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 animal mechanical: Nietzsche

The following is a very famous passage from The Anti-Christ. Let's look at it yet one more time, for it bears upon our understanding of both technology and animality massively. It especially constitutes an association, a particular orientation of motifs (by extending that association that is made first in Descartes), that will be explicitly dealt with by two of the most important theorizers of technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Heidegger and Derrida. With the latter, one should read it alongside the entirety of L'Animal que donc je suis (à suivre) (The Animal That Therefore I Am, to be released in full in a few days). And though he does not seem to be as related to the two when it comes to being a theorizer of technology, one has to--in a completely different, but perhaps infinitely more interesting way--try and include Foucault in this group. One has to precisely because his work is largely an expansion of the domain in which the following orientation of Nietzsche's is set up. We might add that in Foucault this occurs not only in the development of his problematics of micro- and bio-power, but also and perhaps even more pressingly in his notion of a discursive formation (which appears very removed from power in general). But, to begin to turn back to this association or constellation of motifs and their being picked up by the great thinkers of technology: Derrida in his lecture puts this whole motif together when he recalls the opening of the second section of On the Genealogy of Morals: "Nature is said to have given itself the task of raising, bringing up, domesticating and "disciplining" (heranzuchten) this animal that promises." But, to return to the passage in The Anti-Christ itself: let us pay attention to two (or three or four) words in the following especially: machine (machina and Nietzsche's own "translation" in the last line: machinal, which gets rendered as mechanistically) and calculate (and miscalculate: all the cognates of rechnen):

We have learned differently. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity," we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his spirituality is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too — as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, he is of course the most interesting. As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machina: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically [machinal]. [...] The development of consciousness, the "spirit," is for us nothing less than the symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism: it means trying, groping, blundering—an exertion which uses up an unnecessary amount of nervous energy. We deny that anything can be done perfectly as long as it is still done consciously. The "pure spirit" is a pure stupidity: if we subtract [rechnen... ab] the nervous system and the senses—the "mortal shroud"—then we miscalculate [verrechnen]—that is all!
-The Anti-Christ, 14; Kaufmann's translation.

First, the play on calculation, on this act of programming and tabulating, which returns both in Derrida and could be said to govern nearly the entirety of the use of the word throughout Heidegger, including its use in Being and Time. If we reckon (the word comes directly from rechnen) such that we get rid of the nervous system and the senses from our sense of what we are, Nietzsche says, we do not reckon: if we rechnen... ab, we ver... rechnen--that is, taking ab- and ver- more literally than usual as Nietzsche invites us to do, if we subtract or deduct, we calculate awry. But what is so interesting about this play is that it is precisely showing the ineluctability of the mechanical: in a way, we are in fact always already calculating, because we are already calculating in such a way that we try to get rid of what makes us calculable--in a calculable way (subtracting).

To be a bit clearer and spell out the paradox that gets missed in the English (though Kaufmann tries valiantly to save it): in order to get rid of the senses and make man something that is only spiritual, we are already deducting, adding, multiplying (cf. what Nietzsche says a few sections earlier about pity being the multiplier of suffering), etc. We are sizing up man in terms of forces, in fact quantities, in order to be able to make a qualitative distinction of this sort. Thus: we only miscalculate according to Nietzsche because we (only) calculate. In other words, we do not miscalculate because we somehow have gone about our qualitative distinctions in the wrong manner--that is, theoretically put it out there in an impoverished or mistaken form. No--and we must add what he says in Ecce Homo, namely that error is not blindness but cowardice (merely--but this makes all the difference!--a lesser form of strength, power as a quantity of energy). In the end, this subtracting here is only finally expressed in theories. Thus, this calculation is taking place on the ground, as it were (and this does not disqualify theorizing and theory as forces at play here--the important thing we're noting is that theories and propositions of reason are not just the only things operative), in the domination of a certain set of bodies over another--the priestly as it has dissipated itself about, or made itself into the "herd." Instead of being an error in theory, this is an error in the constitution of an entire people (or, better, a set of biological/physiological forces), according to Nietzsche, precisely in their calculable qualities. It is these that Nietzsche shows, in the earlier part of the passage, are calculable--that is, able to be reckoned mechanically. Let us take a closer look at what he says here, in the German:

