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Heidegger, Žižek and Revolution

Tere Vadén

P E R S P E C T I V E S O F C R I T I C A L T H E O R Y A N D E D U C A T I O N

Heidegger, Žižek and RevolutionTere Vadén

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s P E R S 1

P E R S P E C T I V E S O F C R I T I C A L T H E O R Y A N D E D U C A T I O N


Tere VadénAalto University, Aalto, Finland

Why did Martin Heidegger, the giant of continental philosophy, believe in 1933 that Hitler is the future of Europe? And why does Slavoj Žižek, “the most dangerous philosopher in the West”, support Heidegger’s right wing militancy?

Heidegger and Žižek are not only erudite thinkers on human being but also incorrigible revolutionaries who even after the catastrophic failures of their favourite revolutions – the October revolution for Žižek and the National Socialist revolution for Heidegger – want to overcome capitalism; undemocratically, if necessary. The two share a spirited and sophisticated rejection of the liberalist worldview and the social order based on it. The problem is not that liberalism is factually wrong, but rather that it is ethically bad. Both argue for building and educating a new collective based on human finitude and communality. In the tradition of the Enlightenment, Žižek advocates a universalist revolution, whereas Heidegger sees the transformation rooted in particular historical existence, inviting a bewildering array of mutually exclusive criticisms and apologies of his view. The crisis that Heidegger and Žižek want to address is still here, but their unquestioned Europocentrism sets a dark cloud over the whole idea of revolution.

ISBN 978-94-6209-681-3


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PERSPECTIVES OF CRITICAL THEORY AND EDUCATIONVolume 1

Series EditorOlli-Pekka Moisio, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Advisory BoardStephen Brookfield, University of St. Thomas Minneapolis, USA Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley, USADouglas Kellner, University of California at Los Angeles, USAMichael A. Peters, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), USAJuha Suoranta, University of Tampere, FinlandChristiane Thompson, Martin-Luther-University at Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

ScopeThis series maps the field of critical theory and its role in articulating the central problems of education, schooling, culture, and human learning and development in the current historical social, political, economical and global situation. It aspires to build a consistent approach to philosophy and sociology of education from the viewpoint of critical theory, as well as new openings for the future critical theory of education. It will also examine examples of pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and educational policies with a strong accent on actual policies and examples. Series will commission books on the Frankfur t School critical theory in relation to the question of education and social settings of human learning and development. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of the history and systematical issues in the tradition of the Frankfurt School in the setting of pedagogy, education and learning.

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Tere VadénAalto University, Helsinki, Finland

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A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6209-681-3 (paperback)ISBN: 978-94-6209-682-0 (hardback)ISBN: 978-94-6209-683-7 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858,3001 AW Rotterdam,The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/

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No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Chapter 1: Introduction 1A Revolution, After All? 1Radical Heidegger as the Starting Point 2

Chapter 2: Metaphysics is Politics 5Truth is Not Neutral 5Heidegger and Žižek in Everyday Politics 8Heideggerian Marxism and Žižek as the New Marcuse? 12The Problem with the Liberal Subject 16

Chapter 3: Heidegger on Revolution 27The Subject, the Worker, the Polis 27“Nur Noch Die Jugend Kann Uns Retten” 38Heidegger’s Step and Its Direction 52

Chapter 4: What is Wrong in Heidegger’s Revolution? 65A Small Man Living in Hard Times 65The Liberal Criticism: Too Much Postmodernism 68Decisionism 71The French Critiques: Too Little Postmodernism 79Nazism as Anticommunism 82Nazism as Asubjective National Experience 83The Typical Marxist Critique 88Žižek’s Untypical Marxist Critique and Praise 96

Chapter 5: Industrial Agriculture and Concentration Camps or the Will and Evil 111

Chapter 6: Žižek on a See-Saw 127

Chapter 7: Žižek and Heidegger Avec Means 139

Bibliography 155

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The origin of this text is a course on Heidegger and Žižek in the University of Tampere; I want to thank all participants for lively discussions. The writing itself was made possible through a grant by the Finnish Association of Non-Fiction Writers. Warmest thanks also to Juha Suoranta and Mika Hannula who gave crucial comments and criticism on the manuscript along the way.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

A REVOLUTION, AFTER ALL?

If the last century was characterised by the widening scope and deeper penetration of capitalism, modernism, economic growth, mass culture and representational democracy in nation states, it was also a century of revolutions against these developments. The October revolution in 1917 in Russia and the National Socialist revolution in 1933 in Germany were the most impressive challengers to liberal capitalism in Europe. In their distinct ways, both revolutions tried to reinstate ideals absent from bourgeois materially oriented civilization and to tackle the problem of economic and social inequality. Both failed and in the process took their crown jewels, “socialist man/woman” and “Aryan master-race”, to their graves. But inequality has not disappeared, and even if postmodernism has put a wet blanket on utopias and ideals, most people are not happy with the vile harvest provided by individualistic capitalism—vile, it is often assumed, because of wrong values or a lack of values altogether.

The responses that Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) present in the face of the catastrophic failures of the revolutions they admire—the socialist and the National Socialist—are similar. Both continue to insist that revolutionary change is necessary, but at the same time emphasise the role of careful and painstaking thought. The work of both thinkers is shot through with an urgent awareness of crisis, propelling them to untiring and unyielding philosophical resistance. In the 1950’s and 1960’s Heidegger speaks of the need to “be prepared for being prepared” and hints that maybe we need to wait 300 years before a new opening. Our contemporary Žižek is both more impatient and hesitant. At times he predicts that capitalism will face a cliff very soon, at times he claims that the 20th century saw too much of the action urged by Marx (“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”) and too little calm and unhurried thought. Despite having once burnt their fingers and despite the genuine care they want to take in matters of philosophy, both thinkers are set alight by the idea of total upheaval: “If only we could think and enact a proper revolution…”

Our proposal is that we spend some time attending to this hope for a genuine, properly thought-out and enacted revolution. On one hand, we can agree about the assessment of the situation. Really, things can not continue as they are. Heidegger’s warnings about the dangers of technology and Žižek’s reminders of how exploitation and injustice are a part and parcel of all types of capitalism hold true. A genuine

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revolution? Why not! Why not a revolution, if it would stop the destruction of nature and the subjugation of humans into resources for capitalism. On the other hand, there is a nagging doubt, “what if…”, a fear that the promised revolution turns sour. The doubt is based not only on the expectation of the return of previous disappointments and failures, of the revolution devouring its children. A dark cloud can be detected inside the idea of revolution itself. To borrow an interrogatory structure often employed by Heidegger: who (or what) is demanding a revolution from whom (or what)? In the name of whom is the demand made? Could it be that the demand is made in the name of someone or something to whom a revolution can not be an answer? What if revolution is the wrong answer to the right question? These two poles—“why not!”, “what if… ”—provide the tension through which we approach Heidegger’s and Žižek’s revolutions.

RADICAL HEIDEGGER AS THE STARTING POINT

However, the two theorists will not be handled equally. Heidegger takes the foreground, for three reasons. First, Heidegger has become common background for nearly all contemporary critical philosophy, not the least for Žižek. Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein1, his critique of technology, and his narrative of the history of Being pop up time and again when liberalism, capitalism and consumerism are thoughtfully opposed. The reliance on Heidegger also creates a potential minefield, because for Heidegger himself his philosophy consistently meant a rejection of liberal democracy. When theorists relying on Heidegger want to deepen democracy and strengthen individual rights, the upshot is a performative contradiction: either they have not understood their Heidegger right or Heidegger himself was inconsistent. A synthesis between genuine democracy and the deepest roots of Heideggerian thought is still missing,2 even though, for instance, Jacques Derrida has stated that for him and many others the goal is to democratise Heidegger’s thought and to vaccinate it against “the worst.”3

Second, in a rare manner Heidegger was both a philosopher and an active, militant revolutionary, who in addition to his work at the university took part in politics. It must be remembered that Heidegger was an active participant in a successful and actual revolution—successful in terms of overturning the previous government and gaining power, if not in terms of all the goals of the revolutionary movement, not to speak of Heidegger’s goals for it. After the Second World War, in public Heidegger understandably tried to belittle his political activism. He was afraid that the baby of his thought would go with the bathwater of Nazism. His attempts seem to have worked relatively well, partly because many Heideggerian philosophers find it easy to believe that philosophy is necessarily remote from day-to-day politics. Heidegger’s critique of civilization is celebrated, his actions in politics not. One of the almost unbearable ironies of the case is that many Heideggerian wannabe-revolutionaries want to have their Heidegger without the dirty everyday struggle of changing social structures, that is, without the revolutionary grassroots that they

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themselves—but not Heidegger!—lack. Here Žižek is one crucial step ahead of his postmodern colleagues, as he recognizes the philosophical importance of Heidegger’s revolutionary political action.4

Third, Heidegger takes the foreground because Žižek formulates his thought on revolution partly as a response to Heidegger. In addition to Hegel and Lacan, Heidegger is one of the first tools that find their way to Žižek’s hands. Both Žižek’s idea that truth is fundamentally partisan and his notion of the structure of a revolutionary act are directly connected to Heidegger (more precisely Heidegger’s notion of Werk): a revolutionary act creates ex nihilo a structure that before the act was impossible.5

So the question is about revolution, especially Heidegger’s revolution. If the picture Heidegger gives is, more or less, correct (technology as an epoch in the history of Being, the impossibility of democratically challenging technology, the fundamentally technological nature of Americanism, Bolshevism and, ultimately, Nazism), why is his revolution wrong, wrong for nature, wrong for humans in general and wrong for the workers, in particular? Juxtaposing Heidegger and Žižek, we intend to use both as criticisms of each other.6 What, exactly, is wrong in Heidegger’s revolution? Or is the leftist corrective, for instance, as presented by Žižek, wrong? Or is the notion of revolution itself already flawed?

