Specters of communism

(Thanks to comments from Grant, I revised a lot of this post--see his comments below for some good insights. It is basically an attempt to extend certain frustrations of Fredric Jameson in his essay "How Not to Historicize Theory" to the way the events of the last few weeks were covered in the news. Postscript: the general thrust of this article aligns vigorously with Jiri Pehe's August 24th article on the Prague Spring which everyone should read: there Pehe says "I suspect that our lasting reluctance to discuss the period [of the Prague Spring] openly is, more than anything else, a sign that the trauma of communism is still very much alive today, despite the last 19 years that democracy has had to take root.")
Bill Keller said the following in the Times a couple days ago:

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.
If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

This seems completely backwards in so many ways (even in referring by proxy to Fukuyama, who himself has backed away from that thesis for a long time now), but it comes down to the following for me: if we in America think this summer in particular heralds the return of giant post-Communist powers, as Keller says, it is only because here in America we never quite found a way to deal with their passing away.
Now, indeed, Keller himself seems to argue this when he says,

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

And yet, he doesn't because he puts it in all the wrong terms: precisely the terms of return that I am speaking about. And this misses everything important.
In fact the verbal slip here is indicative: somehow Keller relegates "the beginning" of the end of the Soviets to the category of "end," discounting it as "a beginning," a beginning that was greater than that of an end. In other words, we have the beginning of the end, and then we have the end as a beginning, as a beginning that exceeds any beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire is not really a beginning, even though Keller must still call it only a beginning.
And what does this real beginning, the beginning that exceeds any mere beginning of the end, bring about or begin? In short, resentment. The end of Communism was the beginning of the very indirect, passive aggressive resentment of the West instead of the Cold War's more direct and clear combat with it. And this is the real problem with Keller's analysis, what makes him miss the point entirely: he characterizes Russia as a country that has suffered a particular pseudo-psychological defeat that has been seeting under the surface all these years to resurge in a sort of nationalist aggression like we see now in Georgia. This is why, as he says, 1989 was a real "beginning"--and why saying this is something different than saying that in our "victory" over Communism we have not learned how to cope with its passing (my personal thesis).
Why is this so mistaken? Because it presupposes a sort of psychodynamic or communal-consciousness model of the operation of the state and its people that was probably only valid for thinking about the actions of Nazi Germany--if it is even valid there. Thus, he says the fall of the wall and the disbanding of the USSR did the following:

