Heidegger's Body Parts

James Sallis

This, he said, is Heidegger's arm.

Or perhaps not. An extreme close-up, shoulder to wrist, hand out of frame (as friends who write scripts might say): how is one to know? But let us give him benefit of doubt.

He appears to be reaching for something (our speaker continues). Perhaps a book of Hegel's or Holderlin's lurking there (we may as well say it) just offscreen, or a cup of that bitter, dark Viennese coffee he prefers.

This is Heidegger's hand. Note the grooved callous on the second digit, into which the pen fits like a ladle into a gravy-boat, note how the cuticle pushes away from the nail, how the nail itself is deformed from the frequent protracted pressure of the pen.

Heidegger's face. On the planes of which considerations live like squatters and homesteaders in Westerns.

Here (you think) is a man who would understand that black bread cannot be hurried, understand the time it takes to train bears properly, a man who would always select as best the sourest cheese.

And, finally, this (our speaker says, shutting off the slide projector) is the space around Heidegger.

We sit blinking in the sudden light.
___

Essays to be written: Coffee and philosophy.

'In Hegel, you can see the way he grinds coffee into his argument--usually metaphorically. You can really follow the coffee bean throughout the history of philosophy, and come up with extraordinary developments. There's someone called Malsherbes who wrote about this. Just the relation to coffee as a miraculous opening. At one point Hegel writes about coffee and its substitute. One could trace the history of wars in terms of the coffee bean. Even literary history: who drank how much coffee? And where? What kind of a social space the cafe produces? The Viennese cafe and Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard, Arnold Schoenberg'.

Barthes:

'Coffee, the sober liquor, powerfully cerebral, which, unlike alchohol, increases clarity and lucidity - coffee whcih suppresses the vague and heavy poetry of the imagination's mists, which strikes a spark from what is actually and accurately seen, the flash of truth itself.'