NOTES

1 I will use the term Dasein without translation. However, if the word seems alien, one can always read in its place “life”, as long as one remembers that life here does not mean a biological phenomenon or the life of an individual but rather life as in the expressions “German life”, “cabin life”, “military life”, “academic life” and so on (all of which, by the way, are Heidegger’s own expressions: “deutsche Dasein”, “Hütte-Dasein”, and so on).

2 Pauli Pylkkö’s Aconceptual Mind. Heideggerian themes in holistic naturalism (1998) tries to cure the anti-democracy of Dasein philosophy by a strong dose of non-classical natural science. The project is promising, but very few philosophers steeped in so-called continental philosophy or critical theory care enough about the natural sciences in order to follow. However, Arkady Plotnitsky (2002, 1994) works along the same lines.

3 In the interview “’Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” published in Cadava et al. (1991).

4 Repeatedly Žižek tells that he looks down on leftists that do not want to get their hands dirty. For the same reason he does not regret his involvement in Slovenian politics at the time when Slovenia was gaining independence from Yugoslavia and turning towards capitalism: “I despise abstract leftists who don’t want to touch power because it is corrupting. No, power is there to be grabbed. I don’t have any problem with that.” Boynton (1998).

5 The connections can easily bee seen by comparing, for instance, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (GA5, 48, 62-63) and Žižek’s description of the act in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism (2002a, 173-178).

6 The plot goes like this: the penultimate end will be a Heidegger corrected by Žižek, but the Žižek used in the correction is first amended by a dose of Heidegger. Finally, we will have to leave also Heidegger’s incorrigible Europocentrism behind.

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CHAPTER 2

METAPHYSICS IS POLITICS

TRUTH IS NOT NEUTRAL

Both Heidegger and Žižek want to burst the bubble of non-political philosophy. Philosophy is action, doing, politics in its genuine sense, or it is not at all. Not only is philosophy action, it is the most decisive kind of action. Heidegger and Žižek claim that everything depends on thinking, and, moreover, right now.1 Philosophy as action is absolutely decisive, urgent and world-historical. Here we find the most crucial connection between Heidegger and Žižek: for both, truth is partisan. Truth is accessible only from a limited, engaged, and partial position that has abandoned all safety nets. For instance, in his comments on Hölderlin—one of the most sensitive topics for Heidegger—Heidegger insists that hearing the word of the poet means risking a change, of being swept away so that all safety is lost. Only from this vulnerable experience may truth grow. For Heidegger, experience does not mean an accumulation of aesthetic and atmospheric snippets. Rather, experience contains an overwhelming force that the experiencing subject may very well feel as threatening:

To experience something, be it a thing, a person, a God, means that this something happens to us, hits us, comes over us, turns us over and changes us. (GA12, 149)2

The same goes, according to Heidegger, for the German revolution that should not be treated as one fact or historical event amongst others. The revolution reveals its truth and greatness only to human life that has been transformed by the revolutionary experience.

Žižek often uses directly political terms in defining his notion of the non-neutrality of truth. For instance, the truth of universal Christianity is not that “we” are Christians and “they” are not, but rather that the gap between being a Christian and not being a Christian is found inside all of “us” and “them” and that “[…] universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position.” (2006a, 35)—that is, from the point of the practising Christian. In this way, we are led to the political nature of truth:

Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint is exactly like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement for its Cause; yes, the “truth” of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, not to any neutral observer. (Žižek 2004, no page numbers)

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Consequently, Heidegger and Žižek have to be revolutionary. They see attempts at alleviating the excesses of capitalism as futile or even counterproductive, as such attempts only prop up the system. Neither Heidegger nor Žižek stand for slow, step-wise reformation. This revolutionary extremism is clear in Heidegger’s attitude towards ecological questions. A technological delay of climate change (for instance, through some kind of geo-engineering), will only deepen the real catastrophe, the technological understanding of Being. Similarly, in politics, softening or covering-up the nihilistic destruction caused by capitalism through various kinds of philosophies of values, virtue ethics or religious charity gets Heidegger’s as well as Žižek’s scorn.3 Such cushioning, first, makes the destruction in terms of the subjugation of humans even worse, and, second, muddles the truth:

The parallel with Bolsheviks is absolutely pertinent: what Heidegger shares with revolutionary Marxists is the notion that the system’s truth emerges in its excess—that is to say, for Heidegger, as well as for Marxists, Fascism is not a simple aberration of the ‘normal’ development of capitalism but the necessary outcome of its inner dynamics. (Žižek 2009c, 7)

Ž iž ek’s details are a little hazy, but the insight is correct. Heidegger would not speak of Fascism4 and would not think that it (or, rather, Nazism) is the truth of capitalism only. Rather, Heidegger would insist that the wrong kind of Nazism, the kind that eventually prevailed, is the truth of not only capitalism but also Bolshevism because of the common foundation that they share: the technological understanding of Being. But Žižek’s observation is crucial: in a Hegelian way Heidegger thinks that the technological understanding of Being has to be completed, has to reach its fullest bloom, before its truth can be discerned and overcome. This simply because truth is a matter of experience. The technological understanding of Being is true. It is the way in which technological human being really is in the world. Only experience that grasps the roots of this technological experience in a new way may bring about change and a new kind of life. In order to live differently, one has to experience differently, and vice versa. Heidegger thinks that also the “neutral” truth that the rational subject possesses is partial and partisan. “Objective scientific truth” is the experiential truth of a metaphysics of subjectivity. Žižek does not speak about experientiality, but emphasises the ideological nature of all objectivities and self-evidentialities, which in itself means in Žižek’s Lacanian world that the subject is (libidinally, ideologically) implicated in such “objectivities”. Because truth is partial also when seen as objective, it hurts. Changing power relations, living differently and transforming the society—that is, politics and philosophy—are not purely or mainly intellectual or cognitive undertakings. They are based on experience. Another world means another experience. For instance, Žižek points out how Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis on the “objective” “end of history” has already died twice, first politically in September 2001 and then economically in September 2008. Both deaths were very traumatic. Here is another crucial commonality: both Heidegger and Žižek think that experiences that are drastic and undermine the subject’s control over her life are necessary for thought and action.

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It is not hard to fathom that the liberalist notion of human being according to which a person is (and should be!) a separate individual that rationally maximises her/his benefit, by choosing both in the store and in the poll booth the alternative that she/he likes most (or that maximizes her/his chances of survival, or economic position, or social standing, or psychological well-being, or what have you), is distasteful to Heidegger and Žižek. As a psychoanalyst, Žižek sees the rational individual as a tip-of-the-iceberg manifestation of the deeper and more powerful forces that make up a person, not as the true foundation or nucleus of personhood. We will return to the differences between Heidegger’s and Žižek’s notions of the subject. For now, it is enough to note that, following Heidegger, Žižek bases his notion of the subject on the idea that the subject is possible only because it is incomplete, finite, broken. At the same time, Heidegger’s long career with all of its twists and turns can be seen as a single extended campaign against the liberalist notion of human being. His ontology, epistemology, anthropology, social philosophy and philosophy of language are all thoroughly anti-liberal and anti-individualistic.