Was die Thiere betrifft, so hat zuerst Descartes, mit verehrungswürdiger Kühnheit, den Gedanken gewagt, das Thier als machina zu verstehn: unsre ganze Physiologie bemüht sich um den Beweis dieses Satzes. Auch stellen wir logischer Weise den Menschen nicht bei Seite, wie noch Descartes that: was überhaupt heute vom Menschen begriffen ist, geht genau so weit als er machinal begriffen ist.

What Nietzsche means by this is very basic--but it is precisely this that makes it an unbelievably profound understanding of Descartes: we can provisionally say that, according to Nietzsche, Descartes had the boldness to interpret the animal as a set of physical forces--in short as something that was constituted in a calculable manner. But we have to double back and look at the terms Nietzsche uses in order to substantiate this, for, as we will see, the way we understand the two appearances of the machine here interprets the entire paragraph for us. These two (more or less) appearances are constituted in Nietzsche's use of the Latin machina, and then of als er machinal begriffen. The reason why we speak so timidly about the number and the exact constitution of the mechanical here is because it is not clear what the relationshp of the latter phrase to the former Latin one is doing, nor what they themselves actually refer to individually. We can turn for help to the translators. Kaufmann leaves the Latin, and renders the last phrase as "understand mechanistically." R.J. Hollingdale turns machina into "machine," and renders the phrase provocatively as "our knowledge of man today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge of him as a machine." This directly makes this phrase refer back to the use of machina: according to this rendering, Descartes understands animal as a machine, and our knowledge of man is gained only by understanding him as a machine. Kaufmann's translation, on the other hand, collapses the whole phrase als er machinal begriffen into an adverb, but preserves the reference: this has the effect of setting up a tension between the two phrases. In short: Descartes did not understand the animal mechanically, as we do when we gain our only knowledge of the human, but instead understood the animal as having the essence of machina, of what is invented, of what is a contrivance or a creation.

The point is not to specify which translation is better, but to understand the problems at work here. Kaufmann is extremely delicate in trying to show the difference between the first and second reference to the machine, because that difference is there--not only in the use of the Latin but also in the use of the verb: in the first case, we have verstehn (know, in the sense of understanding) and in the second we have begriffen (know, in the sense of grasping). Descartes understands, we grasp. To this extent, we can say with Kaufmann that Descartes understands man as machina, while we grasp man mechanistically.
But we also have to specify, with Hollingdale, that what Nietzsche says is, more literally, not "just as far as he grasps...," but "precisely to the extent that he grasps as..."--this is how he translates it (substituting grasp back in there instead of either "have knowledge" or "understand"). While being more literal is by no means to be more accurate to the source text, it is true that Kaufmann loses a few crucial words (the crucial word als, especially) in his version by trying to lump them all together in an active word.
So, what to conclude from all this? With the first phrase, I side with Kaufmann (one should retain the Latin), and in the latter, I side with Hollingdale, though recognize the importance of the fact that Hollingdale loses something active about the phrase--namely, the fact that any understanding or grasping that we do would, in a sort of paradox that we explored already with calculation, have to be just as mechanical as the object we are grasp, because the object is us. And insofar as this is the case, we don't really have knowledge or understanding in the manner of Descartes: Descartes understands the animal as machina, therefore, while we do something different, more actively, in itself, already machina.

