Reiner Schürmann
In his invitation to this conference, Professor Harries suggested that, among other topics, we discuss the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s political commitments. I shall not speak of these commitments themselves. They resulted, however, in a new understanding of Heidegger’s single issue—the question of being—which from then on was to endure until his last writings. As I see it, the philosophical significance of those events can be summarized in one sentence: they prompted a brutal awakening to the tragic condition of being.
Tragedy consists in a legal double bind. Antigone, Creon, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Eteocles—all owe allegiance both to the edicts of their city and to the customs of their family lineage. Living under the tragic double bind is unbearable, which is why each of them chose his or her univocal law, for example, Antigone that of the family, and Creon that of the city. Their denial of the conflicting law, however, proves hubristic. By tragic logic they perish. Blinded—literally, in the cases of Oedipus and Tiresias—to a world held together by single binds, the hero’s eyes are opened to that other logic. Their empty and black globes see the double bind admitting of no reconciliation, superelevation or synthesis. They see the human condition, the clear knowledge of which is tragic knowledge.
Heidegger had to “err greatly”1 to attain this knowledge. His first major work written after the events of 1933-34 (and according to some, his one major work pure and simple), the Beiträge zur Philosophie,2 attests to the tragic as does no other philosophical document of our century. In this work, Heidegger pursues the question of being qua being and answers it (although not in exactly those words) by interpreting being itself as the one originary double bind. As such, it places us under disparate laws that are mutually exclusive but without disjoining parts of one genus.
Stated succinctly, this means that the law of phenomenalization or contextualization, i.e., of a thing’s entry into a world, binds it otherwise than the law of singularization or decontextualization, i.e., of its possible expulsion from its world. Heidegger provides a number of descriptions for this double bind of phenomenalization versus singularization. The most pertinent for tracing the rehabilitation of tragic logic is their description as appropriation and expropriation. Despite their lexical symmetry, these do not pertain to one and the same genus. If they did, they would not be ultimate as Aeschylus and Sophocles narrate them to be. If they were jointly exhaustive of one genus, they would be secondary to its covering law. In the absence of any such subsumptive single bind the conflict of appropriation and expropriation remains one of “differing.”3
It is no exaggeration to say that this insight into the tragic condition of being moves Heidegger’s thinking until his very last writings. Perhaps for reasons having to do with his own rude awakening to that knowledge and in order to have his own errancy instantiate the originary double bind, he came to characterize our place in history as a transitive site. In the mid-thirties, the insight into tragic differing, conjoined with the hypothesis of a historical transition comparable only to the Greek beginning, was put to work to lash out at what appeared as our own age’s single bind: cultural isomorphism, metaphysical as well as technical.
These sorties have something ambiguous about them. His own collusion with the one most brutally subsumptive regime, Heidegger suggested, was due to one bind—he would say, one “trait,” and I will also say “strategy”—in being’s way to be: he had let himself be appropriated by the regime, hubristically denying the other bind, trait or strategy, expropriation. But such hubris is the very essence of metaphysical posits, including their latest hegemonic offspring, the uniformity spread by modern technology. Under the highly paradoxical title Beiträge zur Philosophie, Heidegger thus claims to have returned from philosophy and its thetic professionalism just as at the end of any Greek tragedy the hero returns from his thetic denial of tragic differing.
This, then, is Heidegger’s charge: philosophical theticism, Bolshevism, Americanism, and National Socialism, as well as his own “erring,” all repeat the tragic denial by which the Greek hero chose his law. If the originary double bind consists in phenomenalization versus singularization, then all of these various posits repeat Creon’s denial of the singular.
But a denial is no simple matter. One can only deny what one has somehow seen, even if to obliterate it. Hence Heidegger’s attempt, in his lectures on the history of philosophy in those years, to set free what metaphysicians have seen, yet systematically denied. This is time as singularizing all phenomena.
Does the same structure of seeing and denying, I first ask, not hold true of the items he so boldly equates: Bolshevism, Judaism, Christianity, “the rise of the masses, industry, technology ..., the rule of reason... .” (BzP 54)? If all of these figures of the isomorphic arise from a manic denial of the nongeneric other, then isomorphism conceals—that is, both hides and yields—the tragic. It will, therefore, be useful to look first at the phenomenon of modern cultural isomorphism and inquire about the other that is repressed there and perhaps returns even as it is repressed. I will then describe tragic logic as the attempt to reach an originary condition that puts common names out of their subsumptive function.
Concerning the Isomorphic: Archic and Anarchic
What is, when the struggle for standards is dying out?