What is it about liberal individualism that grates the nerves of Heidegger and Žižek? Let us give the word to Heidegger with a long quotation, so that the impetus can unfold. The quotation has to do with the nature of poetry.5 The topic is close to Heidegger’s heart, and he uses all of his considerable skills in showing that poetry is not the public linguistic expression of something individually and internally experienced:

The writer Kolbenheyer says: ‘Poetry is a necessary function of a people.’ It does not take much understanding to realise that so is digestion, at least for a healthy people. When Spengler defines poetry as the expression of the prevailing cultural soul, the definition includes the manufacture of bicycles and cars. […] All of this is so hopelessly lame that we speak of it against our will. But we must mention it. First, because this way of thinking concerns not only poetry, but all that happens in human existence in all of its kinds […] Second, because the way of thinking does not arise from the fortuitous lameness or incapacity of an individual thinker. Rather, it has its essential ground in the mode of existence of humanity in the 19th century and of the modern time, in general. If the much misused term ‘liberalistic’ can and should be used to name something, then this way of thinking. For this way of thinking sets itself axiomatically and beforehand outside what it thinks about, makes it a mere object of its opinions. In this way poetry, too, is just an immediately encountered phenomenon, that can completely meaninglessly be categorised together with other phenomena as ‘expression’ of a soul bubbling somewhere underneath. This way of thinking itself forms a completion of the precisely definable ‘liberal’ human existence. Up till today, it has gained prominence in countless forms and versions, because it is easy to assume, does not concern anyone and is conveniently applicable on anything. (GA39, 27-28)6

The liberalist view of human being is mistaken simply because its sees a human being as a self-sufficient and free-floating entity, relating to things and other humans

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as it sees fit. Contrary to this, for Heidegger poetry, for instance, is a part of human being. When poetry exists, it makes humans the way they are. To put it crudely: poems tell us what it is to be human, what can be experienced, what can be expected, what language is, how we can live together and so on. These experiences in turn are what it is to be human. A human is human and the kind of human being that she or he is, because poetry has opened a world to her or him (and the kind of world it has opened). Only secondarily can a human being set herself or himself outside poetry and to analyse it as if from a distance. This secondariness means also a certain kind of thinness, flatness, thoughtlessness compared to the first-hand experience of poetry. Heidegger’s descriptive term is noteworthy: liberalism does not concern (angehen) anybody. Liberal views and opinions can be changed at will, without any deeper consequences for one’s humanity. The liberal view of human being is both too thin and flat and too diluted and distant. A liberal view does not present a duty, it does not put its holder into an emergency, unlike poetry that lives as a part of human being. What goes for poetry, goes for community: Heidegger sees community, Mitsein and shared language as fundamental experiential fields that precede the individual, and therefore have a claim on human being before and after the individual. His most famous work, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) is one of the most erudite and forceful expositions of the community-before-individuals view that the history of philosophy has seen.

Even though Heidegger’s definition of liberalism is quite broad and unusual, it functions as the basis for his own and for Žižek’s criticism. For both Heidegger and Žižek the fundamental error of liberalism is in its philosophical anthropology and, consequently, in its philosophical politics. Liberal politics is only a servant of liberal philosophy, incapable of real thought (Heidegger)7 or critique of ideology (Žižek). For this reason, neither Heidegger nor Žižek think of revolution as merely involving a change in political power relations. For both, revolution means a transformation of what it is to be human—a little bit like a religious rebirth, and not coincidentally, since the partiality of truth is related to the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, done without reason. For Heidegger, this transformation would mean the (re)birth of some kind of new communal experience and life, maybe in terms of a new god or at least something holy, which in time would make possible new meaning and new livelihoods. For Žižek, the transformation would mean adulthood in a Lacanian-Hegelian vein, the abandonment of ideological crutches and setting an autonomous self-discipline in a communal project.

HEIDEGGER AND ŽIŽEK IN EVERYDAY POLITICS

Even while most vigorously covering up his active involvement in the Nazi revolution, Heidegger never denies that his intention was to revolutionise German universities. This is no little goal, especially in the context of Heidegger’s bigger aim of aiding the rebirth of European spiritual life—European, which Heidegger took to mean Greek-German, because of the material and essential bloodline between the

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two peoples (stamm- und wesensverwandten, GA16, 283). In this sense, Heidegger’s overall project was intensely pedagogical. Like Heidegger himself puts it, the history of German universities is the history of German Geist, which in turn contains the history of Germany itself (GA16, 285). Heidegger never denies that his philosophy was intended to bring about a total upheaval and rebirth of European man. Even in his “philosophical testament”, the Spiegel-interview from 1966 titled “Only a God can save us”, Heidegger insist that for him the decisive question is what kind of political system our technological age needs.8 So the crucial question for Heidegger in the 1960’s is—according to himself—political. If Heidegger already in the 1930’s took part in an actual honest-to-goodness political revolution, how much more weight did the question of a political system carry in the 1960’s! Of course the situation had drastically changed, and Heidegger did not anymore pin his hopes on a political mass movement, but rather on preserving and nurturing the hope for change in some kind of cells of resistance.9 Accordingly, he changed his own pedagogical mode of operation. He quite consciously stopped lecturing to large audiences, and started working by giving meticulously prepared seminars to small groups in thoughtfully selected non-academic settings.10 But in each of the phases of his work, Heidegger was a revolutionary thinker who did not step back from real political work when he saw an opportunity for it. It is a truism that there is a certain distance between Heidegger’s thinking and the ideas of the Nazi leaders; such a distance always exists between the thinking of the leaders and what actually transpires (think of Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and the October revolution). This distance does nothing to prove that Heidegger was “apolitical”. Quite the contrary. That the distance existed and that Heidegger was aware of it11 and still chose to enter into revolutionary political work only highlights how committed Heidegger was to revolution, in general, and the Nazi revolution, in particular.

In a rare way, Heidegger was prepared to interpret contemporary and past events as messages of Being-historical relevance, revealing tectonic shifts in Being itself and the thinking connected to it (Fügung). Sometimes Heidegger comes across almost as a pagan priest, reading the details of events as oracular prophesies. He strongly believed that thinking in general and his own thinking in particular had a (albeit indirect; more of this later) task in transforming everyday life and politics. His belief even took the forms of a kind of hubris.12 Such belief is also the background to Heidegger’s almost only show of remorse, the sentence “he who thinks great, errs great”.13 In a letter to his wife Elfride on March 4., 1946, Martin in simple prose analyses the phenomenon of erring (the topic being Martin’s poem “Tagwerk des Denkens”, GA81, 24). The letter explains that thinking means bringing into truth, i.e., into unconcealment. In other words, the more true your thinking, the more you are bringing the concealed into the open, and the bigger the possibilities of error. Only thoughtlessness guarantees no errors, and, conversely, the possibility of erring is a genuine part of thinking (2005, 243).

The quote also shows that in Heidegger’s case the distance between thinking and everyday political action is not the familiar distance between theory and its practical

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application. In Heidegger, the distance is created by the genuine and irreducible concealment and mystery (Geheimnis) of Being. Truth itself contains a dangerous and irreducible tension between concealment and unconcealment, and therefore thinking is “distanced” from a direct causal efficacy on reality. Thinking can not cause and much less force anything to happen, simply because the truth embodied in thinking is full of struggle, tension, and not the product or possession of humans alone.

But the hubris and a peculiar take on thinking should not lead us astray. We should not imagine that Heidegger was an otherworldly fool with either bad or good intentions. Once more: unlike many radical thinkers and revolutionary theorists, Heidegger worked for several years in preparing and then carrying out revolutionary ideas, innovating and implementing structural reform, with his party membership card in the uniform pocket.14 By taking up the rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger took the bull by the horns and chose the unthankful position of spearheading National Socialist structural reform in the German universities. His was the task of transforming lofty principles into everyday practice, and he took part not only in implementing reforms imagined elsewhere but in innovating new ways of giving educational flesh to National Socialist bones. Heidegger took this role not only in his home university, but in the broader world of the whole German university system. He not only planned, but carried out structural reforms that were by no means universally accepted or lauded. We will return to the details, but for now it is enough to remember that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 until its dispersal, took for years active part in forming National Socialist educational policy, implemented it in innovative ways in 1933-34 in Freiburg, and long after leaving the rectorship continued to take part in the internal struggle about the nature of National Socialist higher education.

In politics, only the best was enough for Heidegger. Only politics that aspired to a total transformation of European life, of the re-evaluation of past values and the rebirth of new human being was good enough for him. Politics as thought (philosophy) and as action (praxis) were for him inseparable—as is only natural, given the anthropology of Sein und Zeit. He was lucky, because in his lifetime a political movement promising total transformation did appear on the German and European stage, so that compromises were not needed. On the political map of contemporary Europe Heidegger would not have found a movement measuring up to his stringent criteria.

*In contrast to Heidegger, Žižek’s political activity has been much more prone to compromises, even to being “reasonable”. The best known is his run to be included in the 4-person presidential council of Slovenia in 1990, as a part of the liberal democrat ticket. Žižek, who calls himself a communist and a radical leftist, has explained that the co-operation with liberal democrats was necessitated by the situation15: the goal was to stall the advance of a coalition of nationalists and ex-communists. A similar reasoned situation-awareness characterises Žižek’s actions

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as a public intellectual. He is always provocative and uses cognitive dissonance as a pedagogical tool, but often—for instance, while appearing on Al-Jazeera or the BBC—he reins in his neurotic ticks, refrains from alienating the audience and is quite polite.

