Wandering to Dwell: Heidegger and the Phenomenology

of Dwelling in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Satarupa Sinha Roy

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 2017,

pp. 29-49 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2017.0003

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/651411

No institutional affiliation (14 Jun 2018 07:21 GMT)

 Sinha Roy 29

wandering to dwell:

f heidegger and the

phenomenology of

dwelling in sebald's

the rings of saturn

Satarupa Sinha Roy

Men alone, as mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as

world.
—Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

Full of merit, yet poetically, man / Dwells on this earth. —

Friedrich Hölderlin, "[In lovely blueness . . .]" 1

In Heidegger's writing dwelling—or the ways in which we live in

the world—is suggestive of a unifying phenomenon pointing toward a
place where things gather into what I will call an abiding whole-ness. 2
Abiding wholeness should not be taken to be the equivalent of
sedentariness. It does not connote stasis. In other words, dwelling is
the opposite of not being at home in the world and is neither akin to
the mere occupation of space nor the forceful appropriation of it.
Dwelling, as Heidegger suggests, may be actualized through a certain
familiarity and intimacy with the space one inhabits and that which
derives from a principle of natural openness. 3

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 63, number 1, Spring 2017. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
30 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, preoccupied as it is with the
themes of devastation and loss, seems at first to suggest the
impossibility of dwelling per se in the contemporary world and of the
human ability to call forth a sense of belongingness in the midst of a
landscape dominated by severance and destruction. Sebald's
narrative, aptly subtitled "eine englische Wallfahrt" ("an English
Pilgrimage"), is—at least, ostensibly—an account of his journey on foot
through the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in East Anglia. Its rambling
facade, connecting (apparently) disjointed topics, reaches far beyond
the physical geography it covers to a profound acknowl-edgment of
man's ineluctable tendency toward destruction. Yet Rings is not about
destruction or even the unspeakable horrors of history; it is, on the
contrary, about the emancipatory possibilities of wander-ing, by which
man may come to dwell in the world or, as Heidegger describes it,
"attain to the world as world" (Poetry 180). The super-ficial dystopia of
the narrative stands substantially vindicated by the possibility of
reaching (through walking or wandering) beyond the restrictive
spatiality of containment to that of freedom (of the spirit) and
involvement. Walking in Rings is a discursive way of speaking about
people, events, and things—an opening up to the world, as it were,
something Heidegger might have called "deconcealing" (38). Sebald's
prose, like his labyrinthine paths, moves toward a certain openness
where things "emerge" or "arise" in their own ways (59). His
wanderings through the English countryside, in this sense, may as well
be taken to resemble an act of incessant border crossings between
different temporal, spatial, and cultural formations. But such journeys,
as this essay underscores, are not random, aimless actions but are
rooted securely in the wanderer's (here, the anonymous nar-rator's)
desire to arrive at dwelling in the world.
In the opening chapter of Rings, Sebald recounts his experience
of place—that of a room in a Norwich hospital where he was admit-ted
exactly a year after completing his Suffolk walk—which usefully
doubles as a model for understanding the essence of human existence.
The tortured identification with Gregor Samsa—the protagonist of
Kafka's novella Metamorphosis—is cleverly manipulated into an ac-
knowledgment of the general human predicament in a world rendered
alien by war, reckless commercial exploitation, and the impetuous
destruction of nature. Just as Gregor's transformation into a mon-
strous bug confirms his alienation from his immediate environment,
Sebald's unexplained illness heightens his (and by extension, the
reader's) consciousness of man's alienation from nature. Needless to
say, it is impossible to dwell in such a place—not merely because it is
evocative of the unheimlich, or the uncanny, but because it lacks the
very conditions that make dwelling possible in the first place.
 Sinha Roy 31
Broadly speaking, the aim of this essay is to show how the every-day
practices of dwelling have come to inhere in the act of wandering, so much
so that movement (both literal as well as figurative)—not fixation or
localization—has, to a formidable extent, come to underlie Being. 4 In order
to identify and fully grasp the interconnections be-tween wandering and
the Heideggerian notion of dwelling as implicit in Rings, it is useful to
recapitulate Heidegger's characterization of the term Dasein. Literally
translated as "there-being," Dasein or Da-sein stands for the distinctive
human essence predicated by man's consciousness of his own being or
presence in the world of things (Wheeler). 5 Put simply, Da-sein, as
Heidegger saw it, can be under-stood as being-in-the-world in the same
sense that dwelling is—the emphasis being not overly on the spatiality of
dwelling but rather on a sense of belongingness through which Da-sein
comes to be in the world. Thus, Heidegger was more concerned with the
meaning of being (der Sinn von Sein)—the understanding of which we are
always already in possession of yet are bafflingly inarticulate about. 6

