“Ossification in the Homeplaces”: Reading Heidegger through Lugones

Abstract This paper examines central themes in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time from the perspective of María Lugones’s account of world-traveling. By thus reading Heidegger through Lugones rather than vice versa—a methodology I call “centering the margins”—I challenge a tendency in comparative work to approach historically undervalued work through a more canonical voice. I argue that doing so has interpretive consequences that tend to be occluded on a standard comparative approach: (i) a critique of the indexed nature of Dasein and the broader Eurocentrism of Heidegger’s project; (ii) a more nuanced account of the methodological value of lived experience; and (iii) a problematization of the early Heidegger’s recapitulation to a unified account of the self. Rather than ameliorate canonical philosophy by offering specifications to insufficiently differentiated philosophical accounts, turning to the margins on this methodology allows us to see where a canonical philosopher resorts to traditional motifs—the dangers of what Lugones calls “ossification in the homeplaces.” The epistemic advantages of marginalization notwithstanding, centering the margins is self-destructive in that the final aim is the dissolution of that dichotomy and the freeing up of new epistemological terrain.