© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15691640-12341442 Research in Phenomenology 50 (2020) 122–131 brill.com/rp Research in Phenomenology Thinking Through the Politics of Black and Brown: Heidegger in the Thirties Richard Polt. Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, 302pp. 1 The New Heidegger Situation Amidst all the furor of the most recent Heidegger debates and scandals that have been rekindled with ever more intensity over the last five years, we often forget how revolutionary Heidegger’s thinking was within its own time. In an era dominated by Husserl, Dilthey, and the neo-Kantians of both the Marburg and Freiburg strains, Heidegger burst upon the scene to refocus the question about how to think and to do philosophy. The young Heidegger went about dismantling the very forms and practices of philosophical education by chal- lenging the fundamental Fragestellung that ruled the day. Was philosophy a rigorous science? A worldview? A meditation on individual existence? The foundation of knowledge itself? As Heidegger developed his own thinking dur- ing the 1920s culminating in Being And Time (1927), he came to understand the bankruptcy of all the old approaches. Instead he called for a return to factical life that involved taking up again in a revolutionary and transformative way the questions that emerged at the very beginning of philosophy in the work of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (GA 36/37:5–12). What Heidegger achieved in this concerted assault on the academic conventions of “university- philosophy” has left its enduring mark on the way philosophy gets practiced in both Europe and the Americas. And yet Heidegger’s status as a guide and model for this new kind of thinking has come under its own form of rigorous questioning and critique. With the recent publication of Heidegger’s letters to his brother Fritz, the sensational reception of the Black Notebooks, and the scholarly contributions of Peter Trawny and Donatella Di Cesare, we have been exposed to the dark side of Heidegger’s legacy. No longer can serious scholars doubt the long-held suspicions about Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism or to his anti-Semitic prejudices that, as we have seen in the Black Notebooks (esp. GA 97), extend beyond his own personal prejudices to include his understanding of “the history of beyng.” The result of this most recent Downloaded from Brill.com07/24/2020 06:14:41PM via College of the Holy Cross