Toward the end of the “political” failure of 1933–4, whilst deploying an effort of thought in the direction of the national on the basis of a sustained reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger also comes to question the contemporary concept and practice of the “political” in the light of the ancient polis. Thus, Heidegger can be seen to be engaged in a double gesture: on the one hand, he thinks the possibility of a use of the national that would be free from nationalism as well as from the form of the nation-state; on the other hand, he re-evaluates this latter and distinctively modern form of political organization, that is the nation-state — this very state which in effect is the vehicle and the most effective servant of technology — by way of a reflection on its forgotten essence, namely the polis:
The basic modern form, in which the specifically modern and self-positing self-consciousness of man orders the whole of being, is the state. Such is the reason why the “political” becomes the normative self-certainty of historical consciousness. The political determines itself on the basis of history conceived in terms of consciousness, and this means experienced technologically. The “political” is the completion of history. Because the political is thus the technological-historical certainty underlying all doing, the “political” is characterised by the unconditional lack of questioning [Fraglosigkeit] with respect to itself. The lack of questioning of the “political” and its totality belong together. Yet the reason for this belonging together and the existence of it do not lie, as some naive minds believe, in the free will of dictators. Rather, it is founded in the metaphysical essence of modern actuality in general. Yet the latter is fundamentally different from the being, in which and out of which Greekness was historical. For the Greeks, the polis is that which is absolutely question-worthy. For modern consciousness, the “political” is the necessary and unconditional lack of questioning.
(GA 53, 117–18)
What distinguishes the modern experience of the “political” from the ancient polis is thus a certain lack of questioning with respect to itself, and this means with respect to its own essence. This lack of questioning is evident in that the state is but the political configuration best adapted to the essentially technological demands of modern consciousness. What characterizes this modern consciousness is that it is self-consciousness, a consciousness so conscious of itself that it has become absolutely certain of itself. In the movement of its absolutization, it has become world-consciousness. This consciousness is all encompassing and all mighty, because it is self-positing: its essence or its being is not derived from anything outside of it, but is its own foundation. As such, it is absolutely fraglosig. No doubt, this reading of modernity sees the culmination of an historical process as it is metaphysically described in Hegel’s thought. The political, its state-organization and its technological domination, is itself the result of this process which culminates in the exposition of the history whereby consciousness becomes ab-solute by becoming free from its own presuppositions and positing itself as the only ground of its becoming. This is what Heidegger means by an “unconditional lack of questioning”: a lack of questioning with respect to the forgotten ground of being, forgotten and shut off in the self-positing of man as absolute spirit. In this sense, the “political” represents the end or the completion of history, if it is true that history is the process whereby consciousness posits its own relation to the world as a relation of absolute freedom. But to speak of the end or the closure of history is not to acknowledge a terminal point (today? tomorrow? or was it yesterday?) at which history would cease. Rather, it is a matter of acknowledging how, with the political, history is now gathered into its most extreme possibilities. It is a matter of acknowledging how the total and global presence of beings, and that is the negation of the essentially withdrawing and concealing dimension of being, is at the same time the very condition of possibility for the overwhelming and totalitarian presence of the political. The “totality” and the “totalitarianism” of the political, which seem so specific to modernity, are thus to be accounted for not on the basis of the fortuitous will of some individuals once called tyrants, and today best labeled as “dictators,” but on the basis of what Heidegger describes as the history of the essence of truth, a history which, in effect, is the unfolding of the forgottenness of — and the increasing lack of questioning with respect to — the truth of being. In other words, the total penetration of the political — that is, its totalitarian presence — is not the deed of Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin. It is not a question of names and individuals, but a question of destiny or Geschick: the “decision” was made long ago; the fear and trembling that continues to animate our century could be heard long before the actual events. The events were long since destined, not as a fate or a fatality, but as a metaphysically extreme possibility. And what Heidegger designates under the word “political” marks perhaps this most extreme possibility, the possibility in which and as which metaphysics exhausts itself. The political today will have marked an end with airs of a funerary mask, of fire and ashes. Such is the reason why, ultimately, Heidegger is able to encompass under a single diagnosis the liberal democracy of America and the Workers’ State of the Soviet Union.1 All political organizations are merely a response to the challenge of the actuality of modern consciousness, which he designates as technology, and the sole demand of which is the total organization, manipulation and appropriation of the whole of being, which has become a pure Bestand or “standing-reserve.” One can wonder as to whether Heidegger was right to suggest, as he did in the der Spiegel interview, that democracy is perhaps not the most adequate response to technology. With the collapse of fascism and of soviet communism, the liberal model has proven to be the most effective and powerful vehicle of the global spread of technology, which has become increasingly indistinguishable from the forces of Capital.
At the other extreme of the lack of questioning of the political with respect to its forgotten essence, the Greek polis is characterized by its question-worthiness. The fundamental goal of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Greek polis is to show how it remained open to the founding abyss of the truth of being, thereby rendering its own closure impossible and escaping the modern conceptions and demands of the “political.” Thus, to think the polis is tantamount to wresting it from the sphere of the political and the domain of political philosophy in order to bring it back to the site of its essence, which in itself is nothing political: it is to think something that is older than and prior to our concept of the “political” and of what has come to be practised under the word “politics.” With a view to what? To calling for a return to the ancient polis? Or to opening a freer relation to the modern political?
Before one even begins to answer such questions, and look into the various interpretations Heidegger gives of the polis, it is perhaps necessary to say a few words concerning the contexts and modes of treatment of that question. The following remarks aim to illuminate the stakes of this discussion by situating it both chronologically and textually.
Roughly speaking, Heidegger devotes two series of texts to the interpretation of the Greek polis: the first discussion occurs soon after his resignation from the rectorship, in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, and the second occurs in a series of texts from 1942–3.2 As regards the latter, we can only note the striking continuity and homogeneity of its analyses: it indeed consists of three lecture courses in a row. This insistence can only suggest that something major was at stake for Heidegger in that question. Given the temporal sequence, it is also not surprising to find a great unity of style, emphasis and concern throughout those lecture courses. We need to wonder, however, whether there are significant differences with respect to the first interpretation of 1935, and whether Heidegger’s interpretation of the polis matches the evolution of his thought in general.
As regards the types of sources which Heidegger decides to consult and interpret, there is a striking similarity throughout. The sources are Greek, naturally, but not directly “political” (Heidegger does not draw on political treatises, on constitutional documents or historical accounts and testimonies) and, in the most significant cases (in Introduction to Metaphysics and Hölderlin’s “der Ister”), not even “philosophical.” Heidegger’s approach to the Greek polis is therefore not primarily informed by philosophy, that is, by what metaphysics has had to say about the polis and about politics, nor by history, by law or by what Heidegger would regard as any anthropology. By what, then? What is Heidegger’s angle on the polis, that angle that will allow him to reveal the polis in its truth? To put it abruptly: the poetic, or the mythic. To be more specific: Introduction to Metaphysics and the Ister lecture course address the question of the polis on the basis of a reading of the famous second chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone; the Parmenides volume, while referring to that same chorus, focuses on the two muthoi that are told toward the middle and the very end of Plato’s Politeia; finally, the Heraclitus lecture course envisages the question on the basis of two anecdotes concerning the master. Not only does Heidegger ignore the political literature of Ancient Greece; he also very carefully avoids the founding philosophical texts: Aristotle’s Politics and his two Ethics, as well as the major part of Plato’s Politeia.
All of this is to indicate that Heidegger wishes to think the polis pre-politically and pre-philosophically: mytho-logically — as if the truth and the essence of what came to be experienced under the word polis remained secured in the very margins of the metaphysical text, in a saying whose mode of aletheuein remained more truth-ful than the truth of philosophy, or of any anthropology:
The knowledge of primordial history [Ur-geschichte] is not a ferreting out of the Primitive or a collecting of bones. It is neither half nor whole natural science, but, if it is anything at all, mythology.
(EM 119/155)
Muthoi remain truer to the essence of that which they name, because their mode of truth is itself closer to the essence of truth than the truth of metaphysics, which is merely veritas and adequatio:
Muthos is the Greek for the word that expresses what is to be said before all else. The essence of muthos is thus determined on the basis of aletheia. It is muthos that reveals, discloses and lets be seen; specifically, it lets be seen what shows itself in advance and in everything as that which presences in all “presence.” Only where the essence of the word is grounded in aletheia, hence among the Greeks, only where the word so grounded as pre-eminent legend pervades all poetry and thinking, hence among the Greeks, and only where poetry and thinking are the ground for the primordial relation to the concealed, hence among the Greeks, only there do we find what bears the Greek name muthos, “myth.”
