Being and Time Divisions I and II
“Theory Underground’s BEING AND TIME lectures guide us chapter by chapter through our reading of Heidegger’s masterpiece in a way that brings out both its conceptual systematicity and its power to affect and provoke us in our search for the good life and the understanding we need to live it. David Mckerracher’s emphasis on thinking through the text as we read it means that the lectures are interesting and useful to both beginning readers and those who are already familiar with the text. Nothing is shirked in his presentation: Questions related to Heidegger’s reactionary politics are a steady theme, but never without giving Heidegger his due when it comes to re-thinking Heidegger’s concepts such as dasein, being-in-the-world, possibility, and negativity, which McKerracher clarifies in new ways.
The lectures constitute a dense, intense, and thought-provoking step-by-step introduction to reading BEING AND TIME in its relevance to contemporary thought, life, and politics.” Terence Blake – Agent Swarm (IRL Former student of Deleuze and Foucault)
No other book from the 20th Century has had so large an impact on philosophy. To read Levinas, Sartre, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Arendt, Jaspers, Marcuse, Žižek, et al. without an intimate understanding of Being and Time is to fundamentally miss the context and impetus for all those thinkers. Yet this text gets ranked as one of the hardest books of all time in the world. If not to merely contextualize and understand those other thinkers, then why bother with this work that is, in fact, incomplete?
Instructor Bio
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a course-based social media site and app by and for people who don’t belong anywhere: drop outs, blue collar intellectuals, and renegade PMCs. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of Dave’s work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? Dave’s questioning into the conditions of possibility for living the Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. Dave develops this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, Dave has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Theory Underground is Dave’s vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conservation necessary to take this project to the next level, the long-term goal of which is to overcome the current culture war deadlocks by inquiry into their conditions of possibility. The goal of this work is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
Dave used to think “knowledge and understanding” were reducible to, or limited by, what can be known scientifically. Back in his New Atheist/naive socialist days, he started having conversations with Bruce Beerman, one of his philosophy professors. One day Bruce said, “I can’t even talk to you about this stuff anymore. You just have to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Thus began the struggle to understand and think through Being and Time. What does it have to tell us about the limits or place of science? What does it do to challenge naive socialism, dialectical materialism, and scientific socialism? How does Being and Time challenge Descartes through Kant, as well as Bertrand Russel and early Wittgenstein? Dave’s goal is not to teach those other thinkers, but to try to read and teach this text on its own terms, while giving special emphasis to aspects of this text that tend to go under-discussed. These days the questions that plague people are “Is Heidegger an idealist? A realist? Is he arguing everything is subjective?” Dave will show that attempts to reduce a phenomenological inquiry such as this to some “ism” utterly fails to understand the nature of the project, much less its most valuable contributions to the history of philosophy. To live the examined life today, we must first wrestle with Being and Time.
Standard Questions: How to read a text that is so difficult? What gets lost in translation? The difference between Being and “sense of being”? How does this work pose a fundamental critique and deconstruction of modernity, liberalism, Marxism, and even Hitlerism? On the latter, what did Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party have to do with this text? Why are those most influenced by it almost always some kind of progressive or leftist, and why do their own politics differ so radically from his own?
Dave’s Theory Questions: How does existential time deconstruct the kind of time we have been subjectivized into thinking is normal? In what ways to does Heidegger broach “energy,” libidinal economy, and in what ways does his failure to think these head-on challenge or undermine aspects of his project? How do sex, labor, jouissance, basic necessities, and recognition factor into this project?