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Very nice, but this is also the way we talked about Bosnia, which, as we will see, is mistaken for the same reason: it moves quickly between an idea of nationalism or community and the idea of totalitarian psychological frenzy, without making clear what allows for the jump across between the two. Furthermore, it seems only to apply to the states of Eastern Europe and anything resembling a Communist or post-Communist society. It is as if, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, it couldn't happen here. In short, one could call it the logic of the losers. But doesn't this betray the fact that it is merely a way of bolstering the idea that we were and still are (despite all signs to the contrary) the winners? Something seething under the surface, the inner core of a repressed Communism: this is what, for Keller, motivates the action and the nationalism going on in Russia now. Similarly, China is seen--though Keller only moves towards this somewhat--quite similarly, since it has supposedly given up its real hardcore Communist core and embraced capitalism.
And as I began to indicate, what the idea of the return of Communism qua failed-resentful-post-Communism does is, however, more important than whether any of this actually really corresponds to the reality of the situation. This idea covers up the extremely pressing issue of dealing with the "minor-league monsters" which Keller dismisses here but are very much a problem of globalization in the wake of the fall of Communism--indeed despite what Paul Krugman maintains. These monsters aren't just hiccups in the process of globalization and--here is the flipside--neither are they the the fallout of the collapse of any major government that would challenge that of the West.
As I suggested earlier, one would need to see how we dealt with the Bosnian War (and Rwanda, and, now Darfur--though I'll confine myself to Bosnia) as the template for precisely how this work of covering up the real problem proceeds. What was so horrible about Bosnia was the similarity to a large scale nationalism working on such a small scale, and yet so effectively: this obviously came to a head in the unbelievable work of ethnic cleansing. (I should note that a great movie on Heidegger, The Ister, makes certain connections between Serbian nationalism and Nazism that are very well thought out and well depicted.) Indeed, we still can't really seem to cope with this sort of nationalism that we find now with Serbians, particularly in their reaction to the arrest of someone so unbelievably evil as Radovan Karadzic. What produces it? We must work here at the level of more minute and precise forces than those Keller seems to naively posit are at work. In other words, we must not be taken in, as Keller is, and so many are, by the size of the nations and the movements involved (the hugeness of China, in particular). At this huge level, the forces needed to unify a movement just fall into all the old categories of propaganda that now seem so extremely irrelevant: is it really the case that Serbs hate other ethnicities because people tell them? Adorno already in his time gives extremely good reasons why this is a bad way of putting the problem (cf. "Education after Auschwitz").
Now, our ignorance in the face of these problems is precisely not what is addressed by the policy we took in Bosnia. That is, this is not because there is no way to address this level of the micro-forces, it is just that our models of action, which stem from the policy of aid and international peacekeeping which were honed in Bosnia, and which devolved into full out war, precisely avoid them. What is needed is a new way of dealing with the spread of globalization and the destabilization that post-Communist or post-authoritarian regimes introduce into it as this spread occurs. Aid has the tendency, it seems to me, to merely compensate for this destabilization and restabilize, but it allows what is problematic--which is precisely not solely economic, nor cultural, but political through and through--to fester anyway. That is, the problem is a political problem, located at the foundation of the political union that constitutes these post-Communist states, and in some cases, can be ethnic. But it is a problem not of seeing these ethnic interests a s things that are psychological--rather one must think them as the thing that unifies the notion of political action. And again not in the sense of propoganda: rather we are dealing with the idea that politics is founded on a notion of a living body of a certain type, and a sort of filiation or purity between its members: in this sense it is very much ethnic, though not in a cultural way. This takes me into further territory, which is too complicated and confusing for me now. I'll wrap this up.
One thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter--one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it by trying to shift certain aspects of it (those that allowed these politico-ethnic regions to somewhat unify under Communism, if they did unify) into areas like culture, separate from the economy or from the operation of the political sphere in these countries as such. The key is to see that Communism does not return into our thinking as a big massive, homogenous albeit weakened force, like we often depict China and how Keller tries to get us to think about Russia (it is homogeneously resentful): we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally (or rather, ethnic-politically) determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Fredric Jameson's insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists that this is still actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.

Zizek on Heidegger and Nazism, again

I presented a somewhat detailed response to this topic a while ago: since then, the essay Zizek wrote on "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933" has made its way into his newest book, In Defense of Lost Causes--the topic thus merits a reconsideration, but I'll be more brief and more blunt.
Zizek's effort in this book is valiant. One can take this recent and precise characterization of the book by Terry Eagleton (a rarity in Eagleton's corpus--and perhaps the only one in this shallow, resentful review), and affirm it against Eagleton's scorn:

The self-consciously outrageous case the book has to argue is that there is a “redemptive” moment to be plucked from such failed revolutionary ventures as Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Žižek is by no means a champion of political terror: the Mao he offers us here, for example, is the mass murderer who mused that “half of China may have to die” in the Great Leap Forward, and who remarked that though a nuclear war might blow a hole in the planet, it would leave the cosmos largely untouched. His aim is not to justify such demented views, but to make things harder for the typical liberal middle-class dismissal of them (my italics).

