Reiner Schürmann
... the as yet unnamable that announces
itself—and cannot but announce itself that way,
as is necessary each time a birth is in progress—
in the species of a nonspecies, in the formless,
mute, and terrifying form of monstrosity.
—JACQUES DERRIDA,
L’écriture et la différence
In what follows, I should like to glean from Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy1 some evidence for reading that text, just as well, as a monstrous “Contribution to Politics.”
Why this text rather than another? Not, to be sure, because—following certain commentators—I consider it his masterwork.2 Far from it. But, in a sense, because of this “far from it.” First, these Contributions date from the years when Heidegger was painfully working through what he would later call his greatest blunder, committed a few years earlier; when, circumspectly, he dared in his courses to distance himself from the regime; and when he was writing under the most intense, combined influence of Hölderlin and Nietzsche. Next, this text deserves one’s attention for the overdetermined legacy it bears. It is a disconcerting document indeed. The elevated tone easily veers toward exaltation: “No one understands what ‘I’ am thinking here” (BzP p. 8). The language is more ponderous than in any of his other writings; at times one may trivialities—in the sense of the trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric—makes for difficult reading. An atrophy of grammar (undernourishment of the sentence, often stripped of its predicate) and a cacotrophy of logic (misnourishment of the rules of discourse so as to make them perish) serve a hypertrophia (overnourishment) of rhetoric. Litotes, hyperbole, sentence fragments, questions left open, nouns reduced to their verbal origins: these and other rhetorical devices are meant, it seems, to undo in philosophical discourse the work of construction.
The masterwork of the thinking of being? Far from it—but doubtless Heidegger’s most significant effort, because symptomatic. Far, as the center in the metaphysical arena is from the periphery. The text begins by tracing this periphery: we are living “the age of the transition from metaphysics to the historical thinking of being” (BzP p. 3). Thus is traced the closure of an epoch, which it is impossible to leap over in order to place oneself abruptly outside it and so make an absolute break.3 Centripetal forces, however, which there is reason to believe are not foreign to those that drew him to the administrative center of a model university, never cease to pull Heidegger’s thinking back from the periphery. From the viewpoint of epochal history, the line of embarment that encloses our site accounts for all the embarrassments of this text. It is the schema of an epochal closure, just as much as the attempts to think otherwise, that makes it significant, monstrous.
Conventional wisdom holds that phenomenology remains incapable of any critical discourse, particularly as political regimes are concerned. Its method, it is claimed, condemns it to mere descriptions, whatever the political reality. Thus it would exclude itself from current debates around liberalism and democracy, to say nothing of socialism and its still viable forms.
In Heidegger’s case, this objection is just not pertinent. His phenomenology is one of “worlds”—of economies, regions of manifestation, constellations of presencing, games of gathering (λέγειν), contexts. We always stand inscribed in many such worlds, each of which is phenomenalized according to its own law (about which, more below). Now, to free these irreducibly plural worlds, Heidegger has to argue against all ultimacy claims based on the representation of some one covering law. The most enduring among such representations, maximized into ultimate referents, have been the Greek κόσμος, the Latin natura, and modern subjectivity. Their epochalization provides Heidegger with a powerful tool for criticizing totalitarianism. Indeed, totalitarianism conflates the ultimate referent constituting modernity with a regional referent constituting a given political world. More precisely, National Socialism conflates subjectivity, our epoch’s standard sense of being, and the subject *‘German people.” What makes the Contributions symptomatic is that in them, Heidegger, while denouncing it vehemently, also yields to the impulse of such conflation. To understand his philosophical reaction, after 1934, to the ideology of his day—and to sort out elements of collusion from elements of critique—one must inquire into the many places and postures in which the subject appears in his attempt at thinking being without maximizing representations: that is, at thinking it as event.
I first give the Contributions a topological reading, spelling out in a four-point inventory some of the gravitational forces that carry it toward the center of the very arena it seeks to delimit and to work to its very limits. After each such sketch of a focalizing strategy, I indicate in a few words the dispersive counterstrategy monstrously allied with it. Than I give the text a nomological reading, approaching the political from the point of view of the law. Through his understanding of the law as broken from within, Heidegger eliminates the very possibility of maximizing this or that representation as an ultimate standard, and hence of identifying it with a given collective subject. I ask: Under what law do the counterstrategies so indicated place our historical site—that is, us?
What we found and create ... alone will be
true.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER,
Beiträge zur Philosophie
The center where, as Heidegger never stops repeating, metaphysical strategies have from all time been interwoven, was and remains “man”: the concept of representable beings endowed with attributes and capable of perfecting themselves, be it by ascending toward the universal, by entering into themselves, or, yet again, by progress. Now, in these pages, Heidegger just as tirelessly repeats: Who? who are we? A question not to be confused, to be sure, with that other one: What? what are we? The What ends up pointing toward the archive of humanist idealities; the Who, toward the self understood as a possible gift of the times. But this other response—other than humanist—appears only at the end of a complex series of detours, of decelerations and accelerations, in an itinerary of utterances that still issue from the most solid center of entitative doctrines regarding man, where the technique of representation and the logic of attribution sustain the thesis of perfectibility. “No one understands what ‘I’ am thinking here”: the I who is thinking and who signs with his initials M.H. is still placed within a pair of quotation marks, holding the hegemony of the subject at bay; at that distance, that is, which is to separate the thinking that traces the history of the being-event from all historicist representations of entities. Elsewhere, the quotation marks disappear. Here is one specimen of that more ancient cloth, forming a text with the logic of things and the thesis of perfectibility that this logic helps to weave: “decision.”
In the phenomenology of historical destiny, this word is to be taken literally. It designates the epochal breaks “severing” (caedere) eras of truth. The question Who? does not arise there, since such a (protostructuralist) phenomenology is concerned with processes of concealing-unconcealing, not with agents.
But it happens that alongside this aletheiological semantics of decisions-caesurae, one reads for instance: “Who decides? Every one.” To the question Who? suddenly answers the sum total of humans capable of taking a decision. The persistence of the subject in its most entitative form is flagrant indeed. And what is at stake as a result of this decision, posited as one posits an act? “The rescue of beings”—that is to say, the rescue of a collective subject, for these beings are “the West.” It is difficult not to construe a decision such as this after the modern paradigm of consciousness. Decision so recentered appeals most obviously to an agent and to effects emanating from him, when formulated as an alternative: either “found truth and recreate beings,” or else succumb to “anesthesia,” to the lack of creative and founding efficacy, which carries the gravest consequences (BzP pp. 100-101). Whence the call, also reiterated, for creators (die Schaffenden) and founders (die Gründer).
The few who are to create and found the site from which the many will then decide where to go: this model of decision is generally “political” and doubtless more specifically “populist.” What does it presuppose here? One might well believe oneself in the thick of an anthropology of capacities or faculties, where the possible denotes acts in our power: “Who is capable [wer vermag], and when, and how?” (BzP, p. 353). Being and Time had taught us to inquire about ourselves (and about the possible) in another way than in accordance with our powers (Vermögen). In addition, action is to be focused on an aim, on an end, on a founding. “Why? (an appeal to grounding)” (BzP, p. 258). Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics had taught us to understand groundings, too, in another way. Furthermore, in order to “overthrow today’s man,” the latter “must step out of his current basic constitution.” Is this not asking the utmost of freedom as the seat of acts in potestate nostra? Last, the anthropologism is patent when Heidegger suspects his contemporaries of not measuring up. To step out of his mode of being “is perhaps already asking of today’s man something impossible” (BzP p. 248). On the Essence of Truth had taught us to understand freedom in another way.
Counterstrategy, now, concerning the Who: The self will be inscribed in discordant times and will thereby be wrested from the grasp of the modern hegemony of self-consciousness. The double bind of appropriation and expropriation will constitute it as tragic.
The final section of the Contributions (at least prior to the trustees’ editing)4 is titled “The Last God.” The phrase recalls first of all the theology of salvation as it was practiced by Heidegger (and Rudolf Bultmann) in their weekly sessions in Marburg a decade earlier: a theology of ἔσχατα (last things), not in the sense of an outcome to occur at the end of time but in the sense of the fullness of salvation offered in the instant. The phrase is overdetermined, however, by an intimation of essence. It connotes the possibility that widely differing experiences of the divine found in both the Greek and the biblical traditions can be gathered together in a single nucleus (das Gottwesen; BzP, p. 406) and extracted from their speculative and religious gangue. This resurgence of Husserlian idealist essentialism in the notion of Wesen is as provisional as it is unexpected. Finally, there occurs a return of the theory of καιρός (the opportune moment) which Heidegger, in the early 1920s, had hoped to make the core of a study on Aristotle that never got written. The word “last” is indeed to be understood in a temporal sense, designating not, to be sure, the endpoint of some time span but an instant marking an epoch. Everything which, for the past two and a half millennia, has been held to provide salvation would then be reduced to its quintessence, as it were, and gathered together in a now. This critical moment, when the phenomenological truth of the divine in its numerous past acceptations could become the “own” (eigen) of a historical human type, would be the event (Ereignis) to come. It was thought to be a possible event, for which Heidegger during the mid-1930s was attempting to prepare the way. Concerning the last god, he takes up an expression of the prophet Elijah (1 Kings 19:11), and speaks of this god’s “passing” (Vorbeigang).
Counterstrategy, now, concerning the divine: Heidegger suggests (but without providing any definite outline) a more pagan god, one that he does not name: a god venerated since remote antiquity for his resistance (through flexibility) to all forms of representation and co-optation—Proteus. Given his tenacious labor of decentering, Heidegger may well have meant to say, toward the end of his life: Only Proteus can save us now.
