Cultural and biological devastation: Jonathan Lear

I have always enjoyed the work of Jonathan Lear. His account of Freud, combined as it is with his intense interest in and understanding of Aristotle, is the most vibrant and cogent one I think Anglophone countries have produced in a very long time (compare any one of his books on Freud to those of Anglophone theorists and the difference isn't even funny). Back in Illinois, I had the opportunity to listen to an early version of his new book Radical Hope in a talk, and the subject as well as Lear's excellent treatment of it have not ceased to be on my mind since. It couldn't be otherwise. Lear's daring and yet sensitive effort to produce a philosophical anthropology of the Crow and their fascinating leader Plenty Coups (Aleek-chea-ahoosh) not only introduces you to an amazing culture and its history, but also confronts contemporary virtue ethics with an immense problem that anyone within the field (or anyone even with an interest in it) is not likely to forget. And now that I have had time to get to the excellent book itself (now in paperback), I find myself returning to this problem with a better understanding of how Lear is trying to frame it.
This problem is catastrophe: what happens when a culture is faced with its own demise? Reproducing a significant Heideggerian distinction, we might actually call this cultural death, not cultural demise: Lear does not mean that this culture is threatened by biological extinction, and thus must work at preserving its bare life or surviving, but that, as a community, it will not be able to foster individuals that have any relationship to its norms or standards of excellence, that is, foster them ethically on the level of culture--a prospect that, he argues, is just as frightening. Now, this does not mean that cultural death is not related to the threat of biological distinction: just that--and we will come back to this repeatedly later--the ethical action under discussion in the book will tend to locate itself on the level of culture, while more pragmatic but not necessarily ethical action will be directed towards the needs of survival. Now this distinction is not merely me being fascinated once more with Heidegger: Lear's effort is explicitly conducted with the help of the excellent John Haugeland and constitutes a great attempt to reintroduce certain contemporary ethical assumptions centering around Aristotle back into the Aristotelian framework of Heidegger's thinking. That is, it is (putting it conversely) a work that attempts to bring Heidegger back to Aristotelian ethics.
The impact of the problem of cultural death upon thinking is clear. Once it is comprehended, one has to wonder whether this moment of cultural death is not the death of the concept of virtue ethics as well: unless we have something to say besides what virtues should be cultivated by a culture, unless we can say something about whether and how, in the face of the annhiliation of its traditional ways, any culture can have and hold onto virtues, we are not going to be on sure ethical ground. This is so not only in the sense that the concept and project of virtue ethics will find a limit. Indeed, some argue that something like this limit should apply, keeping us outside of the sphere of anything encroaching on the meta-ethical, as this problem forces us to do. But even if we accept this, the deeper ungroundedness of ethics would still apply: we would not have a secure basis because, as occasional references of Lear's book make clear, the problem of the death of a culture could perhaps more prevalent than one thinks. Even if we overlook the problems of mass migration caused by various political and economic situations throughtout the rest of the world, in America alone we face the anxieties about terrorism (not necessarily about acts of terrorism but rather how to adjust daily to the possibility of it, like some other cultures do) and certain events like Hurricane Katrina (not in the aspect of its brute destruction of life, again, but in terms of how we adequately can comport ourselves to the cultural devastation any displacement like that required by the disaster would entail). This is so even if we don't admit that this frequency of cultural death or devastation is empirically higher now for some reason: perhaps virtue ethics is haunted in its foundations by this risk--and haunted to a degree that previous philosophers could not register. Lear makes this point about Aristotle specifically: the Nicomachean Ethics, while it may speak of the acquisition of skills and excellencies, and even their devolution or loss, does not talk about the problems of handing down these virtues--at least in a way Lear feels comfortable advocating. This presupposes a sort of static model of virtue: while we can say culture gets passed down in learning, for example, this is merely to collapse the issue of handing-down or handing-over into something that is assumed will be handed-down or handed-over. What we encounter here is the same problem Heidegger encountered, one that is--I would argue--the most significant one about his entire endeavor and the most pressing for any modern ethical as well as ontological account, given our time and place: the problem of historicity. In order to address historicity, beyond the level of talking about nurturing and education, in order to talk about historicity itself, we must address the possibility of the death of culture as inherent to culture--that is, as inherent to any system or structure of virtues. And unless we address historicity, we will not be able to account for what is ethical in a world where that historicity itself is precisely what is in the balance.
In a few sentences towards the end of the book, Lear brings to the fore the whole problem in just a few sentences, and also the possible response (Plenty Coups's) to it that Lear advocates:

For a vibrant culture, it is traditionally the task of the older generation to adapt the culture's ideals to current challenges and to pass those ideals on to the next generation. But in the period 1870-1940, the Crow tribe went through such a collective disruption that there was no way to pass on those ideals in an unproblematic way. It was in this context that Plenty Coups drew on traditional tribal resources--the [traditional, but somewhat neglected interpretation of] the chickadee--to formulate an ego-ideal of radical hope. That is, he gave the tribe the possibility of drawing on a traditional ideal that would help them endure a loss of concepts.
-Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, p. 141

But what makes this problem, as Lear frames it, itself problematic for me is its use of the Heideggerian distinction we discussed above: the difference between the biological demise of a culture, its extinction, and the passing away of the possibility of handing-down culture. For the difference between death and demise seems to be distributed in an odd way when it is extended out beyond that of something like an individual: that is, when one assumes that culture has a structure like the Dasein of Being and Time. Are we to think that the realm of culture is separable from biological existence as this account makes it seem? Furthermore, are we to think that attacks against the culture of a community are more prevalent in our world today than attacks upon the existence of these communities? And, fundamentally, are we to think that the possibility of handing-down culture, even though it depends on the possibility of biological existence from one level to the next, acts as if it is indifferent to its bare existence and the threats to it in decision-making, with its eye, as it were, only on the level of culture?
Now, one can see that these objections might risk missing the entire point of Lear's work by asking him to be more radical than necessary. And I think that these objections do indeed miss the point, if one is trying to make them in the service of some hyper-liberal principle that does not settle for anything less than its own ideal, even for the sake of argument. We will encounter one of these ways of objection--or rather, contradiction--in just a moment. But I don't think they do when they are made to try and help Lear address what he is trying to address even more effectively.
For my second point, I think, is the most crucial and would be the most significant for Lear: the fact that his book presupposes that threats to the biological existence of a people are something that do not happen as frequently as threats to culture, or, even if this is not the case (it is not my goal to get into some empirical dispute), the fact that communities do not or should not have as much to do, ethically, about their biological extinction as opposed to their cultural death.
And to return to the risk of missing what Lear is saying, there is one way to precisely make this point that would be crude. It would be by framing it in a particular way around the Holocaust. Lear had to face questions about the Holocaust repeatedly, as he says in a footnote: When I have presented these ideas in lectures, I have regularly been asked about similarities to the Jewish holocaust in World War II (p. 163, note 42). But there is a way of asking it that would make our point only by shutting down the possibility of the discussion of ethics.
Now, I call this way of making our point crude not because it references the Holocaust--indeed this event does bear upon the discussion--but because this reference to it here would reference it as a contradiction. To put it another way, it is crude because is a way of putting our question, and a lot of other questions, that misunderstands precisely what is at stake in in it. For Lear may indeed be operating in such a way that he does not think what he is doing can address the Holocaust. That is, he may think that not only are the situations and ethical demands different in the two cases, but also that the first case is ethically relevant for him while the second needs a different set of resources to be dealt with. To extend this line of argument to its extreme, Lear might not think that the ethical sphere in which he is working (perhaps even virtue ethics itself) has any ability or, what's more, any need to address the Holocaust.
And all these possibilities are good reasons, I'd like to think--that is, if they are all not, on some level, also completely legitimate. For what is crude is assuming these objections ultimately have no reason behind them because the Holocaust must always be addressed by them. This is not something even Derrida--who thought there was no ethical position that would be fully able to legitimize itself--would hold. He would acknowledge that there are indeed reasons for granting ethical thought a certain sphere of operation: even if it were to be deconstructed, the point for Derrida is precisely not to make demands of this sphere that discount its reasons for operating that way (one must discount, instead, its reasonability, that is, its legitimacy, if anything is to be in fact discounted). And I call attention to the example of Derrida here because he indeed felt that the Holocaust needed to be and was being addressed nearly always--it was that important, that massive of an event. But the point is that using the Holocaust as an example here is one way to make unreasonable demands on a sphere which indeed, if it weren't subjected to an attack with this event, might be willing and able to extend itself to address it. It is a way to cut through all the complications of these levels in which ethical action may be operative but still unable to face up to this monstrosity--a level which could indeed apply to people who are indeed facing up to it, or, more likely, to those who are learning how to face up to it. I bring up this way of putting the question because it is a common form of contradiction in some circles, and, as I noted above repeatedly, my objection here will run up against, but hopefully distinguish itself from, that way of contradicting.
In the end, comparing the case that Lear bases his study upon to the Holocaust passes over the fact that, even if Lear is only operating on a level that refuses to address the Holocaust, a level that thinks it passes beyond where ethics has anything to say to it of significance, within these protocols of his discourse Lear seems to foreclose what he himself demands: that culture have some relationship to the maintenance of life or survival of a people. In other words, as we said above, putting the question of the difference between the extinction of a people and cultural death in terms of whether the Holocaust, as an extinction of people, can matter to Lear's argument--putting it this way simply misplaces the question's proper emphasis. The emphasis should be on how culture cannot separate itself from survival too much, otherwise the whole point of being concerned about the death of a culture becomes pointless.
Now we can look at the rest of the footnote, for this is actually what it seems to say with respect to the Holocaust: not that the Holocaust is something too extreme for the book to handle, but that it is an event where culture has been so separated from existence that any concern about culture seems actually, as far as decision-making is concerned, to be less relevant--either it will survive or it won't:

Crow concepts [or conceptions of virtues] could, I think, have survived their own holocaust. A more relevant analogy therefore seems to be the destruction of the Temple. With that destruction certain traditional forms of orientation--e.g. toward a priestley caste, toward the Temple, toward sacrifice--became impossible. There were no longer viable ways of so orienting oneself. Unlike the Crow, the Jews had their Book; and the rabbis were able to use it to construct a liturgy that would be specifically applicable in conditions of exile and diaspora. In this context, Plenty Coups's decision to tell his story to a white man so that it might be written down and preserved as a traditional story takes on added significance.
-Radical Hope, p. 163, note 42.

