Building, dwelling, thinking...

A reading of "Bauen, Wohnen, Denken," which proceeds roughly along the path of the introduction and first part of the essay, with general comments meant to make Heidegger a bit more accessible interpolated. Thanks to my friend and colleague Emily for giving me the opportunity of writing this finally! I hope it is a little bit helpful:

Building (Bauen: constructing, structuring, to house something) and dwelling (Wohnen: residing, living, to stay with somebody) are the terms of the question. The question focuses upon building. It asks: If our inquiry "traces building back" into the place where we can see it working in the way that is most proper to it qua building, if we trace the way it looks like it works back into this "domain" (Bereich), then does this place, this domain, this original coherence of the phenomenon of building have anything to do with another sort of place that we call a dwelling? Looking into the way building is properly building, which means looking at the way it is building (that is, looking at it ontologically, in its be-ing building), does this resonate with how dwelling is properly dwelling? Does this building be-ing building resonate with dwelling being dwelling?
To understand this, we will ask 1) What is it to dwell, or how does dwelling be? and 2) How does building resonate with [gehört] or belong with dwelling?
To put it in more simple terms, Heidegger looks at a phenomenon: as Merleau-Ponty would describe it, the way that something coheres as it appears to us, its structured appearance to our lives (so like, a room appears to us as a usable space before it appears as a rectangle we inhabit, to the extent that the space of the room warps around the objects in it. Sartre said once a room taken phenomenologically is a lot more like how a blind person "sees" it: the room is a set of objects for him to use--the fact that it has corners is really irrelevant because they're hard to touch, nothing he needs is there, etc.). Thus what will follow is a phenomenology of building or construction. But his phenomenologies are phenomenological ontologies: they look at the coherence of something appearing precisely as how it exists, in its being (taken intransitively, as be-ing or is-ing: Levinas said helpfully once that Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is in restoring an intransitive character to being). So the being of building is a sort of coherence, its remaining proper to itself as a phenomenon--but doing so not in the aspect of how it looks or feels, say, but in how it exists, how it just remains there in its activity as an activity, how it "just works" as we like to say, implying some process but at the same time implying that it just does this process in being typically itself. So he's looking at the way building is properly being building. This is why he contrasts what he's doing to some aesthetic, architectural treatise on construction to giving rules or architectural ideas: this couldn't be further from looking at the being of building (for him--for me, this move in Heidegger is always suspect, because its dickish, as if his way of doing things is the only real way). He's also going to do this phenomenological ontology with dwelling, or, translated a little less pompously, "living in" something (his translators are also pompous sometimes). In fact, he's going to look at this first, to try and see if living in something is going to end up having any relation to constructing something. This makes sense because, of course, we live in the things we build. But the uniqueness of Heidegger is to pose this banality in ontological terms.
Part I:
At first it looks to us like we can only reach (gelangen, get to, as in: get to that place where there is)--it looks like we can only get to dwelling, or what dwelling is, through building, by means of building, or what building is. This is why we asked what dwelling is first--to try and work against the way things seem when we don't see them as structured appearances or as phenomena (and chiefly when we don't see them as appearances structured by their being, as ontological phenomena). In fact, we work against this because the mode of our presentation of building looks like it informs our way of considering it. That is, if we do look at things in this mistaken way, we'll think that dwelling is merely an end of building. This makes dwelling look like it is just having shelter in something, in being located inside a place that is reserved by building for this purpose. But this is not right: just because we fulfill the purpose of something doesn't mean that we are properly dwelling, that we are, in our being, in our remaining what we are, dwelling. In fact, I can dwell by precisely not fulfilling the purpose of something. To look at building as a means, and dwelling as an end--and thus to look at dwelling through building--is to avoid the question. We'll come to this below in how the question about housing problems is brought up.
For Heidegger, thinking about a dwelling in terms of its ability for us just to be located within it is, like thinking about the room as a rectangular box in space, to miss the phenomenon, is to miss how it is structured. It's no mistake that this is how science, in the use of physics in engineering and architecture, thinks about a dwelling (according to Heidegger). What's interesting is that for him this is reflected in how the problem of living-in something or dwelling in it is usually approached. His resistance to this approach will govern the structure of the rest of the essay: it especially governs what will happen next--his turning to language. When Heidegger does this, he supposes several things that are a bit farfetched and which I tried to bring out below: 1) that language itself can give us the phenomena if we hear it right, 2) the right language in which we hear this is German (here he is in serious danger of becoming a Black-forest patriot and/or Nazi) and that this is the case because, 3) like Hegel, he believes that German has a relationship to the way that the Greeks, the proper thinkers, thought (also a Nazi conception, but again, Hegel thought it too, so what this means is, on a certain level, tough to say). What he is trying to do, though, is significant: he's trying to think of construction or building not as a means, which means thinking of it not as something involving machines and technology. So he tries to pull that back out of the language. What he's claiming though is pretty profound: because we think of a dwelling through construction, this means of presenting it itself makes construction a means. In other words, the way of presenting the problem duplicates the way we consider the terms of the problem.
However, if we look at language, the German language, the language proper to thinking and in which nothing less than the spirit of the West, as it was handed down from the Greeks, is preserved as such, then to build, bauen, is already to dwell: that is, dwelling has a relationship to building that is not of a means-end nature. For building, in German, in this proper language, especially if we go back and look at its older meanings, in fact looks a lot like it simply means being, which is preserved in the German word for "am:" bin. When I say I am (ich bin), I mean "the way in which... I am." That is, I mean: I have cultivated myself, constructed myself, taken care of myself in this particular way. I have precisely not *made* myself or manufactured myself, as if I were a performance. "Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing." Cultivation is an art, but is not something technical: it is closer to the art of trimming vines and shaping a plant. In short, building itself is not properly something technical, precisely because--for reasons we state most clearly in "The Question Concerning Technology" but which we'll get to below--the technical is not technical: the technical is much closer to this cultivation, to this taking-care-of, to this sort of protection, which we'll come back to. Building is not properly manufacturing, it is cultivating.
