Suspicion and restoration

Ricoeur's De l'Interpretation (translated as Freud and Philosophy), is famous for introducing a distinction between hermeneutics of suspicion--whose practitioners are the three bad boys of Western civilization: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--and a restorative hermeneutics or hermeneutics of recollection. The goal of the book is not to oppose one to the other, but to take the latter, with which he aligns both faith and phenomenology (specifically in the phenomenology of religion, the object of which is the sacred--the essence of ritual, belief, and culture), and have it pass through the former. This is not because faith is inadequate, but because the hermeneutic tradition "is at variance with itself" (27), or has already split between the two, and thus has something perhaps to bring to suspicion.

How has it split? The Aristotelian problem of semantics understands the sentence as "saying something of something," or declaring something about being, understood already as meaningful and needing clarification or rather elucidation, proclamation. Such a stance recognizes that "real meanings are indirect" because "I attain things only by attributing a meaning to a meaning" (23). Clarification here primarily revolves around circumscribing the possibility for error, for attributing meaning in a false way. But it never presumes error can be overcome: Aristotle says in the Metaphysics that "being is said in several ways" (23). However, it does not directly attempt to take up the complete range of meanings itself. This is the task of the second branch of the hermeneutic tradition. Here, we have the sentence as Scripture, introduced by the Christian community (there is a notable absence of the Rabbinical tradition in Ricoeur's account) and then as text (via the "book of nature"), as something articulated in many ways and only able to be reduced because it unfolds according to specific forms (like allegory and analogy). These must be understood in themselves to allow the sentence to be understood. In this view, the falsity of a sentence becomes not only a covering up of the true, but the creation of a new direction which leads one astray from the truth and back into the plurality of meaning--that is, the replacement of an intelligible text not with a more intelligible text (which is the goal of this criticism), but a less intelligible text. Thus the process of unfolding meaning is an attempt to get past lying and towards the authoritative version of something.

Ricoeur's goal is not, then, to reunite the hermeneutic field through some "general hermeneutics," some "universal canon for exegesis" (27; we might see Gadamer trying something like this), but rather to make this "conflict of interpretations" work for philosophy, or resolve a more total "crisis of reflection"--something I won't really get into now but is quite interesting in itself and ultimately necessary for understanding the whole of this famous distinction between the suspicious and the restorative.

Now, Freud has both the suspicious and the restorative elements in him. He always pushes his theory, though, towards the suspicious. But certain elements escape this. Ricoeur recognizes these elements lie in the connections Freud makes to culture in order to give a the psyche and its mechanisms some recognizably anthropological basis. As far as the psyche is concerned, Freud asserts we can do without them. But in his texts, they function as more than mere hypotheses. Oedipus, for example, isn't just some sort of empty structure that happens to have been represented in literature. Freud has recourse to it because it has enough thickness to give a certain character to the psychic mechanisms.

Ricoeur pushes hard on these "symbols," as he calls them, and the results are amazing: the view of Freud that he comes up with eventually accounts for so much that remains embarrassing and unexplained in early psychoanalysis, and which subsequent theories have had to scramble to make more rigorous (or more confusing). The symbolic (which we should distinguish from the Lacanian symbolic) pops up not just in these "literary" references, but in the most basic elements of the Freudian approach. Ricoeur sees even the move between the economic and the topographical as a negotiation of the symbolic--indeed this is his central concern, since such a move constitutes, for Freud, the dream-work itself, and thus (when it is itself worked upon) the process of the interpretation of dreams.

One can't convey just how novel, and how refreshing, Ricoeur's approach is. The economic/topographical distinction is of immense importance, and is too often bypassed as simply the relationship of two unconnected regions, one of which can always be reduced to the terms of the other. Ricoeur makes the distinction the center of his reading, and by connecting the 1895 "Sketch for a Scientific Psychology" to the Interpretation of Dreams, patiently shows how the solely economic considerations of the former are developed into the topographical considerations in the latter. It is through the notion that the economic constitutes a discourse of force, and the second a discourse of meaning, that we return to the distinction between a hermeneutics of suspicion and restoration. For what Freud does is interpret the second discourse in terms of the first, continually. In other words, meaning will always be seen as having its origin in force, never in another meaning. Or, more accurately, when meaning has its origin in another meaning, this process will always be seen as itself originating in the movement of forces. And it is in this way that the dream work itself will be seen as something in need of unworking, demystifying--in short, will require a hermeneutics of suspicion.

