing the implications of Harvard’s rejection of Trump’s “activist…

We start at section 60 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and read how self-certainty, calculability, unquestionability, machination, and knowing “who we are and what we are supposed to do” contribute to the lack of a sense of plight and the loss of the knowledge that “genuine selfhood occurs in a grounding beyond oneself.”…

In section 59, we read of the denuding of every disposition until all is common and average, of the era of complete unquestionableness, of the new bewitchery as the dominance of machination, and of humans falling prey to the hunt for lived experience. From this vantage we look at several aspects of liberalism: the bias…

In section 58 we dive into Heidegger’s exegesis on the three ways the abandonment by being cloaks itself – in calculation as a “basic law of comportent,” in speed as “the inability to withstand stillness of concealed growth,” and in the massive as “the most acute opposition to the rare and the unique.” We then…

We finish reading section 56 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), which involves making our way through Heidegger’s list of those elements “wherein the abandonment by being announces itself,” and includes such items as art as cultural utility, the destruction of the earth by speed, calculation, and the massive, an obduracy against all intimations,…

In section 56 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we read of how the truth of beyng is conditioned by the abandonment by being and how this uprootedness causes our insensibility to the ambiguity in what is held to be essential, for instance “everything that is meant by a people: the communal, the racial,…

Section 55 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) gives a deep and beautiful description of the abandonment by being and by beyng that beings have suffered due to the compulsion for objectivity, for the “in itself,” and for the nihilism that has flowed through metaphysics since Plato and culminated in the “secular successors” of…

Sections 53 and 54 are combed thru this episode, and they’re all about the difference between plight and progress. Progress has to do with well-being, prosperity, an unbroken supply of useful and enjoyable things, but it has no future, as it merely “takes things that already are and expedites them ‘further’ on their previous path….