In David Farrell Krell’s Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks, readers encounter a magisterial engagement with two distinct yet inextricably bound dimensions of Martin Heidegger’s corpus: on the one hand, Heidegger’s detailed account of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time, and on the other hand, the highly contested and troubling political entanglements of the Black Notebooks.
Krell’s work shows Heidegger’s extraordinary philosophical achievements and to the disquieting “catastrophe” that ensues when one confronts the virulence and extremities of the Black Notebooks. This book, originally developed from the 2014 Brauer Lectures in German Studies at Brown University, reveals Krell’s deep immersion in Heidegger’s early and late thought, and it exhibits an intellectual generosity that situates Heidegger in dialogue with Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Schelling, Hölderlin, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Lacan, and many others. One is repeatedly struck by the density of Krell’s expositions, which bring to light how the very word “ecstasy”—the ἐκστατικόν—guides Heidegger’s analysis of time’s sudden displacements, while simultaneously illuminating the philosophical calamity that awaits us when we read the Black Notebooks in all their polemical fury.
From the outset, Krell emphasizes that Heidegger’s interpretation of time, especially as found in sections 65–68 of Being and Time, remains one of the signal achievements of twentieth-century philosophy. Through the term Ekstasen, Heidegger underscores how “original” or “primordial” temporality places Dasein outside itself in a threefold manner of futurity, having-been, and the present—these three together unify in what he calls “ecstatic temporality.” Krell, drawing on both his longstanding work on Heidegger and a keen comparative sensibility, devotes significant attention to how this ecstatic interpretation arises in Heidegger’s text, what historical precedents might have inspired Heidegger’s notion of ἐκστατικόν, and how the analysis of time in Being and Time belongs to a philosophical heritage that spans Aristotle’s reflections on the “all of a sudden” (ἐξαίφνης) in the Physics, Augustine’s accent on rapere (to seize or to be seized), Schelling’s deliberations on the birth of consciousness in the Ages of the World, and other deep sources in the Western tradition. Krell demonstrates that, for Heidegger, time is not a linear sequence measured by clock or cosmic calculation, but an active process that “temporalizes itself” in the form of “raptures” (Entrückungen) or “rapid removals,” wherein Dasein is constantly propelled into displacement beyond any stable notion of presence or presence-at-hand.
The book’s first part elucidates that Heidegger’s existential conception of death—death as my “ownmost,” “nonrelational,” “unsurpassable,” “certain yet indeterminate” possibility—cannot be grasped if one imagines time merely as a manifold of “now-points.” Rather, the future “comes toward” Dasein in resolute openness, the past or having-been simultaneously casts Dasein back upon its thrownness, and the present is bound up in everyday distractions that Heidegger interprets as “falling prey” to the world of busy involvements. Krell is careful to highlight Derrida’s earliest seminar on Heidegger, taught in 1964–65, where Derrida puzzles over the tensions between running-ahead (Vorlaufen) in the future ecstasis and the deepening accent on having-been in Being and Time’s final sections on historicity.
Derrida discovers that, by the breathless conclusion of Being and Time, the ecstasy of the past begins to eclipse the future, in a way that displaces any simple privileging of resolute openness or “presence.” Krell’s analysis extends these Derridean meditations by exploring Lacan’s “mirror stage,” Merleau-Ponty’s “body schema,” and the possibility that infancy and childhood—far from being extraneous—reveal an entire undisclosed dimension of ecstatic time. He shows how Heidegger himself hints, in section 72, that the “other end” of Dasein, namely birth, has been largely neglected in the project of fundamental ontology. To be sure, Heidegger’s official emphasis is on death: the resolute acceptance of mortality reveals finitude, or original time as finite. Yet Krell notes that Heidegger concedes the existence of an equally significant yet recondite domain in which birth comes into play, that natal dimension thoroughly integral to our factical existence. From this vantage, Krell envisions a hypothetical re-articulation of Being and Time focused less on mortality alone than on natality as well, speculatively imagining how Dasein’s “birthing” might alter many standard existential themes.
