Being as Passion

 

 Gesthemane hours of my life

In the dull glow

Of glum apprehension

You have often seen me.

Crying I shout: never in vain.

My young being

Weary of plaints

Trusted none but the angel of mercy.

—Martin Heidegger

In an essay on entertainment, Peter Glotz hints at a possible connection between the critique of entertainment and the passion for death: “The condemnation of entertainment, diversion, light art, has religious roots. In Pascal, for example, for whom ‘diversion’ disrupted concentration on a life centered around death.”1Martin Heidegger, too, stands in this intellectual, even theological tradition, which perceives in entertainment a lapse, even apostasy, from the authentic form of life. Distraction is, for Heidegger, a “flight from death.”2 It circumvents the “possibility of authentic existence” for Dasein.3 Only by facing death as “the measureless impossibility of existence” does Dasein become aware of the possibility of authentic existence.4 As on many other occasions, Heidegger resorts here to the language of the Christian religion. Dasein is exposed to the “constant temptation of falling-prey.” Being-in-the-world is “tempting.”5 Diversion leads to “falling-prey.” It is the antagonist of an earnest, struggling life centered on death.6 “Struggle” and resoluteness are essential to Heidegger’s existential-ontological vocabulary.7 In “struggling” resoluteness, Dasein “chooses its heroes,” according to Heidegger. Existence is passion. It is even a passion unto death.

The term “entertainment” does not belong to the vocabulary of Being and Time. But Heidegger’s existential-ontological analysis of “everydayness” contains the lineaments of a potential phenomenology of entertainment. Heidegger’s “they” may be interpreted as the subject of mass entertainment, even as the hypersubject of mass media: “In utilizing public transportation, in the use of information services such as the newspaper, every other is like the next. This being with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of being of ‘the others’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and the way they see and judge.”8 The they embodies, even verbalizes the horizon of average meaning and understanding according to which the masses understand themselves and the world. The they comprises everyday patterns of understanding and conduct to which the masses are oriented. The they is constitutive for understanding, for its patterns of apprehension generate a reality, an “everyday and stubborn reality.”9In numerous ways, entertainment media impart patterns of interpretation and conduct. Entertainment thus maintains the world. Entertaining is also maintaining. Television, which is never addressed in Being and Time, may be considered a defining medium for the they. It does not passively display an “objective” reality. Instead it actively produces reality, or that which must be taken as real. Television is a reality machine. Watching television (fernsehen) does not produce distance (Ferne), instead it engenders proximity. It places distance at a distance by configuring reality as proximity to “the everyday way of being interpreted.”

Mass entertainment permits meanings and values to circulate on narrative and emotive pathways. It also shapes feelings, which are constitutive for apprehension: “The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Dasein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one ‘sees.’”10 The function of entertainment media is to re-impregnate the “public way in which things have been interpreted” which is determined by “average understanding” or the normal view of the world.11 Conduct and interpretation patterns are internalized through physical and psychological channels of desire. In this way, entertainment stabilizes the existing social structure. The they is sustained insofar as the they is entertained. The meaning-structure, which may only be reproduced, “disburdens” judgment and understanding.12 The invention of a world, of something completely alien is far more laborious and demanding than the discovery of an already interpreted world. Television too effects a “disburdening of being” by proffering prefabricated meaning-formations or myths: “And since the they constantly accommodates Dasein, it retains and entrenches its stubborn dominance.”13 Hence, entertainment is not the antithesis of “care,” is not a careless giving-oneself-over to the world, but is rather a depraved form of “care” in which Dasein is concerned with things that un-burden its existence.