We have not yet answered how this cultivating is dwelling, but we can see that this view of building as a sort of manufacturing is precisely what the means-end view of building and dwelling has done to our thought. It has turned us away from all that in building already could mean something else. (This means that, in truth, it has turned us away from Germany, from German language.) It has turned us away from how building and constructing can mean something like cultivating, and cultivating in a pure, proper, German sense: that is, without recourse to an idea of cultivation as performance, as fakery, as tricks, as technique and art that is a technology in the vulgar sense. To think of cultivating as something other than a manufacturing, to hear it even in our language itself: this is what being attentive to the phenomenon, rather than reducing it to a means-end relationship, had allowed us.
So perhaps we can look at our German language again, this time precisely at dwelling, and see whether it too could mean something like cultivation. Then there would be a relationship that would not be one of means-end. It would remain then for us to inquire into what the nature of this other relationship would be. But first let's get to dwelling now without building, without going through building: which we now know means, without seeing building as something that has an end.
We don't hear that wohnen, dwelling, means cultivating directly. That is, we have to take a detour in order to hear cultivation in dwelling. (It will take us to what we will call the fourfold.) For like building, it means remaining as something, but it means this more immediately, in terms of preserving and guarding, not cultivating. In fact, it means something closer to freeing-up. When I say I dwell, what I really mean is that I am free to do whatever. It does not mean, like cultivating, a sort of gathering together and holding together as protection, but a setting loose, a sort of freeing up. So we have gathering on the one hand and a setting free on the other—but we will come back to this opposition.
What we should note now is that if dwelling means being free, a dwelling would therefore be something like an object that is set free so that it can exist within this type of freedom. In fact, this freeing up of the thing is a lot like saving it from becoming a mere end, something that is just an object located within a techno-scientific or objectivized space. It is, as we will see, to really treat it as a thing, before it becomes an object, a point in space. This is not just a change in terminology that will oppose something good (a thing) to something bad (an object), although we will indeed exploit this opposition. What we are getting at is more fundamental: a dwelling is a freed object, or a thing that is more originary, more proper than an object because it is free. When something is left to its own, it is dwelling: “to dwell means… to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence,” that is, to its being properly itself.
To clarify: what Heidegger is doing is distinguishing something that is objectivised and scientific from something that, he says, is more basic, more properly itself. To call the dwelling a thing here means the same as regarding the room not as a rectangle but as a livable space. This will come back more explicitly in the second part. But this distinction allows him to launch himself into a meditation on how the world looks when it is full of things, not objects, and how the dwelling fits into this world made up of these things.
Put differently, dwelling is when something’s thingness takes precedence before its objecthood because, as we said, dwelling is precisely this freeing. A dwelling is only a concatenation of dwelling itself, therefore, which is a setting free, a making free, an allowing of what surrounds me to come before me unburdened by how it logically is supposed to fit into my business. Dwelling is more free than the space in which I carry out my business. In fact, it fits into a whole world that is more properly itself than the space of my business, the space of technical and scientific objecthood. In this non-technical world, the dwelling is on top of the earth, before this earth is considered a set of resources, a set of minerals. It is also under the sky, before it is considered the space of physics. It is on top and below these, in this world, which also remains in front of gods and the holiness that pervades the phenomenality of things as such. And in this world are mortals, who is capable of being properly himself in his being-towards-death, in his dying qua dying, as we explained in Being and Time.
Each of these obscure terms—earth, sky, mortals, gods—all these are essentially what we see around us considered phenomenologically: that is, with concern for their being properly themselves, grounded or structured by their being. They are not just the things that we see but the larger “regions,” as Heidegger occasionally will call it, in which more specific things can appear. They are like the ur-phenomena, in which the things appear. Something coming out of the sky will appear to us as a sort of sky-phenomena: for Heidegger the phenomena of the sky include the length of the day and time, basically time-management. Something from the earth appears to us as an earth-phenomenon: it is that out of which we create things and make things. The gods or divinities are the realm in which we try and relate to both earth- and sky-phenomena as such: something from this region appears to us as our expectation about a thing. The sphere of mortals or men is where we live out our lives, where the phenomena like the continuity of one’s self-history appears. This continuity is ensured by death—but that is an issue I can’t get into here because it takes too much time: one has to summarize a lot of Being and Time, in which it is first fleshed out. Regardless, you see what is going on. What is being explained here by looking at the regions in which phenomena appear is that the coherence of the world, which is the world being properly itself as a world, and which he in a vatic manner describes as its oneness—this coherence is only possible if man dwells in it, in the sense of dwelling that this essay is pursuing. For dwelling will fit together these ur-phenomena or regions. That means that man takes up the earth, the sky, the holiness of the world as well as his own mortality, and makes them actively fit together, gain the structuredness that is proper to them as phenomena, through his own dwelling. The world could indeed take up space without man, but only man can give it the significance of a phenomenon: that is, an appearance that is structured and meaningful insofar as it is.
Each of these four aspects or regions of the world fits together, to borrow a metaphor we used in Basic Concepts. But this fitting together, this oneness of the four, can only take place if there is dwelling, and if man, the mortal, is the one who does this. How is this possible? Well, it is possible in that the fitting-together is precisely what is allowed by a sort of setting-free of the things within these regions. If you set something free, it is set free so that it can find its proper place, so that it can find where it can most be itself, so that it can fit together with its most proper situation. This, we know, is precisely what dwelling does: it sets a thing free.
So we now understand the ramifications of this setting-free of the thing. To set a thing free, to keep its freedom, is to allow it and other things to find their proper situation. This situation is one that occurs within one aspect of the fourfold. And insofar as it is free, it allows the fourfold to fit together, to become one or have a oneness—a oneness that simply is the world being properly the world. But we also understand how dwelling is cultivation, as building is. For to allow all these regions, all these fourfold, to fit together, is to care for the whole world through the setting free of the things. Indeed, dwelling might deal immediately with things, with the setting free of things—but this setting free is a way to ultimately cultivate the world as such, to preserve and save and nurture the world as its proper self. And insofar as this is so, we understand how Dwelling is building: “dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things”—that is, sees things as part of the fourfold, of the world itself—“insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building...”