On a similar plane, Sebald's narrative is not just about aimless

wanderings in the English countryside betraying an ontological rest-
lessness symptomatic of the dispossessed or the unhoused but is also
(albeit, more tangentially) a riposte to the conspiracy of silence over
the atrocities of the Third Reich and the subsequent destruction of
Germany by the Allies during World War II. In Luftkrieg und Literatur
(On the Natural History of Destruction), Sebald draws our attention to
the "half-consciousness or false consciousness" characterizing the
works of authors and historians in postwar Germany that did not al-
low the devastating experience of the air raids over German cities to
take root in the collective memory of the German people (ix). Quoting
novelist Alfred Döblin's description of a city reduced to rubble by the
air raid, Sebald emphasizes how even the relative optimism induced by
the postwar reconstruction of the war-ravaged nation resulted in the
denial of dwelling itself: "People walked 'down the street and past the
dreadful ruins . . . as if nothing had happened, and . . . the town had
always looked like that'" (5). Ruins shelter no one; nobody dwells in
the empty shell of the blighted city. It is the site of absent longing. In
Rings, the testimony of William Hazel—the gardener of an English
manor house—similarly attests to the voluntary obliteration of the past
and the memories associated with it. Curious to learn more about the
Germans' experience of the carpet bombings, Hazel made inquiries in
Lüneburg and was surprised to find that "[n]o one at the time seemed
to have written about their experiences or afterwards recorded their
memories" (39). For Sebald, such forceful concealment of the horrors
of history makes dwelling uncertain and is, in effect, a negation of it.
32 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
In his essay "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger etymologi-
cally traced dwelling to its Gothic root wunian, which means "to be at
peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. . . . To dwell, to be
set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve,
the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The
fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserv-ing"
(Poetry 147).7 The denial of the historicity of things, events, and
(human) experience is therefore a denial of dwelling itself since by
abnegating the past one not only fails to conserve "each thing in its
nature" but also to preserve it from impairment. In Rings, Sebald
seems to have set himself the task of reconstructing the past through
wandering, but not only that; part of his endeavor (and a substantial
part, for that matter) is also focused on a far more complex inquest: if
dwelling is the manner in which man comes to be in the world, how
does dwelling unfold as a mode of being against a history of violence,
oppression, and destruction? Alternatively, Sebald's concern hinges
not so much on a realistic representation of the past as on how one
may be able to know the past as it really is. This is especially signifi-
cant since the human past, according to him, is a prior moment in a
continuous flow of events that, when viewed as a continuum (as
opposed to intermittence), comprise the story of humanity.
In Rings, however, Sebald's analysis of the nature of human
existence in space and time is implicit in the sense that even though
he does seem to cast in a postimperial and postmodern frame the
question of being and dwelling in a globalized or postglobalized world,
he seems to do so circuitously by drawing parallels from nature and
natural history. For instance, in the third chapter of Rings, the nar-
rator—while passing through an anglers' colony south of Lowestoft—
drifts off in contemplation of the nature of existence and dwelling,
moving subsequently onto a reflective discourse on the North Sea
herring. As much as the narrator's description of the everyday life of
the fishermen accords a certain ontological distinctiveness to lives
lived in the periphery ("They just want to be in a place where they
have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness"
[52]), the reflection on the herring seems to be poised delicately
between an essentially Foucauldian biopolitics and the (somewhat
equivocal) ethics of representation. The power of man over nature—
visually invoked by the photograph showing a group of fishermen
proudly exhibiting a mammoth catch—is certainly not all that there is
to the narrator's allusion to the perilously overfished herring. Al-
though man's subjugation of nature, powered by purely utilitarian
goals, comes across, in a way, as a familiar figuration through the
narrative, it also points toward an apocalyptic erosion of the natural
equilibrium—doubly dangerous because it not only heralds disorder
 Sinha Roy 33
but also deformity. While for the latter, the herring's "bizarre
muta-tion" (53) stands by as a pertinent analogue, the
disintegration of the natural equilibrium is generally implicit in the
violent histories of colonial exploitation, political oppression, and
war. Moreover, the reflection on the herring—specifically, the
pictorial representation of the dead fish—assumes a far more
complex character when viewed in relation to the imminent
photograph of the (Jewish) corpses at Bergen-Belsen. 8
While the dead herring both anticipate and visually evoke the
calamity of the Holocaust, their juxtaposition with the perished Jews—
as noted by Jonathan Long—raises issues pertaining to the ethics of
representation. Long argues that "the text itself offers no criteria
according to which either of these events—the killing of the herring for
food and the murder of the Jews—can be privileged over the other"
(144). This kind of pairing—as Anne Fuchs has similarly noted—
conjures and indirectly critiques an essentially Cartesian ap-proach to
nature and the physical world per se. 9 While this Cartesian reduction of
nonhuman life-forms to purely mechanistic systems signals the
insidious workings of a utilitarian biopolitics, its devalu-ation of human
life implicit in the callous objectification of the dead Jews in Bergen-
Belsen can—just as amenably—be viewed as man's increasing
alienation from nature. According to Fuchs, "Sebald's daring
juxtaposition of the story of the herring and the corpses of Buchenwald
underlines the common denominator of both stories of destruction: a
cold and objectified biopolitics which disregards the value of life by
means of a reductive interpretation of nature" (173). Sebald's
reflection on the herring thereby legitimately evokes the unheimlich—a
world rendered strange and unfamiliar insomuch as dwelling fails to
occur in it. It is important to note here that both the North Sea herring
and the Jews who perished in Nazi concentration camps across Europe
anticipate a global unworld overseen by the rapid proliferation of
science and technology and—along with it—a severely altered,
distorted and fragmented relationship between man and his immediate
environment.10 Sebald's landscapes are, concomi-tantly, much less
faithful renditions of the external world than care-fully formulated
spatial constellations pointing toward the ontological anxiety that
signals the absence of dwelling. Their relationship with the global
unworld is, by and large, metonymic, which is also to say that the
representativeness of landscape in Rings is a key issue for the
phenomenological understanding of space and, consequently, of the
dwelling that occurs in it.
Space, as far as the current analysis on Sebald's representation
of it in Rings is concerned, is differentiated into place—the setting forth
into the ontological determination of the world.11 This facet of
34 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
Sebald's writing, occasioned by his preoccupation with the idea of
place (along with its problematic) as the potential structural enabler of
human dwelling, shares a keen affinity with Heidegger's notions of
place and situatedness. Both Heidegger and Sebald ask the same
question, though Heidegger's inquiry is more straightforward: what is
dwelling (in the world)? Sebald's approach, on the other hand, more
indirectly focuses—more or less exclusively—on the challenges of
dwelling in a world beset by the destructive forces of biopolitics,
cataclysmic conflicts, exile, and panoptic surveillance: what, in the
global unworld, might approximate dwelling? Yet one is likely to de-
tect echoes of the late writings of Heidegger in Sebald's reflection on
being and dwelling—especially in the latter's perennial quest for the
place of being or what might simply be called home. The dystopia
conjured by Rings conveys the innate homelessness of man, which, in
turn, throws into sharp relief the essential equivocity of dwelling in the
global unworld. This aspect of Sebald's writing has a clear precedent in
Heideggerian thought. As Heidegger writes, "It requires reflection,
whether and how (ob und wie) there can still be homeland in the age
of the technological equi-formed world-civilization" (qtd. in Young
188).12 In Rings, one finds Sebald circuitously asking the same
question: can contemporary man be at home in the world?
From the very beginning of his narrative, Sebald thoughtfully
differentiates between place that is merely occupied and place where
one feels at home—that is, the place where dwelling occurs. While the
former can effectively be compared to an empty or impoverished shell
that fails to supply the ontological security necessary for the
vindication of a ubiquitous feeling of homelessness or a sense of not-
belonging, the latter may be described as a site to which one's
rootedness can be naturally traced. The global unworld, as Sebald
envisions it in Rings, is a plainly dystopic realm inasmuch as it resists
the idea of dwelling by encouraging the insidious machinations of
modern technocratic civilization to perpetuate man's oblivion of his
Being.13 For instance, it is by manipulating the constructedness of
one's subjective world or one's embeddedness in place that dominant
political groups often assert their supremacy, wherein the assertion of
power almost certainly involves the marginalization of the pow-erless
not just by driving them out of their Heimat (homeland) but by
robbing them of their ontological security.14 Sebald refers to the
unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Croatian Ustasha during the
Kozara offensive of 1942 in order to underscore the fact that the
oppressor's violence was all the more grievous for the fact that it
completely expunged the possibility of experiencing dwelling:
 Sinha Roy 35
Of the children who were left behind, twenty-three thousand
in number, the militia murdered half on the spot, while the
rest were herded together at various assembly points to be
sent on to Croatia; of these, not a few died of typhoid fever,
exhaustion and fear, even before the cattle wagons reached
the Croatian capital. Many of those who were still alive were
so hungry that they had eaten the cardboard identity tags
they wore about their necks and thus in their extreme
desperation had eradicated their own names. . . .
Like everyone else they learnt the socialist ABC at schools,
chose an occupation, and became railway workers, sales-
girls, tool-fitters or book-keepers. But no one knows what
shadowy memories haunt them to this day. (Rings 98)

