Burke, Heidegger, Derrida and The Specter of Nazism at the Origin of Rhetoric By Gregory Desilet (From Cult of the Kill: Traditional Metaphysics of Rhetoric, Truth, and Violence in a Postmodern World, 2006, with minor revisions 2014). Section Headings: 1) Introduction (p. 1) 2) Dialectical Being in Heidegger (p. 4) 3) Dialectical Substance in Burke (p. 7) 4) Heidegger and Burke—the Similarity (p. 11) 5) Heidegger and Burke on Truth (p. 15) 6) Heidegger and Burke on Freedom (p. 20) 7) Heidegger and Nazism (p. 22) 8) Heidegger and Burke—the Difference (p. 27) 9) Heidegger and Burke on Technology—a Further Difference (p. 29) 10) Complementarity Metaphysics—the Postmodern Alternative (p. 33) Notes (p. 37) References (p. 43) Introduction Under the section portentously titled “Order” in A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke provides one of the more concise expressions of his understanding of rhetoric and its motivational resources:

Order, the Secret, and the Kill. To study the nature of rhetoric, the relation between rhetoric and dialectic, and the application of both to human relations in general, is to circulate about these three motives (1969b, 265).

By placing the violence of “the Kill” at the motivational center of rhetoric and dialectic, Burke’s assertion appears to be an oversimplification as outrageous as it is concise. But that impression underestimates the care, indeed the career, Burke has invested in this insight. The three motives of his formula organize themselves around clusters of related involvements. “Order,” for example, names the group of motives associated with the unity of identification, congregation, and peace. “Secret” evokes mystery and division and aligns with the boundaries of hierarchy, prohibition, repression, and guilt. And “the Kill” points to the thorough transformations of death and renewal in victimage, redemption, transcendence, and purification. The entries in this last cluster are all names for the sacrifice necessary to complete the cycle and restore order to a divided and conflicted world—what Burke gamely refers to as “the Barnyard.” Burke reiterates the importance of this entire progression again when, in The Rhetoric of Religion, he ominously concludes: “Order/Through Guilt/To Victimage/(hence: Cult of the Kill) . . .” (1970, 5).

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More than merely identifying this troubling cycle as worthy of singular attention, Burke claims that it is the central and inescapable issue underlying all rhetoric. Citing Coleridge in the appendix to Permanence and Change, Burke offers an earlier version of his formula while also exposing its religious roots: “The two great moments of the Christian Religion are, Original Sin and Redemption; that the ground, this the superstructure of our faith” (1984a, 283). He goes on to add that these “moments” constitute “the very centre of man’s [sic] social motivation” and furthermore that “we are not saying that such should be the case. We are simply saying that, as regards Coleridge’s statement . . . such is the case, in the great religious and theological doctrine that forms the incunabula of our culture” (1984a, 284-285). Burke is careful to note that he is not saying that these “moments” should be the center of social motivation because he knows they invariably lead to the rituals of the sacrificial scapegoat—the victim, “the Kill”—offered up for atonement and purification. Yet if Burke is correct, this cycle—issuing from “the incunabula of our culture” and underlying all language, all rhetoric—would be, in his broad use of the word “rhetoric,” constitutive and symptomatic of all beliefs, orientations, systems, and religions. Attaining to the deepest and broadest level of presupposition, this cycle philosophically amounts to nothing less than a metaphysics. For Burke, this metaphysics derives from a linguistic motivational nexus because it emerges through language as a consequence of one of its most crucial ingredients—the negative. As sine qua non to every language, the negative, according to Burke, cannot be overemphasized as instrumental in giving rise to the purification ritual of the sacrificial scapegoat and the entire state of affairs named by his cycle of terms—most especially since “the negative helps radically to define the elements to be victimized” (1966, 18). Burke’s metaphysics rests on the sacrificial sense of the negative identified in Chapter One and conforms to the criteria of oppositional relation cited by Jacques Derrida and discussed in Chapter Two. Among the variety of orientations and beliefs within the sociopolitical sphere, no single ideology could be, to borrow phrases from Burke, more thoroughly “rotten with perfection” in the use of the negative to “radically define elements to be victimized” than that of the National Socialist Party of Nazi Germany. Nothing in the annals of human history exceeds the ultimate negation enacted through the state sponsored anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party that led to the “Final Solution” of the Holocaust. The unprecedented dimensions and severity of this negation have made Nazism synonymous with the most extreme implementation of the principles of exclusion and purification found in scapegoating. But if the Nazi ideology of racial purity and fascist politics that gave a “logic” to the Holocaust may be seen as a kind of “perfection” in the use of the negative—a negative that as a consequence of the omnipresence of language serves, according to Burke, as cornerstone to every cultural edifice—it does not take much calculation to see where a more universal “perfection” of this culture and its metaphysics may lead. Burke was no stranger to this troubling thought. He understood full well the sense in which the orientations offered by various philosophies and religions, including even his dramatism, move in close proximity with fundamental moments of Nazi ideology and, in essence, devoted his life to illustrating the difference.

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This difference, for Burke, turns on making the careful distinction. The traditional metaphysical pattern evident in religion, while a necessary component of Nazi ideology, is not a sufficient component. In “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” Burke maintains that Nazi ideology is a “distortion” and a “bastardization” of “fundamentally religious patterns of thought” (patterns Burke has identified as Coleridge’s “moments”). This requires Burke to admit, “There is nothing in religion proper that requires a fascist state. There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state” (1973, 219). This admission invites the conclusion, to which Burke would no doubt assent, that every religion, and the entire metaphysical tradition since the invention of language, remains always subject to the same danger, the same possibilities of “distortion.” Although his analysis is not extensive, Burke’s comments on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, when viewed in the context of Heidegger’s controversial and contested association with Nazism, help cast light on the differences between Heidegger’s philosophy, Burke’s dramatism, and Nazism. While seeing an important difference between himself and Heidegger concerning the direction of their respective approaches to the negative, Burke finds nevertheless that the negative plays the same fundamental role in Heidegger’s philosophy as it does in his dramatism:

For if man is the symbol-using animal, and if the ultimate test of symbolicity is an intuitive feeling for the principle of the negative, then such “transcendental” operations as the Heideggerian idea of “Nothing” may reveal in their purity a kind of Weltanschauung that is imperfectly but inescapably operating in all of us (1970, 21).

In light of the discussion in Chapter One, the transcendental operations of the negative peculiar to this Weltanschauung, as Burke understands it, may not be all there is. Granting as much, a question remains concerning exactly how the negative may be operating in Heidegger’s philosophy of Being. This question becomes especially important in light of Heidegger’s membership in the National Socialist Party of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Does his philosophy exemplify, as Burke suggests, the “principle of the negative” that conforms to traditional patterns of thought? Or should Heidegger be believed when he claims that his philosophy does not repeat traditional metaphysics? And if such is the case, does that not place his philosophy in an altogether different context beyond the “Cult of the Kill” quandary—a context that must not be confused with any version of traditional metaphysics and especially not the extreme of Nazism? Accepting Heidegger’s claims about his metaphysics and granting a consistency of thought and action (an assumption interpreters of Heidegger’s life and work ought to abandon only as a last resort), leaves further questions. What sense can then be made of his varieties of pro-National Socialist rhetoric before, during, and after the war? And what sense can be made of his lifelong refusal, for the most part, to speak directly to questions concerning his involvement or to publicly denounce the actions of the Nazi regime? And if Heidegger’s words and silences, actions and non-actions, can be contextualized in a way that will render them largely consistent, what will that then mean concerning the significance of his philosophy for future generations? Given the considerable influence of Heidegger’s philosophy on many in the past century, these questions remain difficult to ask and more difficult to answer. But precisely because of

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Heidegger’s influence, these questions must be addressed. The analysis that follows explores possible answers by comparing Heidegger’s philosophy to dramatism and evaluating Heidegger’s claim that he ventured into what lies beyond traditional metaphysics. Heidegger’s philosophy has, for many, served as a bridge extending beyond the tradition to certain postmodern alternatives such as deconstruction. However, rather than presenting itself as an alternative to the tradition, deconstruction has been found by some to be in alarmingly close proximity to extremes of the tradition such as Nazism. It has been suggested that it is no accident that the works of Heidegger and Paul de Man—each with ties to the Nazi regime—have become significant in the rise of deconstruction (e.g., Shaw 1990, Berman 1990, Hirsch 1991). In the course of this discussion of Burke and Heidegger, the question of the metaphysical status of deconstruction and any possible compatibility with Nazism will also be addressed. The analysis begins with a brief recapitulation of the characteristic features of traditional metaphysics and contrasts these with an alternative seemingly suggested by both Heidegger and Burke—an alternative from which, however, both ultimately retreat, although in importantly different ways. Following further discussion of their differences—including key differences separating them on issues surrounding National Socialism and the role of science and technology—the analysis returns to similarity. The final section argues that both Burke and Heidegger—despite the important differences between them—remain closer to the metaphysical core of Nazi ideology than is desirable or necessary—a direct result of the retreat from the alternative each seems to approach, a retreat that needlessly abandons “the nature of rhetoric” to a metaphysical universe exclusively inhabited by the “Cult of the Kill.” Dialectical Being in Heidegger In the discussion of metaphysics in Chapter Two, Derrida identifies traditional metaphysical thinking as grounded in an orientation toward opposition in which 1) one value is ideally or historically prior and paramount and the other derivative or arbitrary and/or 2) one side emerges as inherently or naturally subordinate to the other. He finds the fixed hierarchical ordering manifest in these operations to be not just one metaphysical gesture among others, but the metaphysical exigency. Certainly the traditional understanding of the relation between Being and time conforms to this exigency. Since difference as change always manifests itself in the passage of time, temporality serves, from the beginning, as a foremost philosophical category and symbol of difference. By contrast, the Being of essential reality—classically understood—endures, immutable and apart from all difference. Being and time are therefore understood to be fundamentally opposed. The world, as that which is in time, presents itself as a region of the breaching and contamination of pure Being, as that which is outside time. Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and various forms of Christianity are often cited as exceptional examples of this type of metaphysical orientation. Chapter Two discussed how, in Being and Time, Heidegger begins what appears to be an assault on traditional metaphysics with his desire to conduct a phenomenological, or experienced based, investigation of Dasein. Finding temporality to be an essential structure of the being of Dasein,

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Heidegger draws Being and time closer together and sets the stage for a rethinking of Being as experienced by Dasein. Heidegger’s rethinking of Being—as presence—leads to a rethinking of time. More thoroughly developed in his later work, the rethinking of time initiates a subtle shift whereby the emerging and receding of Being belong to the understanding of presence as a presencing—as the weaving of presence and absence, the incursion of the non-presence of a projected future and a retained past in the present moment. Accordingly, the present is not purely present but is instead sundered by time and by absence, presenting itself as the trace of that which is not fully present. Language, as the “house of being,” evinces a similar quality of presencing in the emerging and receding of the trace through words—the primary links to Being. On the basis of Heidegger’s phenomenological understanding of a merging of Being and time it becomes possible to conceive of a metaphysical orientation in which Being and time belong together. Such a metaphysics would undertake to describe Being in a manner 1) consistent with the view that time and difference do not in any sense “befall” Being but instead arise equiprimordially with Being and 2) consistent with a view of opposition in which the opposites—Being and time—as equiprimordial, are neither essentially separate nor reducible to one. Metaphysics of the traditional variety models a form of opposition whereby oppositional pairs exist not only in hierarchical relation—where one side is dominant over the other—but in a relation where one side is either derivative of the dominant other or effectively functions as a form of contamination of the dominant side. The alternative metaphysics suggested by a more temporally based understanding of Being offers an exceptional form of opposition. In this opposition, hierarchical relation may alternate through varying contexts even while each member remains linked essentially with the other. This alternative models a more balanced yet complex relation between opposites where one cannot be reduced to the other and where one never occurs without the other. Few terms are adequate for describing such a relationship, but the word “complementarity” will be used here in the sense deployed by Arkady Plotnitsky (1994) in his discussion of the parallels between the views of oppositional relation in the work of quantum physicist Niels Bohr and Derrida. As, for example, in wave/particle duality in physics, this view of opposition resists deep synthesis while also acknowledging inextricable relation.1 Although Chapter Two makes the case for viewing the work of Heidegger as traditionally grounded, Derrida has shown how and where it may be possible to read Heidegger along a different metaphysical bias. At certain points, both in Being and Time and in his later work, it becomes possible, Derrida suggests, to read Heidegger in two ways. On the one hand, for example, Heidegger’s distinction between primordial and derivative time in the context of the discussion of Hegel at the end of Being and Time may be symptomatic of a traditional metaphysical orientation—an orientation suggested in Heidegger’s choice of terms as Derrida argues in the following passage from the essay “Ousia and Gramme”:

Now, is not the opposition of the primordial to the derivative still metaphysical? Is not the quest for an archia in general, no matter with what precautions one surrounds the concept, still the “essential” operation of metaphysics? Supposing, despite powerful presumptions, that one may eliminate it from any other provenance, is there not at least some Platonism in the Verfallen? Why determine as fall the passage from one

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temporality to another? And why qualify temporality as authentic—or proper (eigentlich)—and as inauthentic—or improper—when every ethical preoccupation has been suspended? (1982, 63).

On the other hand, Derrida cautions against an overly hasty assessment concerning the metaphysical quality of Heidegger’s thinking:

It is not in closing but in interrupting Being and Time that Heidegger wonders whether “primordial temporality” leads to the meaning of Being. And this is not a programmatic articulation but a question and a suspension. (1982, 64).

Derrida concludes by stressing the possibility of a double-reading of Heidegger’s text:

The Heideggerian de-limitation consists sometimes in appealing to a less narrow determination of presence from a more narrow determination of it, thereby going back from the present toward a more original thought of Being as presence (Anwesenheit), and sometimes in questioning this original determination itself, and giving us to think it [the more original thought of Being] as a closure, as the Greco-Western-philosophical closure . . . . In the first place the displacements would remain within the metaphysics of presence in general . . . . The other gesture, the more difficult, more unheard-of, more questioning gesture, the one for which we are least prepared, only permits itself to be sketched, announcing itself in certain calculated fissures of the metaphysical text. (1982, 65).

Is Heidegger’s “more original thought of Being”—anticipated in the quest for an authentic temporality—yet another determination continuous with Greco-Western-philosophical closure? Or is it a more profound and unheard-of questioning of any and every original determination? Certainly Heidegger believed he had distanced himself from traditional metaphysics. However, the debate concerning the place of Heidegger’s work in the history of philosophy concerns not what Heidegger believed about his work and the break it may have made with traditional metaphysics but whether his work successfully achieves such a break. The two metaphysical views discussed thus far—traditional or premodern metaphysics and what will be called, for purposes herein, complementarity or postmodern metaphysics—lead to different philosophical orientations with, as will be explored more fully, significantly different implications. Later, a third metaphysical alternative will be added between these two which will, predictably enough, be referred to as modern metaphysics. Just as Heidegger’s analysis of Being and time unveils an absence at the heart of Being and obscures his metaphysical leanings, Burke’s analysis of the philosophical category of substance leads to similar difficulties. However, Burke brings to the problem of a seemingly unmanageable chain reaction of fissuring substance(s) the resolution of a controlled reaction—a resolution that, it will be argued, also appears to be operative in Heidegger’s texts.

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Dialectical Substance in Burke As already discussed, dramatism appears consistent with, and in fact exemplary of, traditional metaphysics. It would seem that nothing could be more clear when Burke singles out the two great “moments” of dramatism as Sin and Redemption alongside the emphasis he places on sacrifice both in material and symbolic senses. The role of the negative in dramatism, by helping “radically to define the elements to be victimized,” succeeds in marking off a traditionally essential difference symbolized in the difference between “Yes” and “No.” A discrete difference also divides another of dramatism’s key oppositions: action and motion. But complications arise when Burke triggers what may fairly be called a deconstruction of his entire system of categories when undertaking his often-cited examination of the quizzical “pattern” exemplified in the “paradox of substance.”

. . . we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word “substance,” used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating something that a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing’s context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing’s context. And a thing’s context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not (1969a, 23).

By uncovering the contradiction whereby the word for what a thing essentially “is” names by way of what it essentially “is not,” Burke also uncovers the instability in the boundary between the inside and the outside, the object and its context. The boundary failure evidenced in the mutual incursion of the inside and the outside reveals nothing less than a division in substance itself. Burke sees that this division necessitates a rethinking of the essence of substance, for it is a division that also reveals a kind of merging—as in the hidden dynamic between object and context. This division in substance—that is also a linking of object and context—turns out to be, in the historical drama, no mere theoretical difficulty lacking in practical consequences. It is the central discovery, thoroughly examined in Chapter Four, that drives the Enlightenment and is exemplified most powerfully in Newton’s theory of motion. And, with ever more thorough application, the same discovery provides the basis for structuralism and poststructuralism, where theories of the sign emphasize the crucial role of context. The boundary confusion Burke exposes as the paradox of substance surfaces again in his discussion of Spinoza. In the course of explaining how the Seventeenth Century philosopher makes the case for the controlling role of context, Burke confirms the central position of this discovery in the transition from Aristotle to the Enlightenment.

In Aristotle, each stone, or tree, or man, or animal, could be a substance, capable of being considered “in itself.” But Spinoza held that no single thing could be considered “by itself ” . . . . Thinking contextually, Spinoza held that each single object in the universe

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is “defined” (determined, limited, bounded) by the other things that surround it. And in calling on men to see things “in terms of eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis) Spinoza meant precisely that we should consider each thing in terms of its total context (1969a, 25).

Translating Spinoza’s insight into pentadic terms, the substance of the agent as something “in itself” now takes on an integral relation to scene whereby the agent cannot be understood or identified apart from the scenes in which it is immersed. Agent and scene enter into dynamic relations whereby it becomes difficult to tell where one begins and the other leaves off—relations Burke designates as ratios. The precedent established in the scene/agent ratio, a mirroring of the “paradox of substance,” creates a problem for dramatism when the direction of influence between agent and scene appears to threaten the integrity of Burke’s key distinction between action and motion. As influence shifts toward the scenic realm, the agent—decentered and distanced from authorial choice—slips ambiguously into scene with a consequential blurring of the difference between action and motion. Granting as much, Burke has shown that, when pushed, he would not, at the ontological level, cling to the privileging of action over motion.

I need but point out that, whether or not we are just things in motion, we think of one another (and especially of those with whom we are intimate) as persons. And the difference between a thing and a person is that the one merely moves whereas the other acts. For the sake of the argument, I’m even willing to grant that the distinction between things moving and persons acting is but an illusion. All I would claim is that, illusion or not, the human race cannot possibly get along with itself on the basis of any other intuition (1966, 53).

To his credit, Burke is sufficiently perceptive and philosophically honest to acknowledge that a rigid distinction between action and motion may not hold up. Trouble creeps into the distinction such that behavior becomes both action and motion undecidably. Furthermore, the etymological story of the paradox of substance becomes “representative anecdote” for what befalls any distinction, any rigid line, between what a thing is and what it is not. Faced with the collapse of his key distinction at the ontological level, Burke nevertheless presses for continued acceptance of the distinction at the axiological level with his claim and implicit appeal that “the human race cannot possibly get along with itself on the basis of any other intuition.” Having gone to the edge, having experienced the vertiginous abyss of paradox, Burke then advocates a strategic withdrawal in the effort to preserve the value of social order from the divisive chaos of actions become motions and agents become agencies.2 Furthering his cause of continuing the emphasis on action and the negative and all that goes with these—which seems intuitively and fundamentally correct to him—Burke finds a dramatistic response to the difficulties raised in his analysis of substance. Toward the end of A Grammar of Motives he shows how to recover from the impasse created earlier when he performs a brilliant appropriation by placing the paradoxical division of substance—with its apparent challenge to traditional metaphysics—in the service of traditional metaphysics. He accomplishes this with a methodological maneuver he refers to elsewhere as “dialectical transcendence” (1959, 362-363).

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As an example of this procedure, consider the following from Burke’s commentary on Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

To review briefly: The poem begins with an ambiguous fever which in the course of the further development is “separated out,” splitting into a bodily fever and a spiritual counterpart. The bodily passion is the malign aspect of the fever, the mental action its benign aspect. In the course of the development, the malign passion is transcended and the benign active partner, the intellectual exhilaration, takes over (1969a, 461).

In this dialectic the fever reveals itself to be of “ambiguous” or divided substance. The parts are then named “malign” and “benign.” In the transcendental progression, the malign bodily fever is distilled away leaving the purity of the benign spiritual aspect. The trick here is that the fever, when divided, is found to have parts that are arranged in a radical hierarchy. One part is contaminant in relation to the other. The apparent division in substance is not really a division but rather the incursion of an alien “other” into substance. The contaminant is not essential to the “whole” which it opposes. The complementarity metaphysics of the one that is also two is abandoned in favor of the one that only appears to be two by contingent and inessential contamination or perversion of the one. It could be argued that this example sheds more light on Keats’ poem than on Burke’s methodology (and perhaps vice versa). Yet Burke makes pivotal use of this same dialectical transcendence to resolve a similar ambiguity in his dramatism. In A Rhetoric of Motives he speaks of the ambiguity of identification and division in the “substance” of rhetoric, and then shows how to overcome the division by way of dialectical transcendence. The progression can be illustrated with two quotations from the Rhetoric.

In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication possible, thus providing the first condition necessary for their interchange of blows. But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric (1969b, 25).

Here Burke describes the ambiguous substance of rhetoric—an apparent concession to the boundary difficulties of the paradox of substance. But the discovery of this ambiguity along the scale between “identification” and “separateness” is now the first move toward dialectical transcendence. Burke then proceeds to show how the poles of this rhetorical scale, which he also refers to as “peace” and “war,” are not equally weighted, not equally essential:

We considered, among those “uses” to which Samson Agonistes was put, the poet’s identification with a blind giant who slew himself in slaying enemies of the Lord . . . . Noting that tragic poets identify motives in terms of killing, one might deduce that “they are essentially killers.” Or one might deduce that “they are essentially identifiers.” Terms for identification in general are wider in scope than terms for killing. We are proposing that our rhetoric be reduced to this term of wider scope, with the term of narrower scope being treated as a species of it . . . . Being frank, then: Because of our choice, we can

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treat “war” as a “special case of peace”—not as a primary motive in itself, not as essentially real, but purely as a derivative condition, a perversion (1969b, 19-20).

Translating the representative metaphors of “war” and “peace” back into division and identification, Burke claims that divisive motives are a “special case” of identification, that as such these motives are not essentially real, and that, in fact, divisiveness is altogether derivative and a perversion. But the relation of the essential to the perversion is also the relation of the genuine to the counterfeit, the purely whole to the contaminant—the signature relation of premodern metaphysics. Finding rhetoric divided between “malign” (division) and “benign” (identification) aspects then sets up dramatistically the necessity for transcending the malign aspect through the purification of sacrifice. In concluding the Grammar Burke notes that since the world, the “Barnyard,” is always divided, always at war, the best that can be hoped for is a relentless “purification of war” toward a closer approximation of the wholeness and unity of communal peace (1969a, 442). Consequently, as will be explored more thoroughly in the final section, Burke proposes to fight fire with fire, using controlled forms of victimage in the continual purification of divisive motives. In a book-length analysis of Burke’s entire corpus, Robert Wess confirms this general understanding of Burke’s use of the dialectic of transcendence by showing how he uses this strategy to similar ends in his analysis of St. Augustine’s Confessions. In arguing this point Wess makes crucial the distinction between the two terms “perversion” and “alternative.”

Burke treats Augustine’s conversion to Christianity as a shift not from an alternative orthodoxy but from perversion: “we might best point up the chapter in his final conversion by juxtaposing it with the chapter on perversity” (64-65). If counter-covenant is equated to evil, as in Hobbes, and if evil is equated to causa deficiens, as in Augustine, and if counter-covenant, evil, and causa deficiens are together equated to the negative, as in Burke, then yes-against-yes gives way to yes-against-no, and perversion becomes of interest as the negative taken to the extreme of “strong in sin” (1996, 229).

Wess also confirms conclusions reached in Chapter One that this particular privileging of the negative in The Rhetoric of Religion extends throughout Burke’s thinking despite hints of a more balanced approach evident in Burke’s constitutional analysis in the Grammar:

Just as Burke recognizes yes-against-yes only to bury it beneath yes-against-no, he recognizes constitutional analysis only to marginalize it in favor of logologically rewriting Augustine’s theological doctrine of evil as words about the word “no,” such that the alternative to “yes” is not a different “yes” but a version of “no,” a “deficiency” rather than “a power in its own right” (1996, 229).

But Burke is not alone in having discovered the usefulness of dialectical transcendence as a means of resolving the paradoxical difficulties of substance.

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Heidegger and Burke—The Similarity Since Burke regards the “Cult of the Kill” cycle of sin and redemption identified in Coleridge’s moments as an inescapable consequence of culture issuing from the invention of language and the negative, it follows that he would look for Heidegger’s thinking to be closest to his own at those points where Heidegger places emphasis on the negative. But Burke finds Heidegger’s point of departure in the use of the negative to be significantly different from his own. While granting their approaches share common ground, “encroaching on territories claimed by the other”—a conclusion consistent with his analysis of the scene/agent ratio—Burke finds they part company on the basis of their respective emphases of scene and agent. For Burke, the concern with Being or “what is” reflects the scientistic and scenic preoccupation with context and knowledge while the concern with agent reflects the dramatistic focus on action and choice. In The Rhetoric of Religion he restates the reason for his preference:

First, I would set “Dramatism” against “Scientism.” In so doing, I do not necessarily imply a distrust of science as such. I mean simply that language in particular and human relations in general can be most directly approached in terms of action rather than in terms of knowledge . . . Either approach ends by encroaching on the territories claimed by the other. But the way in is different. Dramatism beginning with problems of act, or form, and Scientism beginning with problems of knowledge, or perception (1970, 38-39).