"Sociality with the Absolute..." and a bit about "self-deconstruction"

A wonderful formulation of Levinas', using some formulations he finds in the 12th century philosopher/mystic Judah or Yehuda Halevi (יהודה הלוי). Namely, that the relationship with the order of god is conceived in "social" terms like "association" and "proximity", though not in such a way that this connotes a deficiency in proper philosophical knowledge about this order:

It is, in fact, my opinion that the relation to God called faith does not primordially mean adhesion to certain statements that constitute a knowledge for which there is no demonstration--a knowledge that would from time to time be troubled by the anxiety of a certainty lacking proof. To me, religion means transcendence, which, as proximity of the absolutely other (i.e., of the one of its kind), is not a failed coinciding and would not have ended in some sublime projected goal, nor in the incomprehension of what should have been grasped and understood as an object, as "my thing." Religion is the excellence proper to sociality with the Absolute, or, if you will, in the positive sense of the expression, Peace with the other.
-"On Jewish Philosophy" (interview with Françoise Armengaud) in In the Time of the Nations, 170.

Frankly, I find this much more useful and interesting as a meditation on how to approach the relation to God than the rather old-fashioned reflections of Jean-Luc Nancy in his recent Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity: that is, one should be able to characterize this relation differently, using people like Yehuda Halevi, rather than take this relation itself as the object--which means taking it somewhat for granted--and looking at that. In other words, to me, Nancy gets tangled up in what I think are these Levinasian problems, but poses them as if they were Derridian in nature: namely, as problems dealing with the dis-enclosure (déclosion) of a field in which the self-deconstruction of the Christian relation to God can change its orientation. This seems misguided, because for Derrida it was not the relation that was the issue but the conception of God himself (which produced the relation). Regardless, the whole notion of Christianity as "self-deconstructing," which Derrida I think warned Nancy too much about, and which Nancy is too obsessed with in turn, is just odd to me. For what is not self-deconstructing? The phrase seems like an oxymoron intended to try and get Nancy to reflect on his rather philosophically-oriented notion of deconstruction--one which Derrida I think rightly opposed, perhaps most in his amazing, late work on his friendship with Nancy, On Touching. But Nancy seems not to take it seriously--or too seriously.
This makes him end up spinning all sorts of tales about a relation to the absolute being self-deconstructing, when what he might just be saying is what Levinas is saying here: that the relationship to God is going to be social, or whatever, in some way. Somehow Levinas can say more directly what Nancy just can't--that's all I'm getting at--when they are actually talking about something similar, in the end. For both, in turn, can be deconstructed by Derrida--that is my point. But one has a healthier way of formulating the problems involved than the other. And I don't like to think that this has something to do with the essential nature of Judaism versus Christianity: this is what I think Nancy would like us to think, but I don't buy it. I do think there are essential differences: I just don't buy that Christianity is different because it poses the same problems that Levinas brings up here (and this is what I'm saying happens in Nancy) just in a more complex fashion.
I know this is all a bit confusing--I apologize, it's confusing for me now, too--but maybe after more reading of Nancy I can more perspicuously articulate my reservations. For now, I'll just remain vague and schematic.
Regardless, I just wanted to draw attention to wonderful quote that set these things going in my mind--one that occurs in a bit of a different language than usual for Levinas (care of Halevi, and it is this willingness to assimilate that I'm really saying Nancy lacks), though with the ever-present talent of his for rich condensation and brilliant clarity: "Religion is the excellence proper to sociality with the Absolute..." Amazing!

Angry criticism and the name

Obstinate old man--senex
sapiens, it is not. What is he saying;
why is he still so angry? He says, I cannot
forgive myself. We are immortal.
Where was I? Prick him.
-Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love

