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?
Even though this book is “a failure” in a sense, its goals are arguably less important than its process. The book cannot be summarized, but is a practice, a radical de-centering, and fundamental critique of the presuppositions we take for granted most.
McKerracher 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? McKerracher’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?” McKerracher 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?
McKerracher’s Theory Questions: How does existential time deconstruct the kind of time we have been subjectivized into thinking is normal? In what ways 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?
There are two ways to get involved: Enroll via one of the tiers, or become a Tier 3 or 4 subscriber to TU – either via the app (available on Apple and Android app stores) or right here on the site.
Tier 1: AUDIT: Access to the lecture Zoom calls + 6 months of access to the lecture recordings and the forum.
Tier 2: LONG-TERM BUY-IN: Everything from Tier 1 + Long-term buy-in and access to the course, forum, and lectures. This includes the accountability structure.
Tier 3: CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM: Everything from Tiers 1 & 2 + Direct constructive critical feedback from McKerracher (via voice messages and/or marked up reviews of your assignments).
Tier 4: ASSESSMENT & ACCOUNTABILITY: Everything from Tiers 1-3 + (1) Access to any of the live and recorded exegetical reading sessions of this text that McKerracher will do + (2) Two 1-on-1 Zoom calls with McKerracher. The first is to be scheduled while the course is ongoing, and the second is to be conducted after the course is over, for a constructive criticism session dealing with your final project.
David McKerracher (M.A.)
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 McKerracher’s work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? His questioning into the conditions of possibility for living the Good Life led McKerracher to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher develops this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and Timenergy (coming out Fall 2023). Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory from his compatriot Michael Downs. Theory Underground is McKerracher’s vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation 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, but without creating indefinite civil war with those who try to “stay natural” and remain on Earth.
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