Behold the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? Him who smashes their tables of values,the breaker, the law-breaker — but he is the creator.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Heidegger is essentially a writer, and therefore also responsible for a writing that is compromised (this is even one of the measures of his political responsibility).
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
To think is to risk. Every thinking thought is a thought that risks the entirety of thinking. It is a thought that departs from thinking but that, at a decisive moment, ventures into the void, broaches an abyss and reveals the groundlessness of true thinking. Thinking is essentially transgressive, intrinsically dangerous. In this movement of transgression, thinking opens onto itself, in such a way that this opening will always exceed any closure and any totalizing. As an opening, thinking clears a space, yet a space that is not easily delineated: not an enclosed space, but a horizon, an unfolding. Thinking, in that respect, is a clearing, one that allows for a new light to shine. Whenever thinking happens, beings come to shine anew. This clearing, of course, also presupposes a certain relation to time, and particularly to the present, which is not left untouched by thinking. For thinking opens onto the future, which is the future of thinking. It is not as if some future awaited thinking, secured in some present to come. Rather, thinking is itself futural: it is a leap ahead, a transgression that opens onto another present, another historical possibility, a “dangerous perhaps” (Nietzsche). Is it time itself, then, that thinks in thinking? Thinking is at once closest to history, essentially historical, and farthest from history, beyond history. Thinking is essentially a departure: de-parting from the present, thinking ventures into the promise of another time, of another configuration. Its sacrificial gesture is its very venture, one that opens onto pure possibility. Its ground is its own ability to broach the actualization of its very nothingness. It is an ad-venture, that is, a venture that allows for a happening — an event. This is a solitary venture, even when it takes the form, as it always does, more or less explicitly, of a confrontation with the history of thinking. The history of thinking (of philosophy) is the history of that risk: from Plato to Descartes, from Heraclitus to Heidegger, thinking unfolds as a series of transgressions, each representing a moment of rupture. Every voice that speaks the risk, that opens the today onto the abyss of its own nothingness and pierces through the present is historical in the most concrete sense. Speaking the risk is risking to speak. For speech does not leave the world untouched. In the silent undoing of its word lies its danger. From the very start, speech upsets and undoes the order of things, leaving it adrift, yet open to the possibility of its own future. Every thinking thought is a thought for the future, but for the future that only such thought broaches. It is not l’ air du temps, this cheap perfume, that thinking invites us to breathe; rather, it is the air of the open sea and of great heights, it is fresh air. He who has not felt the silence and the trembling at the origin of thinking cannot understand the stake of its history. He who has not experienced the risk inherent to thinking remains sealed from the essence of thinking. Were it not for those moments, necessarily rare, there would be no philosophy, but simply the ordering and the formalization of diffuse opinion.
To annul or reduce the risk of thinking is to put thinking at risk. Thinking is most at risk when not confronting the risk, when, holding back from the risk, it indulges in the stillness of the present and embraces the shared evidence of “facts.” Thinking is most threatened when its threatening power is silenced. When things (beings as a whole) are in the hands of the doxa. When thinking is no longer in a position to oppose the dominating discourse, when the weight of the ortho-doxy is such that the voice of the para-dox can no longer speak, then history ceases to be. When speech is turned into doxology, when thinking falls under the yoke of the proper and the correct (the orthos), when philosophy puts on the robe of values and the crown of reason, then the risk is immense. Such a risk one cannot help but see at work today. Haunted by the destructive power of its ideologies and by the deceptive mystique of its narratives, the West has sunk into absolute fixation. Because it can no longer relate to the future in the way of a promise (there is no hope for hope), because it is not able to invent another concept of the future, another meaning of the promise, the future itself has become altogether impossible. The today is time thus suspended, time closed off from the very possibility of a future, awaiting its final undoing. Under the guise of thought, a state of facts is today condoned, the obvious is held for the true and the good, a status quo is all that is hoped for. Our epoch has become that of reaction and conservation, of good conscience and of moral order. Thinking itself has become suspicious, whenever it does not respond to the sole exigency of a vague and complacent thematization of opinion, or to the demands of performance.
