The Irony Of Heidegger

This important new book offers the first full-length interpretation of the thought of Martin Heidegger with respect to irony. In a radical reading of Heidegger's major works (from Being and Time through the Rector's Address and the Letter on Humanism to The Origin of the Work of Art and the Spiegel interview), Andrew Haas does not claim that Heidegger is simply being ironic.

Rather he argues that Heidegger's writings make such an interpretation possible - perhaps even necessary.Heidegger begins Being and Time with a quote from Plato, a thinker famous for his insistence upon Socratic irony. The Irony of Heidegger takes seriously the apparently curious decision to introduce the threat of irony even as philosophy begins in earnest to raise the question of the meaning of being.

Through a detailed and thorough reading of Heidegger's major texts and the fundamental questions they raise, Haas reveals that one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century can be read with as much irony as earnestness. The Irony of Heidegger attempts to show that the essence of this irony lies in uncertainty, and that the entire project of onto-heno-chronophenomenology, therefore needs to be called into question.

Review: 'Haas destroys the illusion of any immediate reading of Heidegger. He urges us to become alert to an author who is using language in all its registers ... such that it falls upon us to find out what is 'meant' as 'ironic' or 'figurative', and what can be read and disputed as if it was 'literal'.' Pirmin Stekeler, University of Leipzig, Germany Haas' The Irony of Heidegger is an important contribution to our philosophical ruminations on Heidegger, not because it sets out some comprehensive view of Heidegger, but because it problematizes the very idea of a comprehensive view.

Ironically, it is a book that should be taken very seriously - or at least as seriously as anything ironic can be taken. Philosophy in Review, January 2010