For Whom the Bell Tolls? Notes for a Psychoanalytic Reading of Heidegger’s Being-towards-Death

Abstract

In this article the author analyses Heidegger’s account on “being-towardsdeath”as it is discussed in Being and Time. Beginning with comparison of the relationbetween reality and oblivion in Heidegger and Freud, the author investigates the way inwhich these conceptions demonstrate both “Ptolomaic” and “Copernican” moments. Inthe second part of the article, the focus is on Heidegger’s personalistic phenomenology ofDasein: the author argues that in order to comprehend the meaning of “being-towardsdeath”it must be taken together with analyes of “thown projection” and the sphere ofBefi ndlichekit. Th e author concludes that Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s existentialsolipsism is strongly founded and also that it does not oppose, in its most signifi cantaspects, a psyhoanalytic reading of Heidegger’s understanding of ownership and death.