Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Volume 14, Number 2 -Volume 15, Number 1,1991

Changing the Subject: Heidegger, "the"

National and Epochal
Dennis J. Schrnidt

Calling things by their real names, unmasking and decoding that

which dominant ideological frames let pass through critical grids as
something to be taken for granted, always proposes its own intervention
as political critique of the most radical strain. One wants to say of pro-
gressive political philosophy precisely what Celan said of the poem: "elle
ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose."l By virtue ofhaving enlisted itselfin that
expose of the masked and encoded, to that end of retuming things to
their "truth," their "real" names, philosophy has always been an activity
ready to align itself with an effort to move political life forward some
degree in the direction of an ameliorated political sphere. The founding
of "the"-the singular is really quite out of place here-Western philo-
sophie tradition happens precisely when such an alignment, when the
political potential of the question, comes into view; that is, when Plato
consigns his thinking to articulating the coincidence of the dialectical
urge ofthe question with "the good.''2 Throughout the effective history of
that tradition, these animating visions of a good life, the EU npu't'tcoflEV
which are the last words of Plato's Republic (621d1), typically conflicted
and, what is worse, often showed themselves to be only fetishized self-
interest and bias; nonetheless, the affinity of the spirit of questioning
with critique proved irresistible. Questioning tends to gravitate into a
critical posture, often even against the self-interested intent ofthe ques-
tioner. The tendency of traditions to sediment and become sluggish, to
evolve into "positions," has always been a sure sign that questioning,
the life-blood ofthinking, had begun to drain away.
At the termination of one tradition of questioning, the point of its
greatest self-confidence, this affinity of thinking and the forward-mov-
ing, ameliorating, urge ofhistory is thematized and elevated to the sta-
tus of the sole, the absolute, principle of philosophy. Hegel and Marx
conceptualize this bond between thought and history by uniting the
progressive strands in each, thereby formulating the imperative that
thinking tie itself to social contradictions, to every residue of inequity

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and domination, every unemaneipated politieal formation. That for-

ward-moving instinet of the question is so powerful that Ernst Bloch
developed an entire philosophie system around its umbilicus, which he
characterized as "hope" and a compelling "transcendental hunger"
which he found working its way through every deed and decision that
bears the mark ofthe mind. 3 Yet precisely at the moment-and this is
no mere coincidence-in which what seems to be the revolutionary
potential ofphilosophy comes forward as such, philosophy itselfbegins
to speak of its own decline, end, and decadenee. Mter Marx, one finds
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Nietzsehe turning philosophy
upon itself, thereby unmasking its own taboos and twisted roots.
Thinking was called upon to face its own certain uncertainty and to
confess that it could never free itself from desires. By the time most of
us writing today began to take up the prospects that once stood as "the
philosophie tradition," they had fallen under mortal suspicion and con-
sequently the most vital discussions possible, the only questions that
still glowed with some uncanny possibility, revolved around the end of
philosophy. Philosophy as it had been picked up and handed down
proved wholly inadequate to the task of either preventing or even com-
prehending the catastrophes of our times. Something more than the
innocence of the future had been extinguished. So it came to pass that
Bloch and Marcuse, citing Kafka and Benjamin, eould only speak of
hope today in terms of its ironized appearanee: saying it is given, "but
not for us," and "only for those without it." Adorno summed up the
moment: "Philosophy, which once seemed to be overcome, remains alive
because the moment of its realization was missed."4 Philosophy had
outlived itself, surviving only as drained of all vitality.
What gradually beeame clear by way of such self-interrogation was
that philosophy would have to scrutinize the very place it had arro-
gated to itself as a discourse assigned the task of judging every dis-
course, ineluding itself. The self-authorizing dream of "the question"
was being dreamt out, we learned to redouble our suspicions of hege-
mony and authority, and the prospect of original philosophie question-
ing came to be doubted. From this perspeetive of a certain exhaustion
of possibilities, it gradually became clear that many of the long-stand-
ing assumptions of philosophie questioning were themselves merely
presumptions that were at best untenable, at worst pernicious, despite
their own avowedly progressive intent. 5 I am referring to a set of deci-
sions that have come to be gathered together under the name "onto-the-
ology," assumptions that trace their heritage back to the effort to model
thinking after an image of an infinite and omnipresent mind. I refrain
from rehearsing the struggle to formulate the claims of thinking alert
to its own finitude "against" the claims ofinfinite mind6 ; rather, for now

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I would simply single out as an instance of an onto-theological pre-

sumption that is particularly important for what folIows, the prejudice
that thinks the being each one of us is according to the model of a sub-
ject with an essence and a set of rights that are innate rather than
won. 7 Thinking that submits to such onto-theological prejudices ulti-
mately confessed its own remoteness from the life it had dedicated to
thinking when it could no longer maneuver and hide from itself.
Historical events brutally lifted the veils of a lifeworld governed, at
least ostensibly, by onto-theological assumptions of "the best." A
renewal of philosophy-at least of a radical questioning that out-
stripped the inheritances of philosophy's perceived traditions and that
was capable of hitting home-was needed.
For many, that rejuvenation of radical interrogation first appeared
as the questioning of questioning itself that Heidegger developed early
in his career. 8 Quite to the point and with what still looks like a stroke
of genius, Heidegger opens Being and Time with the assertion that we
have forgotten how to ask radical questions. The analysis that follows
that claim begins with a hermeneutics of both questioning and forget-
fulness, and ends by demonstrating that Dasein pushes itself to its own
finite truth in taking up both its death and its history.9 In that themati-
zation of the question-as lost-and of history-as forgotten10-an
avenue was opened for a recovery of thinking today. An abyssal open-
ing requiring a self-reflexive interrogation beyond the distancing and
displacing confines of every possible self-representation, beyond every
causal account of a self to the point of real freedom. Heidegger's early
works were-and still remain-heady stuff, challenging and almost
stunning in the honesty and transparency that they ask of thinking.
Significantly, this rejuvenation ofthinking seems to receive its first for-
mulation in Germany, in the Weimar years. A birthdate and place that
is no accident and that will come to haunt subsequent developments of
that line of questioning.
Even those who do not agree with me will, I am sure, understand me
when I suggest that the decision about the end of philosophy today
remains the most basic decision to be made. Furthermore, it is quite
clear that to make that decision and to affirm-even, as Nietzsche sug-
gests, to celebrate and accelerate-the end ofthe onto-theological tradi-
tion, to work in Heidegger's choppy wake, is both to take a risk and to
set oneself at odds with oneself. One takes the risk of radical error if
one is less than vigilant when answering the call for questioning with-
out restraint, even questioning our capacity to question at all today;
that is, if one thinks, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "without banisters."ll
All the landmarks are dislodged from their customary places and one
feels at first as if on a dead end. To speak German a moment (but then

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that is a question: can "we" still speak German today?12): one is on