The above passage is an obvious precursor to the story of Aus-

terlitz—the eponymous protagonist of Sebald's 2001 prose work. The
expunction of authentic memory—in Austerlitz's case, through the
deliberate erasure of archival information concerning his real iden-tity
(by his foster father Emyr Elias)—as the alternate fate of those who
escaped the Shoah forms one of the major preoccupations of Sebald's
prose work and, to a great extent, that of European and North
American literature following World War II. 15 This is also what Sebald's
readers are primarily confronted with—a crisis of moder-nity, whose
lexicon can finally be accessed through an initial loss of language and
its surprising retrieval in another tongue (as Austerlitz does) in the
domain of the putative Other. The loss of language in Austerlitz
(symbolically presented in Austerlitz's sudden aphasia) is consequently
symptomatic of its protagonist's alienation from both space and time—
the ultimate convolution of his notions of history and of place (or its
absence) therein. If language is perceived as the structural enabler of
one's subjectivity and the primary presupposi-tion behind the
constructedness of one's identity, then Austerlitz's sudden and
unexpected debility represents a denial of dwelling itself since this loss
of language is a belated enactment of a cataclysmic loss of both home
and being. For one to feel at home a certain spatial orientation is
imperative, which is also to say that dwelling or being-in-the-world
cannot be accomplished without a concurrent notion of an originary
orientating place—one that can be variously described as Heimat,
homeland, or home. While the disquieting lives of the displaced
Bosnian children (as alluded to in Rings) anticipate the personal
narrative of Austerlitz, they also seem to call our attention to the
traumatic experiences of marginality and estrangement. The erasure
of subjectivity—as these untold narratives of marginalized individuals
seem to suggest—generates a disequilibrium leading to
36 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
the complete annulment of dwelling, a condition that, in
accordance with Heidegger's philosophy, can be legitimately
articulated as the shattering of the "fourfold" or the confluence of
the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals (Poetry 148).16
Although the spatial orientation of beings to a certain vital place
presupposes the existence of an originary or umbilical site, this meta-
phorical umbilicus is by no means suggestive of land alone. Instead, as
Young persuasively argues in his enunciation of Heidegger's notion of
dwelling, "Place, dwelling place, is not land nor people, not space nor
time, not past nor present nor future. It is, rather, all of these
together" (202–03; emphasis added). To Young's discerning list one
may add the lived experiences of the body. 17 We live in a "somatic
society," writes Bryan S. Turner, which can be defined as "a social
system in which the body, as simultaneously constraint and resistance,
is the principal field of political and cultural activity" (12). Concomi-
tantly, in such a society, the primary political or personal problems are
not only problematized within the body but are also expressed through
it. In Rings, Sebald's treatment of Roger Casement routes the question
of dwelling through the lived experiences of the body. Casement,
Anglo-Irish by descent and a British consul, was instru-mental in
exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Putumayo rubber
plantation in Peru. He was knighted by King George V in 1911 and
later tried and executed for his treasonous involvement in the Irish
nationalist uprising. Although widely lauded for his patriotism,
Casement was censured and indicted for his homosexuality, which, in
the words of Sebald's narrator, "sensitized him to the continuing
oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the
borders of social class and race, of those who were the furthest from
the centres of power" (Rings 134). Interestingly, Sebald links Case-
ment's homosexuality to his heightened sensitivity toward oppression
and state-mediated aggression (colonialism and its affects), ironi-cally
tracing his persecution to his own admission and—following the
divulgence of the contents of his diaries—to the state's knowledge of
his purportedly deviant sexual behavior.
Casement's account provides valuable insights into Sebald's own
thoughts on dwelling, as Sebald makes a direct connection between
Casement's sexual orientation and the essence of his being. The so-
called Black Diaries—the circulation of which eventually sealed
Casement's fate as they contained scandalously vivid confessional
descriptions of his myriad homosexual encounters —bring to the fore the
complexity of male homosocial desire and its troubled relationship with
the conventional institutions of gendered dwelling. As Sebald shows
through Casement's example, the orthodox matrix of gendered spaces
underpinned by the traditional opposition between homo- and
 Sinha Roy 37
heterosexuality are coded to reject any possibility of atypical dwell-ing
that may inhere within its panoptic and largely sterile domain. 18 What
specifically emerges from Sebald's thematization of Casement's
account is the fact that part of the epistemic mastery of traditional
institutions of power over individual subjects derives from those
institutions' functional authority to normalize. In this par-ticular
instance, the denial of being to the homosexual body may be
perceived as the normalizing discourse of the state and its manifest
propensity to immediately other—even criminalize—every emerging
difference. Throughout Sebald's writing, the subject of difference is
made to convey the echo of violence, however faint, yet its effects are
curiously palpable even in the liminal zones of memory. Be it
Casement, the novelist Joseph Conrad, the fictional Austerlitz, or
Ambros Adelwarth of Sebald's The Emigrants, the issue of differ-ence
—sexual, political, or racial—as the fundamental principle of identity
has memorably problematized the question of being. After all, as
Sebald makes clear in Rings and elsewhere, and as Heidegger's
thought on the "Being of beings" presages (Poetry 23), the problem of
dwelling is never too far apart from that of identity and existence. This
is especially significant for the purpose of our current inquiry since, in
actuality, dwelling can never free its essence from the truth of (the
being's) difference (from other beings) nor can it meaning-fully occur
in denial of such difference (if there is any). Thus, it is necessary to
consider dwelling (the Being of beings, per se) and dif-ference
together, which is also to acknowledge simultaneously the
transformative effects that the principle of identity (often powered by
a sense of difference or nonbelonging) may have on the everyday ex-
perience of dwelling. Concomitantly, as this relation between identity
and dwelling reiterates, the criminalization of one's core identity is
naturally and obviously tantamount to the expropriation of dwelling.
Through his thematization of marginal lives, Sebald attempts to draw
our attention to this characteristic fragility of human civilization that
consists in the ultimate vulnerability of man to regimes of despotic
power and control.
To consider the issue of dwelling from a different perspective,
one may begin by asking the question, "What is not dwelling?" While
Sebald does not address this matter with any definitive directness (at
least in Rings), Heidegger—in his 1951 lecture "Building Dwell-ing
Thinking"—is quick to dismiss the superficial causality between the
shortage of residential buildings (particularly in cities, following World
War II) and the "real plight of dwelling" as illusive (Poetry 159).
Furthermore, by making clear that "not every building is a dwelling" at
the beginning of the lecture, he seems to challenge the ideas that
building presupposes dwelling and that dwelling automatically occurs
38 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
in all built structures (Poetry 143).19 Even though Sebald does not
seem to concern himself expressly with the Heideggerian notion of
building as far as Rings is concerned, he does seem to explore the
nature of dwelling by an incisive exploration of its absence and the
conditions contributing to that end. 20 For dwelling—as he affirms
through his representation of the ruinous landscapes of Somerleyton,
Lowestoft, Dunwich, and Orfordness—does not imply shelter alone or
even buildings that merely provide shelter but is suggestive of a
specific place where man, by being able to transcend the practical
purposes of everyday living (shelter being just one of those), ori-
entates naturally with his immediate environment. By this account, it
is not difficult to read into the dystopic field of modernity, which
contains the seeds of its own destruction, the melancholy absence of
dwelling. Of the ruinous expanse between Woodbridge and the sea—
now dotted with abandoned military installations—Sebald writes, "Time
and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes barracks,
gateways and fenced-off areas where, behind thin planta-tions of
Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hangars and
grass-covered bunkers, the weapons with which, if an emergency
should arise, whole countries and continents can be transformed into
smoking heaps of stone and ash in no time" (227–28).
Similarly, as Sebald shows, the unheimlich (uncanny, or un-homely) stretch of Orfordness—resembling a Far-
East penal colony— quickens the experience of place not as a location gathering the landscape around it into a simple
oneness (what may be referred to as an instance of abiding wholeness, or what Heidegger would have called the unity of
the fourfold) but as the terrible premonition of death and decay. As an erstwhile research facility of dubious import,
together with its implication in a scopic regime of power and surveil-lance, Orfordness—the ruins of which come across
not as sublime but as the quintessentially unheimlich—evokes the "technical-scientific objectivation" of man and nature
alongside man in nature (Poetry 46).21 It is therefore that, to Sebald's narrator, the abandoned build-ings of Orfordness
—some of which resembled temples or pagodas—on closer inspection appeared to be nothing other than the melancholy
remains of an extinct civilization, one whose place on earth has been irrevocably lost.22 Such a place—as Heidegger
would have conceivably averred—is destitute because it epitomizes the hubris of a political regime that, in its penchant
for complete mastery over man and na-ture, proved destructive for both. This, certainly, is also the malady of the global
and postglobal world where the tyranny of unbridled consumerism coupled with the unmitigated desire for control has