(BzP 28)
The project of uniforming the world institutes the modern age. Thus, why did substances facing the subject need to be termed “extended” at the rise of modernity, if not to make them equal in their forms, i.e., uniform, isomorphic? In Kant, the uniformization of phenomena is obtained through the inner sense. This means that only what can be temporalized is a datum and that only what can be ordered in calculable succession or simultaneity is temporal. As for the acts of the understanding, there are powerful reasons why the first of these acts must concern what can be measured and calculated. Since the subject knows only perceptions that are measurable in their spatial and temporal extendedness, the first Kantian category has to be that of quantity. Thus, the uniform and the quantifiable must not be treated as mere consequences of the “Copernican revolution” toward the legislating subject. Quite the reverse: only because every phenomenon has to be accessible to calculation—because its phenomenality is summed up in its calculability—the subject has to occupy the place of legislator. Establishing itself as the spontaneous source of the laws of being, the subject will be certain that these laws are indeed everywhere the same.
The modern regularity of phenomena results, then, from an act of anticipation, from an a priori positing, a thesis. For Heidegger, the spontaneous subject is defined by this very theticism alone. “Positing a rule ahead” (BzP 161) is the one gesture that constitutes both the autonomous agent and the datum uniformed by him. Now, a rule prescribing what ought to be is called a “norm.” The isomorphic is the normal. The shortest way to show how the isomorphic results from the positing of norms is the historical. Step by step, this way leads from modern universal μάθησις to a kind of abyss whose bottomlessness forms the very content of tragic knowledge.
To the Cartesian and Kantian institution of the project of mathematization responds its full-blown success in the twentieth century. Heidegger describes today’s planetary deployment of this project in terms of “giganticism” and “operative machination.” In these descriptions, the isomorphic appears as the terminus of a particular modern trajectory. It is the mode of being in which triumphs the strictest focusing of phenomena upon subjectivity.4 Read this way—that is, tied back to the early modern project of a universal μάθησις—the question cited above, “What is, when the struggle for standards is dying out?”, emphasizes the extinguishing of the struggle. There is no longer a struggling for norms, since everything amounts to the same. In many polemical pronouncements, Heidegger phrases and rephrases the emphasis on the withering of standards, for example, in the equations that I quoted between Bolshevism, Americanism, National Socialism, Judaism, and Christianity. If these are all moving along the same path, they plainly have ceased to fight among themselves to set the standard. What prevails in their grey-on-grey is the standardizing of nature construed transcendentally by the rules of subjective temporalization and quantification. Isomorphism is thus held to characterize one epoch, the one in which the hegemonic “I think” sets the standard.
However, the historical thread that has guided us to an isomorphic site leads, to be sure, from much further back. Normalization is ancient. Prior to forcing conformity with the subject, it forced conformity with the type. Heidegger traces a genealogy that leads from the type (from the idea) to the subject (to transcendental idealism) and, finally, to “machination” (to the ideal of performing). Such a genealogy can be drawn in retrospect since the constellations of mastery that have produced a history’s genesis from its inception onward appear only at its end. Here these constellations have to do with phantasms and isomorphism, that is to say, with norms and the normal or with standards and the standardized. The violence of the ideal as the master of meaning resides in its formalism. A para-digm shows (δεικ-) how to define something. It formalizes that to which it is applied, informs it by making it nameable, conforms it to what it ought to be—in short, uniforms and standardizes it. Such is archic isomorphism: the uniformity imposed by a type, an idea, a model, a cause or some other variety of ἀρχή.
Heidegger’s historical critique spots an illusion at the heart of this very uniformity imprinted by the ideal on what passes for the real. It is the one historical illusion, “the essence of which is deeper still than ‘the dialectical illusion’ made visible by Kant” (BzP 461), namely, to believe that a normative difference separates the ideal from the real. In retrospect, the lineage issuing from the Platonic idea only seems to have been driven by the focal meaning that an age posited as great, hegemonic, normative, ideal; epochal history only seems to have been moved by ultimate referents. There could be neither norms nor the normalized unless being had from the outset been made amenable to possible operations of measurement and calculation. It must have been construed so as to lend itself to such operations. In one word, it must have been made isomorphic by a prior constraint and a prior reduction. Being must have been understood beforehand in an algebraic manner (algebra coming from an Arabic word signifying precisely “constraint” and “reduction”). Otherwise, no valuation of high and low could ever have been performed on it.
