Slavoj Zizek on Heidegger

Zizek, self-proclaimed "Heideggerian" in his early years, raises some interesting questions about Lacan's tortured relationship to Heidegger in The Ticklish Subject, but his remarks on Heideggerian politics often seem to be inadequate, coming up short of the real issues. Indeed, he oversimplifies the Heideggerian position, but this isn't the real problem. In fact, the characteristic oversimplification of Zizek is a maneuver which I find often more productive than plodding along in the particular amongst "facts:" Zizek might agree most with Hegel that "thought moves in the universal" and gathers its power only by particularizing itself--that is, not by being constantly confronted by the particular as if the particular (facts, "accurate" information) inherently contradicted the universal (statements too wide in scope). Insofar as this is the case, he must oversimplify. Indeed his merit is that this oversimplification becomes integrated into his text: in other words, the excess of this oversimplification (oversimplification's "over-") is primarily the elucidatory element in any statement and further works to pushs his discourse along. This is because, like Hegel, Zizek's writing aims to hit constantly not only at the presuppositions that characterize a particular discursive position, but the perverse core of that presupposition that renders it so manifestly powerful: thus his continued uses of precisely's and Is it not the case that... ?'s, and, most of all, his paradoxes. Thus it relies on oversimplification, turning it into a force that is more powerful than any "fact-based" discourse that pretends to get at all objective truth (and thus equally moves within the realm of universality despite its own claim). Of course, this is all characteristic of thinking speculatively or dialectically about any problem (again, like Hegel), but it can go amiss when it overemphasizes the wrong nexus of perversion within a presupposition. That is what happens here.
In short, he emphasizes the perversity of the axis within Heidegger's thought that moves between "ontic" and "ontological," showing that Heidegger inevitably gets into trouble on the basis of this binary itself because it always priveliges the latter term. The ontological will always be "more primordial" for Heidegger. And since the ontological veils itself constantly in the ontic, Zizek, like Heidegger, asks how we are supposed to get to the ontological. Heidegger puts it this way in Being and Time: "Ontological Interpretation projects the entity presented to it upon the Being which is that entity's own, so as to conceptualize it with regard to its structure. Where are the signposts to direct the projection, so that Being will be reached at all?" (359). If the ontic is the "factual," the "whatness" of any particular being (an ontic interpretation of God might say that "God is the greatest," applying a predicate to something in order to characterize it) and the ontological is the "potentiality" of the thing, its Being (ontologically characterizing God would conceed that God would be merely a thing if we were to call it "greatest," and would look instead at how its existence makes possible a general possibility for its own existence, how it exists instead of not)--if all this is the case, and if we can only really bring to language the ontic, how can we get to the ontological? Heiegger says that we must "look at the phenomenon," look at the ontic in its ontological dimensions. But what is the relationship between the ontic and the ontological there such that we may derive one from the other? Do not all ontolgical phenomena have to be accessed ontically? And therefore, do not all ontological characterizations proceed by merely substituting an ontic phenomenon for an ontological one (Derrida says as much in a quote Zizek skillfully deploys--indeed, his most unappreciated genius might be his ability to bring to light key quotations most people miss)? In short, for Zizek, it comes down to this: "Those who come closest to the ontological truth are condemned to err at the ontic level... err about what? Precisely about the line of separation between ontic and ontological. The paradox not to be underestimated is that the very philosopher who focused his interest on the enigma of ontological difference--who warned again and again of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content (God as the Highest Entity, for example)--fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting the essence of modern man" (The Ticklish Subject, 12--witness the striking speculative logic and the precision in the oversimplification).
Thus, apropos the problem of how to choose a political system, Zizek shows that we really get into problems if this is the case. Citing his own experience in Yugoslavia as a young philosopher, he makes the claim that "Heideggerians are ... eternally in search for a positive ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy that inevitably ends in error" (13). Furthermore they engage in a political passivism, denying that any manifestation of a particular ontological truth in a definite political system will be flawed because it will be ontic: for example, they will condemn Soviet Communism while holding up Socialism as ontologically true--indeed, how many "postmodern" Heideggerians and Heideggerian Marxists did precisely this throughout the twentieth century, especially after the fall of the Soviets (cf. Specters of Marx and the various responses to it, which all do not really differ, regardless of the different views on Marxism expressed, in taking up this precise position).
Now, how much does this all hold up? The first thing to be noted is what Zizek is right about. He is precisely right in characterizing the difference betwen the ontological and the ontic, for starters, which makes his characterization of the "paradox" above all the more poignant: Zizek is not passing off some simplified version of the ontological as far as Heidegger's own political positions goes. That is, the usual way to engage with Heidegger's statement in his Introduction to Metaphysics about the "inner greatness" of the Nazi movement is either to characterize it as overtly Nazi--that is, as just giving into propoganda in calling it great--or (what is more common) to say that it merely gets at an ontological truth about the movement, while leaving that ontological truth indeterminate and thereby evacuating the phrase of any content. Zizek rightly sees that what the "inner truth" of Nazism was for Heidegger was precisely the no-holds-barred confrontation of man with technology, the attempt to seize it and integrate it into life, rather than through slowly (as in capitalist democracies) let it seep into our experiences such that technology ends up governing them totally (Zizek gets this from various remarks of Heidegger, but also sees that it is connected to his later interests in technology, which few are willing to do--that is why it is a good reading of this incident). The key to Heidegger is to realize that while the ontological veils itself, that does not mean it is indeterminate--this key Zizek applies with skill.
Yet it is precisely in this merit that he goes wrong, because he manipulates this key to his own advantage. That is, he is willing to problematize the ontological for Heidegger precisely when it is a matter of his Nazism, as well as for his Yugoslav Heideggerian acquaintences, but then not see that it is this very determinacy to the ontological he has used that allows a connection between the ontic and the ontological and "errors" (like choosing a horrible political system to embody an ontological truth) to be avoided. Of course, he does this in order to more radically correct the Heideggerian framework through integrating it with Lacan's remarks. But this only means the depth of the problem that he uncovers is not seen fully; that we have only arrived at a superficial version of the perversion constituted by Heidegger's paradox. In other words, Zizek's warning not to underestimate Heidegger's raising to ontological dignity a horrible ontic phenomenon only serves to cover up the real perverseness of this action that he passes by.
I'll specify this "real perverseness" more later.