After Heidegger? stakes its claim with uncommon precision: it assembles a deliberately heterogeneous forum of accomplished interlocutors to test whether Heidegger’s thought still provides living questions that can be taken up as one’s own in a philosophically responsible way under conditions shaped by new disclosures—above all the Black Notebooks—and by contemporary exigencies that he neither envisioned nor addressed directly. Its distinctive contribution lies in the way it binds an editorial frame to a many-voiced internal polyphony so that the volume functions less as a monument to a settled past than as an occasion that compels method, evidence, and principle to answer for themselves in a post-Heideggerian landscape. In that sense the question mark in the title names an obligation rather than a posture.
The book organizes a broad field of problems by a simple, transparent compositional gesture: the editors solicit short essays from their advisory board and a few additional scholars, then group the resulting meditations into seven clusters that double as argumentative paths through the material. The frame is disclosed plainly in the editors’ introduction; its wager is twofold. First, the premise that contemporary philosophy unfolds after Heidegger—both in the sense of temporal succession and in the sense of still having to reckon with questions he set in motion—must be examined rather than presupposed. Second, that examination must proceed with a discipline that neither canonizes nor cancels: one receives a thinker by making the questions one’s own, which means analysis and development joined to critique—especially in light of the evidence concerning his political judgments and anti-Jewish claims in the notebooks. The editorial rationale is not the neutrality of a catalog; it names an active responsibility to interrogate the philosophical reasons for continued attention and to distribute that interrogation across multiple registers—overview, politics, existence, method, late thought, and intercultural or postmodern openings. The introduction is explicit that the volume’s title carries its question mark advisedly, and that the Black Notebooks heighten the urgency to disallow any “Heideggerian” cult while still holding open the possibility that the questions remain philosophically fecund.
The opening part on “Overviews” sets the book’s argumentative tonality by staging three tensions that recur throughout. Drew Hyland isolates the primacy of questioning—philosophy’s basic speech act—as Heidegger’s enduring provocation, while asking why a practice so attuned to openness did not internally resist an allegiance to a diabolic political regime. This juxtaposition, rather than being treated as a personal scandal outside philosophy, is recast as a philosophical problem about the limits of a mode of thinking oriented to questionability and releasement. The editors’ synopsis makes this dual movement explicit, and the organization of the ensuing parts shows that the book treats such duality as method: the essays must both preserve the phenomena disclosed by Heidegger’s investigations and investigate the conditions under which those phenomena become distorted or dangerous.
Gregory Fried’s contribution sharpens a second recurrent tension. If daring defines the philosophical step that risks inherited horizons, then the historical wager of an anti-Platonizing history of Being entails consequences for our modern arrangements—scientific, political, and ethical—that cannot be domesticated as purely “ontological” distinctions harmless to practice. Fried’s pathmark underscores how the critique of foundations can itself become founding if it is made to underwrite a singular political leap. That problem—the transfer from an account of meaning’s historicity to a politics that claims to answer to the history of Being—returns in later parts, where John McCumber, Lawrence Hatab, and Arun Iyer in different ways ask what conceptual resources within Heidegger’s project either permitted or constrained his political choices and what can be salvaged for ethical and political reflection without smuggling in a quietist ontology. The editorial précis is forthright that these interrogations identify both achievements and failings, and that Sheehan’s propaedeutic insistence on meaningful presence and appropriated ex-sistence re-anchors the tradition of phenomenology as the medium for a sober “after.”
The volume’s second part, “After the Black Notebooks,” is the hinge that forces a new composition of the whole. Donatella Di Cesare’s essay refuses both the pious defense of the “resentful orphans” and the categorical banishers, arguing that the notebooks belong intrinsically to Heidegger’s corpus and unsettle received interpretive schemas; one cannot license a selective reading that keeps Being and Time while discarding the Notebooks as peripheral. The result is a re-construal of the archive’s unity and a reframing of several loci—from technology to uprootedness to eschatology—that had stabilized in postwar reception. The essay’s strongest claim, thematized as metaphysical anti-Semitism, is deliberately severe: in seeking an “essence of the Jew,” the notebooks collapse into the very metaphysical schematism the project otherwise resists, and this relapse marks an internal impasse in the thinking that must itself become a starting point for renewed reflection. The argumentative force here is diagnostic and constructive: the wrong turn is specified conceptually, and the imperative to start again is not a moralizing add-on but a methodological necessity once the relapse is shown.