"Holzwege" without "Wegmarken"~rso it seems. Similarly, one is at
odds with oneself to the extent that the language of philosophy still
bears the assumptions of a two millennia tradition in its grammar and
syntax, which is why Nietzsche remarked that "I fear we will believe in
God so long as we believe in grammar."13 Metaphysics is still the native
language, or at least the accent, of thinking insofar as we speak with
subjects that we predicate. One finds it necessary to interrupt oneself
continually. Language is asked to be frugal and acrobatic at once.
Parataxis, anacoluthis, words crossed out, fragmentary essays seem the
only avenues left if we are to open rather than reductively foreclose
questions today. For the moment at least, what Rorty wants to call the
"conversation" ofthe West has, ifit is honest, now to abandon any pre-
tense of fluency. Language, as Heidegger persistently reminds us, now
needs to articulate itself.
Perhaps the thorniest difficulty that one faces when one tries to
think, as Walter Benjamin suggested, "against the grain ofhistory,"14 is
that such a project requires the recovery of history from its metaphysi-
cal calcification, yet it is precisely history that sets up the most stub-
born obstacles to thinking. Such a recovery is simultaneously most
important and most problematic. Like the mind after which it modelied
itself, onto-theology suffers no death and so has no history. Immunized
against both, the onto-theological tradition could only concede its own
futility once faced with death as the question ofhistory in the "unthink-
able" questions posed by history today beginning with Auschwitz and
Hiroshima. Consequently, basic to the project of overcoming that tradi-
tion belongs the recovery of death and history, of what Heidegger ini-
tially characterized as the finite transcendence of Dasein. 15 But there is
an irony, maybe even an impossibility, lurking in all of this: we learn
the need to assume our history at the same time we learn that the his-
tory of thinking can no longer be carried forward as it had been. We
learn the ineluctibility of history only to find that such knowledge
leaves us both without a future and with a moribund paste "The end"
marks an impasse and poses a paradox that are quite literally unprece-
dented. But even if entry into the end entails a shock of the new, the
paradox it introduces is itself not at all new. It is rather certainly as
"old" as modernity, if not as "old" as philosophy itself, since philosophy
has always struggled with the question of its own '[fAos and comple-
tion. But the redoubled difficulty of that paradox today is that the mod-
ernist reply, the magical clean sweep that invokes a "new beginning," a
renaissance that overcomes the paradox of the worn-out, is no longer a
thinkable answer to the impasse of the end. So we find ourselves living

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between "two eves"16 and the best we have yet done to name those
times is the rather lame prefix 'post-', still not comprehending just how
the "post-" time equally marks itself as "pre-": "The beginning still iso
[...] It stands before uso [...] The beginning has invaded our future" (BA,
12-13). At times, when the question of the future eludes us, it seems
that all we have left before us are postmortems of the paste Today one
begins, but only just begins, to understand the sense of Benjamin's
comments about the angel of history as it is painted by Paul Klee:
He is about to distance hirnself from something at which he is star-
ring. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread.... His face is turned toward the paste Where there appears
to be a chain of events before us, he sees a single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurIs it in front of his
feet...a storm is blowing from paradise; it got caught in his wings
with such force that the angel can no longer close them. This storm
irresistibly propels hirn into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris grows skyward. 17
We are beginning to understand that history has gone on behind our
backs and yet has still not yet won its rightful place in thinking today.
But what we have witnessed of late is the end of the representation of
history, the prelude to which begins with Hegel, and that has served to
prepare the way for the real entry of history into thinking.
But it is important to make a distinction here between two sets of
difficulties posed by this imperative to open the way to and recover-
that does not mean to rehabilitate, but to lay bare-history. On the one
hand, there is the recovery of the history of metaphysics, of that which
is to be overcome; on the other hand, there is the recovery of the history
of the effort to overcome metaphysics. The epoch of the end of philoso-
phy, though too "young" to know its name, is "old" enough to have its
own history, and now it must struggle with that as weIl. The entry of
history into thinking stands under the imperative of a peculiar demand
for a self-expose: if it is not to be yet another reenactment of a mod-
ernist, de-historicizing action that sweeps history out of its own future,
then claims about the end of philosophy need to attend to their own
complicities with history as that which it both does and does not pro-
pose for the future. It is this question of assuming such a history of the
effort to mobilize thinking for history that I propose to address here.
A stain of truly Sophoclean incomprehensibility and proportion
attends the birth and early years of the project of thinking and speak-
ing without unquestioned respect for the margins of metaphysical
guidelines. 18 The stain, of course, appears with the apparent and real
collusion with fascism of many of the leading thinkers, and even some
of the texts and language, working to articulate the end of philosophy.

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In particular, one thinks of Nietzsche, whose sister was easily able to

refunction and reformat his image and work in conformity with
National Socialist ends, of Heidegger's collaborative gestures to the
same ends, of de Man's youthful racist comments, and even of Adorno's
momentary alignment with National Socialist thinking. Of course, if
such naming of names mattered, one could continue and dredge up fur-
ther incriminating allegiances, pointing a finger at Lukacs and Bloch,
even Sartre on some occasions and Beaufret as well-to name a just
few more. 19 I do not want to drown the specific question ofHeidegger in
a sea of equalizing names. Above all, I certainly do not want either to
tar a movement with a wide ad hominem brush/o or to allocate myself
the arrogance ofinnocence and courage from which I might presume to
impugn failings in others. But there is a double dilemma by which I do
not want to be held captive, namely, that one risks de-politicizing a
question when one personalizes it, yet one equally risks de-personaliz-
ing and so ultimately aestheticizing a question by politicizing it. To
trespass the incommensurate boundaries ofthe personal and the politi-
cal, boundaries that shift historically, is to lose sight of precisely what
is at stake in any question. 21 Much of what must ultimately be asked
does, however, concern those boundaries: for a writer and teacher, the
question more precisely concerns the person and the work, but it also
refers us to the relation between a discourse and history. Every dis-
course is certainly a discourse of its times, but no discourse that has not
been compressed into the status of a mere document is held completely
captive by its times. These relations-public/private, personal/textual,
discourse/history-build a matrix within which the full complement of
issues raised by the "stain" is to be thought.
My purpose here is not to engage the full sweep of possible issues,
but rather to pose the most extreme form of a question which those of
us who regard ourselves as participating in such a movement can no
longer evade. The point is that potential for political incompetence and
collusion with repressive regimes seems especially great here, and we
must finally begin to ask how questioning guided by the decision to
think with respect to finitude and difference (as opposed to thinking
under the metaphysical rule ofinfinity and the same) is to cope with its
own riskiness. Unable to normativize itself, to codify its own measures,
acting only with respect to the "principle of anarchY,"22 "post-metaphys-
ical" thinking sometimes looks like it is left to be "the politics of the
ineffable."23 But, if we take seriously the idea that the founding of
Western philosophy bound itselfto a political sensibility, then we must
take seriously the idea that the overcoming of such philosophy has
already carried with it its own political sensibility and imperatives. 24
The tradition that Plato founded with a thematization of the unity of