In merging these lines of argument, Krell’s commentary resonates with the writings of Augustine, whose Confessions ruminate on the suddenness of psychic transformations—both the “blind hopes” that tear us into confusion and the lightning-flash of divine grace. Krell shows how such Augustinian motifs parallel the Greek concept ἐξαίφνης in Aristotle’s Physics, so that the sudden (or “all of a sudden”) can be read as an uncanny morphological event within time’s ungraspable ecstasy. Likewise, in Hölderlin’s poetic reflections on the “ex-centric” or elliptical orbit of tragic events, Krell discerns a “rapidität” that illuminates how Heidegger, in the 1930s, might have glimpsed a tragic rapture in the unstoppable speed of historical catastrophe. Although Heidegger abandons the precise terminology of ecstatic temporality after Being and Time—preferring later to speak of the “clearing,” of letting beings come to presence, or of the truth of beyng (Seyn) in the massive volumes of the Gesamtausgabe—Krell shows that the fundamental impetus remains the same: time, for Heidegger, is an unparalleled force that envelops, snatches, or seizes human existence in ways that confound every notion of stable presence or calm interiority.
Yet this graceful mastery of Heidegger’s ecstatic thought cannot be separated from the more disquieting topics that Krell addresses in the second part of his book: the so-called Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte). With the publication of these notebooks from 1931 to 1941, readers of Heidegger encountered a harsh polemical tone, including incendiary remarks about “Weltjudentum” or “international Jewry,” plus relentless diatribes that lash out at the Catholic Church, Bolshevism, Americanism, and other institutions of modernity. Krell recounts that the immediate scholarly and public reaction to these Notebooks was one of shock and condemnation, as the pejorative references to Jews thrust Heidegger’s legacy into fresh crisis. More puzzling still is how these diaries and marginalia alternate between mocking National Socialist racism and expressing anti-Semitic insinuations about calculative machination. In the Notebooks, Heidegger does not simply single out the Jewish people with hateful stereotypes; he mounts an overarching, universal critique of “gigantism,” “machination,” and the “oblivion of being,” which for him defines the entire modern epoch. The real perplexity, Krell argues, is that even though Heidegger castigates racially driven biologism, he also speaks of “World Jewry” as if it were the supreme culprit of that oblivion and that “gigantism.” One therefore confronts passages of such blatant defamation that it is impossible—and ethically inadmissible—to exonerate Heidegger. Precisely for that reason, Krell refuses both a simple denunciation that would burn Heidegger’s books and a sanitized approach that would ignore these catastrophic notations. Instead, he calls for painstaking, critical reading: a reckoning with the complexity of these texts, which, on Heidegger’s own terms, ultimately sabotage the philosophical project they purport to advance.
What emerges is Krell’s sobering assessment of the “catastrophe” for Heidegger’s thinking. The raptures that once seemed dedicated solely to unveiling the finitude of human existence and letting Dasein stand before its ownmost possibility become entangled in a paranoid strain Krell calls “paranoetic.” Heidegger’s abiding suspicion—one might even say mania—is that the “destiny of beyng” has abandoned humanity, that the last god has hidden himself, that the “fall” of the West into monstrous technologies reveals the ultimate dereliction of being. Such an all-consuming suspicion can find no single target or cause; there is, for Heidegger, no agent or entity to blame, for what is truly menacing is the oblivion of beyng itself. Yet Heidegger still makes specific scapegoats: Jews, Americans, Catholics, all subject to rhetorical attacks that sometimes spiral into breathtaking vitriol. The sinister tone arises not only from the content, but also from the style in which Heidegger’s lugubrious piety and violent polemic conjoin, overshadowing the pious references to the arrival of a “last god” who might someday rescue Europe from its catastrophes.
Krell’s judgment—that these Notebooks cannot be read without registering Heidegger’s collapse into unrelenting negativity—does not, however, devolve into a simplistic dismissal. Instead, Krell meticulously situates the Notebooks alongside the earlier philosophy of time, showing how no direct continuity links the luminous breakthroughs of Being and Time and the resentful excoriations in the diaries. Yet there remains a perplexing residue of the same rhetorical tools: references to Entrückung, an insistence on the “hardness” of a new beginning, and repeated recourse to “shipwreck” as the sign of philosophical progress. Thus the sense of “ecstasy” cedes to the possibility of “catastrophe,” such that we see, as Krell puts it, how Heidegger’s legacy hovers between the best and worst of thinking. The clarity with which Krell presents this diagnosis, refusing any exculpation for the anti-Semitic remarks but equally resisting a wholesale excision of Heidegger from philosophical discourse, underscores a consistent theme of “magnification.” Krell cites Heidegger’s own statement that genuine thinking rises above polemics and magnifies greatness, yet these Notebooks themselves turn out to be mired in polemical spleen. By reading them with devotion and critical distance, Krell exemplifies exactly the sort of “generous and gracious thinker and teacher” praised by reviewers, even while his exposition remains unsparing in its evaluation of Heidegger’s political and philosophical failings in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Throughout the book, Krell’s style is engaging, but also intense. He alerts us that many of his pages still preserve the “lecture style” of the Brauer series and that he has intentionally refrained from removing the occasional informality that arises in a spoken address. Yet this only deepens the impact, for one feels the lecture-hall immediacy of a philosopher who has wrestled with Heidegger’s texts across decades, uncertain how to resolve their contradictions but certain that ignoring them is impossible. The result is an admirably accessible introduction to themes that can often appear forbidding: Krell illuminates the nuanced structures of ecstatic temporality, the interplay of future, past, and present, the extraordinary claim that in the blink of an eye (Augenblick) we confront our mortal possibility, and the layered ways in which forgetting, nostalgia, anxiety, and resolute openness shape Dasein’s time. He likewise devotes significant space to a reflection on how the infant or child might experience time, bringing to bear Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the embodied subject—a curious supplement to Heidegger’s unrelenting focus on the adult Dasein as confronted by death. Krell underscores that by turning to birth and early childhood, we might unearth new and unsuspected facets of Heidegger’s existential analysis, including the uneasy tension between dependence on others and a projected possibility of genuine freedom.