This becomes an issue for Heidegger as a direct consequence of the being question. In the first beginning—the Greek—where they become problematical, the phenomena of the city and of being overlap in many ways. They share the same “poietic” and linguistic characters (in its gathering, being utters itself and sets itself to work, just as the city is, above all, the space instituted by the word); the same “technical” manifestation of φύσις (τέχνη of inscribing within bounds whatever shows itself); the same agonistic character due to the undertow affecting the city (its archaic past in the sense of the pre-Doric: that is, the heroic) as well as being (its “expropriation”). Last, they share the same nomic essence, as both are sites of a gathering (λέγειν, whence a certain redundance in defining man as a living thing either “endowed with λόγος” or “political”). These are but so many intersecting meanings reflected by the proximity of words (πόλις-πέλειν). They are so many features, too, connecting “the act that founds a political state”? with the act that produces a work of language.5 In the Greek beginning, there is being as both extradiscursive and discursive gathering together: the kinship of Solon and Homer.
The same features—obviously neither exhaustive nor systematic—would also mark the rebeginning, the repetition, the retrieval, the refounding after a long history of forgetfulness. Now one must take a good look at the role assigned to Germany in this other beginning. As the young Hegel as well as Marx had first observed, followed unanimously by the subsequent tradition, nineteenth-century Germany had no being of its own. Heidegger shares this view: Germany still has no being in accordance with any of the features just mentioned.6 In Hegelian terms (turned, however, against the system of objective Mind), the state remains for Heidegger a notion, something abstracted from everydayness. But only a concrete gathering, in the sense of the everyday, can become phenomenal. The properly political phenomenon will therefore be not the state but the people. Put the other way around: It will be termed “people,” the sort of gathering capable of becoming a phenomenon in accordance with the features mentioned. The philosophical impetus behind Heidegger’s administrative commitments is to be found in the kinship these features suggest between the question of being and that of politics, a kinship rooted in λέγειν.
The founding in the realm of language, responding to the Greek epic, then bears the name of Hölderlin. For a few months, Heidegger also thought he could name the new Solon. The Volk,7 at any rate, is to be understood as a gathering brought about by a founding utterance (τέχνη assigning its limits to “natural” language), in ceaseless struggle with the concealment traversing from within and dispersing every poetic, as well as every political, configuration.
The return of representational thinking is no less obvious here than it was in the case of the Who? and of the last god. One cannot help feeling disturbed as one recalls that the step beyond Being and Time was meant precisely to disencumber thinking from the remnants of subjectivism that still burdened the Existential Analytic. In the Contributions, those remnants appear in Heidegger’s oscillations between the particular (which always results from an operation of individuation starting out from a referent posited as universal) and the singular (a referent that lies outside all positions, universals, and individualizing operations). He rehabilitates the same old prestige of the particular for the Who? and the god and the people, while attempting to retain the singular more firmly than ever—more pathetically, as we shall see. There is the universal “people,” particularized in the Greek, the Roman, the German, and so on. Contrary to what one might believe at first sight, it is not with his attention to entities that Heidegger invalidates the very phenomenological project he unrelentingly claims for himself (singular beings alone—the temple of Paestum, this pitcher, that bridge, to cite some well-known examples—allow one to διασῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα (Eudoxus of Cnidus], “to save and preserve what shows itself”); it is with the representation of ideal entities. Germany must fulfill the idea. This collective subject must step into the τόπος historically occupied by ultimate referents, a τόπος Heidegger otherwise denounces as the nest of all metaphysical illusions.
Counterstrategy, now, concerning the “people”: Heidegger will never undo the tie linking πέλειν to πόλις (which is not to say that he will keep conflating ultimate [i.e., metaphysical] with regional [e.g., political] referents; he will, on the contrary, work through the first so as to overcome them, and fracture the second so as to destabilize them). The questions of politics and of being will always raise for him one and the same problem of “gathering.” A thought of being, however, which has been freed from subjectivism—if such a thinking is at all to come within our reach—forces one to think of politics in another way. The strategy of decentering in the Contributions struggles with this transition. The gathering can then no longer take place around, or by, or on a self-conscious subject such as the people. It will place every single phenomenon within the normative double bind of gathering and dispersion, of unconcealing and concealing, of appropriation and expropriation.
The task of particularizing the idea remains, for “the ‘people’ is not yet the essence of the people [das noch nicht volkhafte ‘Volk’]” (BzP, p. 398). The quotation marks signal Heidegger’s disenchantment with the movement of the day. In 1936, the essence of the people—without quotation marks this time, as one commonly speaks of things common—remains as yet to be established. As previously, the mutation in being-man remains in arrears, since the uprising (Aufbruch) of 1933, it can be conjectured, had not fulfilled its promises. The “principle of the people” (ein ‘vélkisches Prinzip’; BzP. p. 42) will still have to provide the standard for the wholly other being-man, but one has henceforth to await the domination by the founders to come. What would these have to found? With the people, Heidegger removes to the sphere of the not-yet the there by which, in the earlier Existential Analytic, he had sought to break up subjectivist solipsism. The postponement of the there holds the Who? in suspension, just as it delays the passing of the last god and puts off, until some remote tomorrow, the popular uprising. “Man transmutes himself by founding being-there” (BzP, p. 230). Only when the “people” will have become a people (no more quotation marks, for we “dare [to use] immediate speech”; BzP p. 239), being-there shall be. “Being-there is nothing but moment and history” (BzP, p. 323): moment, as it finitizes human gathering as never before; history, as it thereby founds a beginning other than the Greek. The there remains thus still “to be prepared” (BzP p. 231), and being-there—in an explicit critique of Being and Time—“the ground of a determinate being-human: of the one that is yet to come” (BzP, p. 300). Such is now the surprising contingency of being-there. It may, and it may not, come to be.
With this ontic singularization of the there, the historical or destinal obviously collapses onto the historiological or historicist. The historical is always measured in Heidegger by the scale of being as it gives itself to and at the same time withholds itself from thinking. The modes of these gifts and these withholdings spell out the epochs in our destiny, thereby determining what at any given time it is possible and impossible for humans to do, to will, to experience. The historiological is measured by a different scale, one that is just the converse of epochal concealing and unconcealing. Here, facts such as inventions, revolutions, and other seizures of power—the will of leaders, the consensus of rational agents, and so on—determine the periods of history. Thus, each time Heidegger ventures in subsequent writings to date the beginning (for instance, with Parmenides) and the end (for instance, “in three hundred years”)8 of the history of being’s self-withholding, there lurks a risk of succumbing to a second-order positivism where acts, including philosophical acts, mark turning points in history.
Now if January 30, 1933, did not start the hoped-for renewal, the breakthrough to a new type of man still remains possible at a later date. Heidegger does not hesitate to describe the forms of power, both exoteric and esoteric, capable of leading us there. In order to stand up to the isomorphism that has come to envelop the planet, “the dominion over the ‘freed’ (that is to say, uprooted and egotistic) masses is to be established and maintained through the constraints of ‘organization.’” This seems to be what he has to say about government. Simultaneously, another, more hidden domination is needed for the sake of the renewal ahead. “Here it is a matter of preparing the future [founders] who will create new sites on which to stand within being itself.” And he adds that both forms of domination, the exoteric and the esoteric, “have to be willed by those who know” (BzP. pp. 61-62). Willed to what end? To found Da-sein understood as an ontic possibility .9
Reading Being and Time, who would ever have thought that a few years later Heidegger would submit being-there to the will of a few? This establishment of a contingent will ruling over the there determines the anthropologism, the theologism, and the populism we have just seen.
Counterstrategy, now, concerning that contingency: Heidegger will remove the there from the hegemony of self-consciousness. The there arises as a possibility, he will say, from the fractured instant. The temporality (Temporalität) of being, out of reach for an analytic starting from ecstatic temporality (Zeitlichkeit), will then become thinkable by means of the double bind of a given phenomenalization and, within it, a singularization to come: that is to say, as tragic temporality.
Such is the profound ambivalence of the contributions to politics operative in the “contributions to philosophy.” It results from the monstrous overdetermination of being’s event-historical sense by a subjectivist- epochal sense.
Concerning an analogous shift in another text of Heidegger’s, written during the same years, that contamination of deconstruction by subjectivity has been judged fatal.10 Fatal, yes, if fatum is meant to render Geschick: destiny, sending, “mittence” (an awkward Latinization, though). But fatal in the sense that the persistence of the human, divine, national, historical subject would lead to the ruin, even the death of the deconstructive project, that this project would thereby suffer a fatal blow—that seems to me much more difficult to argue. One might as well assert that attributive grammar is itself harmful or deadly for thinking (and indeed it is, for a thinking—not Heidegger’s—that claims to implant itself firmly outside the metaphysical closure). What could be more “metaphysical” than to determine a grammatical subject by means of a predicate? It is therefore indispensable to grasp the “destinal” necessity which, after 1934, continues in Heidegger to encumber the other thinking by the system of the same.
The double level of writing (for the public and for the initiate), the tactics for mastery on both levels, the calculation of dates, the conjunction of preparatory knowledge and will, the creation (not the reception, as he will later say) of.sites in being, and, finally, the kerygma announcing a type of humanity to come: all of these obviously form a system, and a “system” in just the sense Heidegger has tirelessly sought to dismantle. Does one not hold with the eidetics of the Who?, of god, of the people, and of factual history the branches of a tree-diagram modeled on Porphyry or Descartes, only revised on the drawingboard of historical consciousness?
Perhaps so, at least if the trunk of this new arbor Porphyreana were to promise in its turn some eidetics of being. Only then would the totalitarian impulse—the conflation of the German collective subject with subjectivity as the modern standard sense of being—triumph. On this point, however, there is no compromise, no contamination, no hesitation at all. Being, in the Contributions, is understood as “event.” It can be said in many ways—for example, in the singular and in the plural—but never as the starting point of a dieresis. The event like tree trunk grafted with eidetic branches remains monstrous: it possesses that monstrousness which Jacques Derrida himself, in the lines quoted in the epigraph above, has so pertinently shown to be an epochal necessity; a monstrousness which never ceases to turn Heidegger’s contribution to politics into claudication.
As regards the founding of the essence of
being’s truth, “logic” itself is an illusion,
though the most necessary illusion that the
history of being has known up to now.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER,
Beiträge zur Philosophie
It remains to be shown how, in the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger moves away from the conflation of regional and ultimate referents: that is, away from the totalitarian impulse. The book indeed provides also contributions to politics in a sense other than crypto-subjectivist. This other sense has to do with the law. It denatures the genealogy of λόγος-λέξ legitimacy and renders the law itself monstrous. What is said of λόγος in the lines quoted above applies also to the law. Λόγος and λέξ designate functions of any focal meaning of being: λόγος, its function of gathering phenomena into a constellation; λέξ, its function of subsuming them under one principle or referent.
In those lines Heidegger states one feature common to all ultimate representations. The Greek κόσμος, Latin natura, modern subjectivity, and all other archic representations hinge on this “most necessary illusion,” logic, itself understood as the corpus of norms for truth. Heidegger’s critique of those representations supposes that with regard to the principial—in particular, transcendental—λόγος, he takes a step back toward the tragic λόγος. This distance alone allows him to describe logic as “an illusion whose essence lies even deeper than the ‘dialectical illusion’ made visible by Kant” (BzP, p. 461). He could not state better the radicalization he inflicts on the modern critique of totalizing speculations. For Kant, their illusion unceasingly mocked and tormented (zwackt und dafft) reason.11 Their megalomania kept the natural metaphysician in us alive, as every search for conditions necessarily postulated the unconditioned. If, in Heidegger, postulates per thesin trick us out of a “more necessary” historical necessity, it is because they bear upon being independently of its fixation around the normative ego and its antecedents. Here, necessity results not from a system of a priori acts but from the tragic double bind of life-death (better: natality-morality).12 How, now, does the logical illusion with its nomic function arise from this double bind?
In epochal history, one phantasm of the universal always commands any given economy of present beings. “Commanding” here means that logic proves to be illusory in its work of subsumption. To show how, it may suffice to point out in the logic of the same (a) the interest that speaks through it and (b) the understanding of being that is reflected in it, as well as (c) the originary conflict that it covers up. These incursions into “metaphysical” territory—which constitute its terrain as such (but that is another problem)—aim at anything but bringing in some verdict on the past. What is at stake each time is rather our own historical possibility carved out indirectly by these incursions.
In logical subsumption (a redundancy, anyway) an interest declares itself. Heidegger suggests this first, speaking as a symptomologist of modern times. “The dread before being has never been as great as today. The proof: the gigantic staging by which we attempt to surmount this dread” (BzP p. 139). He describes the gigantic therapeutic contriving as an allpervasive “operative machination” (Machenschaft, a word that expresses at once making [ποίησις and τέχνη], sinister maneuvering,13 and the collapse of physics into “that which produces itself”; BzP, p. 126). Later he was to describe the same thetic contriving as “positional enframing” (Gestell). Both descriptions suggest one and the same phenomenon. The dread that has become unbearable hints at it, for all to feel; the most rigid institutionalize fixity (which, in these late 1930s, has thus become one instance of a planetary development) displays it for all to see; it is called need for security. In the logical fixation of being, conceived to make true the phenomena so fixed, “the unwavering assurance against all insecurity” (BzP, p. 203) is sought. In what attracts us as logically true, the interest in safety grips us from within (by the need for consolation) and from without (by the need for consolidation). It also drives the entire history of truth from the time φύσις came to denote self-production up to the global reach of contemporary technicity. The referents supported by the historical illusions have thus nothing disinterested about them. If they have been able to maintain themselves over quasi-pharaonic millennia, it is because they have served as our bearings for damming up anguish in the face of instability. Whence a first indirect feature of “the essence of the truth of being” as event: it will have to be thought of otherwise than as guaranteeing stability (otherwise too, obviously, than as the determinate negation of the stable, such as flux, becoming, or movement).