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possible political formations with thinking under the sign of the idea
can only be overcome with a thematization oflike kind. 25
We must confess, with every trepidation possible, that a thinking
that enjoins itself in the project to overcome the tradition has already
attempted such a thematization. In particular, I refer to Heidegger's
Rectorial Address. 26 Since Heidegger never repudiated that text, it can-
not be removed by any political or conceptual surgery that would
remove "erroneous" texts, thereby relieving those of us who read
Heidegger of its burden. 27 To take Heidegger seriously, one must make
the effort to take the Rectorial Address seriously.
Here I interrupt myself to try to preempt a great misunderstanding
of my remarks. I hope that it need not be said that the occasion and con-
text ofthat Address, its proximity to fascism, can never be elided. Need
it be said that nothing stands further removed from the ameliorated
political condition than fascism? I hope it is clear, from the outset and
without any qualification whatsoever, that one of the motivations for
overcoming onto-theology is precisely that it has been found to harbor
the seeds of exclusion, repression, and domination, and that the effort to
overcome such a tradition cannot readmit such forces into itself. Every
collaboration with brutality and repression must be denounced, and we
must not wait for such forces to reveal themselves, but must be in
advance of them. The call of thinking today is precisely to call fascism by
its brutal name, to unmask it and expose its hideous face. Having a
remarkable protean quality, fascism renders difficult the question ofits
true name. But there have been serious attempts to come to terms with
the epochal dimensions of fascism and so to see through its guises to its
source. To single out one such effort that I believe offers productive
resources for those attempting to mobilize Heidegger's thought for ends
that would preempt the appearance of fascism, I point toward Walter
Benjamin's work. Precisely at the moment of fascism's entry as itself
into culture and history, Benjamin named the effort to mobilize thinking
to the defeat of fascism as the task of thinking today, and in his essay,
"Art in the Epoch of its Technological ReproducibilitY,"28 Benjamin the-
matizes the link between fascism and modern technicity, a link that
Heidegger himself is dedicated to exposing as the wrenching power of
the Gestell. According to Heidegger, metaphysics culminates in the reign
oftechnic and ofvalues, and it is no accident that the political constella-
tion that appears in conjunction with that culmination is fascism. The
call for the overcoming of metaphysics is simultaneously the call for the
overcoming of that political constellation. 29 Significantly, the Rectorial
Address takes the issue ofthe technical organization ofthe university as
its critical target. Yet before we can move with any confidence in answer
to that call, we need to ask about both the real and the apparent proxim-
ity of the first moment in which an answer to that call was attempted.

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How are we to pick up as our own an intellectual tradition that seems

to have shown itself ready to come so close to precisely what needs
overcoming?
While many were not ready to think through such a question and
most were content to perform a sort of surgery on thinking to separate it
from its risks, a few did find themselves captivated by the question of
political thinking at the end of the tradition. In particular, one thinks of
Arendt, Levinas, Celan, and, to a lesser extent, Werner Marx and
Gadanler. 3o I do not mean to suggest that theirs are the only efforts;
quite the contrary, since today there are numerous such attempts. I do,
however, want that roster of names to indicate that attention to the
political meaning of difference and finitude is not recent and is not sim-
ply a defense against recent wide-spread denunciations of the transfor-
mations in thinking that have followed in Heidegger's wake. 31 Rather,
the sense that avenues opening onto real and progressive political think-
ing are opened by the end of metaphysics is not a new sense, but does
have its own history which now should be taken up as weIl. Yet while
there do exist such attempts to mobilize the Heideggerian thought of
difference to the end of an ameliorated politicallife, until recently such
attempts have not begun by first confronting the documented risk, the
early "stain," ofthat thought. It is not the case that recent "revelations"32
are truly recent and so have caught us by surprise. Nothing of great
surprise has come to light recently, even if it is the case that our worst
suspicions about Heidegger's involvement in the Nazi Party have now
been confirmed. What has changed significantly is the distance which
we now seem to have from Heidegger, as weIl as our readiness to face
our own distress, namely, that we still haue understood nothing. That, of
course, is the real issue: whether we who have been defined by an
impossible heritage know how to move forward from this point. The
period of the deferral of that distress, the stretch of time in which we
never understood that we still understand nothing, aperiod that
Lyotard, repeating Freud, finds as worthy of thinking in terms of its
Nachträglich character,33 has reached the point at which such deferral is
no longer tenable. "We" have now to ask about ourselves, for in the end
it is us, our reply, that has been problematized for the present.
Among the recent attempts to ask the question of the risks and pos-
sibilities of political thinking in Heidegger's wake, I propose to single
out two, one writing in German, the other in French, for comment. 34
Both Habermas and Lacoue-Labarthe have made relatively recent and
yet already controversial contributions to the question of political ques-
tioning in Heidegger's wake. Both have done so previously,35 but their
most recent contributions do so by explicitly raising the question of the
"risk" and "stain" posed by the "Heidegger affair." Both begin with the

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proclamation that they remain open to the possibilities opened by

Heidegger's thought, yet the resulting differences could hardly be
greater. Since both reject any refusal ofHeidegger's thought in toto and
both acknowledge the originality ofhis thinking, it is perhaps advisable
to begin by asking just what it takes to "take Heidegger seriously." Can
either Habermas or Lacoue-Labarthe lay claim to such an effort?

Habermas begins his remarks by giving and taking away the entire
question in a flash, and he does that only to instantly enroll himself in
the question he has just removed. Watch both the tropes that pivot
around the word 'but' and the impact of the word 'we'36:
The moral judgment of a later generation, which in any case is
called forth more strongly by Heidegger's behavior after 1945 than
by his political engagement during the Nazi period, must not be
allowed to cloud our view of the substantial content of his philo-
sophie work. But just as little should the legitimate distinction
between persona and work cut off the question of whether-and if
so, to what extent-that work itself may be affected, in its philo-
sophical substance, by the intrusion of elements of what we
Germans call Weltanschauung-an ideologically-tinged worldview.
This question takes a cleared shape in light of Farias and Hugo
Ott. But it cannot be answered with the methods of historical anal-
ysis alone. (WW, 431; emphasis added)
From the outset, then, Habermas writes from the very same perspec-
tive that he knows to have been rendered problematic by the topic of
his own text. Habermas asserts a distance from Heidegger that is the
distance of a "generation," but he confesses that such a distance still
does not know precisely how remote it is from that earlier generation:
But in general as members of a later generation who cannot know
how we would have acted under conditions of a political dictator-
ship, we do weIl to refrain from moral judgments on actions and
omissions from the Nazi era. (WW, 433; emphasis added)
Of course, that is the question: just who is this "we"? Who can it be
today and how can it be constituted in the face of the impasses which
mark the history that delivers us over to such a question? Around what
can an enlarged and emancipatory solidarity be found today? From
what perspective can a critical questioning be achieved today? How can
a language and memory, the fabric of community, be found today that
defines itselfby a true distance from the failures ofthe past, not simply
by a denial of its own relation to that past? By means of a lightly paro-
die jab, Habermas tries to distance himself from Heidegger's efforts to

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broach these questions. Speaking of Heidegger's work after Being and