led to the reification of man together with his experience of the world and his situatedness in it. 23
 Sinha Roy 39
Furthermore, the association of the unheimlich with Orfordness is
explicitly established through the unlikely comparison of its coni-cal
buildings with prehistoric tombs of the mighty and the powerful. The
anonymous "boffins" who inhabited such tomblike buildings, silently
working to produce weapons for the state, were after all mere
automatons (Rings 236). Just like the faceless women mechani-cally
gutting and sorting dead herrings in a film from the narrator's
childhood,24 the boffins—in their palpable vulnerability to control and
manipulation—stand in sharp contrast to those "buried in prehistoric
times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold." 25 It is instruc-
tive to note in this awkward juxtaposition of images the differential
representativeness of death within the metastructure of human ex-
perience, for to a later generation, the site of Orfordness—together
with its dilapidated contraptions and forgotten workforce—would likely
be severed from any signification, haplessly committed to the
perpetual ignominy of oblivion. Unsurprisingly, then, this is the real
plight of dwelling—that man must, as Heidegger suggests, forever
seek to understand the nature of dwelling; that in doing so he must
forever learn to resist all external impositions on the human will to
forget the essential nature of his being.26
Sebald's enunciation of dwelling (and its absence) in Rings is
thus developed around a few pivotal questions: Can the contemporary
man be at home in the world? If so, then how? Is dwelling opposed to
wandering in the same sense as, say, heimlich (the homely or familiar)
is to unheimlich? What contributes to the failure of dwelling in the
global or postglobal age? Contemporary man's loss of place (and
consequently, his failure to dwell or to be in the world) is intri-cately
tied to a number of identifiable factors. Besides a pervading sense of
homelessness that defines the general human condition in a
trenchantly globalized world, the often implicit violence unleashed by
contemporary technology—as Sebald's narrator in Rings points out in
the course of his wandering and narration—comprises the most
substantial threat to human existence.27 By dissolving man's ignorance
into the magical crucible of metaphysics, technology pro-duces an
infinite surface of knowledge without depth, doing so at the cost of
authentic knowledge (that is, the ontological truth) about the nature of
man's being. In this sense, modern technology—rather than "clearing"
(Poetry 51) or "opening up" (44) the world28—causes it to retreat into
the reductive two-dimensionality of a "productionist metaphysics"
(Zimmerman 124).29 In Heidegger's oeuvre, the term "metaphysics"
generally bears a negative connotation as it suggests deep-seated
assumptions within the metastructure of the Western episteme
pertaining to the true nature of things. This position is reiter-ated by
Young, who claims, "Metaphysics precludes dwelling because
40 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
it is, as it were, two-dimensional; it precludes 'depth'" (195). The
tyranny of metaphysics and scientific rationality is implicit in Sebald's
accounts of the herring and the silkworm moth, Bombyx mori;30 the
tacit references to the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide; the dis-
section of Aris Kindt; the Mauritshuis in The Hague; and, of course,
Orfordness. All of these—in one way or another—foreground a de-
structive obsession with exteriorizing, rejecting the "abyss" (Abgrund)
for the impoverished infinity of the surface (Poetry 90).31 None of
these subsume the fundamental principle of dwelling.
The nature of homelessness as it emerges in Rings brings us
back to the initial question: whether or not man can dwell meaning-
fully in the world. But before engaging with Sebald's representation of
homelessness as the antithesis of dwelling, one may as well ponder
briefly the nature of wandering that—counterintuitively and, at least in
Rings—is much less an affirmation of (man's) homelessness than the
expression of a certain turning in toward the intelligibility of be-ing.
So, what does such turning in likely entail? In what ways does
wandering contribute to the constructedness of being and its place in
the world and how does it lead to dwelling? Interestingly, Sebald's
appraisal of being-in-the-world and wandering is routed through a
complex web of associations (quite random at first appearance but
subsequently much less so) linking the narrator; the writer Michael
Hamburger, whom the narrator visits at the latter's home in Suf-folk;
and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Interspersed in the text are
references to Hölderlin's verse and Hamburger's translation of it. For
instance, the narrator's arrival in Hamburger's village is preceded by
the following reflection evocative of Hölderlin's "Bread and Wine":
"Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the
mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on" (173–74).32 The
drift of Sebald's thinking, his poetic wanderings across oneiric
landscapes and rambling digressions, dissolve the reigning incongruity
between disparate times and places bringing together people and
events into the unity of their common ground. His reference to
Hölderlin's po-etry is not accidental; in fact, Hölderlin's verse—as
Heidegger also pointed out—encases important clues as to the nature
of dwelling in the world, or "poetic dwelling" (Poetry 215). For