Entertainment is an unburdening of being that generates pleasure. This is the conclusion of a phenomenology of entertainment based on Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness. “Idle talk” unburdens talk. It represents the sum or whole of everyday meaning-formations or convictions: “The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its being public, but encourages it. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter.”14 Gossip and scandal are also “idle talk.” As forms of entertainment, they help preserve “the public way of being interpreted.” They do not celebrate meaninglessness, but instead possess their own form of disclosedness. Everydayness is rife with average presentations of meaning that people consent to unawares: “This interpretedness of idle talk has always already settled itself down in Dasein. We get to know many things initially in this way, and some things never get beyond such an average understanding. Dasein can never escape the everyday way of being interpreted into which Dasein has grown initially.”15Heidegger does not consistently describe the they or idle talk in phenomenologically neutral terms. Frequently his interpretation is colored by value judgments or representations with clearly religious roots. Idle talk retains a “disparaging sense.” Heidegger’s value judgments let what is positive in everydayness slips continually into the negativity of the inauthentic. Everydayness talks into the ground any possibility of authentic existence: “Ontologically, this means that when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitdasein, toward being-in itself.”16 Idle talk is contrasted with its positively inflected counterpart, the passionate form of talk that is “keeping silent,” which renders audible the “uncanniness of the suspension.” The they un-burdens existence. But being as such is burdensome. Being is passion. The they and entertainment dispassion existence into “the groundlessness and nothingness of inauthentic everydayness.”17 In truth, idle talk is everything but groundless: it establishes or reinforces a communicative ground. Groundless or cryptic would better describe that keeping-silent which congeals into passion.

Being and Time could equally have been called Passion and Entertainment. Homo doloris as a passion figure represents the antithesis of the they. Only in the “primordial individuation of reticent resoluteness that expects Angst of itself” does Dasein arrive at authentic existence.18 Passion is individuation. Homo doloris is also Homo solitudinis. Entertainment is different: it gives no impression of individuality. In contrast to the they, which sustains the familiar and “holds any new questioning and discussion at a distance because it presumes it has understood and in a peculiar way it suppresses them and holds them back,” Heidegger’s Homo solitudinis ventures forward into the uncertain.19 He exposes himself to that angst which frees him from “the illusions of the they.”20 “Thus Angst takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the ‘world’ and the public way of being interpreted.”21Acquiescence to the world is constitutive of falling-prey. Entertainment too is based on acquiescence to what is. It is condemned to generate or at the very least sustain what is. Angst as the reagent of authentic existence is a negative expression in this respect. It comprises “clinging to whatever existence one has reached.”22 It leaves Dasein homeless by tearing Dasein away from the familiar world. Entertainment, on the other hand, makes Dasein at home in the present world. It maintains the home. Entertainment is homekeeping. In the face of death, Dasein finds itself away from home. It becomes aware of that uncanniness of being that remains concealed in the unambiguous, familiar world of the they.

In falling-prey, Dasein’s striving does not extend past the known and familiar. Its condition is one of acquiescence to the world. Dasein has always already arrived. The “temporality of falling-prey” is the “present.”23 The future is only a pale continuation and extension of the here and now. The temporality of falling-prey excludes the completely other. For it, the future in the emphatic sense, in the sense of the recognized-as-approaching, is closed. The temporality of falling-prey is also that of entertainment. The Dasein that entertains itself clings to the here and now. Entertainment reinforces that which is. Its temporality is also the present. The past is the old. The new is what is to come. But neither the old nor the new are the other.

The passion of authentic existence exhibits an entirely different time structure. In contrast to falling-prey, what determines it is not the present but the future. The future is the temporality of passion. A messianic future, in which the completely other discloses itself, may well by foreign to Heidegger’s thinking, but his authentic future as “anticipation of death” does abandon the known and familiar. It makes the world appear in light of “not-being-at-home,” casting Dasein out of the “being-at-home of publicness.”24 “Not-being-at-home” drives Dasein to passion, compels it to heroic resolution.

The passion of authenticity presides over Heidegger’s Being and Time. The they remains a form of degeneration. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Heidegger’s approach to it is not ontologically neutral. It forces into the background the constitutive function of unimpassioned everydayness, of the they, which among other things consists of tending to the world through patterns of meaning and identification, maintaining it in a special sense.