Once the book transitions to its second thematic orbit, it charts a steady progression through the ironies and horrors of the Black Notebooks: the bitterness toward the modern university and its bureaucratic entanglements; the obsessive castigations of “worldlessness,” which Heidegger sees as a historical condition of an entire age; the allusion to a “tragic” or “catastrophic” destiny of beyng, in which mortals seem abandoned by the hidden last god. Krell observes how all political, cultural, and ecclesiastical institutions are subjected to Heidegger’s scorn; no group escapes condemnation. The Notebooks’ repeated exclamations, “You dolts!” or “You oafs!,” reveal a crescendo of polemic so extreme that it ultimately subverts Heidegger’s own attempt to maintain a posture of philosophical piety. For how can an “enraptured” openness to being coexist with hateful fixations upon a hidden “international Jewish conspiracy” or upon the intrusions of Catholicism? Krell’s conclusion is that no consistent “rescue” can be found in the Notebooks. Even the appeals to the last god ring hollow, because the intensity of the polemics sabotages the very piety that purports to welcome this hidden divinity. Polemical rage and quiet reverence collide, leaving a textual field of destruction that, in Krell’s phrase, cannot be forgiven or overlooked, even if it must still be read and interpreted for what it reveals about the precarious fault lines in Heidegger’s thinking.
Krell’s final chapters make this tension explicit: to read Heidegger, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, demands a vigilant awareness that the impetus of ecstatic temporality may plunge into the darkest underside of philosophical reflection. The finitude that seemed so revelatory in Being and Time can, under the pressure of historical turmoil, devolve into metaphysical paranoia, in which all that remains is suspicion of a grand “machination” that threatens to devour the world. Here, Krell discerns an element of tragedy that resonates with Hölderlin’s own sense of the cataclysmic speed of ancient drama, or with Nietzsche’s pronouncement that philosophical insight may sometimes coincide with destructive mania. Although Heidegger’s fundamental orientation is aimed at the clearing (Lichtung) of being, these diaries show how easily clearing collapses into incantations of doom. By juxtaposing the best aspects of Heidegger’s ecstatic analysis—its luminous dissection of anxiety, resoluteness, having-been, natality, and mortal finitude—with the worst of the Black Notebooks’ rhetorical violence, Krell reveals a thinker at war with himself. Heidegger’s legacy thus becomes that of a Janus-faced figure whose genuinely profound inquiry into time stands alongside vitriolic disfigurements of his own age, of modern technology, of Jewish culture, and of nearly every form of difference encountered in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s.
The strength of Ecstasy, Catastrophe is precisely the refusal to flatten these tensions into a single overarching narrative. Krell neither dismisses Heidegger wholesale, nor excuses him. Instead, he shows that the tension between “ecstasy” and “catastrophe” belongs to the core of Heidegger’s legacy. Readers thereby witness how a single line of thought—one so compelling in its phenomenological detail—can break under catastrophic historical conditions and yield a painful record of human complicity in ideological illusions. Krell’s commentary does not end by prescribing an easy resolution. Rather, it invites us to a persistent, unflinching mode of reading: we must confront the Black Notebooks with the same seriousness that once greeted Being and Time. We must parse their statements, weigh them in the context of Heidegger’s broader reflections, register where they invert or negate the commitments of fundamental ontology, and acknowledge that the “sudden” can be both the luminous moment of insight into finitude and the abrupt plummet into vile conspiracy thinking.