What's in question in the Holocaust is life, not culture. Now, in saying that this makes culture less relevant to decision-making, I don't mean to claim that, for Lear, culture in this moment becomes superfluous. It means that the thrust, the force of ethical decision is directed not towards the cultural aspect of a people but towards how they can survive. All the ethical resources of a people, all their virtues, are marshaled in that direction. Culture is still a big part of this effort and indeed decisions as to the preservation of culture do get carried out: but as far as ethical decision making goes, these concerns are not at the forefront. What would bear upon ethical decision-making is if culture itself had such a relationship to communal survival that destruction aimed at culture alone (here, the Temple) could cause havoc.
This may or may not be good reasoning. But one certainly sees the uniqueness of Lear's argument begin to come out into the open: what is so significant about the Crow as a historical example is that the destruction of their culture alone was enough to bring about particular forms of intense suffering. Lear thereby constructs an ethics that addresses adequately those forms of suffering, the suffering that can be caused by (let's call it) the mass displacements of a people alone--something very prevalent throughout history and indeed in our time--without having it also have to address the aspect of genocide that may or may not occur during this displacement. In short, a whole field of ethical action is opened that is not reducible to that of a people faced with biological annihilation. This avoids the ethical pitfall of having to have a people be threatened on the level of their bare life in order for various ethical questions to come to the fore: we should not be demanding, Lear seems to say, that a holocaust be necessary for these types of ethical questions to come up. In a way, then, it is precisely a discourse directed towards addressing the Holocaust. At the very least, Lear seems to be saying that it would be a mistake to insist that we interpret this field of actions immediately as those of a people faced with biological extinction. It would be just as much a mistake to interpret things this way as it would be to say that this people was in a normal ethical situation: there are many more ways ethical action understands itself and occurs.
But still, I think, the distinction Lear is making is still questionable: can we really separate off concerns for survival from concerns for living well--that is, from the concerns of this radical ethics? Even in the case of the Crow, whose concerns are--as Lear seems to argue--not directed towards coping with the biological? This is essentially the question Derrida poses to ethics, following Levinas, and he does so along precisely the Heideggerian line of thought that Lear is utilizing. I won't pursue Derrida's conclusions, but I think reduplicating some of his concerns here about Heidegger will allow me to come to my own.
For the problem is, as we said, the sort of analogy at work here: at a certain point, Lear seems to be thinking of a culture like Heidegger is thinking about Dasein. The problem is not exactly that of analogy itself, but the implications that it has for the terms involved, particularly culture. Now, Lear bases his remarks about Heidegger on his colleague John Haugeland's supple interpretation of Being and Time, an interpretation which specifies that Dasein should not be understood as a person but as a way of life, as a collection of actions or tendencies to action. And while this is a very good interpretation of Dasein--Dasein is most definitely something closer to Foucault's care of the self (a set of applied rules and norms in practice that become subjectivised only on the basis of this set) than a psyche, even if it is not totally conscious--when it is applied analogously by Lear the functioning of a culture must be interpreted accordingly as a certain way of life, as a certain set of norms and tendencies and actions.
And while this does not sound problematic in itself--what else is a culture except a set of norms and tendencies?--it becomes so when we introduce the problem of cultural death and extinction. For on the level of Dasein, acting in accordance with one's possibility of death--that is, being-to-death or being-towards-death--is more easily bound up with demise, Dasein's possibility of bare biological extinction. Now, this has been a problem for Heideggerians right from the start: being-towards-death often looks too much like being-towards-one's-demise, so that we constantly fear when we are thinking about what Heidegger means by being-towards-death that we will mistake our biological extinction for the event or phenomenon that Heidegger is getting at. When explaining Heidegger, one has to rigorously distinguish between the two, citing often that sentence in Being and Time that declares Dasein often comes to its demise or extinction before it has really come towards its death.
Now, since on the level of culture there is, it would seem, a greater difference between the phenomenon of the extinction of a whole people and the phenomenon of a cultural displacement--indeed Lear himself in the above footnote is precisely trying to hit home that there is, that we perceive it in fact often--this would seem to argue for the analogy. If we can tell a cultural Dasein's death apart from its mere demise more clearly than that death of which Heidegger himself speaks, we should have an easier time than the Heideggerians with getting a grasp on death and what to do about it. But I actually think this is not the case.
According to the logic of Lear's argument, the more robust a tradition, the more it is a part of not just the basic needs of a people but an expression of their potentials, their excellencies, which are not directed towards those needs. Despite the fact that one could point to many cultures whose robust traditions are directly related to--if not integrated in--practices of survival, if we assume what Lear seems to be saying, if we think that cultural activity separates itself off more and more from the basic function of survival, would this not demand that survival be necessarily presupposed by culture more and more? That culture become ever more complacent with its ability to survive, such that the cultural activities which develop become ever more dependent upon survival? Especially when they are handed-down? According to Lear's argument, it is obvious that a community cannot pass on through generations a highly refined culture--that means, a culture highly separate from the duties of communal survival--unless survival still is, on some level, active and possible. But if all this is the case, then what one thought was easier to distinguish suddenly becomes more difficult: survival, mere biological existence, though it would not be directly the matter or content of cultural practice, would become coextensive with cultural activity itself. That is, cultural activity would so presuppose survival that this activity, instead of being completely dissociated from it, would become intertwined with and dependent upon it intimately.
But this is not what Lear thinks. From the fact that culture, given his definition of it, does not presuppose its survival to be the matter of its activity, from the fact that survival would not be what cultural activity is constantly directed towards, Lear seems to think cultural activity is indeed separated from the activity of survival. What this means is that any threat to the community's survival will not be seen as a threat to its culture in the first instance. And the ramifications of this assumption are very extensive--indeed, wider in scope than how far we suppose a culture can get infected, as it were, by concerns for the community's survival; that is, whether it can or cannot change its content at all according to the demands placed upon it by the threat to its survival. What Lear seems to think is that survival does not become something that can be anticipated at all culturally. Only on the level of the basic functioning of a society--the level of resources--would there be a response to this threat, would there be any ethical decisions regarding how to deal with what is to come on the level of survival. In other words, even if culture addressed the threat to the survival of the society on its own proper (that is, cultural) level, this would only in fact be the devolution of culture. Culture that addressed biological survival would be a deficient form of culture (which is, of course, something different than saying it would be a bad form of culture).
And here is where the real problem with the use of Heidegger lies. While Heidegger grounded this assumption--the assumption that biological activity is not what is anticipated by Dasein, except in a derivative or deficient way--while Heidegger grounded this in the temporality of Dasein and its tendency to fall or be deficient, Lear seems to have this assumption rest on the the bare fact that it is possible for culture to not be an expression of survival. Simply because there can be a difference between cultural death and society's demise, this difference must be maintained for culture to not be deficient.
The problem is greater than whether or not one should really call this a deficiency or not. It is about exactly what one can anticipate. In Heidegger's case, the fact that anticipation is deficient when it deals with the level of biology is coherent, at least. In Lear's case, it isn't. For even if culture anticipates on its own proper level, like Dasein, how can one ever tell that it is not merely anticipating what is best for survival? This is the problem of radical hope and optimism that Lear addresses at length throughout the book.
For obviously there are more reasons for insisting that the difference between culture and acts of survival ought to be maintained than just the bare fact that it can be maintained. It makes sense to think of any culture worthy of the name as somehow, at bottom, different than a mere function of survival. But what is crucial is that, because cultural action can presuppose survival to such an extreme extent that survival is coextensive with culture as a basic possibility--as I demonstrated above--one will never be able to stop suspecting whether an act of courage at the level of culture is merely a function of survival, whether it is not merely an expedient that staves off the demise of the culture. In the end the distinction then reduces to the mere possibility of the distinction. But nothing in ethical action can ensure that the terms of the distinction will not be so intertwined that actually making it will correspond to or line up with the distinction itself. Lear insists throughout the book that Plenty Coups's act is separated essentially from a merely biologically advantageous action that would get the Crow through the day--what he calls mere optimism as opposed to radical hope. But cannot one always in the end doubt this claim?
I don't mean to question the integrity of the acts of Plenty Coups himself. I merely want to insist that what seems like a clear difference for Lear between a courageous act on the level of culture can be still seen as survival--and precisely because, in the end, Lear does not specify how the temporality of culture ensures this distinction. And it is not clear how Lear would go about this: he makes some headway in saying that cultural time can break across generations, such that Plenty Coups himself, who grew up in a certain culture, can say that after the culture passed, "nothing happened." But what is needed is some account of the continuity of this discontinuous time that would be able to distinguish itself from what is merely an effect of efforts to survive--and Lear, here at least, does not give us this. For even if cultural time appears to be determined by something beyond the level of mere biological functioning--for instance, the existence of institutions or rituals of education that indeed get transmitted across generations--is this not also explainable as a mere offshoot of reproduction and the demands of raising healthy children? The point is not to prove that the cultural is reducible to the biological, though: it is to show that, given the particular idea of time that Lear supposes works on the level of society, it would not be distinguishable from within that society's culture whether any act was ultimately due to its own effort or the efforts of striving for biological survival. Historicity or the handing-down of culture, in short, however it is attained by culture means, cannot escape the fact that it is also constituted biologically through reproduction.
There is a deeper reason, however, that causes Lear to not be more precise about temporality: it is the idea that culture can ensure itself though focusing upon an empty or enigmatic signifier--a particular ego-ideal, as the portion of the book that I cited first above said. But I'll return to this later, when I expand a little on this post.
The point is that given all this, is it not clear that perhaps what is necessary even in the situation of the Crow could be to respond to survival first, and then any issue of culture? When Plenty Coups takes action to preserve the tribe's land, at the expense of several of the old ways of the culture, could the result not be just as successful if what he was trying to ensure thereby was survival first and foremost? And could not this also be virtuous? Not in the sense that, in the case of the Crow, there could not have been virtue of a higher kind, but in the sense that there would be in all cases no higher, purely cultural kind of virtue, no virtue that was not also mere survival. At least it is clear that the ethical cannot be confined to the level of culture as Lear hopes to do. And while, obviously, there are better and worse ways to survive, this opens up the question not of whether these ways are qualitatively different than survival--that is, whether they are really not survival but culture--but whether and how differentiating these ways constitutes an ethics of survival. That is, what is opened up is a different ethics than an ethics concerned with cultural devastation. I'll leave off here, but will hopefully return to these issues, and the particular question of the ego-ideal in Lear's work, in the future.

