File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0306, message 98


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:42:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: That Pete <that_pete-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: H in the media


For many writers, one aspect of being in Iraqi prisons or asylums was not
unlike an invitation to Yaddo in New York or other artists' colonies in the US
-- the sentences were solitary periods in which they only had time to think.
Khudair Meri, a satirist and playwright who describes himself as a disciple of
German existentialist Martin Heidegger, draws much of his work from his spell
in the Al-Rashad Mental Hospital from 1988 to 1991.

He was ordered to seek treatment for ''hysteria against the regime,'' he says,
because of essays such as ''The Livelihood of War,'' which made the Swiftian
proposal calling for more war widows and orphans to balance the population of
soldiers fighting in the Iran-Iraq war.

''A Ba'athist official accused me of being an enemy of the regime,'' Meri
recalls, sipping a sugary tea in the threadbare offices of his new independent
newspaper.

''The official asked, `What is your political party?' I said I was a member of
a party called the Science of Existence. The Ba'athist wrote this on his paper,
and noted, `This party should be investigated.' He asked me, `Who is the party
leader?' I said the chairman was Martin Heidegger. And the official wrote, `We
should find this Heidegger.' ''

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/173/living/What_will_we_say_now_+.shtml


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005