Throughout these pages, Krell’s language conveys a thoroughgoing engagement with Heidegger’s published works, lecture courses, private notes, and myriad references to the Greek and Germanic traditions. He plumbs the major motifs—anxiety, forgetting, the call of conscience, the concealment/unconcealment of being, the radical negativity underlying world decline—and shows how they bind together early and late Heidegger in an uneasy continuum. Yet the vigilance with which he explores specific passages from the Black Notebooks, highlighting their internecine rifts, ensures that Krell is always both teacherly and critical. He draws attention to the nuance that, while these Notebooks pour scorn upon everything from Catholic orthodoxy to American pragmatism, they also articulate fundamental doubts about the Nazi movement itself; one finds Heidegger mocking the regime’s superficial racism even while refusing to purge certain references to anti-Jewish conspiracies. This unresolved contradiction is, for Krell, the hallmark of catastrophe: instead of clarifying his stance, Heidegger recedes into cryptic, grandiose statements about “beyng,” about “the last god,” and about an impending “overturning” of world civilization. The hoped-for “rescue,” invoked by Hölderlin’s famous line—“Where the danger is, the rescuing also grows”—never fully materializes here.
What makes this book indispensable is its dual accomplishment of representing, in highly refined philosophical style, the best of Heidegger’s interpretive approach to time, and then situating that brilliance alongside the moral and intellectual collapse that the Black Notebooks display. The result is not a text that indulges in moralistic condemnation alone; it is far richer, adopting an almost forensic thoroughness as it tracks the rhetorical gestures, the manifold illusions, and the movement of rapture toward—and eventually into—disaster. The very term “ecstasy,” once keyed to the Greek sense of stepping outside oneself and linked to the suddenness of insight, reappears in the Notebooks as a possibility for violent derangement. In the final analysis, Krell’s reading underscores that the shining articulation of existential finitude cannot be divorced from the world in which it takes place, and that philosophy’s great conceptual architectures can be marred by prejudice and historical complicity.
Yet Krell never leaves us in despair. His accessible style—despite the density and difficulty of the themes—offers a model of how to read Heidegger’s complicated oeuvre without either dismissing it out of hand or capitulating to uncritical admiration. The text consistently reminds us that we ourselves are shaped by the “ecstases of time,” even in our scholarly approach. We, too, bring past inheritances and future projections to bear on the present moment of engagement with these works. In this sense, Ecstasy, Catastrophe proves as much about us, as readers, as about Heidegger. If the final portion of the book devotes itself to the darkness of the Black Notebooks, the earlier chapters’ reflections on natality, on the child’s anxious or joyful discovery of a world, on the possibility that there is no truly stable vantage point in time, remain quietly interwoven with the gloom. Krell demonstrates that natality—as a philosophical concept—may open unsuspected dimensions of responsibility, precisely because it underscores the continuity of a communal future. If we come into the world as children, vulnerable and dependent, perhaps the illusions of resolute autonomy must forever be bracketed by an awareness that we remain ecstatically cast outward among others, never fully extricated from those communal contexts that shape our language and our moral sense. In confronting the disquieting negativity of the Black Notebooks, we might also reaffirm the imperative to remain open—ecstatically, if precariously—to a more shared horizon.
Ecstasy, Catastrophe is not only as an immensely learned, patient, and illuminating study but also as a demonstration of how deeply a philosopher can probe the entanglements of time, finitude, and historical cataclysm. One emerges with an intensified appreciation for Heidegger’s intricate phenomenological analyses—an appreciation that resonates with Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews’ mention of Krell as a “generous and gracious thinker and teacher”—but also with the sobering realization that in the shadows of that same Heideggerian corpus lurk forms of prejudice and vitriol that no authentic philosophical enterprise can excuse. This is the extraordinary achievement of Krell’s text: it discloses the Janus face of Heidegger’s legacy, revealing the genuine brilliance of ecstatic temporality on the one side and the lethal meltdown of a thought undone by its own historical moment on the other. Krell’s unfolding of these tensions becomes an invitation for readers to ponder how the force of time, whether experienced in the rapture of philosophical insight or in the miseries of ideological mania, runs throughout our existential commitments. For that reason alone, “Ecstasy, Catastrophe” should be read by anyone who dares to face, rather than flee, the complexities and tragedies that arise when the mortal question of time intersects with the mortal question of history. It is in precisely that intersection that the brilliance and the brutality of Heidegger’s legacy become most vividly, and disturbingly, clear.
Simon Gros 
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