In their Hermeneutic Communism and elsewhere, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala have advanced a powerful philosophical distinction, derived from Heidegger, between "framed" and "hermeneutic" thought.¹ Their distinction is, to my mind, among the best modes of conceptualizing philosophical realism and its alternatives, not least because it draws attention to the material, medial underpinnings of thought in a similar way to how Heidegger himself alerted his readers to the way in which even purportedly "pure" forms of intuition like time and space (Kant) needed to be seen as always material, structured, embodied modes of existence.²