Time, Habermas writes:
Now it is a "people" and no longer the individual, which ek-sists.
Not we as individuals, but We with a capital 'w' see ourselves
exposed to the "need of turning" and the "prevailing of the mys-
tery." (WW, 442)
Habermas continues by noting that Heidegger interpreted this "We" by
means of "the nationalistic privileging of German fate" (WW, 443). This
question of nationality, a perspective from which Habermas writes and
to which he alludes, although never problematizes, is all-important,
and it is a question toward which Heidegger himself directs us when he
writes about his own political activities during the Third Reich, saying
that his motivation was attached to a sense of the importance of "the
National" and not to other elements of Nazi doctrine: "the Social and
the National were not in my view existentially connected to the biologi-
cal-racist world view doctrine."37 One might weIl wonder about
Heidegger's inability to see through the shams of criminal excuses mas-
querading as doctrine and about his failure to see the "leaders" for the
thugs they were, but his failure should not disable us from asking
about the very real and important differences between such "doctrine"
and those comments by Heidegger that bear some undeniable resem-
blance to the language of that "doctrine." The point of greatest proxim-
ity seems to be on the issue of "the National," and it is that point that
should be called forward along with the equally crucial question----one
that we are even farther from being able to ask today----of "the Social."
There is a very real sense in which Heidegger singles out "the Germans"
as bearers of "destiny" in the present, and so it is not only the sense of
"nationality" working here, but also this "singularity" that begs to be
thought. One sees this in several remarks that ring out as the expres-
sion of nationalism at its worst, such as one reads in the lecture course
on Heraclitus given in 1943-44:
The planet is in flames. The essence of humankind is out of joint.
World-historical reflection can only come {rom the Germans, on the
condition that they find and preserve "the German. ''38
One notes the curious condition attached to this privilege, a condition
that renders difficult the very notion of "the" national insofar as it indi-
cates that Germans, "the most metaphysical people," still have not yet
found the "truth" of Germany in this age of the overcoming of meta-
physics. Nonetheless, even with the condition appended, those are eerie
words rendered all the more difficult to think by the era of their utter-
ance. But we should not let their difficulty for us obstruct the political-
historical question toward which they point. It is a question all the

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more difficult to pose, since it is ultimately directed at us and the possi-

bility offutures, a question about the limits ofthe 1tOAtc:- and the domin-
ion of its laws.
Habermas indicates that he has chosen to address "the Heidegger
controversy" as a German ofthe Federal Republic. 39 From that perspec-
tive, he is able to identify "Heidegger's attitude to his own past after
1945 [as] exemplifIying] astate ofmind that persistently characterized
the history ofthe Federal Republic until weIl into the sixties" (WW, 435).
An attitude belonging to "the milieu of the Adenauer era of repression
and silence" (WW, 454). But rather than asking about this repression
and silence as a political-historical manifestation, Habermas depoliti-
cizes the question by turning it into a matter of individual failing:
"What makes Heidegger into a manifestation, typical for his time, of a
widely influential post-war mentality concerns his person-not his
work" (WW, 454). In that move, Habermas retreats from the question of
history and entangles himself in the same basic confusion that I believe
proves to be the tragic error governing Heidegger's own political
engagement. 40 I am referring to a confusion of the national, epochal,
and personal. The "Heidegger question" is an urgent question, but it
loses both its sharpness and urgency if it is simply addressed as a "per-
sonal" question or even as a "national" question. It is urgent because,
as Habermas himself admits, Heidegger's work stands as one of the
greatest contributions to the language of our times, and it is incum-
bent upon "us" to ask how that work stands in relation to time itself.
Because Habermas turns the question around those axes, he is left only
to conclude that the issue has not "become anything more than special-
ists' affairs" (WW, 456). What Habermas neglects is the real point to be
thought, namely, that it is most urgent to ask how both the national
and the personal have been rendered problematic today by history.
More precisely, it is necessary that we ask how the crisis of the present
is to be understood as a crisis of history itself, the point at which his-
tory begins to confess itself. Blanchot refers to another who understood
that point and who dedicated a body of work to thinking through its
significance for those who had outlived the death that history brought:
"Celan knew that the Shoah was the revelation of the essence of the
West."41 In the legalized illegalities offascism, the law ofWestern politi-
callife emerged as a kind of photographic negative of what was always
sought. If "we" are to think the upheavals that made possible and
accompanied the Nazi horror, and if we are to understand how "we"
are to forge a pact with history that would preempt such horror from
appearance in history again, then we must think the deepest historicity
ofhistory, that is, we need to think the capacity ofhistory to be effective,
repetitive, to transmit power and repression alike, to bring to appear-

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ance, and to marginalize all at once. 42 But first and foremost, we need
to ask about the proximity to the very worst of what it was attempting
to overcome of that discourse which set itself to overcoming meta-
physics by means of clarifying the force of historicity that undermines
every metaphysics.
Habermas denies that Heidegger's thought offers anything toward
the end of thinking history: "The more real history disappeared behind
Heideggerian 'historicity', the easier it was for Heidegger to adopt a
naive, yet pretentious, appeal to 'diagnoses of the present' taken up ad
hoc" (WW, 434). Instead of a confrontation with "real" history, Habermas
finds Heidegger thinking history by means of an operation of "abstrac-
tion by essentialization" (WW, 449, 453) that produces an "idealistically
deified history" (WW, 441). Only in passing does Habermas critically
allude to one of the productive ways in which Heidegger urged that his-
tory be confronted, namely, in thinking language as the preservation of
history.43 What Habermas does not say, and what he would very likely
dispute is that Heidegger does understand that history is the rising
and falling of singular events, events that hammer horne the truth of
what he early designated as 'Jemeinigkeit'. Yet such events are the
events of mortals in their brief appearance, that is, those events must
be thought as passing away and leaving no trace behind save what is
translated into the memory of the idiom of the word and the happening
of the work of arte To think history, as Heidegger urges us to confront
it, is thus to think language as history that has happened, and it is to
preserve a sense ofthe limits ofhistory, namely, a sense that what is to
be thought has already left no trace behind.
This relation between language and history is among Heidegger's
most powerful insights, and it is certainly among the most important
clues and prospects for thinking that understands its time as at the
"end" ofphilosophy. But the effort to think history from out ofthat rela-
tion is not the sole avenue one finds in Heidegger for thinking the
impasse of thinking today. Nor is it the element of history that plays
the most decisive role in "the Heidegger controversy."44 What is most
important to realize is that one cannot understand the crisis at the
heart of this controversy until one understands that it is a crisis not
simply of an individual's involvement in one of history's horrors, but
rather a crisis that points toward the more dangerous dynamics of
nationalism and the unsettling relation of discourse to history.
Ultimately, one needs to understand what Celan has already told us:
that this controversy and crisis is to be thought as the epochal fulfill-
ment of a certain 'tEAOs, one that delineates the essential metaphysical
topography of the West and that designates the end of the West as a

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teleological arrival. That 'tEAOC: in terms of which "we" must begin to

think "our" times indexes thinking today to early Greece. Habermas is
right when he claims that Heidegger understood the "we" today as
"heir to the Greeks" (WW, 445), but he does not ask about the persistent
haunting of German philosophy since Hegel, since the entry of philoso-
phy into its end, ofthis shadow oftragic Greece. Nor does he press that
point and ask about the specific content of the real confrontation with
Greek thought in Heidegger. Yet Heidegger's contention is precisely
that in that confrontation, that effort to re-read "the" Greeks, to "out-
Greek the Greeks,"45 one gains a certain clarity about the real stakes of
the present age. In other words, one learns that history has pinned our
times today to a specificity, one the contours ofwhich are clearly visible
in the constellations of contemporary life, namely, to the specific task of
thinking the Gestell as the contemporary manifestation of 'tEXV11.
Habermas is once again right when he notes that for Heidegger "tech-
nology, now the signature ofthe epoch, expresses itselfin the totalitar-
ian 'circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption'" (WW, 447).
What Habermas does not acknowledge, and what Heidegger himself
leaves unthematized, is that the critique of"the essence oftechnology,"
the retrieval of the question of 'tEXVll, is a radical critique not simply of
one dimension of modern politicallife, but of the very idea of the politi-
cal as it has remained unquestioned up until the crises of the present
age. That is why Lacoue-Labarthe could press a point already made by
Hannah Arendt and conclude that "National Socialism at no point pre-
sented itself as a determinate politics... , but rather as the truth of the
politi<;al" (HAP, 114/77). Setting aside for the moment the crucial ques-
tion of the singularity of the crisis of history that is identified with
Auschwitz, I call attention instead to the political significance of the
specific content to which the history designates as the real name of
"our" present: the Gestell. 46

