From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Glitch as Heideggerian Forgetting
This thesis proposes a reading of the glitch. For other philosophical interpretations, see Philosophy and Beach Surgery.
The Glitch as Heideggerian Forgetting argues that the glitch—the irreparable seam between the two halves of the embedded story—is best understood through Heidegger's concept of Verborgenheit (concealment/forgetting) and the withdrawal of Being in the opening of truth (aletheia). The dissertation proposes that the glitch is not a narrative failure but an ontological necessity: the story's incompleteness is a productive display of the forgetting that subtends all appearing.
The author traces Smith's ''Subject (Ontological Incompleteness)'' essay (which grounds consciousness as a Möbius gap between the real and ideal) into the novel's structure: the glitch is the site where Being both reveals and withdraws, the "seam" that can never be sutured because suturing would require a vantage point outside the very incompleteness that constitutes the work. The thesis reads Leif's erupting wings at the novel's climax as a figure of Gelassenheit (releasement or letting-be)—not triumph but a relinquishment of the demand for coherence.
The work draws on Being and Time, Blanchot's readings of Heidegger, and—controversially—Paul de Man's deconstructive temporality. It has influenced subsequent scholarship on apophatic theology and the doctrine of refusal, though critics object to the author's subordination of narrative event to ontological abstraction.