As a political actor Žižek is two different things, one in the West and another in his native Slovenia. In the West his role is that of a public intellectual. He gives interviews, writes columns and opinion pieces, takes part in debates and makes interventions in conferences, and frequently lends his support to political movements and campaigns, such as the Occupy movement in New York or the Syriza coalition in Greece. However, in the West he has not taken part in party politics, has not run for office or aspired to political leadership, unlike in Slovenia. In Slovenia, the public opinion sees him as a liberal suspected of hard-line communist sympathies. In the West, the public perception is the opposite: Žižek is seen as a communist but suspected of covert liberalism.

In Slovenia, Žižek’s role as a public intellectual started through writing for the Mladina newspaper and through his participation in the radical art scene, for instance, as part of the support for the Laibach collective.16 Žižek was further drawn to action through Mladina in 1988, when four of its editors were accused of holding secret military documents. Žižek supported the editors and founded the Council for the Support of Human Rights. At the same time he left the communist party. After Slovenia gained independence, Žižek supported first the liberal democratic party and then the centre-left liberal Zares party that splintered off from the liberal democrats. Underlining this attachment is Žižek’s friendship with the founder of Zares, Gregor Golobic. Many leftist Slovenians have been irritated by Žižek’s support for the liberal democrats, who in government were involved in corruption scandals, and by his support for the “yes”-vote in the election on NATO membership. At the same time, some have suspected that Žižek is a Trojan horse, carrying a Stalinist core under the liberal veneer—a reputation that has tarnished also Golobic because of his connection to Žižek.

When Žižek in the Western media insists that one good measure against global capitalism is the collective ownership of the means of production, it is obvious that his alliance with the liberal democrats that in Slovenia supported the privatisation of nationalised industries seems odd. His reply is simple enough (from Lovink 1995, no page numbers):

What the liberal democratic party did was a miracle. Five years ago we were the remainder of the new social movements, like feminist and ecological groups. At that time everybody thought that we would be vanishing mediators. We made some solidly corrupted, but good moves and now we are the strongest party. I think it was our party that saved Slovenia from the faith of the other former Yugoslav republics, where they have the one-party model. Either right wing like in Croatia or left wing like in Serbia, which hegemonised in the name of the national interest. With us it’s a real diverse, pluralist scene, open towards

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foreigners (of course there are some critical cases). But the changes [sic] of a genuine pluralist society are not yet lost. […] The question is: will we become just another small, stupid, nationalistic state or maintain this elementary, pluralistic opening? And all compromises are worth for this goal.

Pluralism and multiculturalism are in practice more important than collective ownership of the means of production, and avoiding virulent nationalism more important than state socialism. So far so good! This should be kept in mind when assessing the militancy of Žižek as a theorist: in practice, he is very committed to the ideals of anti-racism and anti-nationalism. Even if he provokes audiences with the ideas of totalitarianism, when push comes to shove he opts for a Popperian “open society”.

This might be something of a disappointment. When it comes to everyday politics, a big part of Žižek’s theoretical flair and flamboyance is lost and turns into rather familiar progressivism: no decisive breaks, no once-and-for-all swipes, but calculated choices for the lesser evil. This should be considered in combination with the characteristic move Žižek makes at the decisive moments of his talks and texts. He analyses, points out the antinomies and dead-ends, shows the hidden impossibilities, but provides no answers. Rather, in the end, Žižek says: “I’m just pointing out that we can not continue like this, but I don’t know what we should do!” Here, Žižek is a much more traditional philosopher than Heidegger. Žižek is a gadfly, raising questions and provoking problems, showing the limitations of our knowledge and practices—but leaving the rest open. Maybe more precisely a psychoanalytic gadfly, luring us into the thick of the problem, clarifying some obstacles, showing some structural guidelines, and then disappearing and leaving us staring into the mirror. The task of taking up the collective discipline that saves the world from rapacious global capitalism is left to the reader, the listener, to us.

HEIDEGGERIAN MARXISM AND ŽIŽEK AS THE NEW MARCUSE?

Contrary to still too prevalent prejudice, Heidegger’s phenomenology and Marxism are not like oil and water. There are important areas of contact, common starting points and shared concerns. Both Heidegger and Marx see work and everyday life as ontologically and politically decisive. They agree, as well, on the essentially historical nature of knowledge and existence.17 This means that meaningful change has to happen collectively and practically. For both, the task of philosophy begins with everyday life—and philosophy also has to end up being relevant to everyday life in order to be worth its name. To be sure, there are decisive differences in the analyses the two philosophers present, but the fact that Heidegger agreed that the old bourgeois order had failed to solve the “worker question”18 and that liberalism was not the answer, means that the two face at least one crucial problem in common: how is social life to be organised in the industrialised and modern age, beyond the confines of individualism, liberalism and purely calculative reason?

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Consequently, there have been several attempts at building a “leftist Heidegger”. This has often meant dissociating Heidegger’s phenomenology from what has sometimes—and mistakenly—been seen as its coolly philosophical distance from politics. For instance, most of the French reception laboured for decades under the impression that a proper interpretation of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was by necessity leftist. In this context it is significant that one of the earliest and most prominent synthesisers of Marx and Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, who in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s wrote a series of articles that have been recently collected under the title Heideggerian Marxism (Marcuse 2005), himself thought that no Nazi sympathies were visible in Heidegger’s work before 1933 (Marcuse 2005, 169, 176). After 1933, however, Marcuse had no illusions with regard to Heidegger’s politics, and quickly wound down the project of combining Heidegger with Marxism (see Marcuse 2005, 159), even though it may be argued that phenomenological insights continued to inform his later work. One indication of Marcuse’s thorough disillusionment with Heidegger is his vigorous post-war effort towards getting Heidegger to reflect on Nazism; an effort unparalleled by any of Heidegger’s students or disciples.

Marcuse wanted to develop a more “concrete” Heideggerianism, in terms of an analysis of the emptiness of bourgeois life and its overcoming through an active relationship to life, which he finds better described in Marx, especially in his writings on alienation. As Marcuse (2005, 165-166) himself puts it:

we saw in Heidegger […] a new beginning, the first radical attempt to put philosophy on really concrete foundations—philosophy concerned with human existence, the human condition, and not merely with abstract ideas and principles.

Marcuse interprets Heidegger’s Dasein as a collective subjectivity that can act historically in the Marxist sense. Here, in worldly Dasein, the otherwise crippling distinction between subject and object can be overcome, and a processual and historical existence becomes possible. However, for Marcuse, Heidegger’s mistake was too much abstraction and “ontologisation” that rapidly increase after a promising start in Being and Time. His final verdict is clear and merciless:

If you look at his principle [sic] concepts […] Dasein, das Man, Sein, Seiendes, Existenz, they are “bad” abstracts in the sense that they are not conceptual vehicles to comprehend the real concreteness in the apparent one. They lead away. For example, Dasein is for Heidegger a sociologically and even biologically ‘neutral’ category (sex differences don’t exist!); the Frage nach dem Sein remains the ever unanswered but ever repeated question; the distinction between fear and anxiety tends to transform very real fear into pervasive and vague anxiety. Even his at first glance most concrete existential category, death, is recognized as the most inexorable brute fact only to be made into an insurpassable possibility. Heidegger’s existentialism is indeed

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a transcendental idealism compared with which Husserl’s last writings […] seem saturated with historical concreteness. (Marcuse 2005, 167-168)

In an important way Marcuse’s analysis is close to Heidegger’s self-criticism. Heidegger came to see the attempt at fundamental ontology in Being and Time as mistaken, precisely because it strove towards ahistorical and supposedly neutral structural descriptions. From this perspective, Heidegger’s public political writings, speeches and engagement in the 1930’s can be seen as a corrective against such “transcendentalism”; the “right step”, as Žižek calls it. We will return to the issue of Heidegger’s apparent withdrawal from politics after the Second World War. For now, suffice it to remember that, as noted above, in the Spiegel interview Heidegger emphasised that the crucial question for him was political. Marcuse’s summary of Heidegger’s philosophy, written in 1934, illuminates the issue:

It should be noted that phenomenology’s radical move into the realm of facticity would, on the one hand, soon be redirected toward the transcendental and, on the other hand, lead immediately to the political ideology of racist Germany. Already in Heidegger’s principal work, Being and Time, the radical motifs are submerged beneath the transcendental currents. (2005, 159)

How could Heidegger’s phenomenology be split towards both transcendentalism and immediate political action if it did not contain some of the promised concreteness and historical acumen? Certainly, from Marcuse’s perspective Heidegger’s political trajectory was wrong, “ideological” in the sense of containing false consciousness. However, from Heidegger’s own perspective he was continuously struggling to find the openings through which thinking is world-historical. The supposed “false consciousness” of transcendentalism arises because Heidegger does not place the driving force of history in economic questions and class antagonism like Marcuse. However, as we will see below, this does not mean that Heidegger’s account of history would be non-antagonistic or non-dynamic.

