Despite being unfinished and rushed to publication – appearing in 1927 in Edmund Husserl’s “Annals of philosophy and research in phenomenology” – Being and Time is Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus and remains one of the most decisive and impactful philosophical interventions of the twentieth century. Being and Time effort to post the question of being (die Seinsfrage) influences the entirety of the course of contemporary philosophy.

A critique of philosophy as whole, the book announces the need for a Destruktion (deconstruction) of ontology in order to return philosophy to its fundament: the question of being (die Seinsfrage). Radicalizing his teacher, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and the latter’s call to “return to the thing’s themselves,” Heideggger argues that philosophy must begin with the “everyday” and what is passed over, overlooked, and lost to theoretical forms of reflection. Only when we attend to our practical dealings with the world can pose anew in a radical way (radical in the sense of going to the root) the question of  the “meaning of  being.”

What is the meaning of being? This is the book’s fundamental question, and Heidegger claims provocatively at the outset of the Being and Time, that this question has itself been forgotten and the task of the book is to awaken its readers to an experience of this forgetting. The project of a “fundamental ontology” is inquire to both condition of the possibility of the human being’s relation to being and the manner in which it is forgotten. To think this relation requires the most fundamental recasting of the categories through which we conceptually determine the human being’s relation to the world, itself, and its history. For Heidegger, it is the human being’s, or, as he proposes to rethink the anthropos, Dasein’s relation to time that is most fundamental and thus the ground of the understanding of being and, thus, ontology as such. Being becomes a problem and a question only for a being that is in time, i.e., temporal, mortal, or finite. Being and Time is a book that attempts to attune the reader to its own mortal being, to the singular experience of its relation to death and dying that Heidegger argues is unique to “Dasein.”

To adequately grasp “Dasein” in its concreteness requires a radically new approach to philosophy that breaks with its modern assumptions. Understanding is not a matter of knowledge of objects and the being that understands, i.e., Dasein, is not a subject. This first “draft” of Heidegger’s philosophy produces a radical break with the positing of man as a subject, a position linked to the modern anthropological stance of philosophy. Being and Time relocates the question of being outside of any subject-object relation, and thus, outside of the epistemological privilege of theoretical knowledge. The treatise purports to uncover and think that which the tradition has left unthought, namely the difference of being to all beings. This is explored by a threefold articulation. Phenomenologically: any appearing of beings points to being as to that which never enters into appearance, whose retreat from the visible conditions all appearance. Existentially: in anxiety, Dasein is ripped out of its being-in-the phenomenal world and thrown back on the openness to the question of being that it is. Ontologically: the difference of being qua being is indebted to its reinscription in the horizon of temporality.

This destitution of the subject shows itself to be a mainstay of contemporary thought; it branches out into existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction, poststructuralism, including thinkers who are not labelled as Heideggerians such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Latour.

The seminar will be a close reading of this book that proceeds slowly, section by section. No foreknowledge is necessary. The discussions will thematize its contemporary import.