Heidegger's turn

It is very confusing to read of a turn in Heidegger's thinking. Philosophers seem to want to locate it in some work of Heidegger's, whether it be the essay on the essence of truth (Richardson put forward this thesis long ago), the humanism letter (Derrida usually tends to see things turning here) or, more recently the Beiträge zur Philosophie (there is also the Kant book). Theodore Kiesel also has added importantly to a certain consideration (also always there) of a sort of turn towards Being and Time, dividing up Heidegger's thought, then, into three areas. For the turn in Heidegger's thinking, as it is usually put, is one from Being and Time to Seinsgeschichtliche denken or thinking in (or on) the way of the being-historical (i.e. "being-historical thinking," as it is usually translated). This thinking of course found most explicitly in the later works on technology and Ereignis (enowning or event of appropriation). The pre-turn that I spoke of, would be the turn towards an analysis of Dasein from the early writings (but this is of course too felicitous a way to put it: the turn is explicitly talked about as a specific movement of thought by Heidegger and it would be wrong to think of a mere turn towards and away from something in one's thinking as this turn itself).
The turn itself is made by moving from an analysis of Dasein towards being via time, to one of how being gets destined or scattered about over history. This second analysis cannot totally be phenomenological in the manner of Being and Time, then.
I will elaborate on this more later, but I think that the more you deliberate this problem of "where," the more you lose yourself in more arbitrary distinctions. The turn needs to be specified really only if you too are trying to be Heidegger, if you too are trying to do the type of analysis he undertakes--and not much even then. With the increasing professionalization of phenomenology (in areas of cognitive science) this indeed might be really necessary--that is, as you elaborate questions of method. But it can easily keep you from the philosophy that this method is trying to articulate--and thus philosophers especially are pretty wrong to keep focusing on it in this way (since they don't even have the tools to do it well, like the scientists). The point itself certainly isn't in a book--one can specify places of the later thought in Being and Time itself (Levinas is particularly good at this, as well as Carol White). It is simply the odd supplement to Being and Time: Being and Time, unless it gets continued in its own manner, slips into a different mode of thinking. The seminars around Being and Time somewhat reflect this. The book itself has its own problematic, and so once you step outside of it, it does not really make sense to locate another book in which this other thinking is located--you are pretty much already in it. This is because what is turned from is so extremely specific, while what is turned to cannot be. The crucial question behind most inquiries into where Heidegger turns is really about what is lost in this gap, in this shift from one perspective to the other.

Verfallenheit

I was looking again through Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity and the Phenomenology of Religious Life, and thinking about the various critiques Derrida and others levy against a distinction Heidegger makes between the proper and the improper. One can't understand these critiques as just critiques of the distinction between the two or a taking apart of a binary opposition (which some would call a "deconstruction" but that, without what follows here, does not get at the sense of the word as Derrida and others like Nancy mean it), because it is a critique that is really an investigation of a problem very internal to the nature of the phenomenon that Heidegger was (in an unbelievably amazing manner) attempting to investigate in Being and Time and elsewhere that he names Verfallenheit, fallingness (a coinage I prefer over "fallenness," the standard translation). This is the spirit of the account and explanation Nancy makes that I quote in an earlier post: one needs to understand the complications of the distinction between the proper and the improper within the phenomenon of their meeting, in fallingness and in the other phenomenon of anxiety before one can start critiquing the distinction--or rather, understanding the critiques of the distinction (by Derrida, especially), because they are indeed thinking precisely about this phenomenon when they critique it.

So what is Verfallenheit? Nothing more (and nothing less) than absorbtion in the world, the withdrawing of the possibility of access to something in the face of one's actual process of accessing it, even when one is trying to investigate or discern the reasons for one's ability to encounter it (in fact, falling shows up really concretely there). The process is quite simple, actually, because we encounter it every day:

During the course of a factically experienced day, I deal with quite different things; but in the factical course of life, I do not become aware of the different hows of my reactions to those different things. Instead, I encounter them at most in the content I experience itself: factical life experience manifests an indifference with regard to the manner of experiencing. It does not even occur to factical life experience that something might not become accessible to it. This factical experience engages, as it were, all concerns of life. The differences and changes of emphasis are found entirely in the content itself. The self-sufficiency of factical life experience is, therefore, grounded upon this indifference, an indifference which extends itself to everything; it decides even on the highest matters within this self-sufficiency.

-from The Phenomenology of Religious Life

But of course its simplicity does not extend to its ramifications or even in the reasons for its constitution as such. And this is the same spirit in which we should encounter the critiques that Derrida (and others) levy against this: the fact that for Derrida the experience of falling is also interrupted all the time, that in fact it is always interrupted prior to its being constituted as such and from outside what it distinguishes itself from (authentic projection of oneself into the future as the future and as oneself), is also just a simple phenomenon--with of course vast implications, since it is the structure or non-structure in which we (and more than we) encounter and are able to encounter anything.

Division II, baby

Ohh yeah... get ready for it: Classes start soon at Berkeley, and Hubert Dreyfus' lectures on Division II of Being and Time are going to be downloadable.

They're amazing lectures, and a really great way to begin to learn what Heidegger is talking about. It's interesting: you see that many people are critical of Dreyfus for being too pragmatist, leaning too much on Division I and not pursuing paths, very much present in Being and Time, that open up so easily into his later work--all this you hear, but I think Dreyfus' interpretations have held up for so long despite the changes in Heidegger scholarship over the years because he has a real sense of what he continually refers to as "the phenomenon:" Dreyfus thinks extremely hard about the sort of happening, the sort of taking place, the phenomenology that Heidegger is doing when he is doing phenomenological ontology and that can be overlooked quite easily, because he just has so much to say about ontology! This doesn't mean Dreyfus interprets Heidegger like he is Husserl or something, or even like Merleau-Ponty... it just means that he gives you such a solid foundation from which you can either take off from or ground yourself within in order to deal with Heidegger, because he gives you a vivid sense of the moment of the phenomenon taking place--the point of its withdrawal. You really see that this aspect of what Heidegger is doing is almost indispensable for some of his larger claims: the interpretation of time as futural must show up in worldhood somehow, and show up in a definite phenomenon that we can sort of see every day... this "must," this necessity, is the mark of Dreyfus' rigor--getting you to see it like this is his job, and he does it wonderfully. I think that one thing that he said during last semester's course is absolutely true: that in this sense Division I is more expansive and anything said in Division II. Whether Dreyfus thinks this is because Division II is less worked out and a more rough draft than Division I, or because it constitutes less of an interpretation and working out of Aristotle, or anything else, I think that this claim remains legitimate if only because you can see how much mileage Dreyfus himself is able to make of it. That is (sorry for these fragmented comments, they'll have to do for now, given that I'm traveling a lot and writing papers), I think Division I is more expansive because it is making a claim about the merits of ontology in its exposition that is unprecedented and sets the tone, so to speak, for anything that could follow from it. More than the courses, or even the Contributions to Philosophy, the first division of Being and Time is such a sustained effort of an argument about ontology that it colors everything that will follow. It is the struggle with the attempt to think beyond or before "values" or "experiences" and to bring them back to a "how," a reason or a structure that runs deeper than any particular way you can specify that structure--any "what." It is that amazingly creative leap Heidegger makes away from Husserl and back towards Aristotle, that one can see in his early lecture notes.

Patočka and Heidegger, or, towards Donner la mort

Jan Patočka's interpretation of some of the basic concepts within Being and Time in the fifth of his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History explores and exploits a point (one point of many) on which the whole of that treatise turns: the relationship of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) to authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Recently in America, this point (again, it is one of many crucial points, however) is only explored explicitly with comparable depth by Bill Blattner in his work on Heidegger's notion of temporality (though Hubert Dreyfus' entire presentation of Heidegger could be said to stem from or be founded upon the implicit exploration of this distinction, specifically his conviction that the first division of Being and Time is actually wider in philosophical import than the second: such an assertion can only arise from a move similar to Patočka's and actually needs to be seen as this). The problem revolves around how there is no term that Heidegger opposes to everydayness that easily bridges the gap between everydayness and authenticity: the only mediator is inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit). So it is here that Patočka must begin (that is, it is here that any analysis of this problem in depth must begin: so while many people analyze the relationship between authenticity and everydayness, it is only with respect to clarifying the relationship of inauthenticity to everydayness in with a view to explicating authenticity that we can have an explicit, in depth analysis of the real unity or lack of unity of the treatise at this point--this is just to clarify the above).
Patočka first makes inauthenticity and authenticity a parallel movement to the movement of everydayness. He then introduces a distinction within everydayness that seeks to clarify the second division's movement towards authenticity in being-towards-death. Put simply, he introduces another distinction in opposition to everydayness, the exceptional or the holiday ("holiday" of course seems a little too playful at first, but it becomes interesting when one reads Heidegger within a more Marxist framework, focused as it is on leisure and the work in leisure capitalism creates--see Adorno especially for this). Saying that Patočka merely introduces another distinction is indeed putting it simply, however, because this fundamentally understands the care-structure with more clarity than Heidegger himself understood it in the text. Whether Heidegger would have subscribed to this interpretation is of course questionable, but that is what makes Patočka's reading as much of an expression of a unique philosophy of his own as it is a reading of Heidegger--thus we had to begin with the vague expression that this is an "interpretation of some of the basic concepts" within the Heidegger's book. The specific alteration of the care-structure accomplished here is a clarification of the component of "falling" (verfallen) and its relationship to everydayness, which remains hazy in the book (even though one can piece together what Heidegger might be getting at, it lacks the same phenomenality as mood and understanding, for example). But I'll leave this only as a suggestion for now: the important thing is to outline how Patočka's distinction then allows for two binaries (inauthenticity/authenticity, everydayness/exceptionality) to set themselves up in relation to each other.

