If not by way of conclusion, at least by way of gathering some of the recurrent motifs and stakes of these pages, let me formulate three questions or, shall we say, three irreducible reservations that I wish simply to mark. To a large extent, these questions remain programmatic and will no doubt need to find their own space of articulation in due time.
1. The first question has to do with the centrality of the motif of the Heim for the question of politics. This question, as I have already suggested, touches on what I have designated as an economical overdetermination of Heidegger’s thought. To economy proper — that of labor and of the Worker, that of production in the age of technology — Heidegger wished to oppose or liberate another economy, which he never acknowledged as such, not even as an aneconomy: it is the law of the oikos, of the home and the hearth, the law of the proper, of the national and the native. This law is not the effect of labor and production, but that of (the) work (of art) and the poet. It arises out of the necessity to articulate the Da of Sein, to delimit the space or the place of being. In other words, it is an economy of being, or, as Schürmann has shown, of presence.1 As soon as the question and the thinking concerning being is dependent upon that of the “there,” of its presentation and its donation, the path is laid, as it were, for the introduction of the thematics of the abode, of the site and of the place: in short, of the topos. Ontology is an onto-topology. Must we conclude that phenomenology, insofar as it remains attached and subordinated to a problematic of presence and of donation is, from the start and forever, oriented toward a certain economy, toward a certain predilection for the home and the abode, for the shelter and the hearth? Can we — and this seems to take place as early as section 12 of Being and Time — inquire into the topology of being without being driven into a thematic of the sojourn and the dwelling? Are the topoi bound to be thought as oikoi? Not necessarily. I would want to suggest that if the spatiality of Dasein as being-in-the-world does indeed presupose a certain mode of dwelling, it does not necessarily imply that mode of dwelling that became central to Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s, and to which the political engagement of 1933–4, as well as the subsequent confrontation with this engagement, remained indebted: the national and the native, the Heimatliche and the Heimische. True, Heidegger must be recognized as forever having rendered the thematic of the proper, of the abode and of the nation problematic: the abode is never simply given, the proper is never accessed or appropriated without the most extreme experience of the improper, the national itself is always an experience of the fundamental unfamiliarity of being. A thinking of the nation might even benefit from working its way through the complexities of its Heideggerian thematization. Nonetheless, we can wonder as to whether this thinking of the proper is altogether inevitable. We can wonder as to whether thinking, poetry and art, while retaining some essential connection with this dwelling spatiality of being, must ultimately be pushed in the direction of a domestic topology. Instead of conceiving of language as this space where being comes to find and appropriate itself as in its own shelter, could we not conceive of language as the open plain (or plane) at the surface of which presence would sketch its own lines of flight? Rather than submitting language — poetry, literature — to a logic of translation and appropriation, could we not inhabit language as the land of our errancy, in quest of our own foreignness? Why, in other words, should we not become strangers in our own language? Beckett, or Joyce, might here become paradigms. This, to be sure, is infinitely close to what Heidegger suggests in certain places. Yet, ultimately, Heidegger’s conception of thinking, of language and of history remains subordinated to the exigency of the return (Heimkunft), of the becoming native (Heimischwerden), of the proper and of the home. Ultimately, the space of the abode — whether as existence, as language or as Volk — remains bound to a domestic economy, in a gesture that excludes the appropriation and the translation of such an economy by the laws of a larger economy, that of Capital. Ultimately, then, it would be a matter of wondering whether thinking must not be wrested from propriety altogether, whether dwelling has not entered a mode that is irreducibly transnational and translinguistic, always mediated by the absolute exchangeability and fluidity of an absolutely common value (money), thus forcing thinking into a different economy. Let it be clear: it is not henceforth a question of simply validating the effects of global capitalism on the contemporary mode of historical dwelling, much in the same way in which it cannot be a matter of embracing or rejecting technology as the dominant mode of presencing. But it is a matter of acknowledging the extent to which these material processes bind thinking to a new critical becoming. Thinking, if it is to remain critical, cannot abstract from such processes. Would the task, then, not become to think the destinal and the material together, to think the economy of presence as the presence of a global and hegemonic economy, that is, as the presence of Capital?