Heidegger, "The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling"
(Poetry 226), and as Sebald so emphatically demonstrates in Rings—
through the paral-lel worlds of Janine Dakyns and Michael Hamburger,
for instance— "poetic dwelling" describes the dwelling of those who are
at home in the world. While it may not point toward any specific
location per se where man achieves dwelling in the world, nor any
specific praxis that enables him to master his own presence and being-
in-the-world, the provenance of poetic dwelling (as far as Rings is
concerned) can
 Sinha Roy 41
be traced to the sphere where the "Being of being" is preserved in its
true nature. In Rings, the provenance of dwelling can be traced to the
primordial desire of man to wander—to discover anew a common
ground for existence in nature. A globalized world—as Sebald affirms
(and as Heidegger prognosticated)—is a curious contradiction: one
that banishes distance yet does not essentially heighten intimacy; 33
one that stimulates (even obligates) movement yet does not reinforce
freedom; and one that focuses on indiscriminate disclosure yet fails to
acknowledge, in the process, the natural immeasurability of depth.
Sebald's thesis, though not overtly philosophical, hinges on the
problematic of being and dwelling. The act of wandering, one must
note, is central to his thesis (and hence, to his discursive enuncia-tion
of being-in-the-world) insomuch as he proceeds to link it to the
restoration of the dematerialized body of modernity. 34 In this sense,
wandering can be interpreted as a means (not the only one, however)
whereby dwelling may be accomplished, a measure by which the
unheimlich of homelessness is resolved into the heimlich of dwelling in
the world. Although the issue of homelessness as such receives more
unambiguous treatment elsewhere in Sebald's work (for ex-ample, in
The Emigrants and Austerlitz), in Rings it belongs to a far more liminal
territory, never quite surfacing as a direct concern. Yet, homelessness
pervades the narrative inasmuch as it signifies a state of nondwelling
impelled not essentially by the experience of migration or exile.
Concomitantly, the stories of individual lives that make up the
narrative of Rings—unlike those of The Emigrants, for instance—are
not about homelessness; instead, they only tacitly address it as a
ubiquitous human condition characteristic of the contemporary time.
Here, homelessness in its penury is the opposite of dwelling in its
plenitude. Quite plausibly, Rings—through its endless repetition of
circuitous routes—reiterates, above everything else, the real plight of
dwelling: that man "must ever learn to dwell" (Poetry 159).
The transition from homelessness to dwelling can also be alter-
natively interpreted as the crossing over from the domain of Erlebnis
to that of Erfahrung.35 The predominance of Erlebnis (lived experience
in the contemporary world) insinuates a destructive penchant for
manipulable experiences—experiences more akin to "machination"
(what Heidegger refers to as Machenschaft), those that can be infi-
nitely reproduced by way of generating a superficial and objectified
representation of things (Livingston 149). Such formulations are
deficient in the sense that they are essentially informative in nature
and merely so, which is also to say that their conceptualization as the
objectified representation of the world tends to ignore the historical
origin of experience per se. Ironically, Erlebnis—although most com-
monly thought of as lived experience—does not connect with life or
42 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
with man's inner consciousness; instead, with its banal insistence on
superficiality, it tends to devalue the true nature of man's being-in-
the-world. In Rings, Sebald further emphasizes the banality of Erlebnis
as "the universal category of the 'experienceable'" (Livingston 157)
with the aid of images—black-and-white photographs—that punctuate
the text. The relation of these images to the text is dubious at best
since instead of corroborating the text, the images (at least, some)
disregard the monumentality of the events described by rendering
them universally graspable. Despite his engagement with the crises of
modernity, Sebald seems hardly eager to speak for the silenced
subjects of history and even less so to reduce human experience to
any common denominator. For Erlebnis to become reconciled to the
reassuring continuum of Erfahrung, the thrill of the hour (which is both
prereflection and prethought) must resolve itself into the solidity of
genuine experience.
In the global unworld, man is doomed to thrive in the totalizing
domain of lived (or immediate) experience, severed from his inner
consciousness or, to use Heidegger's expression, his "ownmost being"
(Being and Time 115). And if genuine experience can be taken to lead
to ontological security, then Erfahrung, with its acknowledgment of the
"inevitable belatedness of memory" (Jay 340) and a genuine zeal to
"preserve an allegorical rather than symbolic relationship between past
and present," can veritably signal the actualization of dwelling. 36
Sebald's thesis in Rings is a reassuring gesture toward the possibility
of the resolution of Erlebnis into Erfahrung, whereby contemporary
man—redeemed in his nature and amidst nature—accomplishes
dwelling in his capacity "to read the word 'death' without negation"
(Poetry 122). As Sebald would have liked his readers to believe, this
existential awareness of mortality—the express acknowledgment of
which concludes his narrative—forms a coming home to one's own
being as dwelling.

