I enjoy facilitating the opening to what we are. I participate in multiple modalities.
I once wrote a master’s thesis in philosophy at Freie Universität, Berlin.¹ It was about ‘das Ereignis’ in Heidegger’s late work: about experience, historical contingency, and groundlessness. This was made possible by the DAAD’s generosity.
Regarding philosophy. Having grown up in a household without books, I began seriously reading and thinking when I discovered as a teenager that the questions I’d always asked weren’t mere pathological aberrations, but have a long history. My first philosophical teachers were Bertrand Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche, a seemingly odd, but historically meaningful combination. From 2007 to 2009 I was momentously digging in the cul-de-sac that is Analytic Philosophy, before I recognized what it was. This period was formally concluded with a Bachelors degree from the University of California, Berkeley. There I had the good fortune of encountering Hubert Dreyfus who used to mutter under his breath in Heidegger seminars.
At the moment, I’m engrossed in the body, that is, the body-mind, which is Western intellectualism’s blind spot. I practice ‘yoga’ and experiment (experience, learn) in other body-mind traditions. I’m keen on new techniques and research in body-centered psychotherapy, especially relating to trauma. This has world-changing potential. Also, the contemporary dance scene has become an invigorating playground for me, with its lackadaisical influx of syncretic embodiment practices.
What I’m now doing involves everything I’ve ever done.²
Otherwise, I love encountering you.
adam@adam-b.com
I tend not to judge the impulse to get in touch.³
May we rest in complicity or learn what we know.
1:
The desire to be recognized by others is inseparable from being human. […] This is not merely a question of satisfaction or self-love; rather, it is only through recognition by others that man can constitute himself as a person. […]
At the moment when individuals are nailed down to a purely biological and asocial identity, they are also promised the ability to assume all the masks and all the second and third lives possible on the Internet […] The more the citizens of the metropolis have lost intimacy with one another, the more they have become incapable of looking each other in the eye, the more consoling the virtual intimacy with the apparatus becomes […] I am here if the Machine recognizes me or, at least, sees me; I am alive if the Machine, which knows neither sleep nor wakefulness, but is eternally alert, guarantees that I am alive; I am not forgotten if the Great Memory has recorded my numerical or digital data. […]
And behind the apparatus that seems to recognize me, are there not perhaps other men, who do not really want to recognize me but only to control and accuse me? And how is it possible to communicate with neither a smile nor a gesture, with neither graciousness nor reticence, but rather through a biological identity?
[…] we must be prepared, with neither regret nor hope, to search […] for that new figure of the human. Or, perhaps, what we must search for is simply the figure of the living being, that face beyond the mask just as much as it is beyond the biometric facies. We still do not manage to see this figure, but the presentiment of it suddenly startles us in our bewilderment as in our dreams, in our unconsciousness as in our lucidity.
– Giorgio Agamben, Identity without the Person, from Nudities (2010) (Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella)
2:
Das Seinsgeschick: ein Kind, das spielt.
– Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Wintersemester 1955/56)
3:
We perpetuate struggle when we operate from the mistaken fear that identification with the life force will dissolve our personality.
– John Pierrakos