In the end, let us just explicate what it is trying to get at with this knowledge of the tension between the two phrases at the level of the rendering of the words themselves, expanding our initial reading of them. We can come up with the following: Descartes had the boldness to acquire knowledge of the animal as machina--as a construct, as an invention, as a functioning. In fact, it was precisely this that allowed him to distinguish the human from the animal: the human was more natural, less machine-like, more spiritual than the animal. The perversity of this gesture is, for Nietzsche (beyond the oddness that humans would be more natural than animals), in that it makes the natural precisely what is anti-nature: spirit. And what is more, it is obviously not consistent--it cannot be, nor would Descartes want it to be that way. We physiologists endeavor to prove how the animal is a construct, is, in short, a set of calculable elements or functions like forces, and to do so more consistently than Descartes by extending this into the human. The effect is double: it is to make the natural precisely what is mechanical, precisely what is constructed; and it is therefore also to restore naturalness to the human, by despiritualizing him (as it were) and interpreting him as a functioning just like this mechanical animal. It is in this sense that any knowledge or grasp of the human that we have now extends only to what we know of him as this construct, as this calculable set of forces--that is, insofar as he is natural and we interpret the natural as the mechanical. Now how one understands this last sentence comes about here, for one understands both the nature of one's understanding and how much the mechanical is exactly participating in the human. Instead of coming down on this phrase, I'll leave it somewhat open (I might come back to it later, and with my own rendering/translation of it), and simply point to a recent experiment ("Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts") that does not specify so much as illustrate a particular way that we can understand this grasp. I would say that this is not the particular type of physiology that Nietzsche is thinking about, but that actually this experiment would indeed be included in its efforts. What is precisely so interesting and slightly disturbing about the experiment is that it merely is an extension of what is already there with respect to the animal, as well as the human: the animal is already a machine, in some way--and we too are visibly seen in the experiment as coming close both to this animal and this machine (that the animal is).

Historicism

If I have been unduly harsh on historicism in several posts below (especially my post on The Country and the City Revisited), it is because there is something more depressing about its failure as a movement within literary criticism than--for example--the failure of deconstruction. While the latter seems as if it were supposed to fail, as if it were supposed to remain merely a pipe dream, as if it were supposed to stay true to its starry-eyed idealism (despite its paradoxical claims to empiricity) and float along disinterestedly even before its moment has passed, the former always strove to be more pragmatic, to work towards the idealistic but always fall back upon the real, the actual--thus it is a bit more painful to see its downfall, for we lose with it a bit of our groundedness in actuality itself, and does completely against our will. (Informing these remarks is Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism, which has a brilliant piece on historicism and its failure which seems to me to display these qualities. Soon we will also turn to Thomas Pfau and his more bitter account.)
"Failure" and "downfall," of course, need to be immediately qualified (we should note that Jameson and Pfau do this as well): nothing simply fails within the study of literature, and certainly not historicism. We apply the term when assessing these movements precisely for this reason. To be clearer: until now (and perhaps beyond now--in America that is), the study of literature cannot really be distinguished from the application of an interpretive method, from a hermeneutic enterprise. Historicism and deconstruction, then, were both events in history (movements) and theoretical assumptions (methods). The movement passes by--not only for reasons of fashion, but also for professional necessities, world events, all sorts of historical reasons--and the method changes with it. The only way to really show how both are tied together is to talk about the movement as if it were then an expression of the method: that that interpretive was a reflection of some aspect of the interpretive theory. We thus say it failed, but this is precisely because the theory will always have a complex relation to the historical movement--in short, that it can't be said to fail simply. It is our way of trying to find the problems within the necessary aspects of the historical event itself. At least this is what I gather from the way people talk about these movements--the best example, I think, is that of Frederic Jameson--if they do not dismiss them unreflectingly as fashions. I prefer to call this whole process the "dating" of a particular critical activity: things do not fail--they become dated. I like to think that this produces interpretive structures or forms or events not unlike Peter Eisenman's City of Culture currently being built in Spain (and pictured throughout)--that is, in terms of penetrating the historicity of the critical act (in Eisenman's structure, the landscape and its uses) with a respect for its impenetrability, its being over with or merely a date (that is, mechanically or technically: Eisenman builds up the landscape, modifies it mathematically--see below picture--and then builds up the landscape itself again as buildings). In the end, the problem may just stem from not listening to Nietzsche, who reminds us how hard it is to say anything at all about these things without some resistance: "The most valuable insights are the last to be discovered; but the most valuable insights are methods" (The Anti-Christ, 13).