The isomorphic does not, then, follow a referent posited as archic. Rather, it includes this referent. When he states that algebra contains the key to all knowledge, Descartes is merely axiomatizing the most ancient pre-understanding of being. What could be more calculating than to say, for example: “Here is teleological Nature, it is what is greatest, it sets the standard”? Or: “Here is transcendental Subjectivity, it gives meaning to all phenomena”? Retrospectively, the prestige of the normative reveals, from its rise in ancient Greece, the prestige of the calculable. But this illusion of algebraic isomorphism will never appear to a merely historicist screening of epochal ideals. “Ideals,” Heidegger writes, “are of an essence that is not properly historical [geschichtlich], but historiological [historisch]” (BzP 443). Their respective promotion and sphere of influence can be inventoried just like that of any other leading representation in factual history. The historical, on the other hand, does not lend itself to recording and comparing. It concerns “only what relates to Being: to the decided, the un-decided, the indecisive” (BzP 443), that is, to the caesuras setting epochs apart. What is not to be missed in contemporary “giganticism” is the epiphany of what norms and the normal are about. Their difference is the very content of the illusion in which one key referent commands operations such as predicating and naming. The normative difference is the content of the archic illusion accompanying the common, the κοινόν, in all its variations.
There occurs indeed, Heidegger writes, a veritable “‘wizardry of what is universally valid” (BzP 343) as the common designates at once the form unifying particulars into a class—making them uniform—and the standard serving as their model. The isomorphic extends the universal without bounds in the first sense; phantasms maximize it without a beyond, in the second. The historical thread, unraveled back as far as the Greeks, reveals thus a duplicity under the long career of the common. Perhaps this double game played by the representations of the same becomes obvious only once the normalized extensiveness of the κοινόν and its normative intensiveness have obviously collapsed into one-dimensional technology. Then, “being as that which is the most common,” i.e., its boundless extensiveness, lets all beings “be most intensely,” i.e., its ultimate intensiveness (BzP 444, 136). When each being counts as ὄντως ὄν, then all are equivalent, equally valid and indifferent (glezchgültig). This is the moment of the decisive crisis when, once and for all, “the struggle for standards is dying out.”
With the detour via the genealogy of being as idea, the emphasis lies rather on the first part of the question cited, namely: “What is?” Answer: under the theticism of the idea and of all that has been endowed with value ever since, only the isomorphic is. The history of being, however, gives this answer a fuller resonance than the modern mathematization of phenomena from the focal point of the ego. In the twentieth century—and for Heidegger, in the mid-1930s—it becomes unmistakable that stepping back from the normalized to its norm, one goes literally from the similar to the same. Whence this truth of archic isomorphism: it has never served anything but an illusion covering up thetic, integrative violence.
The collapse of the normative difference into isomorphism is thus ancient. Today, it is deepening into an abyss. Heidegger responds to that collapse by a No and a Yes that are equally vehement. No to isomorphism, since the standardized world makes being-there (Da-sein) difficult and rare; since it perverts being-there into being-away (Wegsein, BzP 323). Yes, since for the phenomenologist of being, there is nothing other than singulars. This there is, to be sure, is not nothing. It “is” being itself qua event. But a universal and most intense being, which would be normative for everything else as it locates all things between the top and the bottom of a scale, lacks any phenomenality. Or, rather, it possesses only phantasmic phenomenality, as the one historical illusion.
With this Yes to phenomenal isomorphism, the motive of the vehemence that prompted Heidegger to wager on a certain political movement becomes clearer. If archic isomorphism, in the shape of one phantasm or another, has kept us enchanted for over two thousand years, the work of disenchanting the world was already completed in the first half of the twentieth century. Giganticism and machination had effectively taken care of idealities. They had already displayed in the full light of day the evidence that all beings are worth the most intensely being. All ὄντα are worth the one ὄντως ὄν. Did the movement in question not promise a break with that sameness, as it set out to relocate the “we”? The isomorphism of the most monotonous indistinction at least conveys this truth about being: there is no use probing for depth in the direction of ἀρχαί. The whole problematic of the profound and the superficial proves to be essentially calculative as it amounts to measuring one being against another. Depth, then, needs to be thought anew. There is nothing to be sought behind phenomena; they themselves are to be preserved in the caesura in which the event of contextualization-decontextualization displays them. The normative “difference” (Unterscherdung) between beings and one figure or another of their beingness gets put out of function by a step back toward the “decision” (Entscheidung, BzP 455) between these figures and event-like being. Only if one has never bothered to open a single page of Heidegger can that decision be construed as some human initiative. It accounts rather for the heterogeneity in the double step back by which Heidegger transmutes the ancient theme of the a priori. Difference allows one to move from beings to their illusory depth which is thetic and therefore archic; decision, on the other hand, moves from these illusions to their phenomenal condition which is event-like and therefore anarchic.