I'm interested in a type of criticism I've seen lately, one that can't stand other people's thoughts unless it has them held in a position, under a name. It is not so much that it can't stand people that don't have clear positions, as it is that it can't stand the difficulty of naming, in general, and at this historical juncture. Naming has become harder, somehow, in the postmodern world. This criticism concludes that it is better to have a name than none at all. So, frustrated with you, it gives you a name. And what it does in the process is not so much confine you to a position or that name, as think that you once had no name, no position at all, prior to their giving it to you.
This is the problem. I don't mind names, call me whatever you want. Names usually only help a situation: they label, they identify, they correct themselves, they allow you to see what faults describing something as X instead of Y produces, etc. The problem is that hesitation over what to call something or someone is not the same as indecision over it or, more significantly, a refusal of naming.
I just went to a talk, for example, where the phrase "ideological critics" was applied to certain people. By this was meant those who gave either new historicist or deconstructive or feminist or queer readings of a text, though in a looser way to also imply those all that work that is influenced by these modes of looking at texts. This was useful. But it was applied as if these ideological critics were refusing to take a stand on something crucial about textuality by being concerned with ideology. In short, the name was circularly applied: by calling these critics ideological critics, you could criticize what you call them. Thus, you only criticize the name: but the slippage here between the name and the referent is all that counts. It destroys any responsibility to try and rigorously demonstrate that the name applies to the referent. In the end, it assumes that the ideological critics refusal to call themselves your name is a dismissal of naming itself. And in the process what it does is not use naming so much as a process that elucidates as a process that just is frustrated with the problems of naming in itself.
What am I getting at? This criticism just seems angry, at the end of the day. And nothing more. By that, I don't mean it does nothing or is nothing. By no means. It is simply is frustrated with the conditions of its own possibility, and wants to impose those conditions upon everything. So it doesn't develop them, when it is placed in a new situation, but merely uses that situation to confirm its conditions of possibility. So it is in the end a type of criticism that doesn't do anything but can say a lot about everybody. It's just pissed off. When it does say something, it doesn't come from this way of criticizing: it seems external, like it could have been achieved by a critic who wasn't so angry. And this is the case because, indeed, under the guise of trying to quickly name something so the critic can get somewhere already and stop worrying about its conditions of possibility, it worries only about its conditions of possibility--because it doesn't think its responsible to step beyond them. So instead of engaging with its object, this criticism sucks its object back into its own sphere of problems. The name is the tool for this non-engagement: it labels, it makes it possible to talk about the thing, but at the same time it does this disingenuously, because it also believes labels or names don't hold. It aspires to a radical provisionality, while at the same time trying to impose its stamp upon everything.
Here is a position for you, angry critics: all pragmatism is this angry criticism.
This doesn't mean that the theses of pragmatism--what it has to say about truth, for example--have this character trait. It merely means that the way pragmatists, or those who fall into pragmatism (which is a more common phenomenon than you might think), go about articulating these theses is by getting angry. In short, what this means is that pragmatism (or its modern form) is a certain style of dealing with the investigations of Wittgenstein (among others), most notably characterized by the two pronged idea that a) we are beyond Wittgenstein, we should know better than him, and b) given the theses of Wittgenstein, which we know and are beyond, you can't get beyond him. Taking up this frustrating two pronged thesis and militantly waving it around, that is what makes you angry. Rorty was great at this, and played a lot with the possibilities of this anger. That is, he often appeared angry and calm at once, and it is this cognizance of his own position on positions that I personally enjoy about him--and why I think he resists a lot of the criticisms that people levy against pragmatists.
But those who do not at first appear to be pragmatists are also angry: Marxists, for one. Gayatri Spivak is constantly infuriated. This isn't bad, as I should emphasize: it simply is a way of presenting ideas and reducing your opponent's position--one which makes them into, in fact, your opponent. And especially under the guise of usefulness, that quality of the name that I tried to outline earlier. The name, the name for the position, is exceptionally useful. But to use its usefulness against itself, as a ruse that will allow you to claim to be, at least, clear about something--this is a strategy that angry critics constantly deploy. So in her essay on Foucault and Derrida, Spivak believes she is being clear when she tries to parcel out their respective positions. This doesn't in the future preclude her from criticizing Foucault in a pretty base manner--that is, in a really angry way, frustrated with her own real inability to criticize him.
But then there are other political thinkers, obsessed with the civic and with solidarity in different ways, who are exceptionally angry: Gillian Rose, perhaps is the most concrete example. The fury she displays (a lot like that of Geoffrey Hill, her friend) is extraordinary, and most precisely of all these examples takes the form I elaborated above with reference to naming. Let's look at her attack on Derrida, often a figure that this criticism grows unbelievably frustrated with. We can imagine why: not only does he criticize clarity as a virtue in itself--he calls this somewhere a naive belief in a sort of philosophical Esperanto--but he precisely resists the frustration one feels with the name. That is, unlike the pragmatist, he thinks the two pronged, contradictory relationship to Wittgenstein precisely as a contradiction to develop, to explore, such that it breaks down. It is not something that is constantly trying to be resolved for him, and it is not something that can be preserved by the work of philosophy: the work of philosophy takes it up and destabilizes its function as philosophy's premise or condition of possibility, no matter how contradictory it is. But back to Rose, for whom this is all intolerable: watch her infinite rage in motion:

All this stems from the logophobic ethos of Derrida's thinking (pardon my neologism). Desperate for expiation and for ethics, he nevertheless desires to avoid at all costs renewing the question (yes, the question), which Marx himself posed and from which his thinking, young and old, proceeded: "How do we stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic?" Only our taking on the burden of posing this question anew would permit us to investigate the possibility of an ethics which does not remain naive and ignorant of its historical and political presuppositions and hence its likely outcomes.
-Mourning Becomes the Law, 70-71 (italics in original).

Notice the neologism with the immediate criticism of what she named. Nowhere is there a second thought as to whether this name applies to Derrida--thinker of the dialectic and the problems of the dialectic par excellence (has she ever read "From Restricted to General Economy?" or Glas?). The assumption, I think, is that he will respond, and that if he can prove the name logophobic doesn't apply--and it doesn't, as he addressed explicitly in several interviews and papers (cf. "For the Love of Lacan")--well, then, Rose will take back her position. She thus seems to demonstrate a good faith in discussion. Seems to: for will this taking-back ever happen? Well, the short answer is no: for what Rose here also deploys is the fact that the name will still stick unless she herself takes it back. So not only does Derrida have to say, no, that does not apply, he has to make her take the thing back herself. It's like we are in fourth grade, and saying bad things about each other's mothers. Take it back! You take it back! The good faith in discussion is the same thing as the anger with the frustrated possibility of naming something I outlined earlier--in short, faith in discussion is the imposition of her inability do discuss upon someone else. So she will say, with a fury it is oddly hard to dissociate from anti-Semitism (and I'm not the first to say this, of course), Levinas, Bloom, Derrida, Jabes, and others (but the term applies most forcefully to Levinas, I think) all "operate according to what might be termed neo-Hebraism" (Mourning Becomes the Law, 79--while she acts like this is well-known, the name is in fact Rose's), a quality that does not just remain as a label but also rings throughout her writing like a sort of accusation, like it also names a stain, a disgusting pathology. This excess in the act of naming is the frustration with naming: the name applies, but it applies itself knowing that it won't ever be exactly right. So what happens? You name anyway, without hesitating over the name--and here is where frustration turns into anger. The residue of affect here--the anger at the futile position of the neo-Hebraists--is not just one about whether this name applies or not. That would be too simple, too Rortyian (this is the technique I spoke of above: Rorty turns anger back against itself to merely end up with this frustration). This residue of affect is concerned with how the neo-Hebraists will not themselves ever accept the name that Rose gives them... even if they were to say they did. This is the same thing, I am suggesting, as the determination to skip over one's own inability to deal with the name: Rose wants to impose the frustration she feels upon others, to never look like she is hesitating. What this completely, utterly overlooks, is that Levinas, Derrida, Jabes, even Bloom all might feel this frustration too. In the process, she makes it seem as if her opponents don't ever think what she thinks--that they, in fact, renounce thinking, questioning (yes, questioning).
That the other might feel this frustration with language, with naming, is what Frederic Jameson understands. He is a great example of someone who escapes this angry sort of criticism while genuinely exploring all the virtues that angry critics think naming allows. Constantly calling the thing by a name, at the same time he never gets frustrated with naming. This can make him extremely difficult to read, especially in his later work, because the names he calls something keep shifting around, and don't apply in the way that you normally think they will apply to something. In short, he does not abuse the clarity afforded by the name, but puts it to work. Deceptively clear, he tries to produce a community where names can be used and are used, but one in which we all understand the other's frustration with their inappropriateness. Using a name is not a fatalistic act for Jameson--it doesn't demonstrate that one is making a resolute decision despite what one already knows about how the name will not apply. It doesn't want to "prick him," as Hill says in the poem above, as if this is a lamentable but responsible act. It simply is what happens in an effort to communicate.

