Anarchy in the Name of Heidegger

Perhaps, what it means to be contemporary in thought is to find oneself in a situation of questioning that remains at once abstract and concrete. Such a place of questioning would inhabit the world while simultaneously releasing us from the binding and blindness of the world in drawing us away from its immediate hold, thus coming to place the world into the tighter grips of its questioning. To be contemporary, in this regard, would mean to be disjointed, placed athwart in a space that nonetheless still retained a footing in and orientation towards the world. Such a space of questioning is the place of thinking itself. In its inaugural figuration under the name of Socrates, thinking takes the form of an interpolation that speaks and enters the world from nowhere, as with the opening question of the dialogue Protagoras. “From where, Socrates, have you just arrived?” The voice of thinking is without place, atopos – strangely issued from nowhere, and in this sense, original without any manifest origins. Beginning with these reflections, the aim of this paper is to explore Reiner Schürmann’s iconoclastic engagement with Heidegger’s thinking.