Next to Nietzsche, the most influential figure in contemporary thinking about selfhood and subjectivity has been Martin Heidegger. Both Jean-Paul Sartre, who developed a subject-centered existentialism, and the “post-structuralist” French figures who sought to proclaim or advocate the “death of the subject,” including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, were indebted to him. Since the post-structuralists were sharp critics of Sartre, it is clear that Heidegger was susceptible to being read in contrasting ways; the ambiguities of his legacy are compounded when we remember that he was a deep conservative, and for a time a public supporter of Nazism (a position he never clearly renounced), whereas many seeking to draw on him have located themselves on the political far left. Indeed he had considerable difficulty in stabilizing the implications of his thinking himself. A chief goal of the position he developed in his most famous book, Being and Time (1927), was to displace the human subject from the central position it had occupied in philosophy since Descartes, and to replace the notion of stable selfhood with a different, fluid, and “temporal” understanding of the self. But during the 1930s he himself concluded that the residues of subject-centered thinking were still too powerful in that book, leading him to seek different ways to purge them, by expanding his reliance on mystical traditions, both Western and Eastern, and by focusing on language as the active agent of thinking, the voice of being.