The understanding of being reflected in the logic of subsumption can only have been fashioned so as to satisfy, without remainder, the need for assurance-security-safety. Without remainder—whence the attraction (and the word) of the universal. The illusion, one and unique in this, arises as one “posits something before oneself, in its koinon and its katholou” (BzP, p. 477); as one turns an aggregate of “this” and “that” toward what is common to them from one general point of view (ad unum vertere: to “universalize”). Whether such positing of the universal, the common, and the general operates through defining, predicating, or naming, it always results from inflating one phenomenon beyond the limits of manifestation. Standards such as the κόσμος, natura, and subjectivity has been “maximized” (aufgesteigert; BZB p. 246) out of one finite experience. The operation of standard-setting cuts philosophy loose from any attachment to phenomena. This observation allows Heidegger to argue against the very posit of ultimate referents, hence also against their—totalitarian—conflation with regional referents. Yet it also prompts a most troubling question: On what basis have the universal, the common and the general “assumed [angemasst] an eminent rank” (BzP p. 477)? What has been the impetus behind the hubris (Anmassung) of the universal posited as the sole standard (Mass) for the true? The question is one of phenomenology, not of some explanatory etiology. If the illusion vitiates our languages, then the regional games of singulars and their phenomenalization open the space for all speech and hence for words. What falls victim to critique, however, are ultimate subsumptions as well as the law they impose. In what way has their hubris come to us? From a historical point of view, one would have to answer: through the ancient construction of causes and the modern construction of conditions. From the point of view of being, the answer would be: through the representation of a true beingness, cause as well as condition of beings. The sway of the illusion is only secondarily due to the concatenation of epochs. It is due first of all to the fact that the truth of being has been cleansed of its intrinsic discord (which cleansing is nothing other than ἐπέκεινλόγος more powerful than which nothing could be conceived.
Normative maximization is an illusion because it covers up the originary strife of appropriation-expropriation. Yet both everydayness and our historical site make us more familiar with that strife than with anything else: everydayness, through the double bind of life and death (natality and mortality), and history, through that of modern pathology (archism and anarchism). Everydayness and history thereby manifest truth in its conflict of unconcealment-concealment. How does the logical illusion arise from that double bind? Answer: by the manic denial—the thoughtlessness, in other words—of life posing as if the expropriating, concealing, mortal, anarchic undertow were not. I take Heidegger to state the one issue that guides his critique of totalitarianism as he asks: “Entering into being-there, its instant and its place: how does this occur in Greek tragedy?” (BzP p. 374). Answer: always through assenting to the double bind by which, in Aeschylus and Sophocles, the law of the family lineage undermines the law of the city, and conversely.
For Heidegger, the task of thinking amounts to retrieving this polymorphic undertow. The task is complicated by its polymorphism. Thus he speaks of the event at times in the plural, designating the openings of epochs, where being refuses itself (ἐπέκειν), all the while granting an economy; and at times in the singular, designating the disparity that “keeps the standard” (BzP, p. 510) in such refusing and such granting. If the reversals in our past have displaced the logical illusion in accordance with some hegemonic hold, in retrospect their consecution signals in the direction of a forgotten, entirely other hold. Phantasms have been able to rule as law, only inasmuch as they have been kept by being itself as event (das steht beim Seyn selbst; BzP, p. 492). A thinking that acquiesces in the double bind may be nihilist, relativist, and anything else one likes to show upon epochal phenomenology; it is all this in that it recognizes the historical differing that opposes points of reference lacking any common name. But such a thinking is, first of all, tragic in that it recognizes the differing within the event, which opposes concealment and expropriation in the condition of being to unconcealment and appropriation. Again, it takes a manic denial of tragic truth to cry nihilism in reading Heidegger. The strife between normative referents for the true only reflects the strife within originary truth itself, a strife for which “being qua being” is bound to remain nameless.
Acquiescence to originary discordance summarizes all of Heidegger’s efforts after 1934. To suggest its an-archic “contribution to politics,” it will have to suffice to sketch the archic concordance forced by normative phantasms. Such concordance results from the integrative violence of the law, spreading isomorphism.
In jumping from strategy to strategy, the Contributions not only thematizes the monstrous passage to the normative limits; it carries it to completion. Thus, Heidegger first speaks under the rule of self-consciousness. Then all of a sudden he speaks from somewhere else, pointing to the transgressive strategy in every argument for ultimacy. Whence is he speaking then? Where is he who says: Ultimate norms are illusions whose legislative institution and whose transgressive destitution depend on being itself? Clearly, a discourse such as this no longer issues from the epochal ascendancy of consciousness and subjectivity. If it still did, how could it render that ascendancy problematical? The enterprise may rather be compared to the question “What is metaphysics?” To raise it, he was to say later, “is, in a sense, to have left metaphysics.”14 In a sense. The same is true here. He asks: What are the phantasmic illusions that are more necessary than the transcendental? The question can no longer be raised in the broad daylight of transcendental subjectivism. From what place, then? Not, to be sure, from some extrametaphysical satellite or some new wave washing beyond the antisubjectivist tidal wave. These are but so many reactive effects to that last “old sun” (unless it is the worldnight’s moon), the ego. Heidegger does not leave the terrain where the substitutes for the Platonic sun continue to rule. He speaks instead from the blank place (offene Stelle; BzP, p. 510) that has been gaping in consciousness from the time of its normative institution. He speaks from the place of the innermost rent (der innigste Riss) in the modern theticism of the same, a rent first apparent in Kant in the disparate modes of positing (being as Setzung and as Position)15 where night turns into twilight the leaden evidence of noon. This is something quite different from declaring cheerfully that metaphysics has ended and that one has only to decide to change terrain by brutally placing oneself outside.