Heidegger’s Dasein primarily and above all resides in the “work world.” Already in Being and Time, Heidegger grasps work as a basic form of human existence. The first world is the “work world.” Work is guided by “circumspection.” Circumspection discovers things in their whereto, that is, in their meaning, and reflexively, prior to any expressive thematization. It creates a nearness to things by classifying them in or admitting them into the functional context of the familiar work world. They are situated within the work world in accordance with their particular whereto. Heidegger calls this admitting, situating bringing-into-nearness of things “de-distancing.” De-distancing “circumspection” as “nearness” eradicates distance. But if work ceases, then circumspection sheds its association with the work world. This generates free time as time liberated from work, wherein “circumspection becomes free.” Possessed of an “essential tendency toward nearness,” Dasein perpetuates the activity of de-distancing outside of the work world.25 In its free time it wanders through “a distant and strange world,” appropriating it “only in its outward appearance,” gawking at it, as Heidegger might say. In free time Dasein looks into the distance. This looking-into-the-distance has its own particular mode of vision: “Dasein seeks distance solely to bring it near in its outward appearance. Dasein lets itself be intrigued just by the outward appearance of the world.”26 In its free time, Dasein, liberated from circumspection, gives itself over to the “lust of the eyes,” its craving for images. It looks into the distance.27Heidegger’s remark on “free circumspection” may also be read as a critique of television: “When curiosity has become free, it takes care to see not order to understand what it sees, that is, to come to a being toward it, but only in order to see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another novelty. The care of seeing is not concerned with comprehending and knowingly being in the truth, but the possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Thus curiosity is characterized by a specific not-staying with what is nearest. Consequently, it also does not seek the leisure of reflective staying, but rather restlessness and excitement from continual novelty and changing encounters. In not-staying, curiosity makes sure of the constant possibility of distraction.” Television viewing, then, is a passive “being delivered over to the world.” Only images are consumed. Curious, restive seeing is analogous to channel surfing. Dasein channel surfs through the world. Channel surfing as “not staying” is, translated into ontological terms, an inauthentic mode of being-in-the-world. Channel surfing ontologically disperses Dasein in an inauthentic existence.

In the year Being and Time was published (1927), Heidegger was not yet familiar with television. In Germany the first experimental broadcasts took place in 1934. Being and Time does, however, expressly address radio, which enables a kind of distance-hearing. Heidegger views relates radio to the aforementioned “essential tendency toward nearness”: “All kinds of increasing speed which we are more or less compelled to go along with today push for overcoming distance. With the ‘radio,’ for example, Dasein is bringing about today a de-distancing of the ‘world’ which is unforeseeable in its meaning for Dasein, by way of expanding and destroying the everyday surrounding world.”28 Heidegger is unusually judgmental here. But his ontology of the Dasein alone fails to clarify why radio simultaneously expands and destroys the “everyday surrounding world,” which is destroyed to the very degree to which the de-distancing of the world is adjudged negative. Is the true world, which would mean home, destroyed through the sounds or images of the “distant and strange world”? Or do images themselves, as mere representations, destroy what is worldly in the world? Some thirty years later, Heidegger expresses himself more clearly with regard to the massive diffusion of television: images and representations merely propagate a world that is in fact no world: “And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world.”29The late Heidegger likewise mistrusts the eye and the image. His critique of “representation” is in its way a critique of the image. Images do not only disclose; they also enclose or conceal. They divert vision from the preeminent, from the real, both of which evade mediated representation. An interesting apercu appears in Heidegger’s often-mocked essay “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” After a detailed description of his hut in Todtnauberg, he remarks:

This is my work world—seen with the eye of an observer: the guest or summer vacationer. Strictly speaking I never myself observe the landscape. I experience its hourly changes, day and night, in the great comings and goings of the seasons. The gravity of the mountains and the hardness of the primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir trees, the brilliant, simple splendor of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered in snow—all of this moves and flows through and penetrates daily existence up there, and not in forced moments of “aesthetic” immersion or artificial empathy, but only when one’s own existence stands in its work. It is the work alone that opens up space for the reality that is these mountains. The course of the work remains embedded in what happens in the landscape.30Heidegger speaks critically of “the eye of an observer.” World and landscape elude mere observation. The worldly in the world cannot be objectified as image or representation. The “gravity of the mountains” and the “hardness of the primeval rock” are what is real in the world. The world emerges as resistance, which work alone can share in. Whoever does not work, whoever merely observes and enjoys like a tourist, thus has no access to the world. Emphasis is placed repeatedly on work. Only work grants access to the world. Only work “opens up space” for “the reality that is these mountains.” Mere observation leads to the vanishing of the world. The real in the world is only accessible prior to media dissemination. It reveals itself only in the moving and flowing through and penetrating of meadows in bloom and flatlands covered in snow, the rush of the mountain brook and the deliberate growth of the fir trees: “all this moves and flows through and penetrates.” Media destroy this moving and flowing through and penetrating proper to the real. Media replace “daily existence” (this expression, tägliche Dasein, still bears echoes of Being and Time) with “realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world.”

Gravity and sustenance compose the facticity of the world. Heidegger’s objection to media is, in the end, that media images de-factify the world, that they cannot sustain the weight of the world, the particular weight of things. The medial eventuates in the disappearance of the real. Heidegger lays special stress on the characteristics of things that evade media representation or mere seeing, such as “the gravity of the mountains” or “the hardness and scent of oak.”31 Neither the “scent of oak” nor the “deliberate growth of the firs” may be objectified through media. Authentic things, the things of an integrated world, have a special gravity, a special materiality opposed to mediality. The weightlessness of the medial, virtual world defactifies the world. Only the “the wide expanse of everything that grows” “bestows world,” Heidegger states.32 Medial things do not grow, but are instead produced. Things that grow, that are integrated, that are rooted, are opposed in Heidegger to medially produced, defactified things.

Heidegger’s thinking comprises a refactification of the world, above all on the linguistic plane. Rhymes and half-rhymes (delight/autumn night, fir/pasture) suggest an original, unspoiled order in the world which eludes both representation and medial fabrication. The refactification of the world is enabled by a refactification of language. This is true for Heidegger’s things, as well. Heidegger’s things are well known: “brook and bluff,” “mirror and clasp,” “book and picture,” “crown and cross.”33 Alliteration binds these things to an originary world. They make up a reality perhaps no less unreal or virtual than the world of medial things.

Heidegger’s expressions—“hardness,” “gravity,” “gloom,” “obscurity,” or “burden”— not only evoke the facticity of the world; they also propagate his language of passion. Being is suffering. During entertainment, which unburdens Dasein, we distance ourselves from being as passion. Only work corresponds to the passional character of being. Heidegger’s emphasis on work persists through the transition from the work-world to the mountain-world. In “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces,” he states: “It is the work alone that opens up space for the reality that is these mountains. The course of the work remains embedded in what happens in the landscape.” Even work is, particularly in the late Heidegger, not a form of action, of making or producing. It is passion. It is based on thrownness. In its peculiar passivity and passion it attends to “what happens in the landscape.”

For Heidegger, thinking, too, is work. Thinking as work is, again, passion. It is distinguished by the passivity of “suffering.” The task of thinking consists in being “an echo.” “To be an echo is the suffering of thinking. Its passion is quiet sobriety.”34 Sober passion is an oxymoron. But Heidegger understands passion in the original sense of passio or suffering, as passivity in self-sacrifice or self-surrender to the given matter of thought, which is accessible not to active grasping but rather to passive suffering. Thinking must allow itself to be determined (be-stimmen), modulated (durch-stimmen), indeed overruled (über-stimmen) by “what cannot be thought in advance” or by “what sustains and binds.”35 This is the basis of the facticity of thinking.