To interpret is to displace the origin of meaning to another region. The topography, at least in its static and properly topographical from, will be the pictorial representation of this movement of interpretation from the apparent meaning towards another locality of meaning. But even at this first level it is impossible to look upon Deutung as a simple relation between ciphered and deciphered discourse; it is not enough to say that the unconscious is another discourse, and unintelligible discourse. In its transposition or distortion (Verstellung) of the manifest content into the latent content, interpretation uncovers another distortion, that of desires into images...
-Freud and Philosophy, 91-2

Thus, we get a mixed discourse, which tends to conceive the unconscious as the proper object of suspicion, even as it forces meaning, the object of a restorative hermeneutic, into its service:

To say that a dream is the fulfillment of a repressed wish is to put together two notions which belong to different orders: fulfillment (Erfüllung), which belongs to the discourse of meaning (as attested by Husserl's use of the term), and repression (Verdrängung), which belongs to the discourse of force. The notion of Verstellung, which combines the two universes of discourse, expresses the fusion of these two concepts, for a disguise is a type of manifestation and, at the same time, a distortion that alters that manifestation: it is the violence done to the meaning. Thus the relation of the hidden to the shown in the notion of disguise requires a deformation, a disfiguration, which can only be stated as a compromise of forces.
-Freud and Philosophy, 92

But when Freud looks at things like typical dreams (dreams of being naked, etc.), or when he finds that certain objects or figures typically represent certain desires, he is left confused: he has to express some larger economic principle underlying these symbols. What Ricoeur does is pose the question of why indeed the dream process in its entirety has to be seen as opposed to such symbolic manifestations. For in them, what we find is a sort of relationship to otherness that is opaque and cannot easily be demystified: one has to foist upon them a certain amount of mystification which is ultimately not present in them--merely because they have already been worked upon elsewhere. They can only have their essence specified--this is what the phenomenology of religion does, for example, with symbols. And this is why the latter is a hermeneutic of restoration. It deals with meaning not by seeing in it a distortion of its own real meaning--its own authoritative truth--but rather the expression of a more general plurivocal essence that allows for all sorts of meanings, all sorts of aspects to be grasped (through the fact that their meaning is not manifest, or rather is also present somewhere other than in their manifestation, their immediate meaning). Ricoeur then proposes to reintroduce this dimension within analysis, not to undo the Freudian contribution, but to bend it back to accommodate the full range of possible meanings. I'll have to stop here, but this hopefully can serve at least as a little sketch of the whole project.