Perhaps Eagleton phrases it in an asinine way, but I think that this "making things harder" of Zizek is precisely how we should read Zizek's effort. Phrased a little less cynically, we might put Eagleton's statement this way: Zizek restores weight to politics, philosophy, and culture--this is his mission and has been his mission consistently throughout this career. And rather than losing momentum over the years, he has only become more intense--his ambitions and his fire only have grown.
But Eagleton's idiocy locates the problem in this restoration--he makes the same mistake as Zizek, but falls only on the other side of its result. The problem is this: who is the subject to which Zizek addresses his discourse? Granted, unlike other big thinkers on the Left (I'm particularly thinking of certain Frenchmen, with their extraordinary academic and state apparatuses), Zizek's ideas is less institutionally supported in the sense of having a stable and somewhat more closed forum in which to speak--indeed, his best work is when he is among psychoanalysts. But his major works are always more global than that: he is probably the first thoroughly global (and this does not mean international) thinker. This means that his remarks are directed somewhat all over the place. And in the end, who reads them? Well, in the UK and in America, the typical middle-class Anglo-American thinker (I bypass the great and much more fruitful reception he has had elsewhere, and merely talk about our Zizek, the Zizek that we see and talk about here). I'm not saying the people are middle-class who read Zizek. It is that the particular middle-class that Eagleton has in mind is the one sympathized with and identified with by the Left intellectual: the subject needed to be mobilized and enlightened in order to do something substantial about capitalism. Zizek's great achievement is to try and restore some weight to Marxist notions and the Marxist spirit by showing Marxism isn't as old as we thought: it still has life in it yet, because it can link up in a creative way with Lacan--that is, an anti-humanistic (but not Althusserian) thinking. This must resolutely be called "making things harder" only in the sense that this means an ascesis, a training in thinking and in activity so as to be able to adjust thinking to the radically new problems posed by capitalism--those problems which escape the more rigid Marxism of most of the twentieth century. In short, it means thinking about action: Zizek is the thinker of individual and collective action against and within capitalism--if this means things must be harder, it means that we also are on the way to addressing their difficulty by becoming hard. Eagleton cannot know what this means: all he can do is seek out points where real thinkers are complicit in the capitalism they criticize.
Thus, where Eagleton would stupidly see some hypocrisy in the precise identity of the Anglo-American subject of Zizek's work (shouldn't Zizek mainly be talking to the rebels?), we can begin to see that the real problem in this identity is that it can only be marshaled into action by appeals to practicality--or at least this is what Zizek seems to assume (and with some grounds for doing so). The extremely impractical restorative weight that he gives to certain problems, then, ultimately has to turn on almost being able to be confused with the immediately practical: this is the one, sole aspect that constitutes the Zizekian flair in almost every sentence. There is a reversal on a conceptual level that he effects--for example, what Heidegger did in 1933 (join the Nazi party) was not evil, but actually a rare thinking-through of the commitment his philosophy was making politically and one that took place not within that philosophy itself (smuggled into texts) but in action--and this reversal almost of itself can seem to be absolutely pragmatic--it suggests that one should not philosophize politics as much as engage in political action. The force of this reversal is always an appeal to pragmatic action--and this because the audience Zizek writes his sentences for is one that needs not only conceptual shifts and reversals but clues to guide their practical activity. In short, the people Zizek writes for can't just think through a conceptual reversal--they need the force of this reversal to reflect some practical action they can engage in then and there.

While this might be right about these readers, I wonder whether Zizek doesn't need to rethink this aspect of his writings--for in a case like this with Heidegger we see that perhaps another way of arguing and appealing would be both more practical and intellectually interesting. For what is Zizek's treatment of Heidegger, after all? It doesn't say much besides its title: in short, postmodernist philosophers who sneak politics into their words are weak compared to even Heidegger, who had the smarts to join a party in the open, as an action--that is, be committed to what one says even more than theorizing it. Of course this was a monstrous choice--but in principle, with other parties, this is what the Left needs. So Zizek argues, but this is only to isolate what is most obvious about the case of Heidegger: that he made a political decision which was tied into his thinking. Beyond the shock, the appeal to mobilize in a similarly counterintuitive way (but with a totally different party)--precisely because (according to Zizek) Heidegger's case is a paradigmatic instance of the risks of political engagement for thinkers--this does not do much. And it risks making a sly appeal to the perverse in Heidegger's action as what we should feel if we are being political, if we are being active--it gives us something disturbing that we can be okay with so we can get off our asses and mobilize. In other words, this makes it seem as if the bar is lowered for all of us and that political action is just perverse since it always risks being an abomination. In short, it risks being pragmatic for the sake of being pragmatic--that is, just to mobilize. And it is willing to sacrifice the conclusions for this aim. This is Zizek's fault--and to say this is to be as far away from chastising him as a provocateur as possible.
In the end, if Zizek is advocating an action like Heidegger's but directed differently--if he is saying that most political action of thinkers has to risk becoming Heidegger--well I can't see how this isn't a refusal to think what is so vile in Heidegger: the privileging of presence, of activity, of manliness, of the poetic; and the denigrating of the calculating, the prosaic, the everyday--all this, so prevalent in his writings, being made into a Nazism, committed to very specific ideals that are unspeakably disgusting. Many thinkers have had these privileges before: they are not Nazis. And if Zizek is saying that they are precisely not politically engaged because of this--well, he is waging a war not just pragmatically in the now against capitalism, but with a lot of human history. It all comes down to this: is Zizek's discussion of Heidegger an example for a revolutionary mind? Or is it something more impractical? If it is the latter, well, I don't know how we would read Zizek.

