Reiner Schürmann

In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann reads Marx’s work as a transcendental materialism. Arguing that what is most original in Marx is neither his political or sociological nor his economic thinking, but his philosophical axis, Schürmann shows that Marx conceives being as polyvalent praxis. With patient rigor, Schürmann delineates this notion of praxis from the interpretations proposed by Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School, as he traces Marx’s move beyond the dualism that has governed ontology since Descartes. Stepping out of this dualism, however, Marx does not espouse a monism either—be it an immobile one as Parmenides’, or a dynamic one as Hegel’s. On the problem of universals, Marx’s transcendental materialism is nominalistic: being as action is irreducibly manifold. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann in the course of these lectures draws out the philosophical axis in Marx’s work, which determines and localizes his theories of history, of social relations and of economy. On this view, Marx’s unique place in philosophy stems from the fact that the grounding of phenomena is seen by him not as a relation that produces cognition, as in Kant; nor as a relation of material sensitivity, as in Feuerbach; but the grounding occurs in labor, in praxis, in the satisfaction of needs. Whereas the Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis in Marx that introduces multiplicity into being. Following Schürmann’s own suggestion, this edition is complemented by a reprinting of his Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. This rupture puts an end to the epochal economy of presence and returns principles to their own precariousness. As a whole, this volume brings out one of the less appreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri and François Laruelle.

On Heidegger’s Being and Time is an outstanding exploration of Heidegger’s most important work by two major philosophers. Simon Critchley argues that we must see Being and Time as a radicalization of Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition, and the phenomenological concept of the a priori. This leads to a reappraisal and defense of Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology. In contrast, Reiner Schürmann urges us to read Heidegger 'backward', arguing that his later work is the key to unravelling Being and Time. Through a close reading of Being and Time Schürmann demonstrates that this work is ultimately aporetic because the notion of Being elaborated in his later work is already at play within it. This is the first time that Schürmann’s renowned lectures on Heidegger have been published. The book concludes with Critchley’s reinterpretation of the importance of authenticity in Being and Time. Arguing for what he calls an 'originary inauthenticity', Critchley proposes a relational understanding of the key concepts of the second part of Being and Time: death, conscience and temporality. (Source: [Routledge](

This collection assembles key essays of Reiner Schürmann centering on the concepts of anarchy and the singularization to come. Setting out from the question of the status of practical philosophy at the end of metaphysics, these texts track the crucial role of Schürmann’s engagement with the work of Michel Foucault between 1983 and 1991. Drawing on his highly original reading of the philosophical tradition, Schürmann traces the status of identity and difference in Foucault’s conception of history to develop a radical phenomenological understanding of anarchy. The texts pose the question of the fate of philosophy after the critique of the subject and the collapse of the divide between theory and praxis, philosophy and politics. Besides making Schürmann’s seminal readings of Foucault widely available, the essay collection offers a concise and accessible introduction to Schürmann’s thought and documents a shift in his thinking during the 1980s. Taken together, these pivotal essays introduce the reader to the entirety of Schürmann’s most urgent concerns and assemble the conceptual tools for the project of his last book, Broken Hegemonies. This topology of broken hegemonies, which in many ways offers an alternative to Foucault’s genealogical strategy, takes the form of a subversive re-reading of the history of Western metaphysics that urges our present relentlessly toward the singularization to come. To the reader unfamiliar with Schürmann’s work, these texts establish him as one of the most radical thinkers of the late 20th century, whose work might eventually become legible in our present. (Source: [Diaphanes](

In this remarkable work, Reiner Schürmann shows Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century Christian mystic, as the great teacher of the birth of God in the soul, which shatters the dualism between God and the world, the self and God. This is an exposition of Eckhar's mysticism-perhaps the best in English-and, because Eckhart is a profound philosopher for whom knowing precedes being, it is also an exemplary work of contemporary philosophy. Schürmann shows us that Eckhart is our contemporary. He describes the threefold movement of detachment, release, and "dehiscence" (splitting open), which leads to the experience of "living without a why," in which all things are in God and sheer joy. Going beyond that, he describes the transformational force of approaching the Godhead, the God beyond God: "A man who has experienced the same no longer has a place to establish himself. He has settled on the road, and for those who have learned how to listen, his existence becomes a call. This errant one dwells in joy. Through his wanderings the origin beckons."

In Broken Hegemonies, the late distinguished philosopher Reiner Schürmann offers a radical rethinking of the history of Western philosophy from the Greeks through Heidegger. Schürmann interprets the history of Western thought and action as a series of eras governed by the rise and fall of certain dominating philosophical ideas that contained the seeds of their own destruction. These eras coincided with their dominant languages: Greek, Latin, and vernacular tongues. Analyzing philosophical texts from Parmenides, Plotinus, and Cicero, through Augustine, Meister Eckhardt, and Kant, to Heidegger, Schürmann traces the arguments by which these ideas gained hegemony and by which their credibility was ultimately demolished. Recognizing the failure of ultimate norms, Broken Hegemonies questions how humanity today is to think and act in the absence of principles. (Source: [Project MUSE](

What happens when "thinking" no longer secures a rational foundation for knowledge and "acting" no longer means conforming one's daily enterprises, public and private, to that foundation? In his brilliant deconstructionist analysis Reiner Schürmann provides a comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's thinking from the perspective of this question. Focusing on the relationship between theory and practice in an era in which metaphysical rationality has come to an end, Schürmann explicates an economy of presencing in which thinking can no longer be called upon to legitimize praxis by measuring it against some enduring principle or archē. Thinking and acting, he concludes, can then become an-archic. (Source: [Indiana University Press](