Burke explains that the “way in” involves primarily a difference in how the negative is initially understood. In an earlier passage from the same text he addresses this difference in reference to the work of Henri Bergson.

From the Dramatistic point of view, however, Bergson’s observations might be modified at one point. His statement of the case inclines towards the “Scientistic” slope. For he begins with the propositional negative, as with a sentence like “It is not . . .” But Dramatistically (that is, viewing the matter in terms of “action”), one should begin with the hortatory negative, the negative of command, as with the “Thou shalt not’s” of the Decalogue (1970, 20; see also Burke, 1966, 454).

Burke then goes on to relate this issue directly to Heidegger:

Existentialists such as Heidegger and Sartre should certainly be examined quizzically for their tendency to “reify” the negative, by starting from the quasi-substantive “nothing” rather than from the moralistic “no” (1970, 20).

Continuing, Burke then argues that Heidegger’s use of Nichts or Nonbeing is a dialectical consequence of his philosophy of Being.

The negative being what it is, when you have arrived at a term as highly generalized as “Being,” there is one notable dialectical “advance” still available. You can add the negative, and thereby arrive at “Non-Being” (Nichts), which can be treated as the contextual ground of your highly generalized term, “Being.” For such an absolute

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opposite is all that’s left. Whether or not it actually refers to anything, it is a “reasonable” operation linguistically (1970, 21).

Although Burke’s understanding of Heidegger’s use of Nichts appears to derive from passages in “What is Metaphysics?”, a more relevant comparison can be made with the related words “not” and “null” (Nicht and nichtig) in Heidegger’s discussion of guilt in Being and Time. Here it becomes possible to see similarity underlying what may be only a superficial difference between the two theorists. This similarity is especially evident in the ways in which Burke and Heidegger understand the origin of guilt. For Heidegger, guilt is rooted in what Burke calls the “propositional negative,” the “is not,” the Nonbeing horizon from which Being emerges. This use of the negative is central in Heidegger’s description of how Dasein has been “delivered over” to the kind of being he calls “thrownness.”

In being a basis—that is, in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and on this basis. Thus, “Being-a-basis” means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from the ground up. This “not” belongs to the existential meaning of “thrownness”. It itself, being a basis, is a nullity of itself (1962, 330).

Existing as thrown, Dasein is not. Dasein’s being is the kind of being always underway and not yet in place. Dasein constantly “projects itself on possibilities” and thereby reveals itself as not already and essentially this or that possibility. This “not yet” quality of Dasein conforms to one of the basic tenets of Heidegger’s existentialism: “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (1962, 67). In Heidegger’s thinking, existence, as the existence of a thing, is distinguished from Being. The sense in which Dasein’s existence (which Heidegger distinguishes from the existence of a thing by using the term “ek-sistence”) is not derives from the circumstance that its being, the meaning of its being, is underway. Also, as thrownness, Dasein is not in control of its being “from the ground up.” To be thrown is to be out of control in the sense of falling—being vulnerable, exposed, and at risk. Heidegger’s discovery of a nullity or absence at the heart of Dasein’s being as thrownness ties into his account of guilt—the kind of guilt Burke calls original sin or categorical guilt.

In the structure of thrownness, as in that of projection, there lies essentially a nullity. This nullity is the basis for the possibility of inauthentic Dasein in its falling; and as falling, every inauthentic Dasein factically is. Care itself, in its very essence, is permeated with nullity through and through. Thus “care”—Dasein’s Being—means, as thrown projection, Being-the-basis of a nullity (and this Being-the-basis is itself null). This means that Dasein as such is guilty, if our formally existential definition of “guilt” as “Being-the-basis of a nullity” is indeed correct (1962, 331).

As thrownness, every Dasein is first, in its falling, inauthentic—that is, not automatically in a relation to the essence of the truth of Being. In becoming authentic, Dasein does not move from guilt to non-guilt, but instead becomes “authentically guilty.” Dasein is not born into the world

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with true understanding or an authentic relation to Being. Dasein must yet hear the “call” of Being as an appeal to “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit). Heidegger explains that, “hearing the appeal correctly” means understanding Dasein’s being as thrownness which requires “taking cognizance of the Fact that one is ‘guilty’” (1962, 333). Taking proper cognizance of this fact opens Dasein to the possibility of authenticity but does not alter Dasein’s thrownness nor Dasein’s “guilt” as “Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity.” For Burke, categorical guilt consistent with the dramatistic emphasis on action and the corresponding hortatory negative emerges as a consequence of the inevitable exposure to prohibitions—the prohibitions implicit in hierarchy and law or what Burke calls the “conditions of Dominion” inseparable from life in human community. Thus, dramatistically, guilt derives from the hortatory negative and the inevitable failure to follow its directives. “Order leads to Guilt (for who can keep the commandments!)” (1970, 4; see also the discussion in Chapter One). However, Heidegger’s existential emphasis on Being and the corresponding propositional negative gives rise to categorical guilt as a consequence of exposure to the Nonbeing, the “notness” (Nichtheit) of thrownness—exposure to the inevitable separation from Being (possibilities of Being) that accompanies Dasein’s not having come to rest along a trajectory of one path in exclusion to other paths. Like the dramatistic dialectic of Yes and No, Heidegger’s dialectic of authentic and inauthentic follows what appears to be a classical binary logic. Heidegger’s use of the term “authentic” to describe a possible relation to Being does not appear to be a good choice if he understands Being in a postmodern sense as duplicitous (both one and two) at the origin. The relation of Dasein to Being, understood in a way consistent with postmodern metaphysics, calls for terminology that will invite less confusion with traditional oppositional relation. However, in the context of making a case for the view placing Heidegger’s philosophy beyond traditional metaphysics, one of his more prominent commentators, John Caputo, argues that Heidegger’s use of the authenticity terminology must be understood in a more subtle way such that it need not and ought not to be viewed as compatible with traditional categories.

Authenticity is Dasein’s attempt to keep itself in motion . . . .The Being of Dasein cannot be grasped by means of the categories of presence and absence but only by taking Dasein in its being-possible, its ability to be (sein-konnen) . . . . And authenticity consists in keeping alive that indefiniteness . . . . it means staying in motion. (1987, 199).

But even Caputo is prepared to admit that if he is indeed correct in his assessment of Heidegger’s use of “eigentlich” (where Macquarrie and Robinson translate the root “eigen” as “most its own,” “ownmost,” and “proper”), then it is an unfortunate choice of terms. Caputo goes on to complain of Heidegger: “But then do not call it authenticity, which is spoken in the language of metaphysics. Call it instead a kinetics, an arche-kinetics” (1987, 200). Although Caputo’s explanation of Heidegger’s use of authenticity is not without justification, it falls short of being convincing. Rather than pointing in the direction away from traditional metaphysics, Heidegger’s use of authenticity appears to read more consistently as one among several telling symptoms of that metaphysics.

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As argued in Chapter Two—despite what Heidegger calls the forgetfulness or oblivion of Being as an effect of temporality—an authentic relation to the truth of Being as Being-uncovering or aletheia can and should, through resoluteness, lead to the retrieval and preservation of Being in renewed presence. This is done most significantly in and through language. Thus, Heidegger’s remark in Being and Time:

The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems (1962, 262).

Where Burke concludes, despite the complications of the paradox of substance, that it is not possible to get along on the basis of any intuition other than that of Action and the possibility of affirming right or moral action, so Heidegger may be understood to conclude similarly that it is not possible to get along on the basis of any intuition other than that of Being and the possibility of affirming an authentic relation to the truth of Being—a relation that will preserve the force, the traditional force, of the most elemental words. While the terminology of authenticity suggests traditional metaphysical leanings in the early Heidegger, his understanding of the essence of technology serves as a telling example, from his later work, of the way in which he retreats from the paradox of substance and the attendant “pseudo-problems” and boundary difficulties besetting “elemental words.” As already illustrated, Burke confronts the dialectical division created by the intrusion of the negative with a sacrificially conceived dialectical transcendence. Presumably, like Burke, dissatisfied with an essential division coursing through his philosophy, Heidegger also mounts a response and also does so with a resourceful deployment of dialectical transcendence. Heidegger begins in similar fashion by finding the elemental substance, in this case technology, to be ambiguous—that is, divided. One side of this divided substance he then finds to be “saving” while the other side emerges as “the danger”—corresponding to what in Burke’s example are the benign and malign aspects. Or, expressed in the Heideggerian terminology of disclosure, technology is divided between “presencings” or modes of “enframing,”—one which blocks the true coming to presence of Being and another which fosters a true disclosure of Being.

Thus the coming to presence of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible upsurgence of the saving power . . . . The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth. On the one hand, enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth. On the other hand, enframing comes to pass for its part in the granting that lets man endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus does the arising of the saving

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power appear (1977d, 314). The ambiguity of Being consistent with postmodern metaphysics (where opposition displays essential division and essential relation) is abandoned in favor of an essential dividedness in which unity is contaminated by an impurity—a “block” that appears to lack any essential relation. The enframing that works against the “saving power” is not simply an alternative mode of revealing. It is that which blocks “every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing” and “radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth.” This mode of enframing emerges as a pervasive contamination of the essence of truth—what Heidegger in this context calls “the danger”—and would seem to have no place in the ecology of truth. This understanding of Heidegger’s notion of truth, however, is not always easy to sustain in relation to his more extended discussions of truth. Like Burke, Heidegger’s references to truth are complex and may in many respects appear to align with a postmodern approach. Heidegger and Burke on Truth Samuel B. Southwell’s work supports the finding that considerable similarity exists between the views of Burke and Heidegger—similarity rooted in advocacy and elaboration of a philosophy of Being. Southwell sees Burke and Heidegger approaching greatest similarity through the emphasis on integration inherent in a philosophy of Being—which he contrasts with what he regards as the endlessly destructive analyses found in deconstruction (this view of deconstruction will be addressed in the concluding section of this chapter). But the issue of integration is also the point around which, ultimately, Southwell sees a divergence leading to the greatest difference between Burke and Heidegger. He finds that “fundamentally Heidegger’s thought resists the integration of art in life that occurs in Burke” (1987, 83). In clarifying this difference, Southwell begins by citing Heidegger’s discussion of truth from “The Origin of the Work of Art.”

The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again. To submit to this displacement [that occurs in the work of art] means to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work (1987, 83).

Southwell then explains what he finds at work in this passage.

Clearly art is not another instance of the acts which constitute life in general. The absolute uniqueness of the work of art, its transforming “our accustomed ties to world and to earth,” and our restraining “all accustomed ties to world and to earth” are to be explained by the “ontological difference,” the difference between beings and Being, between two distinct realms, the ontic and the ontological. This is the basic premise of Heidegger’s thought early and late. It means that the effort to think, or describe Being, occurs at a level of “reality” from which the rest of knowledge is derivative and to the analysis or description of which it is irrelevant . . . . (1987, 83).

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As derivative, what passes for the “rest of knowledge” stands in relation to Being in the kind of opposition characteristic of traditional metaphysics. However accurate, this kind of separation between art and ordinary life and between Being and beings is not as clear in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” text as Southwell’s claim might imply. Appreciating the way in which this separation occurs in this text and in Heidegger’s thinking in general calls on Heidegger’s understanding of truth and the connection he makes between truth and art.

The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this revealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of beings has set itself to work . . . . Only [great art] is under consideration here . . . (1977d, 166-167).

Throughout this text Heidegger demonstrates a complex understanding of the relation between opposites—evident in his description of the tension between “world” and “earth” as revealed in the work of art.

The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential features in the work-being of the work. They belong together, however, in the unity of work-being . . . . The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated [emphasis added]. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through the world. But the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another . . . . The opposition of world and earth is strife. But we would surely all too easily falsify its essence if we were to confound strife with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and destruction. In essential strife, rather, the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their essential natures (1977b, 172-73).

World and earth are “essentially different” but also “never separated” (i.e. essentially related). With the notion of “essential strife” Heidegger appears to describe a relation consistent with a postmodern rather than a premodern view of opposites. But this preliminary understanding of opposition is preparatory for other more essential divisions that ultimately occur within Heidegger’s account of truth. The essential strife between world and earth within the work of art presents the opening through which the truth of Being may be revealed. As discussed in Chapter Two, Heidegger likens truth to a kind of lighting—an unconcealment that emerges alongside that which remains concealed. But the concealment that contrasts with unconcealment is not simply falsehood. Heidegger explains:

We believe we are in the immediate circle of beings. Beings are familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the lighting is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling [emphasis added] . . . . The essence of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by a denial. Yet this denial is not a defect or a fault, as though truth were an unalloyed unconcealedness that has rid itself of everything concealed. If truth could accomplish this, it would no longer be itself. This denial, in the

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form of a double concealment, belongs to the essence of truth as unconcealedness. Truth, in its essence, is un-truth. We put the matter this way in order to serve notice, with a possibly surprising trenchancy, that denial in the manner of concealment belongs to unconcealedness as lighting. The proposition “the essence of truth is un-truth” is not, however, intended to state that truth is at bottom falsehood. Nor does it mean that truth is never itself but, viewed dialectically, is also its opposite . . . . Truth occurs precisely as itself in that the concealing denial, as refusal, provides the steady provenance of all lighting, and yet, as dissembling, metes out to all lighting the indefeasible severity of error. Concealing denial is intended to denote that opposition in the essence of truth which subsists between lighting and concealing. It is the opposition of the original strife. The essence of truth is, in itself, the primal strife in which that open center is won within which beings stand and from which they set themselves back into themselves (1977b, 176-77).

