Identity Difference Repetition

At over 200 million, the population of Uttar Pradesh is now double the world-wide target population of 100 million put forward by Arne Naess.

And having exceeded 5 million, what was to be the target population of the former nation of Norway?

With some 200 Sumatran rhinos remaining, what was the ratio of rhino to hominid back in the golden age before, say, the mastery of cave fire?

A game with numbers: very human.

Metro Lucknow is about the population of metro Montreal; Kanpur about the same.

The Oslo region is about half as many as either.

And thanks to Arne Naess, Oslo philosophers are required to prove that they can use set theory to show that they can say what they mean.

Now let us compare mountains, while trying to think like the repeating difference.

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Another absence in the Martin Heidegger letters

The absence of an index in the GA volume of Vorträge unde Aufsätze may reflect Heidegger's view on "der Leser".

The absence of one particular entry in the index to the English translation of "Letters to his Wife" is vexing: it may reflect the use of digital indexing and the exclusion of "common words".  The missing term is culture or Kultur. There are a few old Indo-European words which any reader should know and this is one.

I have added two notes: page 137 and page 190 which correspond to his letter 19320620 and his 19450614.

While both remarks are distasteful as quotations, they are perhaps not as troubling as his repeated mention in other works of those who "reckon" or "calculate".

Unlike correspondence between Jaspers and Arnedt with its many discussions of "German" and "Jewish", in the letters to Elfride the English translators have the term "Jews" in the index refer the reader to "anti-Semitism."  This is astonishing.  If many politically radicalized Jews were attracted to Communism then his remark to that effect is to indicate what?  A lack of anti-Semitism? His literary executors proved unable to translate one of his remarks; another appears to be a repetition of a stereotypical insult.

But the absence for me will always be the Jews of Marburg.  How many mezuzah were neglected on doorframes?  Where is the map of Marburg for December 1938?  Who later retired in comfort from the sale of such a house in 1965, 1975?  How were the tax-rolls of Marburg lost in the undamaged town? Lost in a town so free of the "culture" that the Heideggers despised? What would be a simple index on such a map?

When Heidegger says hegen it is as if the forest has not only a steward, but a shepherd.  And the houses in the town, what he called "Wohnhäuser" - who was to be the steward of those absent names and each Mezuzuh "en-framed"?

Kristeva on Heidegger: colours

In his Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Heidegger invites the students in his Marburg lecture to consider what it is to think on the wall.  He cannot tell them how, when she first entered his office, that he asked her to removed her hat, her raincoat - or did not.  Husserl insists that when the thing is present, the backside is present in consciousness in the horizon, a phenomenon well-known in the worldwide demand for denim.

Colour.  Denim was originally colored using Newton's absent shade (just as the sun and the moon with the known planets numbered seven, so must his colours of the prism) - indigo - and not Genoa blue.

Kristeva draws our attention to the turn from green to brown in his thought of his saucy wood nymph.  Here is a possible clue: Trakl "Die Raben".

In Die Raben we find the Schatten, the doe, the braune Stille and the furrowed acre.

Über den schwarzen Winkel hasten
Am Mittag die Raben mit hartem Schrei
Ihr Schatten streift an die Hirschkuh vorbei
Und manchal mal sieht man sie mürrisch rasten.

O wie sie die braune Stille stören,
In der ein Acker sich verzückt,
Wie ein Weib, das schwer Ahnung berückt,
Und manchmal kann man sie keifen hören.

Und ein Aas, die sie irgenwo wittern,
Und plötzlich richten nach Nord sie den Flug
Und schwinden wie ein Leichenzug
in Luften, die von Wollust zittern.

Or not.  But what awaits the doe (hind), if not the buck (stag, Hirsch) in rut (Brunst, Hirschbrunst)?