Questions on Heidegger and Kierkegaard

On my Kierkegaard post below, a reader (Sean) posted a great comment:

Do you side with Kaufmann or Dreyfus? To what degree is Heidegger indebted to Kierkegaard? Does it really stop at thrown-ness? Or, can you trace all of Heidegger's existentialism back to 'Religiousness A' (a secularized version)? Isn't the real distinction exactly what anxiety reveals, is it the value of finite existence, or does is reveal an infinite - a sort of flipside to finite existence - as well? 

I was prompted to respond with the following, which is way-too-long--especially for a real non answer! Hopefully others have something to say besides this--which I invite you to do! Please excuse typos, etc:

The relationship of Heidegger to religion is a tricky one. This precludes it being any mere "secularized version" of a text of Kierkegaard. Furthermore, this would have to deal with how, for Heidegger, Kierkegaard relates to the Aristotelian structure of being-in-the-world and the rereading of Aristotle more generally that occurs in Being and Time, which is not an easy relation to figure out. In "The Hermeneutics of Facticity," an pretty early course (1924) Heidegger is outlining much of what will become Being and Time in its basic approach to interpretation, and he there cites Kierkegaard as prominent in the sense that it inspires his hermeneutical or interpretative task or way of getting at being. I think revisiting this nexus would probably give us some directions in conceiving *exactly how* Heidegger is thinking about Kierkegaard: one could say that the interpretative method that Husserlian phenomenology gets modified into would have to be conceived as more Kierkegaardian. In other words, it is obvious Heidegger is indebted to Kierkegaard massively--the real question is how. This is all one possibility--I'm really saying that I have no clue, and thus your question opens up a great avenue to pursue. Do you have any idea?

As to Kaufmann or Dreyfus, I'm not so familiar with the arguments of the former relating to Kierkegaard and their opposition to Dreyfus' readings: I think Dreyfus has a great interpretation of Kierkegaard though, and though I haven't listened yet to his lectures on death, guilt, and resoluteness in the Heidegger course this semester, I plan to--they should localize at least some of these problems within the Heidegger. I will say that I think Dreyfus is a little too quick perhaps to characterize Kierkegaard as merely the "existential" influence of Heidegger, as if all of Heidegger's concern with death and guilt were to stem from a concern that is able to be distinctly separated from his more Aristotelian concern in Division I. I'm not the first to criticize him in this way though: Blattner is the best at it, though perhaps going too far in the other direction and making the concerns of temporality and finitude (finitude being really what death is all about for Heidegger), the sole organizing theme of the book. Heidegger sees being as finite, and this is probably one of the central theses of the book: furthermore, he sees Aristotle saying the same thing long ago. He must elaborate how this is able to be so--and so that leads him to posit a Division I that will merge with the concern of Division II, death etc.

Kierkegaard figures there also because he breaks with Hegel--that should be noted. Hegel is Heidegger's archenemy--so anyone able to say that there is a nothingness and a freedom in nothingness, a possibility for a finite subject to relate to infinite possibility (whether God or not), possibility en abyme (as Derrida likes to say) or, conceived probably less rigorously, as drive and repetition of desire (which Lacan says and this is how I formulate it above), would not escape him in his reading of Aristotle. A great helpful book on this is actually Levinas' God, Death and Time--it is really clear and outlines certain concerns about infinity and finiteness in Heidegger and elsewhere that you touched on. Whatever you think of him, too, reading the section on Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death by Derrida is helpful, because he outlines pretty much a standard reading of the suspension of the ethical in relationship to death and shows how at this point one can relate it to concerns of finiteness and infinity. But I'm talking too much--what do you think?

One more thing... with regard to thrown-ness... of course it doesn't stop there, but I think that's the structure that is the best to think about with all this Kierkegaard stuff (as I say in later posts, though unsuccessfully--I stopped all this because it was getting too tough to think)... the real question is how this possibility beyond possibility that is experienced in the dread of nothingness *already exists or is factical* in Dasein. How possibility or futurity (to talk about it in temporal terms) is already within Dasein so that Dasein is thrown back upon it in its existence, so that it is thrown back upon its factical existentiality in its being-existential or projecting itself forward into nothingness, how projecting oneself forward into nothingness is throwing oneself back to the fact of one's nothingness (this all takes place in some remarks on nothingness that are really weird in Being and Time and have a lot to do with Hegel)--this relay, when conceived with respect to its facticity, is the real tough thing to think. Projection is easy--thinking facticity is the real tough stuff. And to Dreyfus' immense credit (I don't know how many people congratulate him on this--but everyone taking his course or exposed to his writings probably should, it is so so vital for understanding anything in Being and Time), this is what he thinks best and why he lays so much emphasis on Division I: it's there that we get a structure that is somehow, in its being structureed that way, already there (da), albeit falling and distracted, etc. This might answer your last question--why I actually don't think that it is so much about the what anxiety reveals. It is about the nature of this revealing as such that is the key for Heidegger. Others like Levinas will change what is revealed and then go back and read it into the structure of Dasein that Heidegger elaborates and show how it cannot be that way (this is what he does in the book I referred you to--but of course not with the rest of his philosophy, which is much more thought out [precisely with regard to what facticity would then have to be] than this one lecture). But for Heidegger, finitude or infinitude would have to announce itself before it is revealed in the revealing itself--the real trick is not deciding then whether revealing that is done in Dasein is finite or infinite, but by trying to let Dasein itself point the way towards answering this, which only then will take us to what is revealed. This leads, however, to the hermeneutic circle Heidegger points out famously. But, again, this is all too much: I'll post this as a separate new post, so it might be easier to find--and also so that others can perhaps get in on what you asked!