Although lengthy and difficult, this citation is useful in showing most of the extended dialectical route through which Heidegger traverses in accounting for his understanding of truth. As a mode of unconcealment, truth is essentially grounded in concealment and is thereby divided in its essence. Yet concealment is itself divided in what Heidegger calls a double concealment. Concealment as refusal entails yet is distinguished from concealment as dissembling or error. Heidegger elaborates on what he means by error in the essay “On the Essence of Truth” where in his discussion of untruth (concealment) as error or errancy he notes that “errancy and the concealing of what is concealed belong to the primordial essence of truth” (1977a, 137). He goes on to say,

Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite to essential truth. Errancy is the open site for and ground of error. Error is not just an isolated mistake but rather the realm (the domain) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven. In conformity with its openness and its relatedness to beings as a whole, every mode of comportment has its mode of erring (1977a, 136).

But errancy as a division within concealment also reveals a further division within itself that folds back into the question of truth. Thus, on the one hand, Heidegger says:

Man errs. Man does not merely stray into errancy. He is always astray in errancy . . . . The errancy through which man strays is not something which, as it were, extends alongside man like a ditch into which he occasionally stumbles; rather errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the Dasein into which historical man is admitted (1977e, 135-136).

And on the other hand, Heidegger describes how errancy “contributes” to the possibility of what does not lead astray:

But, as leading astray, errancy at the same time contributes to a possibility that man is capable of drawing up from his ek-sistence—the possibility that, by experiencing errancy itself and by not mistaking the mystery of Dasein, he not let himself be led astray (1977a, 136).

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Errancy, like every other Heideggerian “substance” mysteriously divides and participates in malign and benign ways—both “leading astray” and “not leading astray.” This dialectical movement ultimately accomplishes a distillation, a more primordial sorting of what leads from what leads astray. Though truth and error be in some sense conjoined for Heidegger, coming to understand the mystery and the workings of this conjoining ultimately rises to the level of transcendence and a revelation of the truth of Being. Dasein may find itself at a panoptical vantage and context from which it becomes possible, “by experiencing errancy itself,” to not be “led astray.” This movement corresponds to what has been described as dialectical transcendence and is analogous to the movement ascribed to Burke in Chapter One where, through the process of division, division itself is transcended. Moreover, for Heidegger, the capacity for discrimination that leads to this distillation becomes possible only for those who, through resoluteness, have come into an authentic relation to the truth of Being. This authentic relation to Being lets beings be in an unusually originary way.

Letting beings be takes its course in open comportment. However, letting beings as such be as a whole occurs in a way befitting its essence only when from time to time it gets taken up in its primordial essence. Then resolute openness toward the mystery . . . is under way into errancy as such. Then the question of the essence of truth gets asked more originally [emphasis added] (1977a, 137).

It is not hard to imagine that Heidegger, believing himself to be in “resolute openness,” also believes that he asks the question of the essence of truth “more originally.” Here it may be emphasized again that the role of human being is, for Heidegger, more agency than agent. Heidegger’s Dasein acts only in the sense of becoming more receptive, becoming more an opening for Being by stepping aside and “letting beings be.” Dasein then becomes the agency for the truth of Being, the opening where Being itself may be free to bring about the authentic relation whereby the essential truth of Being emerges for Dasein. Although he appears to be saying something other, something more postmodern, Heidegger ultimately advances a notion of truth as grounded in the possibility of straying but not in the necessity of straying because “man” (Dasein), by “letting beings be” need “not let himself be led astray.” This point addresses the subtle but significant difference between Heidegger and Derrida. For Derrida, “straying” at no point reduces to possibility but always remains a necessity—at every level of understanding. Recalling the deconstructive diagram in Chapter Two, “Being 1” and “Being 2” are split by différance illustrating the sense in which for Derrida the ontological difference Heidegger describes as the difference between Being and beings deconstructs into the difference between Beings and beings. Where différance is equiprimordial with Being, Being exhibits the division that is multiplication and not merely the division that is presence and absence or Being and Nonbeing. From within this pluralistic view of Being it becomes possible to evaluate truth only on the basis of provisionally circumscribed contexts. Such contextualization undermines any and every notion of authentic or original relation to Being and entails that it becomes possible to value one disclosure as true over another as error only through newly defined or highly sedimented contexts. Contextualization is discussed again in the final section of this chapter and more thoroughly in Chapters Four and Five.

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Although Heidegger’s understanding of key oppositional relations coincides in places with the postmodern, lending to potential confusion, at bottom (or at top) it remains traditionally transcendental. Briankle G. Chang, in Deconstructing Communication, aptly summarizes Derrida’s suspicions about Heidegger’s thinking of Being:

For Derrida, Being, let alone Appropriation, is possibly nothing more than a metalinguistic notion that results from a transcendental deduction based on the need for something to which language could refer. As a metalinguistic entity, it is empty; worse yet, it turns out in the last analysis to be a morphological trick that language plays on us. Whether as Appropriation/Expropriation or as presencing/absencing, Being institutes itself as the highest “transcendental signified,” a master referent that in reality is but one signifier with a capital B, a morpheme, a paper Being, dislocated from the self-referentiality of language as something outside the play of differences [emphasis added] (1996, 132).

Although he would no doubt want to deny it, the overcoming of the metaphysics of subjectivity and subject/object duality that Heidegger attempts to achieve by recourse to “Being” may succeed only in moving the effects of the transcendental subject from Dasein to Being. One of the collateral effects of favoring the unity above the dividedness of Being emerges in the collectivistic interpretation of Dasein that, as will be seen, Habermas finds to be especially apparent in Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time. Returning to Southwell, his claim that Heidegger separates art from ordinary life, elevating it in status to where it reflects an authentic relation to the truth of Being, concurs with the claim that Heidegger’s philosophy operates on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the pure and the impure. However, it should be noted that Heidegger does not separate art from ordinary life so much as great art (and an authentic relation to the truth of Being) from ordinary life. The more fundamental problem, as Southwell notes, lies in the transcendental separation between Being and beings. Southwell contrasts this Heideggerian view with Burke’s understanding of the integration of art and life:

For Burke, art is an instance of the rhetorical activity which is ceaseless in life, and being happens within and as part of the multifariousness of life. The pentad is the paradigm of that happening, a paradigm of being as human act, which is also a paradigm of art, and a plan for criticism in which all knowledge becomes at least potentially of use (1987, 83).

Here Southwell refers to the inclusive proportionalizing strategy in Burke, which is consistent with a desire for integration, but does not indicate, as argued in Chapter One, the way in which, for Burke, this inclusiveness inevitably turns on a deeper strategy of exclusiveness founded on the necessity of the negative (understood by Burke in the sacrificial sense). For Burke, it is only by way of a process of mitigated use of the sacrificial negative, a “congregation by segregation,” that evaluation, criticism, and integration proceed. This deferred but nevertheless underlying predominant principle of exclusiveness is precisely what Southwell criticizes in the difference between Being and beings in Heidegger.

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The similarity between Burke and Heidegger extends to the notion of truth. On several occasions, especially in Permanence and Change and Attitudes Toward History, Burke speaks in ways that also suggest he finds error to be an inescapable component of truth: “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (1984a, 49) and “Every insight contains its own special kind of blindness” (1984b, 41). Superficially these are postmodern statements and they coincide with Heidegger's assertion that “every mode of comportment has its mode of erring.” But just as Heidegger eventually arrives at the conclusion that “man” is free for the possibility to not be “led astray,” so also Burke arrives at a similar conclusion as, for example, when he says near the end of Permanence and Change, “where there is the possibility of a wrong interpretation, there is also the possibility of a right one. The freedom to err argues a freedom to be right” (1984a, 257). As argued in Chapter One, Burke then takes what appears to be a postmodern turn in a premodern direction by also responding with the attitude that division in the essence of truth indicates a flaw in the human condition—a condition existing in the excluded middle between Heaven and Hell or Dominion and Chaos. This perceived flaw then promotes a metaphysics of “fear and resignation” (along with a wry “comic” attitude) that must traffic in periodic dialectical cures (read: scapegoating rituals with, hopefully, symbolic victims) to correct or compensate for this flaw. By contrast, complementarity metaphysics affirms that same condition (with vigilance and with acceptance of potentially tragic consequences) as essential to the possibility of life—an attitude advocated by both Nietzsche and Derrida. Heidegger’s sophisticated grasp of the complexities and tensions between the crucial oppositional pairs of Being and time, presence and absence, matches Burke’s perceptive understanding of the difficulties surrounding the action/motion pair in dramatism. Both theorists find the essential ground of their respective systems invaded and split apart by the negative—in the one case Being and the “is not” and in the other case Action and the “shall not.” Although, as Burke phrases it, the “way in” may be different between his approach and Heidegger’s, the orientations generated by both end up “encroaching on the territories claimed by the other” perhaps more than Burke allows. Heidegger and Burke on Freedom The similarity between Heidegger and Burke continues in the way in which each understands the consequences of his thinking in relation to human volition. Speaking of the quality of enframing that “endangers the relation to the essence of truth” Heidegger says, “Human activity can never directly counter this danger” (1977d, 315). Similarly, the “arising of the saving power” and the emergence of an authentic relation to Being, cannot be directly willed. This resembles, at least in form, those religions that are of the belief that human souls are saved or not by the gift of grace from outside. This view corresponds closely with the spirit of what Heidegger actually says in the Spiegel interview of 1966: “Only a god can save us” (1981, 57). The “arising of the saving power” is a mystery that is of a piece with the “mystery of all revealing.” For Heidegger, there is an important sense in which it is Being that acts and Dasein is the scene on which Being plays. Returning to the language of Being and Time, choice, insofar as it exists for Dasein, consists of two alternatives: Dasein may “choose” resoluteness thereby establishing a predisposition to hear

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the call of Being as the emerging of what is given and, through such openness, gain access to the truth of Being; or Dasein may be irresolute and, in effect, choose to be overcome by forgetfulness, temporality, absence, and other such blocks to the revealing of the essence of truth and consequently remain in an inauthentic relation to Being. This structure of authentic “choice” mirrors the structure Burke sees following from the dramatistic emphasis on the hortatory negative. Humans may choose to be resolute in the obedience of saying Yes to the Order of a sacred structure (Burke uses the word “Dominion”) or may choose the irresoluteness of disobedience in saying No to that Order (Burke, 1970, 183-196). And in both Burke’s logological dramatism and Heidegger’s existentialism this fundamental “choice” dissolves into a clouded question of destiny. Where Heidegger claims authenticity cannot be directly willed, Burke finds true obedience cannot be willed. Again, Burke—as the theorist of action—must be lauded for his ontological honesty. Consider this passage from The Rhetoric of Religion:

But insofar as personal character is defined by choice . . . the question then becomes one of deciding how far back the grounds of choice must be traced (atop the primary logological fact that the perfection of choice comes to a head in the formal distinction between Yes and No). Insofar as Genesis would depict us as arising from a scene that is the act of a super-person, and insofar as redemption is thought to be got by voluntary enlistment on the side of Order, conceived sacrificially, then the ultimate formula becomes that of Jeremiah 31:18: “Turn thou me, and I shall be turned” (converte me, et convertar). Here the indeterminate watershed of “free” choice is reducible to a question of this sort: Though all men are given enough “grace” to be saved, how can anyone be saved but by being given enough grace to be sure of using it? Yet how could he have as much grace as that, without in effect being compelled to be saved (in which case he would not, in the last analysis, have “free will”)? (1970, 193).

And a little further on Burke concludes:

Problems of “predestination” lie in the offing, inasmuch as different people are differently tempted or differently enlightened, and such differences are not of their own choosing but arise in connection with the accidents of each man’s unique, particular destiny (1970, 196).

