Counter-Currents
Now Available!
Derek Hawthorne’s Being & The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Counter-Currents
304 words
Derek Hawthorne
Being and The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Cinephile Press, 2024
There are three formats for Being and the Birds available through our product page:
- Hardcover: $40
- Paperback: $20
Philosopher and film critic Derek Hawthorne draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to illuminate Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic The Birds, about a series of savage and inexplicable bird attacks on Bodega Bay, a sleepy California fishing village. Hawthorne argues that The Birds depicts a Heideggerian “event” (Ereignis): a sudden and fundamental transformation of the meaning of everything. Modern men believe we are masters of our own destiny. Heidegger calls this “humanism” and rejects it completely. The Birds is an anti-humanist film. In the space of one weekend, all pretensions to the understanding and mastery of nature are shattered, and man is reduced to helplessness in the face of unfathomable mystery.
“Derek Hawthorne’s Being and The Birds is the most penetrating and insightful commentary on The Birds ever written, drawing on the film, the original story by Daphne Du Maurier, the film’s production history, and even its surprising connection to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Hawthorne also manages to explain Heidegger’s key ideas in remarkably accessible prose. Thus Being and the Birds serves as an ideal brief introduction to the most important philosopher of the last century.” — Trevor Lynch, author of Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema
“Being and The Birds: Heidegger and Hitchcock, analyzed by a profound and passionate scholar of movies and metaphysics. If you are into both, you will be kept on the edge of your seat while reading this masterly, surprising essay. It is a first-rate intellectual Ereignis and surpasses Camille Paglia’s British Film Institute study as the best thing ever written on The Birds.” — Martin Lichtmesz, author of Ethnopluralismus: Verteidigung und Kritik
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
3 comments
I don’t know much about the renowned NS philosopher and am not smart enough to grasp the connection between him and Hitchcock’s Birds, but find Professor Heidegger’s 1929 anti-Jew letter interesting enough:
Nothing less is at stake than our undeferrable facing of the fact that we are confronted by a crucial choice: either to infuse, again, our German spiritual life with genuine indigenous forces and educators, or to leave it at the mercy, once and for all, of the growing Jewish contamination, both in a larger and a narrower sense. We can only regain our own path, if we prove capable of helping fresh forces to prosper, without the usual baiting and fruitless controversies.
“Martin Heidegger on the Jewish Contamination of German Spiritual Life” at nationalvanguard.org
The Birds aside for a moment, the great Douglas Mercer straightens out what pointy-headed academicians have tried for decades to deny.
The publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Books has caused no end of consternation and gnashing of teeth and hair pulling among scholars. Until their publication they could (somewhat but not really) plausibly argue that Heidegger was not really a “nazi” but, if he was at one point, he fell out with them and had been at best a fellow traveler.
Surely (they say as they grasped at straws) a thinker of the magnitude, depth and profundity as he could not have been an actual (let alone thoroughgoing) National Socialist. Turns out he was though, a National Socialist that is, and that’s just something they are going to have to live with forever. And a quite dedicated, unrepentant and thoroughgoing one at that. It’s all there in black and white and if you are willing to shell out a few hundred dollars you can read it for yourself.
How to reconcile it or if you can reconcile it (as you can imagine it) is the subject of countless academic kerfuffles, fierce debates, accusatory back and forths, ignoble contrition, hand wringing, rending of garments, warbling wailing and unholy ululations, all of it rather banal and desultory, there being a reason that the word “academic” means to be meaningless, irrelevant, and beside the point. They never once consider that if he was that smart (he was, and then some) maybe he had a point on the crucial question of Adolf Hitler. That rather obvious and simple proposition blows their minds and is so far beyond their pale, is so much a bridge too far, that they can’t even begin to think it. For them the truth is a bitter pill they cannot fathom let alone swallow.
But there it is nonetheless: Martin Heidegger their culture idol, their culture icon, was an upstanding and unreconstructed German National Socialist in good standing and remained so (more or less vocally) until his dying day in 1977. And in his private notebooks (Black Books) he let the cat all the way out of the bag reminding one that there is nothing more beautiful on this planet than when the truth comes out of the closet. He said that the Jews were the agents of destruction on the earth, he said the Jews threatened being with eternal devastation, he feared that through intermarriage the Jews would be engrafted surreptitiously on the blood of the German people, he said the Jews lionize race so they have no right to criticize the Germans for doing so; he also said that it was the Germans who were a historical people and it was the German people who were the deep thinkers and poets whose mission it was to answer to and be the bearers of destiny; it was the Germans who were to be the enactors of the destiny of the earth; that it was the Germans and the Germans alone who heard and could fulfill the call of being.
He was right of course, despite the professorial meandering and maunderings. And all of the noise and wailing in the academy is simply the fallout of that simple fact.
More: “The German Mission” at WhiteBiocentrism.com
See also WikiJews’ “Black Notebooks”
I really like looking through a post that can make men annd women think.
Also, many thanks for permitting me to comment! https://WWW.Waste-ndc.pro/community/profile/tressa79906983/
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.