When the metaphysical determination of the 1tOAtc: was first defined

by Plato, it was framed as a question of 'tExvll. At least that is the frame-
work within which Plato has Socrates pose the question ofthe determi-
nation ofthe political: all activities seem to require a special knowledge,
a 'tExvll; what then is the 'tEXV11 appropriate to the determination of the
"good" 1tOAtc:? Couching the question of the 1tOAtc: within the question of
'tExvll proves to be decisive for the effective history and governing image
dominating Western political philosophy, an image "ofthe city as a work
of art" (RAP, 102/66). That is why it can be said that the onto-theological

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tradition is one in which "the political is the sphere of the {ictioning of

beings and communities" (HAP, 125/82). Political thinking is wedded to a
notion of self-production that in turn is bound to a conception of the
(political) subject thought according to the relation of that subject to the
will to its own self-production. Nietzsche named the animating spirit of
such thinking "the will to power," and he understood that the will to
power is itself art. 47 During the first years of the Nazi domination,
Benjamin made the connection clearer still: fascism is "the aesthetiza-
tion ofpoliticallife."48 That is a point that has a certain empirical visibil-
ity: the role of the "artist" in the formation of the Nazi state is clear-
from Speer and Riefenstahl, through the place of Wagner's music and
the layout of the autobahns, to the failed artist Hitler hirnself, the Third
Reich can be thought, according to the film director Syberberg, as the
"total artwork of a perverted West."49 Lacoue-Labarthe understands this
connection and even touches upon another connection that needs to be
thought (more than he hirnself does) in providing the phrase "national
aestheticism." It is this understanding of the political significance of the
work of art that enables Lacoue-Labarthe to make the interesting and
important suggestion that "racism-and anti-Semitism in particular-is
primarily, fundamentally, an aestheticism" (HAP, 109-110/69).50 Likewise,
it enables hirn to find and pursue one of the threads running through
Heidegger's thought that leads to a fundamental criticism offascist poli-
tics: "Heidegger, insofar as his project in the 1930s consists explicitly in
'overcoming' aesthetics, gives a privileged access-and perhaps the only
possible access-to the essence of the political that is simultaneously
veiled and unveiled by National Socialism" (HAP, 115/77).
Heidegger's effort to rethink and refunction the notion and legacy of
the Greek sense of tEXVll is weIl known. That effort is generally dated
from the texts immediately following Heidegger's departure from the
rectorate, especially Introduction to Metaphysics and "The Origin of the
Work of Art" (both 1935), while the continuation ofthat project through
a concern with the work of art and with modern technology is clear,
though there is less clarity about the relation of those concerns to the
question oflanguage that equally belongs to this point. 51 However, ifwe
are to read the Rectorial Address, then it is necessary that we recognize
that the effort to radically problematize tEXVll is central to that text as
weIl. A full discussion of that effort is beyond the scope of this essay;
however, it should be noticed that the introduction of the question of
tEXVll, as a question of the University as the site of the organization of
knowledge,52 is made by means of a passage from Aeschylus which
names the "weakness" of tEXVll: "tEXV11 ö'avaYKllc acrSEvEcrtEpa Jlaxpffi"
(BA, 11). Heidegger interprets the passage as folIows: "That means:
every knowledge of things remains already handed over to overpower-

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 SCHMIDT/CHANGING THE SUBJECT

ing destiny and fails before it" (BA, 11). From the outset, tExv11 is mea-
sured "against" the more powerful power of history, and with that the
horizon of the determination of the political is dislodged from its meta-
physical relation to tEXV11, a relation which freezes the 1tOAtt:: out of his-
tory and thereby masks its truth. Insofar as a community is founded on
the condition that it is lifted out of time, it becomes the site of only cal-
cified relations, not of real, that means mobile, relations. It becomes, in
other words, merely the representation of community, and it lives
according to the coercions it imposes upon itself. 53
True community is possible only in rare moments, and its possibility
numbers among its requirements much that cannot be willed. Yet even
if there is an element of a gift in the achievement of community, it still
requires of us an exertion that Heidegger characterized as an uncanny
readiness, a potential that he frequently called the essential aspect of
Greek Dasein and that he found so weIl articulated by Sophocles,
namely, to 8EtVOV. In the end, I believe that is the still undeveloped
thought that one finds in Heidegger as promising for progressive politi-
cal thinking: what solidarity can be reached cannot exclude the essential
strangeness that we are to each other, as weIl as to ourselves. It is that
strangeness, that abyss that each of us is as answerable for ourselves
despite every pressure, that cannot be fictionalized, cannot be substan-
tivized or normalized, cannot be resolved into a subject, but remains
fundamentally free. The 1tOAtt:: that excludes the place of that strange-
ness, that introduction of difference in the finite temporality of Dasein,
excludes the place for its members. I say this only to point in the direc-
tion which I believe is now to be pursued. It is a direction that one finds
already anticipated in Heidegger, a direction that leads the question of
tExv11 to the question of 811(11, since "the 8EtVOtatov of the ÖEtVOV, the
strangest ofthe strange, lies in the countervalent relation between 811(11
and tEXV11" (EM, 124). Heidegger did begin to ask about this "other" econ-
omy of 811(11 in circumstances still very close to the war and at a point
when no one could pretend to be blind any longer to the horrors it never
really hid. Writing in 1946, Heidegger turns to a sustained reflection on
the "oldest" saying of the West-but one must ask according to the mea-
sure ofwhat "calendar" it is the oldest-a saying in which Anaximander
speaks of the relation of ÖtKll and the order of time. There is, of course,
much that must be done if "we today" are to ask with seriousness about
Ö11(1l, about the possibility of ''justice'' today. If we are to do that, we
need to begin again by asking how the question of justice is able to be
asked in relation to history. More precisely: Is there even the possibility
ofjustice any longer? Can there be social relations that are not bound by
the restrictive economy of the Gestell and its calculus of exchange and
retribution? The first, tentative steps in the direction of answers comes

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in learning how to assurne our difficult and impossible history and in

beginning to recognize that we are still held in the grip of an image of
knowing that remains modelled after a fictionalized mind that we are not.