In light of these remarks, Burke’s thinking in The Rhetoric of Religion parallels Heidegger’s thinking evidenced in the Spiegel remark: “Only a god can save us.” Both Burke’s dramatism and Heidegger’s existentialism reduce to authoritarian systems in which the authority of a sacred Order or the authority of the truth of Being is given to human community from an “outside,” an absolute other (such as might be conceived of as “God” or “Dominion,” etc.), leaving as “choices”: obedience or disobedience, acceptance or rejection, authenticity or inauthenticity. While the effects of choice can be observed in behavior, the ultimate origin of choice remains unobservable and tied to a transcendent order of being. In summary, strong similarity exists between the way in which the accent on action leads to requirements for right action in relation to a moral order and the way in which the accent on

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understanding leads to requirements for right seeing or truthfulness in relation to the essence of Being. Where Burke stresses that ways of seeing/saying are in themselves actions (language as symbolic action) Heidegger stresses that actions are the outcomes of ways of seeing/saying (language as the house of Being). While, as Burke maintains, there may be a difference in approach between a dramatism that begins with the hortatory or moralistic negative and an existentialism that begins with a propositional negative, there is in effect no substantial difference between the two with respect to the way in which they constitute what he calls a Weltanschauung based on a dialectic of transcendence through the “principle of the negative.” Furthermore, contrary to what Southwell claims, the difference between Burke and Heidegger does not turn on a significant difference in their respective paradigms of art and plans for criticism (or evaluation) and the notion of truth underlying these. Burke and Heidegger offer fundamentally the same drama of human relations and the same plan for criticism. The tremor in the foundation of the distinctions between action and motion or Being and time or truth and untruth brought about by the relentless probings of Burke and Heidegger points to a substantial similarity. But a more fundamental distinction appears to have escaped similar tremors in both cases. The principle of exclusion operating in the essentialism of the distinction between the pure and the impure exerts decisive influence on both Burke and Heidegger—but with significantly different results with respect to their sensitivity to the sacrificial consequences stemming from this essentialism. The remaining sections will address this crucial difference and its effects in the context of aspects of Nazi ideology. Heidegger and Nazism Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” published in 1947, makes explicitly clear a primary sense in which he views his philosophy as a significant departure from the then contemporary version of traditional metaphysics—the humanism consistent with the insistence on the subject as agent. With the focus on Being, Heidegger transforms the subject as agent—inherited in the metaphysics of subjectivity from Descartes to Kant—into Dasein as the scene for the agency of Being. Because Heidegger’s way of speaking about Being, similar to Burke’s speaking about Order, resembles the way in which many theologians preach about God, some interpreters of Heidegger find a quasi-religious tone in his philosophy of Being. This apparent religious tone attracted considerable attention in Protestant theological circles in the early 1960s. Theologians ruminated especially on passages such as the following taken from the “Letter on Humanism”:

Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the lighting of Being . . . the advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being (1977c, 210).

And further:

Man is the shepherd of Being . . . . He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth (1977c, 221).

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Responding to the desire of many Protestant theologians to explore the relevance of such thinking to theology, Drew University organized a conference for April 9th, 1964, for which Heidegger was invited to give the inaugural address. For reasons of poor health Heidegger did not attend the conference and in his place a former student—Hans Jonas—was invited to give the inaugural address. During the 1920s Jonas had studied theology and philosophy at the University of Marburg under Heidegger. In the early 1930s Jonas left Germany in response to Hitler’s increasing persecution of Jews. As a Jew, Jonas had to confront the doctrines and practices of National Socialism in a way in which Heidegger, a non-Jew, was never forced to confront them. Although conceived of as a pro-Heidegger event, Jonas began the convention’s inaugural address by suggesting that the theologians may have been deluded by Heidegger’s quasi-religious rhetoric. Then he shocked the gathering with the following words:

Heidegger’s Being is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening on thought: so was the Fuhrer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of Being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger’s thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls . . . . Heidegger’s own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten: “Let not doctrines and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being. The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and everything demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!” (1996, 28).

This quotation certainly casts a dark shadow on what Heidegger may have in mind when he speaks of the “lighting of Being” and the “call” of Being. It is taken from an article written by Heidegger and published in a student newspaper, Freiburger Studentenzeitung, in November of 1933 (for the full text see Farias, 118-119). Heidegger’s identification with National Socialism began when he joined the party in 1933 and reached notoriety with the delivery of his “Rector’s Address” of 1934. By all accounts, the most disturbing aspect of this identification is the fact that Heidegger never officially and publicly separated himself from the National Socialist Party. He remained a member of the party throughout the war. He remained a member despite the open and obvious anti-Semitism, gangsterism, and brutality practiced by members of the party—a gangsterism elevated to the status of a party platform. After the war he offered no apologies and in their place certain disavowals. And although in one context following the war he claimed he was not a Nazi, in other contexts he made it clear that this did not mean that he disassociated himself, even in the post-war years, from National Socialism (Heidegger, 1981, 61). Heidegger’s decision to join the National Socialist Party and the policies he advocates in the Rector’s Address of 1934 are, according to Jurgen Habermas, prepared for by certain changes taking place in his thinking beginning as early as 1929:

What changes at that time in Heidegger’s philosophical conception is not the activist demand for resoluteness and projection, but rather Heidegger’s way of taking authenticity

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as the standard for the responsible acceptance of one’s own life history. This standard is liquidated and along with it the critical moment of Being and Time provided by the individualistic heritage of existential philosophy. The concept of truth is then transformed so that historical challenge through a collective fate takes over. Now it is a “people” and no longer the individual, which ek-sists (1989, 442).

It is easy to see here, in the direction of Habermas’ portrayal, the implied affinity of this evolved notion of Dasein with the fascistic emphasis on the collective over the individual. Habermas then elaborates on this more collectivist interpretation of Dasein as he imagines it unfolding in Heidegger’s thinking:

. . . he dissociates the dialectic of truth and untruth from the individual’s care for his own Dasein and interprets it as a happening, which challenges the people to a resolute confrontation with a common historical fate. With this, the switches are set for a national/revolutionary interpretation of what in Being and Time was a self-heeding and self-assertion sketched in existential terms. Thus Heidegger, who had opted for the Nazi party before 1933, could explain Hitler’s successful power-grab in terms of concepts retained from his own analytic of Dasein. But he adds something: the nationalistic privileging of the German fate, the conflation of the collectivistically interpreted category of “Dasein” with the Dasein of the German people, and those mediating figures, the “guides and guardians of the German destiny,” who can shape necessity and create the new, if only their followers keep themselves in hand (443).

Before, during, and after the war Heidegger appears never to have abandoned a belief in the elite mission of the “Dasein of the German people.” Before the war he aligns this mission with the National Socialist movement, but not, Habermas notes, without some disillusionment, even as early as 1935:

. . . in 1935—Heidegger’s talk of the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement . .

. betrays a distancing from certain phenomena and practices that are supposed to have nothing to do with the spirit of the thing itself. The philosopher, anyhow, knows better: he knows the metaphysical status of the national revolution. All is not yet lost, though the political leaders are allowing themselves to be deceived about their true mission by false philosophers such as Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baumler (446).

According to Habermas, it is not until defeat becomes fully apparent that Heidegger experiences his most thorough disillusionment with National Socialism as an historical movement in Germany.

Heidegger’s working through his disillusionment after 1934 had led to a differentiation between the unfortunate superficial forms of Nazi practice and its essential content. Now he undertakes a more radical revaluation, which has to do with the “inner truth” itself of the Nazi movement. He resolves on a recasting of the roles in the history of Being. Whereas previously national revolutions with their leaders at the head represented a countermovement to nihilism, now Heidegger thinks that they are a particularly characteristic expression of it, and thus are a mere symptom of that fateful destiny of

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technology against which they were formerly supposed to be working. Technology, now the signature of the epoch, expresses itself in the totalitarian “circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption” (447).

By Habermas’ account, Heidegger would offer this characterization of the Nazi movement as a truthful assessment of his views. On this basis Heidegger can argue he was never significantly associated with the movement or those who wielded state power before and during the war. But Habermas remains unconvinced:

Instead of giving a sober account of the facts, Heidegger simply whitewashes himself. The “Rektoratsrede” he understands as already an “opposition,” his entrance into the Nazi party under spectacular circumstances as a “matter of form” . . . . For the following years, he claims, “the opposition that had begun in 1933 had continued and grown more vigorous” . . . . Silenced in his own country, he saw himself as sacrificed to a “witch hunt” (450).

Habermas finally concludes with the following indictment:

Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism is one thing, which we can safely leave to the morally sober historical judgment of later generations. Quite another is Heidegger’s apologetic conduct after the war, his retouchings and manipulations, his refusal publicly to detach himself from the regime to which he had publicly adhered. That affects us as contemporaries. Insofar as we share a life-context and a history with others, we have the right to call one another to account. Heidegger’s letter to Marcuse [see next section], in which he takes up a manner of settling accounts that even today is widespread in academic circles, was his reply to the following challenge from Marcuse, a former student: “Many of us have long waited for a word from you, a statement that you would clearly and definitively free yourself from this identification, a statement that expresses your real current attitude to what has happened. You have made no such statement—at least none has escaped the private sphere.” In this regard, Heidegger remained bound by his generation and his time, the milieu of the Adenauer era of repression and silence (454).

Habermas’ narrative highlights as evasive and disingenuous, at best, Heidegger’s claims that his involvement with the Nazi party was only a “matter of form,” that he was never really a part of it, and that he remained, along with the true “Dasein of the German people,” essentially opposed to the party. In sum, Habermas holds Heidegger accountable primarily for living in denial—a denial that is self-deluding and dismissive of the larger human community. This conclusion presents itself as a disturbingly ironic indictment against the philosopher of Eigentlichkeit. Concerning the problem of reconciling Heidegger’s thinking with his actions, Habermas makes a helpful move when focusing on the “collectivistic” interpretation of Dasein. His separation of a more existentialist (and “individualistic”) Heidegger of Being and Time from the pro-Nazi (and “collectivistic”) Heidegger of the period beginning in 1933 points out a subtle but significant shift in Heidegger’s thinking in what otherwise appears to be a largely consistent philosophical development.

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Heidegger’s refusal to give an explanation of or to offer any apology after the war for his actions before and during the war is consistent with the behavior of a man who, as Habermas relates, felt no guilt—a man who in fact insisted on his innocence and refused at all times to acknowledge any complicity, error, or wrongdoing. Yet how, as a functioning member of the National Socialist Party throughout the war and author of texts such as that found in the Freiburger Studentenzeitung, can Heidegger genuinely reconcile—as is evident by all accounts he did—the claim, according to Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, that “he had not been a Nazi” (Habermas, 1989, 454)? Habermas hits on the most plausible answer when noting Heidegger’s “differentiation between the unfortunate superficial forms of Nazi practice and its essential content.” But he does not show explicitly how this differentiation grows naturally and directly from the metaphysical ground of Heidegger’s philosophy. Assuming, as Habermas argues, that Heidegger was, by 1933, operating with a collectivistic interpretation of Dasein, it would have been consistent and natural for him to view Germany as one substance, as a group, as the “Dasein of the German people.” But, in Habermas’ portrayal of Heidegger’s thinking, this Dasein, as the heart and substance of Germany, cannot in itself be the source of the failure and ruin that befalls Germany. Searching for an explanation for the hard times of war and defeat, Heidegger comes to understand the “Dasein of the German people” as divided Dasein—or in Burke’s terminology, “dialectic substance.” By substituting different key words into the text on technology cited previously, the resulting dialectic provides an explanation for Heidegger’s perplexing adherence to National Socialism. This exercise in substitution also reveals similarities in the way in which Heidegger may have understood the “ambiguities” in both technology and National Socialism—a National Socialism that, in its Hitlerite version, counts for Heidegger as the fulfillment of technology as malign enframing. National Socialism here serves as “dialectic substance” moving in combined destiny with the essence of Germany as a nation and a people.

Thus the coming to presence of [National Socialism] harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible upsurgence of the saving power . . . . The essence of [National Socialism] is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth. On the one hand, enframing [as the brand of National Socialism exemplified in Nazism] challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth. On the other hand, enframing [as the brand of National Socialism Heidegger envisioned and advocated] comes to pass for its part in the granting that lets men endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that they may be among the ones who are needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus does the arising of the saving power appear.

Recalling this passage in its original context, Heidegger points out the evils of what Habermas calls “the will to will”—the manipulative rendering of everything into commodities, the symptom of the malign enframing of technology embodied, in Heidegger’s view, in the Nazi leadership. Exposing this division in German substance and identifying the contamination as

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rooted in technology prepares the way for Heidegger to understand analogously that there were those who did not succumb to the influence of this malign enframing, that there were those who were safekeepers of the “saving power.” The safekeepers only appear to be a part of the Nazi movement by proximity and superficial association and only appear to share in guilt and contamination while others actually partake of it. Dialectic substance, when applied to the German people and the National Socialists as groups, results in a division of the group into “us” and “them”—setting up the imbalanced polarization necessary for scapegoating. This move turns the scapegoaters, the Nazis as led by Hitler, into the scapegoats, and, in doing so, serves, from Heidegger’s point of view, to extricate him from the worst consequences of his Nazi entanglements—since he claims he had broken with Hitler’s leadership. But this reconstructed explanation of his behavior, never officially and clearly expressed by Heidegger, seems all too convenient and pale, especially when placed against the kind of rhetoric many wished Heidegger had been moved to express—rhetoric such as the following:

It may well be that people, in their human frailty, require an enemy as well as a goal. Very well: Hitlerism itself has provided us with such an enemy—and the clear example of its operation is guaranty that we have, in him and all he stands for, no purely fictitious “devil-function” made to look like a world menace by rhetorical blandishments, but a reality whose ominousness is clarified by the record of its conduct to date. In selecting his brand of doctrine as our “scapegoat,” and in tracking down its equivalents . . . we shall be at the very center of accuracy (1973, 219).