2. Wanting always to hand the essence of politics over to something which would not be political (namely: being, presence), does Heidegger not simply miss what constitutes the specificity of this sphere, does he not refuse it any existence outside of that which is imposed upon it by the unveiling of being? And does not this specificity have to do, precisely, with a certain impossibility of essentialization? If politics indeed grows not out of the soil of being, but between men, if its site is indeed that of the between, then does it not designate that which resists every unifying and essentializing appropriation? Is it not irreducibly horizonal? Does not every attempt to draw politics back to a place other than that of this between in which it plays itself out in its entirety, henceforth signify its annihilation? Such, at least, would be our hypothesis here: if Heidegger never managed to recognize the autonomous existence of the political, then this is insofar as it is, from the start, measured by the yardstick of something which signifies its own annihilation; wanting to anchor the political in the folds of presence alone, what sees itself closed off is its irreducible horizonality and multiplicity. What is the political, then, if not a way in which presence comes to unfold? We must here leave this fundamental question hanging. At stake, however, is this space of the between, this irreducibly flat space in which the humanity of man is played out, this space where the ancient name of justice comes to be articulated. “There is” politics, properly speaking, from the moment that justice becomes a question: not the dikè that Heidegger always traced back to being, but the justice which Aristotle says constitutes the ultimate goal of all activity and the last stake of praxis. Politics is born from this indelible “fact” which enjoins us to think away from being. Politics is this place where a difference other than the one which separates being from beings, and being from non-being, is played out: the difference through which everyone comes to be related to an Other. Politics is only the expression of this differential relation which is always a relation of power and desire. It lives and produces itself in this gap; it negotiates itself there, in this critical space, this space of crisis and incision, this space of decision, this space where it is always a matter of cutting into the flesh of the matter. This space, in other words, of justice. Totalitarianism designates the closure of this space, the will to resolve everything or the desire to have done with justice. Nothing, in the thought of being, rises up against such a desire. On the contrary. This thought went so far as to serve as a relay for this desire.
3. Finally, there is the question of myth, which is still in need of its own deconstruction,2 the closure of which Heidegger experienced without ever being able to think it through. If Heidegger’s conception of myth remains bound to a metaphysical logic that can be traced back to early German Romanticism, and specifically to the “new mythology” called for by Hegel in “The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism,”3 it is first and foremost in the essential complicity that links the possibility of a historical beginning with the power of myth. In Heidegger’s sense, myth is primarily the saying through which the relation to the origin is asserted. Only secondarily, and to a lesser extent, perhaps, does Heidegger also retain the traditional social function of myth, that function whereby a community gathers, commmunicates and perpetuates itself through the repetition of the founding myth. In the sharing of myth, then, it is a question of bridging the gap that separates us from the origin, of recapturing the lost or forgotten archè. Only in this appropriation of the origin is history made possible; only in the becoming-present to the founding moment does the possibility of a future arise, and with it the sense of destiny and community. Despite the tensions and complexities of Heidegger’s relation to the archè and to the Greek muthoi, whether Sophoclean or Platonic, his attitude toward them seems to echo this basic logic of myth. As for his reading of Hölderlin, which can be seen as operating at the very limit of myth, insofar as, in a time of distress marked by the absence of the gods, poetry can only free the space for the hypothetical coming of a new god, it nonetheless subordinates the political and the whole of Western history to the return of the divine and the problematic of salvation. Salvation, as always, can only come from a god. But is salvation what is at issue? Or must we not finally free (save?) ourselves from salvation, from all gods and ideals, at least when thinking politics? Is the death of god not also the death of the theologico-political, or of mytho-politics? Is the closure of metaphysics not also that of myth?
In the end, the mythology Heidegger calls for has perhaps very little to do with “the Nazi myth,” at least that myth that sings the superiority and historical destiny of the Aryan race. Yet Heidegger never quite put himself in a position to identify this myth as such and to deconstruct the political logic that is attached to it. He only diagnosed it as the cheapest metaphysics and offered a counter-myth in return. His move toward the mytho-poetic, and toward art in general, is indeed a move away from the Nazi myth, yet it is also a further inscription of the political sphere in that of mythology. It is a move into the “truly” or “authentically” mythic. Admittedly the privilege of a language (the German one) and of a muthos (Hölderlin’s) is radically different from the Nazi myth. Yet it is this very primacy of a language and of the historical situation of a people that governed Heidegger’s nationalism, even in its Hölderlinian form. Ultimately, nationalism remains bound and subordinated to mythology, which provides it with its heroes and its gods. Together, they mark the end and closure of politics. After Heidegger, and in the wake of this century’s destructive myths, it is a question of marking the closure of mytho-politics, a question of abandoning myth to myth itself. It is, in other words, a question of acknowledging the fact that the very appeal to myth as the founding moment of a people is itself a myth, a fiction that is doomed to the most catastrophic outcome. Indeed, to will to live under the power of myth is already to announce the closure of the space of politics. To appeal to the political and historical power of myth, to put myth to work, is to attach the space of the between of politics to the grounding and univocal voice of a single narrative. As soon as the mythic appears as a “solution” to a historical “crisis,” it can no longer operate as myth. Myth indeed works, or worked, in that it was historically productive, yet it cannot be put to work. If myth cannot work without a work (of art, of poetry), the work itself cannot be (politically, historically) put to work. Myth is essentially paradoxical in that its utterance always designates the absence of that which it names, and yet it is in the name of this absence that actuality is transformed, and that politics is brought to an end. There is no hope in myth. There can be no new mythology. Myth cannot be made to replace the space of politics, that space for which we wish to reiterate the ancient name of justice.