A Pair of Peasant Shoes

A paragraph in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” which claims to discern the world of a peasant woman in a painting by Van Gogh has become notorious, especially following Derrida’s assessment of it as a “pathetic collapse” symptomatic of ideological-political investments. The article argues that the collapse occurs not in that famous paragraph but in the one that follows it. Close attention to this neglected paragraph reveals a collapse in two movements: first, in Heidegger’s appeal to an imagined peasant woman as an authority external to the picture; second, in his turn to what “we” call Verlässlichkeit (reliability), where “we” means not anyone but “we, the Germans.” This relocation of the collapse allows us to recover the famous paragraph itself, not as derisory ekphrasis but as lucidly apocalyptic: not a fantastical description but a clear-sighted revelation of the world that, in our time, is being lost

Appeal · Painting · Paragraph · Peasant · Revelation · Literature and Cultural Memory · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism