In sections 74 and 75 we read of “total mobilization” as the setting in motion and undermining of all previous contents of still-enduring formations, the priority of procedures and contrivances, and the pressing of the masses into service. This is the outcome of modern science as a derived instituting of knowledge that places what is...

Section 73 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) links “science” and the “abandonment by being.” Science has become the “conceptually pre-formed consequence of the interpretation of the beingness of beings under the guideline of thinking.” In short, a “concoction of ‘world-views’ composed of indiscriminately adopted forms of thought.” Heidegger says we must meditate on...

In section 72, we get an expansion of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism from being without a goal (telos) to being the essential occurrence of the abandonment by being, aka machination, lived experience, and liberalism. Two “oppositional forms of nihilism” are discussed – Christianity and Bolshevism – whose “denial of a lack of goals” gives birth...

In the middle of section 69 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), we read more of the gigantic and how it is the incalculable in the form of the plight of the lack of a sense of a plight due to the distorted essence its “world as picture” and quantitative sense of time and...

We start section 69, entitled the Gigantic, and read about its being “quantity as quality” due to representation’s systematic spacialization and its hatred for limitations. This being-historical state in which “everything is humanly possible” manifests in liberalism’s fixation on what things represent and the anxiety that a limitless representational possibility can foster. Comparison is made...

In section 68 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we read about machination and lived experience reciprocally drive each other to the extreme (thereby extending the deformations of beingness), how the discovery of “nature” was prepared for by the supernatural, and how the attitude of imitating and continuing the same “believes itself to be...

Our glimpses into the distorted essence of beyng via machination and lived experience continue in sections 64-67. We read how “farthest from them is the power of preservation, whose place is taken by exaggeration, out-yelling, and mere blind screaming, in the wail of which one crows over oneself and deludes oneself in order to escape...

In sections 62-63 we read about machination concealing itself through the prescriptive force of “lived experience” as actuality, objectivity, and correctness. This uncovers how the addiction to lived experience supports and is supported by such standard liberal dogmas as relatability, community, and affirmation. We conclude by discussing the implications of Harvard’s rejection of Trump’s “activist...

We start at section 60 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and read how self-certainty, calculability, unquestionability, machination, and knowing “who we are and what we are supposed to do” contribute to the lack of a sense of plight and the loss of the knowledge that “genuine selfhood occurs in a grounding beyond oneself.”...

In section 59, we read of the denuding of every disposition until all is common and average, of the era of complete unquestionableness, of the new bewitchery as the dominance of machination, and of humans falling prey to the hunt for lived experience. From this vantage we look at several aspects of liberalism: the bias...