Good Revolutions Gone Bad: Žižek’s Critique and Praise of Heidegger’s Nazism

© 2015. Philosophy Today, Volume 59, Issue 3 (Summer 2015).ISSN 0031-8256 1–304

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201561077

Good Revolutions Gone Bad: Žižek’s Critique and Praise of

Heidegger’s Nazism

TERE VADÉN

Abstract: Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Žižek represent the two major anti-liberal

European revolutions of the twentieth century, the Nazi and the October revolutions.

Both revolutions ended badly, but neither Heidegger nor Žižek retreats from the revo-

lutionary position, simply because it is an indelible part of their philosophy, where the

finitude of the world and human being necessitate a partisan truth. By reintroducing

the concept of the subject, Žižek wants to present a correction that cures Heidegger’s

politics. Unfortunately, the resurrection relies on a sleight of hand: the subject to be re-

introduced tries to be at the same time ahistorical and leftist. Žižek finds in Heidegger’s

reading of Anaximander signs of ahistorical subjectivity, but this interpretation is based

on a misconstrual of Heidegger’s notion of alêtheia. On the other hand, by analysing

Heidegger’s two famous passages mentioning the extermination camps, we find the

factual blind-spots in Heidegger’s ontological gaze.

Key words: Heidegger, Žižek, revolution, Nazism, metaphysics of subjectivity

Introduction: Philosophy Is Revolutionary Politics

What unites Žižek’s and Heidegger’s philosophy is also what sets them apart: revolution. For both, the total transformation of human being is at the same time an empirical necessity (be-

cause of the state the world is in) and a theoretical possibility (because of their philosophical anthropology and ontology). The most succinct summary of the common theoretical position leading to political engagement comes from Žižek himself. In Žižek’s view, Heidegger “ontologises” Kant’s epistemological turn

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that recognised the finitude and limits of human knowledge. The ontologisation of finitude can be described in many ways. One is by saying that for Heidegger temporality (historicity) is not a deficient mode of eternity, but the other way around.1 Therefore, as Žižek writes:

Heidegger’s ontology is in fact ‘political’ . . . : his endeavour to . . . assert as the key . . . man’s decision to adopt a ‘project’ by means of which he actively assumes his ‘thrownness’ into a finite historical situation, locates the historico-political act of decision in the very heart of ontology itself.2

Žižek most emphatically agrees with this definition of the political as an ontologi-cally basic category, leading to an attitude of “fully assuming the consequences of the lack of ontological guarantee.”3 Consequently, both Heidegger and Žižek see truth as non-neutral and non-harmonious, as partisan and kämpferisch.

However, the commitment to revolution does not yet decide the content of politics. Where Heidegger parts way with almost everybody is in insisting—even after the war—that the Nazi movement had the right potential. Žižek, too, thinks that a revolution, the October revolution, which went terribly wrong and produced large scale mass murder, had the right potential. Indeed, Žižek wants to present a very precise corrective move with regard to Heidegger’s philosophy. He wants to follow Heidegger to the point where revolution is grounded in the historicity and finitude of Being, so that political commitment becomes one with thought, and personal life is submitted to sacrifice and leadership, but not to the point where a concrete Nazi twist is given to the commitment. Furthermore, he wants to present a theoretical antidote to the wrong twist. The antidote is the concept of a universal, ahistorical subject. The concept of the subject is also connected to Žižek’s motivation for a leftist revolution, so the rehabilitation of the subject is not a provocative quirk, but rather the crucial “quilting point” of Žižek’s philosophy, connecting the overall ontology and the particular, “communist” political content.

Consequently, if we do not want to participate in the rehabilitation of the subject, we have to respond to Heidegger’s revolution in a way that does not neces-sitate the subject. This, at the same time, reduces the need for the rehabilitation. Schematically, we follow Žižek in accepting Heidegger’s “ontologised politics” but part ways in suggesting—through a critique of Žižek’s interpretation of Heidegger—a corrective that is asubjectivist, rather than subjectivist. This, in turn, necessitates that we identify the problems of Heidegger’s Nazism in a more realistic way than, for instance, Žižek does, and, at the same time, accept the “lack of ontological guarantees” also with respect to revolutions: they can go horribly wrong and no amount of theory is going to preclude that possibility.

Žižek’s Critique and Praise of Heidegger’s Nazism 3

Žižek on Heidegger’s NazismThe main upshot of Žižek’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism, most elaborately presented in the long essay “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,”4 is that contrary to the commonly held view, Heidegger’s political activism was not an out-and-out mistake, but almost right. What was right was taking the step into everyday politics, making the connection between philosophy and concrete col-lective activism. This interpretation indicates the deep connection between Žižek and Heidegger: both are incorrigible in their revolutionary beliefs. Heidegger does not denounce Nazism and Žižek does not refrain from offering a touch of totalitarianism and ethical violence as possible tools for exiting the capitalist cul-de-sac. Consequently, in his view of Heidegger’s Nazism, Žižek tries to combine elements from Marxist criticisms of Heidegger with some of the postmodern and anti-enlightenment insights of the Heideggerian legacy.

Most of all, Žižek has to keep at a distance the typical liberal criticism, accord-ing to which Heidegger’s Nazism is an indication of the fact that his philosophy is fundamentally flawed. According to the liberal criticism, as if Heidegger’s word magic and irrationality were not proof enough, the nationalism and linguistic and cultural specificity (not to speak of racism, cultural or otherwise) of his works drive home their anti-philosophical nature. Emmanuel Faye makes the point crisply: because Heidegger thought that philosophy is a völkisch enterprise, an attempt where a linguistically and culturally rooted people struggles for the authenticity of its fate, and because true philosophy is universal, Heidegger’s views do not represent philosophy.5 Against this, Žižek wants to maintain that Heidegger’s thinking was not great despite of his Nazism but because of it.6 Unlike many apologists who want to keep Heidegger the thinker and Heidegger the Nazi separate, Žižek recognizes that for Heidegger Nazism was the only political move-ment that at least tried to address the most important question of our age, that of technology. In other words, for Heidegger Nazism was not one option among others but the only authentically political movement that the twentieth century managed to muster in Europe. Everything else was technocratic management.

Žižek even thinks that Heidegger the philosopher is at his best in the 1930s. This is a view that is easy to substantiate. For all of its reputation and influence, Sein und Zeit is but one example of a whole wave of Dasein-philosophy. What is original in Sein und Zeit is the presentation and relationships between its elements, most of which are present in Heidegger’s contemporaries (including Jaspers, Klages, Bäumler, Heyse, Jünger and so on). On the other hand, while Heidegger’s poetic and enigmatic post-war philosophy may sound novel, the themes themselves, such as Gelassenheit, are well-known in many non-Western traditions and in non-academic Western thinking. In contrast to this, during the 1930s Heidegger makes a unique and original effort in forming a politico-

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philosophical Gesamtkunstwerk, intended to overcome not only liberal capitalism but also the millennial technological forgetting of Being. We do not, on the whole, have many such attempts, much less by skilled philosophers. Žižek is right: the unique promise of Heidegger’s thinking is in his politics.

Heidegger’s Nazism was a Nazism, one version in a loose family resemblance relation to other kinds, schools and sections of Nazism, including the prevailing official Party line, which also shifted in time. The recently published volumes of the so-called Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte)7 reinforce this interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophical politics.8 First, his commitment to the National Socialist movement was genuine, as he saw in it a possibility for an opening for the truth of Being through the struggle of the German people for its essence (Wesen) or, in other words, for a second beginning after the first Greek one: “Thinking purely ‘metaphysically’ (i.e., Being-historically) I have during the years 1930–1934 seen National Socialism as a possibility for an overcoming into a second beginning.”9 Second, he always separated his Nazism from more popular versions, “Vulgär-nationalsozialismus,” distancing himself from biologist, racist and bureaucratic ideals.10 The second step does not, however, mean that Heidegger’s public par-ticipation in the movement—that he never apologised for—could be brushed aside. The Notebooks also make clear that Heidegger’s thought includes not only the idea that the struggle or storm (Sturm)11 in Being makes some free and some slaves12 (thus ontologising inequality, or, as he prefers, Rang13), and not only the idea that certain groups of people (such as the German) have a privileged position in this ontological Rangordnung,14 but also the idea that other nameable groups of people (such as the Jewish) are “Being-historically” furthest into worldless-ness and Machination (Machenschaft) and propagate it.15 That the anti-Semitic remarks in the Notebooks appear more prominently after the disillusionment with really-existing Nazism shows that Heidegger’s enthusiasm for Nazism and his “philosophical non-biological racism” or, more precisely, “non-universalism with Rangordnung,” were two partially separate things; the second could continue after the first was over, even though it also was a ground for the first. To try to save Heidegger by saying that the remarks contain only descriptions of “pure” ontological structures would work if Heidegger himself did not insist that these ontological insights have direct political consequences. In precise opposition to Faye, from Žižek’s perspective it is this “short-circuit” between Heidegger’s on-tology (in its non-neutrality) and the everyday (in its politicalness) that makes Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s “great,” and, correspondingly, Heidegger himself was happy about the possibility of connecting his thought and politics:

The great experience and luck, that the Führer has woken a new reality that gives to our thinking its right track and power to impact. Otherwise it would have despite its throroughness stayed lost and would have found it difficult to have effect. The literary existence has ended.16


However, Žižek begins his article “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933” with a reproach, characteristically presented through an anecdotal story borrowed from G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton tells of General Arthur St.Clare, who after a successful career was stationed in Brazil. St.Clare leads a small troop against the much larger groups of the Brazilian commander Olivier, only to be completely defeated. St.Clare himself is found hanged. In Chesterton’s story suspicions are alerted by the fact that St.Clare was known as a cautious officer. Why would he make a doomed attack on Olivier? It turns out that St.Clare had a dark secret that one of his subordinates discovers. To keep his secret, St.Clare murdered the subordinate and attacked in order to hide the body in the turmoil. However, the troops became aware of the scheme and hanged St.Clare. The plan to hide one body in a mountain of bodies failed.

Žižek’s analogy is clear. Heidegger’s post-war habit of blaming Western meta-physics for the forgetting of Being is an attempt to hide the crimes of Nazism in the pile of Western genocides. The “criminalization” of the whole Western enterprise since Plato is an attempt to cover up the culpability of the Nazis. This cover-up is different from the tu quoque apology, in which the idea is to make crimes more defensible by claiming that they were provoked by earlier and possibly even more heinous crimes by the enemy. Thus, for instance, Ernst Nolte, who sees Nazism as a reasonable and justifiable reaction to the danger of communism.17 Indeed, Heidegger himself does at times point to anti-communism as one reason for his Nazism.18 However, the “pile of bodies” cover-up is special because it refers to a whole history of metaphysical destiny. The idea is that the weight of a multifaceted and ever-widening tradition trivializes the responsibility due to a single revolu-tionary movement, not to speak of the responsibility of an individual.

It is a simple, symptomatic and troubling fact that Heidegger presents no detailed or convincing analysis of the atrocities, crimes and mistakes of the Nazi revolution. He lets us know that the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi move-ment were not realized, but does not say why this is the case.19 More particularly, he says nothing on the connection between the “inner truth and greatness” and geno-cide or between the 1933 revolution and the self-destruction of Germany. Why, exactly, does National Socialism lead to genocidal murder? Does the connection really demand no other comment than the generic explanation that Americanism, Bolshevism and the wrong kind of Nazism are fundamentally the same?

Žižek’s analogy implies that by attacking the whole Western tradition in order to hide the crimes of Nazism, Heidegger is actually trying something too theoretical and too sophisticated. This is somewhat surprising, since typically Žižek praises theory in favour of mundane empirical facts. Here Žižek is urging that we pay attention to a specific and singular historical movement that cost the lives of real people in the 1930s and 1940s. Žižek’s exhortation is not only atypical, it is also somewhat dangerous to his own position. For does not his own flirtation

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with totalitarianism and Stalinism use a similar “pile of bodies” cloak, when it insists that one may at least consider totalitarianism and terror in view of the catastrophes of capitalism? Does not the urge to “repeat Lenin” at least in part rely on drowning the horrors of Stalinism in the sea of capitalism?

Not surprisingly then, Žižek quickly moves on, and starts defending absolute philosophy. Another typical relativising argument is the claim that the universalist and totalising views that philosophers aim at might as such be fine, but one should never try to realise them, since they force the rich and unpredictable empirical reality into their pre-set forms, producing only suffering. Here a philosophical view of “life, the universe and everything” is by its very nature a Procrustes’ bed, where empirical reality does not fit. There is only a small step from a total view to a totalitarian society, and Žižek quotes Chesterton’s idea of a police for philosophers and poets, seeking out total ideas and utopias before they are put into practice.20

Žižek has a very specific reason for dismissing the accusations against total philosophical views. According to him, the slippery slope from total views to totalitarian societies is visible only from a point of view that relies on some version of premodern wisdom. The “wise one” knows that reality should not be forced into alien conceptualizations. Žižek’s rebuttal is that this kind of wisdom presupposes a balance that can not be given a neutral definition.21 The balance in terms of which the richness of reality is allowed to overstep the absolute truth of philosophy is always already shot through with some ideological content (for instance, supporting the prevailing social order) and thus is not any less violent than a total view. Žižek’s rebuttal has a point. Certainly a supposed balanced wisdom castigating total philosophy as ideological and distorting is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Žižek wants to be precise in pinpointing the Heideggerian mistake in the, as such, correct connection between philosophy and politics. Therefore he must at first clear a number of false dismissals of Heidegger. In order to do this, he uses Chesterton’s story once more. According to Žižek, the liberal critique of Heidegger works in the same way as St.Clare, in trying to hide Heidegger’s Nazist mistake in the pile of “totalitarian thinking” and thus failing to look for the specific mistake in Heidegger’s politics. So Žižek proceeds to point out that the mistake was not in the endeavour towards a total view or a partisan truth, not in the concepts of discipline and sacrifice, and certainly not in the idea of revolution. He defends concepts that have a decisionist and totalitarian ring to them:

There is nothing “inherently Fascist” in the notions of de-cision, repetition, assuming one’s destiny, etc. (or, closer to “ordinary” politics, in the notions of mass discipline, sacrifice for the collective, etc.)22

The problem is not these concepts and practices that Fascism in any case copied from the labour movements:


None of the “proto-Fascist” elements is per se Fascist, what makes them “Fascist” is only their specific articulation or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms, all these elements are “ex-apted” by Fascism. In other words, there is no “Fascism avant la lettre” because it is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements Fascism proper.23

For Žižek, the reason for the innocence of these decisionistic concepts is the same as the reason for the innocence of totalitarianism: politics is not a question of balance, but of partisan truth in collective action.

So Heidegger’s revolution is good not only because it is philosophically connected to a correct metaphysics of finitude but also because it takes the step into everyday collective commitment. An example is the “cultural revolution” instantiated by Heidegger through the collective co-operative work of students, teachers, soldiers and workers.24 For Mao and for Heidegger, revolution was not an overthrow of one political clique in favour of another, but rather a total and radical transformation of life.25 The pinnacle of Heidegger’s “cultural revolution” was the Wissenschaftslager invented and run by himself, where a new way of work-ing together was to be rooted in common physical and spiritual labour which at the same time eliminated bourgeois values, divisions of labour and hierarchies. The “revolution” that Heidegger wanted was the instigation of a new beginning, a new Dasein and a new reality, not revolution as a mere reorganisation of exist-ing relations, as the latter could only expand tendencies already included in the historical moment.26

Here, crucially, Žižek admits that there is something empirically similar between Heidegger’s revolution and the socialist revolution. The “cultural revo-lution” and Heidegger’s leitmotif that the beginning is not behind but beckons in front of us, are aspects of Heideggerian politics that Žižek wholly agrees with. He quotes Heidegger who in his 1937/38 lectures27 says that conservativism as a philosophy of history is flawed because only a revolutionary can see historical depth in its fullness. Žižek links Heidegger’s revolutionary vision of history to Walter Benjamin and to Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition as “inverted memory.”28 For Heidegger and Žižek the repetition of historical beginnings is not imitation but the revelation and realization of something included but as yet concealed in the beginning.

This view is crystallized in Žižek’s notion of the revolutionary act. For Žižek, politics is the art of the impossible. An authentic political act changes the symbolic coordinates, making what was impossible, possible. Before the act happens, it is perceived as impossible, but after the fact it is seen as always already possible, be-cause the act itself inserts its conditions of possibility into the symbolic universe. In this sense a revolutionary act is novel, bringing into being something that did not exist before. This account of the act is based on the separation between two realms: the material/historical and the symbolic. First, there is the content of the

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act, second, the form of the act as inscribed into the symbolic universe. The form of the act is what makes repetition possible. The form lives on despite the (often disappointing) fate of the concrete content. The form is for Žižek the Heideggerian beginning that properly speaking is historically in front of us, inviting a repetition that “fails better” than the first concrete instance. This is the reason why, according to Žižek, we should consider repeating the form of Lenin’s act despite the fact that it ended in Stalinist horror.29 An authentic act should be repeated because of the form it opens up in symbolic space. In contrast, an inauthentic act, such as the Nazi revolution, leaves no promise in the symbolic space to be filled.

It is easy to spot Platonist tenets in Žižek’s account of the act; tenets that do not sit easily with his professed materialism. Exactly where is the form of the act preserved in history? How is an act recognized as repetition? These are crucial questions for Žižek, who needs an absolute distinction between the October revo-lution as an authentic act and the 1933 Nazi revolution as acting out. If there are empirical similarities between these revolutions, as Žižek concedes, and if many concepts like sacrifice, duty and so on are common, the theoretical distinction must be sharp. For instance, Žižek notes that the distinction is borne out by the fact that there is a lot of nostalgia for the October revolution and even ostalgia for the Eastern Bloc, but that similar phenomena do not exist with regard to the 1933 revolution. If this were the case, it might indeed point to a dimension of difference between the revolutions, but unfortunately Žižek is simply wrong: the market for Neo-Nazi music and Nazi memorabilia competes on an equal footing with that for ostalgia.30 Consequently, Žižek has to insist on the form-content distinction in a way that makes the form metaphysical in the pejorative sense.

If Žižek would let go of the distinction, the difference between the October revolution and the 1933 revolution and the difference between Stalinism and Hitlerism would be an empirical one, and here Žižek has little to offer. He claims that we do not yet have a good theory of Stalinism and that while Hitlerism was pseudo-scientifically and pseudo-rationally genocidal, Stalinism was more like an irrational autoimmune reaction, where nobody was safe.31 This is true as far as it goes, but there are also several factors that blur the clear contours of the empirical distinction. First, Stalinist terror was not only an “undirected” autoimmune reac-tion. The terror was directed disproportionally towards several ethnic minorities that Stalin had labeled as untrustworthy. Large percentages of these minorities were killed or died in forced relocations. Therefore there is reason, like Otto Pohl argues, to call the terror genocide:

Information released from the former Soviet archives in the last 10 years supports the argument that the Stalin regime did indeed commit genocide against the “Repressed Peoples.” The Soviet government sought to destroy these groups as distinct ethnic identities.32


This mass murder was targeted because a negative characteristic (anti-commu-nism, untrustworthiness) was connected to an ethnic identity. So while Stalinism certainly had some unique features (e.g., liquidation of the party elite), it also had some familiar genocidal features. On the other hand, while Nazi terror most certainly was genocidal, it also had elements of a “autoimmune reaction,” such as the purge of the SA faction. Also, on the Eastern front the killing often got out of hand and became “untargeted” in a way that sometimes became an obstacle to Nazi warfare. It might even be possible to turn the tables and claim that the Nazi terror and genocide were irrational, precisely because they often stole resources from the war effort and took priority over other ideological goals,33 while Stalin-ism, in turn, contained a kernel of utilitarian reason in successfully preserving the rule of Stalin amidst very averse conditions.

These complications by no means obliterate the difference between the Oc-tober revolution/Stalinism and the Nazi revolution/Hitlerism, but they point out that an absolute difference between them on the empirical level is impossible. In both revolutions people took part for opportunistic reasons, for reasons of hatred and murderous revenge, for nationalist and patriotic sentiments, and in order to advance social welfare and equality. Therefore the formal level is strictly neces-sary if one wants to sustain an a priori difference. Why this formal level, then, is not idealist and metaphysical, is hard to fathom. Indeed, it is striking how close the form-content distinction is to Žižek’s conception of ahistorical subjectivity. In both cases the crucial element is a structural effect (the form of the act, the empty subject as the crack in the symbolic universe) of some incomplete, and violent content. In both cases there is a structural after-effect, a rupture that can be named and recognized but that in itself is empty. The form of an authentic act is the after-effect of the content of the act that tears the previous symbolic order. The ahistorical subject is an empty after-effect of the fact that a human being has been “thrown” into the symbolic universe.

The double nature of the act gives Žižek his key insight into Heidegger’s Nazism. To quote:

So, back to Heidegger—in his Nazi engagement, he was not “totally wrong”—the tragedy is that he was almost right, deploying the structure of a revolutionary act and then distorting it by giving it a Fascist twist.34

This is the most precise description of Heidegger’s mistake given by Žižek. Un-fortunately, it is not very helpful: what, exactly, is “the twist”? Do we already know what it is? Or do we know enough of Nazism to be able to work it out? That would be a possible answer if Žižek were to rely on standard accounts of Nazism and Heidegger. However, by praising Heidegger for his insight into the partiality of truth and by abandoning deterministic materialism in favour of a voluntaristic interpretation of history, Žižek has left the standard accounts behind. Therefore we would need a more detailed account of what the wrong twist given to the act was.

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The problem is made more pressing by the fact that the Nazi phenomena that Žižek mentions—nothing new was born out of the revolution, antisemitism, identifying the enemy through pseudo-scientific categories, inability to reorganise capitalist structures—do, up to a point, apply to Stalinism as a perversion of Bolshevism.

The Anaximander Connection: Will, Presence and the SubjectThe wrong twist is according to Žižek connected to Heidegger’s philosophical mistake after Sein und Zeit—a mistake that got worse and worse after the war. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit philosophy was intended to dismantle the trap set by Nietzsche. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s concept of will-to-power becomes a will-to-will, whose concrete historical shape is the technological understanding of Being as totale Mobilisierung. In order to avoid this, we have to let go of the will-to-will, which implies a full paradox of willing not to will. Here Heidegger seeks the help of Christian mysticism and its concept of Gelassenheit. Žižek quotes Bret Davis’ book Heidegger and the Will35 where Davis argues that the concept of the will is evident throughout Heidegger’s work and that even Gelassenheit bears its stamp. On the whole, Žižek accepts Davis’ view but gives it a different flavour. While Davis sees the residues of will as Heidegger’s problem, Žižek sees the clinging to the will as a partial success that Heidegger is unable to take to its fullest:

Our wager is, however, that the persistence of the Will even in the latest Hei-degger, so brilliantly discerned by Davis, rather demonstrates the insufficiency of Heidegger’s critical analysis of modern subjectivity—not in the sense that “Heidegger didn’t go far enough, and thus remained himself marked by subjectivity,” but in the sense that he overlooked a non-metaphysical core of modern subjectivity itself: the most fundamental dimension of the abyss of subjectivity cannot be grasped through the lenses of the notion of subjectivity as the attitude of technological domination.36

Following Davis, Žižek separates between two dimensions of the will. On one hand we have the will as conditioned by a historical age (such as the subjec-tive technological will-to-power), on the other hand an ahistorical Ur-Wille that persists even in the efforts of letting the will go. Žižek’s contention is that this Ur-Wille is somehow a part of Being itself, not of subjectivity (at least a part of the kind of Being that ontologically includes a knowing and speaking subject37). An analogue can be given through the problem of evil. Evil cannot be a result of the distance between humans and God, because such a distance can only appear if there already is in God an infraction or lack that necessitates the act of creation (as, for instance, Schelling insists38). As Žižek points out, this is also the way in which Heidegger says that the subjective forgetting of Being displayed by our contemporary technological age is a consequence of a struggle on the level of Being itself. So, Ur-Wille would be a basic characteristic of all Being, long before


human subjectivity and also long after all possibly world-historical upswells of Gelassenheit.

Žižek’s interpretation is based on Davis’ reading of the following passage in Heidegger’s lecture on Anaximander:

What has arrived [to linger between the twofold absence] may even insist upon its while solely to remain more present, in the sense of perduring. That which lingers persists in its presencing. In this way it extricates itself from its transitory while. It strikes the wilful pose of persistence [Eigensinn des Beharrens], no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present. It stiff-ens—as if this were the only way to linger—and aims solely for continuance and subsistence.39

Žižek hears Heidegger talking about a “rebellious whiling” (Eigensinn des Be-harrens) that clings to persistence despite everything else that is present.40 It is tempting to see Žižek’s account of the Ur-Wille as a return to Nietzsche’s or even Schopenhauer’s view, where Wille is, indeed, ontological in a non-personal and asubjective way. Under this interpretation, Heidegger’s view of Nietzsche as the Vollendung of metaphysics would concern not only a historical period of Western metaphysics but ahistorical Being itself. This would mean that Žižek would have to create out of the Schopenhauerian Ur-Wille a ground for a uniquely leftist revolution, not in the sense of becoming more “wise” or reaching Nirvana, but as a voluntarist attempt to change social structures.