Indeed, the importance of concretely political openings in Heidegger’s thinking can be made clearer through another obvious hinge in Heideggerian Marxism, the proximity between Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness from 1923 and Being and Time. We do not have to go as far as Lucien Goldmann (1977) who suggests that Being and Time is in great part a reply to Lukács, to observe salient points of contact. Again, like Žižek (2000, 107-108) notes, the shared background are the themes of alienation and reification. The problem is seen in a similar light: the nature of work and therefore of all everyday existence in modern (industrial, capitalist, technological) civilisation leads towards alienation. Consequently, the solution is seen in similar terms. Human action, praxis, is what overcomes the subject-object, nature-consciousness division. For Lukács, the distinction is overcome in a praxis led by experience saturated by class consciousness. Here, the world includes an actor, the proletariat as a social class, that is historically rooted and at the same time able to seize the moments when history can be changed. Žižek (2000) emphasises Lukács’

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Leninism, his account of the voluntarist, active, and practical-engaged nature of revolutionary commitment. These are all themes found in Being and Time, where the road towards authentic historicity goes through a collective and engaged choosing of destiny, and enacting that choice in lived practices. However, once again, for Heidegger the crucial experience is not that of a social class, but rather of a people that has grasped its Being-historical destiny. Schematically put, relieved from false ideology authentic human experience is, for Lukács (and, consequently, for Marcuse and other Western Marxists), class-historical and, for Heidegger, Being-historical.

This is a tension that persists between Heideggerian phenomenology and Marxism. Marxism typically sees in Heidegger an ontology that tries to be too a-historical and general. As Žižek (2000, 112), echoing Marcuse, puts it, the problem is losing the specificity of historical events to ponderous generalisations (such as Heidegger’s contention that Bolshevism and Americanism are essentially the same). Furthermore, this neglect of concrete history can then be taken to mean an ideological perversion, in the sense that Heidegger’s description of authenticity and inauthenticity concern a particular type of bourgeois subjectivity. As Marcuse (2005, 29) argues, inauthenticity is also tied to division of labour. From the Heideggerian perspective, in turn, it can be claimed that the problem with Marxism is that it does not recognise how forms of alienation arise also in non-Capitalist structures of production.19 We shall return to this tension, but for now its existence can be taken to indicate that rather than strictly contradicting or undermining each other, the Heideggerian and Marxist perspectives can be seen as complementary.

Furthermore, the similarity between Marcuse’s and Ž iž ek’s criticisms of Heidegger’s ahistoricality points to deeper commonalities between the two. As several writers (e.g., Sharpe 2004, 2005, Day 2004) have noted, there is an interesting parallel between the historical context of Žižek’s work and the work of the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. Sharpe (2004, 9-10) explains how both the Frankfurt school in the 1930’s and Žižek in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s faced a situation in which existing Marxist theory lacked purchase, where, generally speaking, the right was ascendant and the left lacking both in power and ideas. Given this similarity in context and the accompanying similarities in background—including Marxism, psychoanalysis, and, up to a point, Heideggerian phenomenology—it is little wonder that the Frankfurt School thinkers and Žižek also converge in seeing one of the most important fields for philosophy in the critique of ideology and culture. If, as Sharpe (2004, 10) puts it, “Žižek faces a contemporary analogue of the theoretical impasse” that the Frankfurt School grappled with, the parallels between Freudian Marxism and Lacanian Marxism as solutions are also considerable. The critique of political economy, civilisational or cultural critique and critique of ideology are the vital fields that receive various amounts of emphasis in the various stages of the different thinkers, but together form a persistent focus.

In Sharpe’s (2004) analysis Marcuse is a kind of precursor to Žižek, up to the point that Žižek’s conclusion—Sharpe calls the conclusion a dead-end: either a cynical dismissal of politics or a leftist voluntarism—can already be found in Marcuse. The

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fundamental problem Sharpe sees in both Marcuse and Žižek is connected to the way in which they proceed with a critique of ideology. By analysing ideology as a total phenomenon that saturates modern life, they end up in a position of “if I succeed, I fail”. Through offering robust explanations of how revolutionary action has failed and how capitalism is able to neutralise all subversion, Western Marxism at the same time succeeds in pointing out how all resistance is futile. In a sense, if Lacan’s explicitly apolitical and structuralist psychoanalysis does give to Žižek’s account augmented powers of precision and sophistication, it at the same time threatens to push the goalposts of actual political action even further away. As Sharpe (2004, 12, see also 254) writes:

to the extent that one manages to map the totalistic systematicity of social reproduction, one to the same extent flirts with ‘explaining away’ the possibility of any futural transformative political agency.

Correspondingly, there is the continuing problem of pinpointing the agent of revolutionary struggle in a way that would be at the same time theoretically grounded and politically viable. It has been hard, both for the Frankfurt School and for Žižek to find social groups, not to speak of a class, that would at the same time be in the position of revolutionaries, as designated by the theory, and actually willing to embrace a revolutionary consciousness. Žižek has repeatedly named the excluded, such as slum-dwellers, forced to lead a “rootless existence, deprived of substantial links” (2000, 140, see also 2005b) as the contemporary proletariat. Likewise, Marcuse identified the revolutionary potential in marginal groups not yet integrated into the one-dimensional society. However, as Sharpe points out, the position of these groups does by no means automatically lead to proletarisation; quite the contrary: “Abjection can lead to depoliticisation, or even the conservative desire just ‘to get one foot in the door’” (2004, 234). Consequently, Sharpe (2004, 12) sees both Marcuse and Žižek in a vacillating position between resigned cynical determinism and voluntarism. As we will see later, in Žižek this oscillation seems to be stabilising towards an explicit embrace of voluntarism; also because he sees in Heidegger’s best political philosophy a Lukácsian embrace of the need for decisive action that in itself creates its own conditions of success.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE LIBERAL SUBJECT

Even the critics of Heidegger admit that one of his lasting contributions is the idea that Being is historical. In other words, Being and time are connected in a way that makes Being historical. Human being (Da-sein)20 is the place (Da) where Being is unconcealed, unconcealed in general and unconcealed in a particular way as this or that. It is unconcealed as humans bring about a world, not by doing or being busy but by being in time, being in a way that is permeated with time. This is the only way in which humans can be. Human being is always already historical, it is born and it is mortal. Being has its history, unlike in traditional philosophy that saw the most

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essential metaphysical categories as eternal. This description of the historical nature of Being and the mortality of human being has saturated almost all of the 20th century philosophy after Heidegger.

The fundamentally political nature of metaphysics (and all thinking and philosophy) follows already from the connection between Being and time. However, the inseparability of metaphysics and politics can be illustrated more clearly by noticing how the history of Being also entails a certain locality of Being. If the understandings of Being that humans have change according to the temporal history of Being, they also change according to the spatial history of Being. In other words, spatially separated kinds of Dasein that exist simultaneously in physical clock-time contain different historical understandings of Being, for precisely the same reasons that temporally separate kinds of Dasein that exist in the same physical coordinates contain different historical understandings of Being. If, for instance, the understanding of Being in classical Greek antiquity is different from the understanding of Being in 18th century Europe (including Greece), so too (and for the same reason!) the understanding of Being in 18th century Greenland is different from the understanding of Being in 18th century Germany (not that either Greenland or Germany existed in the 18th century). Heidegger would not use “Greenland” as an example. Rather, he speaks of “Kaffirs”, “Semitic nomads” and “Russians” as examples of non-German and non-European understandings of Being.21 Times have changed, and maybe it would not be useful to contrast the “Greenlandic” and “German” understandings of Being in the 19th or 20th centuries, simply because the European pressure on Greenland has begun to bear fruit, unifying the lives and modes of being. The same goes for “Russia”, “Kaffirs”, and so on. In any case, Heidegger leaves no room for doubt about this spatial/local aspect of different understandings of Being. One well-known example is his fascination with Far-Eastern traditions of thought,22 and in the Spiegel-interview he uses this trope in establishing a special task for German-European thought in overcoming the metaphysics of subjectivity.

