ABSTRACT
Heidegger’s technology notebooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s give us new insight into his thinking of technology by highlighting and emphasizing, like nowhere else in his oeuvre, the role of the machine therein. Across the notebooks, we find Heidegger struggling to articulate the exact relation between the machine and machination (in the 1930s and early 1940s), or the machine and positionality (late 1940s onward). The machine is ultimately something of a privileged example for helping us better understand this shift in Heidegger’s thinking as a whole across these volatile years. In this chapter, I trace this thinking of the machine as it emerges from Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche (§1) and leads Heidegger to situate the machine in the context of machination (§2). After the war, the shift in Heidegger’s views of technology lead to a recontextualizing of the machine in terms of positionality (§3). With this, we arrive at Heidegger’s mature thinking of technology and the role of the machine therein. I conclude with some thoughts on the human’s relation to technology and the machine’s place in enabling this (§4).