Heidegger’s thinker is a man of pain. His theology of pain runs as follows: “In the rift of pain, what is granted on high guards its perseverance. The rift of pain rends the veiled procession of grace into an un-needed arrival of favor.”36 The rift in thinking is an opening for the “magnitude” that is “too great for humans.” The closed inwardness of thinking without this rift is not receptive to the “arrival of favor.” Only the rift, only pain opens human thinking for the superhuman. Pain is transcendence. Pain is god. Entertainment is immanence. It is godlessness. Heidegger’s inclination toward passion is mirrored in his selection of things. Notably, his last things are “crown and cross.” By its proximity to “cross,” “crown” recollects the crown of thorns of Homo doloris. Heidegger calls to God in despair when faced with the world of “machinations” defactified by technology and media: “Only a god can save us.”37Being as pain, as prayer, is opposed to the immanence of beings, which in the modern era is irremediably submitted to experience and entertainment. Entertainment is a kind of machination that dispenses with all “timidity” before the divine, before that which cannot be thought in advance.

In many respects, Peter Handke is in agreement with Heidegger. In Handke, the defactification of the world is “dépaysement,” disorientation or “being out of the country.”38 The media world obviates, one could also say, authentic being-in-the-world. Heidegger equates “the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered in snow” in the Black Forest in winter with the happiness of being-in-the-world as being-at-work. For his part, Handke sets forth on a winter journey to the Danube, Sava, Morava, and Drina Rivers. Handke grasps the happiness of “repaysement,” or “repatriation,” of being-thrown-back-into-the-world, while “pressing the ancient iron door-handle” and “pushing open the shop door almost laboriously.” The facticity of the world appears primarily through gravity, through the resistance of things: “In the mild resistance of things, generated by age and material gravity, in their contact with the body of the person entering, an independent counter-body reveals itself. ... The Serbian shop door is literally an object, part of a momentary intensive communication of bodies, even the subject of a spatial-concrete event, possessed of its own existence. ... This slight resistance, the detectable inner force of the simplest things, draws them away from representation, salvages them from disappearance into the rehearsed accessibility of perception.”39 His true things, however, once brought into language, that is, translated into signs, again resonate with the unreal and the ghastly: “forest-dark honey pots, soup chickens big as turkeys, oddly yellow noodle nests or crowns and the often predator-mouthed, often storybook fat river fish.”40 This storybook world is just as unreal as the media world. Its strangely manipulated language generates a kind of virtual world.

Medial things, which whir through space without gravity, which are everywhere, that is to say, nowhere, must also have struck Handke as ghastly. They certainly bothered Kafka a great deal. Media for him are ghosts that de-realize the world, that divest it of its grasp-ability:

The easy possibility of writing letters—from a purely theoretical point of view—must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost. ... How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power. ... Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. It is this ample nourishment which enables them to multiply so enormously. People sense this and struggle against it; in order to eliminate as much of the ghosts’ power as possible and to attain a natural intercourse, a tranquility of soul, they have invented trains, cars, aeroplanes—but nothing helps anymore: These are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal system, the ghosts invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. They will not starve, but we will perish.41Kafka’s ghosts have in the meantime invented television, the internet, and email. These are disembodied means of communication, and for this reason are ghastly. “We will perish”—Handke too might have said this with regard to medial things, which whir without bodies or gravity around the entire planet, and render true witnessing impossible. Media messages and images are ghosts that procreate independently of human beings: “Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness.”42 Everything, following Handke, is ghastly reflections unrelated to reality: “Nearly all the photographs and reports of the last four years ... seemed to me increasingly to be simple mirrorings of the usual coordinated perspectives—distorted reflections in the very cells of our eyes and not eyewitness accounts.”