The mechanical hermeneut attacks!, part 1

Three posts will move somewhat quickly from an explanation of the reasons behind a suggestion regarding Derrida's mode of reading I made a while ago (which will make up the concerns of this first post here), to a discussion of Ricoeur and the hermeneutic strategies of of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (post 2), to a consideration of the mechanical hermeneut or reading machine that is, I confess, more appropriately identified with Jeremy Bentham than Derrida (post 3).
I confess this because my suggestion to consider Derrida as a reading machine (for this is what it was), even if it was only for the purposes of orienting oneself towards him, was somewhat unjustified and risked being very misleading. I think about it as an overemphasis, one that forced things in a particular direction so as to avoid another route that was clearly (to me) worse. This other route was, as any reader of the blog in the past few months knows, that of considering Derrida a close reader, a reader that spends a lengthy amount of time with a work, gets incredibly intimate with it, and with unbelievable rigor reveals all its ins and outs, its meanings and attempts at meaning; in other words, as one who generally sees his task as submitting philosophical texts to literary analysis. Instead, I said that Derrida might be considered first and foremost a sort of distant reader, a computer, a person indexing words like "pharmakon," someone who skims, who reads quickly, who needs a Cliffnotes to really get anything we consider meaningful; in short, as someone who resisted and escaped hermeneutics, not by being even more and more rigorous, but by falling back into meaningless, repetitive, mechanical calculation. As if he considered texts as documents to be searched, or as math problems to be solved.
My aim was to show that this was just as valid a way of approaching Derrida as the other because it is just as untenable--it requires just as much interruption in its application to Derrida in order to be able to apply. In fact--and to show this is the more radical aim--this reveals that the first approach, despite all its mystification of the act of reading (primarily by asserting that it resists science and reason, thereby securing its power for the humanities only--an old thesis that Gadamer radicalizes and that Foucault, in The Order of Things, destroys) is the same thing as the second, mechanical approach. But this is only so if it is also the case that the second approach is the same thing as the first: mechanical reading must somehow be close. In short, as I often said as I suggested all this, duplicating a formula from Margins of Philosophy that I have explicated elsewhere, the reading machine must break down for it to work: reading mechanically or cursorily has to be, at some point, close reading. (In this explication, I say: "If there is a machine that works, in order to be working it must at some point not even be that working that it is.")
This all means that what needs to be stressed is that the mechanical or mechanist understanding of reading is strategic, and thus only pragmatic at a certain point: it tries to combat how, at this moment in the history of reading, and in America, I should say, for I can only speak with any authority of events here where I am--here and now cursory, mechanical reading has not been understood. In other words, Derrida's reading, which is just as cursory as close, has always only been understood as close reading--albeit qualified as more intense, more intimate, than the average close reading. Thus, we very much need to understand precisely how far we are contradicting ourselves when we characterize his reading in particular and any reading more generally as good because it is rigorous. We need to understand that this is contradictory because what would seem to be, despite an entire tradition of notions of rigor, most rigorous would have to be a program, a formula, a mechanical procedure. This leads us to what needs to be thought, since it has never been conceived as such, though always presupposed: what would this mechanical rigor actually look like? Thus, what is necessary is that we begin to hypothesize a machine that would do something like reading, and work out its operation in all its aspects.
Getting a feel for this first problem, however, requires that we must get to the point that we are emphasizing now, the second or supplementary problem--the problem that indeed makes our understanding a misunderstanding if we leave it out: we must so thoroughly understand close reading as contradictory if it is not also mechanical or cursory reading, that we understand how we contradict ourselves without also thinking, conversely, that this machine itself produces closeness. In other words, if we conceive rigor as such, and indeed conceive it as a machine, we must then also show how this machine breaks down to become something like intimate, non-distant reading.
Now, the strategy lies in asserting this: we cannot get to this second problem without getting to the former--even if we somehow understand this latter problem first. This is the strategic element of our emphasis on the mechanical: we must get a handle on how this contradiction--viewed from the side of close reading being confronted with its own cursory double, the machine--currently only appears to us as a a danger, as a threat to our concept of rigor. In short, we must understand how, as Derrida says famously in the exergue to Grammatology, "the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger." More radically, we must understand what Derrida means in the following, after he has just recapitulated Leroi-Gourhan's description of the emergence of writing:

In all these descriptions, it is difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the technê, of orientation in general.
-Of Grammatology, 84-5.

That is, we must understand how, in order to acclimate oneself to what is required by our anticipation of this future, in order to describe it so it can be understood, the recourse to a mechanical language and the thinking of a purely mechanical act of reading--while never able to be justified--is on some level oddly necessary. Necessary not because it allows some pragmatic form of acclimation, something that would allow us to anticipate anticipation, to practice it--and this is crucial--but because it keeps hitting home the impossibility of acclimation, of anticipation. In short, the necessity lies in how this act of working out a interpretative machine somehow works to retrieve the possibility of absoluteness in the absolute danger of which Derrida speaks--that is, what cannot be anticipated. Derrida will later call this possibility hospitality, and its structure is the same as that breaking down which is required for a reading machine to work (that is, the opening up of our second aspect of our question).
Now, at least, it is clear that the danger appears to our close reading because it is possible that in the future rigor in reading might indeed be ensured mechanically, via indexing or cataloguing and search-engine type algorithms. But if we look through history, indeed similar forms of this same danger appear--we are always on this horizon where rigor can be ensured mechanically or by technology. In other words, the reading machine is continually considered throughout history as what produces cursory readings--which, as we remarked above, is a completely unjustified characterization. But rather than tracing the genesis and structure of this characterization, which is what would be required to get some sense of the necessity we are talking about, we might expand upon it as a strategy. This is an act of expansion which requires going more into depth about what a machine is and does.
To lead us into the next post, we can at least begin to think of what a machine that would interpret could look like, and how it could indeed be rigorous despite our worries and the historical characterization of it as sloppy. Searle's famous Chinese-room argument actually provides a good illustration of this very point, emphasizing it albeit indirectly (because, of course, its concerns lie elsewhere): what makes interpretation (in the example, a complex act of translation) conscious or human is not the same thing as what makes proficient and even rigorous interpretation. The output from the room may be excellent without being able to be sure whether it came from a human or a machine. And while this is a problem for certain notions of consciousness, it isn't for certain notions of interpretation. Or is it? And how? We will pick this up again in the next post.

What is dialectic?

