Speaker | John T. Hamilton
William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature | Harvard University

Title | Ungeheuer ist viel; Heidegger on Technology, Convenience, and Monstrous Transformation

A reconsideration of Martin Heidegger’s engagement with archaic Greek texts, specifically the Fragment of Anaximander and the first stasimon from Sophocles’ Antigone, challenges standard interpretations of Heidegger’s thinking on the essence of technology. Especial focus is given to an implicit critique of convenience, which is shown to reach back to his earlier work in fundamental ontology and steer his later reflections on the end of metaphysics.

John Hamilton is the William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Publications include: Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity and the Classical Tradition (2004); Music, Madness and the Unworking of Language (2008); Security (2013); Philology of the Flesh (2018); Complacency: Classics and its Displacement in Higher Education (2022); France/Kafka: An Author in Theory (2023); and Without Within: Parenthetic Interferences in Classical Reception (2025).

A wine reception will follow in the German Department

Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar: “German Studies: New Perspectives”