In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

462 FRAMES
literature of 1926 (from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, via Schickele's
Maria Capponi and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, to Montherlant's
Les Bestiaires), new leisure activities and new interests in the
exotic [see Bars, Gramophones, Mummies], and myriad innovativeand
dangerous-athletic pursuits and spectacles. [see Boxing, Bullfighting,
Endurance, Hunger Artists, Mountaineering, Six-Day Races] All of
these phenomena constitute a complex reaction to the vanishing of a
sphere of transcendence that had generally been accepted as "real" [see
Cremation, Transcendence = Immanence (Death)]-and Sein und Zeit
participates in this reaction. Eliminating the question (not the possibility)
of a "life after death," 88 and expecting that his readers will still see death
as opposed to life (or, at least, that they will maintain the idea of death's
being a transition to a different form of existence), Heidegger himself
makes every effort to define death as part of being-in-the-world: "Dasein
does not, proximally and for the most part, have any explicit or even
theoretical knowledge of the fact that it has been delivered over to its
death, and that death thus belongs to Being-in-the-world. Thrownness
into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive
manner in the state-of-mind which we have called 'anxiety."'89 At the
same time, death is seen as based on "mineness"90-that is, as an exclusively
and purely individual dimension of experience. Heidegger explains
this mineness, as well as the proposed association between death and
resoluteness, through the fact that death confronts individual Dasein
with nullity, with the possibility of its own impossibility.91 It is the
confrontation with its own impossibility which, according to Heidegger,
may persuade Dasein to opt for resoluteness-that is, for the possibility
of its authentic Being.
Emerging in the Present
While the conceptualization of anxiety occurs in a chapter entitled "Temporality
and Everydayness," the second part of Sein und Zeit culminates
in the unfolding of a new philosophical concept for the relation between
temporality and "historicality" (Geschichtlichkeit). Heidegger's double
approach to the phenomenon of time thus reflects both the genesis of his
book and, more important, the two different perspectives from which
the phenomenon of time had become problematic for his contemporar-