Derrida and the crypt, continued: notes from "Fors"

Here, continuing from last time, are some notes on the logic of mourning outlined in Derrida's essay "Fors."

The secret of the crypt is exiled from exchange above ground but not simply to the underground, because it is exiled from there too:

...a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it, external to the interior.

Derrida then moves to a logic of the secret, which will reappear crucially in The Gift of Death:

The crypt can constitute its secret only by means of its division, its fracture. "I" can save [also in the sense of "make an exception of"] an inner safe [a crypt, le for intérieur] only by putting it inside "myself," beside(s) myself, outside.

This complicated sentence means that I can save or make an exception of what is a crypt (an inside/outside outside of the outside [or inside] and outside of the inside) the secret within the space of the crypt, only by putting it inside what is already outside, a performance of myself--and this without regard to this self or any self or even in spite of it. I can only have a secret by showing it, as Derrida will say in The Gift of Death: this does not mean that the only secrets are open ones (i.e. non-secrets), but rather that keeping a secret will make it take its place somewhere in the open. In other words, secrets, if they are secrets, only constitute an interiority elsewhere. If an other learns a secret, then, this only exposes an exterior or something outside the subject to that other. The secret is encrypted to others and--this is the crucial point--for others. It becomes indecipherable for the subject whose secret it is, and always able to be decoded in such a way that the other will misread its contents.

Derrida begins to show that the crypt, the locus of the self, is erected because of "the contradiction springing up from the incorporation itself" of any thing that would serve to become that within the space of the self:

The crypt is always an internalization, an inclusion intended as a compromise [between the desires in incorporation, that for pleasure and that for rejecting/submitting to a prohibition, reality], but since it is a parasitic inclusion, an inside heterogeneous to the inside of the Self, an outcast in the domain of general introjection within which it violently takes its place, the cryptic safe can only maintain in a state of repetition the mortal conflict it is impotent to resolve.

Introjection and incorporation are seen as what mourning lies between. That is, Freud defined mourning as a setting up of a relationship with the lost object. In order to clarify the way in which the relationship could occur, it was postulated that 1) the other could be taken up as a part of one's self, to integrate the memory of the lost (for example) into a self-memory or a selfhood--this is "normal" mourning"--or 2) this whole taking-in could be mimed or played out, to refuse that the other is dead and still a part of me. The first is introjection, the second is incorporation. In either situation there is an attempt to de-cathect the object and place the cathexis somewhere else in the self--the second option offering a quicker way to do this than the first.

At this point Derrida raises a key question:

The question could of course be raised as to whether or not "normal" mourning preserves the object as other (a living person dead) inside me.

Incorporation and introjection seem to blend into each other here, because incorporation in its miming of introjection must at some point refuse to continue, still leaving the other in me still (since it wasn't the other dealt with in the first place, but the mimed object of introjection):

...a foreign body [is then] preserved as foreign but by the same token excluded from a self that henceforth deals not with the other, but only with itself. The more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes it.

Failed incorporation (which is also doubly failed introjection), then, is the source of the crypt:

What the crypt commemorates, as the incorporated object's "monument" or "tomb," is not the object itself, but its exclusion.

Derrida later elaborates this in the following way:

The cryptic place is also a sepulcher... The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead, one we are willing to keep as long as we keep it, within us, intact in any way save as living.

This means the following:

Cryptic incorporation always marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning (melancholy or mourning)... but at the same time the incorporation is never finished.

Why? Looking back at "Mourning and Melancholia," we see that melancholia gets rid of the object or other by killing its ambivalent relation to the subject in its decathecting. If the object or other won't die for the subject as a loss, as in "normal mourning," Freud supposes, it must be made to be lost. One would think that this would then send the other off to the process of mourning. But no, because the object or other has only died in the subject, ideally, fantastically, as a process of substitution for an actual loss that could be introjected. This is why incorporation refuses to be done and return to introjection and to mourning: it has already given up the possibility of having an actual loss to mourn in its attempt to kill off the other so that it could lose it. The other's death cannot be taken over or repeated as a loss once it is killed. Incorporation is, actually, the avoidance of loss. The other's death can never be taken over by me. This is a thesis we find in Heidegger. But at the same time the other's death is what I must integrate or take over. This is a thesis we find in Levinas. This double demand is the space of mourning for Derrida.

Active, passive

Here's a way to think about the relation of three thinkers to the activity or passivity in intentionality--that is, in the emphasis or accent placed on one or the other, such that intentionality does not become so strictly Husserlian but rather turns into an interpretation of what Husserl is or should be getting at (so when I speak of intentionality, obviously none of these thinkers--and especially Husserl--would call it by that name):

For Heidegger, the fundamental intention is anticipation beyond anticipation in being-towards death.  One could label this activity beyond activity.

For Levinas, the fundamental intention is awaiting beyond awaiting in the ethical relation to the death of the other. So one could call this passivity beyond passivity.

For Derrida, the fundamental intention is living-on, or sur-viving, anticipating that is already beyond what it anticipates, or awaiting that is already missing what it is ready for. In other words, it could be called passivity beyond passivity to the point that it is indistinguishable from activity beyond activity.

Each one of these "intentionalities" implies a temporality (but also a spatiality--in the case of Heidegger it would be absent, or, more technically, involve the dispersion of the ecstases out of futurity to the extent that one would be talking about time when one properly talked about space... besides this, one wonders about Levinas), too: for Levinas, for example, time is what is given in relation to the other. Upon the institution of this relation, I am related to a future that is never to be here, that is disproportionately other than any any now or even any presence--or, perhaps put in a better way, to anything that has being. Being is secondary to or merely an effect of a relationship to the other that is temporal and gives me time.