The Yes to the isomorphic understood this way—that is, to the collapse of normative beingness into normalized beings—sustains the narrative which is the history of being. “Once, beingness became the most intensely being [ὄντως ὄν].” From this point forward, “being has had the character of beingness.” And how has the latter been understood? “Always and solely as the κοινόν, as that which is common and thus ordinary for all beings” (BzP 243, 425, 75). Now if being has all along been posited as beingness (as one posits a foundation) and beingness in turn has been represented as one among beings, then the ancient question, “What is the being of beings?” only phrased a management program applied to beings that have been tacitly understood5 to be all worth the same, but among which this or that one was held worth promoting to the rank of standard for the sake of consoling the soul and consolidating the city. The question, “What is the being of beings?” is thus embarrassing for its redundancy. The way that question has been reiterated by the functionaries of mankind,6 it has made them revolve among beings that are strictly equivalent.
The ambiguity of isomorphism could not be stated more pathetically. On the one hand, it tells the truth about beings. No system of qualities except an illusory one ranks them, and the theticism that promotes one or the other among them has never been anything but an act of arch-violence, selecting one representation to decree a stop to questioning. The essential hubris of normative posits has not failed to fade in with the epochal breaks undergone by them. Yes to anarchic isomorphism in which beings remain unclassifiable—alike in this—and resist subsumption under some one meaning-bestowing value.
On the other hand, however, with a shower of quotation marks, Heidegger denounces isomorphism. Thus, in the mid-1930s, “a renewal of ‘culture’ is being ‘called’ for and its rooting in the ‘people’ is being busily pursued with the aim of communicating it to everyone” (BzP 496). Tirades like this abound. Their target is, of course, what Heidegger felt to be the betrayal committed by the National Socialists. Instead of singularizing the German people so that it responds to the Greek, the party has subjected it to a “popularization” (BzP 496) as flat as in America or the Soviet Union. The uprising did indeed take place, but it has ended up perverting everything. Rather than letting the singular be the first (das Erste), the leaders have engaged in positing a stupefying focal meaning: the essence of the masses (das Massenhafte, BzP 122). It has inflated collective subjectivism to the extreme, placing itself thereby in the direct descent of the normative idea and of the standardized, hence, of archic isomorphism.
Anarchic isomorphism, in which the singular yields only to incommensurable strokes of time, announces itself as a possibility in archic isomorphism, the mere aftereffect of some universal representation ruling as the one great, profound, efficient valuative standard—a standard indicating in its turn the algebraic presupposition that is as old as the normative illusion.
Having taken note that the normative struggle is dying out, Heidegger does not, thus, join the chorus that calls for standards. He does something different. He raises the oldest question in philosophy, that of the enabling conditions.
In the sway of the indifferent and the indistinct, the condition which is the event of phenomenalization-singularization is indeed both seen and denied. This is why the tragic strife of being cannot even become a problem as long as some normative hegemony goes without saying, impervious to questioning. But anarchic isomorphism does not fit with the indifferent produced by archic reference. They clash monstrously; this term describes our site. Archic centerings and anarchic decenterings hold us pathetically; this term describes our double bind. Riveted to the monstrous site so described, it is a matter of “destinal” (geschicklich) logic that late modernity should find itself more exposed to collective pathologies than any other age.
What is, then, while the struggle for the standards set by ἀρχαί—by ultimate referents, normative foci, hegemonic phantasms—withers away? What comes to be is the possibility that an older, more hidden, struggle can openly flare up: that of the event of appropriation-expropriation, whose essence is the tragic.
To follow this rehabilitation of the tragic, which is the sole point I wish to make, one has to read Heidegger otherwise than as if the “ontological difference,” with the normative depth it suggests, were his last word.
On the Other that Is Being: The Nameless Tragic
Being and beings by no means allow themselves to be distinguished immediately because in no way do they relate immediately to one another
(BzP 477)
It remains the candor of the natural metaphysician in each of us to believe that beings “relate immediately” to being, if only by a common name bestowed. In the name of “the unwritten and unshakable law of the gods,”7 Antigone consoles her soul and dares to defy Creon. In the name of edicts, the acts of his kingship, Creon consolidates the city and condemns Antigone. Later, it was thought that in the name of nature one could distinguish between simple “acts of man” and “human acts” proper. Each time, normative depth is being sought in one noun. To free the tragic condition of being, Heidegger must destroy the prestige of common names.