Exceptionality allows for a transition between everydayness and the authentic/inauthentic distinction because it retreats from the everyday without yet placing itself within the authentic/inauthentic dichotomy. That is, it suspends, as it were, the relation of everydayness to authenticity and inauthenticity only to have it be the place where this relation becomes most pressing as to how one is disposed in it already. In Heidegger, this becomes the space of being-towards-death. But whereas Heidegger quickly articulates this moment so that it seems to fall within the sphere of everydayness, Patočka sees it as a sort of comportment all in itself distinct from the everyday and its temporal orientation. Patočka explains this in the following way:

The exceptional, the holiday also unburdens [like everydayness], though not by escaping from responsibility [Patočka often calls authenticity "responsibility"], but rather by revealing that dimension of life in which the point is not the burden of responsibility and the escape from it but where, rather, we are enraptured, where something more powerful than our free possibility, our responsibility, seems to break into our life and bestow on it meaning which it would not know otherwise.

-"Is Technological Civilization Decadent and Why?", Heretical Essays, 98-99.

Patočka here is actually showing that there can be two senses of authenticity if one accepts a link between everydayness and inauthenticity/authenticity that is more distinct. The transformed everydayness of the exceptional itself is a form of authenticity that escapes the thrust within the authenticity/inauthenticity dichotomy, which is an existential potentiality for one's possibilities, and moves towards a type of authenticity that focuses or places the accent upon the ek-static nature of this potentiality. While Heidegger brings them together (and perhaps rightly), Patočka tries to assert that authenticity and everydayness can be understood more coherently if we understand them to be linking up with each other within a specific, delimited situation whose style is slightly different than either. Authenticity still bears upon this sphere, and in fact bears upon it all the more because of its distinctness, but its constitution has less to do with this authenticity conceived of as potentiality, or ek-stasis conceived as a standing out of oneself towards possibilities (existential facticity/factical existentiality). This ek-stasis simply stands out of itself to stand out of itself, and while Heidegger would like this experience to precisely be that authenticity he speaks about, Patočka asserts that this overlooks something: namely, religion.

For it is the origin of religiosity traditionally conceived (the experience of the sacred and profane) that enters into this experience of impending responsibility/authenticity that is not an authenticity proper (which will be seen as an overcoming of this sacred and profane sphere and constituting actual religion proper). Patočka calls this pre-religious experience of impending responsibility/authenticity "the dimension of the demonic and of passion:"

In both, humans are placed at risk, however, they are not simply escaping from themselves into the "public realm," into the ordinary everyday...

-"Is Technological Civilization...", 99

It is the experience of being-towards-death ripped from out of its context in Heidegger as an experience of authenticity as potentiality towards possibilities (existential facticity/factical existentiality). It makes possible this authenticity only by refusing its hold which impends on it all the more, and this makes it all the more dangerous:

Face to face with this phenomenon, we tend to forget the entire dimension of the for ourselves [authenticity proper], forget responsibility and escape, letting ourselves be drawin into a new, open dimension as if only now true life stood before us, as if this "new life" had no need to care for the dimension of responsibility.

-"Is Technological Civilization...", 99

Here we get a strict active forgetting (a la Nietzsche) precisely towards that openness to the there in authenticity--a forgetting that brings us away from our potentiality, alethia--and which precisely constitutes our possibility to enter into this openness, this authenticity. It is the unheimlich pure and simple (Heidegger uses the phrase "face to face" famously, like Hegel, with regard to death), seen as resistant to that authenticity which in Heidegger it is swept up into. As the last clause states, this is care without care for the dimension of responsibility/authenticity (thus something like falling without falling, within the phenomenon of falling in care, as it is brought up out of falling). In other words, the demonic constitutes a retreat not from responsibility/authenticity itself, but a retreat from the demand of taking up a relationship to authenticity or inauthenticity. To be a little more clear at the expense of possible reiteration: the demonic is the space created outside of the everyday as it becomes exceptional which refuses, even as it relates to them already, to be authentic or inauthentic, or, in other words,

the demonic [is what] needs to be brought into a relation with responsibility [authenticity] as [i.e. because] originally it is not.

-"Is Technological Civilization...", 100

The demonic thus is not reducible to inauthenticity or a strict experience of falling, and thus not able to be yoked together with the everyday as it is included in the experience of being-towards-death that Heidegger describes. The demonic is being-towards-death all by itself, without ethical or existential/factical relationship, because it is the exceeding of any relation of existentiality/facticity to mine-ness, which constitutes existentiality/facticity proper. This is a crucial point, but we can't elaborate on it now--all that can be be noted is that authenticity is the authenticity of a Dasein that is in each case my own because its possibilities stem from a finite potential. Thus, Dasein, and its being-towards-death, is for Heidegger non-relational, and it is this mine-ness that gets suspended in Patočka's demonic being-towards-death. Perhaps to put another, more interesting way, the demonic is a ek-stasis beyond ek-stasis (if we consider ek-stasis in a Heideggerian way as the ek-stasis directed towards possibilities).

In the end, the demonic and passionate get opposed to work, and constitute for Patočka the sacred, while work remains the profane. Thus he is able to read into Heidegger's Being and Time an experience of pre-religiosity (insofar as this pre-religious world is composed of the sacred and profane), which he then proceeds to show becomes religious when it overcomes itself and reconnects to responsibility and authenticity. Religion then is the re-establishing of this demonic to the authentic, the overcoming of the vertigo of a being-towards-death beyond itself, beyond its heedless non-relationship to authenticity and inauthenticity. We will not get into this theory of religion. However, we will let its contours be suggested by the beginning of Derrida's The Gift of Death (Donner la mort: the French is much more suggestive), which we should now in a sense be able to somewhat understand, as well as understand how it proceeds in its development (its explication and modification of Patočka) with high Heideggerian stakes:

...Jan Patočka relates secrecy, or more precisely the mystery of the sacred, to responsibility. He opposes one to the other; or rather underscores their heterogeneity. Somewhat in the manner of Levinas he warns against an experience of the sacred as an enthusiasm or fervor [or forgetting, mj] for fusion, cautioning in particular against against a form of demonic rapture that has as its effect, and often as its first intention, the removal of responsibility, the loss of the sense or consciousness [conscience] of responsibility. At the same time, Patočka wants to distinguish religion from the demonic form of sacralization.

-The Gift of Death, 1-2

Scattered notes for a paper on Benjamin and Heidegger

This might not be a paper I will end up writing, so I put my notes here:

In "Theory of Gambling"
The Hand and the body more than the eye as the experience of the gambler "feeling" the table.

In "The Work of Art In The Time of Its Technological Reproducibility"
The Freeing of the hand by technologies of reproducibility
and the "Shock:" the eye touched while watching a film

In Being and Time
This schema the opposite of the augenblick whih eschews techne's setting and space--it is the pure relation of Dasein to ecstatic (dispersed) temporality which only then gives space.

Comparison (which relies on a difference in the concept of dispersion [Zerstreuung] between Heidegger and Benjamin: dispersion for Heidegger is geshick, being determined from outside, as well as Benjamin, but for Heidegger this ecstatic relation is only temporal where for Benjamin it is spatio-temporal, in fact irreducibly spatial--cf. Sam Weber, Mass Mediauras)
Augenblick as the view of the history (destining) of light and clearing/concealing compared to the history of shocks [touch] in the theses on the concept of history. cf. Benjamin on Augenblick in his text on Baudelaire: "The camera imparts to the Augenblick an as it were posthumous shock"--after it is already dead, dying beyond dying.

Gambling and risk (cf. Lyotard's Just Gaming, Pascal, and Deleuze's Nietzsche)
These show us two ideas of risk, in gambling existence. for benjamin gambling as an activity shows us the activity of subjectivity itself--in Heidegger nothing is truly gambled because it always can (or does, has to) return from representation to being's possibility, to the nonrisk of presence.

also cf. Benjamin's theories of german fascism and the theologico-political fragment possibly vs. Heidegger's early writing on the three-day meditation on world war I.

The Davos "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" and some helpful quotes on Being and Time

I just finished reading the amazing Davos disputation (called, euphemistically as it can only appear now, an "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" or "workgroup" while the event was being held--I should just mention now that anyone interested in it should consult Peter Eli Gordon's fascinating account of the conflict in Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 [2004], pp. 219–248) between Heidegger and Cassirer that took place in the little Alpine city in early March 1929 (pictured, as it probably looked in March). Heidegger in his rebellious ski-clothes (I've tried to evoke how strange Heidegger looked at the time by including this picture from 1921 of him, on the right, with Gadamer chopping wood) walked in, pissed off at what he thought were Cassirer's misreadings of Being and Time, which still was extremely new on the philosophical scene (has anyone yet digested Badiou's sequel to Being and Event, Logiques des mondes? This philosophical atmosphere probably has the same relationship to 1929's and its familiarity, especially with Kantians like Cassirer, with Being and Time--in fact I think we can appreciate how penetrating Cassirer's reading is, especially with regard to truth, given this atmosphere), and proceeded to bulldoze him with a series of amazingly penetrating responses. By "bulldozed," I mean mostly that in general Heidegger just rudely talked over him: I don't think Heidegger made himself look any better by doing this, except to the hoarde of his spiritual followers in the audience. Nor is it clear that he presented a better case about Kant than Cassirer, in the end. But something (and you can see from the vehemence that this something is very much tied into his Nazism) impelled him to be impolite and indirect to one of the most amazing minds of the early twentieth century. If we can rationalize it, I think he was angry that people were not able to see and appreciate what he had been developing through his teaching and writing at Freiburg for more than a decade--the ideas that made up and were condensed into Being and Time. But obviously there is more to it than that, and this "more" precisely what becomes and what always was ugly, barbaric, romantic, naively Wagnerian and in the end unbelievably stupid in Heidegger. Regardless, any scholar of Heidegger gets some very direct statements out of this "bulldozing," this disturbing performance there in front of Cassirer, regarding what Being and Time was frankly trying to get at, not to mention some more direct statements on Heidegger's interpretation of Kant. From Cassirer, we also get an elucidation of the importance he accords to the symbol and its relationship to freedom, which Heidegger to a certain extent sees (inanely) as unimportant in pushing Cassirer into a definition of what freedom is and how it relates to time. In the end, what I'm saying is that Heidegger brings it to this debate. That said, the quotes we see below should really help anyone reading Being and Time:

On Time:
Every page in this book was written solely with a view to the fact that since antiquity the problem of being was interpreted on the basis of time in a wholly incomprehensible sense and that time always announced the subject (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 198). Notice "every page:" this means Division I, too (Heidegger somewhere says this of Division I explicitly in the discussion, but I can't find it).

What, then, does the eternal actually mean here? From where, then, do we know of this eternity? Is this eternity not just permanence in the sense of the aei [the "always," the "forever," the "everlasting"] of time? Is this eternality not just that which is possible on the grounds of an inner transcendence [my emphasis, mj] of time? ...that [is,] time is not just what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has in itself a horizonal character; that in a futural process of having been as a comportment [my interpretation of what the transcribers of the debate probably misconstrued, mj] I always have at the same time a horizon with respect to the present, futurity, and having-been [or what the transcribers misconstrue as "pastness", mj] in general; that a transcendental, ontological determination of time is found here, within which something like the permanence of the substance [the phenomenon of the aei] is constituted for the first time (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 198).

On "Anxiety:"
This whole problematic in Being and Time, which treats Dasein in man, is no philosophical anthropology... the task is: to bring out the temporality of Dasein with reference to the possibility of the understanding of Being... The analysis of death has the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, but not of producing an altogether final and metaphysical thesis concering the essence of death (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 199). This quote (and the next) seems absolutely indispensible for anyone who is reading Heidegger on anxiety and death, or indeed any one of the "ontical possibilities of Dasein" that Heidegger looks at throughout the work, because it shows a bit clearer than in Being and Time what the role of this ontical possibility is playing in the work. It also shows you that Dasein in general is not a being or entity which man always is, but rather is "in man." In other words, it is a kind or way of manifestation of being, like Vorhanden or Zuhanden. If one thinks the relationship of man to Dasein in this way, you reading Being and Time becomes a lot easier (even though, as Derrida constantly reminds us, this relationship is confused and constantly re-thought in Heidegger, and, in fact, never sufficiently resolved). In the end, what I'm getting at is that you can see the genius of the simplicity in the way Hubert Dreyfus presents his account of what Dasein is (that it is just one of these kinds of being that man can, in a sense, enter into and step out of--even though man never can properly or "own-mostly" be something other than Dasein), and that it gets its justification in the most forthright passages of Heidegger like these.

On the grounds of which metaphysical sense of Dasein itself is it possible that the human being in general can have been placed before something like the Nothing? In answer to this question, the analysis of anxiety was provided so that the possibility of theNothing is thought of only as an idea which has also been grounded in this determination of the disposition of anxiety. It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand the Nothing or anxiety. Being is incomprehensible if the Nothing is incomprehensible (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 199).

Etc.
I would misunderstand myself if I said that I gave a philosophy free of points of view. And here a problem is expressed: that of the relationship between philosophy and world-view. Philosophy does not have the task of giving world-view, although, again, world-view is the presupposition of philosophizing. And the world-view which the philosopher gives is not a direct one in the sense of a doctrine or in the sense of an influencing. Rather, the world-view which the philosopher gives rests in the fact that in the philosophizing, it succeeds in making the inner possibility of this finite creature comport itself with respect to beings as a whole (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 200). Here Heidegger resignifies the role of "world-view" in his work in opposition to Cassirer (or really any humanist philosopher--Cassirer really has just become a straw-man for Heidegger at this point): world-view is a "setting free of the Dasein in man," not an opening out of philosophy into "cultural philsophy," which Heidegger, rashly, characterizes Cassirer's work as.

Negativity, Repetition, and das Geschehen das Daseins

The "historizing" of Dasein, or, rather, das Geschehen das Daseins, is repetition at the same time as it is negativity, Heidegger says. At first, this appears to be the same thing that Hegel claims.
For Hegel, consciousness lifts itself to the level of Spirit, and thus to history, whenever it negates itself determinately, when it employs the power of Spirit and not merely just consciousness. Employing this other power, it becomes other than itself, obviously. But it becomes other than itself in such a way that it reasserts itself as itself, takes all of itself up into itself and comprehends this self through negating the whole of it. This is repetition of the self, but repetition in such a way that it is the repetition and also the denial of repetition, in having this repetition make consciousness other. In other words, it is a repetition that does not just merely reassert, but reasserts so consciousness is lifted into a higher sphere of consciousness, i.e. Spirit, the Concept in its work.
For Heidegger, however, we must reevaluate precisely what we mean by negativity and repetition. Historizing then will still be a matter of repetition through negation, but it will not be a reassertion of a consciousness after it comprehends its own action on the level of the Concept. Rather, it will be repetition as understood through what Hegel calls abstract negation. In other words, it will not be repetition through determinate negation. The negation that Dasein will undergo will be a holding fast to a negativity that is not merely the death-in-life of determinate negativity, of negativity that produces being and is produced by the being that it negates. Rather, this abstract negativity is a death that is abstract, that is, in Hegelian language, pure nothingness, except that it does not, like in Hegel's Science of Logic, remain commensurate with pure being. It is a holding fast to a death that is indeterminate in its negativity, in its lack of being, in its nothingness--this is why we call it "abstract."
The sense of repetition through negation that Heidegger employs is one that is true of a being "frei fur seinen Tod an ihm zerschellend auf sein faktisches Da such zuruckwerfen lassen kann," that is, free for its death in such a way that in breaking itself against it, this being can get thrown back to the fact of its openness, into its "there" (Sein und Zeit, 509; Being and Time 437). The breaking or shattering of oneself against death is an act of negation that holds fast to death as indeterminate and uncertain: it is what Heidegger calls Sein zum Tode, being-towards-death. Thus, it is negation in the abstract, in its indeterminacy.
As such a negation, we can see that it produces repetition not in the sense that in this negation Dasein takes up all of itself into itself and annhilates it determinately. No. Dasein takes itself and shatters itself against annhilation itself, its own possibility of not being in the abstract; that is, its own possibility of being nothing at any time, in any place; its own indeterminate possibility of being nothing. Put a different way, this is Dasein's access to the withdrawal of its own Being. It is not access to Being itself. Rather, it is the access of Dasein to the potential for its Being to not be, to go away from it, and thus in this access Being itself withdraws, or at least unconceals itself in its withdrawing as the withdrawal of Being. Heidegger will later say that this point of access is the enowning of Being, Ereignis, the acceptance of a being into the play of the movement of Being in its withdrawal and the giving of Being. Regardless, it is clear that this negation repeats in a way in which it repeats itself as the shattering against death that it is.
Repetition through this shattering of Dasein against death then is the movement in negation in which Dasein gets thrown back into its openness, into its potential to shatter itself. It is not a repetition of the identical, but of a holding together of the Same (cf. Identity and Difference). Why does it get thrown back? Well, if Dasein is not taking itself up into itself and annhilating this totality, it must be a sort of taking-up that cannot be a taking-up of something. In other words, it cannot be a taking-up at all, a reassertion, a return of the identical (for the identical is always what gets taken up; what gets taken up is taken up by something that can comprehend it, and therefore that for it is selfsame, never shifty, never able to become something different so as not to be taken up by what comprehends it). Nothing is doing any comprehending here, any totalizing, that would require the reassertion of what is comprehended as "a totality," as "the comprehended." Rather, by a process of standing out into a void, indeterminate nothing, Dasein is sustains itself as this indeterminacy, because it is this indeterminacy, it is this potential that is, at this moment, in being-towards-death or abstract negation, the potential for itself not to be. In relentlessly remaining here, in the nothing, Dasein gets thrown or projected back (zuruckwerfen) onto itself. In other words, the self that projects itself into the nothing brings itself with it into the nothing, into the indeterminacy of the potential to be nothing. This bringing-along is what Heidegger means by "throwing back." The "back," is also a "forward into." Projecting itself into the nothing in its indeterminacy, Dasein throws itself back into what is projected forward into the nothing, the projection itself. Thus it repeats: it returns to itself as itself.
This is das Geschen das Daseins, "historicity." The "bringing-along" or "stretching itself along," (Sicherstreckens, cf. Being and Time, 427) is the process that makes up the historicality of the Being of Dasein. In other words, historicality is the holding together of Dasein in the withdrawing of its Being, the effacement or sending away of itself in such a way that Being is sent back, given as it is, i.e. again as itself. History is not the presence or return of past moments of presence. It is what happens as we lead ourselves into the future, into nothing. But back to repetition.
The "stretching itself along" into indeterminate nothingness is distinct from the projection itself only in its inauthenticity. Authentically, the bringing-along of Dasein into the nothing is the same as the projection of Dasein into indeterminacy itself. It is this projection "explicitly," as Heidegger says. The explicitness is only there because the same is not what we are used to seeing. Explictly being itself, in this moment Dasein repeats itself, because it is itself (the bringing-along of itself) going back into (brought along into) itself (the projection of itself). The bringing along of itself is brought along into the projecting of itself into the nothing. This is what Heidegger means when he says that "repetition is a [delivering, destining, handing-over Uberlieferung] explicitly--that is to say, a going back into the possibilities [or projecting-power] of Dasein" "Die Wiederholung ist die ausdrukliche Uberlieferung, das heisst der Ruckgang in Moglichkeiten des dagewesenen Daseins..." (Being and Time, 437, Sein und Zeit, 509).
The handing-over of itself to itself in bringing itself along into its projecting of itself into nothing--this is repetition according to Heidegger, the repetition that takes place in abstract negation. Thinking through this is absolutely astounding, and it is the most crucial task that anyone had performed with Hegelian negativity after Marx and Kierkegaard. But both Marx and Kierkegaard, while inquiring into negativity (the first through the his dialectic, the second through his analysis of anxiety), did not inquire into the repetition that this determinate negativity entailed. For Hegel, repetition is the bringing back of a past moment. As Heidegger comes to show, a repetition that takes place in an abstract negation would not focus on a bringing back of what is past, of what gets determined and then negated: it would have to be a "repeating of what is possible," or, in other words, a bringing oneself along into the possibility that one is in indeterminate nothingness. As Heidegger says, "die Wiederholung des Moglichen is weder ein Wiederbringen des 'Vergangenen,' noch ein Zuruckbinden 'Gegenwart' an das 'Uberholte,'" "The repeating of that which is possible does not bring again something that is 'past,' nor does it bind the 'present' back to that which has already been 'outstripped'" (Sein und Zeit, 509-10, Being and Time, 436). Repetition is the negation taking place indeterminately and manifests itself in a historizing, a bringing along of possibility. As such, it takes place not in a present, but in the future as what is pure, indeterminate possibility. Therefore repetition does not bind a present to an occurance that is-not-now. Repetition brings Dasein along into the future as possible, or historizes into the future, into abstract nothingness. Historizing then is the withdrawing of presence, the withdrawing of presence itself into abstract negativity, the futural possibility of itself as a future. In fact, it has no concern for a present in a Hegelian sense. As withdrawal of presence itself, it is the trace of the future, the trace of nothingness.
I put these last reflections down quickly and without clarity, but I hope the general sense of "historizing" and its difference from a Hegelian historizing will be made clear. Historizing is repetition in negativity, but it is indeed this in a very specific sense that requires one to dispense with the notion of the present. Repetition and negativity do not take place in the present for Heidegger. They take place in the future of Dasein, as the coming-to-itself and bringing-itself-along of Dasein, i.e. as historizing.