Accounting for mourning

...here, this title announces both a subject and, for Derrida, a tautology or identity in difference, precisely as it also enacts the explanation or account that it announces: a substitution, a translation, a switching between one and the other is mourning, and is accounting or calculating--that is, work, mourning work. Accounting is substituted for mourning: this is the account of mourning, for Derrida. In other words, the transit between accounting or calculation, and the work which we do in mourning, can be summed up in how, in The Politics of Friendship, "how many of us are there?" is precisely the question of the work of mourning and friendship. Am I the other? Which other am I? My body becomes a crypt for the incorporated/introjected other, and for every other. For each other is every bit other, for Derrida. Counting the others--mourning them--is, then, accounting for them, being responsible for them. And for me, who is included in the "us" of "how many of us are there?" I too am other (like in Levinas), and account for myself in counting the others. But counting is only accounting--that is, mourning work--if this counting is interminable, impossible, unable to be calculated or counted. For the moment I stop counting, I stop accounting. This is the double-bind of responsibility and friendship, which are mourning, for Derrida.

Levinas on Heidegger and Aristotle

I just think this is a wonderful interpretation of Heidegger, that lets you into the amazingly rich place where Levinas is coming from: the entirety of Being and Time can perhaps be read as the attempt to think as gathered-together or non-separated this separation Levinas marks in Aristotle:

Man is thus Da because this manner of having being in his charge is not an intellectual affair but man's entire concreteness. The Da is the manner of being-there in the world, which is to question about being. The search for the signification of being does not come about in the same manner as in Aristotle. Like Aristotle (see Metaphysics A, 2 ["We begin by wondering that things are as they are."]), Heidegger speaks of astonishment or wonder, but for Aristotle wonder is nothing other than the consciousness of one's own ignorance: knowledge comes from my wanting to know. There is in Aristotle a complete separation between Sorge and questioning, a complete disinteredness of knowledge. This is not at all the case in Heidegger.

-God Death and Time, 25

Now, the crucial thing for Levinas is that this gathering-together of what in Aristotle is separated is not taken far enough by Heidegger.

Translation of Derrida

David Wills, despite being a wonderful translator of The Gift of Death, suppresses a lot of crucial aspects of the French in his rendering the following sentence (on page 70 of both the French and the English editions):

Des engines à donner la mort sans compter livrent une guerre sans front.

Wills translates this as:

Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front.

While this gets at the condemnation of the horrific deaths occurring every day over the claims of religions to the divine logos that is happening here at this stage in Derrida's text, it makes it sound as if the (interpretative) machines were bad in and of themselves. What Derrida is getting at is more subtle: he is saying that machines both without number (i.e. there are many of them, too many) and, more significantly, without calculation--sans compter--relate themselves to death. The play on sans compter is crucial because Derrida advocates a type of dissimulative counting or accounting for the other throughout the text: it is one of his main theses regarding the economy of the gift of death. These machines are being condemned because they refuse to account: and this is the only way in which Derrida follows in the tradition of the philosophical condemnation of machinery or technology. The only machine Derrida will condemn (and yet there are so many, an innumerable amount) is one that does not calculate.

Furthermore, this gift of death is there in the French sentence! Machines, without counting and without number, give death (donner la mort!). Wills is trying to suggest that any death given by a machine is not a gift. Derrida, however, is asking, "What would it be like for a machine to give death?" This machine would be, for Derrida, a dissimulative machine, a machine that calculates but that breaks its own mode of functioning, its law or its program, through that very calculation. It is only thus that it could relate to death as a gift, as something inscribed within yet exceeding its ability to account for it. I'm moving too quick--there will be another post that will outline this stuff in more detail. For now, let me just suggest a different translation:

Machines of giving death without number(ing) wage a war without front.

I can't really think of a good way to bring the "sans compter" into the sentence with its dual signification, so this will have to do for now (using number in the sense Derrida gives to it in the section on "Enumerating" in The Politics of Friendship). I'll get on it, however, and make something better--including a more computational, machinelike sense. One should also note that "front" can also mean "face:" so we are getting a war where the face of the other (in the sense that Levinas gives to this formulation and that Derrida discusses with respect to the front earlier in the text), is not present or able to be faced--it would truly be a machinelike waging of a war if machines, who have no face, are the ones that are putting to death. Any suggestions however are very welcome!