This exercise of destruction serves to reveal ourselves to ourselves as bearers of a future potential, not to undeceive us as the victims of mystifications past. Once the normative difference (in which beings would relate immediately to being as their common name) has been recognized as theticism’s illusory core, varied over the centuries cum ira et studio, then the conflictual condition of being itself becomes thinkable. To catch a glimpse of this condition in which no common name covers the disparate that is the case, it suffices to listen to the advocate—the historical “they’—who speaks in the name of what the French so aptly call une idee arrétée: the stop decreed to institute the rule of one ideality or another. This advocate pleads what the natural metaphysician in us has been saying all along and what the genealogy of phantasms makes apparent: he speaks of everything and of nothing; the name of an idea meaning everything but the stop, l'arrêté, saying nothing (except an “investment”).8 What is then glimpsed is a condition freed of stoppages and decrees, of the presuppositions implied in the professional maxim not to proceed indefinitely in the quest of conditions, of all ἐπέκειν, of every epochal fixation. A condition becomes thinkable in which being, as it does not subsume particulars under some one common name, does not relate in any immediate way to singulars.
To understand being as time—Heidegger’s one issue, throughout—is to understand that in any configuration of presencing the singularization to come disrupts phenomena. But as such a strife, being does not relate immediately to beings, whose condition it therefore is to remain unbound. This is the lesson of technological giganticism. To a retrospective reading of our history, the self-revelation of the isomorphic in contemporary technology brings to light an inner discord that has worked on historical time as if from beneath (unterzeitlich, BzP 108). In the absence of normative immediacy, the question of being can only remain an open one.
Only those to whom this or that representation is everything, and therefore binds everything, also have an answer to everything. The entire lineage of historical illusions is there to supply examples of such fictitiously immediate relations. The case of classical natural law may illustrate these single binds. Understood as a normative principle of continuity between regions of experience, nature has to relate immediately to each of the phenomena, or phenomenal regions, that it homologizes: the soul, the city, humankind, the cosmos. In natural law theory, nature is held to subsume their diversity under its teleological regime. To the genealogist, however, the order of ends it imposes has in advance been posited for the sake of an end, that is, for the sake of immediately relating this ultimate referent to each being.
The “decision,” by which the Heidegger of the 1930s seeks to dismantle systems of normative subsumption, cuts focal meanings such as nature loose from being as event. Stated otherwise, following a play of graphemes, being (Sein) as the common referent of beings stands cut loose from being that is to remain a question (Seyn) because of its intrinsic strife.
To understand the ontological difference as describing the being “of beings” is to miss straight away the otherness Heidegger seeks to rehabilitate. Construed around the genitive case, the difference only follows the old schema of an immediate, subsumptive, normative, nominative, entitative relation—in one word: the relation of single binds. But does this key really open doors to the most ancient question in philosophy, or does it rather force the lock? There has been no lack of solutions to the problem of being—according to Heidegger, one and all forcing and falsifying it beyond possible διασωζειν.9 It is always beingness whose numerous modulations have provided the answers, not without having first turned the question of a verb and its temporalizing function in language, into that of a noun and its stabilizing function. Thus the normative difference between nature and an act thought to be natural answers first of all the question, “In the name of what?” Only on the strength of an authoritative name does it also answer the question, What is being? Nature can provide a focal meaning, homologize ends, and differ thereby from beings, only once the complex event of presencing has been obliterated for the sake of stable presence and once this presence has been phantasized in accordance with the interests of order and perdurance.
Normative referents succeed in subsuming singulars only at the price of a violence that cancels out disparity, that imposes archic isomorphism, that turns being into some phantasm of beingness, and that buries otherness in terminal forgetfulness.
So what? one may ask. The “what” is an institutionalized violence that is terminal in a more brutal sense.
What is at once being seen and denied under the recourse to hegemonic phantasms betrays itself in an old anguish: Where are we going? In terms of the monstrous site that is late modernity: Where is the archic-anarchic pathos of our epoch taking us? Or again, aiming more directly at the forgetfulness concealed by this monstrousness and this pathos: If in place of ultimate principles one is to think of an originary strife, rehabilitating nonsubsumable disparates, then where does being, as so radically other, point? By way of a response, Heidegger designates an abyss. But the abyssus is a theme as old as angustia. Put side by side, the two words “abyss” and “anguish” may even produce some handsome literary effects, though perhaps a bit old-fashioned. The exact terrain traversed by this abyss needs therefore to be mapped out, and its trail traced with some precision.
Its terrain is the terrain of all terrains: “The abyss is the originary unity of space and time.” As to its trail, it follows a lack, a flight: “The abyss [means] that the ground stays away” (BzP 379). One is to think, it seems, of a fault incising a vanishing line into every foundational representation.
