What Is Missing? The Incompleteness and Failure of Heidegger's Being and Time

In this chapter, I consider several prevalent interpretations of the fragmentariness and “failure” of Being and Time, including three of Heidegger’s divergent and at times conflicting self-interpretations. I then turn to questions of hermeneutics that are provoked by this incompleteness and its reception in relation to Heidegger’s approach to hermeneutics as the art of interpretation. Heidegger’s practice and elucidation of destructuring, creative, and violent interpretations that intend to liberate the “unthought” in the text appear to clarify his own subsequent depictions of Being and Time. But there remains a discrepancy and distance between the contingent incompleteness of Being and Time owing to the circumstances of its publication and the role this incompleteness is later given as part of the history of being. I examine the “gap” between the thought and the contingent empirically existing “author.” Heidegger’s best interpretations of the significance of Being and Time in his philosophical journey entail a different understanding of the relationship between “life and work” than the one Heidegger himself maintained—one closer to the hermeneutical perspective and interpretive strategies, which embrace critical autobiographical and biographical reflection, encouraged by Dilthey and Misch.