The historical and local nature of understandings of Being (of metaphysics in general, of the questions “why is there something rather than nothing?”, “what is (there)?”, “what is Being?”) mean for Heidegger that the subject-object distinction that modern European rationality assumes as a universal hallmark of objectivity and truth has to be discarded. Heidegger’s criticism of the metaphysics of subjectivity is one with his criticism of liberalism. The first could be called the anthropological and the second the political wing of the Heideggerian grand critique. For Heidegger, to think of humans and to act as a human according to the view that to be human is to be a subject that through her or his senses gains a view to a separate world, gathers information about it and ultimately knowledge of separate objects, is only one possible way among many others; a way that has a history in the sense that it has not always existed and not always will.23 This is the first step. The subject-object distinction is neither a universal truth (about human being, for instance) nor any kind of (say, epistemic or scientific) necessity. The starting point for this Heideggerian step is the obvious experiential fact that humans do live and experience without the

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subject-object distinction (for instance, in anxiety). Subjects and objects do exist, to be sure, since living according to the subject-object distinction is one human possibility. The subject is something that can be created by living in a particular way.

A second, important step follows. The subject-object distinction contains a necessary perversion, since the subject (or, more generally, the distinction) does not do what it is supposed to do. The subject is a human possibility, but a bad one, because it perverts human being. The reason for the perversion is again easy to see. The subject contains a circularity that theories based on the subject-object distinction are unable to acknowledge. Here we have to be precise. Heidegger does not object to circularity, as such. In a famous way he makes circularity a positive part of the hermeneutic method (Being and Time, §2). Rather, the problem is that the circularity included in the subject-object distinction goes unnoticed, or, even worse, repressed, and the distinction gets presented as a scientifically objective or philosophically necessary starting point.

The problems following from the unacknowledged nature of the circularity can be pointed out in many ways. Maybe one of the clearest is to start from a criticism of natural science. Like his mentor Husserl24 before him, Heidegger insists throughout his career that natural science is circular in a way that it itself is unable to recognise. Natural science claims that the subject and the object are something discovered in nature. It claims that nature consists of things (entities, objects) and that the human doing science—or the scientific community, or the community of rational beings, or any other subject of science—is also a thing, for instance, a brain, or a mind, or something similar. However, in fact, the subject-object division has to be presupposed for there to be natural science in the first place. Without the distinction (typical)25 natural science is not possible (measurement is impossible, objects can not be individuated, separated, categorised, the influence of the researcher on the environment can not be controlled, etc.). So what happens is that features of the silently presupposed subject-object distinction get mixed up with the supposedly objective and non-circular results of science. Also the supposedly objective knowledge about the distinction (or of subjectivity or of objectivity) itself is tainted by the circularity. In a crude and absolutely binding way this is the reason for the fact that natural science is unable to recognise the will to power and technological manipulation inherent in its pursuit of objective knowledge. The subject, the object and “thingness” are not discovered in nature, but presupposed in order for natural science to be possible. Furthermore, for natural science to gain its authority, the presupposition has to be denied. The result is a perversion of scientific activity and of all knowledge based on the subject-object distinction.

In philosophy the unacknowledged nature of the circularity can be seen in the view that philosophy should be about the maximally unambiguous communication of propositional information between rational subjects. A particularly bad case of this perversion Heidegger sees in Descartes, who in an unabashed way lays the foundation of philosophy on a thinking (doubting) subject. Heidegger uses huge amounts of time and pages in order to show that many philosophically interesting and decisive

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moves have been made long before we are anywhere near this kind of self-conscious ego, pondering the idea of a perfect God. At the same time the ego, the subject, is only a tiny speck in the sea of human experience. For Heidegger, the Cartesian ego is punctual, ahistoric and spiritless. In 1933 (GA36/37, 42-43), Heidegger groups the things overlooked by Descartes into four different sets: action, decisiveness, historicity and being-with (Handeln, Entschiedenheit, Geschichtlichkeit, Mitdasein). It is noteworthy that all four have to do with the social and embodied, i.e., non-individual and non-intellectual, aspects of human being. All of this comes before the ego and forms part of the stuff from which the ego is formed, and all of this is overlooked by Cartesian modern philosophy, and therefore continues to fester inside the supposedly sanitised notion of subjectivity. Consequently, unwittingly and often to its own considerable surprise such Cartesian thinking ends up as an errand-boy for individualism and nihilism26, in the same way that supposedly neutral natural science unwittingly and to its sometimes great consternation ends up supporting the technological domination and destruction of nature.

Because this issue is so crucial, let us attend to another long quote from Heidegger. Here he explicates the circularity point by point, this time in terms of “culture”, or, as Žižek would call it, ideology. The topic is racist thinking—and here we at the same time encounter the clear fact that Heidegger was not and could not have been a biological racist27:

Racial breeding is a measure undertaken by power. It can be instigated and stopped by power. It bases its proclamations and ways of operating on the prevailing conditions of power and domination. Its is not in any way an ‘ideal’ as such, because as an ideal it should lead to an abandonment of claims to power and to a preservation of ‘biological’ traits. So, strictly observed, in every kind of racial thinking we see already an inbuilt thought of racial supremacy. The supremacy is grounded in different ways, but always on something that the ‘Race’ has achieved, when the achievements are measured by the yardsticks of ‘culture’ or something similar. But how, when culture—in the narrow sense of racial thinking itself—is itself a product of the Race? (The circle of subjectivity). Here the circle of subjectivity, that has forgotten itself, comes clearly to the fore, not as something that contains only the metaphysical determination of the I, but as the determination of all human being in relation to beings and to itself. (GA69, 70-71)28

Racial thinking can not think race objectively, neither as biological nor as cultural. In biology, it sees traits to be avoided or eradicated, even though it should see biological traits, in culture it sees achievement and degeneration through the lenses of the culture doing the study. This because the idea of race contains the circularity of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Race does science on race and tries to hide this circularity. The race doing the study is already presupposed, even given a privileged position, and therefore it muddles up all the ostensibly “neutral” results—in this case impinging them with a will to power included in the idea of racial supremacy.

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Like Heidegger points out, this is not a problem peculiar to racial thinking, but rather a problem characterising all thinking based on the subject-object distinction. The same circularity can be found in contemporary natural science that often flatters itself by imagining it has left crudities like racial thinking behind. Often, for instance, natural science explains human behaviour by genes, without realising that here, again, genes are studying genes and explaining genes by genes, and thereby silently smuggling ideas about what genes (humans) are into the ostensibly neutral results on genes (typically, the ideas include a valorisation of survival, even a commitment to the idea that survival is somehow “good”, and ideas about the causality in nature).

If these are Heidegger’s philosophical reasons for objecting to a metaphysics of subjectivity, he also has a set of more direct and existential grounds for disliking the subject. For the kind of subject that freely chooses amongst a set of alternatives (according to some rational, economic, hedonistic or similar set of preferences) is, according to Heidegger, shallow and incapable of commitment. From here springs the criticism on liberalism. The crux is the idea of free choice. Something freely chosen can also be freely unchosen, discarded, forgotten. Nothing makes the liberal individual responsible. The liberal individual is always ready to change its choices, including changing itself, in a chameleon-like manner reflecting the freely available circumstances. Against this, Heidegger holds that a deeper and truer human being is rooted in a layer of (partly non-human) meanings that bind without the conscious or intellectual part of an individual having any final veto on what the meanings make us responsible to or responsible for. The kind of subject incapable of commitment Heidegger calls freischwebende, free-floating, and neither as a philosopher nor as a private person (sic) does he have anything good to say about modern individualism. To be free of the bounds of responsibility towards the world and God, to be free of the bottomless danger and horror of being mortal and being a people were, according to Heidegger, simply signs of degeneration. The name for this degeneration is “free-floating and rationally choosing individual”. In philosophy the degeneration takes the form of a safe and disengaged (ungefährliches und unverplichtetes) analysis of any and all problems without any need or pressing emergency (Notwendigkeit und Not, GA36/37, 6).29

What, then, do Heidegger and Žižek fear? They do not resist liberal capitalism and individualism because they would be somehow illusory. On the contrary, liberalism is a really existing phenomenon. When it comes to technology, Heidegger is not afraid that technology would break down but rather that it works without a hitch. The same goes for liberal capitalism: the problem is not that it wouldn’t work but rather that it functions very well. Like Žižek repeatedly notes citing Frederic Jameson, today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.30 Heidegger’s and Žižek’s enemy is precisely the self-evident ease with which liberalism reigns. That is why we need a totally transformative experience—a revolution.

