Impotence and Meaninglessness in Heidegger’s Metaphysics (1928-1929)

In the first book dedicated to Heidegger's early metaphysics, Andrés Gatica Gattamelati explores the emergence of impotence as a central concept.

Before deploying in the 1930s one of the most ambitious critiques of Western metaphysics that the history of philosophy has ever seen, Martin Heidegger devoted himself to the task of discovering the limits of a positive metaphysics. Although the reception of Heidegger's work has tried unremittingly to emphasize the anti-metaphysical character of his thought, stressing, above all, the hackneyed "overcoming of metaphysics", Heidegger was between 1928 and 1929 an enthusiastic metaphysician who from the ground still provided by phenomenology built a complete metaphysics around the "impotence of man." Gattamelati argues that for Heidegger the metaphysics of Dasein was carried out as a culmination of the experiences of insignificance that he had already highlighted from 1924 onwards. In Heidegger's phenomenology, impotence [Ohnmacht] stands out for the first time in the history of philosophy as the ultimate horizon of both the way in which human life configures meaning [Sinn] and, at the same time, of the way in which the limits of this very configuration are exposed.

This is an important study of an under-examined period in Heidegger’s work which makes key insights from European scholarship available to English readers. Uncovering for the first time the main transformations the concepts of world, transcendence, freedom and intentionality underwent in Heidegger’s thought between 1927 and 1929, Impotence and Meaninglessness in Heidegger's Metaphysics (1928-1929) will give readers a clearer idea of the convulsive and highly dynamic period that follows the philosopher's magnum opus.