Principal theticism becomes problematical from the site, our own, where the fragility of the modern normative posits has become the most widely spread piece of information in the Western world. Just like the experience of Oedipus, this new evidence may open one’s eyes. From the blank place in pathetic consciousness Heidegger will end up being able to describe the discordance that rends the event and that has broken all epochal referents. But—and this alone is important here—speaking from that blank rent, he can describe those referents themselves both in their subsumptive effectiveness and in their hubris. With a strong dose of polemics he traces them back to Greek key concepts such as ἀρμονία, εὐδαιμονία, and ἐντελέχεια: “The fissuring of being must not be patched up by the fabricated semblance of compromises, of ‘happiness’ and of false accomplishments” (BzP, p. 406). So much for the equalizing beginning. Allusions to the Stoa, to Plato and Aristotle, are barely concealed. Beingness has been phantasized to reconcile what being as event fissures. Then, here is what he has to say about the normative force of these illusory reconciliations: the subject runs “the danger of revolving around itself and of idolizing what are only conditions for its permanence, to the point of turning them into its unconditioned” (BzP, p. 398). This time, Heidegger reads the genealogical history from its end, where the subject revolves around itself, literally making a world of its own representations. Whether it designates the individual or the people, the ego raises its own identity to the level of an idol, postulating it as the ultimate condition for the sake of consoling and consolidating itself. The description of idolization is obviously pertinent for every equalization posited as normative. Heidegger does not hesitate to name a few of these illusions—one and all, versions of logolatry—which have served to force the tragic disparity within the event into some guarantee of the same.16 How is being understood if it is to lend itself in this way to the phantasms of the same? “Only that properly is which endures in being present” (BzP p. 115). Hegemonic phantasms invade thinking only after all topological incommensurability has been smoothed over by commonplaces: only after the discordant event has been leveled off into the universal as what remains identical and common. The agent of such leveling-off is the law.
What indeed is a representation to be called whose job it is to force into isomorphism all other representations measured by its yardstick? What is of its essence the same for an entire class of cases, and before which all are equal? Such a representation is called a law. To speak of equality before the law amounts then to yet another redundancy. The law is defined by the equality it imposes on subjects and cases, just as its subjects and cases are defined by the law that equalizes them. “All men are mortal”; “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides of a right triangle”; “Oviparous animals reproduce by means of eggs hatching outside the female’s body; viviparous, by bringing forth living young”; “Thou shalt not kill”—in every case, a law gives a figure to the same, and it always makes equal the cases, the facts, particulars, subjects, human practices, and natural processes for which it “obtains.” Without integrative violence there is no law, and without the law, no isomorphism. To obtain, to be valid and fit: all this means to be strong—to exercise integrative violence. What then is more violent than a “value” posited in order to impose on disparate singulars some figure of the same, turning them into affinitive particulars?
Such is at least the work of the law as it appears through the strict reciprocity between a standard and the standardized. It appears in an entirely different light from the perspective of the event that breaks an opening, not for the universal concordance among particulars, but for the conflictual discordance among singulars. This is tragic law, thinkable by mortals who have unlearned to philosophize death away manically.
1 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (1936-38), vol. 65 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989); cited hereafter as BzP. The present article is fully understandable only in conjunction with three related papers of mine: in K. Harries, ed., Heidegger on Art, Politics, and Technology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, forthcoming); in M. R. Zinman, ed., Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy: The Problem of Technology in the Western Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming); and in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (forthcoming).
2 For a quarter-century, Otto Pöggeler has kept his readers in suspense; the Beiträge alone, he claimed, contains Heidegger’s genuine thinking, which the lectures and public courses merely make accessible to a more general audience: Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), p. 145. The Beiträge is said to constitute his “major work proper [das eigentliche Hauptwerk]”: “Heidegger und die hermeneutische Theologie,”’ in Verifikationen: Festschrift für Gerhard Ebeling (Tübingen, 1982), p. 481.
3 Jacques Derrida’s strategy has been “to decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break”: Margins: Of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 135. This might be read as a description of events in France at the time the essay was finished—“May 12, 1968” (p. 136)— were the proclamation of a future “which breaks absolutely” not a leitmotif in Derrida; cf. the “Exergue” to his Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 5.