"The central front on the war on terror"

Don't we all sense that characterizations of the Bush administration's disgusting rhetoric as "fascist" or "dictatorial"--see Frank Rich's column yesterday if you want one of the more thoroughly executed instances of this--don't really get at the heart of the matter, and end up just sounding paranoid, ineffectual. Why is this the case?
It is because this term as it is used refers to fascism when it is at its height, its fullest manifestation. But wasn't Germany, for example, just as fascist in the years before the National Socialists came to power? That is, in its willingness ("will" is precisely the fascist way to describe it, as we will see) to sacrifice values, the values of the Heimat, etc. it was just as fascist as when it actually took them away. (One should revisit a review by Benjamin of a volume of Jünger, where he says precisely this--I think its in the second volume of the selected writings... Benjamin also sensed this about Heidegger, I think) The impotent will, the longing for a will that characterized Germany after the First World War--that is what fascism is, and this longing is what really pervades the disgusting "war on terror." The contradictions of Bush are not expressions of the double-speak of a Hitler or a Stalin--they are contradictory because they are expressions of a power that is really only the impotent longing for adefinite enemy, for a front on which to face them. Isn't the unbelievablely naive optimism of this administration that they will meet this enemy precisely what cannot be accounted for by every critic of this administration? Who has not explained it away as mere doublespeak in some form? We must ask ourselves, doesn't this impotent optimism resemble someone like Jünger's after the war (or Heidegger's, always) in his longing for another field of battle, for another definite enemy, for another front? (For Heidegger, we should say, another Auseinandersetzung.) That is, isn't this optimism genuinely expressed--in the sense that it also necessarily expresses an impotence to have the future be present?
Along these lines, we might reread a passage from Derrida as applying to our "war" in this way:

...polemos unites adversaries, it brings together those who are opposed (Heidegger often insisted on [this]). The front, as the site upon which the First World War was waged, provides a historic figure for this polemos that brings enemies together as though they were conjoined in the extreme proximity of the face-to-face. This exceptional and troubling glorification of the front perhaps presages another type of mourning, namely, the loss of this front during and especially after the Second World War, the disappearance of this confrontation which allowed one to identify wthe enemy and even and especially to identify with the enemy.
-The Gift of Death, 17.

What is crucial about this passage is that it emphasizes how the mourning for the polemos is already this second mourning, is already a "presaging," and thus is already the mourning for its eventual possibility of being lost. The two move together, and characterize how fasicism shows up on the scene not in the restriction of freedom itself but in the genuine (/contradictory) insistence that there is (the loss of an) enemy. That is, where things get framed in terms of polemos or of will and impotence--even by the opposition (see Rich's column)--and where this language is not taken seriously, there fascist tendencies are really at work. We shouldn't read, then, the blatant idiocy of a phrase such as "the central front on the war on terror" as the machinations of a conniving fascist administration like the NSDAP at the height of its power (when it was fascist as Nazism), but as the very real reframing of the way we talk about our actions in the very real (early) fascist language of longing through power for a definite identification, a definite confrontation. That is, it is precisely in how it makes any characterization of them as "fascist" in the late fully fledged Nazi sense seem paranoid. Insofar as we long genuinely for a will to bring back the rights of the constitution--like Rich does--we've already succumbed to their more subtle fascism, because we too look only for a real confrontation, a real enemy.

