Responding to Loss

Responding to Loss: Heideggerian Reflections on Literature, Architecture, and Film provides detailed explications of The Crossing by Cormack McCarthy, the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. The interpretations—thinking via Heidegger, Marion, Arendt, and Levinas—call for an adequate response to loss, violence, witnessing.

Mugerauer Robert :

ROBERT MUGERAUER is Professor and Dean Emeritus in the Departments of Architecture, Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington.

—Charles Bambach:
“In an interpretation that ranges from the writings of Martin Heidegger to a novel by Cormac McCarthy, a project by Daniel Libeskind, and a film by Wim Wenders, Mugerauer’s new book attunes its readers to the phenomenology of loss in a way that makes it palpable. Hinting at truths that lie hidden, turning our attention to the concealed play of shape, sound, voice, and structure, Mugerauer succeeds in ‘doing’ philosophy that engages the work of art in its concrete facticity. He breaks out of the convention of scholarly monographs and writes as if art mattered to the way we live our lives.”

—Ingrid Lehman Stefanovic:
Bob Mugerauer is a leading authority on Heidegger and architecture. Here, he addresses the phenomenon of loss through multiple textual lenses, with a particularly thoughtful set of reflections on Liberskind’s Jewish Museum. How loss informs a meaningful lived world--and how that loss is reflected and enlarged through diverse art forms--is a topic that few have confronted in such a wise and engaging manner.

—Jason Wirth:
“An original and sensitive study that brings a Continental philosophical sensibility to the problem of loss destitution, suffering, and bearing witness to catastrophe. Mugerauer explores the question ‘How can we deal with what befalls us in life?’”