4 See the editor’s postscript, BzP p. 514.
5 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 62. {2001 edition p. 60}
6 The modern national states seem to be taken by Heidegger as avatars of Roman republicanism, if not of Caesarism: “The Roman relation to beings is managed by the imperium,” he wrote in 1942—43; from this imperial conception of being stems Roman law (ius, deriving from iubeo, “I command”). Now this ‘Roman essence of truth finds its completion ... in the nineteenth century”: Parmenides (lecture course of 1942-43), vol. 54 cf. Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982), pp. 65, 86. On Heidegger’s deliberate obliteration of the concept of state, see the following note.
7 It is needless to set one’s nerves on edge over this word. Its theoretical usefulness goes back a long way: it has to do with German quarrels over the concept of state. From at least the time of Friedrich List, “political economy” has been rendered in German as Volkswirtschaft; the League of Nations was the Völkerbund; since Kant, “international law” has been Völkerrecht, and so on. Among German theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word “people” had no ethnic connotations; it was a terminological choice due primarily to negative motives. One has only to open Adam Smith to see how fluid the concept of “nation” was at the time. The concept of state was no better suited to the Germans by reason of their Kleinstaaterei and their Vielstaaterei—the proliferation of their mini-states. In the social sciences and philosophy, Volk was used to avoid these semantic difficulties. In the mid-1930s, in opposition to the word’s univocal use under National Socialism, Heidegger appeals to its polysemy. The “abandonment by being,” he writes, appears in particular in the “total insensitivity to polysemy [Vieldeutigkeit].” Thus the word “people” evokes at once that which characterizes “the community, the race, that which is low and inferior, the nation, that which endures” (BzP, p. 117). This pollachēs legetai is instructive, since the last of these ways “the people” is said, barely conceals a polemic against what does not endure: the state—from which Heidegger had just withdrawn his services. Neither in Being and Time (§ 74) nor in BzP can the word Volk be taken without some argumentum baculinum to support the thesis of a persistent ultranationalism on Heidegger’s part.
8 “Only a God Can Save Us Now” (interview with Der Spiegel), trans. D. Schendler, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6 (1977): 21.
9 The “there” (da) thus takes the place of what in Being and Time Heidegger had called eigentlich, usually translated as the “authentic”; the “not-there” (weg) takes the place of the “inauthentic” (BzP p. 323ff.).
10 Derrida deems “fatal” the removal of quotation marks from the word ‘spirit’ (esprit, Geist) in Heidegger, after Being and Time: De l’espirit (Paris: Galilée, 1987). He insists heavily on this (pp. 24, 65, 66, 87, 90, 100). There may be something of a rhetorical tactic in both the charge and his insistence, since they obviously serve to distance him from Heidegger. They also seem to serve the more astonishing tactic of stepping out of “metaphysics”: a tactic for which, Derrida declares, one needs only to “decide [sic] to change terrain” (see above, note 3). This candor has something perplexing about it. What could possibly guide one in such a decision? What would be its conditions and its means? Has not Derrida himself reiterated the extent to which λόγος ties every statement back to the “old ground”? Doubtless a more local quarrel is also being carried out behind the scenes: Derrida is obviously demarcating himself from French philosophy, which (as every handbook tells it) was spiritualist until the arrival in France of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. So be it. This rattling of axes to grind should not, however, obscure the fact that Derrida, seeking to inscribe National Socialism within the spiritualist tradition—in order to place himself abruptly, irruptively, absolutely outside—responds poorly. I find the responsibility regarding the monstrous site that is ours better kept by the Derrida who observes that the “the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new terrain on the oldest ground” (Margins, p. 135). The subjectivist allegiance commanded by Heideggerian “spirit,” just as by Derridean “decision,” “choice” (Margins, p. 135—without quotation marks), and so on, must be viewed as an object lesson demonstrating the impossibility of jumping over our epochal closure. No text administers this lesson more harshly, however, than Heidegger’s Beiträge.
11 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B. 397.
12 The originary double bind in Heidegger—i.e., the tragic condition of being—is discussed in the articles cited in note 1; for the distinction between natality and mortality, cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 9, 117, 247.
13 The word obviously alludes to maneuvers (mechanēma) such as the ones to which Agamemnon fell victim (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, p. 981). The victim of these machinations is bound in “toils no bronzesmith made” (p. 492), caught in a net that is also a trap. In the German vocabulary of hunting, one would say he is gestellt. The two words Heidegger uses to describe contemporary technology, Machenschaft and Gestell, connote the hunting trap and the tracking-down of prey.
14 Martin Heidegger, “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” trans. W. Kaufmann, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: New American Library, 1975), p. 208. According to the Contributions, the “questioning conversation” with the Greeks “already requires the leap” into the other beginning (BzP p. 169).
15 This disparity is already operative in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the distinction between being as givenness and as category; it becomes explicit in the Critique of Judgment, sec. 76.
16 E.g., “the Suprasensory World, the Ideas, God, the Moral Law, the Authority of Reason, Progress, the Happiness of the Greatest Number, Culture, Civilization”: Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 65.
Reiner Schürmann - Riveted to a Monstrous Site: On Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie
Translated by Kathleen Blamey.