Heidegger, Nazism, Zizek and Politics

One of you was awesome and pointed out that Slavoj Zizek had just written an intriguing article on Heidegger provocatively entitled "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933," and I thought I'd address it more here, since I was perhaps a little too initially dismissive of what it said. (To perhaps help with this address--for what is said here will either submit to or efface its evidentiary trace, though this will occur precisely through a reinterpretation of its evidentiary authority--I've attched a famous photo of Heidegger at a meeting with other Freiburg faculty and administrators. Heidegger is marked with an X.)
It's an amazing article, and very thoroughly goes through the positions people have taken and are taking towards Heidegger's engagement--regardless of where you fall on the issue, I think that looking over and subscribing to how Zizek outlines the current situation is profitable. I also think Zizek's account of the interrelationship between Heidegger's thinking and his political decisions not only during the Nazi period but especially afterwards is absolutely insightful--and merits everyone's attention who is interested in the issue.
But I still think the main point of the article is where Zizek gets into problems. Let me first say, though, that I have been and am nearly always sympathetic to Zizek--to the extent that I agree with him when he says that our political situation stands in need of a repetition of Leninism, where repetition means not a return to Leninism but precisely seizing on the open possibilities of Leninism today (although my understanding of repetition is still different, see my post on "Repetition, Negativity and das Geschehen des Daseins," below). I also agree with Zizek that along with this repetition there needs to be (and this is even more urgent) a fierce opposition to populism as a seductive but in the end extremely dangerous position for the Left to endorse (See Zizek's article "Against Populist Reason"--I think it was called--in Critical Inquiry). Fundamentally, though, Zizek remains and has always remained too the real potential of Derrida and deconstruction, which I know he sees--and I just this is afflicts his theorizations of an adequate postmodern subject-position (in at least one way I'll outline below). But to the article.
In the (extremely accurate) words of the person who pointed it out to me, the article essentially tries to outline how "today we are quick to renounce things like collective action, revolutionary engagement, and wagers on truth as containing an element of 'totalitarianism,' where the proper analysis would look beyond this broad-brush approach and find the redemptive elements within collective politics that don't yield totalitarian results." My awesome interlocutor continues: "All of this becomes relevant to Heidegger though, when considering the 'totalitarian' nature of his Nazi engagement. We are all too quick to dismiss his engagement as such as totalitarian. Zizek argues that this engagement is positive and fully necessary for politics - where Heidegger missed was his inability to think beyond the current political horizion and to grasp the emergence of an Event."
In response I said the following, prefacing this with how I don't take issue with the critique of the "broad-brush" approach to totalitarianism--that is, I agree wholeheartedly that we can't read Heidegger simply as a Nazi philosopher, as a philosopher of Nazism or even of totalitarianism generally. Instead, I say, "I'm taking issue with the way he goes about trying to change the way we are disposed to dismiss Heidegger, that is, the way he wants us to read Heidegger in light of a better conception of totalitarianism."