An operation of diachronic geography consists in inscribing some terrain in space and time. These constitute therefore the terrain of all possible terrains. The inscription of a spatiotemporal figure requires that space and time precede it as essentially isomorphic. Such has been, at least, the modern way of construing them. Space and time must be forms (not contents) of magnitude (pure extensions), infinite (not structured from within), and given (neither acquired, nor abstracted). To speak of space and time is to speak of empty dimensions preceding every phenomenon and making it available to possible measurement. Inscribing a phenomenon amounts to calculating the place it occupies in these dimensions. Their epochal representation joins them together in various ways, to construe in advance the empty frame within which every object figures as one piece in a combination of extensions. For the representational subject, nothing has being unless it fills the a priori emptiness in accordance with the dimensions of “in front of,” “next to,” “below,” or “above,” as well as “before,” “after,” or “simultaneously.” For the moderns, the originary unity of space and time resides in the subject who prescribes them to every object of possible experience in view of its universal μάθησις.
Heidegger, we saw, translates the transcendental illusion into a historical one, where it effects a certain epoch and a certain destiny. He does not proceed otherwise with spatial and temporal apriorism. As it was born from the project of mathematization and serves it, this apriorism offers the perfect tool for containing, repressing, and mastering the tragic. The interest behind these operations, however, becomes blatant as one observes the representations of space and time at work. No great suspicion is needed to notice that the Where? and When? have never been as neutral as they were claimed to be. They have, on the contrary, always and essentially worked to the advantage of one or another historical phantasm and its regime. Where? and When? are referential questions: where and when in reference to a focalizing center? The void or empty magnitude they open needs therefore to be structured in advance; for instance, in reference to the Aristotelian ἓν or to Kantian reflection. How, then, can the paradox of such a structured void even be thought of if not on the basis of some structuring agency—the One as substance, the Subject as consciousness—ordering phenomena? Spatiotemporal mathematization has never been innocently “theoretical”; it has never been disinterested. It is comprehensible only as labor: the labor of strengthening hegemonies.
Whether construed ousiologically or transcendentally, beingness differs from beings in that it arranges them into referential juxtapositions and sequences. Now, Heidegger’s step back from beingness reinscribes the spatiotemporal problematic within the phenomenology of event. At the monstrous limit of universal mathematization, space-time turns into the singular “stead of an instant” (Augenblicksstdtte, BzP 375). That turning moves from isomorphic, i.e, measurable time to the abyss of incommensurable times.
“The abyss is the originary unity of space and time.” The origin, it seems, has to be thought otherwise than as ground-providing substance or subject, for “the abyss [means] that ground stays away” (BzP 379). Therefore, Abgrund has, first of all, a negative connotation. It designates the collapse of bedrock that could serve as a bottom on which to posit shapes of the normative difference.
In this difference the origin is literally significant, as a foundational posit signifies to us what to be and what to do. It renders autochthonous those who seek stability there. To the sedentary, it guarantees a common name. Among those who claim the same signifier—whose common name is ab origine, aboriginal—there can be no diversity, nothing disparate. The ground (the origin and basis of their spatiotemporal cohesion) endows them with more than a name; it normalizes those it names, lays down their law. In the Abgrund, on the other hand, the Grund on which one common name would grant autochthony slips away. In describing the origin of time and space as abyssal, Heidegger cuts short the idyll of the home soil, because he cuts out the meaningful effects of common names. How, then, is one to think of an origin that signifies no univocal integration or belonging?
In order to deactivate the mechanics of normative signification (and hence to disengage the clutch connecting ought to is), Heidegger preferred for a few years to strike out the word Seyn—an erasure that set the style for much of French writing for over a decade. Just about anything was then put “under erasure”: the name of the father obviously, that of capital, of spirit, and in their sweep any sign naively charged with meaning. The wave of erasures was followed by that of palimpsests. The word crossed out rhymed only too well with the repressed, whose fragmented return one had to prove capable of deciphering. Such is the way of fashion. Literary effects are however one thing; the question of Being and its gravity for our self-understanding is quite another. At least in reading Heidegger, only the other that is being remains nameless. This is so since its intrinsic disaccord no longer lends it to normative posits.
Negating any name of the ἀρχή does not amount to spilling over into some mysticism of the origin. How could this be so when anarchy designates the inner break within grounds and underpinnings, which has been operative all along in theticism? The other that being is does not counter archic posits with their determinate negation. Counter posits only play to enhance archic referents, “father” and “capital” included. The anarchic and the archic, too, “by no means allow themselves to be distinguished immediately because in no way do they relate immediately to one another.”
