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The Glitch as Heideggerian Forgetting (2015)
This article is about a 2015 essay on Heidegger's philosophy applied to Beach Surgery. For other philosophical readings, see Ontological incompleteness.
Corrigan's essay argues that the structural impossibility between Half One and Half Two—the seam that "does not compute"—is best understood through Heidegger's notion of Vergessenheit, the forgetting constitutive of Being itself. Where Heidegger posits that authentic existence requires acknowledgment of what has been forgotten, Corrigan reads Smith's narrative fracture as a refusal to unforget: a commitment to letting the glitch remain generative and withdrawn.
The essay traces three moments: the Dust garden (Katita's raking of "history, truth, language"), Rico the Architect's unbuilt mirror-city, and Leif's twelve-word question as expressions of the same philosophical forgetting—not a failure to complete, but a stance toward the unrepeatable.
Notably, Corrigan cites a 1992 pirate transmission (status: disputed; archive source: ███████████ .sol) in which a voice speaks of "the sand garden as archive that remembers by refusing."[1] The essay was reprinted in Sacred Incompleteness as Ontological Structure (2020) and sparked numerous counter-readings, particularly from apophatic theologians.
See also
- Ontological incompleteness
- Subject (Ontological Incompleteness)
- The glitch as Koanic Refusal
- Apophatic theology and Beach Surgery
References
- ↑ Corrigan, "Vergessenheit and the Unjoined Seam," JNTM 12.2 (2015)|