Media make people blind. They generate a world without witnessing. They do not bear witness to reality. They falsify and deflect the world. Their “machinations” obscure its facticity. Dasein, on the other hand, is a being-thrown. The human Dasein exists thanks to the “appeal of the highest heaven” and “protection of sustaining earth.”43 One ought to respond to this appeal and let oneself be borne by that which oversteps the human. Neither human Dasein nor the world is producible. This is the basis of their facticity. As humans, we are determined and modulated by “what cannot be thought in advance.” This is the basis of our facticity. Only so long as our thrownness, our facticity, resides within ourselves are we safe from becoming a “slave” of “machinations.” People are, Heidegger states, “servile to their future.” Distraction, which in Being and Time cuts Dasein off from authentic existence, makes people deaf to the language of the future: “But the call of the pathway speaks only as long as there are men, born in its atmosphere, who can hear it. They are servants of their origin, not slaves of machination. ... The danger looms that men of today cannot hear its language. The only thing they hear is the noise of the media, which they almost always take for the voice of God. So man becomes disoriented and loses his way. To the disoriented, the simple seems monotonous.”44“Book” and “mirror” make the language of the future audible. Film and television deafen the ear to it, so that people grow hard of hearing and distracted. The book is bearing witness. Film is a machination. “Jug” and “plow” are traces of origin. They are not “devices.” Radio and television, on the other hand, lead to homelessness. Heidegger constructs the authentic world through a highly arbitrary distinction. What Heidegger lacks is serenity before the world. His language of passion is willful, and achieves its effects through crude selection and exclusion. It is not friendly. Not only “herons” and “deer” belong to the world, but also mice and Mickey Mouse.

1. Peter Glotz, “Über die Vertreibung der Langeweile oder Aufklärung und Massenkultur,” in Die Zukunft der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 217.

2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 357.

3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 242.

4. Heidegger, 242.

5. Heidegger, 165.

6.Earnest, related to the German ernst, derives from the Proto-Germanic ernustuz, meaning “struggle” or “fight.”

7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 352.

8. Heidegger, 119.

9. Heidegger, 159.

10. Heidegger, 159.

11. Heidegger, 159.

12. Heidegger, 120.

13. Heidegger, 120.

14. Heidegger, 158.

15. Heidegger, 158–159.

16. Heidegger, 159.

17. Heidegger, 167.

18. Heidegger, 297.

19. Heidegger, 158.

20. Heidegger, 145.

21. Heidegger, 177.

22. Heidegger, 244.

23. Heidegger, 317.

24. Heidegger, 177.

25. Heidegger, 98.

26. Heidegger, 161.

27. [There is an untranslatable play on words here: fern sehen—“to see into the distance”; fernsehen—“to watch television”; Fernseher—“television.” Below Han speaks of the radio as enabling a kind of Fern-hören or distance-hearing.—Trans.]

28. Heidegger, 98.

29. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 48.

30. Martin Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” in Martin Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 27.

31. Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay,” 70.

32. Heidegger, 70.

33. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 180. [Translation slightly modified to stress alliterative elements.—Trans.]

34. Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 66.

35. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 199, 292, 283.

36. Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, 122.

37. Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay,” 57.

38. Peter Handke, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, trans. Scott Abbott (New York: Viking, 1997), 30.

39. Hubert Winkels, Leselust und Bildermacht. Literatur, Fernsehen und Neue Medien (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1997), 89–90.

40. Handke, Journey, 40 (translation modified).

41. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken, 1990), 229.

42. Kafka, Letters to Milena, 229. See also Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977): “So if I do not write, that is due chiefly to ‘strategic’ reasons such as have become dominant for me in recent years. I do not trust words and letters, my words and letters; I want to share my heart with people but not with phantoms that play with the words and read the letters with slavering tongue. Especially I do not trust letters, and it is a strange belief that all one has to do is seal the envelope in order to have the letter reach the addressee safely.” Kafka has a more human form of art in mind: “I forgot to add to my remark above: It sometimes seems to me that the nature of art in general, the existence of art, is explicable solely in terms of such ‘strategic considerations,’ of making possible the exchange of truthful words from person to person.”

43. Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay,” 70.

44. Heidegger, 70.

Good Entertainment

 A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative

by Byung-Chul Han

 translated by Adrian Nathan West