However, it is not clear that Anaximander and Heidegger are using “rebel-lious whiling” to talk about an ahistorical Ur-Wille and, consequently, Ur-Subject. When it comes to Heidegger, the passage should be interpreted as talking about one element of alêtheia, alêtheia as revealing, that is complemented by another equally original side, alêtheia as concealing. These two together, revealing and concealing, form alêtheia as a process, as action: they are parts of an act, not parts of an actor, such as a subject or an Ur-Wille. To interpret revealing (“rebellious whiling”) and concealing as drives or desires is harmless anthropomorphism precisely as long as we do not construct theories of ahistorical subjectivity on the basis of this anthropomorphism.41

It is ironic that Žižek bases his analysis of Heidegger on this passage, as the fragment by Anaximander in question (Diels-Kranz B1)42 has most typi-cally been interpreted as an example of the kind of “eternal wisdom” that Žižek argues against. Most often, Anaximander is interpreted as saying that balance must be restored because that which has risen has to fall (paying penalty for the disorder it has caused). In contrast, Heidegger’s interpretation does not accord with this traditional interpretation of “eternal balance” (as he discards the ideas about justice and retribution) nor does it agree with Žižek’s view of “rebellious whiling” arising out of formless emptiness like a Lacanian drive. Characteristi-cally, Heidegger interprets the double movement of revealing and concealing as

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a feature of Being, not as a feature of becoming.43 Presence is upheld by absence (of that which is no longer or not yet). However, Anaximander speaks of a break or out-of-bondness (ἀδικία). Heidegger has already interpreted Being as a bond between absence and presence, so he has to give an account of how the bond can be broken or how, more mundanely, disorder is possible. It is here that he pres-ents his interpretation of “rebellious whiling” as something in which the present rebels against its bond with the absent. For Heidegger, “rebellious whiling” is not a feature of Being as it arises out of emptiness, but a moment in alêtheia, the aspect of revealing as present.

Consequently, “rebellious whiling” is not Heidegger’s last word on the pres-ence of beings. “Rebellious whiling” as a-dikia is one side of an essentially unified double movement in which the other side is “reciprocal concern” (διδόναι . . . τίσιν ἀλλήλοις), which Heidegger interprets to mean that the present are cir-cumspect with regard to each other and thus give themselves order, dikia.44 In this way, the present are characterised not only by “rebellious whiling” but also by “caring bondedness” and the double process, a surmounting, that ties them together is the essence of presence:

That which stays awhile in presence presences by surmounting reckless dis-order, the ἀδικία, that which itself prevails in the while as an essential possibility. The presencing of what presences is such a surmounting.45

Presence is an overcoming of “rebellious whiling,” and both “rebellious whiling” and “concerned bondedness” are genuine possibilities of the present beings. “Re-bellious whiling” is a potential for the present, it is a potential or capacity (Mögen), but this does not mean that “rebellious whiling” is an agent or the indication of the presence of an agent or (proto-)subject. For Heidegger, “rebellious whiling” is not an agent and not a property of an agent, because the present (as beings, as subjects and objects) is possible only as the overcoming of “rebellious whiling,” of surmounting the a-dikia. In fact, Heidegger is even more unequivocal:

Disposing order and reck, usage [τὸ χρεώ] releases the present being and delivers each to its while. By doing so, however, it places it in permanent danger that its tarrying in the while will petrify into mere persistence. Thus, at the same time, usage hands presencing over into dis-order. Usage conjoins the dis-.46

Heidegger says clearly, that both the “whiling” and the overcoming of whiling in dikia are moments (essential components) of Brauch (τὸ χρεώ, usage), not drives or desires (e.g., a drive to be, or a death-drive) to be ascribed to the present (or to something not yet or not anymore present) or the properties of something present (or not yet present or not anymore present, such as the Wille of a subject).

Davis and Žižek are right in pointing out that “rebellious whiling” appears quite suddenly and unexpectedly in Heidegger’s interpretation. The reason for


this is that Heidegger needs something to explain Anaximander’s idea of a-dikia. However, by overlooking the other side of whiling and by anthropomorphising it too quickly Žižek misses the processual nature of Heidegger’s interpretation of presence. For Heidegger es ereignet, but there is no “es” doing the appropriation or tying the bond. If the ahistorical subject that Žižek needs for his theory hangs on a thread this thin (that is, on the grammatical structure of Indo-European languages, the “es,” “it,” as a surrogate subject of a passive sentence), the theory of authentic revolutionary acts is in deep trouble, too.

Technological Agriculture and the Camps: The Will and EvilIn 1949 Heidegger gave in Bremen a lecture called “Das Gestell” that contains a famous sentence (omitted from the published text of the lecture under the title “Die Frage nach der Technik” in Vorträge und Aufsätze47):

Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.48

This is the purest example of Heidegger’s “pile of bodies” response: the extermi-nation camps are just a drop in the ocean of Western forgetting of Being. At the same time the quote is a good example of his philosophy of technology, according to which the modern understanding of Being sees everything as raw material for a will to power. This is what Heidegger means by saying that the phenomena he mentions are “essentially the same”: in all of them the world is understood as raw material for technological use.

There is an amount of truth in Heidegger’s claim. One particularly chilling aspect of the extermination camps is the effective engineering that had been invested in their design; the murdering of people is approached through a model taken from industrial production. However, as Žižek notes, again following Davis, at the same time Heidegger’s callous comment overlooks something else. Mass murder in extermination camps includes an element of evil that a technological understanding of Being as such lacks. The description of evil in extermination camps as an industrial manipulation of raw material forgets that it is possible, as Žižek quotes from Davis49:

for a person to look another person in the face and, clearly sensing the with-drawal of interiority, wilfully pull the trigger, or point a finger in the direction of the gas chambers. The wickedness of this face-to-face defacement—this wicked will to power that wills the murder of the Other as Other, in other words, that wills to maintain a recognition of the Other precisely in order to take diabolical pleasure in annihilating his or her otherness—radically exceeds the evil of the calculating machinations of technology.50

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Žižek emphasises that the difference between industrial agriculture, the manufac-ture of hydrogen bombs and other forms of technological modernity, on one hand, and genocide, on the other hand, is in the ontological category of the industrial manipulation. In the case of the extermination camps the objects of manipulation are human subjects, ontologically similar to the murderers. Žižek anticipates a reply, according to which it is not Heidegger who is equating agricultural land, vegetables, physical compounds and human beings. Rather, he is just pointing out what the technological understanding of being has already done. Žižek retorts:

The answer is clear: Heidegger is simply (and crucially) wrong in reducing Holocaust to a technological production of corpses; there is in events like the Holocaust a crucial element of the will to humiliate and hurt the other. The victim is treated as an object in a reflexive way, in order to humiliate him further, in clear contrast to the industrially produced vegetable, where this intention to hurt is absent.51

This is a crucial watershed. Žižek insists that Heidegger’s claim shows how he neglects the dimension of ahistorical subjectivity which is apparent in the will to humiliate. And this is true, up to a point. Heidegger’s does not recognize that when farmland is approached technologically and when humans are approached technologically the first happens, so to speak, between ontologically different beings and the second between ontologically similar beings.

