ABSTRACT
A number of commentators note an impoverishment characteristic of Heidegger’s conception of “being-with,” his term for the existential structure that underpins the capacity for relationality. Authentic beingwith is largely restricted in Heidegger’s philosophy to a form of “solicitude” that mirrors and encourages the other, liberating the other for his or her “ownmost” authentic possibilities. Such an account of authentic relationality would not seem to include the treasuring of a particular other, as would be disclosed in the mood of love. Indeed, I cannot recall ever having encountered the word love in the text of Being and Time. Authentic selfhood for Heidegger is found in the nonrelationality of death, not in the love of another. As Lacoue-Labarthe (1990) puts it, “‘Being-with-one-another,’ as the very index of nitude, ultimately remains uninvestigated, except in partial relations which do not include the great and indeed overarching division of love and hatred” (p. 108). Within such a limited view of relationality, traumatic loss could only be a loss of the other’s mirror-function-that is, a narcissistic loss-not a loss of a deeply treasured other.