(GA 54, 89/60)
It is only by looking at certain muthoi, then, that one ought to be able to grasp the essence and the truth of the Greek polis. Specifically, it is a matter of understanding that the polis does not above all designate a space, be it geometrical, political, economic, cultural or even philosophical, even though it does designate such a space also, but primarily names the place or the site in which man comes to dwell in a historical-ontological manner. To say that the polis is primarily the site of a historical dwelling is to say that its decisive character lies not so much in the conjunction and the organization of essential needs, necessities or even desires, but in an originary relation to the truth of beings. The difficulty that Heidegger faces thus consists in thinking the essence of the polis prior to its appropriation by the various discourses of anthropology, prior to the historiographical, political, social and economic thematization of its essence. The thinking of essence necessarily questions beyond any anthropology into the truth of anthropos as the being who always and from the very start is ap-propriated by the essential and historical unfolding of being. Speaking of the chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, as a poetic piece that speaks prior to any such anthropology and that therefore names the essence of man, Heidegger warns us against a misinterpretation of the whole poem,
a misinterpretation to which modern man readily inclines and which is indeed frequent. We have already pointed out that this is no description and exposition of the activities and fields of activity of man, a being among other beings, but a poetic outline of his being, drawn from its extreme possibilities and limits. This in itself precludes the interpretation of the chorus as a narrative of man’s development from the savage hunter and the primitive sailor to the civilised builder of cities. These are representations that belong to ethnology and to the psychology of the primitive. They stem from the unwarranted application of a natural science — and a false one at that — to man’s being.
(EM 118–19/154–5)
If myth constitutes indeed a point of entry into the truth of the polis, it is an entry of an entirely different sort than the ones favored by the social sciences. Such sciences, for whom myth is one source of “information” amongst many, and for whom myth itself can even become an object of concrete investigation, a mytho-logy, nonetheless remain closed off from the essence of the myth, for they question it on the basis of a preconstituted logos the essence of which is precisely to have delineated the myth in such a way as to assign it to a specific and determined region, that of “mythology” as it is commonly understood, that is, as the whole of “narratives” recounting the origin of the cosmos and of the earth, the coming into beings of the gods and their relation to humans, the heroic and founding deeds of past generations, and so on. So long as the myth is seen in terms of a mode of understanding that precedes the discovery and the progression of the sciences, so long as myth finds its place assigned and defined by this logos that defines itself precisely in terms of a twisting free from myth, or rather, so long as we continue to believe in this other myth according to which the world coined by rational logos is truer than that of the early Greeks, a myth which is itself Greek and, even more than Platonic, as Heidegger himself saw, perhaps Aristotelian, so long as we continue to embrace metaphysics’ own myth, as an effort to liberate itself from myth and posit itself in itself on the basis of itself — the myth of auto-foundation — we shall forever remain sealed off from the truth of myth, which is precisely truth itself, or the essence of truth as the play of concealment and unconcealment whereby “there is,” whereby presence occurs and beings find their own site — and not only their “space” — in the midst of truth.3 Thus, in the case of the polis, it is a question of thinking beyond — that is, prior to, yet in accordance with a priority that is itself not chronological and with an order of precedence that is not that of the logos of metaphysics — the (metaphysical) thought of the polis, beyond this thought into the unthought of the polis. It is, therefore, a question of becoming more Greek than the Greeks themselves, of thinking a polis that perhaps never was, never actually took place, even though Heidegger will come to designate it as the place of being. Should this be surprising? If being is such that it is never actually there, neither qua being, nor qua substance, nor as this or that particular being-present-at-hand, how could the polis itself, as the place of the unfolding of the essence of being, be simply present? How could it be otherwise than in the movement of its effacement? This, perhaps, is the point at which to think prior to metaphysics becomes tantamount to thinking beyond metaphysics — if this is at all possible. To be sure, Heidegger will have his own doubts: there perhaps never was a polis that was pre-metaphysical, a polis in which and for which a certain metaphysical conception of logos and of truth was not already in place. The polis, insofar as it is, falls within the realm of presence and metaphysics. To think beyond its evidence into the truth of its essence is not to think another polis, or a more originary polis. It is perhaps to free the possibility of another polis, in what would amount to a turning or a shift within history. Is this not the point at which Heidegger’s thought breaks with archaic thinking, and becomes an-archic? In the end, one can wonder whether Heidegger’s polis is not Greek only by name, whether it resembles in any way this ancient polis we have become familiar with through the research of the scientific community. This suspicion is actually at work in Heidegger’s own text, working it and shaping it from within, to the point where, having developed a first extended analysis of the polis in 1935, Heidegger feels the necessity to launch yet another series of interpretations in 1942–3.
Polis. This is a word that cannot be translated. To be sure, Heidegger will provide detailed interpretations of the meaning and the stakes underlying that word. Yet the word itself will remain untranslated. If that word resists translation, it is not for a lack of words and lexical resources, it is not because of some insufficiency on the part of those languages other than Greek. It cannot be translated idiomatically for it has already translated itself historically. Every attempt to translate the polis today is an attempt to translate it on the basis of a historical translation that has already taken place and that defines the very nature of the today. Thus, the historical translation of the polis is indeed its transformation into the city-state or the nation-state. Yet to translate polis idiomatically by state or nation is, from the very start, to close off the very possibility of grasping that which is at issue in the word polis. It is to translate a world into another world, an epoch into another epoch. Thus, if, as Heidegger claims, a world or an epoch is indeed defined in terms of its relation to truth, it is also to translate one experience of truth into another one. Yet since that originary experience of truth is fundamentally what is at issue for Heidegger in our relation to the Greeks, it is to lose any possibility of a genuine dialogue with the Greek world. In the move to the nation or the state, that is, in the move to the modern conception of the political, it is precisely this experience of the polis as the site of a relation to truth that is lost. This, however, does not mean that the state is no longer a happening of truth; yet it is a happening of this mode of truth or of aletheuein which consists in the uttermost covering up of the happening itself. It is that mode of truth characterized by the most extreme forgetfulness of truth. Such is the Gestell: the happening of truth as untruth or the domination of the counter-essence of truth. In other words: the age of absolute visibility and pure transparency, the epoch of unreserved patency and total presence where everything has become evident, “in your face” as it were, and where this all too visible reality has reached a point of irreversible saturation, a point where it feels the necessity to make itself virtual and invent for itself another space (cyberspace).4 We must therefore exercise caution when confronted with the word polis, a word that has become so familiar under the guise of “politics” and the “political” that it goes simply unquestioned. By leaving the word untranslated, Heidegger restores questioning to the word, and hopes that it will thus open the way to the thought of its essence. There is no problem of the political outside of its translation from out of the Greek polis. We shall therefore never quite leave this question of translation, to which we shall be forced to return later.
Heidegger’s first thematization of the polis arises out of the commentary of the chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone that he provides in the section of Introduction to Metaphysics entitled “Being and Thinking.” To be more specific, Heidegger derives the meaning of the Greek polis from the third strophe of the chorus (line 370), where, according to Heidegger, one finds the third and last essential determination of the Greek man as hypsipolis apolis, which Heidegger translates as “Rising high above the place, he is excluded from the place.” In Heidegger’s translation, the strophe as a whole reads like this:
Clever indeed, mastering
the ways of skill beyond all hope,
he sometimes succumbs to malice,
sometimes is prone to valiance.
He wends his way between the laws of the earth
and the adjured order of the gods.
Rising high above the place, he is excluded from the place
he who for the sake of adventure always
takes the non-being for being.5
The traditional translation of polis by “city” is thus dismissed, and replaced by Stätte, place. This is how Heidegger justifies his translation:
Polis is usually translated as city or city-state. This does not capture the full meaning. Polis means rather the place, the there, wherein and as which the being-there [das Da-sein] is as historical. The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which and for which history happens [die Geschichte geschieht]. To this place and site of history belong the gods, the temples, the priests, the festivals, the games, the poets, the thinkers, the ruler, the council of elders, the assembly of the people, the army and the fleet.
(EM 117/152)
The polis is thus the place or the site of history, that is, the very way in which the historical essence of man is there. The polis is the site in which the encounter with history happens. It is only insofar as the polis is the site of such a specific encounter that to the polis belong features such as gods, temples, festivals, poets, etc. What needs to be addressed, then, and grasped, is the very nature of history itself, if it is such that it alone can account for the very existence of the polis. What is history? How does history occur? This question is decisive, for the answer that it is given in 1935 is significantly different from that of 1942–3. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger sees history, along with the polis as the site of its unfolding, as the happening of a conflict or a confrontation between man, essentially determined on the basis of technè, and the whole of being (or phusis), essentially determined as dikè. This twofold determination follows from Heidegger’s interpretation of the opening verses from the chorus, in which man is designated as to deinotaton, the uncanniest, strangest and most unfamiliar of all beings: das Unheimlichste. The deinon, which serves to designate the essence of beings as a whole, points in the direction of both the overpowering power (das Überwältigende Walten) of phusis, and to the violence (Gewalt-tätigkeit) of man. The verses read as follows:
There is much that is unfamiliar, but nothing
that surpasses man in unfamiliarity.