To say that “being” names nothing, that it is not a name, is to rob it of the very power that has instituted all hegemonies: the subsumptive power. That power fades together with the common name. Under the other that is being, regional laws remain disparate—as the tragic playwrights had known and as Heidegger had to rediscover in those fateful years. A retrospective reading of epochal hegemonies would reveal that we have always lived under differing strategies forever deprived of one adjudicating phantasm.
“The abyss” designates this inner conflictuality of being in several ways. All of them have to do with Ereignis (the event of appropriation-expropriation).
Where the ground slips away, something unfathomable opens up. To speak of the abyss is then to recognize a retraction toward a measureless No that wins out over the attraction of all Yes and of measure: in the abyss opens up “the originary nothingness that belongs to being itself and hence to the event” (BzP 388).
Being as event is abyssal because it is nonfoundational (abgründig). Yet it, too, is structured from within. Not, to be sure, through one more standard meaning for a priori operations, but rather, through the “steads of an instant.” Space and time do originate in the event, although no longer as if in some focus centering them in advance of experience and for its sake. How does the transmutation throw spatiotemporal representations off their received axes? Heidegger turns the pure dimensions of universal mathematization into singular traits, singularizing the event. The monstrosity of our historical site appears clearly when the Aristotelian categories Where? and When?, together with their Kantian offspring, get converted—perverted perhaps, certainly subverted—into singular traits that make up the event. In any phenomenal presencing, nothing other than the singularization to come is what accounts for being as event. But unlike the crypto-henology so often read into Heidegger, there is no oneness, no simplicity, no harmony to be found in this jointure of phenomenalization-singularization. The “emptiness of the abyss” does point to the event as “joined” together (gefügt, BzP 381); yet, since its jointure occurs in strife, this still means that any aeonic10 terrain sinks away from under the here and the now.
The abyss, thus, leads toward the decision-caesura where being cuts itself off from epochal hegemonies. Heidegger redirects the appanage of the German mystics: “The ‘void’ is just as much, and properly speaking, the fullness of what remains still undecided and to be decided: the abyssal” (BzP 382). The abyss exerts no power at all, but it contains the fullness of possibles."11
Heidegger calls the locus of that decision ahead of us Da-sein. A perplexing contingency thus comes to characterize man’s being. Being-there continues to be outstanding as long as man seeks to posit himself on some univocally normative foundation. It comes about as we make our own the strife that our death reveals, whose condition in being is the singularization to come. Being-there’s own place is the abyss of the ground lost and of singularization regained. At the risk of losing itself unto death (not out of a willing like Leonidas, but out of a knowing like Oedipus), being-there must keep the groundless. “Holding firmly onto the abyss belongs to the essence of being-there” (BzP 460).
What is abyssal, finally, is the tragic contrariety itself that through all these strategies Heidegger seeks to rehabilitate in being, beyond theticism. On this point, there is no “influence” to deconstruct. His quest to renounce all names that lay down the law and to affirm tragic being remains without precedent in the history of ultimacy claims. The event, then, equals originary strife. “Being: the event.” “Abyss: as the timespace of strife” (BzP 346).
Is it reading too much into Heidegger’s sudden awakening in the mid-1930s to view it as the task to think an originary condition for which every referential name of being has to fail? He would then be echoing Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus. In this tragedy, the most difficult for us moderns to understand, all questioning has ceased. Contrariety has been accepted, even affirmed as the hero’s condition, whom it leaves broken. Something analogous happens to Heidegger after his error. Concerning the entry into the singular “stead of an instant,” he asks: “In what way [does this occur] in Greek tragedy?” (BzP 374). He seeks to accept and to affirm in being the strife of appropriation-expropriation. However, to become guardians of the undertow that breaks them, “‘rational living’ beings must first become mortals.”12
Whatever may have to be said about the man Martin Heidegger, in the mid-1930s his thinking underwent a brutal awakening that led from tragic denial to the recognition of an originary tragic double bind.
The philosophical question is not whether the reinterpretation would have occurred that way without the expectations he had invested in the political movement of the day and without the harsh turnabout that ensued. The question concerns rather what he calls the “terrible warning” given by history since antiquity (BzP 73), i.e., by the thetic hubris culminating today in planetary technology. Would Creon have seen the conflicting laws of city and family without first having blinded himself in his nomothesis, against Antigone? The Greeks did not speak of ὕβρις εὐτυχής (felix culpa). Yet, this would have been an apt description of the tragic crisis. Not that it leads to a happy ending. But, compelled in the end to acknowledge his hubris, what does the hero see? He stops denying that there is, that there has always been, a legal double bind. In the crisis marked by guilt and sorrow, hubristic blindness turns into the visionary blindness embodied in Tiresias and Oedipus. Being as discord is seen by bloodied eye-sockets alone and affirmed in silence.