Yet Heidegger never comes close to using language as explicit as these words of Burke’s from “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’.” Certainly Heidegger must have had some knowledge of the contents of Mein Kampf. Considering their metaphysical similarities, what in their respective philosophies might account for the considerable difference of degree between Burke and Heidegger in their responses to Nazism? Heidegger and Burke—The Difference For Heidegger the guilt deriving from the war and the war crimes is not merely centered within factions of the German people. All the warring nations, under all forms of government, share equally in this guilt, the roots of which he traces to the metaphysics of consumption and control most prominently evidenced in the inundating tide of technological development. Heidegger’s belief in this shared guilt is documented, according to Habermas, in a letter written by Herbert Marcuse to Heidegger. This letter, in which Marcuse quotes Heidegger, was written in response to a prior letter sent by Heidegger to Marcuse after the war. Marcuse refers to an astonishing remark Heidegger makes about how he viewed the Nazi war crimes:

You write that everything I say about the extermination of the Jews holds equally for the Allies, if instead of “Jew” we write “Eastern German.” With this sentence, do you not place yourself outside the realm in which a conversation among humans is possible at

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all—outside the logos? For only from fully beyond this “logical” dimension is it possible to explain, adjust, “comprehend” a crime by saying that others did the same thing too (Habermas, 1989, 453).

Heidegger, by this account, believes that all the nations involved in the war were no different in having fallen under the influence of the malign aspect of enframing evidenced, to Marcuse’s dismay, in what Heidegger regards as equivalent acts of victimage. Heidegger extends the division of substance at the collective level, the level of the nation, to include not only Germany but every warring nation— such that the Dasein of each is divided between those who fell under the malign influence of technology and those who remained with the “saving power.” Heidegger spreads the guilt by claiming that the “Dasein of the German people” is not alone in having been exposed to a contamination. This is a process for which Burke has coined the appropriate phrase “socialization of losses” and about which he gives the following account:

The operation of this salvation device . . . has its counterpart in the “curative” doctrine of “original sin” whereby a man “socializes” his personal loss by holding that all men are guilty (1984b, 312).

However, Heidegger’s socialization of losses differs from Burke’s description here in that he socializes loss only to the level of the group. He does not hold that all warring men are guilty but rather that all warring nations are guilty. Dialectic substance does not here extend to the individual. Unlike Burke, who consistently links his secularized notion of “original sin” to every individual including especially oneself, Heidegger fails to make similar use by analogical extension of the notion of categorical guilt worked out in his understanding of Dasein as thrownness. This failing is consistent with Habermas’ account of the shift in Heidegger’s thinking toward a more collectivistic interpretation of Dasein. For Burke these two levels of dialectic substance, the collective and the individual, correspond to two forms of sacrificial scapegoating: the sacrifice of victimage and the sacrifice of mortification. Where the collectivity is viewed as the relevant dialectic substance, some share in guilt while others do not. Cleansing occurs here, as described in Chapter One, through the victimage of sacrifice yielding a partisan catharsis. Where the individual is viewed as the relevant dialectic substance, each person shares in contamination and the process of cleansing occurs through the mortification of self-sacrifice and yields what Burke calls a nonpartisan catharsis. Burke’s dramatistic analyses repeatedly illustrate that the inability to share categorical guilt—in whatever degree or variety—produces deep partisan divisions and provides the basis for the most devastating forms of victimage and violence. His dramatism describes measures whereby the battle of partisan divisiveness may be moved inward to play out within the self rather than in the community. Burke’s program for mitigation of the social problem of victimage, along with the possible disadvantages of such a program, will be discussed in the final section. In sum, a crucial difference for Burke between dramatism and the ideological core of Nazism and similar politicized creeds lies in the difference between a requirement to look for pollution as it may lurk in the matrix of motives, doctrines, and beliefs within the self (and every other) as opposed to a readiness to find pollution outside the self and exclusively in some other, whether as person or group.

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The radically exclusive privileging inherent in the structure of oppositional relation characteristic of traditional metaphysics may itself induce a particular kind of block in the relation to truth. By remaining at the partisan level of the dialectic, Heidegger appears to believe that those who come under the influence of the truth of Being are given of Being in such a way that they cannot be implicated by any mere surface identification with those who do not see. The true mission of the “Dasein of the German people” as well as the “inner truth” of National Socialism, for which Heidegger believed himself to be a voice, remain intact and uncontaminated. In this regard his philosophy bears uncomfortable resemblance to a belief system in which there is, in effect, an “elect” chosen to hear the call and the word of Being. Habermas nicely summarizes the central problem with this rationale:

A self-critical attitude, an open and scrupulous comportment to his own past, would have demanded from Heidegger something that would surely have been difficult for him: the revision of his self-understanding as a thinker with a privileged access to truth (1989, 454).

Heidegger and Burke on Technology—A Further Difference While Heidegger and Burke differ significantly in critical discernment with respect to partisan and nonpartisan mechanisms of scapegoating, an even greater difference separates them on the issue of technology and the explanation for the Nazi war crimes. For Heidegger, technology is the logical consequence of the brand of metaphysics of presence given initial expression in the philosophy of Descartes. But, contrary to what Heidegger argues, Descartes’ thinking may not be so much a further refinement of the metaphysics of presence as it is the beginning of a departure from it that culminates in an alternative metaphysics. A brief detour through the philosophy of Descartes will help draw into focus the relevant issues. Essentially Descartes begins his departure from the metaphysics of presence by asking, “What is the most fundamental and metrical form of presence?” He observes that in all cognizance or apprehension of present beings—most characteristically represented as thinking—there is already a presence. This presence—as the experience of a being who is doing the thinking, an “I”—is prior to all other presence, prior to the experience of all other beings. Heidegger follows Descartes up to a point:

Until Descartes every thing at hand for itself was a “subject”; but now the “I” becomes the special subject, that with regard to which all the remaining things first determine themselves as such. Because—mathematically—they first receive their thingness only through the founding relation to the highest principle and its “subject” (I), they are essentially such as stand as something else in relation to the “subject,” which lie over against it as objectum. The things themselves become “objects” (1977e, 280).

In using the words translated in this passage as “subject” and “objects,” Heidegger employs terminology belonging more properly to Kantian rather than Cartesian metaphysics. But his point remains relevant insofar as Descartes may be viewed as having, with the reflection on the

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“cogito,” set in motion the ground and structure of what becomes for Kant the subject/object opposition—an opposition analogous in Cartesian terminology to the difference between res cogitans and res extensa. In the passage cited, the presence of other beings as objects is subordinate to the more fundamental presence of the subject, for it is through the presence of the subject that other beings become objects. The “prior” or more fundamental relation of the presence of the subject to the presence of the object motivates “subordination” of the being of the object in relation to the being of the subject, initiating a hierarchical imbalance and direction of control favoring the subject. Thereby objects become significantly effects of the subject. And this direction of control emerges as desire for more control, a desire that eventually saturates the rationality that becomes the model for scientific and technological endeavor. Following Heidegger’s account of Descartes’ contribution, the subject, by way of mathematical thinking—the deductive mode of reasoning Descartes refers to as mathesis universalis and which he models in his own methodological approach—can unlock the secrets of the object and thereby master the natural world. Essentially the subject, by way of cognition, appropriates the object. Having apparently established a powerful distinction between subject (res cogitans) and object (res extensa), Cartesian metaphysics nevertheless cannot shut the door to boundary problems that begin to surface when the question arises as to where the line must be drawn between what the subject contributes and what the object contributes. The critique of Descartes that Heidegger brings to a head acknowledges these boundary problems by pushing Descartes’ thinking further with the additional insight that subject and object are not essentially different in status, that the subject is also an “effect.” For Heidegger, things receive their thingness, beings receive their Being, through Dasein. But unlike Descartes, Heidegger asserts further that the “I” that thinks is not the “I” of a rational thinking subject, but is instead the “I,” or rather the “it” of Being, of thinking itself. Dasein, like a catalyst, liberates Being, but is not in any substantial way “in control.” What Dasein brings to presence as Being, what Dasein understands, is not something Dasein merely wills. Understanding comes, in significant measure, on its own. As a consequence, both subject and object become, in Heidegger’s philosophy, effects of Being. This collapses, while not annihilating, the distinction between subject and object—a distinction that when left intact structures an appropriative relation between subject and object. Nevertheless, beneath Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity, another layer of traditional metaphysics seems to persist at the more fundamental level of the distinction between presence and absence, Being and time. As has been argued, Heidegger’s texts appear to contain a subtle but consistent residual depreciation of time despite the special attention he grants it in Being and Time and elsewhere. It would seem that for Heidegger there is a lingering sense in which, however unavoidably, time contaminates Being, separating Dasein from the truth of Being. The sense of this depreciation of time, as Derrida notes, can be detected in Being and Time, and it can still be discerned as late as the Spiegel interview of 1966 in Heidegger’s obvious privileging of tradition:

As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of

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the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition. Contemporary literature, for example, is largely destructive (1981, 57; see also 1975, 51).

The critique Heidegger mounts against the subject/object relation and the metaphysics of subjectivity is not necessarily also grounded in a thorough critique of the kind of oppositional relation most consistent with traditional metaphysics. Here a distinction can and ought to be made between metaphysical alternatives. As noted at the beginning of the second section, Derrida identifies the metaphysical exigency—but does so while describing two operations. But these two operations, although both hierarchical, are significantly different. One describes a relation in which one side is derivative or arbitrary and the other describes a relation in which one side is subordinate. The derivative is a perversion or warping of an originally pure value by an inessential or accidental contaminant, whereas a relation of subordination obtains when one value predominates over another value within an essential relation. On the basis of this difference, a distinction can be drawn between a metaphysics of presence as a premodern metaphysics, where opposition is modeled on the inessential relation between the pure and the impure, and a metaphysics of subordination—a modern metaphysics—characterized by an essential relation of fixed hierarchical dependence of the higher side to the subordinate side. The pure presence of a premodern metaphysics divides Being along the axis of presence/absence in accordance with discriminations, at the deepest level, between the pure and the impure. In contrast, the metaphysics of subjectivity divides Being between subject and object whereby the relation between the subject and object, conceived of as the imbalance of subordination (of object to subject), is distinctly not the same as the intrusion of contamination (of the impure into the pure). Whereas an object has the being of the manipulable, a contaminant has the being of the expendable. The division modeled in the relation between subject and object, while remaining implicit and hierarchical in Descartes, is nevertheless a retreat from the more radical pure/impure division that remains relevant at the level of the structure of Being and time in Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger dissolves the subject/object distinction into a more primordial understanding of Being within which inheres a sedimented relation between opposites similar to a pure/impure division. The persistence of this understanding of opposition at a deeper level, confirms that Heidegger, like Burke, does not finally endorse the mode of oppositional relation herein assigned to postmodern metaphysics and thereby remains within premodern metaphysics. Heidegger’s appreciation of the “paradox of substance” falls short of a balanced preservation of the tension between key oppositions in his philosophy.3 Having offered a critique of the form of opposition characterized by subordination from the more radical vantage point of the form characterized by contamination, Heidegger, in effect, stages a critique of one of the metaphysical operations identified by Derrida from the ground created by the other. In this light, he clearly does not escape traditional metaphysics, but it becomes easier to understand why he thought he did. In separating himself from Descartes, Heidegger believes he has distanced himself from the culminating influence of traditional metaphysics in the version of the metaphysics of presence as the metaphysics of subjectivity. But he is mistaken in his

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assessment of the metaphysics of subjectivity as a culmination of traditional metaphysics. The most powerful illustration of this point appears in the way in which Heidegger’s thinking leads him to speak about the consequences of technology. Heidegger’s disgust with the modern approach to science and technology, which he regards as an expression of the malign form of enframing, reflects a concern with the process of enframing that makes of everything an object and a commodity for some form of consumption. During the pre and post-war years, he saw this movement of technology as a devouring of the world and believed his philosophy to be a system that worked to oppose this “commodification” of the world and Dasein by preaching a hearkening to the call of Being rather than a herding of entities, a husbandry rather than a hammering. But this husbandry apparently also called for a thorough kind of weeding. Processes of purification and cleansing, consistent with themes of authenticity, were for Heidegger at the deepest level acceptable and even necessary whereas the rendering of everything into a commodity was not. Consequently, the way in which he understood the evil of the Holocaust, and apparently the only way he was able to understand that evil, was precisely as the evil— induced by the modern technological agenda—of transforming the Jews into commodities. This is painfully obvious in the following statement first brought to light by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe as uttered in a lecture by Heidegger in 1949.

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs (Davidson, 1989, 423).