Notes
1. These lines are from a late poem by Hölderlin which begins: "In lovely
blueness blooms the steeple with metal roof." Heidegger quotes these
lines from Hellingrath's edition of Hölderlin's poetry (Poetry 211).
2. A building, from a mere architectural structure, becomes a
dwelling only when its inhabitant feels at home, is at peace in it,
experiences an "ontological security" in relation to it, and is there
able to abide in oneness with the surrounding world (Young 189).
Ontological dwelling (with which this essay is primarily concerned)
is subjective and is thus different from existence, which connotes
pure objective presence.
 Sinha Roy 43
3. In the architectural sense, such space is closer to Frank Lloyd
Wright's unfolding architecture as opposed to an enfolding one.
4. "Being" (or, is-ness) with a capital "B" is used in the current
context to differentiate it from "being" (entity).
5. As Stambaugh informs us in her translator's preface to
Heidegger's Being and Time, "It was Heidegger's express wish that
in future translations the word Da-sein should be hyphenated
throughout Being and Time, a practice he himself instigated. . . .
[so that] the reader will be less prone to assume he or she
understands it to refer to 'existence' (which is the orthodox
translation of Dasein) and with that translation surreptitiously
bring along all sorts of psychological connotations" (xiv).
6. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes "Being" (while acknowledg-
ing, at the same time, its indefinability in terms of traditional logic), in
the following words: "'Being' is the self-evident concept. 'Being' is used
in all knowing and predicating, in every relation to beings . . .
and in every relation to oneself, and the expression is
understandable 'without further ado'" (3).
7. "Building Dwelling Thinking" was originally delivered as the 1951
lecture "Bauen Wohnen Denken" in the Darmstadt Colloquium II
on "Man and Space."
8. The photograph referred to here is without a caption, and although
Sebald mentions Bergen-Belsen on page 59, neither the Holocaust
nor the photograph is discussed at any length, the interrelation
be-ing purely implicit. As Long rightly observes, "the thematisation
of the Holocaust in [Sebald's] work goes hand in hand with a
profound concern with the longer history of modernity" (Image 3).
9. Sebald's pairing of the dead herrings with the corpses of Bergen-
Belsen and his penetrating enunciation of Rembrandt's painting
The Anatomy Lesson can be read as a trenchant critique of a
disturbingly anthropocentric world view (Fuchs 167–83).
10. Heidegger writes, "The world worlds, and is more fully in being
than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe
ourselves to be at home" (Poetry 43). Therefore, in the global
unworld (Unwelt), the worlding of the world no longer takes place.
According to Ziarek, in the "global unworld, humans come to be
the undead—or, more precisely, the undying, no longer open to or
capable of being towards death. They flee mortality not simply into
religions or atheism, into moral stringency or relativism, into
asceticism or pleasure, but also into the technicist visions of
undying existence by way of perpetuated electronic downloads of
consciousness and informational undeath" (226–27).
11. While the notions of "space" and "place" are often used interchange-
ably, it is important in the current context to remain alert to their
intrinsic difference and also, paradoxically, their relatedness. Tuan
summarizes both their difference and relatedness in the following
44 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
words: "In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of
place. 'Space' is more abstract than 'place.' . . . The ideas 'space' and
'place' require each other for definition. From the security and stability
of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space,
and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows
movement, then place is pause" (6).
12. For a detailed exposition of the notions of "dwelling" and "place" in
Heidegger's writing, see Young.
13. For Heidegger, technological production involves "formless forma-
tions" (Poetry 110)—a somewhat extreme objectification of the
world leading to its final dissolution. He quotes from a letter of
Rilke which sums up this very idea in its indictment of American
materialism. Heidegger further writes: "In self-assertive
production, the human-ness of man and the thingness of things
dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not
only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as the will
to will, trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings
to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in
those areas where there is no need of numbers" (Poetry 112).
14. The German word Heimat has no exact semantic equivalent in English.
According to Peter Blickle, the idea of Heimat "unites geographic and
imaginary conceptions of space" (1). Commenting on the difficulties of
defining the term in other languages, Blickle notes: "The difficulties
Heimat poses when it comes to describing its referent or referents
become clear, however, when one puts the question to [native]
Ger-man speakers. They tend to acknowledge at once that there is
more than one Heimat—they know that the word has become a
relative term—and yet, somewhat uneasily and without being able
to define it exactly, they will admit to reserving a place for Heimat
among such terms as self, I, love, need, body, or longing" (4).
15. Elie Wiesel's Night (1960), Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970),
and Jean Améry's At the Mind's Limits (1966) are just a few examples.
16. According to Heidegger, man is at home—that is, he dwells "on
earth, under the sky, before the divinities," and among mortals:
those "capable of death as death" (Poetry 148). The fourfold refers
to the underlying unity of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. "This
simple oneness of the four," writes Heidegger, "we call the
fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling."
17. This is different from the notion of Erlebnis discussed subsequently in
this essay. In the current context, the lived experience of the body
refers to one's experience of one's own subjectivity and not to the
shock experiences of everyday life that Erlebnis originally involves.

