Can a place think ? on Adam Sharr's Heidegger's Hut.

Abstract

This review article engages with the architect Adam Sharr's Heidegger's Hut (2006), a study of Martin Heidegger's work hut at Todtnauberg, and also with Heidegger's own "essay" on thought at the hut, "From Out of the Experience of Thinking" (written 1947). The article traces a tension between some intellectual assumptions in the mode of presentation chosen by Sharr and the provocation of Heidegger's thinking. The challenge of Heidegger's thinking is to resist the mode of a biographical survey, a challenge focused above all in his elusive concept of the "earth." This uncanny and nonfoundational element in the "experience of thinking" is seen as crucial for Heidegger at Todtnauberg, as opposed to its having offered, as Sharr's study concludes, a "datum" for personal identity.