The mechanization of the food industry and the manufacture of corpses are one and the same for Heidegger because he has located the essential problem in technology and the metaphysics of subjectivity with its insinuation of the mind-set of manipulation and control. But in denouncing technology for reducing not only nature but human beings into commodities, Heidegger does not probe deeply enough. The Jews who were exterminated in the Nazi death camps were not regarded by the Nazis as only commodities; they were a pollution. The Jews were not merely objects to be manipulated. They were threatening pathogens to be eliminated. The issue goes beyond a problem centered in the metaphysics of subjectivity with its themes of manipulation and control to the deeper and more encompassing layer of a metaphysics of purification. In sacrificial rituals the scapegoat is not simply a victim but the perfect victim— worthy in every way of extermination. Understanding this distinction is critical to understanding the depth of the problem of the Holocaust and its horror. Unlike Heidegger, Burke appreciates full well the fact that the Jews were scapegoats. He correctly sees the Holocaust first and foremost as a horrific form of sacrificial cleansing.

With a culture formed about the idea of redemption by the sacrifice of a Crucified Christ, just what does happen in an era of post-Christian science, when the ways of socialization have been secularized? . . . . But we know, as a lesson of recent history, how anti-Semitism provided the secularized replica of the Divine Scapegoat in the post-Christian

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rationale of Hitler’s National Socialist militarism; and we know how Jews and other minority groups are thus magically identified by many members of our society (1969b, 31-32).

Burke then goes on to show how this primary structure, the structure of purification implicit in the sacrificial scapegoat, may become concealed by a more superficial terminology of “commodification” or “objectification” consistent with the modern orientation immersed in science and technology:

In its transcendence of natural living, its technical scruples, its special tests of purity, a clinic or laboratory can be a kind of secular temple, in which ritualistic devotions are taking place, however concealed by the terminology of the surface. Unless properly scrutinized for traces of witchcraft, these could furtively become devotions to a satanic order of motives. At least such was the case with the technological experts of Hitlerite Germany. The very scientific ideals of an “impersonal” terminology can contribute ironically to such disaster: for it is but a step from treating inanimate nature as mere “things” to treating animals, and then enemy peoples, as mere things (1969b, 32).

And Burke might well have added that it is but another short step, where “special tests of purity” are in operation, from treating enemy peoples as mere things to treating them as pollutants. It is a terrible category error to treat a person as a thing, but it is far worse to treat a person as a thing that, in keeping with quasi-religious “ritualistic devotions,” is also a pathogen and a pollution. The distinction lies in the difference between forcing others into labor and forcing others into ovens. Granted, the Nazis did both, but the question remains one of accounting for the latter—accounting for actions that extend beyond oppression to inconceivable brutality. The inclination to divide the world and its people into various pollutants far surpasses the technologizing of the world in destructive power. Using people, however ugly in itself, in no way compares to the destructiveness of treating them as contaminants. This is what, as Burke has thoroughly demonstrated throughout his work, the principle of scapegoating accomplishes. Burke understands that the deeper issue of scapegoating evident in the Holocaust can overwhelm and appropriate the various forms of objectification, manipulation, and control associated with the mind-set of science and technology. Contrary to what may be inferred from Heidegger’s texts and recorded comments, the desire for control heightened by technological extensions, while not innocent in its effects, is not the source of the problem. The Holocaust haunts the world with a deeper horror. Complementarity Metaphysics: The Postmodern Alternative Burke has presented, perhaps as well as anyone in the past century, a penetrating and thorough analysis of the problem of scapegoating. In doing so, he has also succeeded in approaching the heart of traditional metaphysics. And he has not proposed that there is any way to extinguish the sacrificial fires of purification fueled by traditional metaphysics. He can only recommend turning the scapegoating impulse inward, fighting fire with fire through controlled burnings. He urges that rituals of sacrifice and purification be turned on the self in mortification or self-slaying. And

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short of actual slaying of the self, he proposes that pollution is more rightly found in and purification performed through the use of symbols and symbolic scapegoats rather than human scapegoats. The turn from redemption through victimage to redemption through mortification becomes for Burke the imperative separating ideologies like Nazism from the more humane alternatives presented in beliefs like Christianity and the secularized Christianity of dramatism.4 While admirable as a humane alternative, Burke’s strategy for coping nevertheless fosters a continuation of the same underlying structure of belief that made possible the Holocaust. In fighting fire with fire, Burke retains the dialectic of us/them. The pollution that was on the outside now seeks to confine itself to the inside. The other—as the other person—is no longer either pure or impure, either of me or alien to me, but is instead consubstantial with me in impurity. This proliferation has the humanizing effect of grounding everyone equally in impurity and thereby promoting the ability to share guilt and compassion. But it has the dehumanizing and self-destructive effect of installing the sacrificial dialectic internally. Directing the dialectic internally feeds the roots of the Holocaust and the possibility that an inner Holocaust can spill over and inflame the larger community. This establishes the need for vigilance. But vigilance is not all that is needed. The deeper source of the problem lies in how the paradox of substance is understood. Any orientation offering a way out of Burke’s sacrificial cycle of Order, Secret, and the Kill must achieve a form of balance in oppositional relation. With deconstruction Derrida approaches rather than retreats from the paradoxical quality of essential difference and essential relation in the division of substance and/or Being and clearly evokes this with the deconstructive neologism “différance”—a term used to reference the generation of “the same, which is not the identical” (1982, 17). Différance models an opposition in sameness and difference where the poles of the relation function overall with equal status—while not necessarily, as will be discussed, simultaneous equal significance. The incalculable effects of différance account for the irreducible difference of the other as well as the necessary and irreducible link to the other. If both division and merging are not found to extend all the way through to every particular being and person, then in a real sense the fully other, as both same and different from the self, never arrives, never comes to life in the self. And consequently conscience never arrives. In premodern metaphysics conscience can only be the conscience of an established and static higher authority as a result of its imposition of the radically uneven relation between the pure and the impure. Indeed, only an authoritarian ethical system can result from this relation. Wherever the difficulty of the paradox of substance is thoroughly granted, it follows that nothing is essentially unnatural—in which case either there are no impurities or contaminants in the world or everything is an impurity and contaminant. Either everything and everyone is essential and part of the whole or nothing is. On the basis of a complementarity metaphysics an understanding of difference and the other occurs adequate to insure that the other is not systematically and essentially excluded.5 Along with the promise of inclusiveness, however, complementarity metaphysics appears to give rise to its own undoing. While complementarity may serve well for modeling balance and equity

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in human relations, it appears to serve badly as a model for providing a foundation for judgment, choice and evaluation. And that may be a shortcoming of sufficient proportions to threaten its potential for promoting a lasting cooperation in human relations. For if the paradigmatic model of opposition presents poles of different but equal status, choice has in effect been reduced to a matter of taste. Where alternatives are different but of equal value, the choice between them is more an issue of taste than of judgment—analogous to the choice between chocolate and vanilla. This has been a major criticism of postmodern positions, since the model of opposition inherent in such positions seems to leave no basis for evaluation. The erosion of standards in literary criticism and radical multiculturalism are, it has been argued, resulting phenomena. And few will be comfortable with the idea that only a matter of taste distinguishes the Axis from the Allies in World War II. The issue of evaluation throws into question the adequacy and relevance of postmodern metaphysics as an alternative to premodern metaphysics. More than noting a difference, evaluation requires grading and hierarchy. Postmodern metaphysics, carried to its logical conclusion, would seem to lead to the nihilism of the leveling of all values. Some have believed, as noted in the Introduction, that the roots of Nazism and the crimes of the Holocaust lie in this nihilism as a destruction of value by a leveling of value—first and foremost the leveling and destruction of the value of truth. But this assessment of the ethical ground (or lack thereof) of postmodern metaphysics is wrong on two counts: 1) while leading to a kind of undecidability, it does not lead to a moral impasse by way of a leveling of values, and 2)—and this cannot be stressed enough—it is not the impasse of undecidability, but something more like its traditionally conceived opposite, that makes it possible to throw others into ovens. Postmodern metaphysics only appears to lead to nihilism through a failure to extend its “logic” of relation to its logical conclusion. While it is true—as Burke makes explicit in his dramatistic analyses of action—that evaluation cannot proceed without dialectic, cannot proceed on the basis of any intuition other than that there are (at least) two and that the two are not equal in value, this polar inequity does not in itself undermine postmodern metaphysics. In its structure of opposition, as already noted, essential relation presents a fluctuating or alternating hierarchy. This fluctuation turns on alterations of context. Although postmodern metaphysics holds that both sides of a pair are essentially of equal value, that need not imply that in particular contexts each side is of equal value. One side may be of lesser value in one context while being of equal or greater value in another context. The both/and logic of the complementarity requires that opposition be understood as displaying equality through hierarchical alternations. Everything and everyone is both equal and different and higher and lower. Nothing is theorized as essentially expendable or permanently subordinate. Everything is different yet of equal value as well as different and of unequal value through different and changing contexts. Unlike premodern metaphysics, dialectic and evaluation within postmodern metaphysics proceed along an undercurrent of value—bestowed not only on the complexity of the process of evaluation but also on the complexity of objects of evaluation—as a direct result of the underlying structure of essential inclusion.

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This way of understanding evaluation calls for judgment through temporally shifting frames of reference over and against totalizing laws, rules, and formulas. And consequently, this dialectical process calls for rhetoricians and audiences to make conscious attempts to decipher and/or define such frames and contexts in making and assessing arguments and judgments. The importance of and difficulties with this contextual framing are discussed in more detail in Chapters Four and Five. Having established the possibility for evaluation in postmodern metaphysics, it then makes sense to argue from within the rules of its logic that there are grounds for preferring it over premodern metaphysics. But it is crucial to point out that postmodern metaphysics need not establish itself in relation to premodern metaphysics by way of the evaluative structure of the traditional oppositional relation. In other words, to view the preference for postmodern metaphysics as an instance of the application of premodern metaphysics’ principle of exclusion would amount to a justification of that preference from within an already premodern orientation and terminology. Postmodern metaphysics does not oppose premodern metaphysics but instead overlays it. Alternative orientations to opposition, alternative dialectics, do not oppose so much as superimpose each other. As noted in Chapter One, Gilles Deleuze understands this process as conversion rather than yet another operation of the principle of exclusion peculiar to premodern metaphysics. Similarly, the two orientations cannot be contrasted, for example, by way of the simple opposition between principles of inclusiveness and exclusiveness. From the postmodern direction, in every inclusion there remains a level of exclusion and in every exclusion there remains a level of inclusion. There is no pure exclusion; there is no scapegoat. The scapegoating or exclusionary principle is displaced and transformed and becomes impossible from within the “logic” of postmodern metaphysics. In essence, what really changes between the premodern and the postmodern is the attitude toward the other. The other can no longer be scapegoat. However, insofar as premodern metaphysics exerts influence, what Burke has to say about scapegoating will remain relevant and the specter of Nazism, as the negative “run amok,” will continue to hang over humanity like a dark cloud. Here Burke’s dramatism recommends itself over Heidegger’s philosophy of Being by imposing a program of vigilance over the mechanisms of scapegoating. But, more importantly, it may be crucial for the balance and quality of human relations to understand that the sacrificial Weltanschauung identified by Burke—and every other expression of premodern metaphysics including his own—is not all there is. Granting the complementarity alternative to the Burkean formula of sacrificial rhetoric expressed in the “Cult of the Kill,” a summary, but by no means final, conclusion may be drawn concerning Heidegger’s troubling association with Nazism. His link to Nazism is a symptom of a larger problem that suggests both his philosophy and his character be regarded as considerably less than exemplary models.