18. In the current context, I personally prefer the word "atypical" to

"deviant" mainly because the former does away with the moralistic
intelligence often associated with the latter. Sebald's characteriza-tion
of Casement, as this essay suggests, is less concerned with the
 Sinha Roy 45
analysis of any aberration in the fundamental character of
Casement's being than it is with the exploration of Casement
himself as a mar-ginal figure, his marginality being an unfortunate
yet conventional function of his sexuality.
19. Heidegger goes on to add, "Bridges and hangars, stadiums and
power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations
and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not
dwelling places" (Poetry 143). As Heidegger suggests and Sebald
seems to imply, dwelling neither presupposes nor abides by the
logic of built structures alone. Just as not all houses are homes,
similarly not all buildings are dwellings.
20. Heidegger's formulation of the notion of building is structured in terms
of a "letting dwell" or a "letting-appear" (Poetry 157). He characterizes
the nature of building in the following words: "Building accomplishes
its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only
if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build."

21. Heidegger attributes man's alienation from place (and, by exten-sion,

his inability to dwell) to the "technical-scientific objectivation" of
nature (Poetry 46). According to Heidegger the functional aspect of
technology is its revealing nature, which threatens to upset the natural
balance between man and his immediate environment. Warn-ing
against the dangers of the overuse of technology, Heidegger writes, "It
[technology] causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to
turn into a destruction. This destruction may herald itself under the
appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of the technical-
scientific objectivation of nature, but this mastery never-theless
remains an impotence of will" (45–46).

22. One is but tempted to read into this unusual description of abandoned
buildings the antithesis of Heidegger's Greek temple (see Poetry 40–
41). However, the so-called "temples and pagodas"—echoing Hölderlin
—are empty and godless and, in their deceptive likeness to the site
that presides over the unity of the fourfold, are merely sterile symbols
devoid of any signification. See especially Hölderlin's "Patmos," which,
according to Richard Sieburth, is the poet’s "great-est meditation on
the deus absconditus" (20–21).

