One of you was awesome and pointed out that Slavoj Zizek had just written an intriguing article on Heidegger provocatively entitled "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933," and I thought I'd address it more here, since I was perhaps a little too initially dismissive of what it said. (To perhaps help with this address--for what is said here will either submit to or efface its evidentiary trace, though this will occur precisely through a reinterpretation of its evidentiary authority--I've attched a famous photo of Heidegger at a meeting with other Freiburg faculty and administrators. Heidegger is marked with an X.)It's an amazing article, and very thoroughly goes through the positions people have taken and are taking towards Heidegger's engagement--regardless of where you fall on the issue, I think that looking over and subscribing to how Zizek outlines the current situation is profitable. I also think Zizek's account of the interrelationship between Heidegger's thinking and his political decisions not only during the Nazi period but especially afterwards is absolutely insightful--and merits everyone's attention who is interested in the issue.
But I still think the main point of the article is where Zizek gets into problems. Let me first say, though, that I have been and am nearly always sympathetic to Zizek--to the extent that I agree with him when he says that our political situation stands in need of a repetition of Leninism, where repetition means not a return to Leninism but precisely seizing on the open possibilities of Leninism today (although my understanding of repetition is still different, see my post on "Repetition, Negativity and das Geschehen des Daseins," below). I also agree with Zizek that along with this repetition there needs to be (and this is even more urgent) a fierce opposition to populism as a seductive but in the end extremely dangerous position for the Left to endorse (See Zizek's article "Against Populist Reason"--I think it was called--in Critical Inquiry). Fundamentally, though, Zizek remains and has always remained too the real potential of Derrida and deconstruction, which I know he sees--and I just this is afflicts his theorizations of an adequate postmodern subject-position (in at least one way I'll outline below). But to the article.
In the (extremely accurate) words of the person who pointed it out to me, the article essentially tries to outline how "today we are quick to renounce things like collective action, revolutionary engagement, and wagers on truth as containing an element of 'totalitarianism,' where the proper analysis would look beyond this broad-brush approach and find the redemptive elements within collective politics that don't yield totalitarian results." My awesome interlocutor continues: "All of this becomes relevant to Heidegger though, when considering the 'totalitarian' nature of his Nazi engagement. We are all too quick to dismiss his engagement as such as totalitarian. Zizek argues that this engagement is positive and fully necessary for politics - where Heidegger missed was his inability to think beyond the current political horizion and to grasp the emergence of an Event."
In response I said the following, prefacing this with how I don't take issue with the critique of the "broad-brush" approach to totalitarianism--that is, I agree wholeheartedly that we can't read Heidegger simply as a Nazi philosopher, as a philosopher of Nazism or even of totalitarianism generally. Instead, I say, "I'm taking issue with the way he goes about trying to change the way we are disposed to dismiss Heidegger, that is, the way he wants us to read Heidegger in light of a better conception of totalitarianism."
I pretty much stand by that, but I thought I'd elaborate why I think Zizek (and perhaps my interlocutor) would say I was wrong--since it's in the article (and indeed all of Zizek's work), because it brings up a huge question about the nature of the Lacanian political project and, indeed, the post-modern political project as a whole (if one can subsume it under this heading).
Now, Zizek would respond to me by saying that I am, like many people who side with Derrida, ignoring the consequences of my own critique of Heidegger. That is, if I am willing to condemn Heidegger and his Nazism, and at the same time willing to admit of a more complex situation regarding Nazism and totalitarianism now and in Heidegger's time (that is, I am not just naively looking at totalitarianism and Heidegger as "bad," as a philosopher of Nazism), but unwilling to take up a comportment towards these issues I critique, I am (to be frank) emptying out all the force of critique and of subjectivity more generally--I become merely a function of late capitalism, an postmodern unhappy consciousness, another hack who doesn't have any real conception of the consequences of words precisely when he asserts that words have consequences. In fact, according to Zizek, this is precisely what Heidegger resisted in his decision to become a Nazi--an empty form of perpetually unhappy academic criticism. And to that extent, Zizek continues, Heidegger was right in 1933--as the title of the essay says. That is, Heidegger resisted the typical leftist illusion of a comportment towards the political that precisely did not do anything political, did not risk anything in its ability to continue thinking, did not correctly apprehend the violence that is in the nature of the political act insofar as it actually does risk doing something. Heidegger, according to Zizek, precisely engaged in this risk--and insofar as he did so, he conceived of and engaged in the political subject-position or comportment correctly.
