Simon Critchley in New York Times

From the quoted Rousseau: ‘If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time…’

From Critchley in ‘Beyond the Sea’: ‘It is a question of different experience of the present, what Heidegger calls the rapture of ecstatic time that breaks through the ordinary series of past, present and future that habitually marks the rhythm of our lives. If eternity means anything, it is this lived intensity of the present.’

Is this really what Heidegger says in “Sind und Zeit” concerning the ecstasies? Heidegger and Rousseau have (basically) the same concept of time and temporality? The ‘experience of the present’ in Rousseau is equatable with Heidegger’s ‘making present’ in primordial time? The intellectual Stalinism that somehow, by brief, hurried and forced consultation of those called to trial, makes Rousseau, Melville, Beckett, Heidegger and Nietzsche agreeable enough to be taken altogether without problem or mentioned in the same paragraph without reservation, much less those problems glaring in the original and later smooth over, enrages me to no end. Perhaps this kettle logic is Lacan’s real legacy.

I gave the kettle back undamaged; the kettle had a hole in it when I borrowed it; I never borrowed the kettle.