The Heidegger “affair” can be perceived as the effect of such a historical situation. The stakes behind it are high: the nature, the task and the danger inherent to thinking are all at issue. Why, after all, is there such an affair? Why has the polemic come to focus on Heidegger? Why not on intellectuals such as Schmitt or Hartmann, or on ideologues such as Rosenberg and Bauemler? Why is the scandal not that of a whole generation of German intellectuals and academics, to which we should immediately add the names of certain European writers (Celine, Brasillach, Pound, Lewis) who were amongst the most zealous supporters of fascism? The uneasiness, the sense of embarrassment, deception and perhaps outrage that one feels in the case of Heidegger exceeds by far his mere academic and administrative responsibilities as well as the most despiteful of his actions: it is not only, perhaps not at all, as professor, or even as professor-rector that Heidegger bears a political responsibility. The scandal is not primarily biographical. And such is the reason why biographies, however faithful, correct and illuminating they may be, will never exhaust or even touch upon the heart of the matter. No, the responsibility and the uneasiness lie elsewhere: in the fact that Heidegger was a thinker, in the fact that thinking is what is at issue, from the start and throughout, even in the darkest hours of his political misadventure. The fault is that of thinking; the uneasiness and sense of loss involves the essence of writing. Not every academic is a writer, not every philosopher a thinker. If there is a Heidegger “scandal,” it is essentially because we are confronted with a thinker, in the sense that I have tried to articulate, because his mistake, some wish to say his fault, which was immense, was not such despite his thought, but because of it. Does this mean, as Heidegger himself claimed, that the error was great because the thought behind it was great too? Whatever the objections and the reservations, whatever the power of the critique and the extent of the rejection — all of this is possible only because, from the very start, there is the recognition that what we are faced with is a moment of thinking, that Heidegger himself was a writer. If there is a fault, if there is an erring, it is because, from the start, there is thinking. Such is the fact we are forced to confront: how thinking can fall prey to the most absolute of all derelictions. This is what we are forced to accept: that thinking itself can embrace the event of this century which has become synonymous with the death of time and of thinking, and yet remain thought-provoking throughout, that this thinking calls for thinking in the very moment in which it lets its name be associated with the most disastrous episode in the history of the West. We must learn to live with this uneasiness, if we are to continue to read Heidegger. Such is perhaps the most difficult task: to accept that a thinker, or a writer, be great, groundbreaking, abyssal and Nazi, if not, at times, despicable.
Or is there, after all, something unquestioned and perhaps illegitimate in the assumption that thinking would open the way to the “right” choice? Is there not something wrong in seeing thinking as this practical guide through history? If thinking is, as we have suggested, essentially risky, if it consists in broaching possibilities so far unimaginable, must it not assume the potential consequences of such a risk? There is something suspicious in the way in which philosophers are asked to illuminate every single event, to project themselves into the future, not as creators, but as future-tellers, as if there still was something of a priest in them. We want our philosophers to be priests: we want them to guide us, to show us the way. But this is not what thinking is about. True, philosophy is, to a large extent, responsible for this opinion. It itself emerged out of priesthood, it itself often has claims over the good, the beautiful, the true. But philosophy is not the guardian of a moral order, it is not there to justify and legitimize a given situation. This is not to exonerate philosophy, to wrest from its responsibility; its responsibility simply does not lie in making the right choices: it lies in questioning what right is, in not allowing the space of questioning to be closed off in the name of a right and a good or a true. Paradoxically, there was a bit of a priest in Heidegger, something of a Führer: there was a temptation to seal off the space of questioning, or the temptation to see the possibility of questioning outside of the space of writing, in politics. If philosophy is the question, if the question takes place in writing, the answer is not in politics. Or rather, there is, in philosophy, in writing, something that always exceeds the answer that is given in politics: in every question, there is something that cannot be captured in an answer. It is this impossibility to which philosophy must devote itself. Its place is writing. Not the institution, not the nation or the people. The time has come to no longer ask of philosophers that they show the way, that they be spiritual leaders and illuminate the masses with their wisdom. The time has come to acknowledge the fragility of thinking, this perilous exercise.
What is most uncanny and most bewildering about Heidegger’ s case is that we cannot simply rank him amongst Nazi ideologues, and that his writings cannot simply be made to exemplify this ideology. There is almost always something in Heidegger that escapes such a possibility, not in such a way that it would save or preserve some part of pure thought, untouched and uncontaminated by the necessity of the political choice, but precisely in such a way that this line of flight, ever so thin, ever so tentative, signals the site of Heidegger’ s own choice. It is only by following such lines, that is, by tracing the contours and the detours of Heidegger’ s own thought, that we can be in a position to sketch the meaning and the stake of his relation to National Socialism. Heidegger’ s thought brings National Socialism under a new light, the light of light, or of being. Any confrontation with Heidegger’ s relation to National Socialism is, at bottom, a confrontation with the thought of being. It is in the name of this question that Heidegger embraced the “movement,” in the name of this same question that he subsequently engaged in a long and convoluted Auseinandersetzung with the movement, as well as with the historical situation and the future of the West. It is this very relation this book wishes to thematize.
The hypothesis that governs this book is that the relation in question begins to articulate itself long before 1933, in those sections of Being and Time devoted to the historicity of Dasein. This is not to say that, to use Adorno’ s own words, Heidegger’ s thought is “fascist in its most intimate components.”1 I would even wish to suggest that Heidegger’ s early thought is not fascistic at all, but that it puts a number of motifs into place that will be mobilized in 1933 in order to welcome and legitimate the coming into power of Nazism, thus exemplifying an ontic realisation of those ontological structures laid out in 1927. I wish to suggest also that this relation cannot be limited to the period of the rectorate, and that the majority of the lecture courses and the writings from 1934 to 1945, particularly those devoted to Nietzsche and Hölderlin, are an attempt to come to grips with the reality of National Socialism, with the historical and political situation of the West, as well as with the present and future of Germany in the age of global technology.