But what about the "Heidegger controversy"? How important is it for

"us"? What are "we" to do? Heidegger is among the first to drive horne
the realization that history has pressed the issue of technicity upon uso
However, it remains a very real question whether Heidegger's own
efforts to think down that path, especially during the decisive years dur-
ing the rise offascism in Germany, expose or rather serve to further the
worst manifestations of the political present of such technicity. But
again, the question is directed to us and to our ability to find a critical
site from which the significance ofthe Gestell can be gauged.
It is clear that we should not suffer from further confusion: we should
not let the often contemptible and sometin1es sad errors of a dead man
be the reason we kill a living thought. Heidegger never owned that
thought, and he certainly was not alone in bringing it to our attention.
But the attempt to kill the thought by exhuming Heidegger has been
carried on with some frequency oflate, and it is important that the ideo-
logical agenda of such maneuvers be made transparent. Nonetheless,
that maneuver should not deflect attention away from the real difficulty:
if we are to pick up a line of thinking as promising, then it is incumbent
upon us to ask about its risks and liabilities. We should never presume
that the project of overcoming the onto-theological tradition has any
immunization against horror and tragic error. But that shattered confi-
dence should not be cause for a retreat to what has the greater share of
complicity in that horror and the crises we face today. It should rather
be the occasion oftrue vigilance, namely, ofradical self-critique.
What does it take to take Heidegger seriously? I believe it takes the
decision that the distortions of contemporary life-from the microscopic
to the macroscopic, the difficulties of personal relations and the seeming
impossibility of any larger circle of relations-are rooted in long habits
of thinking and understanding such relations. Habits of the mind have
been instituted and have taken on an effective life of their own effec-
tively distorting the possibilities ofliving in such times. Heidegger put a
radical question to our times; if we are to find a way to live in these
times justly, then we must not shrink from the question. If we are to
move beyond such distortions, we must ask, with seriousness, about the
stakes of history today at its end.

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NOTES

1. "[I]t does not impose itself, it exposes itself." Paul Celan, Gesammelte
Werke 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 181.
2. For a discussion of the initial radicality of the Platonic recommendation of
the life of theory, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Lob der Theorie," Lob der
Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 26-50. A full discussion of the
political dimensions of the Platonic founding of philosophy would need to
follow through Gadamer's passing observation that, with the exception of
Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinkers were actively engaged in the political
life of the 7t6At~, and that the decisive Platonic gesture is to praise political
abstinence as requisite for the good life. It is significant that at the end of
the metaphysical tradition, from Marx to Sartre, we find renewed discus-
sions of the engagement requisite for a full politicallife.
3. For a discussion of the relation of language, art, and political criticism in
Bloch's work, see my "Kunst, Kritik und die Sprache der Philosophie" in
Philosophische Rundschau 4 (Winter 1987), pp. 299-307.
4. Theodor Adorno, "Negative Dialektik," Gesammelte Schriften 6
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 15.
5. It is with such a sense of the exhaustion of traditions that Lacoue-
Labarthe opens La {iction du politique by discussing the "modesty" of the
age. See La {iction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987), pp. 13ff.;
Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),
pp. Iff. Henceforth, cited as HAP with French and English page refer-
ences, respectively.
6. There are numerous places one might turn to examine such an attempt. I
call attention to my own in The Ubiquity of the Finite (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1988).
7. Habermas frames the issue in a similar fashion in the first chapter of Die
Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 9-
58; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 1-44.
8. Testimony on behalf of such a claim comes from numerous places, but I
refer especially to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), p. 34f.; Hannah Arendt, "Heidegger at
Eighty," Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1978); Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), pp. 27-54. Even Habermas is able to say:
"From today's standpoint, Heidegger's new beginning still presents proba-
bly the most profound turning point in German philosophy." (''Work and
Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,"
trans. J. McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15, No 2., p. 434; henceforth, cited as
WW with page reference).
9. In regard to this point, see especially Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1972), § 74.

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10. In this, Heidegger turns Hegel's attempt to unite history and thinking on
its head, since for Hegel history takes place in the "temple of J.lVllJ.l0cruvll"
(Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1970), p. 12).
11. It is not mere coincidence that both Plato and Heidegger call attention to
the disorientation that accompanies radical questioning. I am referring to
the remark that Socrates makes in the Republic that in philosophy one
risks a double blindness and the "infection of darkness" in the ascent to the
sun, as weIl as in the return to the cave (515a-517b), and to Heidegger's
comment that "philosophy [poses] a continual dislocation.... That is why
one often does not know which way to turn in it" (Was heißt Denken?
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975), p. 1).
12. It might be better to say that it is a question oftranslation. That is what
Heidegger seems to be indicating when he says, "Tell me what you think
about translation and I will tell you who you are" in Hölderlins Hymne
"Der [ster," Gesamtausgabe 53 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984), p. 76. For
Heidegger, the specific question concerns the translation of Greek. See,
for instance, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966),
pp. 10-11; henceforth, cited as EM with page reference. See also Der Satz
vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1978), p. 163, where Heidegger calls the
translation of Greek philosophicallanguage into Latin the most "decisive"
moment in the formation of Western metaphysics. The question of trans-
lation belongs to the task ofthinking history.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Götzen-Dämmerung," Werke (Frankfurt: Ullstein,
1976), p. 406.
14. Walter Benjamin, "Über den Begriff der Geschichte," Gesammelte Werke
1.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 697.
15. This need for the recovery of history-not the representation of history,
but the historicity and finitude of thinking-is fundamental to the point I
want to make here. But it is not an issue that I will develop here.
16. J acques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," trans. A. Bass, Margins ofPhilosophy
(Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982), p. 136.
17. Benjamin, op.cit., pp. 697-698.
18. The reference to Sophocles is deliberate and leads directly to what I take
to be one point worthy of serious pursuit. I believe that Heidegger's turn
to Sophoclean texts, especially Antigone, is to be read as an effort to con-
front his own tragic choice, one that Heidegger saw as "destined." That
Heidegger took Sophocles as giving voice to profound political insight is
clear, as evidence one only need look to the references to Sophocles and
the essence ofthe 1tOAtc: in EM and GA53, especially pp. 107f. For confir-
mation of this point, see the exchange of letters between Heidegger and
Jaspers regarding Heidegger's Rectorial Address in Martin Heidegger-
Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1920-1963 (FrankfurtlMunich: KlostermannJ
Piper, 1990), pp. 155-162. Also significant are the letters in Martin
Heidegger-Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918-1969 (Marbach:
Schillergesellschaft, 1990), pp. 48-62. For a fuller discussion of this, see

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my "Heidegger and 'the' Greeks: History, Catastrophe and Community,"

James Risser, ed., Heidegger Toward the Turn (Albany: SUNY Press, forth-
coming), and "Ruins and Roses: Hegel and Heidegger on Sacrifice,
Mourning and Memory," R. Comay and J. McCumber, eds., Endings
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming).
19. Of course, the question is not one specific to philosophy, but must be
asked as a question of the question of "intellectuallife" and the imperative
ofresistance, oflaw and resistance. For a presentation of a larger histori-
cal context that might help frame the question in that of "intellectuallife,"
see, for instance, J. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
20. In a not ·so subtle way, this is what Habermas does by means of a citation
of Manfred Frank's article, "Philosophie heute und jetzt," in which Frank
links "new French theories" to a renewal of an "irrationalist tradition...
broken off after the Third Reich." See WW, p. 436.
21. This question of the public and the private, of the limits of "the" political
(not of politicization, since everything admits of politicization), is another
point most crucial to what I am discussing here, but that I will not
develop here. However, I refer the reader to Hannah Arendt's The Human
Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), especially pp. 22-
78. I believe that it is obvious that among its many problems, this confu-
sion of the political and personal drives much of Farias' Heidegger et le
nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987). More than confusion works here though: at
times, there seems to be a deliberate conflation of such lines.
22. With that phrase, I call forward the French title of Reiner Schürmann's Le
princip d'anarchie (Paris: Editions du Seuill, 1982), a book that I find very
sensitive to the questions at issue here and that moves rather far in the
direction of the possibilities available.
23. Here I am referring to Thomas McCarthy's critique ofDerrida and "decon-
structivist politics" in "The Politics of the Ineffable," The Philosophical
Forum 21, No 1-2, pp. 146-168. While I do not agree with McCarthy's
piece, it does represent perhaps the clearest articulation of objections
raised from the perspective of a rejection of the overarching claims of fini-
tude and difference, and an acceptance of the normative possibilities of
critical questioning.
24. Such is also the case ifwe agree with Carl Schmitt's claim that all signifi-
cant theories of politicallife have been secularizations of a submission to a
theological imaginary. Heidegger's efforts to dismantle such images, to
show their essential untenability (even, one might add, for theological
inquiry itselO, can then be seen as an effort to dismantle the basic terms
of political thinking.
25. That is why Gadamer suggests that what is awaited today is a thinker
who finds a way to do for the Heideggerian thought of difference what
Marx did for the Hegelian thought of the dialectic. See Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Hegels Dialektik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1971), p. 85.

