Grant Farred, professor of English and Africana Studies, writes about the motivations for writing his latest book, Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (2015), in this piece on the University of Minnesota Press blog.
"Heidegger saved me because he gave me the language to write about race in such a way as I’d never written it before," Farred writes. "Heidegger enabled me to write in this way because he has made me think about how to think. Of all the philosophers I know and the theorists I read, Heidegger stands apart because he is the only thinker I know who explicitly sets himself the task of thinking thinking."
Farred is also the author of In Motion, At Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body (2014), and What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (2003)