In My Study: Beyond the Subject and the Object

Abstract

I hope you feel comfortable, Herr Professor, looking out of the portrait I have of you on my desk. (You used to be up there on the wall with Professor Husserl and Professor Wittgenstein and many others. But that was before I learnt so much about Heidegger the Little Man.) The framed photograph was cut out of one of my many books on or about you. The frame is a cheap thing that I bought in an indoor market when I was on holiday a few years ago. (I thought you might appreciate the concreteness of specification.) It is a strange portrait. Your generous domed forehead cannot erase the resemblances, created by your period moustache, between your face and that of Mr. Oliver Hardy. You are wearing a little skull cap to keep your head warm (at the right temperature for thought, perhaps). I can just see the top of a jacket whose velvet lapels enable one to guess the Tyrolean rest. (‘He usually dressed,’ so reports one of your ex-pupils, ‘in knickerbockers and a folksy Black Forest peasant coat with wide facings and a semi-military collar, both made of dark brown cloth.’¹⁴) It is cut off just below the neck, so I am spared the spectacle of your shortness clad in shorts, for that would make serious conversation more difficult.