Žižek wants to show that Heidegger neglects a dimension of subjectivity crucial to understanding the Holocaust. Instead of seeking to get rid of the will through Gelassenheit, Heidegger should have noticed the revolutionary and ahistorical dimensions of subjectivity and embraced them in his thinking. There-fore, Žižek concludes his restoration of the subject by analysing the mistakes of Gelassenheit thinking. According to Žižek, Gelassenheit is Heidegger’s attempt to describe a balanced and harmonious Being on the other side of the distortions set by human will and the connected technological understanding. Žižek warns: “Beware of gentle openness!”52 with the implied assumption that Heidegger’s view of truth as unconcealment and Gelassenheit as unforced openness lead away from politics and authentic philosophy. According to this interpretation, Heidegger thinks that there first is a harmonious Being that secondly gets disturbed by the human will and that it is possible to return to the harmony through Gelassenheit. Žižek asks isn’t it rather the case that only the excessive stuckness of the drive gives the possibility for Gelassenheit? What if any world at all is possible only through the “distortive” drive and Ur-Wille? According to Žižek, the retreat to a will-less Gelassenheit is possible only because the world is already distorted by the drive of willing. He sees two consequences that should be quoted in their entirety:

First, that human finitude strictly equals infinity: the obscene “immortal-ity”/infinity of drive which insists “beyond life and death.” Second, the name


of this diabolical excess of willing which “perverts” the order of Being is subject. Subject thus cannot be reduced to an epoch of Being, to the modern subjectivity bent on technological domination—there is, underlying it, a “non-historical” subject.53

Žižek is right in pointing out that Gelassenheit thinking may in many versions include an ill-conceived idea of harmonic unity. But that was certainly not what Heidegger had in mind in the 1930s. For him the whole idea of Europe is founded in the Auseinandersetzung with the Asiatic, and the root of all existence is struggle, Kampf, Heraclitus’s polemos.54 Even the later Heidegger of Gelassenheit is not an Eastern mystic wanting to completely extinguish the will. What Heidegger sees as the problem is a will to will, a will that wills itself, its own certainty. This will to will is deeper than the Nietzschean will to power. Gelassenheit, in turn, is the main path towards the overcoming of the will to will. But it is far from clear that Gelassenheit as such would equal an extinguishing of the will. The question of will in the later Heidegger is thorny and can not be discussed further here, but at the very least we can say that while Heidegger does want to guide the Western world beyond the will to will, it is not at all clear that he wants to get rid of any and all kinds of will in the name of harmony. Rather, he wants to move to an area beyond will, an area that is made dynamic by the dialectic of the will and non-will.55

Most crucial is the misunderstanding concerning Heidegger’s idea of truth as unconcealment (Un-verborgenheit). As well known, Heidegger starts from the Greek word alêtheia with its two parts, the negating prefix a- together with the body lêthê (that which is hidden, covered over). The compound alêtheia Heidegger takes to mean that which is revealed in its concealment, often literally: something that is concealed by the very act of being revealed (or something that becomes present by being concealed). For Heidegger the conquest of truth cannot be an aggressive unveiling, because concealment is a part and parcel of truth. Hence his distrust for the crass attitudes of Cartesian philosophy and modern natural science. But all of this does not mean that Heidegger would think that human deal-ings with the truth are harmonious, peaceful or nice. Quite the contrary. Heidegger always emphasises two very dynamic and non-harmonious features of truth.

First, truth as alêtheia is something dangerous and unpleasant that at the very least obligates and binds, subjects the human being to inhuman forces, and in some cases directly destroys the human.56 Truth and the work (such as a work of art) that embody it are de-personifying and anegoic. Second, and even more decisively, truth itself contains polemos. Structurally this is evident in the way that truth spans the tension between concealment and revealing. Truth needs both concealment and revealing and the struggle between them. It is good to remem-ber how Heidegger sees the essence of the Greek origins of Western civilization in their “agonistic severity.”57 The Greek beginning that has to be repeated is for Heidegger the polemos of Heraclitus, the lightning that steers all. In Hölderlin,

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too, Heidegger reads the contradiction between the gods, if not the outright struggle and animosity between them. It is this struggle between the gods that gives the basic attunement to German existence and life on German soil, not some primordial harmony.58 Žižek’s mistake in thinking that Heidegger gives room for an unpolitical dream of harmony and a gentle openness in balance with nature is based on a false categorisation. Heidegger does think that truth is not a matter of personal will or of subjective attainment, but that does not mean, as Žižek seems to think, that truth for Heidegger in general would be harmonious or balanced. The struggle and violence of truth are on an impersonal level, even though they can also reach the world of the individual, for instance, by destroying the subject-object distinction. The struggles, tensions and dynamisms are inside truth itself, including truth in/as a work. From there they engage human beings.

Žižek also neglects Heidegger’s other almost as scandalous quote on extermi-nation camps, maybe because in this quote Heidegger in his own way actually does state that the camps have an uniqueness that is connected to human existence. The quote comes from the same 1949 Bremen lectures, this time from a lecture called “Die Gefahr”:

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in. Do they die? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated in-conspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China. But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible.59

Again, Heidegger succeeds in being extremely cold and inconsiderate by sug-gesting that the victims of camps do not die because they are technologically exterminated. But at the same time he points to what in his view constitutes the loss of humanity in the camps: the loss of authentic death. In Heidegger’s ontology this is significant, since death in its essence is the source of meaning and authenticity. By taking away the possibility of authentic death and replacing it with mere perishing the extermination camps annihilate Dasein as Dasein.

It is notable that even here Heidegger is still lacking the aspect of being face to face. Or, more precisely, the other half of encounter is present, because liquidation in camps rob the dying of their authentic death, of their authentic Dasein. This Heidegger recognises and points out. But he does not give a face to the designers and builders of the camps, to the pullers of the trigger or to the murderers pointing to the gas chambers. Heidegger says nothing of their Dasein as perpetrators of the annihilation of authentic Dasein. In this sense Žižek and Davis are half right. Heidegger does not think about the subjectivity or the face of the people doing the de-humanization or “de-mortalisation” of the victims and thereby neglects a


part of the evil in extermination camps. However, Heidegger’s neglect does not imply that the only way to recognise this evil is through evoking a dimension of ahistorical subjectivity. The destruction of otherness and the purposeful nihilation of authentic death are recognisable as evil also if we think that the murderous humans are not ahistorical subjects, but rather cases of historical Dasein.

