Daniel Sibony is a psychoanalyst and a recognised expert in Biblical and Koranic studies. He recently published Le Grand malentendu. Islam, Israël, Occident (2013). He is the author of some 40 other works, including Islam, phobie, culpabilité (2013), De l’Identité à l’Existence (2012), Don de Soi ou partage de Soi (2006) and Lectures bibliques (2006).

We tend to focus our concerns on the question of possessing or having: having a good job, a good reputation, power, money, etc. Yet it is being not having that is essential. But what is being? Being signifies infinite possibilities; it is the potential of being everything that is. This was how the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus understood it, and how Heidegger defined it in the 20th century.
In this book, Daniel Sibony takes a new look at these age-old issues. He shows that the notion of being first appeared in the Bible, not as an abstract concept but in the form of stories, dramas and laws. However, it was totally absorbed by religion and never found a writer to revive it — and certainly not Heidegger, who, contrary to what is commonly thought, made no new contributions to the notions that were already present in the biblical texts.
In conjunction with Sibony’s earlier works, L’Enjeu d’exister and De l’Identité à l’existence, this book gives us a new conception of what Being means.

• An original, well-documented, interconnected approach to the Bible, psychoanalysis, and philosophy (particularly Heidegger).
• Sibony provides elements for a better understanding of the question of Heidegger’s affiliation to the Nazi Party.
• A re-examination of the relations between philosophy, religion and 20th-century ideologies.