Nazism, Heidegger and Derrida

Isn't the upshot of all of Derrida's comments on Heidegger's Nazism the imperative "Be careful!"? Indeed, as an elaboration of Heidegger's projected "destruction" of metaphysics (cf. Being and Time ¶5) isn't Derrida's entire project of "deconstruction" merely "careful" (that is, productive) destruction of metaphysics--whence the cautious "-con-" that merely makes explicit the sense Heidegger gave to "destruction" in saying "this destruction is ... far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition" or "a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints"? The objection I am making is not really to the content of those comments on Heidegger or to deconstruction, but one to its particularly annoying style: that of the imperative. If one (correctly) understands deconstruction as the carrying out of the destruction of metaphysics that Heidegger describes or as the leading of philosophy into an era where metaphysics is something other than what it was, why put the "-con-" into "destruct" other than to force imperatively the productive character of destruction that Heidegger outlines upon us?
Indeed, what Heidegger says is an imperative. Metaphysics, in 1927 (the year in which he first uttered the imperative to destroy) was in need of this destruction. Wittegenstein too (and with him, analytic philosophy as well as math) realized that metaphysics, as philosophy that takes truth to be correspondence between a representation and an object or Being to be something that is present, had to go (in his Tractatus we see an almost Heideggerian elucidation of how the truth or elucidatory power of a proposition is to be ascertained--that is, in terms not of correspondence but of "surmounting:" "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climed out through them, on them, over them. ... He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly."). And he too gave an imperative: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7). In other words, "that truth which philosophy cannot grasp by way of correspondence must be replaced by a truth that is grasped philosophically by logic" or, quite simply, "metaphysics must be destroyed."
Why, then, this imperative again on the part of Derrida in the "-con-"? And why does it have to take the character of caution? That is my objection. Put differently it is this: It seems that if we understand Heidegger's sense of "destruction" correctly, we would recognize the imperative. Derrida then appends an imperative to recognize the imperative on top of that imperative itself. Isn't this superfluous?
The answer is no, and that my original position is wrong. The whole point of deconstruction is to recognize that the imperative to destroy metaphysics will never be superfluous because it will able to be recognized. This is the essential "ethic" of deconstruction, and why its labor must always appear superfluous. Because truth is not correspondence, its own nature can never even be grasped by a philosophy that would "recognize" it. That is, non-correspondent truth cannot even be theorized by philosophy. Why? Precisely because correspondent truth is a truth constituted by presence, the presence of what will be correspondent to a representation--that is, precisely because truth as correspondence is what is recognized. If truth is not what is able to be recognized (presence), philosophy will never recognize the imperative to move towards another concept of truth.
Is this thesis true, however? Was this really not recognized? At the time Derrida first wrote, this was the case. This is one reason why he attacked the structuralists so fiercely: they completely seemed to ignore this imperative and, like many "natural language" analytic philosophers (including the late Wittegenstein) had avoided the issues Wittegenstein brought up in 1921, returned to a philosophy of presence (while, indeed, including many of the amazing other breakthroughs Heidegger made). The early book on Husserl and the articles that originally made up Of Grammatology are really the first articulations of this superfluous imperative.
But where does that lead us regarding Heidegger's Nazism? In "Comment donner raison" (Diacritcs, 19:3-4, 4-9) Derrida said the following regarding the proclaimations of various members of the French philosophical community in the late 1980's and the press that Heidegger should not be read because he was (briefly--though the meaning of "brief" here was precisely what was in question) a Nazi:

That in the name of which we immediately--or nearly so--condemn Nazism can no longer, must no longer, I believe, be formulated so simply in the language of a philosophy that, for essential reasons has never been sufficient for this and that Heidegger has alsotaught us to question. ...More than ever, the vigilant but open reading of Heidegger remains in my eyes one of the indespensible conditions, one of them but not the least, of trying to comprehend and to tell better why, with so many others, I have always condemned Nazism, in the horror of what, in Heidegger precisely, and so many others, in Germany or elsewhere, has ever been able to give in to it.

Two things are apparent here. First, that a philosopher's Nazism does not entirely implicate all of what a philosopher does, because all these doings in light of this (brief) Nazism prompt us to contemplate what was wrong this Nazism. Second, that philosophy must change the way it conceives itself and its mission if it continues to force these implications upon not only Heidegger but--since Heidegger is a philosopher--itself. Both these points are superfluous, in the sense we outlined above: they call imperatively to a move beyond metaphysics. But it is the second that accomplishes this superfluity most thoroughly: philosophy cannot "recognize" what is wrong about itself and then cut that part out. To do so one would have to be able to recognize nothing less than truth. In short, the demand that we condemn all of Heidegger and his work is unreasonable not because of the scope of what Heidegger himself did, but because to do so is to remain in a philosophy of metaphysics, to remain convinced that what Heidegger did might suddenly present itself to be recognized as evil. As if we did not ourselves determine precisely through reading (not recognizing) Heidegger what is evil in it! Derrida is not trying to show that the amount of Heidegger's complicity philosophically with Nazism is small compared to the majority of his work. He rejects this approach outright, and rather calls imperatively for a transformation of philosophy into a state in which we might be able to more richly entertain the question as to Heidegger's Nazism.
And yet, my objection I think was not entirely wrong, in the end. For why does this point have to be made imperatively--in the form of an imperative precisely to go and re-read Heidegger? Doesn't this make us want to re-read Heidegger precisely in order to find a "genuine" reading of him (or "true" by way of correspondence to what Heidegger actually meant) that will allow us to adequately pose the question of Nazism? I guess the real objective of Derrida is to bring up this precise question. In other words, this is the real issue necessitating the form of the superfluous imperative. In a philosophy beyond metaphysics, one will not re-read Heidegger to try and find a Heidegger that will correspond with the reality of his Nazism. In a philosophy beyond metaphysics, we re-read Heidegger for another reason, a reason that does not entail us recognizing anything. Imperatively, the question comes before us: What would this reason be?
In other words, to those who will say to Derrida that this form of the imperative could never itself be enough to bring about that new philosophy beyond metaphysics, he would concede that they are wrong. The form of the imperative itself will never be enough, but in saying that it is insufficient it has already done its work. That is, in already asking "what would be the reason to re-read Heidegger beyond metaphysics?" that was prompted by the imperative to re-read Heidegger, to revisit the destruction of metaphysics, to reclaim what seemed (in its presence, in being "recognized") superfluous as essential, we merely rephrased the same imperative: "Be careful!" or, more fundamentally, "Respect the non-present!" What seems to lead us back to a place where we need to supply an answer to yet another imperative really is a step forward towards conceiving a philosophy beyond metaphysics: we have conceived its necessity from yet another level, a necessity that leads us forward back to its imperative. Eventually we will hit upon this philosophy, though it will never be something we can recognize.
In fact, we might have already hit upon it in the form of the imperative itself. If an imperative can possess an answer that is non-present, as we are asking it to do here in our question, "What would this reason be? Yet be careful! Respect the non-present!" we have something completely other than a Kantian imperative. The Kantian imperative respected only presence, in wanting a definite answer in the form of an action that made morality itself present. If there is a way of generally being able to respect the non-present in an answer to an imperative, we have produced a new basis for a new philosophy beyond metaphysics. This is the fundamental move of the work of Emmanuel Levinas as Derrida sees him: thus Derrida's turn towards him in his later work (we should note that it is also the move of Lacan, precisely through Kant himself, although Derrida does not use him). The imperative that began the work of Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy therefore itself engenders a philosophy that Derrida can work out such that he can move even beyond Heidegger.