To think the polis, it is therefore necessary to understand how everything — the whole of being — is best interpreted as to deinon, and how, from within this deinon, man emerges as the to deinotaton, the most deinon of all beings. Specifically, it is a question of understanding the polis as the happening of the uncanny strife between man and world, between technè and dikè.
To Deinon, das Unheimliche thus serves to designate “the many,” all of those things that are. It is, therefore, the whole of being that is unheimlich: strange, uncanny, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, at once aweful and awesome, dreadful and colossal, frightening and overwhelming. Why is the whole of being unheimlich? Simply because it is, because “there is.” There is something awe-inspiring about the world, and that is the very fact that it is, the very fact that there is something rather than nothing. The sheer facticity of the world, its overwhelming presence is sufficient for the chorus to proclaim: “Many is the unfamiliar.” Yet not everything is unheimlich in the same way. There is, first of all, the overpowering domination of nature, there is the force of the sea and of the winds, of the seasons, and of the earth, there is the burning sun and the biting cold. All of this is awesome: overpowering and inescapable. And yet, over against this power rises the no less uncanny violence of man who, in the midst of this deinon, navigates the sea and ploughs the earth, catches the beasts of the skies, of the sea and of the earth, tames the wildest animals and the most hostile of all rivers. Man dwells in the world in such a way that he is most exposed to its power. Because he is most exposed to this power, and therefore most vulnerable, this world can become the site of his abode only by way of the most violent of all gestures, only by way of the unleashing of a certain violence against the ruling of nature. Yet this unleashing only serves to reveal and expose the overpowering power of phusis further. Because man is the violent one, the one who surges forth amidst nature and stands erect therein, he is also the one who gathers the dominating and brings it into the Open. Such is the reason why, ultimately, man is the uncanniest of all beings: not at home in the world, without a place, man becomes even more unfamiliar, monstrous as it were, through the unleashing of this violence whereby the earth is turned into the site of his dwelling, and yet gathered in its inescapable domination.
This confrontation between man and nature Heidegger designates further as the opposition between technè and dikè, which is the twofold essence of the deinon. Could the deinon be an early word for Ereignis, for the event through which man and being are brought together and reciprocally ap-propriated? Let us look more closely at this essential opposition.
As we recall from the previous chapters, technè is a motif that began to occupy an absolutely decisive position in the economy of Heidegger’s thought in 1933, where it was made to designate the essence of knowledge, and was identified with the greatness of the Greek beginning, the repetition of which was to open the way to a new historical configuration. It should not be surprising, then, to see it here put to work in a way that is no less decisive. While retaining the fundamental identification with Wissen or Fragen as the most fundamental and history-making comportment, Heidegger decides to retrieve yet another sense of knowledge, which he designates as Machenschaft. Knowledge, then, this most human and unfamiliar of all activities, this mode of standing in the midst of the whole of being that is proper to man (this stance which, from the outset, Heidegger identified with existence itself — ek-sistance) is now “machination.” This new determination is striking for, as we recall, it is the very determination which, in the Beiträge, serves to designate not technè in the originary sense, but rather the essentially nihilistic becoming of metaphysics, which culminates in planetary technology. Thus, if one ought not to be misled by the occurrence of this philosophem in the context of the discussion of the chorus, the essential connection between technè and technology is nonetheless affirmed further: if, as “The Question concerning Technology” will later assert, technology as we know it today is rooted in technè, if, in other words, the complete and utter covering up of the essence of truth is itself rooted in this truth and is a mode of truth, similarly, technè, as the origin and counter-essence of technology, remains sheltered in it, in such a way that it constitutes the hinge around which history will come to turn anew. This connection is asserted all the more strongly, that the word Machenschaft, when applied to ancient Greece, far from designating an experience of the machinic and the mechanical, refers to art, and particularly to this conception, developed at length in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” according to which art is the putting into work of truth, the ins-Werk-setzen der Wahrheit:
Knowledge is the ability to put into work [das Ins-Werk-setzen-können] being as this or that being. The Greeks called art in the true sense and the art work technè, because art is what most immediately brings being, that is, the appearing that stands there in itself, to stand [in something present (in the work)]. The work of art is a work not primarily because it is wrought [gewirkt], made, but because it brings about [er-wirkt] being in a being. To bring about means here to bring into the work, in which the dominating surging forth [das waltende Aufgehen], phusis, comes to shine [zum Scheinen kommt] as the appearance [or the shining forth: Erscheinen]. It is through the work of art as a being that is [als seiende seiend] that everything else that appears and is to be found is first confirmed and made accessible, explicable and understandable as being or non-being [als Seiendes oder aber Unseiendes].
(EM 122/159)
The word technè, then, does not primarily refer to the various technai or techniques — whether agricultural, industrial, military, etc. — of the Greeks, but to this specific relation to being that consists in a putting being to work into a work. Technè is to be understood primarily in terms of a relation between a work and being, or, as “The Origin of the Work of Art” makes clear, between work and truth. It is on the basis of this very relation that one can come to understand not only the Greek conception of art, but the essential complicity between the work of art and those other modes of production generally referred to as technological.6 In both cases, what is at stake in the production of the work is a relation to the truth of beings — to phusis — whereby phusis comes to be gathered in itself and exposed in its overpowering power. Technè, whether as art or as technology, reveals a relation to phusis, in which phusis does not appear as an object of mastery and possession, but as an ultimately unmasterable order to which man is irreversibly attached. In the work, whether in the temple or in the plough, whether in language or in city-creating, it is the very power of the whole of phusis that is gathered and brought to its most complete manifestation.
What is thus perhaps most significant with respect to the previous thematizations of technè is the emphasis on the “making” (machen) or the productive dimension of what now seems to be an activity that is not primarily linked to theoria as the highest form of energeia. If technè does indeed include the poietic activity of the poet, the thinker and the statesman, it also includes those other poietic activities ordinarily referred to as “practical,” such as the building of houses and ships, such as hunting and fishing, such as breeding and cultivating. Technè, in the context of Introduction to Metaphysics, refers to the activities of man in general. There is no opposition between theoria and poiesis, no transformation of the concept of technè. Technè as machination still “means” knowledge, yet knowledge does not exclusively mean theory or philosophy. It does mean, however, this ability to put being into a work on the basis of man’s transcendence. Technè still refers to the transcendence of man, and it is as such that it provides an entry into the meta-physical essence of man and into meta-physics proper.
As for dikè, normally identified with justice, whether human or divine, it is here translated as Fug, a word which is all the more difficult to translate in English — or in any other language, for that matter — that it does not occur in modern literary German, except, as Manheim notes,7 in the expression “mit Fug und Recht”— “with Fug and justice,” where the expression, beyond its ordinary meaning of “with complete justification,” suggests “proper order” or “fitness.” Heidegger stresses that the word be understood first in the sense of joint (Fuge) and structure or framework (Gefüge). By this, we need to understand that Fug is not primarily a juridical or ethical determination, but a metaphysical one: at stake, in dikè, is above all a way for things to be joined together according to a certain order and structure; dikè refers to the jointure whereby things come together so as to reveal a common ordering. It is only then that it can be understood as a decree, a dispensation or a directive to which such things — beings as a whole, including man — must comply. Far from designating the traditional realm of the ethico-juridico-political, Fug designates the originary power of assemblage and gathering of being.
We can now better understand why man is characterized as the most deinon of all beings: man’s own deinon, technè, consists in bringing the deinon of dikè into a work; it consists in surging forth in the midst of phusis in a violent gesture against it, which, paradoxically, brings the overpowering power of nature to its highest achievement and manifestation. Man is the uncanniest of all beings because in his very opposition to the overwhelming ruling of nature he brings the uncanniness of nature to stand and shine forth in the work. At the point at which man comes to posit himself in the midst of beings, in what appears like a triumphant stand, the very power of nature comes to be exposed in its irreducible unmasterability. At the very point at which man seems to have found his way amidst beings as whole, he is thrown out of the way and exposed to the world as to the site of his own homelessness. At the point at which man, in the most violent of all gestures, rises against the might of nature, his violence shatters against the power of being:
The knowing man [der Wissende] sails into the very middle of the dominant order [Fug]; he cracks being open into beings [in the “rift”] [reißt im <Riß> das Sein in das Seiende]; yet he can never master the overpowering. Hence he is tossed back and forth between order and disorder, between the evil and the noble. Every violent bending of the powerful is either victory or defeat. Both, each in a different way, fling him out of the familiar [aus dem Heimischen heraus], and thus, each in a different way, unfold the dangerousness of achieved or lost being.