Now, I absolutely agree with all of this regarding someone who does not take up a definite subject position to this object of their critique--but don't think it applies here to what I'm saying, because I do not think that Heidegger's resistence to this indefinite Leftist position with respect to the political itself constituted a correct apprehension of the essence of the political subject-position--and I think this is really what Zizek is saying. In other words, I don't think this criticism applies, because fundamentally I don't think we can say Heidegger was right at all in 1933, even in the sense Zizek suggests.
Why? Not because I agree with any of the other readings of Heidegger's actions in 1933 (and before and after) with respect to Nazism, especially with those readings that assert it was just a mistake, but because fundamentally I think Heidegger did what Zizek does, which is confuse the violence inherent in thought with the risk that lies in the political event. To assert that this violence is part of the necessary risk inherent in the political subject position is then, really incorrect. The violence in thinking, or even active thinking (action, praxis), is not the same as the risk that this thinking takes in doing this violence.
Let me be clearer on what I mean by "violence," for Zizek is good about marking the occurence of this word in Heidegger's texts and this strain in his thinking--and approving of it. For Heidegger it has to do with the ability of thought to retreive essential or proper thought (thought of the truth of being) and to break down or destroy other thoughts in order to transform them into this essential thought. Like Derrida, and like Zizek, Heidegger fundamentally thinks thoughts are violent--they have effects, and they cannot escape having effects. The history of metaphysics is the history of a certain type of violence for Heidegger, which needs to be properly transformed--and this must also be done through a certain type of violence. This is what Heidegger is getting at in a preface to his book on Kant, to take only one instance of this discussion of violence:
Readers have taken constant offense at the violence of my intepretations. Their allegation of violence can indeed be supported by this text. Philosophicohistorical research is always correctly subject to this charge whenever it is directed against attempts to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers.
-Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edition, xx (the remark is written in 1950).
In other words, nothing can be signifiantly thought without this violence.
Now, Zizek thinks the assertion about the violence in thought stems from something correct in Heidegger--the conception of the real risk in having a relationship to the political in one's thinking, the sense Heidegger had of the political act of thought and its very real consequences. That is, thought risks itself (its ability to continue existing), as well as the thought of others (their ability to continue existing), in being political. Furthermore, if it does not risk itself, it is not political. But there is no such thing as an apolitical thought--Zizek argues. There are only thoughts that risk nothing--these are postmodern unhappy thoughts just characterized. This political risk is the other side of thought itself--insofar as thought is to be itself, then, it must develop and account for (be responsible for) this risk. Heidegger was not responsible enough for this risk--in the sense that he did not develop the risk enough.
But already risk and violence are confused. Violence is about what thought does. It is concerned with its effects. Risk is about the survival of thought itself, it is about what allows thought to continue to be thought. Zizek wants us to recognize both the risk and the violence inherent in thought--i.e. that it is staked upon (risks) precisely its violence. But what this means is that any time a thinker acts in such a way so that they two exist together, he is conceiving of the political correctly. He is comporting himself towards the event. I would contend that it is precisely when one does not stake ones thought on the violence, when one risks an infinite respect towards the violence of thought, that there is politics. This doesn't mean there is a refraining from action--it just means that the political is shifted onto the act of respect rather than upon the mere coexistence of thought, risk, and violence. Thus acting responsibly is not being respectful to the ontology of the political event itself, but precisely by respecting what constitutes the event (which is alterity--see below).
