Abstract

Heidegger qualifies his work with the surprising assertion “I have no philosophy at all.” In this paper, I argue that, to make sense of this odd claim, we must carefully investigate his reflections on philosophical showing. While Heidegger never finished the segment of Being and Time intended to address this issue explicitly, the clues he offers in the published portion of the text indicate that, for him, successful philosophical showing takes place not primarily through a coherent collection of philosophical assertions – that is, through “having a philosophy” – but rather through a certain well-placed interruption of these assertions: an interruption that, when employed in the right context and in the right manner, successfully points out certain particularly elusive phenomena. As I demonstrate, this mode of showing requires that we quite radically rethink what Heidegger is doing – and what we ourselves are doing – in philosophical inquiry.