Peg Birmingham
Recently my undergraduate philosophy of law class read Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. As is well known, he argues that the political emerges from an intense affectivity that unites the collectivity (Volk) against an enemy understood as foreign, alien, and other. The intense affect animating the collective is the willingness to shed blood to preserve a way of life under existential threat from its enemies, including domestic. The important point is that the Schmittian struggle is over existential preservation. Equally significant, Schmitt ontologizes the collective’s existential way of life and thereby its collective struggle. Nowhere in his concept of the political does he consider the historicality of the collective and its intensive affectivity. Nowhere does he consider the collective as harboring other possibilities of shared political life, nor does he consider the political struggle as a struggle over releasing these possibilities. The question emerged: how is it possible to change our shared political existence, especially its affective dimension? Finishing Schmitt and with this question in hand, we began reading Michele Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness along with the introduction to the co-edited volume Critical Race Theory: Writings that Started a Movement. Kimberlé Crenshaw and her co-authors’ critique of civil rights law is that it moved directly to the legal notion of colorblindness, bypassing the necessary step of “race-consciousness.” In this context, I began to think of the fruitfulness of Heidegger’s notion of destiny (Geschick).
Staying within the limitations of this exchange, I focus only on Heidegger’s definition of Geschick in Being and Time as “the historizing [Geschehen] of the community, of the people.…Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free” (GA 2: 508/SZ 384). Immediately following this definition, Heidegger adds the affective dimension of this struggle: “readiness for anxiety” (GA 2: 508/SZ 385). With the inclusion of anxiety, Heidegger grounds the struggle of freeing the power of destiny in the anticipatory resoluteness of being-toward-death.
At this point, it would be easy to read Heidegger’s struggle with destiny as very close to Schmitt’s claim that the coexistence of a people is rooted in the willingness to sacrifice and die for their shared way of being in the world. This would be a mistake. Instead, Heidegger claims that the resolute readiness for anxiety in being-toward-death reveals the ontological condition of coexistence to be temporality. Unlike Schmitt’s ontologizing of the collective way of life and the desire to preserve it, Heidegger insists that the ontological condition of coexistence is “historical in the very depths of its existence” (GA 2: 509/SZ 385). Coexistence is historical in a double sense: taking over its inheritance and freeing the possibilities inherent to it. Further, Heidegger claims the task of historical coexistence is neither to abandon ourselves to the past nor to aim at progress. Instead, the task is to stand in the moment (Augenblick) between the past and the future and struggle to free the definite historical possibilities that have been handed down to a community in its coexistence. To underscore his difference with Schmitt, Heidegger does not think the struggle of coexistence as one of preservation through sacrifice and blood.
Most important is Heidegger’s insistence that a collective struggle with the power of destiny include “the readiness for anxiety.” Contrary to Schmitt, anxiety is not an intensive affect unifying the collective, but instead, singularizes each of us in our coexistence with one another. In other words, anxiety as the felt sense of being a unique existence in the face of one’s own death prevents our coexistence from taking the form of a unified Volk with a single standpoint from which it takes up its inheritance. Heidegger claims that anxiety “dissolves relations” (GA 2: 333/SZ 250) in its singularizing of each unique individual. Contrary to some of his readers, Heidegger is not claiming here the singularity of a solipsistic subject. Instead, anxiety’s singularizing dissolves unified collective bonds, opening the coexistence of a space of singular beings in a plurality with others. The struggle to free the power of destiny then is a struggle involving a plurality of standpoints. The inheritance handed down looks very different depending on one’s location in it.
Turning to Crenshaw et al. and Michele Alexander, in my view Heidegger’s concept of destiny is fruitful for thinking with them on why, more than five decades after the passing of civil rights legislation, structures of white supremacy still dominate our coexistence in the U.S., a dominance reflected in the mass incarceration of people of color. As noted above, for these thinkers, it was the immediate move to the legal notion of colorblindness, without first collectively confronting the deeply racialized history of the U.S., that prevented the freeing of historical possibilities allowing for true “human liberation” (Crenshaw’s words). Crenshaw and her co-authors call this collective historical reckoning “race-consciousness,” which in my view is akin to Heidegger’s understanding of reckoning with destiny, demanding as it does a collective struggle for liberation. For a long time, I have been among those who thought Heidegger’s notion of destiny (Geschick) needed to be replaced with something less robust, less inescapable, less tied to a notion of a collective. I have changed my mind. In this age of the neoliberal economic and ahistorical subject, Heidegger’s notion of destiny reminds us that our coexistence is constituted by an inescapable history that operates as a kind of fate. As I have tried to show, Heidegger does not think the people as unified and homogenous, but instead, through anxiety, as the coexistence of unique singularities in a plurality with others engaged in a collective struggle to confront its history. Finally, responding to my students, and adding to Heidegger’s account of anxiety, the collective struggle of reckoning with our terrible racialized inheritance (I write as a citizen of the U.S.) may give way to other affects opening up a different future. Shame comes immediately to mind.