(EM 123/161)
Man is designated as to deinotaton or as the Unheimlicheres, the uncanniest of all beings, because, in this uncanny world, always at the mercy of the overwhelming and colossal power of nature, he is not at home in it, feels the irremediable impulse to oppose his own freedom and transcendence to the incommensurable force of nature, to transform it and find in it the site of his abode; and yet it is precisely in this titanic effort, in the unleashing of technè, that he also unleashes the ordering power of nature, exposes it and reveals it in its unfamiliarity and frightful prodigiousness, as much as he is revealed in his own finitude:
For the poet, the assault of technè against dikè is this happening, whereby man becomes not-at-home [unheimisch]. In his exile from the homely, the homely is first disclosed as such. But in one with it and only thus, the alien [das Befremdliche], the overpowering [das Überwältigende] is disclosed as such. Through the event of unfamiliarity [Unheimlichkeit] the whole of being is disclosed. This disclosure is the happening of unconcealment. But this is nothing other than the happening of unfamiliarity.
(EM 127/167)
The polis is the site of the happening of this unfamiliarity. It is the site where the twofold and strifely nature of the deinon unfolds. The site of man’s dwelling, his historical abode is such that it is also and at once the site of his homelessness. Man dwells historically by dwelling homelessly. It is only because man is without a home that there is history, it is only because man creates the space of this homelessness that there is a polis. If the polis designates a home, it is only the home of man’s essential homelessness. If it designates a site or a place, it is only the site or the place of man’s essential placelessness. If it is historical, it is only because history emerges from out of the essential strife between technè and dikè, only because history emerges as the happening of the unfamiliar. Now if the polis is indeed the site of this strifely encounter between two conflictual forces, between technè and dikè, between the quasi-demonic violence of knowledge and the no less excessive and overpowering power of nature, or between freedom and necessity, then the very structure of the polis, its very appearance must testify to the way in which this strife actually takes place. Although we do not have the space to sketch what could be called an onto-urbanism, we can only speculate as to what it might look like. Thus, the walls, the streets, the temples and the agora, the fields, the forests and the sea of the polis, as much as the speeches, the statues or the festivals would reveal man’s ongoing confrontation with the whole of being, the very inscription of man’s becoming (not) at home in the face and in the midst of phusis. One can only imagine how such an onto-urbanism, prior to the anthropological interpretation of the polis, particularly to its designation as the site of an essentially political — isonomic — construction, a construction that would respond to questions of distribution of power and representation of the population as a whole, would point in the direction of the polis as a happening of truth, as that very strifely and violent happening in which man and being would come to be revealed as such. If the polis is indeed this place where the confrontation between technè and dikè occurs, the site at which the whole of beings comes to be gathered in its most irreducible power by being brought into the works of language, of art, of architecture and of technology, then it becomes easier to understand why Heidegger wishes to leave the word untranslated: the polis indeed designates this place that is not only and primarily political, but that emerges as the site of a strifely encounter between man and nature, between violence and power. The polis is the site at which history appears. It cannot be translated, because its interlingual translation is also inter-epochal: the nation and the state are precisely the transformation of this originary relation between technè and dikè, this transformation whereby the encounter no longer occurs as the violent creation through which being comes to shine forth in its overpowering power, but as the ordering and mastery of the whole of being through planetary technology. With technology, the overpowering power of phusis ceases to be disclosed, is itself overpowered, and gives way to the domination of hyper-violence. The question, though, is to know whether it is still violence in the sense described by Heidegger that is at play in contemporary technology, or whether the total domination of technology marks the step beyond human violence into nihilism, a nihilism so utterly completed that it can contemplate the possibility of a global annihilation. The question, with respect to the modern Political and its state apparatus, is to know whether it is still violence that characterizes man, or something beyond violence, whether there is not a hitherto unimaginable danger that has taken possession of the whole of being, that of the loss of originary and creative violence.
At stake, then, in the discussion of the polis, and in a way that will remain programmatic for the second series of analyses, is none other than what we have already thematized under the motif of the national and the native in relation to Hölderlin. This connection with Hölderlin will be made quite explicit in the 1942 Ister lecture course. Yet if such a connection is made possible, it is because the point of departure in both instances is that of the historical abode of man, that of the possibility of an authentic dwelling on earth. Underlying the discussion of the polis as well as of the national is thus the economic determination of the home, of the shelter or the abode. Yet it is essential to note that such a determination is always thought in metaphysical or ontological terms, that is, on the basis of man’s relation to the truth of beings. And it is because of such an ontological interpretation that the question of the home is inseparable from that of an originary homelessness and unfamiliarity. The question, we shall have to ask, is to know whether the motif of the home can indeed be ontologized in such a way, or whether it does not carry with it a residual economy that comes to haunt ontology itself. To be more precise: it will be a matter of asking whether any thought of the abode, of the shelter, and, by extension, of the national or the native must not open itself to the sphere of economy, which always and already has oriented dwelling in a particular way. In other words: is our relation to the world, our very way of inhabiting the world not ultimately dependent upon material conditions of existence? And are such conditions not decisive for the way in which thinking itself comes to unfold?
In 1942, Heidegger launches a new series of analyses devoted to the question of the polis. More strikingly perhaps, these analyses are deployed on the basis of the very same chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone Heidegger interpreted in 1935. The point, of course, is to reveal the necessity underlying this renewed reading of Sophocle’s Antigone. Why, in other words, turn to the question of the polis again, and to that same text in particular? To put it abruptly, and for the sake of clarity: so as to gain a more originary understanding of the polis, and by originary I do not mean more faithful to the Greek conception of the polis — whatever such conception may be — but more Greek than that of the Greeks themselves: archi-Greek. This, I believe, is the specificity of the analysis from 1942 to 1943, one that matches perhaps an evolution in Heidegger’s thought with respect to the Greek beginning, at least as it was envisaged in 1935, itself different from the way it was approached in 1927, that is, an evolution whereby the task of thinking is no longer subordinated to the repetition of a question, or of a comportment, but to the step back beyond the beginning into the domain of an archè-beginning. This, as we suggested earlier, is perhaps the point at which thinking becomes an-archic.
As far as the detail of Heidegger’s analysis goes, we can note the following: first, that what constituted the central axis of the interpretation of the polis in 1935, namely the strifely belonging-together of technè and dikè, is no longer the focus of the 1942 intepretation, but is replaced and reconstituted as it were by the more originary dyad polis—pelein; second, and as a result of the first transformation, that the violence that was inherent to the polis is not simply dismissed in favour of a more peaceful or less antagonistic conception of the space of originary politics, but is ontologized further and fully integrated into the very structure and logic of the truth of being. The passage from the 1935 to the 1942 analysis of the polis is none other than the passage from a consideration still based on the truth of beings, thus still metaphysical — and in 1935 the analysis was indeed to serve as an introduction into metaphysics itself — to a more originary interpretation based on the truth of being itself; third, and still as a consequence of the recentering of the primordial analysis, the political nature of man is yet further subordinated to this truth.
Just as in the interpretation of Introduction to Metaphysics, the deinon serves as the Grundwort of the chorus, and of the Greek Dasein as a whole. Yet whereas the 1935 interpretation, while accounting for the unheimisch dimension of the Greek man, insisted on its violent aspect, that very violence that allowed for the overpowering to be gathered and revealed in the work of technè, and while the unheimsich dimension itself was linked to a natural tendency to transgress and step beyond the familiar into the unfamilar, the 1942 interpretation, while retaining the aspects of Furcht and Gewalt, insists that the Unheimlichkeit or strangeness of man be thought primarily in terms of his essential Unheimischsein or being homeless:
Now insofar as in the deinon lie also the powerful and the violent we are able to say that the deinotaton means as much as: man is the most violent being in the sense of the cunning animal, which Nietzsche calls “the blond beast” and the “predator.” Yet this predatory strangeness of the historical man is a remote variation and a consequence of that concealed strangeness which is grounded in unfamiliarity [Unheimischkeit], an unfamiliarity which itself has its own concealed ground in the reversible relation [gegenwendigen Bezug] between being and man.
(GA 53, 112)
The strangeness and uncanniness of man is now entirely identified with its Unheimischkeit: man is the unfamiliar being, because he is essentially not at home, essentially not at home in and with the familiar (nicht daheim — nicht im Heimischen heimisch ist).8 Man is the uncanniest of all beings because he dwells in the un-familiar. This unfamiliarity is itself grounded in the relation between being and man. It is this not-at-homeness, along with its essential and grounding connection with being that requires a full and thorough interpretation. What needs to be thought, then, is how the deinon comes to be characterized on the basis of man’s relation to being. What needs to be accounted for, is how being, and man’s relation to it, is seen as playing the decisive role in the poem as a whole, and in the Greek Dasein in particular. Furthermore, because the Unheimlichkeit is now decisively and essentially reoriented in the direction of a founding Unheimichsein, itself rooted in man’s essential and destinal relation to being, it is also a question of understanding how the Heimischwerden, the becoming-at-home and the becoming native, comes to constitute the very task of the chorus:
The word of Sophocles, according to which man is the most unfamiliar being thus means that man is, in a unique sense, not at home and that the becoming-at-home [das Heimischwerden] is his concern.