Early Heidegger

A great place to start with Heidegger that I recommend to absolutely everyone is in his Phenomenology of Religious Life, the short (all in all it is 7 pages or so) sections on "Factical Life Experience as the Point of Departure" and "Taking-Cognizance-of." Here Heidegger essentially outlines, in the Winter Semester of 1920-21, what would later become his conception of the "world" in Being and Time, not in a rigorous way (as these issues are pursued in Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity), but in an accessible, surprisingly easy manner. One can also see Heidegger's conception of the world stemming out of the teaching (not publications) of Husserl and his interest in the "life-world." All in all, before anyone tackles Being and Time it is probably good to go here for clarification and orientation to Heidegger's overall view.

Ereignis

What is Ereignis (“the event of appropriation” or “enowning,” as it has been translated in English)? I’m not prepared yet to really answer this question (I haven’t read much of Heidegger that is necessary for answering this, namely the Contributions to Philosophy), so I’ll just sketch out how I think an answer could be constructed. At the very least, it will direct people to some key passages (I will later cite these passages explicitly).
First, however, we have to ask what is being asked by this question. What is the function of Ereignis in Heidegger’s philosophy such that it provokes us to define it? A short summary will suffice.
Being and Time thought Being (Sein) from the perspective of a being (Seiende), Dasein. However, it did not seek to think of Being as the ground of this being or any being, and thus was not metaphysical in its basic intention. By “ground” we mean essentially “as the highest being,” and so by metaphysics we mean the thinking that thinks Being as the highest being. As Heidegger puts it in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” metaphysical thinking “seeks out the ground for beings,” and thus elevates a being to the place of Being. Anti- or post-metaphysical thinking, like that of Being and Time, thinks Being as Being, as Being that may indeed ground beings but is not in its essence only the ground of beings. Being for anti- or post-metaphysical thinking is more than merely the ground of beings, and does not allow itself to be represented as a being. But Being and Time essentially thought this non-grounded conception of Being—as we said—precisely by turning towards a being, Dasein, and displaying its relationship to Being. How did this not ground this being in Being? How was Being defined in Being and Time other than as the grounding possibility of Dasein?
Because, as Heidegger constantly repeats throughout Being and Time, Dasein is this possibility. Dasein, in other words, has a special relationship to Being such that it does not have to have Being as its ground. It can remain open to Being, such that its Being is itself, always. Heidegger calls this openness of Dasein disclosive understanding. Thus, by analyzing concretely the disclosive structure of Dasein in its Being, Heidegger thinks against metaphysics.
Nevertheless, the analysis of Being and Time does not think Being itself. And thus the analysis of Dasein does not truly become post-metaphysical, even if it does set itself up against metaphysics. Turning this against into a post-metaphysical position was to be accomplished through the completion of the analysis of Dasein precisely in its openness, which meant in its temporality, its finiteness. But Being and Time was never completed, presumably because the way time made Dasein open could not articulate itself explicitly in terms of temporality. Heidegger then takes a different tack towards the problem of thinking Being without seeking the ground for beings.
Beginning with “On the Essence of Truth,” and most exhaustively in his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger explicitly analyzes the openness itself insofar as Being makes it possible (and for the most part not in terms of temporality). He thus dispenses with any extensive analysis of beings whatsoever. In other words, he thinks the disclosure in the disclosive understanding of Being that Dasein possesses under a new name, unconcealment, and also (because Dasein has disappeared from view for him) as a constitutive feature of Being itself.
It is in this analysis of unconcealment that Ereignis begins to be thought as well. How? Heidegger brings himself back to the fact that Being is still not a ground. This means that it is not, i.e. it does not have Being. For it is Being: it already has it, such that saying that Being is remains a distortion of the nature of Being—it makes Being into something which has properties, a being. Thus unconcealment, though it is a constitutive feature of Being, does not reside in Being. Unconcealment, as an openness to being considered without reference to beings, comes about to reveal Being because of Being, but without residing in Being. Thus something must give Being through unconcealment.
This “something,” which, because it gives Being, cannot be either Being or a being, is Ereignis. The thinking of Ereignis is the thinking of how Being can be unconcealed by unconcealment when unconcealment cannot be in or even by Being and Being itself cannot be. This is the genesis of the concept and its need: turning away from Dasein and turning towards unconcealment itself, Ereignis becomes necessary for Heidegger’s thought.
This established, we can now ask what Ereignis actually can be defined as: we know that defining it is clarifying Heidegger’s response to a post-metaphysical question about the openness (that, we remember, is temporal somehow) that allows Being to be brought forth in general, and, on the more restricted anti-metaphysical level of Dasein, the (temporal) openness that allows Being to be brought forth as Dasein’s disclosive understanding whereby it is. The following sketches out how an account of this definition might proceed. And, again, this is only a sketch, as I am only preparing to encounter this issue.
The first mention of something that distinctly possesses the character of Ereignis is in Being and Time. There Heidegger talks of historicality, and within historicality, of the possibility of Dasein to hand itself down to itself. This handing of itself down is nothing other than what is essentially addressed by the lecture “The Principle of Identity,” given in 1957. Dasein’s handing of itself down, which is essentially its repetition, constitutes its accomplishment of extending itself through time while holding itself together in sameness. This sameness is the essence of any concept of identity: it is what identity is founded upon and derives from. Repetition, as the essence of historicality, is repetition then not of the identical, but of the same. And this repetition gives Dasein itself for the future, or, in other words gives itself time.
Reading these two essays together, we can then turn back to the essay “On the Essence of Truth,” which elaborates a basic thesis of Being and Time that truth is to be conceived as unconcealment. As unconcealment, it is expressly not a correspondence theory of truth. And as a non-correspondence theory of truth, it attempts to think the same as the basis for identity rather than just identity. Thinking the latter alone, i.e. without sameness, is merely correspondence. Understood this way, unconcealment is the unconcealment of the same. This same is the sameness of historicality instituting itself as repetition. Repetition as the same is what constitutes unconcealment, the unconcealment of Being. Insofar as unconcealment is also contending with its opposite, concealment—i.e. insofar as unconcealment presupposes concealment or withdrawal—what is concealed is what constitutes the same as the same. This, as Heidegger says in “The Principle of Identity,” is the belonging-together of man and Being. In other words, what constitutes the same as the same is the difference instituted (by Ereignis, as we shall see) between Being and beings (including, but not restricted to, Dasein). This belonging-together is caused by Ereignis.
But what is crucial about all this is that concealment constitutes the same as the same, constitutes repetition as repetition of the same, constitutes unconcealment as unconcealment. As such, concealment becomes the matter to be thought, rather than unconcealment. That is, unconcealment becomes thought by thinking concealment. Heidegger in “On the Essence of Truth” and later (1962) in “On Time and Being” emphasizes that this concealment, because it makes possible the repetition of the same, and therefore unconcealment itself, conceals itself precisely through its coming forth as concealment in unconcealment. In other words, the concealment of concealment pervades in the unconcealment of Being through repetition of the same. This self-concealing, or, as Heidegger calls it (when it is conceived in this way, i.e. as self-concealment) withdrawing, is what gives Being through unconcealment.
This language of “giving” Heidegger develops in the late lecture “On Time and Being, ” his most explicit reflection on the issue of Ereignis besides his Contributions to Philosophy. The giving of unconcealed Being proceeds through withdrawal. Withdrawal gives while remaining giving: the giving of unconcealment, the concealment of concealment that makes unconcealment possible, does not pass forth into the unconcealed, into the Being that is given. Rather, this withholding of the withdrawn within itself constitutes authentic giving, a giving that does not engage in any type of exchange—a pure gift. Jacques Derrida in Given Time: Counterfeit Money explicitly brings this issue in “On Time and Being” and its relation to the constitutive movement of Ereignis to the fore, and should be read along with that essay in order to bring all of this out. That done, one may say that this type of giving is a “sending,” as Heidegger puts it, or a “destining,” a “destiny” or “fate.” This reconnects the withholding that gives concealment back with those passages in Being and Time: this is the real movement that underlies Heidegger’s thoughts on “historizing” or the handing-down. In other words, it is this “sending” as destining-withholding that constitutes the essence of repetition, if repetition is the essence of both the historical and the unconcealment of Being, as we have already established.
But the issue in “On Time and Being” is what withdraws, and this leads us directly to Ereignis, the name for this “what.” The “event of appropriation” or “enowning” that is Ereignis in the end allows for this withdrawal, this sending, and, as such, allows for Being. All the above, then, gets clearly seen in the light of Ereignis as what withdraws. Identity, difference, the same, concealment, unconcealment, Being: all these are constituted as various modes of Ereignis, the happening that brings about withdrawal, i.e. what withdraws. Ereignis, then, gives Being. But Ereignis is less existent than Being is, since it gives what can’t even be—Being. In other words, Ereignis, like Being, but even more than being, is not. What is Ereignis, then? How does it give?
In asking this, of course, we are asking as to its Being, which it does not possess. Ereignis gives Being. This is another issue tackled in “On Time and Being.” The way the problem is resolved, however, is to realize that we are really talking about something that lies on the horizon of Being. In Being and Time, Heidegger determined the horizon of Being as temporality. Ereignis and the temporal horizon of Being seem to have something in common then. Heidegger pursues this in “On Time and Being” perhaps most of all. Ereignis is not temporality, however. When we say that Ereignis is something that, as giving Being, resides on the horizon of Being, i.e. determines it as something transcending Being, i.e. as something determining yet lying outside of Being—when we say that Ereignis is this, we are saying that Being’s horizon as time as determined in Being and Time is held there as a horizon for Being by Ereignis. Ereignis, in “On Time and Being,” is not the “what” of withdrawal that determines Being in the sense of subordinating Being to this withdrawing “what:” Being is not given by something that is more than it. Rather, Being is given by the withdrawal of the togetherness of Being and temporality, of Being and time: Ereignis is this togetherness itself. If we were asking just a moment ago as to how Ereignis gives Being, then, we were not talking about Ereignis as something “more in Being than Being” which might give Being. Rather, we were talking of the horizon of Being as temporality constituting Being as such as the essence of Ereignis: Ereignis is the withdrawing of that in unconcealment which opens itself up to a temporal horizon, i.e. is the temporalizing of unconcealment in the repetition of the same—and this movement of Ereignis as withdrawal makes time the horizon of Being, makes Being be given temporally, or, finally, gives time and gives Being (es gibt Zeit, und es gibt Sein, as Heidegger says throughout “On Time and Being”).
It might seem as if this detour through temporality has confused everything. But what is to be held in our minds in order to penetrate into the matter of thinking is this: time is the horizon of Being only insofar as “there is” Ereignis. At the same time, there Being is given as unconcealment only insofar as there is Ereignis, i.e. what withdraws in unconcealment. Ereignis is the holding-together of Being and temporality such that they co-determine each other, and at the same time is the fundamental withdrawing that would make such a holding-together forgotten, that would give only Being and time and nothing more (i.e. that would not give the concealing along with the unconcealed temporal Being).
We talked about horizon just a few moments ago, and seemed to have said that both time and Ereignis were the horizon of Being. Derrida goes into this complication with amazing rigor (showing that Ereignis essentially must be in time and outside of time at the same time if it is to be preserved in the sense Heidegger thought it), and clears up what was going on in Heidegger’s head with respect to this. But insofar as we’re just sketching this “what was going on” with respect to the texts available to us, I think we can say that Ereignis is supposed to give time as well as Being precisely in relating time to Being as its horizon. In terms of Being—i.e. disregarding the word “time” for a moment and the matrix of thought that goes with it—we might say that Ereignis gives Being in its finitude, in its unconcealment on the basis of concealment. That is, in terms of Being, Ereignis is what makes Being something that resists boundless unconcealment (and does so by linking Being with time)—i.e. that resists being present. Being is presence by virtue of Ereignis; at the same time, it is never what is present by virtue of the same Ereignis. Boundless unconcealment that results in the giving of Being as a full present, as a being, is prevented by Ereignis. Returning to the issue of time, it accomplishes this determining of unconcealment by concealment through the linking up of Being with temporality.
This is all I can say for now without this all becoming mush, but I hope the movement of the reading is at least clear. Most of all, I hope I brought forth the necessity of seeing how various texts need to be thought together here in order for a coherent conception of Ereignis to come forth. These texts, brought together, are: “On the Principle of Identity” and “On Time and Being,” the chapter on “Temporality and Historicality” in Being and Time and “On the Principle of Identity,” “On Time and Being” and “On the Essence of Truth” with Being and Time, and, in the end, a connection we have left for another time, “On Time and Being” and Hegel’s section on “Determinate Being” in his Science of Logic, which brings together how all this is an attempt to reconceive of the issue of negativity and historicality without reference to the present, to boundless unconcealment or identity without sameness that withdraws itself in repetition.