Peter Trawny intensifies the hinge function by asking why we are asking about the future of Heidegger’s thought at all, and by resisting an easy universal “we.” The plural here is exposed as a practical, institutionally inflected network of readers entangled with an author whose political compromise is neither excusable nor, by itself, dispositive of philosophical content. Trawny’s question is less about whether the work will survive—he treats its continuing cultural effects as given—than about the mode in which it might be read responsibly once the notebooks break open the earlier narrative of silence and separability. The essay shows how the shock to reception reconfigures the horizon of legibility for canonical texts like “The Question Concerning Technology” and the “Letter on Humanism,” and thus alters the criteria for what counts as a faithful or fruitful reading of Heidegger’s idiom. The volume thereby models a hermeneutics of re-entrance: the notebooks are neither detachable scandal nor omnipotent key; they are a disclosure that modifies the intelligibility conditions of the oeuvre as a whole.
Julia Ireland’s “Getting Ourselves on the Hook” and Babette Babich’s “Aftermath” widen the aperture opened by Di Cesare and Trawny. Ireland rejects exculpation strategies that acquit the author at the cost of the community; she redirects attention to affinities and divergences between Heidegger’s conceptual matrices and Nazi ideologemes, not to conflate them but to force readers to become answerable for the uses to which they put the thought. Babich turns the same demand reflexively toward reading itself: in the wake of disturbing texts one must show what one means by thinking, not only what one thinks about. The compositional effect is deliberate: Part II is not a dossier of incrimination or defense; it is a methodological reset that supplies the rest of the book with the discipline of reading under exposure. The introduction announces this pressure from the outset, and the middle and later parts treat it as a condition of responsible appropriation.
Part III, “Politics and Ethics,” gathers four essays that together test whether the architecture of Seinsgeschichte can bear political and ethical weight without lapsing into remnant metaphysics or historical fatalism. McCumber’s thesis locates the root of error in the “history of being” construed as a metaphysical holdover; he wagers that what is salvageable lies in analyses of mortality and temporality, where finitude can be thought without teleological mission. The programmatic force of this claim is to press for a concept of history that does not authorize national destiny under ontological auspices. Hatab’s essay refracts the same concern differently: he argues that central analyses of existence and unconcealment are irreducible to any determinate ideology; to say this is not to exonerate the historical actor but to insist that the conceptual resources of Being and Time can be activated in widely divergent political forms—he provocatively notes that the very formal phenomenology that mapped Heidegger’s own political venture might equally accommodate projects as different as Zionism or the American Revolution. The test is how the formal structures are concretized, not that they structurally entail one political expression. Iyer retrieves an authentic revolutionary impetus in Heidegger that exceeds his disappointed attempt at political intervention, and Schmidt explores the interweaving of philosophical and ethical life in a register closer to practice than to doctrine. The part coheres by distributing a single question—what counts as a political and ethical use of Heidegger’s analyses—across four contrasting strategies of reply.
Part IV, “Life and Existence,” re-centers the phenomenological stakes of being-in-the-world with treatments that stretch from hermeneutic beginnings to the existential edge. Robert Scharff proposes that a return to Dilthey-inflected hermeneutics—becoming hermeneutical before becoming philosophical—could recalibrate the very stance from which Heidegger is received. Eric Nelson interrogates the call to concreteness and doubts that the analyses do justice to actual life; the implied demand is for phenomenology that does not substitute conceptual vividness for lived density. Guignon and Aho draw out the continuing force of anxiety, authenticity, and belongingness; Polt’s “Being at Issue” radicalizes the insight that Dasein’s being is at issue for it by extending it into political philosophy and gesturing toward a traumatic ontology; Lee Braver thematizes the way the work animates abstractions by showing readers the traditions inhabiting them; Kisiel traces a path from early analyses of existence to the later Ereignis concept. The part as a whole argues by accumulation: finitude, Stimmung, appropriation, and tradition are not terminological excrescences but analytic instruments whose evidential force is renewed when the reader tests them against shifts in historical experience. The table of contents marks this arc plainly, and the introduction flags its point: these essays are occasioned by questions about how to live philosophically in finitude rather than how to solve doctrine.
Part V, “Phenomenology and Ontology,” examines the lineage and limits of Heidegger’s methods. Steven Crowell defends a phenomenological measure for Heidegger’s claims, aiming to separate the grain of descriptive insight from the chaff of esotericism; the essay insists that normativity and reason can be treated within a strengthened phenomenological framework without succumbing to the very metaphysics phenomenology contests. Katherine Withy’s insistence on the unrest of the question of being shifts focus from the “what” of being to the light within which presencing shows itself under questionable norms; François Raffoul counters by pressing phenomenology toward “the inapparent,” an event of being that never appears yet must be thought. The argumentative progression exhibits the volume’s refusal to collapse disagreements. It also redistributes the earlier hinge: once the notebooks rule out esoteric insulation, phenomenology must either become more rigorous or relinquish itself to a metaphysical sublime. Several contributors call explicitly for the end of esotericism and for dialogical openness, and the editors’ frame recognizes that the viability of “after Heidegger” depends upon clarifying what kind of phenomenology is being proposed.
Part VI, “Thinking with Late Heidegger,” turns to the lexicon so often treated as forbidding—Ereignis, clearing, fourfold, technicity—and asks whether it can be clarified into sustained philosophical work. William McNeill argues for translating Ereignis as event while carefully specifying its difference from ordinary actuality; David Kleinberg-Levin treats sight as an event of appropriation; Miguel de Beistegui shows how thought’s seeming involuntariness still answers to conditions better grasped as provocation than as gift, opening a path for a renewed aesthetics; Günter Figal takes the clearing as a resource for thinking space, against the cliché that late Heidegger abandons the tradition, while Daniela Vallega-Neu articulates poietic and middle-voiced thinking attuned to bodily time-spaces; Andrew Mitchell shows how relational thinking of things and the fourfold opens a non-anthropocentric ethics; Richard Capobianco argues that late Heidegger affirms the independence of being as alētheia, thereby leaving phenomenology behind. This part is exemplary of the book’s method: it neither homogenizes late Heidegger into an agreed program nor dismisses the vocabulary as incantation; it tests the terms by showing what they do in the hands of different practitioners. The editors’ overview previews these inflections, and the table of contents marks them as a spectrum rather than a party line.
The final part, “Openings to Others,” lifts the question mark in the title into inter-tradition and postmodern space. Iain Thomson’s essay maps a passage from ontotheology to ontological pluralism and tracks the implications in technology, education, politics, and art; Bret Davis reconstructs the promise and difficulties of East–West dialogue that engaged Heidegger intermittently; Trish Glazebrook stages a deliberately dissonant encounter—Robot Girl and das Rettende—to craft a gendered ontology under conditions of technicity and globalization. The editorial synopsis again says quietly what the composition makes vivid: the future of any “after” depends upon whether the idiom can be made answerable to others who do not share the same starting points, and whether such answerability can occur without expanding the idiom into an imperial grammar.
Across the volume, five claims crystallize into a composite through-line. First, after names a doubled temporality: succession that requires critical distance, and persistence that remains provocation. The introduction places this duality at the front by demanding that readers articulate reasons for pursuing Heidegger’s questions while refusing dogma; the chapter groupings enact that demand by arraying contrastive standpoints without quarantining them. Second, the Black Notebooks alter both what is at issue and how it must be read. The evidence of anti-Jewish statements and of a sustained, conceptually framed investment in National Socialism revokes any strategy that treats politics as merely ontic and detachable; it requires a re-reading of technological, historical, and eschatological motifs across the corpus and a re-consideration of the relation between metaphysics and the relapse diagnosed by Di Cesare. The upshot is methodological, not merely moral: a concept of history of being that licenses essentialization of an Other collapses into what it sought to overcome; the only philosophically responsible answer is to begin again at that point of breakdown.
Third, the volume stabilizes a minimal phenomenological core while multiplying its expressions. Sheehan’s insistence that the project is a phenomenology of meaningful presence and of appropriated ex-sistence functions as a common ground; Crowell’s call for phenomenological measure, Withy’s account of normative light, Critchley’s discipline of notice, and Raffoul’s turn to the inapparent contour the field of options without dissolving the center. The contributors repeatedly exchange esotericism for argumentative clarity, and the editors register that exchange as a condition for any credible future.
Fourth, the political and ethical stakes arrive inside the phenomenology rather than after it. McCumber’s remnant metaphysics critique, Hatab’s irreducibility thesis, Iyer’s revolution motif, and Schmidt’s entwining of living philosophically and living ethically together demonstrate that the formal analyses of being-in-the-world can neither guarantee nor preclude specific politics; they supply conditions for practical articulation whose legitimacy is tested in how they are concretized. This is why, in Hatab’s formulation, the same formal schema that traced Heidegger’s political adventure can also underwrite divergent emancipatory projects; the measure is not a deduced policy but the fidelity of concretization to the structures of existence as disclosed.
Fifth, the late idiom can be made to work—technē to technicity, clearing to space, Ereignis to event—once it is bound to determinate problems and interlocutors. The contributions in Part VI are exemplary in refusing the choice between mystification and dismissal. They render the lexicon operative by attaching it to optics, aesthetics, spatiality, embodiment, thing-relationality, and the independence of truth, thereby fulfilling the editors’ opening premise that an “after” worthy of the name will be inventive in applying and transposing the questions rather than repeating a catechism. The table of contents itself reads like an index of such transpositions.
