Martin Heidegger Saved My Life

In Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, Grant Farred combines autobiography with philosophical rumination to offer this unusual meditation on American racism. In the fall of 2013 while raking leaves outside his home, Farred experienced a racist encounter: a white woman stopped to ask him, Would you like another job? Farred responded, Only if you can match my Cornell faculty salary. The moment, however, stuck with him. The black man had gravitated to, of all people, Martin Heidegger, specifically Heideggers pronouncement, Only when man speaks, does he thinkand not the other way around, in order to unpack this encounter. In this essay, Farred grapples with why it is that Heideggerwell known as a Naziresonates so deeply with him during this encounter instead of other, more predictable figures such as Malcolm X, W. E. B. DuBois, or Frantz Fanon. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.