So in Zizek's eyes Heidegger missed the real nature of the risk he was engaged in. Heidegger was not enough of a Nazi for Zizek: he was too much of a thinker of violence and not enough of a thinker that risked his thinking in the political.
But this I think is to confuse risk and violence--thought can risk something precisely by accounting for and respecting this violence. For me there is a difference between recognizing the imperative to be responsible for this violence in its action--this is nothing less than the ethical imperative that we can find in the work of Levinas and Derrida--and employing this violence blindly--which is what Heidegger does in my view. In other words, there is a difference between acting with a respect for (and some degree of control over) the the necessity of this violence, which includes the fact that it is necessarily a source of pleasure--i.e. that it is the site of unavoidable jouissance--and merely employing it and asserting that it is a necessary component of any risky action itself. The latter position may even try to account for this violence in some way similar to the first position, but I think the accent is on the this necessity as an excuse, rather than as something to be respected--and this makes all the difference. So in my view Heidegger was profoundly wrong because of the actual violence of his thought in its risking itself--indeed, Heidegger was not so naive as to think thought could engage in Nazism without violence, but he mistakenly took the mere coexistence of this violence and thought (that was engaged, risking itself), for a respect for this violence.
In fact, to a disturbing degree, he approves of this violence--he approves of its relation to jouissance, and he approves of the fact that thought is constituted by it. Just like Zizek. But doesn't this betray the fact that both Heidegger and Zizek are too wrapped up in the mere act of trying to show people thought is violent and risky and less with trying to conceive of a respect that can issue out of their coexistence? That is, their thought itself becomes indistinguishable from an excuse--though of course to take it as an excuse would be to miss their point. The point is that real thought and real politics are justified only through excuses--that the nature of the political act of thought just is violent and risky beyond excuse. But the disturbing thing about this is that it is also a refusal to think about how to be responsible to more than just the nature of this thought in political action.
This is the barbarism of Heidegger--what produces the inane Heimatkunst within his writings, as well as the Wagnerian strains in his descriptions of the necessary movements of thought.
Of course, I'm not saying that we should be looking for a way out of this violent and risky necessity of political thought--a solution will not present itself to us. This is the position of the unhappy postmodernist that Zizek hates (along with me). It means that we should focus less on fidelity to the event itself, and more on the conditions (or, rather, the condition, which is multiplicity itself in the form differing and deferring alterity/ies) that construct it, that make these things (violence and risk and the political thought) coexist. That means that we have to account for why we cannot ever sufficiently respect the conditions of this political event--which lies in how that these conditions would have to be present to us--and that the real respect is located in this accounting. This means thinking of the conditions of the event as not reducible (as they are in Badiou and Zizek) to the Big Other and the Real--i.e. the fact that the Big Other doesn't exist.
That is, there might be an alterity that is more profound and more disruptive than the Other of Lacanian thought and the Real. Thinking how this is the case is really thinking about responsibility: at least this is the Derridian/Levinasian claim--a claim I think is just as politically effacacious as it is correct.Regardless, just because Heidegger got the risk and violence inherent in the political event right doesn't at all make what he did right (as an act--for Zizek of course it was wrong in what it acted towards, i.e. Nazism)--even if this risk and violence is precisely the opening up of the political to nonpresence, to alterity. Let me be clear: the point is that Heidegger conceived of this alterity like Zizek--that is, as reducible to the Real in the Other--and thus made a political decision that only served to assert the reality of the violence of thought risking itself... he did not try at all to be responsible for this reality, because it thought that merely comporting oneself towards it was enough. What Heidegger did not do is try to integrate it into his thought in an effort to be responsible for it--to this extent his thought shares in what made him become a Nazi. This isn't failing to grasp the emergence of an Event, it is failing to integrate a responsibility to an alterity that cannot even fit within the structure of the Event (as outlined by Badiou)--an alterity that Heidegger was himself on the way to theorizing.
But one can return to Heidegger's thought and indeed transform it into responsibility: this I believe is precisely the project of Derrida and Levinas. More closed to this project than he should be, Zizek does not adequately conceive of the political subject-position.
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