I wanted to elaborate what I was beginning to get at in my post on Derrida and dialectic below. But before I do that, I have to return to the issue of dialectic itself.
What is dialectic? I have two posts below on dialectic and language that were drafts of a presentation that I made to a class on dialectic, and, after seeing how those presentations ended up, I realize it might be better to explain the dialectic in a different way.
The reflections below were motivated by a reading of dialectic that Heidegger makes in "Hegel and the Greeks:" dialectic is the process whereby thought goes through the holding-together and gathering that takes place in language, (in Greek, dia-legein) and comes to appearance that way (so that the whole is, in Greek, dia-leges-thai).
But Heidegger offers a seemingly conflicting reading of dialectic in his early course on the Phenomenology of Spirit: there, dialectic is described as the moving between the speculative and propositional sentence. It is this latter explanation that was a bit clearer to my class, so I'll explain it that way. Hopefully, though, afterwards you can see perhaps how these two explanations are not conflicting. And hopefully we will be led to a position where we can explain a "Derridian dialectic" in a later post.
So, again, what is dialectic? It seems easy to characterize at first, but after a while, you can see that no one is really clear about what it is. Gadamer makes this clear in his book on dialectic (Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies--I recommend it). Dialectic for Hegel is not just a mode of allowing thoughts to address their contradictions, like in ancient or medieval philosophy (in saying it is "not just" these, of course I am not indicating that something of the spirit of Hegel is not in them and vice versa.) Nor is it the mere play of falsity and appearance that Kant makes it out to be in his Critique of Pure Reason, though this influences heavily the sense of "phenomenology" that we find in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel's sense of dialectic is more restricted. And yet, because of this restriction, it is also the most vague: divorcing himself from the tradition of dialectic to specify a really precise concept of what it does ends up making it hard to specify without going through the entire Hegelian philosophy. In fact, this is its point: it is the Hegelian philosophy insofar as this philosophy is the interrogation of negativity and its result in spirit. One cannot extract dialectic from the interrogation of which it is a constitutive movement.
But if we understand this, we can perhaps get a little more specific as to what it is, making reference to Hegel but also trying to wrest dialectic from out of Hegel. Let's begin: dialectic is not a force or power, but a result of a force or power--specifically, "the tremendous labor of the negative." That said, dialectic as a result is always being again taken up by this negative labor, so that it can never be said to merely be the sheer content and residue that this negativity deals with. That said, dialectic cannot be a form or method that experience or spirit through the labor of the negative gets processed through--Kojeve is good in showing you that it is not the form of the labor of the negative.
So, dialectic seems to merely be what we sait it was: a "constitutive movement" of a movement (of negativity and spirit) that is larger than it. This gets us nowhere. Or does it?
Understanding dialectic as a result that is not a result, that is, not a content nor a form, allows us to account for three binaries that the dialectic itself introduces in the texts of Hegel:
Immediacy/mediation
Indeterminate/determinate
Universal/particular
The first deals with how dialectic is a result or not, the second with how it is a content or not, the third with how it is a form or not.

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.

What Zizek forgets, or, Zizek on Heidegger continued, continued

I said that the key to Heidegger is to realize that while the ontological veils itself, that does not mean it is indeterminate. The ontic veils the ontological, but this does not mean that the ontological is as indeterminate as the Kantian noumenal, the a priori. I also said Zizek knows this. But he is unwilling to stridently suggest that this determinacy of the ontological is the positive possibility of perceiving and grasping the ontological. Instead, he is completely willing to make this determinacy into something that only serves to provoke a futile search within the ontic for a way to get past it to the ontological. He thereby makes the ontic/ontological distinction seem Kantian. It is as if the determinacy of the ontological and its resistance to being something Kantian only further chastizes those who cannot get beyond the ontic--and thus makes it seem all the more Kantian. Thus he roundly declares the following as if it were not just true of the Heideggerians in Yugoslavia in the later parts of of the twentieth century but also of all Heideggerians to come: "Heideggerians are ... eternally in search for a positive ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy that inevitably ends in error" (The Ticklish Subject, 13). The determinacy for Zizek only works one way. Zizek forgets his own finding, that point where the perversity of Heideggerian philosophy might lie.
Now, the first thing to note is that this is not a new view of Heidegger, nor is it a wrong one. Heidegger does have a tendency to use the determinacy of the ontological as a way to chastize those who continue to interpret phenomena only ontically. But it should be obvious that this is only because he sees the power of grasping the ontological: what is Being and Time itself, like the Phenomenology of Spirit with regard to the power of thinking with regard to the Begriff, but a demonstration of that power? In terms of this not being a new view, one can cite an immensely critical article of Hannah Arendt from 1946 that says the following:

Heidegger's ontological appoach hides a rigid functionalism in which Man appears only as a conglomerate of modes of Being, which is in principle arbitrary, since no concept of Man determines the modes of his Being.
-"Existenz Philosophy," from the Partisan Review, included in The Phenomenology Reader, p. 355.