Yet before I begin to show in detail how and where this relation takes place, a few words regarding the title of this book might seem appropriate. Hopefully, they will throw some light on the project as a whole. On the one hand, everything happens as if Heidegger had very carefully avoided, if not politics itself, at least a philosophical discourse on the political. In other words, everything happens as if the political had been set aside by Heidegger, cast out onto the periphery of genuine thinking. This, I wish to suggest, is both correct and incorrect. Correct, in the sense that there is no apparent political concern in Heidegger’ s thought, and certainly no explicit political philosophy. Incorrect, however, insofar as the space of the political is not simply set aside by Heidegger, but taken up in a way that he believes to be more originary and historically more decisive. In other words, in place of the political, Heidegger thinks a number of originary topoi to which the political remains ultimately subordinated. This means that “in place of” should be understood in a twofold sense: indeed as “instead of,” but precisely insofar as that which is thought instead of the political is actually thought in the very place or space occupied by the political, as the place that is proper to the political. This does not mean that the political is without a place, that there is no space for politics in thinking and in history. Rather, it means that the political is without a proper place: the space that it occupies is a site opened up by the unfolding of an event (not a “fact,” but a certain configuration of presence) which surpasses it. The political only takes place and establishes itself on the basis of a sending which precedes and exceeds it at the same time. The political does indeed constitute a mode of organization of beings, a way in which words, things and actions come together, but this gathering happens on the basis of a historical-destinal constellation of which the political is only one crystallization. To bring the political back to its proper place is thus to wrest it from politics so as to give it back to history conceived in a destinal or aletheiological sense. To think the political is thus to place it anew in the very site of its essence, and to thus displace it. If Heidegger indeed replaces the space of politics by that of topoi that we shall have to identify, it is by way of an operation that consists in re-placing that which the space of politics would have covered up in the very movement of its happening and unfolding. As a result, the space of politics is dis-located, dis-placed, yet in such a way that this dis-placement simply consists in bringing the political back into the proximity of its own essence. It is this movement of dis-placement/re-placement that I wish to evoke in mobilizing the term “dystopia.” In place of politics, in that very place that metaphysics has ascribed to politics, Heidegger has always thought something other and destinally more decisive, something more fundamentally attuned to the historical unfolding of Being. Even when, as in 1933–4, Heidegger succumbs to the most disastrous politics, he does so, paradoxically perhaps, in the name of something that will have from the start called into question the very legitimacy of politics as an autonomous and ultimately decisive space. In other words, his political action intersected with a concrete space across which it cut, thus revealing it in its originary dys-topia. Heidegger’ s politics consisted in wanting to bring politics back to the site of its own essence which, in itself, is nothing political. Thus, if there once was a coincidence and correspondence between the political space and the space of Heidegger’ s own thinking, and even his own praxis, that coincidence, though perfectly real, was nothing but an attempt at re-placing or re-situating politics. This does not excuse Heidegger. On the contrary, we must raise the question of what allowed for this re-placing of politics to take place in the very movement that has become synonymous with the all-pervasiveness and absolute presence of the political (with totalitarianism in the form of fascism). We must raise the question of the failure of thinking, of that thinking which constitutes one of the most decisive philosophical events of this century.
What about these topoi that would mark the place proper to the political? What can we say about them? First, that they are many, essentially plural. This is not due to some insufficiency or deficiency on the part of Heidegger’ s thought. Rather, it is the very nature of the Sache of thinking that is itself topical and multiple: being, or presence, takes place in different ways and at different times, and it is the task of the thinker to identify those points at which presence is gathered most intensely. The places (Örter) of being are to be understood as points of intensification, in which presence itself has for a time come to crystallize. As Heidegger himself suggests, the word Ort originally means the extremity of the knife edge where everything is brought together, concentrated.2 Second, and as a direct consequence of the plural nature of the topology of being, if the site of the political is located outside of politics, in a topos that would be more originary, the origin itself serves neither as a ground nor as an absolute point of departure. For how grounding is a ground that is multiple? How absolute is an origin that is plural? The ineliminable plurality of the originary suggests that the political cannot simply be derived from a metaphysical archè, but that it must be thought on the basis of points of intensity in which presence bespeaks itself more essentially.3 The first five chapters of this book aim to locate and thematize the various topoi which can be seen to dis- and re-place the political, those very topoi that think the place of politics more originarily. In every chapter, then, this place will undergo a certain dis-location, one that will enable us to consider the political under a new light. The political as such will, therefore, never be at the very forefront of the discussion, but always, structurally as it were, in its margins or at the periphery, if not in the background. This specific situation of the political suggests that it can never be confronted directly, that, if we are interested in thinking its ultimate stakes as well as its essence, then this can itself only be done by way of an essential and originary dis-placement in which the political as such comes to be revealed in its truth. Whether the topos be that of destiny, as in Being and Time, whether it be that of Science, of technology, of poetry or of the Greek polis, as in the 1930s and 40s, it is always a question of locating that which, in the very place of politics, speaks more originarily. As for the last chapter, which deals with the question concerning Heidegger’ s silence in the face of the Holocaust, silence there speaks not as the site in which the political would have withdrawn, not as the sole topos left intact in the face of horror, but as the painful echo that shatters Heidegger’ s own dystopian thought.