I obtained Mitchell’s book today as a set of PDFs from the Project Muse version of the book via the UCBerkeley library.

His concluding chapter begins with a synopsis of his sense of each of the four Heideggerian / Hölderlinan symbols. I hoped to feel invited into beginning the book in order to properly give way to understanding Mitchell’s reading. Clearly, Mitchell’s sense of late-life Heidegger is different from mine, but that would pertain to any reading, I suppose. The issue is: Why one reading rather than another? Should I be drawn to his reading, if I’m deeply drawn to understanding Heidegger’s thinking? Perhaps. But I wasn’t drawn to Mitchell’s reading when I began his “Conclusion...” today.

I know that’s because I’m involved with something else, when his book happened to become available. Being busy with my own projects, I don’t anticipate that I’ll soon want to delve into his reading. But that would be changed by the interest of enough others that I feel that the venture would be good for me soon.

In any event, I felt today that working with his book would be working with his reading, just as his subtitle connotes. I would prefer to first share my reading of “The Thing,” before delving into his book. But before doing that, I’d want to share a reading of “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Then “we” would be well positioned to see how I misunderstand (or Appropriately understand?) late-life Heidegger’s thinking.

Doing that before reading Mitchell’s book (trust me on this) would be very instructive for me, perhaps interesting for you. Anyway, I felt that the book description which I dwelled with was true to his approach: He seeks to represent Heidegger’s late-life thinking, and that’s a useful thing to do: Mitchell’s representation of Heidegger’s late-life thinking. I would dwell with Heidegger’s texts via a very different kind of interest. Mitchell seems clearly focused in the opening discussion of his conclusion on (1) how things are the focus of relationality rather than relationality eliciting an advance of fourfolding itself (i.e., facilitating potentials for possibly originary thinking through Appropriative modeling, in terms of the Hölderlinan symbology); and (2) things for him (for his “Heidegger”) are indeed intrinsically commodified.

I look forward to being wrong about his reading. But I’ll wait to satisfy my desire to learn better what he’s doing, pending unanticipated advents.

In any event, I’m resolute that this note today is merely the first entry in a journey through his reading. I promise to not let this note be the end of the matter. This page will become a table of contents linking to a series of notes and to careful readings; and this note will move to a separate page, linked from here as preface to a companionate wayfaring.