How Not to Translate Heidegger

“How Not to Translate Heidegger” is the name of a discussion on academia.edu.  One segment, focussed on Heidegger’s use of the word “Dasein,” seems to have ended today.  We’ve all received a PDF summary.  “Dasein” is often translated “being,” but sometimes is left in German, too.  In any case, it lies at the centre of the man’s thinking, arguably at its core. I feel like a listener, rather than participant, because I haven’t studied Heidegger, and it only dawned on me recently that academia is, in fact, a social medium.  But I am impressed by at least two things: first, a social medium — nothing if not superficial — has been “refunctioned” into a vehicle for very complex thinking and very careful writing;  second, the participants seems to be discussing an aesthetic question: there is no right, final, certainly no logical conclusion, but rather a cluster of perspectives that arise in the context of individual minds and memories. Flusser, as usual, said it a very long time ago.