Zizek and Heidegger, concluded

I found an article after writing the last post by Thomas Sheehan, the excellent scholar of Heidegger at Stanford, that sums up what I was saying Zizek forgets in his engagement with Heidegger in The Ticklish Subject:

Heidegger’s focal topic was not “Being” (the givenness or availability of entities for human engagement) but rather what brings the opening of clearing within which entities can appear as this or that.
-From "Kehre and Ereignis," in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 3.

This "what" that brings beings forth for us is the structure of alethia or unconcealment, in other words, truth as something other than adequation (this structure is designated by Heidegger's reflections on ereignis, but we won't really get too much into this). Put differently, this all simply means that Heidegger is a philosopher of truth and not of Being: a philosopher that definitively dispenses with the ways Being has been determined through the ages as the present.
I said that Zizek forgets this, and thus focuses his criticism of Heidegger too much on the issue of ontological difference--the difference between the ontological and the ontic--when this difference is only a product or effect of the real issue, truth as unconcealment. Now, how is this the case? Why is truth a more primary phenomenon or issue? And what was the real locus of the perversity in Heidegger's thinking that we said Zizek should really focus his attention on?
As I said, truth is a more primary phenomenon because, as truth without adequation or without presence as its primary trait, it lends determinacy to the ontological. That is, Zizek harps upon the distinction between the ontological and the ontic essentially because, against his own better judgement, he renders the ontic as determinate, as definite, as certain, and the ontological as indefinite, hard to grasp. How is one to get from the ontic to the ontological, and not supposed to substitute an ontic phenomenon for an ontological one? Zizek complains. Is this not what happened to Heidegger in his espousing Nazism as the supreme moment in the history or destining of Being through its (active, not passive, as in democratic capitalism) confrontation with technology? If the ontological were more definite, this could be avoided. But, as Zizek reasons, this would mean sacraficing the break with the metaphysical tradition of determining Being as the foundation of beings or entities that Heidegger effectuates.
Now, we know this break to be due to Heidegger's reconception of truth: Being is not the foundation of beings or the "most-in-being" of beings because Being as what engages with the phenomenon of unconcealment, with truth, is not something that is present. Zizek, however, attributes this type of truth to be a property of the conception of Being that Heidegger possesses--Heidegger, for him is a philosopher of Being in precisely this way. But neither is it true that the ontological is indefinite, nor is it true that dispensing with the category of the ontological as opposed to the ontic would mean a repudiation and rejection of the conception of Being that Heidegger outlines. This is because, as might now be obvious, if Heidegger is a philosopher of truth, the ontological will itself be a category of truth and not of Being. The same with the ontic: the ontic is a mode of unconcealment just as much as the ontolgical. In short: Zizek thinks that by proving the ontological-ontic distinction untenable, one has to turn one's back on Heidegger's greatest achievement, a conception of Being as that which is non-present. But since we know that Heidegger's greatest achievement was a conception of truth as non-present, we see no problem in dispensing with the distinction. But at the same time, we see no need to dispense with the distinction at all. Neither did Heidegger. While he doesn't use the terms ontological and ontic in his later writings, he does not remove the essential dependency on the truth of the ontological for his mode of inquiry.
What we have proven, then, thus far, is that the ontological is a realm of truth alongside the ontic, and thus is just as (if not moreso) determinate as the ontological. The problem remains, however, of how we are to access the ontological and bring it to the fore and not the ontic--that is, how we are able not to substitute something ontic for something ontological.
But conceiving it as a mode of truth, and truth as unconcealing rather than as adequation, already has allowed us to discern the difference. If the distinction between the ontic and the ontological is a distinction in the way that truth unconceals itself rather than primarily a distinction between the ways Being comes about, what this means is that the problem is not one of "embodying" the Being that we might ascertain as the supreme element of a particular time with the beings or entities we deal with in our everyday way of existing. In other words, the if we conceive of the problem of the distinction between the ontological and the ontic as one that is based not in the essence of Being but in the essence of truth and only thereby in Being, the ontological does not have to be grasped instead of the ontic, as Zizek makes it seem. What we are getting at can be illustrated in the example of the political that Zizek thinks this problem of ontological difference bears upon most: in his words, the ontological difference makes...

Heideggerians ...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.
-The Ticklish Subject, 13.

The political system is the ontic "embodiment" of the ontological truth--by which Zizek means something like the way of interpreting Being (Being as present, Being as the ens creatum, Being as will to power)--and this is so by virtue of there being a difference between the ontic and the ontological. Now, I'm not debating whether Zizek's remark is exact when it comes to past Heideggerians, but his rhetoric of necessity and inevitability is only the sign that Zizek interprets Heidegger as a philosopher of Being, as a philosopher that proffers two choices in the way that Being can manifest itself to us. If we instead stick to a view of Heidegger as a philosopher of truth, and the truth he philosophizes as unconcealment rather than correspondence, there are not two choices as far as Being goes. There are two ways that the unconcealment of Being--i.e. truth--comes about. The operative term is not Being, but unconcealment or truth. In other words, it is not that Being is "what" gets unconcealed that matters, though this is the case. The operative term is unconcealment itself and whether it conceals or unconceals: no matter what, whether Being is accessed ontically or ontologically, unconcealment occurs in some way.
Why this is the case is a different matter, discussed in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy and Time and Being, and with respect to the Being of Dasein is explained in the portion on the historizing of Dasein in Being and Time. I'll explicate it more some other time. To put it succinctly, the reason why truth is more basic than Being has to do with the way Being withdraws from becoming present. Being, if it is not present in its unconcealment, withdraws into presence that is never present--that is, neither a type of presence we could properly call presence nor non-presence. The withdrawing of Being allows Being to be a presence in this way, and yet keeps it from being present, and thus withdrawing is just as essential as Being itself for the existence of anything: the withdrawing of Being is coextensive with the presence of Being itself, and just as much as Being allows beings or entities to be. Heidegger puts it this way: something gives Being in its allowing Being to withdraw or conceal itself; something conceals and unconceals Being at the same time. This " something" Heidegger calls Ereignis, which literally means "event," but, because of the sense Heidegger gives to it, is variously translated as "event of appropriation," "appropriation," or, more recently, "openness." Ereignis thus designates the structure of unconcealment, that is, truth, as the movement between the presence and withdrawing of Being, and thus essentially determines how Being is accessed more than how Being is "destined"--that is, more than how Being is taken up as the present, ens creatum, will to power, etc.
As we said then, the problem is not one of "embodying" the Being that we might ascertain as the supreme element of a particular time with the beings or entities we deal with in our everyday way of existing. The problem that Zizek is harping on is a subordinate problem. That is, it is not as if the problem is trying to get from the ontic to the ontological. The real problem is in trying to grasp the unconcealment/concealment of Being that makes possible both an ontic and ontological grasp. Thus, in the political example Zizek refers to, the real problem is in discerning what in the particular political situation allows both epic ontological truth as well as the ontic political system to come forth. In short, it is this "what" that is designated by Heidegger by "epochal:" Zizek reifies what Heidegger says and then accuses him of reifying it, it is clear. But we are getting beside the point. The question posed by this real problem is, how do we go about this grasping of this this primordial "what?" We must also answer another question: why does Heidegger still confer more importance on the ontological?
The person that most explicitly brought this way of grasping this "real" problem is Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his Truth and Method. Gadamer explicates it in much of his remarks regarding fore-having, but then also in his reflections on prejudice. He introduces a foreign vocabulary to Heidegger's though, and so it might not be as clear for us now if we were to look at his work extensively. For Heidegger himself also outlines in a general way how to grasp this more primordial problem of unconcealment already in Being and Time. We'll take an example of how he approaches it and shows how this approach is to be made, however, from his essay "On the Essence of Truth." As Heidegger remarks in On Time and Being, the important thing we shall be explicating is not exactly what is said, the "series of propositions," but rather, "the movement of showing" that underlies and constitutes this series (2). What is shown in the following passage is not a discourse on "common sense," but the fundamental movement whereby we are able to grasp the truth of a situation, the unconcealment/concealment that gives Being:

Our topic is the essence of truth... Yet with this question concerning essence do we not soar too high into the void of generality that deprives all thinking of breath? ...No one can evade the evident certainty of these considerations [regarding whether we soar too high]... But what is it that speaks in these considerations? "Sound" common sense. It harps on the demand for palpable utility and inveighs against knowledge of the essence of beings, which essential knowledge has long been called "philosophy"... [Moreover, we ourselves remain trapped within common sense so long as we do not question it as to its essence... and so even in our questioning, at first] ...we then demand an answer to the question as to where we stand today. We want to know what our situation is today. We call for the goal that should be posited for man in and for his history. We want the actual "truth." Well then--truth!
But in calling for the actual "truth" we must already know what truth as such means.
-"On the Essence of Truth" in Basic Writings, 115-6.

I've emphasized the last sentence because it contains the crucial turn that penetrates into the truth of a situation, its unconcealment/concealment that gives Being. In calling for truth in the mode of its having "palpable utility" to us, in calling it forth with "common sense," we think ontically about Being. But at the same time we think ontologically when we inquire into its essence, in a manner that "soars too high." It is only in coupling this ontological thinking with the phenomenon of unconcealment/unconcealment that announces itself in our potential to already possess some meaning for truth. That is, ontological inquiry does this: it does not specify a truth that shall serve as truth in the sense of something able to be used palpably, but rather inquires into how this specification might be possible at all. It considers the possibility of an ontic specification or grasping of something as indicative of a structure that belongs to the kind of Being of something. In other words, it grasps nothing other than the possibility of the ontic. But this is still too little. There is something even more primordial in this grasping that must be emphasized if the ontological inquiry is to become fruitful and not soar too high. This is this possibility's residing already within the ontic and the ontological. To put it differently, no matter if we specify how this possibility constitutes itself, so long as we overlook its facticity, the factuality of it in its possibility, we miss something and merely specify something ontological that can easily fall back into the ontic. The facticity of this possibility lies in the already of the thing (here, an understanding of truth), taken as a fact and not as a structure. As a fact, this "already residing" means that there is a tension of unconcealment and witholding of this unconcealment--i.e. a concealment. What this fact pertains to is what is specified by the ontological inquiry proper: the possibility in its existentiality or existence--in the way it is--is what is developed. But this mode of inquiry is allowed by this possibility's facticity as much as the ontological itself allows for the ontic. As such, the mode goes nowhere when it loses sight of this fact, this fact of its already residing in some unconcealment/concealment. Heidegger in the above passage, looking at how to specify the ontological essence of truth, thus directs us to this. We might say we have answered our above question regarding why the ontological is important: where the ontic will never lead us to this primordial unconcealment/concealment, the ontological will because it specifies the kind of Being of something. Indeed, it will always lack the ability to bring this kind of Being into truth, but it allows a truth to be grasped as a way Being is unconcealed and concealed.
Furthermore, our first question is answered: we know how to discern the concealment/unconcealment of a situation by paying attention to the ontological's determinancy. In the above example, it is by directing ourself and our inquiry into the ontological constitution of truth that brings us to the fact of this constitution, the specific determination of it. Through this, we access a particular type of tension between concealment and unconcealment that makes the giving of Being as ontologically or ontically grasped, possible. To make this a bit clearer, we can turn to Zizek's example. In the political situation, as we said above, the real problem is in discerning what in the particular political situation allows both epic ontological truth as well as the ontic political system to come forth. The ontological analysis of the political situation would find something like an essence of the political situation. But it is not this essence that is ultimately important: it merely specifies what makes the ontic possible and what the kind of Being of the current political situation exists as. The real important thing is that this kind of Being has been unconcealed/concealed already, and that it as such determines the kind of Being of this situation. In other words, what is essential to get at is how there is unconcealment and concealment in a situation already and that it is this that gives Being in its ontological essence, an essence that makes the ontical understanding of this essence as merely "an" essence possible. So it is not a matter of discerning political systems that hit at the essence of the time at all: we can see now that this is quite a stupid way to approach the political, and why Zizek would want to lambast it. But he misses something more important in doing so.
The real question that should make all of this unify itself and become extremely clear, as well as prescribe a type of Heideggerian politics in lieu of the mistaken model of Zizek, is how this unconcealment and concealment that exists already in a situation looks.
As Heidegger specifies as early as Being and Time, the tension between unconcealment and concealment works itself out as a prescription of the proper, of the appropriate. The proper is what unconcealment gets concealed by: it is characteristic of there existing, factically, a withdrawing of Being. As Heidegger puts it in On Time and Being, "what is appropriate shows itself in the detstiny, what is appropriate shows itself in the belonging together of the epochs" (9), where "destiny" and the "epochs" are the holding-back or withdrawing or concealing of the manifestation of Being. In other words, by focusing on the unconcealing of Being, we can see that the proper constitutes itself as that which forms an injunction to interpret or take over the unconcealed in a particular way: and this injunction itself constitutes a concealing. The injunction for Being to to exist, or to be Being, the injunction that Being exist in a particular way ontologically already veils the unconcealing that gives Being in the first place. Thus Being is never given as something present, as Being. It is always given as something that is proper. Now, how does this apply to the political question of Zizek? In a political situation, the question that allows us to access the unconcealment/concealment that determines how Being is given is what definition of the proper is presupposed or expounded or endorced or debated within the current political situation. When there is an instability in our interpretation of the ontological (and not the ontic--thus our ability to discern the ontological still is extremely necessary), there is a witholding and concealing of the unconcealment that gives Being. This witholding constitutes, then, a "destiny" of Being, or rather a "destining" in the sense of distribution or sending: Being can only be grasped in its unconcealment with a particular type of witholding or concealment that is constituted in the injunction to take it over or grasp it as this kind of Being, as ontologically this and not that.
In this way, then, Heidegger was right in championing the confrontation between man and technology as the definitive political potential of Nazism, because he was not talking about the ontological nature of Being, but specifying a way that the unconcealment which gives Being gets concealed: in other words, Heidegger was specifying an aspect of Nazism that embodied the "epochal" or "destined" concealment of the unconcealing of Being: in the 1930's it was this confrontation that decisively concealed the unconcealment of Being. Where Heidegger went wrong is in championing this insight into the unconcealment of his age as an ontological pheonomenon. That is, in merely making it into the kind of Being of his time or epoch. It should be clear now why this is impossible and stupid: the truth of the time is more determinative of the kind of Being of a time than any kind of Being one can ontologically champion or even discern. This is the real perversity at work in Heidegger: that he did not bring this aspect of unconcealment into contrast enough with the ontological such that one could see that one determines the other. It is a perversity that allows Zizek, then, to make the same mistake as Heidegger: in specifying perversity as inherent or ontologically constitutive for the ontological/ontic distinction, just like Heidegger he overlooks that perversity really announces itself in the unconcealment that makes the ontological what it is, a covering up to some degree.
To put it all a different way, where Heidegger was wrong is in seeing Nazism as the only manifestation of this concealment that appears as man vs. technology. As a witholding of unconcealment, what matters is that this witholding indicates the way Being will give itself. If it gives itself in a conflict between man and technology, that is, in warring distinctions of the essence of man as either something human or as something that has some affinity with technology or as something that can be enhanced with technology, it it obviously a mistake to think that one political system can privelige this witholding against all others, which is what Heidegger did. What is important is the confrontation itself: reducing it to the confrontation of a specific system is obviously making it into the ontological essence of something--and thus to substitute the phenomenon that merely is given by this confrontation for the confrontation itself. In other words, the confrontation between man and technology precisely took place elsewhere than in Nazi Germany: reducing the ways that this unconcealment conceals to an ontological phenomenon that is local to one place confuses the relationship between things.
This should make clear somewhat, I hope, the mistake Zizek makes. Like many Lacanians, there is a distaste for looking at the proper--that field that Derrida brought out as so determinative, precisely as Heidegger specified it--and an eagerness to reduce this phenomenon of appropriateness to something that is perverse in order to undo it or integrate it into a social-psychical economy. What is accomplished in this is a rendering of the proper as something that pertains to the ontological essence of a way of existing, rather than seeing it as a phenomenon of witholding that gives this ontological essence. That is, it too quickly makes the real potential for perversity dissappear and the perversity itself into something that is essential to something. What Heidegger shows us, and what he perversely did not stress enough (and it is inherent to the way he articulated the issue of unconcealment and concealment--that is, truth--that this perverseness is a consequence), is that it is in the destiny of unconcealment, in the way truth must be taken, instituted, debated, etc. as Being, that any perverseness lies. Perverseness is the potential for perversity--not in the sense of potentiality as the opposite to actuality, but in the sense of being the way unconcealment gets withheld.