(GA 53, 87)
Such, then, is the threefold reworking of the designation of man as to deinotaton: man is the most unfamiliar of all beings, because he is essentially unheimische, not at home. This not-at-homeness is essentially ontological, or rooted in man’s relation to being. Because man is not at home, the becoming-at-home is the historical task of man, the task through the completion of which man becomes historical and gains a homeland. Finally, and as a consequence of this threefold designation, the polis appears as the site or the place of this Heimischwerden. What distinguishes this interpretation is thus the introduction of the Unheimischsein and the Heimischwerden as the explicit essence and concern of the Greek man, as well as the complete ontologization of this thematic of the Heim. This transformation is due to the convergence of the thinking of being and of the sustained reading of Hölderlin. It is perhaps necessary, at this point, to note that the discussion of Sophocles appears as the middle section of a lecture course otherwise devoted to Hölderlin, and that it is only with a view to clarifying the fundamental stakes of Hölderlin’s poeticizing that Heidegger turns to the ancient poet. The Sophocles that is presented to us in this lecture course is therefore in conversation with Hölderlin, and secretly governed by the thematic of the native and the national one finds in Hölderlin. If there is a secret dialogue between Hölderlin and Sophocles, if the Hölderlinian hymns, and specifically the river hymns, echo the chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, it is because what comes to be decided in both poems is the homeliness and the homelessness of the Western man. At stake, then, in this secret encounter, is nothing less than the historical destiny of the West. And if one can locate Heidegger’s concern for the political, and by that we mean the possibility for Western man of a genuinely historical dwelling, of a becoming native and a becoming at home, it is as much in this decisive orientation of the deinotaton in the direction of the homelessness of man as it is in the apparently more explicitly “political” discussion of the polis. Or rather, to be more specific, the discussion of the polis is itself entirely derived from the way in which the deinon comes to be thematized anew.
Heidegger finds the justification for this new interpretation in the way in which the verb pelein comes to bear on the characterization of the deinon. Yet there again, Hölderlin will be in the background, secretly governing the interpretation. In the 1935 analysis, the verb pelein was made to signify ragend sich regen, to be in a sort of towering motion, to rise above and thus perhaps to surpass or stand beyond. While the verb pelein does stress the idea of being in motion, Heidegger made it a little more specific by characterizing this motion or mobility as one of ragen, of rising and of towering. In the context of the analysis of 1935, this interpretation fitted well with the overall sense of the destiny of man as being caught in a strifely and violent encounter with the overwhelming force of the whole of being. In 1942, pelein still “means” ragend sich regt. The translation is left unaltered. Pelein means sich regen, to be in motion, and this motion is further defined in terms of a Ragen. Yet the Ragen itself does not refer so much to a rising above and a surpassing, as to a Hervorkommen, a coming forth or a bursting out. Into what? Into the Open, into presence. Thus pelein points in the direction of the presencing whereby every being breaks into the Open, finds its place and holds its position within presence. Pelein is thus synonymous with einai, with being in the sense of presencing: “Pelein: to appear out of oneself into the fore and thus to be [present] [anwesen].”9 The move that is enacted in the interpretation of 1942 seems to be from an understanding of pelein as a specific kind of motion to that originary motion that is presupposed in every motion. Pelein, in the chorus, would refer to that primordial Regen, to motion in the most originary sense: to being as Hervorkommen or presencing. Pelein points to the Constance behind change, to the tranquillity and the motionlessness underneath the storming sea of becoming, of presencing and absencing. Thus pelein is not mere Vorhandenheit; it is not sheer being in the metaphysical sense, being in the sense that has come to prevail from Plato to Nietzsche. But to say that being is the originary movement that allows for every presencing and absencing to be, that allows for the coming into being and the fading of every being is to recognize that it itself is not a being, that it itself does not respond to the law of presence. Being, in other words, is never as this or that being, is never simply present, nor simply absent, but is only as this withdrawal that allows for beings to be, only as this absencing from out of which beings take place and lose their place. Beyond or rather before the movement of coming into being and vanishing, before beings come to be identified with change and movement, there is an originary movement of presencing which, as such, is never present, a movement whose only mode of being is absencing. In presence, what comes to the fore is not presencing as such, but always this or that being, the essence of which never is present, but always is or rules and unfolds as this constant absence. The law of presence is such that what it presents is only its counter-essence; presence happens only in the covering up of its essence. It is in that sense that the strange can be said to rule in beings as a whole. Strange, indeed, are beings, because they only present the non-essential face of their essence. Strange, indeed, are beings, because their familiarity is deceiving, because their very presence is only the covering up of their essence, of their originary site and abode. It is not surprising that the abode itself, or the hearth the chorus speaks of in the last strophe, will come to signify being itself for Heidegger: the concealed site and the original dwelling of all things. Now if amongst such uncanniness, man appears as the most uncanny and least familiar of all beings, it is because he alone is the being who, when relating to beings, does not only relate to their non-essence or their sheer presence, but also to the movement of their presencing. In his encounter with beings, man does not solely encounter such beings, but being as such. Man is thus the being for whom this very uncanniness is a question, this very being for whom, in his being, this uncanninness is at issue. Man is the Unheimlichste because he not only is governed by the law of his essence, but because he also dwells within it, and this means relates to it. This, perhaps, is the way we ought to understand the reinscription of the ragen in the way of a Hervor-ragen: man’s coming forth in the midst of beings is a bursting forth and above, a breaking into the open, not (anymore) in the sense of a violent rising against the earth, at least not primordially, but in the sense of an emergence beyond the mere familiarity of the world into the unfamiliar, beyond the mere presence of things into the movement of their presencing and absencing. Man is the being for whom the whole of being is the site of his own homelessness, the being whose abode is the unfamiliar. Thrown into the world as in the site of his dwelling, man is nowhere at home in the world, for in being in the world he is essentially beyond the world, on the verge of its abyssal foundation and disclosure. If pelein means being, man is the Unheimlichste because this “is,” that designates the Unheimlich in everything that is, is for man a question and an issue, something to which man, insofar as he himself is, relates. In this sense, man “is” more (uncanny) than all beings, for the very uncanniness of being becomes an issue for it and is revealed as such in his very being.
This relation to the unfamiliarity of being is revealed in a twofold way in the chorus. First of all, man is said to be pantoporos and aporos: all over the place, finding ways and tracing paths in the midst of beings, and yet without a place, always faced with dead ends, with paths that lead nowhere. Everywhere is man at home in the midst of beings, working his way through it, encountering beings. The world is his domain, his way: poros. And yet, whenever he comes across something, he comes across the nothing, for he clings to this being and fails to grasp its being and essence. This nothing to which man comes is that which excludes man from being, that which makes him, literally, aporetic. Man reaches the site of his essence only when this familiarity with beings as a whole is suspended, that is, when the Unheimlichkeit that is proper to him, namely the Unheimischkeit through which man relates to beings qua beings is brought into play. For even when man comes under the awesome, violent and uncanny power of the forces of nature (die Mächte und Kräfte der Natur), he is still not experiencing the unfamiliarity that is proper to his essence. This unfamiliarity is, once again, no longer identified with the violence exposed in Introduction to Metaphysics, but with man’s ability to relate to beings as such, and that is to the being of such beings. Yet because man dwells amidst beings to such an extent, immersed in his relation with beings, he is most inclined to lose sight of being itself, to forget it and thereby become aporos. It is in the very familiarity with beings that man becomes oblivious of being and therefore is confronted with the nothing: Heimischkeit alone is the site of man’s abandonment in the midst of beings, the site of absolute evidence, the site of man’s destitution and dereliction. The polis, and of, course, the political itself must be reinterpreted in terms of this presence or absence of a relation to being: the polis, insofar as it remains question-worthy, that is, insofar as it remains the site of man’s relation to the truth of beings, or to the being of beings, constitutes the place in which man unfolds according to his essential unfamiliarity and not-at-homeness; yet insofar as the polis is translated into the modern state, it is the overwhelming evidence of beings that comes to rule, in such a way that man is only confronted with the nothing, thus transforming the political into the site of global nihilism. This is perhaps best captured in the following passage:
This mode of Unheimlichkeit, namely the Unheimischkeit, is available to man only, for he alone relates to beings as such and thereby understands being. And because he understands being, he alone can also forget being. Such is the reason why the Unheimlichkeit in the sense of the Unheimischkeit infinitely, that is, in essence, surpasses all other modes of the Unheimlich. Strictly speaking, the Unheimischkeit is altogether not one mode of the Unheimlich alongside the other modes. Rather, it is essentially “above” them, which is what the poet expresses by calling man the Unheimlichste. The most violent “catastrophes” in nature and in the cosmos are nothing in the order of unfamiliarity [Unheimlichkeit], in comparison with that Unheimlichkeit which man is in himself, and which, insofar as man is placed in the midst of beings as such and stands for beings, consists in forgetting being, so that for him the homely [Heimische] becomes an empty erring, which he fills up with his dealings. The Unheimlichkeit of the Unheimischkeit lies in that man, in his very essence, is a katastrophe — a reversal that turns him away from the genuine essence. Man is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings.