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Heidegger’s philosophy invites significant criticism for at least two reasons: 1) it more than likely, as argued herein and contrary to what it claims, constitutes a version of premodern, sacrificial metaphysics and, as with all versions of premodern metaphysics, warrants specific and exceptional vigilance for the general reasons also argued herein, and 2) in contrast to Burke’s dramatism, it remarkably lacks any hint of an admonitory tone or suggestion of a program of mitigation regarding the potential dangers of the sacrificial negative persisting in its fundamental view of opposition and the workings of this negative in the ritual of scapegoating. Heidegger’s failure of vision, exemplified in the blindness that becomes overwhelmingly apparent in his remark about the Holocaust in the context of mechanized agriculture, points out the inadequacy not only of his metaphysics but serves as a reminder of the measure of inadequacy in every metaphysics. Heidegger lived in a metaphysical world whose fundamental structures conditioned him to the point of paralysis Burke calls “trained incapacity”—an incapacity to see the most obvious dangers of Nazism in light of the ritual of scapegoating. The fact that Heidegger was not sensitized to such possibilities by his view of truth as an unconcealment that also conceals testifies to the ultimately premodern way in which he understood unconcealment. Finally, Heidegger’s character must also remain clouded. His actions take on the proportions of Greek tragic drama where, like Oedipus, he falls victim to his own blindness. In genuine blindness there may be a kind of fate at work; no one chooses such blindness. But it is possible to operate from an attitude appropriate to the possibilities of blindness inevitable to the experience of thrown being-in-the-world. It is possible to exercise greater self-reflection and caution than is evident in Heidegger’s behavior throughout his life. And it is also possible to apologize for association with a system of terror and genocide, even if that association was in fact marginal—and especially where others judge that association to be something other than marginal. It would seem better to proceed with the guiding attitude that blindness in one way is the price of seeing in another—ever mindful of the possibility that this seeing may, through the course of time and a change of context, rise to a blindness that could figure prominently in personal denouement. Unlike Oedipus, Heidegger continued to live in denial even after his blindness had become painfully obvious—refusing to hear the call that had risen to a chorus around him—not the call of Being but the call of humanity. Notes 1. It is important to emphasize, in understanding the use of the term “complementarity,” the paradoxical participation of both the discrete and the continuous whereby each of these qualities may be seen as generated more by alternation or vibration than by blend or mixture. As noted, this kind of participation can be glimpsed in the wave/particle superposition in physics or in dual gestalt images like the duck/rabbit—where there is an alternation between two discrete images and where it is also impossible to tell where one image ends and the other begins. Derrida has used the metaphor of the parasite as a means of drawing into focus the nature of the transition that occurs in the shift from a traditional understanding of oppositional relation to a

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deconstructive understanding. But, as with any metaphor used to illustrate this difference, care must be taken to diminish the chances for misunderstanding. By definition, a parasite is an organism that grows and feeds within a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of the host. The host is essential to the parasite but the parasite, like a corruption or contamination, is other, alien, and inessential to the host. As a model for opposition, the host/parasite relation is imbalanced: the two are essentially different and inessentially related. One is whole and autonomous and the other is dependent and alien. Applying this notion of the parasite to the study of language, specifically speech acts, Derrida asks:

If what they [Austin and Searle in speech act theory] call the “standard,” fulfilled,” “normal,” “serious,” “literal,” etc. is always capable of being affected by the non-standard, the “void,” the “abnormal,” the “nonserious,” the “parasitical” etc., what does that tell us about the former? Parasitism does not need the theater or literature to appear. Tied to iterability, this possibility obtains constantly as we can verify at every moment, including this one (1977, 232).

The “normal” speech act that is “always capable of being affected by” the parasitical intrusion of a difference that “obtains constantly” calls for a fundamental adjustment at the level of theory or the logic of relation. A logic is required that accounts for this possibility in every instance.

From this iterability . . . Sec (“Signature, Event, Context”) seeks to draw the consequences: the first and most general of which being that one neither can nor ought to exclude, even “strategically,” the very roots of what one purports to analyze. For these roots are two-fold: you cannot root-out the “parasite” without rooting-out the “standard” . . . at the same time. What is at work here is a different logic of mimesis (1977, 232).

And again:

As for the inadequation between meaning and saying, as well as the alleged “corruption” of the text, once they have been acknowledged to be “always possible,” their exclusion, whether on provisional-methodological, or on theoretical grounds, constitutes the very object of the critique proposed by Sec. A corruption that is “always possible” cannot be a mere extrinsic accident supervening on a structure that is original and pure, one that can be purged of what thus happens to it. The purportedly “ideal” structure must necessarily be such that this corruption will be “always possible.” This possibility constitutes part of the necessary traits of the purportedly ideal structure. The (“ideal”) description of this structure should thus include, and not exclude, this possibility, whereby “include” here does not simply mean “to incorporate” it (in the psychoanalytical sense, i.e. retaining the object within itself but as something excluded, as a foreign body which is impossible to assimilate and must be rejected . . .) (1977, 218).

The fact that parasitism and corruptibility are, by way of iterability, possible in every instance means that they must be theorized as potentially present in every instance. It could be argued, for example, that it would be possible to discern between instances that count as pure and instances that count as corrupt, because the fact that parasitism is possible in every instance does not mean that it is actualized in every instance. However, Derrida argues that iterability insures not only

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that the difference of the parasite is always possible but also that it cannot be ruled out in any given instance (It may help here to think of wave/particle duality whereby in any given measurement evidence of a particle may appear but the wave function remains nevertheless present in what physicists call “superposition.” A second measurement, in a new context, may then expose the wave function which had remained hidden previously). Again, the difference that makes the parasite case possible is always potentially present—which is to say that iterability makes it impossible to decide with certainty, from context to context, whether or not a given instance is an instance of parasitism (e.g., nonserious speech). This residual uncertainty, however, does not mean that it is impossible to form an opinion about what is the case. The effect of not being able to rule out parasitism in particular cases means that it is impossible to point to any indisputable examples of the pure case (e.g., serious speech). Derrida’s playfulness with this difficulty is exhibited in “Limited Inc abc . . .” where he periodically states, “Let’s get serious” or asks “Am I serious?” It is impossible to read from the text itself what might really be the case—that is, what Derrida might really be intending. No doubt this playfulness, for purposes of illustration, was part of what so thoroughly angered Searle. Initially Derrida makes use of the term “parasite” in the traditional sense as it may be used to describe the nature of deviant speech acts. But when he illustrates how the parasitic case is a pervasive and constant possibility in speech acts, a new logic of oppositions such as serious/nonserious emerges that corresponds to what is herein called the complementarity relation between opposites. In this relation, one side is never present without the other; each is necessary or essential in relation to the other. The parasite must be “included” in this structure, but not, as Derrida says, in the psychoanalytic sense of “incorporate”—as the implanting of a foreign body. Instead, the parasite becomes a “necessary trait of the purportedly ideal structure.” Derrida exposes what were thought to be instances of the foreign intrusion of parasitism as instead instances of a difference that is inescapable and thereby already essential within the oppositional structure. This is why he claims that a “different logic of mimesis” emerges. When he continues to use the word “parasite,” he uses it in the displaced sense authorized by his deconstruction of the opposition in which the term formerly operated. “Parasite” is now understood to refer to what constitutes an essential trait in the oppositional relation between serious and nonserious usage. 2. In The Rhetoric of Religion Burke moves from an axiological to a logological defense of his dramatistic emphasis on the act. “Things” can but move or be moved. “Persons” by definition can “act.” In being endowed with words (symbols) by which they can frame responses to questions and commands, by the same token they have “responsibility” . . . . Ontologically, and theologically, we say that this locus of freedom makes possible the kind of personal choice we have in mind when we speak of “Action” . . . . Implicit in the idea of an act is the idea of free will . . . . The ontological and theological statements may or may not be true. The logological statement would be “true logologically” even if it were not true ontologically . . . . If one cannot make a choice, one is not acting, one is but being moved, like a billiard ball tapped with a cue and behaving mechanically in conformity with the resistances it encounters. But even if men are

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doing nothing more than that, the word ”act” implies that they are doing more—and we are now concerned solely with the implications of terms (1970, 187-188). However, this logological logic remains little more than an etymology of embedded distinctions which inevitably, like water flowing downhill, leads Burke back to the axiological question: why prefer the dramatistic view of action? And Burke’s answer always returns him to the emphasis on order (in this case social order)—which, as will be argued, he finds must be fundamentally authoritative—in keeping with the implications of the hortatory and sacrificial negative. 3. Vitanza (1997) concurs with this assessment when he argues in “Heidegger, Wesen, and ‘The Rector’s Address’” that Heidegger’s philosophy is ultimately caught up in “negative dialectic” or “negative essentializing.” Here the word “negative” corresponds to the principle of exclusion inherent in premodern metaphysics (e.g., 191-205). 4. With respect to attention given to the problem of scapegoating, Girard (1996) counts as a close second to Burke. In Girard’s theory, mimetic desire, as the imitation of another, becomes pivotal in his structure of explanation. This imitation, initially a form of admiration, leads to competition over objects of desire. This competition evolves into rivalry, then to heated contesting, and finally to violence as conflictive disruption of the social order. The divisive violence is finally resolved by a culminating act of violence, the “founding murder” as Girard expresses it, in the slaying of a “scapegoat” as the source of the trouble. This slaying then restores social order. While Girard’s theory of mimetic desire makes a significant contribution to understanding human relations, it fails to adequately account for the phenomenon of scapegoating as sacrificial slaying. Contrary to what Girard argues, the progression of mimetic desire cannot result in a “founding murder” without the addition of something else. Mimetic rivalry could indeed result in “murder” through progressive conflict ending in a passionate loss of control. But why would it not then be followed by remorse for a crime that had been committed in the heat of battle? Instead, the “murder” of the scapegoat produces a sensation of relief and a restoration of the health of the social order as if the “murder” were a profoundly necessary homicide and a justifiable act of purification. The missing element in this progression is Burke’s negative. The notion of the sacrificial negative—the idea of something being a pollutant essentially worthy of elimination—is necessary in order to arrive at the conclusion that a slaying or sacrifice is required to restore balance. The obstacle or rival is understood as an impurity that must be eliminated from the system. The addition of Burke’s sacrificial negative prepares the way for identifying a victim and viewing the “murder” as a righteous cleansing rather than a crime. As Burke says, “The negative helps radically to define the elements to be victimized.” None of the moments in Girard’s theory addresses the dialectical structure of the sacrificial negative as the necessary piece for completing the scapegoating puzzle. Burke, however, does address Girard’s mimetic insights through his notion of identification. Burke, therefore, emerges as the theorist offering the more complete account of the scapegoating mechanism. Both Girard and Burke correctly see that Christianity marks a significant departure from previous mythological and pagan scapegoating practices. Burke’s proposed turn from redemption through victimage to redemption through mortification and the simultaneous turn

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from partisan catharsis to nonpartisan catharsis identifies the Christian contribution. Girard’s promotion of a “nonsacrificial” interpretation of the New Testament parallels Burke’s favoring of nonpartisan catharsis by exposing the way in which the Gospels reject the sacrificial ritual of scapegoating and solicit nonviolence through the belief that all are tainted (and thereby consubstantial) and all are cleansed (and thereby redeemed) through Christ’s self-sacrifice. But Girard’s interpretation, however accurate, must be disqualified as “nonsacrificial” in the sense that the New Testament, as Girard admits, preaches the turn from redemption through victimage to redemption through mortification or self-sacrifice. This turn accomplishes only an internalization of scapegoating. The sacrificial logic remains intact as Girard reveals in the following passage:

I had avoided the word “scapegoat” for Jesus, but now I agree with Raymond Schwager that he is scapegoat for all—except now in reverse fashion, for theologically considered the initiative comes from God rather than simply from the human beings with their scapegoat mechanism . . . . He [Jesus] is scapegoat for all” (1996, 280).

However, Jesus’ self-sacrifice has not gone unquestioned. It is targeted by Nietzsche in his critique of Christianity. Nietzsche argues that the Christian internalization of the agon of good and evil (a premodern structure of oppositional relation) achieves a mitigation of the social destructiveness of scapegoating at the expense of psychological exacerbation of the problem. The concept of “original sin,” retained in the accounts offered by both Girard and Burke, configures human being as rooted in deficiency. Nietzsche regards this imagined point of origin as extraordinarily and unnecessarily counterproductive resulting in an unhealthy emphasis on ascetic virtues and a morbid meditation on suffering—all too evident in Christian icons. Girard and Burke, having both studied Nietzsche’s work, nevertheless fundamentally misunderstand his objection to Christianity and his more radical critique of the sacrificial negative embedded in the structure of scapegoating. 5. For Southwell, the “activity of criticism,” without which, as Burke has argued, there can be no discrimination and consequently no life, “requires a philosophy of being if it is not to become an inanity of deconstructions” (1987, 80). Consistent with these judgments, Southwell claims, quoting Burke, “the natural tendency of symbolic enterprise is towards integration” (1987, 85). In contrast to the position argued herein, Southwell insists the deconstructive approach is the antithesis of integration and a philosophy of Being in that “deconstructionism can tolerate no concept that is not in the service of destruction.” He says further of deconstruction that “it can practice an impeccable consistency because[—]of the two components of all the significant thought of the past, synthesis and analysis[—]it credits only analysis” (1987, 79). In his critique of deconstruction Southwell notes, along with Burke, Heidegger, and Derrida, that there is no getting outside metaphysics. But he fails to see that this must also mean that there are only philosophies of Being—in one variety or another. Even deconstruction is necessarily a philosophy of Being. The issue is rather: what is the being of Being in any particular philosophy of Being? How is Being understood? A deconstructive view argues that Being has the quality of the trace rather than the quality of presence. The quality of the trace, contrary to what Southwell seems to think, is not the same as nothingness, destructiveness, or illusion (e.g., 1987, 79) and is

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instead carefully distinguished from these traits. The trace retains fully the “paradox of substance” (or Being)—substance understood as fundamentally sundered in the contradiction that it both “is” and “is not” what it is (for further explanation of this contradiction see Chapter Four). Retaining the divided quality of the trace does not mean deconstruction is not also a metaphysics of integration. Every metaphysics is also a metaphysics of integration, of ordering, synthesizing, and evaluating. Deconstruction, it could be argued, takes integration to a new level. In deconstruction, integration as evaluation proceeds by way of a fundamental principle of inclusion (emphasizing a discriminative negative) rather than a principle of exclusion (emphasizing a sacrificial negative). As should be evident from the account of deconstruction given in the chapters herein, Southwell’s indictment of deconstruction labors under misunderstandings derived from clearly inadequate readings of its central texts.

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