In essence this says the same thing as the quote from Being and Time that we cited earlier: the ontological approach risks a rigid functionalism in having to go "behind" the ontic without any ontical conception of the ontological to guide it. Arendt, like Zizek, thinks this cannot easily occur, and, unlike Zizek, implies that it is not the business of philosophy to move beyond the ontic without a prior ontic conception that could handily characterize the ontological. What by now should be obvious is that this too overlooks the determinacy that is just as constitutive for the ontological as well as the ontic, and thus that determining Man ontologically does not mean that one has to have any ontic conception of him to start with--in fact, if conceived rightly, any ontic conception will seem wrong once the ontological is grasped. The whole problem, however is how this grasping is to take place. But it is only a problem insofar as we conceed that it proceeds from the determinacy of the ontological and not any supposed indeterminacy: this is what Zizek stops short of investigating, though he knows it well enough as a Heideggerian, and this is why his rigorous analysis ends up seeming like the genuine distortion of Heidegger that Arendt actively engages in throughout her article (the article, it should be mentioned, is a horrible and, it seems to me, deliberate misreading of Heidegger to make him seem inferior to Jaspers).
Why does this all occur? And where does the "real perversity" lie? Essentially because, like all but the most rigorous of Heideggerians--Derrida, Badiou, Foucault, Gadamer, Dreyfus, to name a few of this exceptional group--Zizek believes Heidegger first and foremost devoted his philosophy to the concept of Being. What rigorous Heideggerians realize--and Gadamer and Derrida were the first to really point this out--was that Heidegger essentially is a philosopher of truth, and that the question of Being remains an equally important phenomenon only because it is connected with the essence of truth (in fact, is this essence). This is not to say that Heidegger's later thought past the "turn" it took after Being and Time was more reflective of the essential nature of his thinking than Being and Time itself, but rather, and more profoundly, that from the beginning Hedegger focused solely on the issue of truth and focused on Being because of this focus. Indeed, this seems odd, but one has to understand the profundity of the assertion Heidegger made even before Being and Time and of course even throughout it, that truth is unconcealment and not the mimetic correspondence of an object with its conception. Alain Badiou continually says that this assertion alone is the condition for all of modern philosophy (and thus penetrates deeper than Lacoue-Labarthe whom he cites, and who is merely developing theses of Derrida's):

Our epoch is most certainly that of a rupture with all that Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe has shown to depend on the motif of mimesis. One of the forms of this motif, which explicitly attaches truth to imitation, is the conception of truth as a relation; a relation of appropriateness between the intellect and the thing intellected; a relation of adequation, which always supposes, as Heidegger very well perceived, that truth be localizable in the form of a proposition. Modern philosophy is a criticism of truth as adequation.
-Infinite Thought, "Philosophy and Truth," 45.

Heidegger crystallizes and formalizes how this truth that is not adequation should be conceived, and it is this that not only makes all modern philosphy a criticism of truth as adequation, but also makes it an elaboration of the concept of Being. It is this fundamental insight, that truth, if it is not to be adequation, must be related to the unveiling of Being, that makes the perception of the ontological and not the ontic of such importance. In other words, it is this fact, and not merely the fact that Heidegger is obsessed with the question of Being, that makes him from the beginning (that is, even before his "turn" to the question of truth and being and away from "Dasein" after Being and Time) introduce the distinction between the ontological and the ontic that Zizek criticizes.
Furthermore, it is this that makes the ontological so very determinate. The ontological is the revealing of truth as Being and not as adequation. That is, as soon as we understand Heidegger as the philosopher of truth and not of Being, like all the best Heideggerians, we suddenly understand that the ontological could never be something that is indeterminate. That is, we understand both its opposition to the ontic as that which is merely that sphere of truth that is still determined by adequation while the ontological remains that which possesses a relationship to truth as alethia or the unveiling or unconcelment of Being, and we understand that this opposition is only a function of the nature of the ontological being absolutely determinate within the sphere of truth that it inhabits. In short, we understand both the opposition and its necessity in the inescapable determinacy of the ontological.
It is this point that we will elaborate in hopefully one more post, to be completed later. But for now it is enough to merely indicate it as the fundamental thing that Zizek, as a Heideggerian, should have remembered.