Machenschaft, lived Experiences and Temporality. History, Acceleration and Modernity in Heidegger (1936-1944)

Abstract

The violent events of recent years have shown, on a global scale, how alienating our present experience of time is. Current trends in critical theory and other historical-sociological approaches insist on the devouring pace of acceleration (P. Virilio; H. Rosa) and on the temporal reconfiguration based on “presentism” (Koselleck; F. Hartog). However, we know that these questions are far from being completely new, and that they already worried philosophers in the first half of the 20th century. The recent publication of the latest writings on the Ereignis and the Black Notebooks, written in the 1930s and 1940s, allows us to access an original reflection on what Heidegger names machination [Machenschaft]. In this paper, we would like to analyze the way in which, based on fabrication, we should consider the meaning of our intimate temporal experience in the face of the modern situation. More specifically, we will delve into the ways in which the primacy of manufacturing functions as a closure of possibilities, preventing something truly “historical” from happening.