Publisher's Synopsis
In this essay, Byung-Chul Han rereads Heidegger in all his stages as the vindication of a friendly world. The heart, according to Hölderlin's accurate clarification, is the organ that permanently makes the blood flow and ebb, disengage and reencounter in assimilations and emissions, in appropriations and alienations, those currents of life that are the blood flows channeled through arteries and veins. Already in Heidegger's terminology, the heart would be a metaphor for that intersection of closeness and distance in which dissonances are temporarily made to harmonize to make them pleasant: the world as a habitable confluence, which is constantly being built, of the entombing enclosure of the earth and the inhospitable opening of the sky. If Being and Time, Heidegger's first capital work, is usually read as a rediscovery of the world and the life thought of man, in this essay Byung-Chul Han re-read the German philosopher in all his stages as the vindication of a friendly world . In this hymn to affability, Han puts Heidegger in fruitful dialogue with the German philosophical tradition, French phenomenology, and contemporary literature.