(GA 53, 94)
The first determination of man as the uncanniest of all beings is thus entirely dependent upon his essence as the being who, in relating to beings, is confronted with being as such, and yet who, because of the depth of his involvement with beings, is always about to forget being. Such is the double bind of being the being who understands being. In Sophoclean terms: pantoporos—aporos.
Should it come as a surprise that the second determination be articulated along the same ontological priority? That it respond to the same ontological double bind? The antithetical “hypsipolis—apolis” of the second antistrophe is indeed a repetition of the pantoporos—aporos of the first strophe: “In this word combination the pantoporos—aporos is taken up again”.10 In what way? In other words: what is the relation between the poros or the way that is spoken of in the first instance — that way that leads to something or nothing — and the polis that is at stake in the second opposition? The relation is one of specificity: the polis designates more specifically that which remained undetermined in the poros, in other words “a particular region of the poros and a field of its concrete realisation”.11 Polis, then, would further serve to designate the way (poros). Let us be cautious, therefore, Heidegger warns, and not assume that the word polis is essentially about politics, and that everything in Ancient Greece was “political.” Particularly, let us not assume that the Greeks were, for that reason, the pure and originary National Socialists (this, by the way, would not only be anachronistic: it would also do National Socialism “a favour that it does not actually need”).12 Let us leave this kind of talk to the community of airheads (Dummköpfe) that calls itself “scientific.”13 Let us not assume outright that the polis is a “political” concept and that it is best determined “politically.” Let us even consider the founding “political” texts, or rather, those texts that have come to be considered as foundational for the political history of the West and in which the essence of the polis would be exposed, in the most cautious way. Let us wonder whether Plato’s Politeia and Aristotle’s Politics indeed question in the direction of such an essence, or whether, in talking politically about the polis, they have not already lost sight of its essence, while retaining something of it at the same time. And if such is the case, then “we need to become more Greeks than the Greeks themselves”14 when questioning about the essence of the polis. But how does one go about such a difficult task? Where does one begin, and what does one hold on to? What is to serve as an access to the unthought truth of the Greek polis? The chorus itself, of course. Yet insofar as this chorus is only poetic, the unthought still remains in need of its own interpretation. This enterprise can only be tentative and hazardous. Such is the reason why Heidegger prefaces every determination of the polis with a prudent “perhaps,” as if offering an interpretation to which no empirical verification could correspond:
Perhaps the word polis is the name for the domain that became increasingly and continually questionable and remained question-worthy.
(GA 53, 99)
Perhaps the polis is the place and the domain around which revolves everything that is question-worthy and unfamiliar in a distinctive sense.
(GA 53, 100)
Tentatively, cautiously, the polis begins to unfold as a place (Ort), a domain (Bereich), in which, around which things are made manifest in their question-worthiness, that is, in their unfamiliarity. The polis itself is thus an uncertain site, the site of questioning. But if it is the site of questioning, it is because it is directed toward and also exposes things in their question-worthiness. For there to be questioning, there must be things — beings — that are made manifest as being question-worthy. The question-worthiness of beings lies in the fact that there is more to their being than their sheer beingness. In other words, questioning begins when beings are held in view on the basis of their being, and this means on the basis of being itself, as that which is most worthy of questioning. This is precisely the point at which the modern experience of the political comes to be distinguished from the ancient polis: where the ancient polis appears as the place of the unfolding of beings in their questionableness, and this means in their originary belonging to a truth that is not their own deed, and least of all the deed of man, the modern conception of the nation and the State appears as the site of the most extreme questionlessness of beings with respect to their being, and this means as the site where man posits himself as the measure of truth and rules over beings as a whole. Like the poros of which the chorus speaks, the polis that is in question here is the site of an ontological unfolding, one that is characterized by its ability to reveal the deinon or the Unheimlich in which man comes to dwell historically:
The polis is polos, that is, the pole, the whirl in which and around which everything revolves. Both words name what is essential, what in the second verse of the chorus the verb pelein designates as the constant and the changing. The essential “polarity” of the polis is a matter for the whole of being. The polarity concerns the beings in which, around which it, beings as the manifest, revolve. Thus man is related to this pole in a distinctive sense, to the extent that man, in understanding being, stands in the midst of beings and there necessarily always has a “status,” a stance [Stand] with its circum-stances [Umständen und Zuständen].15
(GA 53, 100)
It is only insofar as man relates to beings in such a way that there comes to be history, that history happens in a distinctive sense, and that the polis takes shape in its concreteness. As in 1935, polis still “means” die Stätte, the place, the site or the scene of the historical happening of man, yet history is here more specifically determined as man’s encounter with the truth of beings as a whole, and not so much as the happening of this particular conflict between the ordering power of phusis and the violence of machination. More than the scene of a titanic and indeed tragic conflict between opposing forces, the polis is now seen as the polos, the pole (der Pol), the whirl (der Wirbel])or the hinge around which everything — beings as a whole — revolves. There is now something intrinsically pivotal about the polis: it is no longer a matrix, a scene, the point at which the paths of man and nature meet in an originary polemos; it is more a hinge that pivots on its own axis, thus attracting beings and organizing them in a specific configuration, a constellation or a cosmos. In the polis, beings as such are disclosed, and brought together so as to constitute a world, with its laws, its gods, its architecture and its festivals. Yet if beings as a whole can be disclosed, it is essentially because man is the being who understands being, that very being for whom, in its very being, being as such is at issue. The polis is the site or the there in which this understanding happens historically. Neither state (Staat) nor city (Stadt), the polis is
the place [die Stätte] of the historical abode of man in the midst of beings. This, however, does not mean that the political takes precedence, that the essential lies in the polis understood politically and that the polis is itself the essential. Rather, it means that the essential in the historical abode of man lies in the pole-like [polhaften] relatedness of everything to the site of the abode, and this means of the being-at-home [of man] in the midst of beings as whole. From this place or site springs what is allowed and what is not, what is order [Fug] and what is disorder [Unfug], what is fitting and what is not. For what is fitting [das Schickliche] determines destiny [das Geschick], and the latter determines history [die Geschichte]. … The pre-political essence of the polis, that very essence that first allows for everything to become political both in the original and derivative sense lies in that it is the open site of the sending, from which all relations of man to beings, and that is always primarily the relations of beings to man, determine themselves. Thus the essence of the polis appears as the way in which beings as such and in general step into unconcealment.
(GA 53, 101–2)
What is decisive and absolutely distinctive about the polis, therefore, is its pre-political, that is, ontological, essence. Only insofar as the polis is viewed as the there in which beings are made manifest to man is the polis authentically political. For in being thus viewed, it is envisaged on the basis of its essence. What is expressed here is the essential connection between the polis and the unconcealment or the truth of beings. Yet this connection is possible only insofar as the polis is itself grounded in the truth of being, only insofar as it itself is a happening of truth: “The polis is grounded in the truth and the essence of being, out of which everything that is comes to be determined.”16
Finally, the polis is similar to the poros in that in it a twofold and opposite possibility rules: much in the same way in which man, as the most unfamiliar of all beings, was declared to be pantoporos—aporos, he is also declared to be hypsipolis—apolis, always exceeding the place, always in danger of losing the place. If the polis is the site of man’s unfamiliarity, it is essentially because man has the twofold tendency to look beyond his place into the place of being, thus opening up his own place as the place of an essential belonging-together with being, as much as to overlook such a place, and thus to dwell in such a way that the whole of being becomes the most familiar and the most obvious:
Man is placed in the place of his historical abode, in the polis, because he and he alone relates to beings as beings, to beings in their concealment and unconcealment and keeps an eye on the being of beings and, from time to time, that is always in the furthest regions of this place, must be misled in being, so that he takes non-being for being and being for non-being.
(GA 53, 108)
The polis is thus governed by a certain reversibility (Gegenwendigkeit), since the unconcealment that takes place in it is at once the risk of the concealment of that very movement. As a result, the historical abode of man is torn between two extremes, always open to the play of its strifely and reversible essence. Ultimately, then, the polis functions like the site in which being comes to be for man as this most questionable and fragile gift, always in danger of losing its questionability, always running the risk of falling into the realm of evidence. The polis is the site of this questioning, the locus of this understanding relation. It is the site where man becomes at home in his own homelessness, the site where man’s essential unfamiliarity or not-at-homeness is made the very center or pole around which everyday life comes to whirl. It is thus the site of the questionability of man, the site that reveals the originary relation between man and being. Man can dwell and become at home in the world only insofar as being has opened itself up to man, only insofar as being is the Open. To be able to see this Open as such, and not only to be sucked into it and be ruled by it, is the specificity of man. Man is this being who can relate to or understand being as such, being in its truth or openness. If man is the uncanniest of all beings, it is precisely because of this ability to look into the abyssal — incommensurable, colossal, dreadful and overwhelming — openness of being, his ability to withstand it and find his own stance within it. The risk — polma — the greatest risk that man runs is to mistake being for non-being, and vice versa, that is, to mistake mere presence for the truth of being, to respond to the law of the essential unfolding of being by covering up the essence.