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26. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität. Das

Rektorat 1933-34: Tatsachen und Gedanken (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
1983). Henceforth, cited as SA with page reference.
27. Quite the contrary of any repudiation, we find Heidegger himself turning
back to the text to read it seriously. I am referring, of course, to
"Tatsachen und Gedanken" in SA. See also the Der Spiegel Interview,
"Nur ein Gott kann uns retten" (Der Spiegel, May 31,1976), especially pp.
196-198, where Heidegger explicitly defends the Rectorial Address by
means of an interpretation of the text.
28. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke 1/2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980),
pp. 472-508. See especially p. 473: "Die im folgenden neu in die
Kunsttheorie eingeführten Begriffe unterscheiden sich von geläufigeren
dadurch, daß sie für die Zwecke des Faschismus vollkommen unbrauch-
bar sind. Dagegen sind sie zur Formulierung revolutionärer Forderungen
in der Kunstpolitik brauchbar."
29. See, for instance, Heidegger's criticisms of fascism in paragraph 27 of
''Überwindung der Metaphysik," Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske,
1978), pp. 93-94: "Der Aktualismus und der Moralismus der Historie sind
die letzten Schritte der vollendeten Identifizierung der Natur und des
Geistes mit dem Wesen der Technik...." The reference to "Aktualismus,"
according to Lacoue-Labarthe, refers specifically to Gentile. See HAP, 160-
161/110 and 119.
30. Habermas quite aptly characterizes Gadamer's work as "the urbanization
of the Heideggerian Province," that is, in terms of its effort to answer the
larger questions of practical life and culture. See Habermas' laudatio for
Gadamer in Das Erbe Hegels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 11-31.
31. Such denunciations have their own political agenda and have become
astonishingly crude in becoming more public. Besides Manfred Frank's
article, cited earlier, I refer to Anthony Gottlieb's article, "Heidegger for
Fun and Profit," in The New York Times Book Review.
32. I am referring, of course, to Farias' book already noted, but also to the
more thoughtful and thorough work of Hugo Ott. See his Martin
Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), as
weIl as the volume edited by Bernd Martin, Martin Heidegger und das
"Dritte Reich." Ein Kompendium (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1989). But there are many others, both older and newer,
careful and reckless, to which one might refer.
33. See Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, Heidegger et "les juifs" (Paris: Editions
Galilee, 1988), especially pp. 33f.
34. My intention is not to provide a "review" of the respective "positions"
offered up by Habermas and Lacoue-Labarthe, but to turn to their work in
order to frame one approach to the questions that I have already sketched
out. Here I should indicate that the choice of Habermas and Lacoue-
Labarthe is not mine, but one suggested by the editors of this issue of the
Journal when they first approached me about writing this piece. I mention
this to indicate that, freed of editorial constraints, I might approach the

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question differently than the options offered by the framework provided

by such texts. I also might suggest other writers as worthy of serious
attention (I refer to Lyotard, Derrida, and GraneI, in particular). As an
indication of the sort of route that I might pursue apart from this editorial
constraint, I would begin by a closer look at Heidegger's readings of
Sophocles (see note 16 above). But I also mention this "editorial con-
straint" in order to give the credit due the editors for the foresight in fram-
ing the question in a manner that I believe highlights dimensions of the
issues with a special clarity found in the stark contrast between
Habermas and Lacoue-Labarthe. In particular, I find that such a contrast
calls special attention to the decisive role played by the nationality of
those writing about those issues. As I will indicate, the question of "the
national" is at the center of many of the issues raised by Heidegger him-
self, as weIl as by "the Heidegger controversy"; that question is just now
beginning to be recognized, but it still remains unclear just how far
"nationality" is still an unthought and yet significant "category" at work in
current discussions (see WW, p. 456 and Lyotard, op. cit., p. 16 where one
finds some acknowledgement ofthis point). To raise that as a possibility is
to serve areminder that language, which along with memory forms the
fabric of nationality, has always been an essential element in questions
raised by the epoch ofthe end ofphilosophy. In this regard, it is quite sig-
nificant that the subtitle of Habermas' introduction to the German trans-
lation of Farias' book is "The Heidegger Controversy {rom a German
Perspective" (emphasis mine). Here too the curious publication history of
Farias' book should also be noted: it only appeared in the "original"
Spanish and German after the "original" French edition, and then only in
rewritten form. If ever there has been a book that wrote itself in public
and corrected itself with the help of its translators while en route to its
original, then it is this book.
35. Here it should be remarked that both could be said to have first gained a
reputation by virtue of their early work in this area. Among Habermas'
first publications is "Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger zu Denken" in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, number 170, July 25, 1953, a text which is
a leave-taking from Heidegger and that closes the book on future serious
engagement with Heidegger's thought. Likewise Lacoue-Labarthe whose
"La transcendence finie/t dans la politique" (in Rejouer le politique (Paris:
Galilee, 1981)) already anticipated much ofwhat he develops in HAP.
36. See also WW, p. 445: "Even within the frame of this Weltanschauung,
Heidegger pursues critical insights that have not been superseded even
today."
37. Martin Heidegger, "Letter to the De-Nazification Committee at Freiburg
University," in Karl A. Moehling, Martin Heidegger and the Nazi Party:
An Examination (Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1972,
Ann Arbor Microfilms), p. 270-271. [See Appendix C, pp. _ , ofthe present
volume for the complete letter.] Elsewhere, Habermas does problematize,
even if only in passing, the link between nationality and race that he finds
missing in Heidegger yet decisive for the Nazis. See "Ethics, Politics and
History," trans. S. K. White, Philosophy and Social Criticism 14, No 3-4
(1988), p. 438. I am grateful to Stephen White for this reference, as weIl as
his comments on this essay.