One reason for insisting on the subjectivity of the murderers may be that seeing them as asubjective makes it easier to understand how their of murder-ousness is possible.60 However, making something easier to understand does not, by the same token, make it more acceptable. When the genocidal Dasein build-ing and operating extermination camps is understood not as lapsed ahistorical subjectivity but as historical, national and collective it is even more horrifying and evil. The evil of German Nazi-Dasein, in which Heidegger took part, which was Heidegger’s (“je meines”), was real and historical, and can not be emptied into the culpability of individual Eichmann-subjects to be brought to justice—even though that has to be done, too. In view of the values of Enlightenment this might sound depressing but at the same time it makes the situation more acute. As Georges Bataille points out, any theory of human existence that makes it impossible to understand the horror of genocide is by that very token ethically faulty.61 A theory of human existence has to make it possible to understand how ordinary humans sometimes are murderous.

In order to condemn the murderers of extermination camps we do not need a concept of ahistorical subjectivity. Moreover, neither a conception of human existence as ahistorical subjectivity nor a conception of human existence as his-torical Dasein are able to stop extermination camps. Žižek is right in expecting that Heideggerian Dasein philosophy should be able to give a better account of extermination camps than Heidegger himself ever did. But this does not mean that the only possible account goes through ahistorical subjectivity.

More to the point: how could something ahistorical and universal, in this case subjectivity, give a face to something? A face is not an ahistorical structure. Here is the first indication of the phenomenon that we propose to call “Žižek’s seesaw.” On one hand he uses the term subject to denote something structural and ahistorical (the rebellious whiling appearing out of emptiness), on the other hand the term is supposed to mean something individual that is embedded in history (a face). This brings us to the second part of the problem. Is Žižek’s attempt to rehabilitate the subject convincing? If not, how should an asubjective view respond to Žižek and Davis’ important observation that the Holocaust is fundamentally different from industrial agriculture?

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The Rehabilitation of the SubjectTo recap, for Žižek the subject is born as a human being is thrown into the sym-bolic universe, thus assuming a formal place that is empty but that distorts the symbolic universe. Therefore the thought of a harmonious symbolic universe is utopian. The symbolic exists only because of the distortion by the empty subject. The subject as such cannot be reduced to a historical era, since already the very existence of a historical era points to the existence of an ahistorical subject. On another level, the Lacanian drive or Ur-Wille points to the same: there is some-thing primordial that has always already broken the whole and thus made human finite being possible.

The first and maybe most important doubt with regard to the rehabilitation is the speed with which Žižek travels from drive to ahistorical subjectivity. Like a caricatured Descartes, who bases subjectivity on the certainty of doubt, Žižek moves from “rebellious whiling” and the distinction between face-to-face hu-miliation and agriculture to ahistorical subjectivity with very few intermediate steps. It is by no means clear that a distinction between face-to-face humiliation and industrial agriculture could not be made without a theory of ahistorical subjectivity. For example, we could say that it is possible to humiliate a human being in a different way than a vegetable because the human is conscious and able to suffer more than the plant. And why would the uniqueness of face-to-face humiliation be an indication of the presence of ahistorical subjectivity in the first place? Do we not, in fact, see here an example of the circle of subjectivity, as Heidegger calls it: the uniqueness of humiliating human beings is thought to arise from their subjectivity because it has already been decided that subjectivity is something unique?

Second, the tasks that Žižek intends for the ahistorical subject can be per-formed without it. A distinction between the promise of the October revolution and the promise of the 1933 revolution can simply be based on their empirical properties. Both were accompanied by revolutionary fervour and jubilation, both were greeted with anxious anticipation and enthusiasm, also abroad. However, the promise of emancipation in the October revolution was wider than that in the Nazi revolution, and, in fact, the October revolution also resulted in the 20’s in a liberation that included, for instance, women and indigenous peoples, while the Nazi revolution had emancipatory effects almost exclusively on ethnic Germans. Moreover, the differences between the ethical and emancipatory qualities of revolutions can be reasoned about without recourse to a non-historical symbolic sphere. For instance, when Kant writes on the French revolution, he—in a way that Žižek among others has noted62—comments on the “taking of sides accord-ing to desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within


the human race.”63 Žižek commends Kant’s view that sees the true promise of the revolution in its ability to galvanize and encourage people outside of France. Likewise, he defends Foucault against the critics who denounced his support for the revolution in Iran by saying that here, too, the crucial thing is “the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (Western) observer, confirming his hopes.”64 However, the phenomena of “enthusiasm,” “hope” or “moral disposi-tion” (moralische Anlage) do not require a universal subject or a universal human race. The enthusiasm to take sides and to repeat a revolution are understandable as historical desires. They can also be rationally argued for in public discussion without recourse to a notion of universal subjectivity, human race or reason.

Moreover, the Davis-Žižek view about the uniqueness of the evil in extermi-nation camps can be questioned, as such. For instance, a non-anthropocentric viewpoint allows us to ask whether it really is so that industrial agriculture con-tains no will to humiliate. Would not, for instance, forms of feminist ecological thinking point out that industrial agriculture and technological submission of nature, in general, contain a hefty dose of disrespect and a will to dominate? Is not the basic attitude of modern natural science that of unveiling and enslav-ing “Mother Nature”? And does not this attitude contain precisely a disdain for Nature as Otherness?

Certainly, a will to humiliate nature is still different from a will to humili-ate a person with a face, but, again, things are not as clear-cut as Žižek’s account presupposes, as is made evident by the common dietary position of not wanting to eat “anything with a face,” including animals and fish. Rather than an on-off distinction of humiliation against humans and technological domination over nature we have a continuum of different degrees of the will to humiliate. On this continuum, industrial agriculture, factory farms, capitalist scarcity of food and technologically organised genocide share some characteristics, like, for instance, a technological distance that makes the object manipulable. At the same time, the phenomena along the continuum are also different, for instance, with respect to the capacity for suffering and awareness of death that the objects of manipula-tion have. To point out some of the technological similarities does not imply the disappearance of all distinctions; likewise, the existence of qualitative differences does not imply the presence of ahistorical structures.

Žižek is proud of the paradoxical specificity of his universalism: it is European Enlightenment and philosophy that are universally valid. The universality of the subject means in true colonialist vein that some entities that seem like human subjects are not (e.g., are not mature enough to recognize the universal dimen-sion in the otherness of other humans). For instance, if there are people living in traditional subsistence somewhere on the taiga or in the rainforest, without psychoanalytic complexes and without the metaphysics of subjectivity, they are not, according to Žižek, fully fledged subjects. At most, they are potential subjects,

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in need of Enlightenment. Maturity means assuming the subjectual structures and the symbolic responsibilities and freedoms implied thereby. Like Husserl, Žižek sees a reason for all people to Europeanize themselves. This colonialism is a direct consequence of the non-materialist and non-empirical nature of the theory on the subject. Here again, universal ahistorical subjectivity is realized in flesh as potential subjectivity, which in turn means being the subject of a colonial project. The ahistorical subjectivity Žižek is talking about is not something found in nature or in human society, but rather something founded by philosophical fiat and then approximated through Europeanisation.

