Responding to Loss ─ Heideggerian Reflections on Literature, Architecture, and Film

Responding to Loss: Heideggerian Reflections on Literature, Architecture, and Film closely attends to a novel, a building, and a film that powerfully bring forth and call on us to respond to dimensions of loss: The Crossing by Cormack McCarthy, the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, and Wings of Desire directed by Wim Wenders. Explicating these difficult but rich works using the thinking of Martin Heidegger and related philosophers Jean-Luc Marion, Hannah Arendt, and Immanuel Levinas helps us to experience the multiple and diverse ways in which all of us are opened to the saturated phenomena of loss, violence, witnessing, and responsibility. This approach is timely because a good deal of recent theory supposedly illuminates the arts and culture or the great dilemmas of human existence, but too often over-generalizes, failing to treat the art works themselves. In fact, the way trauma-inducing phenomena befall us requires close and patient focus if we are to let them come, if we are to adequately receive them. The goal is to provide specific, detailed treatment of the material in order to clarify the intense force of the novel, the building, and the film in a way that does not reduce what they compellingly, even overwhelmingly, bring forth into our world but that instead enables us to more fully absorb the dense, dark and troubling subject matter. Thus, in the face of both what is irrevocably taken away and what continues to be given the task of interpretation is ours alone and unavoidable how could it be otherwise?

Robert Mugerauer is Professor and Dean Emeritus in the Departments of Architecture, Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington.