Onur Karamercan, "Heidegger's Antigone: The Ethos of Poetic Existence"

Hi all --

While teaching one of my dual credit sections, I asked what the richest country on the planet was. I fully expected that everyone knew the U.S. is by far the only answer. And then not one single student answered the United States.

When I think about it, it makes perfect sense why they didn't. 50% of my students are food insecure. They're one paycheck away from not eating. While there's oil everywhere in the Permian Basin, there's not much to show for it other than big trucks and rancid pollution. People sit on billions and sometimes don't even buy a mansion; they would rather live in ugly, gated suburban developments. A false sense of modesty displaces knowing what anything else is worth. You see this in how money in America rarely buys anything of genuine value, and when it does, people want to tear it apart (e.g. our best schools).

Furthermore, whether we have money or not, we panic. We never feel rich when we actually are. We're always scared of something, always imagining someone has more. We're only secure when we can hurt someone else. A cruel, twisted sense of freedom animates many: if you have power and don't abuse it, did you really have it?

So yeah. It makes sense students see their country as poor. In a deep sense, it is poor. If you act like you have nothing and can never do anything other than inflict pain, that is by definition poverty.

Some Links Worth Reading

My brother shared with me the Buzzfeed rundown of that wild Ashton Hall Tiktok where he overuses Saratoga water, does push-ups on his balcony, and rubs his face with a banana peel. Ryan Broderick's take on the video is enlightening: he does think this is reflective of something deeply wrong. As funny as it is, it will work. Men will flock to the lifestyle advertised as if it is real or worth having.

Elise Granata's "7 ideas to jumpstart community practice" is a necessary read you will find yourself coming back to. The key idea is to treat your time as holy–the devotion and dedication matter–and then understand community practice in that way. Here's how it is put in the post:

In this way, community practice is more like a creative habit or meditation or mending the button that’s been dangling off your ratty cardigan for 5 years; it needs you to honor its importance in order to actually happen.

I should add what I personally know about these things. So I was at a fair today where a number of non-profits asked for volunteers. Obviously I think volunteering is excellent; I'm not the most dedicated volunteer, but I do find myself having to steal my time back. What struck me was the lack of gatherings, internships, or continuing opportunities, and I know that this is a problem in the area. The general attitude is "Sign up when you can. Cool you did the work. Kthxbye." And that is one major factor for why people helping each other is more forced than a habit. When you bring people together for extended periods of time, united in common cause, that's the win. You want to let them to champion each other's causes, build community from neighbors who are learning to recognize each other's virtues. I know this sounds corny, but I am speaking from experience.

Annotated Bibliographic Entry for Heidegger's Interpretation of Antigone: Onur Karamercan, "Heidegger's Antigone: The Ethos of Poetic Existence"

Note: As this is the first entry in this series, I have to explain to you what I'm doing. What I want is to introduce you not just to my research, but walk you through how I do it and why it matters. I'm interested in Heidegger's readings of Antigone because 1) Antigone is a badass play and 2) how Heidegger conceives authenticity becomes clearer when he's musing about a woman willing to die for mourning her brother.

Of course, that triggers another question: Why should we care what Heidegger thinks? My own answer is that authenticity, especially in this age of relentless fandom, is something we yearn for but don't realize it. It profoundly affects our politics. You could say the opposite of authenticity is alienation. Maybe we are alienated from our labor, as Marx posited. Heidegger holds that we are alienated from the questioning which allows us to be fully human. I think both those views are at least partially correct, but that entails some tough questions for capitalism and modern politics as we practice both. If capitalism and politics are about finding outcomes which satisfy a population, who is to say that someone's notion of love ripped entirely from Taylor Swift albums is any different from someone who sacrifices for people they don't even know?

Here's how I'm going to organize my research. First, bibliographic entry for the paper. Second, some information about the author. Third, a rewriting of the abstract to reflect what spoke to me most. Fourth, a short list of relevant takeaways for my specific topic. Fifth, questions the paper compels me to ask for future research (or remedying my own ignorance). Finally, one quote that I might use as an epigraph. This is how I'm going to teach organizing one's research from now on. Even bad papers take time to read, so it is important to make sure they are documented.

All entries in this series will be tagged "annotation."

Karamercan, Onur (2021). "Heidegger's Antigone: The Ethos of Poetic Existence." Beytulhikme: An International Journal of Philosophy 11 (3):1063-1077.

About the Author: Onur Karamercan focuses on how Heidegger and a number of thinkers and poets like him work through the "between." Dr. Karamercan's research agenda resembles mine, to be honest. A fruitful dialogue between his papers and mine can probably be established.

Reworked abstract: Karamercan focuses on the "place-character of Antigone’s poetic ethos," using Heidegger topologically. Usually, philosophical readings of the play use a "being/action" distinction. To what degree do "actions" create complications which despoil "being?" Tragedy, one might say, comes about when people reveal who they truly are through their actions and fall apart in the face of that truth. But this is exactly where Heidegger's reading of Antigone has peculiar merit. Antigone locates herself beyond the polis because of her devotion to her brother; the space she occupies is radical (challenging the law), holy (holding family and nature as sacred), and "homely." In homelessness, exiled from the city and confronted directly by death, she is still at home. She demonstrates "poetic dwelling."

Relevant takeaways:

• Heidegger on Heraclitus fragment 119, a statement about ethics. Usual translation: "a man's character is his daimon." Heidegger: "The human being dwells, insofar as he is a human being, in the nearness of god." (note the link between dwelling and ethics)
• Antigone herself is the "uncanniest of the uncanny (deinon)." (this indicates she is a special comment on what humankind is)
• Antigone's actions, according to Heidegger, are "fearful," "powerful," and "unfamiliar." The last needs expansion: she is at home while being homeless. (How can one be unhomely and project an ethos?)
• Antigone as reflective of the poet? A poet herself? (Of a corpse, from the play: it is neither at home with the living and the dead)
• Kathleen Wright: Heidegger pays no attention to Antigone's "sexual difference;" he prioritizes deinon over dike. Hegel's interpretation is superior? Is the productive tension between the family and the state a better frame?
• Knox: Antigone is beyond politics. She wrestles with "the limits of human mortality." Does she truly see her brother as dead? Her fate is being exposed to death! Ismene is political; Antigone is "holy," "siding with the dead against time"
• Heidegger on the between: "… hermeneuein is that exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message. Such exposition becomes an interpretation of what has been said earlier by the poets who, according to Socrates in Plato's Ion (534e), hermenes eisin ton theon are 'interpreters of the gods'."
• Karamercan: "The polis is founded upon the unconcealedness of things (alētheia)," but you need the polis to make "the experience of phusis as phusis" to come into the open.
• The poet, between human beings and gods, just like Antigone, is how we get to dwelling. Poets "encounter before anyone the emergence of being, the meaningful manifestation of things," bringing it "into the limits of language."

Questions for future research:

• Karamercan talks about Heidegger separating Antigone from "the They." What is "the They?" It sounds like the last man of Nietzsche.
• The "fourfold" in Heidegger. What exactly is this?

Key quote:

Karamercan: "Humans are those who are capable of dwelling in the openness of being, namely in the place of the meaningful unconcealment of things as discursive mortals."