I pretty much stand by that, but I thought I'd elaborate why I think Zizek (and perhaps my interlocutor) would say I was wrong--since it's in the article (and indeed all of Zizek's work), because it brings up a huge question about the nature of the Lacanian political project and, indeed, the post-modern political project as a whole (if one can subsume it under this heading).
Now, Zizek would respond to me by saying that I am, like many people who side with Derrida, ignoring the consequences of my own critique of Heidegger. That is, if I am willing to condemn Heidegger and his Nazism, and at the same time willing to admit of a more complex situation regarding Nazism and totalitarianism now and in Heidegger's time (that is, I am not just naively looking at totalitarianism and Heidegger as "bad," as a philosopher of Nazism), but unwilling to take up a comportment towards these issues I critique, I am (to be frank) emptying out all the force of critique and of subjectivity more generally--I become merely a function of late capitalism, an postmodern unhappy consciousness, another hack who doesn't have any real conception of the consequences of words precisely when he asserts that words have consequences. In fact, according to Zizek, this is precisely what Heidegger resisted in his decision to become a Nazi--an empty form of perpetually unhappy academic criticism. And to that extent, Zizek continues, Heidegger was right in 1933--as the title of the essay says. That is, Heidegger resisted the typical leftist illusion of a comportment towards the political that precisely did not do anything political, did not risk anything in its ability to continue thinking, did not correctly apprehend the violence that is in the nature of the political act insofar as it actually does risk doing something. Heidegger, according to Zizek, precisely engaged in this risk--and insofar as he did so, he conceived of and engaged in the political subject-position or comportment correctly.
Now, I absolutely agree with all of this regarding someone who does not take up a definite subject position to this object of their critique--but don't think it applies here to what I'm saying, because I do not think that Heidegger's resistence to this indefinite Leftist position with respect to the political itself constituted a correct apprehension of the essence of the political subject-position--and I think this is really what Zizek is saying. In other words, I don't think this criticism applies, because fundamentally I don't think we can say Heidegger was right at all in 1933, even in the sense Zizek suggests.
Why? Not because I agree with any of the other readings of Heidegger's actions in 1933 (and before and after) with respect to Nazism, especially with those readings that assert it was just a mistake, but because fundamentally I think Heidegger did what Zizek does, which is confuse the violence inherent in thought with the risk that lies in the political event. To assert that this violence is part of the necessary risk inherent in the political subject position is then, really incorrect. The violence in thinking, or even active thinking (action, praxis), is not the same as the risk that this thinking takes in doing this violence.
Let me be clearer on what I mean by "violence," for Zizek is good about marking the occurence of this word in Heidegger's texts and this strain in his thinking--and approving of it. For Heidegger it has to do with the ability of thought to retreive essential or proper thought (thought of the truth of being) and to break down or destroy other thoughts in order to transform them into this essential thought. Like Derrida, and like Zizek, Heidegger fundamentally thinks thoughts are violent--they have effects, and they cannot escape having effects. The history of metaphysics is the history of a certain type of violence for Heidegger, which needs to be properly transformed--and this must also be done through a certain type of violence. This is what Heidegger is getting at in a preface to his book on Kant, to take only one instance of this discussion of violence:

Readers have taken constant offense at the violence of my intepretations. Their allegation of violence can indeed be supported by this text. Philosophicohistorical research is always correctly subject to this charge whenever it is directed against attempts to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers.
-Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edition, xx (the remark is written in 1950).

In other words, nothing can be signifiantly thought without this violence.
Now, Zizek thinks the assertion about the violence in thought stems from something correct in Heidegger--the conception of the real risk in having a relationship to the political in one's thinking, the sense Heidegger had of the political act of thought and its very real consequences. That is, thought risks itself (its ability to continue existing), as well as the thought of others (their ability to continue existing), in being political. Furthermore, if it does not risk itself, it is not political. But there is no such thing as an apolitical thought--Zizek argues. There are only thoughts that risk nothing--these are postmodern unhappy thoughts just characterized. This political risk is the other side of thought itself--insofar as thought is to be itself, then, it must develop and account for (be responsible for) this risk. Heidegger was not responsible enough for this risk--in the sense that he did not develop the risk enough.
But already risk and violence are confused. Violence is about what thought does. It is concerned with its effects. Risk is about the survival of thought itself, it is about what allows thought to continue to be thought. Zizek wants us to recognize both the risk and the violence inherent in thought--i.e. that it is staked upon (risks) precisely its violence. But what this means is that any time a thinker acts in such a way so that they two exist together, he is conceiving of the political correctly. He is comporting himself towards the event. I would contend that it is precisely when one does not stake ones thought on the violence, when one risks an infinite respect towards the violence of thought, that there is politics. This doesn't mean there is a refraining from action--it just means that the political is shifted onto the act of respect rather than upon the mere coexistence of thought, risk, and violence. Thus acting responsibly is not being respectful to the ontology of the political event itself, but precisely by respecting what constitutes the event (which is alterity--see below).
So in Zizek's eyes Heidegger missed the real nature of the risk he was engaged in. Heidegger was not enough of a Nazi for Zizek: he was too much of a thinker of violence and not enough of a thinker that risked his thinking in the political.
But this I think is to confuse risk and violence--thought can risk something precisely by accounting for and respecting this violence. For me there is a difference between recognizing the imperative to be responsible for this violence in its action--this is nothing less than the ethical imperative that we can find in the work of Levinas and Derrida--and employing this violence blindly--which is what Heidegger does in my view. In other words, there is a difference between acting with a respect for (and some degree of control over) the the necessity of this violence, which includes the fact that it is necessarily a source of pleasure--i.e. that it is the site of unavoidable jouissance--and merely employing it and asserting that it is a necessary component of any risky action itself. The latter position may even try to account for this violence in some way similar to the first position, but I think the accent is on the this necessity as an excuse, rather than as something to be respected--and this makes all the difference. So in my view Heidegger was profoundly wrong because of the actual violence of his thought in its risking itself--indeed, Heidegger was not so naive as to think thought could engage in Nazism without violence, but he mistakenly took the mere coexistence of this violence and thought (that was engaged, risking itself), for a respect for this violence.
In fact, to a disturbing degree, he approves of this violence--he approves of its relation to jouissance, and he approves of the fact that thought is constituted by it. Just like Zizek. But doesn't this betray the fact that both Heidegger and Zizek are too wrapped up in the mere act of trying to show people thought is violent and risky and less with trying to conceive of a respect that can issue out of their coexistence? That is, their thought itself becomes indistinguishable from an excuse--though of course to take it as an excuse would be to miss their point. The point is that real thought and real politics are justified only through excuses--that the nature of the political act of thought just is violent and risky beyond excuse. But the disturbing thing about this is that it is also a refusal to think about how to be responsible to more than just the nature of this thought in political action.
This is the barbarism of Heidegger--what produces the inane Heimatkunst within his writings, as well as the Wagnerian strains in his descriptions of the necessary movements of thought.
Of course, I'm not saying that we should be looking for a way out of this violent and risky necessity of political thought--a solution will not present itself to us. This is the position of the unhappy postmodernist that Zizek hates (along with me). It means that we should focus less on fidelity to the event itself, and more on the conditions (or, rather, the condition, which is multiplicity itself in the form differing and deferring alterity/ies) that construct it, that make these things (violence and risk and the political thought) coexist. That means that we have to account for why we cannot ever sufficiently respect the conditions of this political event--which lies in how that these conditions would have to be present to us--and that the real respect is located in this accounting. This means thinking of the conditions of the event as not reducible (as they are in Badiou and Zizek) to the Big Other and the Real--i.e. the fact that the Big Other doesn't exist. That is, there might be an alterity that is more profound and more disruptive than the Other of Lacanian thought and the Real. Thinking how this is the case is really thinking about responsibility: at least this is the Derridian/Levinasian claim--a claim I think is just as politically effacacious as it is correct.
Regardless, just because Heidegger got the risk and violence inherent in the political event right doesn't at all make what he did right (as an act--for Zizek of course it was wrong in what it acted towards, i.e. Nazism)--even if this risk and violence is precisely the opening up of the political to nonpresence, to alterity. Let me be clear: the point is that Heidegger conceived of this alterity like Zizek--that is, as reducible to the Real in the Other--and thus made a political decision that only served to assert the reality of the violence of thought risking itself... he did not try at all to be responsible for this reality, because it thought that merely comporting oneself towards it was enough. What Heidegger did not do is try to integrate it into his thought in an effort to be responsible for it--to this extent his thought shares in what made him become a Nazi. This isn't failing to grasp the emergence of an Event, it is failing to integrate a responsibility to an alterity that cannot even fit within the structure of the Event (as outlined by Badiou)--an alterity that Heidegger was himself on the way to theorizing.
But one can return to Heidegger's thought and indeed transform it into responsibility: this I believe is precisely the project of Derrida and Levinas. More closed to this project than he should be, Zizek does not adequately conceive of the political subject-position.

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.

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.