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NOTES

1 Žižek: “One is tempted to risk a hyperbole and to affirm that, in a sense, everything, from the fate of so-called ‘Western civilization’ up to the survival of humanity in the ecological crisis, hangs on the answer to this related question: is it possible today, apropos of the postmodern age of new sophists, to repeat mutatis mutandis the Kantian gesture?” (1993, 5). Heidegger: “Nur wo das Sein sich im Fragen eröffnet, geschieht Geschichte und damit jenes Sein des Menschen […]” (GA40, 152); “Only where Being opens up as a problem, does history happen as history and humans exist as humans […]” Another, even more revealing quote from Heidegger in 1933 shows how he experienced the National Socialist revolution. Heidegger has just explained how the philosophy grounded by Plato gives a completely new way of seeing the world: “We ourselves stand today—not only after a year or so but after a number of years—in front of an even bigger decision in philosophy, a decision that is greater, wider and deeper than the decision at Plato’s time. The question is expressed in my book Being and Time. A change from the roots up. The question is whether our understanding of Being is transformed from its ground up, or not. It will be a transformation that first gives the framework for the spiritual history of our people. This can not be proven. It is a belief that must be shown to be true by history.” “Wir selbst stehen heute, nicht etwa seit einem Jahr, sondern seit einer Reihe von Jahren, in einer noch größeren Entscheidung der Philosophie, die an Größe und Weite und Tiefe noch weit über die damalige Entscheidung hinausgeht. Sie ist in meinem Buch Sein und Zeit zum Ausdruck gebracht. Eine Wandlung von Grund aus. Es handelt sich darum, ob das Verständnis des Seins sich von Grund aus wandelt. Es wird eine Wandlung sein, die allererst den Rahmen darbieten wird für die Geistes-geschichte unseres Volkes. Dies kann nicht bewiesen werden, sondern ist ein Glaube, der durch die Geschichte erwiesen werden muß.” (GA36/37, 255). Translations here and below by the author, unless otherwise indicated.

2 Heidegger is talking about experiencing language and tells, furthermore, that experience is not some-thing controlled by humans but something that is “sent” to them: “The purpose of [the three following lectures] is to give us a possibility to have an experience of language. To experience something, be it a thing, a person, a God, means that that something happens to us, hits us, comes over us, turns us over and changes us. To talk about ‘having’ an experience does not here mean that we in some way produce the experience; having means here: to go through, to suffer, to grasp what hits us, to receive, so that we join ourselves with what comes at us. It happens, it sends itself, it joins to itself.”; “[Die folgenden drei Vortrage] möchten uns vor eine Möglichkeit bringen, mit der Sprache eine Erfahrung zu machen. Mit etwas, sei es ein Ding, ein Mensch, em Gott, eine Erfahrung machen heißt, daß es uns widerfahrt, daß es uns trifft, über uns kommt, uns umwirft und verwandelt. Die Rede vom ‘machen’ meint in dieser Wendung gerade nicht, daß wir die Erfahrung durch uns bewerkstelligen; machen heißt hier: durchmachen, erleiden, das uns Treffende vernehmend empfangen, annehmen, insofem wir uns ihm fügen. Es macht sich etwas, es schickt sich, es fügt sich.” (GA12, 149).

It is interesting that Heidegger wants to talk about having or making an experience (“eine Erfahrung zu machen”), even though, for instance, in Finnish it would be easier to talk directly about experienc-ing (“tarkoituksena on antaa mahdollisuus kielen kokemiseen, kokemukseen kielestä”), without any “making” or “having”. In the same way the surrogate subject “Es” in the German and the “It” in the English passive voice add something unnecessary and unwanted: the “it” does not refer to an experi-ence of language (not: “the experience happens, the experience sends itself, etc.”), rather Heidegger is talking of subjectless happening without entities (that could be rendered in Finnish without surrogate subjects: “Tapahtuu, lähetetään, liitytään”). At most, the “subject” could be Being (Sein) or happening (Ereignis) itself. However, according to Heidegger, these two do not exist, and therefore they can not be the subjects of an action: they are action, not actors.

3 Here is Žižek (2006b): “We should have no illusions: liberal communists [Žižek means people like George Soros and Bill Gates who advocate a combination of global capitalism and social and ecolog-ical responsibility] are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies—reli-gious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies—depend on contingent

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local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.”

4 Žižek follows the leftist convention of using the term “Fascism” to denote all racist and totalitarian systems, whether they are National Socialist or Fascists. However, Heidegger’s Nazism has very little in common with Mussolini’s Fascism, and the catch-all term “Fascism” in not appropriate in this context.

5 It is typical that Heidegger comments on timely political issues in the midst of deep and abstract philo-sophical passages. For instance, while ruminating on how humans try to relate to their environment by trying to form a picture of the world, Heidegger starts blaming publishers for too commercial concerns and academic people for too much unnecessary travels to conferences (GA5, 98). The scandalous claim—we will return to it below—that extermination camps are part of the same phenomenon as industrial agriculture is made in the middle of a meditation of the essence of technology, knee-deep in the etymologies of Greek, Latin and German terms. After Being and Time, the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) is sometimes counted as Heidegger’s second major opus. It is, on the whole, a rather esoteric and fragmentary work, but it is peppered with surprising quips on the true nature of Bolshevism and the essence of Americanism (GA65, 54, 149). In the 1943 afterword to the tour-de-force Was ist Metaphysik?, in which Heidegger brilliantly explains the importance of noth-ingness for thinking of Being, he rather abruptly starts talking about readiness for and the importance of sacrifice (this immediately after the battle of Stalingrad). Most purist and orthodox Heideggerians may pass by these kinds of sentences as “individual cases”, but the truth is that Heidegger almost al-ways carried two threads throughout his lectures and writings: a linguistic and philosophical one, and an acutely political and contemporary one. The glue keeping these two together is the third element: experientiality.

6 “Der Schriftsteller Kolbenheyer sagt: ‘Dichtung is eine biologisch notwendige Funktion des Volkes’. Es braucht nicht viel Verstand, um zu merken: das gilt auch von der Verdauung, auch sie ist eine biol-ogisch notwendige Funktione eined Volkes, zumal eines gesunden. Wenn Spengler die Dichtung als Ausdruck der jeweiligen Kulturseele faßt, dann gilt dies auch von der Herstellung von Fahrräden und Automobilen. Das gilt von allem, d.h. es gilt gar nicht. […] Das alles ist so trostlos flach, daß wir nur mit Widerwillen davon reden. Aber wir müssen darauf hinzeigen. Denn erstens betrifft diese Denk-weise nicht nur die Dichtung, sondern alle Geschehnisse und Seinsweisen des menschlichen Daseins, weshalb mit diesem Leitfaden leicht kulturphilosophische und Weltanschauungsgebäude errichtet werden. Zweitens beruht diese Denkweise nicht auf der zufälligen Flachheit und dem Unvermögen des Denkens Einzelner, sondern sie hat ihre wesentlichen Gründe in der Seinsart des Menschen des 19. Jahrhunderts und der Neuzeit überhaupt. Wenn etwas mit dem viel mißbrauchten Titel ‘liberalis-tisch’ belegt werden kann und muß, dann ist es diese Denkweise. Denn sie stellt sich grundsätzlich und im vorhinein aus dem, was sie meint und denkt, heraus, macht es zum bloßen Gegenstand ihres Meinens. Dichtung ist so eine unmittelbar antreffbare Erscheinung, die es unter anderem gibt und welche Erscheinung, wie jede andere, dann durch die ebenso gleichgültige Bestimmung als ‘Aus-druckerscheinung’ der dahinter brodelden Seele aufgefaßt wird. Erscheinungen sind uns Ausdruck. Ausdruck ist auch das Bellen des Hundes. Diese Denkweise ist in sich der Vollzug einer gar bestim-mten Seinsweise des ‘liberalen’ Menschen. Sie hat sich bis auf dem heutigen Tag in einer Unzahl von Abwandlungen und Gestalten in der Vorherrschaft gehalten, zumal sie leicht eingeht, niemanden angeht und bequem überall zu gebrauchen ist.” (GA39, 27-28).

7 Heidegger writes on liberalism in philosophy: “Höningswald comes from the neo-Kantian school, which advocates a philosophy that is tailored for liberalism. Here the essence of humans is dis-solved into a free-floating consciousness that, in turn, is in the end diluted to a common and logical World-Reason. In this way, through supposedly strictly philosophical reasons the gaze is averted from the historical rootedness of humans and from the transmission of their national provenance based on blood and homeland. To this was connected a conscious withdrawal from all metaphysical ques-

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tioning, and humans were seen only as servants to a neutral, generic World-Culture.”; “Hönigswald kommt aus der Schule des Neukantianismus, der eine Philosophie vertreten hat, die dem Liberalismus auf dem Leib zugeschnitten ist. Das Wesen des Menschen wurde da abgelöst in ein freischwebendes Bewußtsein überhaupt und dieses schließlich verdünnt zu einer allgemein logischen Weltvernunft. Auf diesem Weg wurde unter scheinbar streng wissenschaftlicher philosophischer Begründung der Blick abgelenkt vom Menschen in seiner geschichtlichen Verwurzelung und seiner volkhaften Über-lieferung seiner Herkunft aus Boden und Blut. Damit Zusammen ging eine bewußte Zurückdrängung jedes metaphyschischen Fragens, und der Mensch galt nur doch als Diener einer indifferenten, allge-meinen Weltkultur.” Heidegger’s letter to Einhäuser, 25. June 1933, quoted in Faye (2009, 37).