This extreme ontologization of the chorus is further confirmed and accentuated in the interpretation that Heidegger gives of the hestia, ordinarily thought to serve a social and political function. Yet such a function, which roughly describes the situation of classical Greece, seems to derive from a perhaps more cosmological and physical conception of the hestia, one which, at times, seems remarkably close to that (purely hermeneutical) of Heidegger.
In section 19 of the Ister lecture course, Heidegger recounts the muthos of the cosmic procession of the twelve gods, led by Zeus through the immensity of the skies, as it appears in Plato’s Phaedrus. Hestia, alone, stays behind in the gods’ abode:
There in the heaven Zeus, mighty leader, drives his winged team. First of the host of gods and daemons he proceeds, ordering all things and caring therefor, and the host follows after him, marshaled in eleven companies. For Hestia abides alone in the gods’ dwelling place, but for the rest, all such as are ranked in the number of the twelve as ruler gods lead their several companies, each according to his rank.
(246e–7a)
It is thus that the goddess Hestia comes to be associated not only with the home, in the very center of which she sits enthroned, but with the earth, to which the home is attached. This connection between home and earth is retained in the way in which, in the Mycenaean house, the circular hearth, identified with the home as such, and with the divinity protecting it, is actually fixed to the ground, as if it were the omphalos or “the belly button that roots the house into the earth.”17 Because the hearth is the fixed point or center on the basis of which the dwelling space orients and organizes itself, it is identified with the earth, immobile and stable in the very center of the universe, at an equal distance from the most extreme points of the universe, thus enjoying a privileged position within it. Such, at least, was Anaximander’s conception of the cosmos, a conception that found echoes in domains that extended far beyond those of cosmology (in conceptions of ethics and politics in particular). One understands how Plato, in the Cratylus, is then able to offer a twofold and seemingly irreconcilable etymology of Hestia: for some, he says, it must be related to ousia or essia, that is, to the fixed and unchanged essence, while for others it must be related to osia, for they believe that all things that are are in motion.18 Does Hestia not then become another name for being or presence itself, whether in the sense of the being that is in the way of being, or the being that is by way of becoming? Is Heidegger not ultimately right to assimilate the hearth with being itself? Is Hestia not the goddess of permanence and change, of being and becoming, of fixity and mobility? Should it be read with the pelein after all? What Heidegger says concerning the polis as the pole around which everything revolves, as the center and the axis in the proximity to which things find their place appears in fact as an accurate description of the hestia: following up on Deroy’s analyses,19 Vernant suggests that the hestia or the hearth of the Greek home be compared to the mast of a ship, solidly anchored in the deck, yet standing up straight and pointing toward the sky, much in the same way in which, while deeply rooted in the earth, the flame of the hearth elevates itself toward the highest spheres of the cosmos through a hole in the roof of the home, thus establishing a communication and a continuity between the terrestrial abode and the world of the gods, thus bringing sky and earth together in a single gesture.20 It is in this sense that, with Heidegger,21 we could read the famous anecdote, recounted by Aristotle,22 according to which, one day, as he was receiving guests by the fire of a baking oven, Heraclitus declared to his bemused and benumbed visitors: “Here too the gods are present.” In other words, it is not only in temples that the gods can become present, and that man can experience the unity of his being with that of the divine, but in the home as such, if the home is understood originarily, that is, precisely in terms of man’s essential ability to dwell amidst the unfamiliarity of being.23 Such, therefore, is the image of the hestia that Plato inherits from the oldest religious traditions in Greece:24 immobile, yet in control of the movements that gravitate around it, central, but in the way of an axis that runs through a machine and keeps its various parts together. Heidegger’s interpretation seems all the more probable, that to the emergence of the Greek polis between the time of Hesiod and that of Anaximander also corresponds the re-placing of the hestia at the very heart of the then newly conceived agora, that open and central space in which communal matters are debated publicly, that space that belongs to everyone and no one in particular and in which the community as a whole comes to gather itself. The hearth that now sits enthroned in the agora no longer belongs to a single family or a single oikos, but to the political community as a whole: it is the hearth of the city, the common hearth, the hestia koinè. There now is a center that is more central than that of the oikos, there now is a law that is more common than that of the family and the home — a law that is nonetheless not identical with that of the priest or the king, the law that comes from on high, but a law that is the deed and the expression of the community of oikoi. Yet whereas for Vernant this transformation designates a specifically political phenomenon, for Heidegger, the emergence of the polis in the re-centering of the hestia designates the openness to being itself, the originary openness out of which the polis comes to exist as such, the pole or the center that gathers humans around an originary opening to the essentially aletheic nature of being. Whereas Vernant sees this transformation as a horizontalization of the relations between men — the hestia no longer serves to establish a contact between the various cosmic levels, but now designates the horizontal space in which the equality and exchangeability of citizens is revealed through logos as the absolutely common value — Heidegger would see the centrality of the open space as confirmation of the founding and inescapable power of being. No doubt, Heidegger would interpret the agora primarily in ontological terms: it is the open space that belongs to everyone, the Open in which beings come to be revealed in their truth and men come to be revealed as the beings for whom this truth is of historical importance. The political, what Vernant identifies as the sharing and exposition of power amongst the various groups of the polis would be interpreted as an effect of this originary disclosure. In a way, Heidegger’s discussion of the polis in terms of a pole around which everything comes to whirl, and the connection he draws between this pole and the pelein from the chorus, which he equates with being, already confirms this suspicion. The agora could itself be seen as the pole around which the matters of the polis come to revolve. It could even be seen like the clearing in which such matters come to be revealed for the first time, the clearing through which the polis comes to exist as such. But it is the identification of the hestia itself with being that is most striking, both in the Ister lecture course as well as in the Heraclitus lecture course:25 the true hearth, the true homeland is being itself, what the Greeks called phusis, with respect to which man can be homeless or can become at home: homeless, when he forgets his home, being, becoming native when he becomes alive to his essential belonging to being. Antigone is the very incarnation of this authentic homelessness — as opposed to the inauthentic homelessness, the “issueless busyness in the midst of beings”26 — the fate that consists in the unreserved embracing of the deinon. Antigone is the heroine of the becoming at home in homelessness. For Heidegger, then, hestia is neither the ancient purely domestic hearth nor the religious center, nor even the hestia koinè, the central (political) hearth, symbol of a center and a medium and of shared power; rather, it designates the Open and the originary law of being, that of concealment and unconcealment.