Regardless, this immense qualification accepted, both our depression and (relative) lack of depression at historicism and deconstruction, respectively, are symptoms of the problematic elements within the movements/methods (let's just call them movements henceforth) that led precisely to this fall or failure: historicism is unknowingly idealistic when it tries to be material--that is, completely, seriously hypocritical--and deconstruction, continually displaying an extremely annoying (but never as depressing) masochism, savors its hypocrisy in proclaiming desperately the need to respect the material, the empirical, when it cannot tear itself way from the ideal.
Jameson in his discussion of historicism does not explicitly put things in the terms of mourning and/or melancholia like I am here, but the sense of a greater failure is there in his account. It is most definitely present in the recent account of the amazing Thomas Pfau (in "The Philosophy of Shipwreck," MLN 122). Pfau characterizes historicism as governed by several axioms, all of which expand on what we have already pointed out as historicism's hypocrisy when it comes to the material: "the axiom of the archive," "the axiom of contextualism," "the axiom of pluralism (or indifferentism)," "the axiom of retroactive liberation (or secularization)," and, most damningly, the "axiom of critique as the guarantor of historical progress." Instead of getting into all of these--which all remain very interesting points--we can sum them up in a basic thesis: historicism operates more as a pragmatic check on wild theorizing, rather than as a genuine historicism. This does not do justice to what Pfau says as a whole, but it emphasizes how (in Jameson too) we have not really gotten over that magnificent Against Theory, of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp: Pfau's focus is really on how historicism becomes a data-producing machine under the aegis of an empiricism or materialism, when its aims are simple idealistic liberal humanism--that is, just as starry-eyed as theory itself. The study of literature--and furthermore professional advancement in the study of literature--becomes an effort to dig up data and make it make no demands on the interpreter other than its archival nature and its newness with respect to the tradition of interpretation. Its "rigor" is really the demonstration of the healthiness of an interpretation backed up in historical records--its ability to live without the larger, more complex, ultimately less particular theoretical statement.

While this may be true, it remains for us to see exactly on what level it is true (thus we return to the problems of whether and where we can distinguish between the practice of interpretation and its method, as discussed above--and how much one can or cannot encroach upon the other, either wittingly or unwittingly). But instead of pursuing this, we can return to how Pfau seemed to reinforce that old argument about new historicism: that it is really the anti-theoretical study of literature, that devolves into a crude plea for pragmatism just as idealistic as theory.
Is new historicism just conservatism within the field of literature? For this is the implication of this claim. Obviously, the case can be made either way. My suggestion is that this is the inappropriate question underneath all the others: we need to think this "pragmatic" aspect of historicism differently if we are going to figure out what its failures are. For there is something indeed extremely amazing about precisely what this "pragmatism" produces: the expansion of the field in which the literary object places itself, and with more complicated processes of determination and delimitation of this aspect than anything Marxism has produced. In other words, what we get is that recognition that even if we looked at the internal logic of a text and exhausted its possibilities (even by affirming that they are infinite), the level at which the text operates must be specified and in fact delimited: it is easily smaller than we might think, caught up as it is within all sorts of activities that are larger than itself. We might revisit the remark of Foucault upon finishing Derrida's Dissemination: "So what?" In other words, for all that, what is the level upon which this immense play is taking place? Plato's texts not only have a complicated relationship to the textual element pharmacia: they are operative within a certain text that has many, many more elements in play--that is, within discourses. Historicism brings one back to the vastness of this field of discourse. More on this later...