8 “Es ist für mich heute eine entscheidende Frage, wie dem technischen Zeitalter überhaupt ein—und welchen—politisches System zugeordnet kann”. (Interview “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”, Der Spiegel, 1976, 206). Heidegger continues by noting that democracy does not seem to be the right kind of system, because democracy sees technology as a human tool, “[etwas], was der Mensch in der Hand hat” (ibid.). In contrast, Heidegger thinks that technology—like poetry!—is something that constitutes humans, and therefore something that humans alone can not overcome.

9 “Against the unstoppable power of technology, ‘cells’ of resistance will be built, cells, which incon-spicuously guard thinking and prepare for the turn […]”; “Gegen die unaufhaltsame Macht der Tech-nik werden sich überall “Zellen” des Widerstands bilden, die unauffällig die Besinnung wachhalten und die Umkehr vorbereiten […]” (Zollikoner Seminare 1987, 352).

10 Petzet (1993, chapter 3 and 77ff), Heidegger (2005, 267). 11 Heidegger took part in the internal power struggles of the National Socialist movement. Certainly,

he wasn’t one of the most adept tacticians or most hardened spin-doctors, but he knew the strategic balance in its overall shape, tried to recognise right moments for action and knew also when he was beaten. The descriptions of the details can be found in Ott (1993), Farias (1991) and Faye (2009).

12 Or what should we make of the fact that during the final months of the Second World War, Heidegger planned a kind of time capsule, a bomb-proof metal container, filled with the best parts of Hölderlin’s and his own writings, to be preserved in a castle tower along the banks of the Donau? (Heidegger 2005, 237) In his letters to Elfride in 1944-45 Heidegger returns several times to this theme: the only meaningful task is to collect the most important of his writings so that future generations have at least some seeds of thinking and plain language, so that the victory of mechanicalness and technology will not be complete (2005, 225, 229, 233, 235-237). He fears that for one reason or another he will not be able to work after the war and therefore the only hope lies in the texts that have already been written; the texts that he together with his brother Fritz catalogues and edits on his mountain cabin and in Meßkirch.

13 “Wer groß denkt, muß groß irren.” (1954, 17).14 All the members of Heidegger’s immediate family were National Socialists. Elfride Heidegger was

active in several local National Socialist organisations and on the national level belonged to the circle of Erica Semmler, the leader of NS-Frauenschaft. (Heidegger 2005, 193)

15 “Together with my friends I support the ‘Liberal Democratic Party’, which is more conservative than I am myself. But it is the only center strength, and we want to prevent that here, as in the other coun-tries of ex-Yugoslavia, there is only the one dangerous choice: old-style communism or nationalism.” Kunisch (1999).

16 Žižek’s connection to radical performance art should not be forgotten. He is not just a fan and a supporter, but commits practical jokes or mini-performances. He has, for instance, told that he has faked official letters, documents and articles (Žižek & Daly 2004, 38). He has also been caught using careless or made-up quotations (see, e.g., “Žižek on Chomsky: Black, white, and red all over” http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004183), and it is by no means clear how reliable his stories of his own life are.

17 Famously, in the Letter on Humanism from 1946, Heidegger commends Marx for having reached an essential understanding—superior to that by Husserl or Sartre—of history through the theme of alienation (GA9, 339-340). Marcuse points out that Heidegger wrote the letter while Freiburg and

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the surroundings were occupied by the French, and adds: “I don’t give much weight to this remark” (2005, 167). Political calculations by both Beaufret and Heidegger certainly influenced the genesis of the “Letter”. Still, there is little reason to doubt that Heidegger at least could have meant what he said.

18 Heidegger’s talks of Bismarck and the proletariat in a 1933-34 lecture series, cited in Faye (2009, 141, 370).

19 Indeed, as Mikko Niemelä (2013, 217) has pointed out, Lukács’ later self-criticism towards History and Class Consciousness can also be read as signalling that not all reification is reducible to a capi-talist mode of production, thus opening a door for a wider, “Heideggerian” account of alienation. My account of Heideggerian Marxism here relies heavily on Niemelä’s work.

20 Heidegger’s term Dasein does not mean an individual, a person, but a way of being shared and lived by several humans. This has often been misunderstood, not the least because Heidegger in Being and Time says that Dasein is always mine (je meines). However, he does not mean that for each individ-ual there would be one Dasein (so that I, for instance, would own my Dasein which therefore would be mine). Rather, the point is that Dasein exists only as engaged, as committed: a particular Dasein is mine in the sense that a hero is my hero. Without this kind of commitment, without the fact that someone lives/is a Dasein, that particular Dasein does not exits. Heidegger puts the same point also in the following way: “That such a way of being human is always mine does not meant that this Being becomes ‘subjectivised’, limited to a detached individual and defined through the individual.”: “Daß solches Sein des Menschen je das meine ist, bedeutet nicht, dieses Sein werde ‘subjektiviert’, auf den abgelösten Einzelnen beschränkt und von ihnen aus bestimmt.” cited in Faye (2009, 360)

21 Kaffirs (GA38, 81, 83), semitic nomads; Faye (2009, 144), Russians; Heidegger (1976).22 Such as the Chinese Taoist tradition, see May (1996).23 In the famous dialogue, “Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit. Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das

Denken”, Heidegger puts the matter like this: “The relationship between me and the object, the often mentioned subject-object relationship, that I [the speaker is the researcher, Forscher] see as the most universal, is then only a historical transformation of the relationship between humans and things, insofar as things can become objects […].” (GA13, 60): “Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Gegenstand, die oft genannte Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung, die ich für die allgemeinste hielt, ist of-fenbar nur eine geschichtliche Abwandlung des Verhältnisses des Menschen zum Ding, insofern die Dinge zu Gegenständen werden können […]”

24 Husserl’s short manifesto Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft (1911) is still unsurpassed in its con-cise criticism of the naivete and circularity in natural science and philosophical naturalism. With regard to these themes Heidegger is always very close to Husserl. Even the quip “science does not think” by the later Heidegger is well in line with the criticism presented several decades before by Husserl.

25 But maybe non-classical natural science is possible: for instance, the thought based on complemen-tarity that Niels Bohr advocated may be able to find ways of doing natural science without the naïve subject-object distinction, see Plotnitsky (2002, 1994), Pylkkö (1998).

26 Nihilism, because finitude, mortality and historicality (features lacking in a Cartesian modern individ-ual) are, according to Heidegger, necessary conditions for meaning—we will return to this below.

27 For Heidegger, biological racism or Darwinism is, naturally, a form of liberalism: “This way of think-ing [liberal biologism] is in no fundamental way different from the psychoanalysis by Freud and others. And not different from Marxism that sees the spiritual as a function of economic production […]”: “Grundsätzlich underscheidet sich diese Denkart [liberal Biologismus] in nichts von der Psy-choanalyse von Freud und Konsorten. Grundsätzlich auch nicht von Marxismus, der das Geistige als Funktion des wirtschaftlichen Produktionprozess nimmt […]” (GA36/37, 211).

28 “Rassen-pflege ist eine machtmäßige Maßnahme. Sie kann daher bald eingeschaltet bald zurückgesteltt werden. Sie hängt in ihrer Handhabung und Verkündung ab von jeweiligen Herrschafts- und Macht-lage. Sie ist keineswegs ein ‘Ideal’ an sich, denn sie müßte dann zum Verzicht auf Machtansprüche führen und ein Geltenlassen jeder ‘biologischen’ Veranlagung betreiben. Daher ist streng gesehen in jeder Rassenlehre bereits der Gedanke eines Rassevorrangs eingeschlossen. Der Vorrang gründet sich

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verschiedenartig, aber immer auch solches, was die ‘Rasse’ geleistet hat welche Leistung den Maßstä-ben der ‘Kultur’ und dgl. Untersteht. Wie aber, wenn diese und zwar aus dem engen Gesichtskreis des Rassendenkens her gerechnet nur Rasseprodukt übrhaupt ist? (Der Zirkel der Subjektivität.) Hier kommt der selbstvergessene Zirkel aller Subjektivität zum Vorschein, der nicht eine metaphysische Bestimmung des Ich, sondern des ganzen Menschenwesens in seiner Beziehung zum Seienden und zu sich selbst enthält.” (GA69, 70-71)

29 Already in Being and Time (§7), Heidegger defines his phenomenology as the opposite of all kinds of freischwebende philosophical views and “problems”.

30 For instance in “The Spectre of Ideology”, the introduction to Mapping Ideology (1995), edited by Žižek.

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