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38. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens,

Gesamtausgabe 55 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), p. 123. One might
also refer to the celebrated remark in EM, where Heidegger says: "Wir
liegen in der Zange. Unser Volk erfährt als in der Mitte stehend den
schärfsten Zangendruck, das nachbarreichste Volk und so das gefährdet-
ste Volk und in all dem das metaphysische Volk" (p. 29). It is difficult to
read EM apart from the questions of "people" and "national" that it poses.
In that regard, EM (1935), like "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" (1935),
is best read in conjunction with SA (1933), since those later texts further
critically the lines of questioning that Heidegger proposes in SA. But one
might also refer to EM, p. 53: "Today the we is valued. Now is the "time of
the we".... We are.... We.---are. Does this statement establish the presence
of a plurality of "I's"? And what about the "I was" and the "we were," what
about being in the past? Has it gone away from us? Or are we precisely
that which we were? Do we not become precisely that which we are?
39. The timing here is worth noting for the future: Habermas wrote this essay
before the movement toward the reunification of Germany, a movement
which should sharpen further our perception of the questions posed by the
coincidence of the epochal and national since it provides further indication
that the question of the national has, to this point, still only been deferred.
40. It is quite significant that virtually all ofthe condemnations ofHeidegger's
personal failings exempt hirn from a racism (for Habermas' comment in
this regard, see WW, p. 445: "[HeideggerJ hirnself was no racist; his anti-
Semitism, so far as it can be confirmed at all, was rather of the usual cul-
turistic breed"; for Lacoue-Labarthe, who does understand that racism is
an essential question here, see HAP, p. 56/33). What is important about
this tendency to exempt the issue of racism is not that it in any manner
exonerates or lessens Heidegger's failings or the danger of his affinities to
the Nazi regime, but that it tends to set aside an essential element ofwhat,
along with the national, must be thought if we are to confront the Shoah as
the essential revelation that it iso For one direction in which the question of
racism is to be taken, see Jacques Derrida, "Racism's Last Word," trans. P.
Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), pp. 290-299.
41. "Thinking the Apocalypse," Critical Inquiry, op. cit., p. 479.
42. Insofar as this question is confined to a narrowly interpreted sense of
nationality, it effaces the largest sweep ofthe issues at stake and ways in
which those issues surface in other guises. For a suggestive piece arguing
for the need to recognize the American role in the Vietnam war as a mani-
festation of the same epochal phenomenon, see William Spanos's
"Heidegger, Nazism, and the Repressive Hypothesis: The American
Appropriation ofthe Question" forthcoming in boundary 2.
43. Habermas' remark is that in ''The Letter on Humanism" we find "traces of
nationalism...effaced.... The world-historical mission of the people...retained
only on a grammatical level; it lives on in the metaphysical privileging of
the German language" (WW, p. 449).
44. The move to the question posed by this relation between language and
history takes place mostly after the war. However, the early contours of

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that move are to be found in texts from the mid-1930s, such as ''Vom
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," in which we find the first formulations of
the question of 1tOetOlc.
45. See GA53, p. 100. See also GA39, pp. 47-49, where Heidegger poses the
question of the "we" in terms of the need to rethink Greek thought. It is
important that Heidegger's recovery of the Greeks be distinguished from
the return to Greece that drove German romanticism and which was, in
fact, a recuperation of the Roman, humanistic, reappropriation of Greece
as it was represented by Winckelmann (mostly in Thoughts on the
Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture, 1755). See Heidegger's
"Brief über den Humanismus" for his criticisms of the German humanist
tradition. In his discussion of Heidegger's relation to "national aestheti-
cisrn," Lacoue-Labarthe effaces this important point separating Heidegger
from the German romantic tradition that does provide one of the paths to
the Nazi state. Yet there are passages in which Lacoue-Labarthe seems to
recognize not only that "it became necessary to 'invent' a Greece which up
to that point had remained unimitated" (HAP, 120/79), but also that the
mimetic relation between German philosophy and Greece itself needs to
be thought in terms ofits peculiar impossibility, namely, the "paradoxical
imperative of propriation: imitate me in order to be what you are" (HAP,
124/81).
46. Lacoue-Labarthe does argue quite directly on behalf of the uniqueness of
the event of Auschwitz (see, e.g., HAP, 71ff/45fl). Yet, without compromis-
ing the horror of Auschwitz, there are reasons one should not make that
decision, for to do so is to blunt the sway of horror today. It seems to me
that the truly critical move is to extend our perception of brutality and
atrocity, to disclose the epochal and global character of the problems of
history, rather than to compress them into a horror beyond all others and
beyond repetition. Apartheid, the napalming and defoliation by Agent
Orange in Viet Nam, the systematic exploitation of "third" world peoples,
and more, also need to be thought from out of the same history that let
Auschwitz happen. Heidegger's now infamous remark "equating" mecha-
nized agriculture and the gas chambers (see HAP, 58/34) is a crude way of
making that claim. To call attention to the depth and sway of "incompre-
hensible" agonies should not be an excuse to diminish the agony and vio-
lence which is at issue in any specific event.
47. Here one should take seriously Heidegger's comment, oft repeated by hirn
in his later years, "Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht."
48. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 506. Here it should be said that Benjamin's work in
general, but especially the essays on art and reproducibility and the the-
ses on history, offer many more positive contributions toward the ends of
critically thinking the conjunction of 'tExvll and history than I have been
able to indicate here.
49. Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Die freudlose Gesellschaft (Munich: Hanser,
1981), p. 74.
50. It is this political function of poetic production that makes Heidegger's
"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" a text deeply concerned with rethinking
"the" political.

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51. The question of tExvll can also be found in Sein und Zeit, and not simply
in the critique of Zuhandenheit, but also in the general question of
Dasein's dealings with 1tpaYJ..lata and its essential technicity. One could
argue that the "turn" in Heidegger's work mimes the epochal turn of the
presentjuncture ofhistory, that is, that his work after Sein und Zeit is in
large measure the self-critical discovery that the project of that text left
the question of tExvll unasked. The full sweep of that project is beyond the
scope of even abrief outline here. But what is important to note is the way
in which it moves through Heidegger's concerns with </>Uffis (see especially
his 1939 essay ''Vom Wesen und Begriff der </>Uffis bei Aristotles"), as weIl
as the way in which it reaches a certain culmination in the 1953 essay,
"Die Frage nach der Technik." Throughout, one should bear in mind that
Heidegger's confrontation with his era is most clearly articulated in his
confrontation with Greek texts. This absolute conviction that the present
is to be confronted with the Greeks remains unshaken and is even to be
found in the 1945 "Tatsachen und Gedanken," where Heidegger explains
that his remarks in the Rectorial Address on Kampf are dedicated to a
rethinking of Heraclitus' notion of 1tOAEJ..lOs, especially as it is thought in
Fragment 53. Ofcourse, no public address in 1933 Germany could invoke
the word Kampf without an echo of Hitler's Mein Kampf I do not say that
in order to indicate that Heidegger is endorsing Hitler, but rather to sug-
gest that he is attempting to refigure Hitler into Heraclitus.
52. Lacoue-Labarthe is quite right when he claims that "the problem of the
university is not an incidental or peripheral problem ofWestern societies,
but their central, prime problem" (HAP, 163/112). On this point,
Heidegger's ''Was ist Metaphysik?" (1929), his inaugural lecture at the
University of Freiburg, should be read as anticipating many of the con-
cerns developed in the Rectorial Address.
53. It remains a question how far representation (Vorstellung) and modern
technicity (Gestell) are to be thought together. To the extent that their
relation is acknowledged, the will comes forward as the issue binding
them. See HAP, p. 131/85 for Lacoue-Labarthe's passing remarks on
stellen. Here again, Nietzsche is relevant (see note 47 above).

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