What can we say with respect to this second round of analyses devoted to the polis? How different is it from the 1935 interpretation? The translation of the chorus from Antigone, which constitutes Heidegger’s major source of interpretation, remains identical to that of 1935. What changes is the interpretation proper. Not that translation would not already be interpretation: on the contrary, Heidegger insists at length that translation is not simply the passage from one idiom to another, but operates at the very heart of each idiom.27 Thus, Heidegger says, it is not enough to translate a Greek word by a corresponding German word, as if translation were a simple case of transposition or equation; rather, it is only in translating the Greek into German in such a way as to move the Greek word itself toward its unthought that one genuinely translates, and in so doing, becomes more Greek than the Greeks. The passage through the other-than-Greek is necessary and productive, not in its equating the Greek and the German, and thereby losing all that was irreducibly Greek in the original, but in its bringing the Greek itself back to the site of its unthought. To be more Greek than the Greeks through translating is not to play by the rules of scientific translation, of philology and etymology. The so-called etymologies of Heidegger in no way constitute a science; they neither confirm nor condemn the work of specialists. Rather, if they seem to embrace or reject this or that standard etymology or translation, it is never in the name of science, but in the name of that which, in language (Sprache), holds itself in reserve and opens onto the recessive domain of the comprehension of being. It matters little, then, in the end, that to deinon does not “mean” das Unheimliche, if this is the direction in which it points. It is primarily a matter of knowing what must be understood by Sinn: Bedeutung or Richtung, meaning or direction. Likewise, it matters little that, in the eyes of classical philologists, the translation of polis by “place,” its connection with the verb pelein, and the interpretation of the latter by means of a poem by Hölderlin, seem dubious, if not erroneous or even fanciful. It is a matter of something altogether different than the correct (richtig) — it is a matter of the true. By truth, one must here understand that which speaks in language independently of any intention. It is from this perspective alone that the comprehension of a hymn by Hölderlin can enable one to bear a saying of Sophocles. This is not an anachronism: history is not the linear unfolding of time, but the unequal sequence of resonances of a power of beginning (archè). It is thus that Hölderlin’s saying echoes that of Sophocles, that, despite the “time” which separates them, the two sayings resonate from out of an identical site. Chronological time is not the time of being. History is not Geschichte: if the former retains the true semblance or the correct as its sole criterion, the latter, on the other hand, responds to that of truth alone. It is thus the truth of the deinon or the truth of the polis that Heidegger tries to delimit. And if it is of the very nature of truth to always remain somewhat veiled in its manifestation, if this manifestation itself takes place only on the basis of an originary concealment, then it is this obscure part which thought must go in search of, it is this obscure region, older than light, that philosophy must plunge itself into. To think the polis as it manifests itself in the chorus from Antigone is to think it in accordance with its truth or its essence, to think it, in other words, from out of the unthought and as if withdrawn site of its unfolding. To think the polis in its withdrawal is not to think the polis as that which withdraws, but is to think it as that which takes place only in the retreat of its essence. And it is perhaps here, in the movement beyond the polis in the direction of the unthought site of its essence, in the leap beyond the Greeks, that the slender but nonetheless decisive difference between the first interpretation of the Introduction to Metaphysics and the second series of interpretations dating from 1942 and 1943 is played out. I would not say that the 1942 interpretation calls the reading of 1935 into question, that it runs counter to it, and that it is as if Heidegger had changed his mind as regards what constituted the kernel of his first interpretation, namely the conflict between technè and dikè; rather, I would say that Heidegger is now in search of a more originary interpretation: not more a faithful interpretation, but one yet more Greek and that is to say, paradoxically, one yet more Hölderlinian. Between 1935 and 1942 the in-depth reading of Hölderlin took place, a reading which by and large amounted to a progressive demarcation of Hölderlin’s poetry from Nietzsche’s thought as from metaphysics in its totality. What is new in 1942 is the questioning of the polis in the light of the truth of being and not simply in the light of phusis, which would remain the experience of the truth of beings. Such is the reason why the analysis that the 1942 lecture course on the goddess Truth in Parmenides’ poem devotes to the polis comes as no surprise.28 I do not believe, then, as has been recently argued,29 that the essential difference between the two interpretations is played out around an evolution marking the progressive elimination of the conflictual and of violence from the political sphere, and this in favour of the awaiting of what is question-worthy. Heidegger retains the determinations of violence, of insurrection, of monstrosity even, which would characterize the man of the polis in his opposition and his submission to the power of phusis. Only this conflict is now clarified in the light of the truth of being itself, which henceforth supports the full weight of the analysis. There is, in other words, a movement from one truth to another, from a truth of beings to a truth of being. Both are, in themselves, strifely, and are deployed only in terms of the opposition between an essence and a non- or counter-essence. The question that bears on the truth of being is the most question-worthy of all questions, and it is only insofar as the polis presupposes such a truth that it is itself question-worthy. Put simply, and a little inadequately, the reading that Heidegger provides is yet more “ontological” than that of 1935, which still suffered from onticity. This was due to the fact that the chorus is an attempt to speak the essence of man by describing him in his opposition to phusis. But the essence of man is nothing human, and that of phusis nothing natural. To put this more clearly: if the interpretation of 1935 managed to describe the polis as the gathering site of the truth of beings for man, it did not manage to think the polis from out of the truth of being, and thus wrest it from all metaphysics. After all, the reading of 1935 served as an introduction into metaphysics, whereas, in the 1940s, it is for Heidegger a matter of thinking before and beyond metaphysics: a matter of leaving metaphysics.
Throughout, Heidegger will have thought the polis, of which the modern state is the historical translation, as a place or a site — the site of a historical relation to the truth of beings. The attempt thus consisted in wresting the polis from the hands of the various specialized discourses in which it was traditionally placed. Relentlessly, Heidegger insists that the polis is not primarily a space — whether geographical, urban, social, economic or political — but a “place,” an Ort. The difference between space and place lies in the fact that the place refers to the very possibility from out of which anything like a constituted social, economic and political space might arise. This possibility is that which Heidegger designates as a dwelling or an abode, which is always geschichtlich: to dwell historically means to relate to the whole of being in such a way that what comes to be experienced and understood in the relation is not just beings, but the truth or the being of such beings. The specificity of the human dwelling is captured under the motif of the Unheimischkeit: the abode of man, his Helm or his polis, is first and foremost the experience of the unfamiliarity of beings and of his essential homelessness. Man can truly be at home in the world, and thus create his own abode, only when he is faced with his fundamental not-at-homeness. The apparent familiarity, the peculiar obviousness and in effect the mastery of the world which modern man experiences, and in which he recognizes his own freedom, is actually only the latest and most complete expression of his alienation. Ultimately, then, the possibility of an authentic historical dwelling amidst beings, the possibility of the polis is entirely subordinated to the law of being. And if the polis does indeed mark the site of a reworking of spatiality as place, this spatiality is itself to be understood ontologically. For those, then, who approach Heidegger’s analysis of the polis with the secret hope that it will reveal some decisive clues regarding the status and the practice of politics in general, the disappointment will be very strong.
Yet one can wonder to what extent Heidegger’s ontologization of the polis is successful, independently of the twisting and the bending of the sources on which he draws, mainly the chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone. Specifically, one can wonder as to the extent to which the question of the abode and the dwelling is purely a matter of truth (of being), or whether, to use a vocabulary that is perhaps inadequate even from a late Heideggerian perspective, there is not something irreducibly ontic about it. What would such onticity consist in? It would consist in certain material elements, always in play and already at work, that would determine the mode of historical dwelling in its specificity. If such elements are indeed already in place, the discourse on dwelling which Heidegger subjects the discussion of the polis (but also of the national) to will itself be materially determined, if not overdetermined. I wish to suggest, at the outcome of this chapter, that Heidegger’s conception of the polis, of the national, and by extension, of politics itself remains economically overdetermined. Striking, indeed, about Heidegger’s entire vocabulary when addressing this question of the polis, of the historical dwelling and what we have come to call the national is the domestic economy to which it remains riveted, that is, the law of the oikos, of the home, the hearth and the house to which it is ultimately submitted. The Helm remains the standard, the ultimate value in the light of which the very possibility of a historical dwelling and the very possibility of the nation come to be measured. But there is no sense of this decisive move that takes place in the installation of the polis, the move of the hestia from the sphere of domestic economy to that of a political economy.30 Our historical dwelling is one that can no longer be thought along the lines of a domestic economy: it is now entirely mediated by the laws of political economy, today of global economy, laws which in themselves cannot be brought back to the economy they have superseded and to the central model they once were made to correspond to. The political itself, and this includes the very viability of notions such as the nation and the national, is now the reflection of this essentially dis-located economy. By becoming global, this economy has exceeded the boundaries of national thinking. It is no longer even attached to a political center, or to any center for that matter: it is trans-national, fluid, a-centered, multiple. It operates horizontally, not vertically, not from a single centralized force but from a disseminated plurality of points of intensity. It has a dynamic of its own, it stabilizes itself in a multiplicity of micro-centers, yet it increasingly rules over the planet as whole. “We” are the products of this dynamic, the effect of post-industrial capitalism. By refusing to think economically, by subordinating the economic, and the political, to the ontological, Heidegger does not simply bypass and surpass this decisive question. His thinking regarding the national and the historical, his thinking as such, I would maintain, is stamped by a certain domestic economy, without ever considering the possibility of that economy being already overcome, already transformed and absorbed into a much larger sphere, that sphere that mediates our relation to things, to others and to the very possibility of feeling at home or not in this world. And if our world is indeed that of homelessness, it is perhaps not as a result of some ontological alienation (the forgottenness and/or abandonment of being), but as a result of the essentially global nature of a material process which in no way can be measured on the basis of the sole law of the oikos.
Heidegger’s thought is ultimately submitted to the possibility of retrieving and preserving a sphere of life and a mode of relation to the world that is in effect always and already mediated by a larger economy. We cannot pose the question of our mode of inhabiting as if this capitalistic processor did not exist; we cannot raise the question of an authentic or proper mode of dwelling with the Eigene conceived in terms of the Heim or the oikos — even if such a Heim is, as in Heidegger, indissociable from an originary Unheimischkeit. We cannot abstract from these processes which on a daily basis inform the very way in which things become manifest. We cannot abstract from the question of value, from the way in which money comes to bear on those very questions concerning modes of historical and national dwelling. Technology itself cannot be abstracted from such an economic process, and reduced to a process of representation derived from the forgottenness of the question of being. In the thinking of being, things are considered independently of the way in which the introduction of value comes to modify the way in which we relate to them and in the way they come to appear. Everything happens as if, for Heidegger, things were devoid of value, as if this determination were of no consequence on the way in which we come to perceive them. It is striking to see how National Socialism was able to draw on the fantasy of this pre-capitalistic economy, on a conception of labor equally distributed and geared toward use-value. This is where I find the strongest attunement between Heidegger and Nazism: more than his nationalism, it is perhaps his lack of economic understanding, his refusal to consider that element as decisive that played a key role in his support for Nazism.