The Remains of Being

A bold, ambitious read of the Heidegger legacy as manifest in six very different interpreters. Provocative from beginning to end. -- William J. Richardson, Boston College What remains of Being after the deconstruction of metaphysics? Santiago Zabala has proposed an original and fascinating answer to this question under the deeply postmodern motif of a hermeneutics of 'remnants'--thinking not Being but Being's remnants--that will repay study by everyone who is interested in the crucial line of radical hermeneutical work that stretches from Heidegger to Vattimo. -- John D. Caputo, Syracuse University, coauthor of After the Death of God Although what remains of Being in the work of the thinkers Santiago Zabala explores--Schurmann, Derrida, Nancy, Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Vattimo--appears differently in each case, Zabala's work also demonstrates that what remains of Being, above all else, is its very questionability--and it is surely that which sustains the possibility of thinking. No mere exegesis, Zabala's work constitutes an important and original contribution to post-Heideggerian thought--it is a true continuation of the lines of thinking whose outlines and direction it also traces. -- Jeff Malpas, author of Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World A stimulating new voice in the hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Vattimo, Santiago Zabala follows his first book, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, with this profound interpretation of the history of metaphysics. After offering a compelling reading of Heidegger's Destruktion of metaphysics as more properly a convalescence (Verwindung) than an agonistic overcoming (Uberwindung) of Being, Zabala interprets the work of six post-Heideggerian thinkers as each engaging in his own specific way with what Zabala calls the remains of Being. This discussion leads to his own forceful arguments concerning the purpose and future of philosophy as one of keeping thought attuned to Being's constant regeneration, albeit always in the form of its remains. -- William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University Santiago Zabala has produced an intensely postdeconstructive work, both reexamining and deepening the closure of metaphysics in the aftermath of Heidegger. His corroboration of the impossible but necessary injunction to pose the question of Being, which becomes ever more urgent and unavoidable after it has been thoroughly used up and depleted, is extraordinarily attuned to, at once, the history and the contemporary situation of ontology. Zabala uncovers nothing less than a vector of thinking that will carry philosophy well into the new century. -- Michael Marder, author of The Event of the Thing Santiago Zabala's excellent book is genuinely novel and offers open paths into the future of thought. It is a breakthrough. -- Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook, and author of The World at a Glance and The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

In Basic Concepts, Heidegger claims that "Being is the most worn-out" and yet also that Being "remains constantly available." Santiago Zabala radicalizes the consequences of these little known but significant affirmations. Revisiting the work of Jacques Derrida, Reiner Schurmann, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Tugendhat, and Gianni Vattimo, he finds these remains of Being within which ontological thought can still operate. Being is an event, Zabala argues, a kind of generosity and gift that generates astonishment in those who experience it. This sense of wonder has fueled questions of meaning for centuries-from Plato to the present day. Postmetaphysical accounts of Being, as exemplified by the thinkers of Zabala's analysis, as well as by Nietzsche, Dewey, and others he encounters, don't abandon Being. Rather, they reject rigid, determined modes of essentialist thought in favor of more fluid, malleable, and adaptable conceptions, redefining the pursuit and meaning of philosophy itself.