Because the volume is an edited chorus rather than a single argument, it invites the reviewer to indicate where the internal displacements occur—how parts merge into others and are displaced by them. The most salient sequence runs from Part I’s scene-setting to Part II’s exposure, which then forces the re-allocation of weight in the remaining parts. Once the notebooks are admitted as integral, the prior habit of reading Being and Time or “The Origin of the Work of Art” under the shelter of an apolitical or purely ontological register is displaced; the phenomenological center of gravity shifts from ontological immunity to answerability. That shift does not cancel the early analyses; it changes their use. The ontological difference can no longer be “protected” by an appeal to the priority of Being over beings; it must be demonstrated in descriptions that refuse essentialization, and it must justify itself where it touches concrete others. Thus Part III’s political-ethical tests sit downstream of Part II’s hinge. Likewise, the problem of method in Part V becomes more than scholastic housekeeping; it is the condition for not relapsing into esotericism under pressure. And Part VI’s work with the late lexicon will only count as thinking with the late Heidegger if it stays exposed to the risks named earlier—otherwise “event” becomes a talisman. The final part’s openings to technology, pluralism, and intercultural dialogue then do not provide “applications” of a theory; they pressure the vocabulary to become hospitable under contestation. In this sense the composition sequence itself is pedagogical: it leads the reader from premise to exposure to re-composition, and the early parts are displaced by later ones insofar as later essays establish the conditions under which the early insights may still be legitimately taken up.
A further displacement occurs within the book’s treatment of history. Several essays re-open the question whether a narrative of Western metaphysics culminating in enframing can function as orientation without smuggling in the teleology it contests. Fried’s attention to daring shows the temptation of world-historical leaps; McCumber’s resistance to onto-historical mission; Iyer’s attempt to think revolution without messianic destiny; and the late-Heidegger part’s refusal of doctrinal finality together compel the reader to exchange saga for site: rather than a single plot line, one has local illuminations that must be re-won. The introduction already hints at this when it insists that philosophers must explain why Heidegger remains worth reading, thereby preventing a story of necessity from replacing the labor of reasons.
It matters that the editorial outer frame is explicit about the audience and about the risk. The editors address readers who will not accept dogma but who sense that Heidegger’s analyses have continuing force; at the same time, they acknowledge that the notebooks require a new sobriety. The frame’s modesty—the title’s question mark; the refusal to homogenize; the decision to include both sympathetic and severe voices—does more than signal even-handedness. It provides the ethical condition for a community of reading in which the use of Heidegger is under judgment by standards internal to the essays’ own phenomenological self-presentation. The book’s self-understanding is therefore procedural: show, do not incant; test, do not shield; make the questions your own by risking your method in public.
The distinctive scholarly stake of After Heidegger? emerges, then, as a three-part thesis. First, the viability of thinking after Heidegger depends on re-founding phenomenological practice under conditions of exposure to historical failure, political compromise, and the danger of relapse into the very metaphysics the project contests. This re-founding is performed, not merely asserted, by essays that tie description to normative light, that explicate conditions for the occurrence of thought, and that link event-language to determinate analyses. Second, any continued philosophical value must be demonstrated in domains where the temptation to essentialize is greatest—politics, ethics, technology, and intercultural encounter—since it is precisely there that the notebooks show the cost of conceptual shortcuts. The essays in Parts II and III make that test unavoidable. Third, the late idiom proves exportable when used as an instrument rather than as a badge; the practical success of these exports is measured by whether they clarify problems in vision, space, embodiment, thinghood, and the independence of truth without demanding a prior initiation into a sectarian vocabulary. Part VI’s contributions are instructive here, and several authors explicitly call for an end to esotericism.
For a final clarification let’s return to the book’s opening compact. The question “after Heidegger?” is answered neither by vindication nor by cancellation; it is answered by a practice. The practice required by this volume is answerability under exposure. That phrase names why the collection matters: it makes clear that rigor in phenomenology and vigilance in politics are the same discipline viewed from different sides. To proceed after Heidegger, one must show that one’s descriptions can survive the Notebooks’ test without repetition of their relapse, and that one’s politics can be grounded in structures of existence that do not silently convert finitude into destiny. The editors’ question mark remains, but it is no longer equivocal; it is a sign of work to be done that the contributors perform in their different ways. By binding a lucid frame to a genuinely plural internal argument, After Heidegger? offers neither a safe harbor nor a verdict; it offers a set of paths whose rightness is attested in the passing.
Simon Gros 
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