Heidegger had hoped for a German response to the Greek inception. Little did he suspect how right he would prove to be. Far from repeating in late modernity the ancient genesis from Homer to Solon, the “history of being” has ended up making us traverse the tragic crisis, leading us from hubristic blindness and guilt to the clear vision—today at least a possibility—of originary unconcealment-concealment. Suddenly it is no longer Rede that is first, and silence a mere modification;13 like the heroes of Aeschylus and Sophocles, our age had to learn the ineluctable double bind. Hence “language is grounded in silence” (BzP 510). At Colonus, Oedipus vows “not to break silence concerning things forbidden.” In Sophocles, these have to do with something Oedipus knows, with tragic knowledge. Indeed, blinded, he sees: “In all that I speak there shall be sight.”14 Likewise in Heidegger. The undertow that ruins univocal normative referents from within remains unspeakable. The legislator on whom certain texts of Heidegger’s had counted for the “proper founding” of a new site had failed. As a result, τόπος needed to be understood otherwise. Thus an awakening occurred to the topical fissuring that legislators—and in their service, philosophical functionaries—have always made it their job to cover up. The hubristic blindness that had led to the statement, “The Führer himself alone is the German reality of today and of tomorrow as well as its law,”15 turns into the tragic blindness that sees the retraction of death in the very attraction for life; that sees concealment in unconcealment and expropriation in appropriation; or again (but these are not Heidegger’s words), the singularization to come in any phenomenal economy; hence, in terms of the law, the transgression in every hegemonic legislation.
Translated from the French by Kathleen Blamey
1 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 9.
2 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), cited hereafter as BzP. This volume has long been announced by Otto Pöggeler, who kept his readers in suspense for a quarter of a century, as Heidegger’s one major work; the Beiträge alone, he claimed, contain Heidegger’s genuine thinking which the public lectures and courses were merely to make accessible to a more general audience; Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), p. 145. The Beiträge were said to constitute his “major work proper [das eigentliche Hauptwerk]”; Poggeler, “Heidegger und die hermeneutische Theologie,” in Verifikationen: Festschrift für Gerhard Ebeling (Tübingen: Mohr, 1982), p. 481. The present article is fully understandable only in conjunction with three related papers: “Riveted to a Monstrous Site,” in J. Margolis and T. Rockmore, eds., The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 313-30; “Ultimate Double Binds,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14 (1991): 213-36; “Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on “That Which Saves’ in the Global Reach,” in M. R. Zinman, ed., The Destiny of Modern Technology, Cornell University Press (forthcoming).
3 Cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
4 “In giganticism is displayed the grandeur of the subjectum sure of itself and building everything upon its own representation and production” (BzP 441). By Machenschaft is to be understood “the schema of thorough and calculative
5 “All have agreed no longer to raise any questions” (BzP 491)—a statement not suggesting, to be sure, some consensus among subjects.
6 “We are the functionaries of mankind,” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 17.
7 ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα , Sophocles, Antigone, I. 441f.
8 The “doctrine of principles” has been handed down by the Greeks like a principal—a fund or a stock—on which philosophers have unceasingly speculated, maximizing the return on man’s natural desire for univocity. Their theticism (Setzen) has served furthermore to “invest” that desire in the sense of Besetzung, cathexis. Like Creon’s and Agamemnon’, theirs have been unilateral investments: for public order, against its disparate opposite, the singular.
9 The philosophical work other than officiary has been described by Eudoxus of Cnidus as “preserving that which shows itself” (diasdzein ta phainomena), fragments 121, 124; (F. Lasserrer, ed., Die Fragmente des Eudoxos von Knidos (Berlin, 1966), pp. 67f.
10 The Greek aiōn designates a figure of time made of natural phases: the natural pattern of pregnancy, of human life, etc. The Heideggerian instant, however, participates in no such Gestalt, be it natural or transcendental.
11 Meister Eckhart described the sum of ideas in God as “the fullness of his Godhead,” sermon “Qui audit me,” in Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, trans. M. O’C. Walshe (London: Watkins, 1981), 2:84. In Heidegger, Abgrund always designates a fullness of possibilities but in the temporal mode of the outstanding, as yet to come.
12 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 179.
13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 208.
14 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1526, 74.
15 Quoted in G. Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Berne: Privately published, 1962), p. 136.
Reiner Schürmann - A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being
From the colloquium “Art, Politics, Technology—Martin Heidegger 1889-1989” held at Yale University, October 13-15, 1989.