23. Such reification of experience consists in Benjamin's notion of

everyday lived experience, or Erlebnis. Benjamin explores the dia-
lectic between the two forms of experience—namely, Erlebnis and
Erfahrung—in the Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940.
For Benjamin, Erlebnis encompasses the everyday, inchoate experi-
ence of the world that precedes reflection, whereas Erfahrung—with its
suggestion of mobility, journey (from the German verb fahren,
meaning to travel or drive), and adventure (from the German noun
Gefahr, meaning danger)—refers to the shared discourse of experience
that, because it can be reflected on, is also specifically communicable.
However, even though the notion of Erlebnis, or the mundane
experiences of the worker—Chockerlebnis, or the "shock-experience"
experienced by the "passer-by" in the crowd, being its
46 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
cognate (Benjamin, Art 160)—according to Walter Benjamin
embody the crisis of modernity, he does acknowledge that
Erlebnis, under certain conditions, may transmute into Erfahrung—
as exemplified, for example, by Baudelaire's lyric poetry.
24. In Sebald, the unheimlich can often be seen to align with Freud's
formulation of the uncanny as "that class of the terrifying which leads
back to something long known to us, once very familiar" (123–24).
25. In Heidegger's view, "What threatens man in his very nature is the
view that technological production puts the world in order, while in
fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank,
down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset
destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could
possibly arise" (Poetry 114). In Rings, Sebald's narrator assumes
a similar position in his circuitous critique of modernity's
ostentatious engagement with technology.
26. The global unworld is characterized by a ubiquitous "oblivion of Be-ing"
(see Poetry 93 and 182–83; see also Letter 257–58 and 262) brought
about by man's subservience to and his ever-increasing dependence
on modern technology to the extent that the subjective experience of
space and time is no longer possible without making way for its
disintegration into mere lived experience (or Erlebnis).
27. In machine technology, as Heidegger indicates, the object
disappears into information. He further suggests, "The threat to
man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal
machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has
already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing
threatens man with the pos-sibility that it could be denied to him
to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience
the call of a more primal truth" (Question 28; emphasis added).
28. Heidegger originally used the German word Lichtung (clearing), as in
an open space, a clearing in the midst of a forest. Alternatively,
"clearing" can also be taken to connote both "to illuminate" as well as
"to accommodate harmoniously." Similarly, "opening up" is defined by
Heidegger as an act of "deconcealing" through which the "truth of
beings" becomes apparent (Poetry 38). He further expands on this
idea to convey a sense of liberation: "By the opening up of a world, all
things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and
nearness, their scope and limits" (44).
29. Zimmerman explores the complex relationship between human
self-hood and modern technology in the works of Hubert Dreyfus
and Charles Spinosa. "Dreyfus/Spinosa," writes Zimmerman,
"interpret the emergence of modern technology in accordance with
Heidegger's view that the West's productionist metaphysics
inevitably ends in the era of technological nihilism, when the
human subject and its object alike are transformed into flexible
raw material for the technological system" (124).
 Sinha Roy 47
30. Sebald refers to one Josef von Hazzi's treatise on sericulture, pub-
lished in 1826, soon after the collapse of the silk industry in Germany
where Hazzi (as Sebald informs us) associates the failure of the silk
industry with "authoritarian management" that "endeavours to create
state monopolies, and an administrative system which buried any
entrepreneurial spirit under a quite risible pile of regulations" (Rings
290). Long describes this as the Foucauldian "exercise of disciplin-ary
power" concerned with rendering bodies "docile" in space (14).
According to Long, "Bodies can be rendered docile by voluntary
submission to explicit regulations, but in disciplinary power, such
regulations are bolstered by a series of other techniques that include
the distribution of bodies in space; constant surveillance, observation,
registration and examination; and the consequent accumulation of a
vast documentary apparatus bearing information about individuals."
31. "In the age of the world's night," writes Heidegger, "the abyss of
the world must be experienced and endured" (Poetry 90). The
abyss, even though it signifies an absence of ground, presents
itself as the seeking of the limitless possibilities of being.
32. David Constantine's translation of the poem reads, "The
astonishing night, the foreigner among humans, lifts / Over
mountains, sadly, in glory, shining" (36). Cooke draws our
attention to the similarity between the semantic structure of
Sebald's reflection and Hölderlin's original verse (166–67).
33. Commenting on the paradoxical nature of the modern, technologi-
cally advanced world, Heidegger writes, "[T]he frantic abolition of
all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in
shortness of distance. . . . Short distance is not in itself nearness.
Nor is great distance remoteness" (Poetry 163).
34. A definite precursor of this would be the body of Aris Kindt—the sub-
ject of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, of which Sebald provides an
extensive reading in Rings. Sebald's reading of The Anatomy Lesson in
the Mauritshuis engages critically with Cartesian rationalism, which
legitimized the viewing of the human body as nothing more than a
mechanical device. In realizing the shift in focus from discipline to
control, globalization nourishes dominions of containment and regi-
mentation that, in turn, reflect the unworld of modern technology.
35. The terms Erlebnis and Erfahrung convey different yet related notions
of experience. According to Jay, Erlebnis may be described as "lived
experience" which "is often taken to imply a primitive unity prior to
any differentiation or objectification" (11). The term Erfahrung, on the
other hand, "can have a more public, collective character" (12).
Notably, within the narrative context of Rings, the notion of Erfahrung
is reminiscent of Kant's conceptualization of experience as a journey
over time that may also be articulated as a holistic narrative of man's
coming to be or dwell in the world. Also see endnote 23.
36. For an insightful exposition of Benjamin's conceptualization of
Erfah-rung, see Jay, especially chapter 8 (312–60).
48 Heidegger and the Phenomenoglogy of Dwelling in Sebald
Works Cited
Benjamin, Andrew. Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Phi-
losophy of Difference. London: Routledge, 1991.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. 1999. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap, 2002.
Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland.
Rochester: Camden House, 2002.
Cooke, Simon. Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." 1919. Trans. Alix Strachey. On Creativity
and the Unconscious: The Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, and Religion
. Ed. Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper, 1958. 122–61. Fuchs, Anne. "W.
G. Sebald's Painters: The Function of Fine Art in His
Prose Works." Modern Language Review 101.1 (2006): 167–83.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1953. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany:
State U of New York P, 1996.
———. "Letter on Humanism." Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi. Pathmarks. Ed.
William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 239–76.
———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York:
Harper, 1971.
———. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans.
William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. "Bread and Wine." Selected Poems.
Trans. David Constantine. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe,
1996. 36–40.
Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Varia-
tions on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005.
Livingston, Paul M. Philosophy and the Vision of Language. New York:
Routledge, 2008.
Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh UP, 2007.
Sebald, W. G. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell.
1999. New York: Modern Library, 2004.
———. The Rings of Saturn. 1998. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vin-
tage, 2002.
Sieburth, Richard. Introduction. Hymns and Fragments, by Friedrich
Hölderlin. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. 3–43.
Stambaugh, Joan. "Translator's Preface." Being and Time, by Martin
Heidegger. 1953. Trans. Stambaugh. Albany: State U of New
York P, 1996. xiii–vi.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1977.
Turner, Bryan S. Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Wheeler, Michael. "Martin Heidegger." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso-
phy. Stanford University, 12 Oct. 2011. Web. 7 Dec. 2016.
Wrathall, Mark, and Jeff Malpas, eds. Heidegger, Authenticity, and Mo-
dernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Vol. 1.
Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
Young, Julian. "What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and
the Worlding of the World." Wrathall and Malpas 187–203.
 Sinha Roy 49
Ziarek, Krzysztof. "The Global Unworld: A Meditative Manifesto." Impasses
of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. Vol. 2. Ed.
Henry Sussman. Open Humanities, 2012. n.p. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.
Zimmerman, Michael E. "The End of Authentic Selfhood in the
Postmodern Age?" Wrathall and Malpas 123–48.