The problems of Europeanisation are not hypothetical. For instance, the les-son of Lacanian psychoanalysis is, according to Žižek, that maturity means acting without addressing one’s acts to a Big Other. These kinds of acts are revolutionary because they voluntaristically create meaning. The revolutionary act changes the symbolic coordinates because the Big Other is the name for the symptomatic knot holding together the symbolic order. Both Žižek’s account of the history of ideas (first polytheism, then monotheism, then the Christian radicalisation of mono-theism and finally materialistic radicalisation of Christianity) and the trajectory of psychoanalysis (first a subject thrown into a symbolic universe beholden to a Big Other, then a mature subject without the support of a Big Other), contain a familiar story of Europeanisation.

Heidegger’s Factual Mistake: Blindness to PurificationCuriously, even though Heidegger typically wants to cut through traditional di-chotomies, he retains the distinction between humans and animals. Heidegger thinks that humans as Dasein always already live in a world whereas animals are stuck in a reactive loop in their environment. For instance, humans do not primarily hear waveforms and nondescript sounds but rather, say, a motorbike roaring by. In hearing a motorbike go by a whole world is revealed—a world of roads, vehicles, houses, reasons for driving and so on. Any meaningful observation or act reveals a whole web of interconnected structures that Heidegger calls the world. For Dasein, the world is always already there, organized in certain ways and containing a binding power. The world may change but even that change reveals its non-arbitrariness. Because meaning is not data, it has unity and directedness, as logos. Given all this, Heidegger’s distinction between humans and animals closely resembles the traditional distinction between speaking man and mute animals. However, for Heidegger the logos-like nature of the world is a larger affair than language in the narrow sense: the world is a historically changing field of (also non-linguistic or pre-linguistic) meaning. In contrast, the animal has an environ-ment that it does not experience as a binding and collective field of meaning and therefore is incapable of historically changing.


So how is it possible that industrial agriculture and extermination camps are essentially the same, if there is a clear distinction between humans and animals (not to speak of plants)? Heidegger does not, to be sure, mention factory farms or other environments of animal industry, but still he should be aware of the ontologically special status he has given to Dasein. Again, a possible answer is to say that Heidegger means that from the point of view of technology there is no essential difference. This is the most felicitous interpretation of Heidegger’s claim. However, it still means that he fails to note that even in his own ontology there is something unique in the situation where humans with a world treat other humans with a world as resources. Dasein as fallen to inauthenticity may live in a way in which Dasein itself is revealed as resources, but animals do not have this possibility. Therefore an extermination camp should for Heidegger be different from industrial agriculture or from an industrial slaughterhouse. If Heidegger wants to be consistent, he cannot say that no more is lost when a human is killed compared to when an animal is killed. And this is, indeed, what he says in the second quote: the extermination camps take away the possibility of authentic death from their victims.

Does Heidegger’s distinction between Dasein with world and animals without world hold? It is true that animals typically do not have historical cultures. But again it seems that the matter is one of degrees rather than of crisp boundar-ies. First, many mammals do have a world of a kind even if not a symbolically expressed one. Let us think about a fox, born as cub in a foxhole. The hole and its surroundings are, in fact, manipulated and partially changed by foxes, mostly by the fox-mother, even though often foxholes are used over generations. Here the needs and drives of the cub meet with a certain kind of response; the food brought by the mother, the safety of the hole, the company of the siblings. These together with the larger environment create the meaningful field of a fox’ life. That the environment indeed is meaningful is shown by the fact that if the cub is brought up in a different environment, say, in a zoo, it behaves and experiences differently. Its wants, needs, and habits grow to be different. Depending on where the cub grew up, it reacts differently, it wants different things and is satisfied through different means. It is true that the fox cannot decide with other foxes to start changing its environment into something else. Still, it is wrong to say that the fox does not have a world as a web of meaning. We may say that the fox has a world that is historically very stagnant. This might be the reason that Heidegger sometimes calls animals world-poor (weltarm).65

Second, certain groups of animals do even have some kind of historically changing world. For instance, both bonobos and Japanese makis have culturally distinct groups in which the use of certain tools or practices such as washing food are learned from one generation to the next. In the case of these animals, there are culturally transmitted changes in their world, changes that make the

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meanings available in their world different compared to other groups of the same species. These practices and habits may change again, may be forgotten, reversed, but that is exactly the point: the lives of at least some animal groups may change historically on the basis of their own collective actions. It would be only an anthropocentric prejudice to think that washing food or cracking a nut between rocks would not be a meaningful activity to an animal.66 From these culturally transmitted practices there is still a long way to human historically changing and technologically transmitted culture. However, once again, the dif-ference is one of degrees.

Third, Heidegger’s concept of being-with (Mit-Sein) may not be able to make a crisp distinction between humans and animals participating in a given Dasein (such as German Dasein, Hütte-Dasein, etc.). People live in close and meaningful interaction with domestic animals and pets. If humans have meaningful interac-tions with animals then the animals form a part of the Dasein at least to the same degree that parts of inanimate nature (such as the Rhein or the mountains and forests of Schwarzwald that Heidegger gives a decisive role in forming Dasein) or other non-human actors, such as demigods and gods. The self-propelled action by animals is up to a point understandable by humans. Correspondingly, ani-mals, such as dogs and horses, understand human behaviour, including moods (Stimmungen) and signs (e.g., guide dogs assisting the blind). This mutual in-terpretability and understandability forms a functioning circle of Mit-Sein where a meaningful world can be opened. Again, it may be the case that the Mit-Sein of animals is dependent on human Dasein, but it is crucial to notice that there is no non-anthropocentric theoretical reason to exclude animals from Mit-Sein.

A consistent Heideggerian phenomenology can present a qualitative differ-ence between the worlds of humans and animals and their languages, but not an absolute one. If an absolute difference was a necessary part of Heideggerian theory, then Heidegger’s claim about the sameness of industrial agriculture and extermination camps would be impossible and Heidegger’s position would be much closer to Žižek’s. But an absolute distinction cannot be maintained and for the most part Heidegger is aware of this.

However, Heidegger’s claim about dying in the camps contains a symptomatic factual mistake that has often been overlooked. Literally, he is saying that industri-al agriculture and the manufacture of hydrogen bombs is the same as fabrication of corpses (Fabrikation von Leichen) on extermination camps. However, to be blunt about it, the goal of the camps was not the fabrication of corpses, not even in the narrowest technical sense, as the corpses were often burned or otherwise disposed of. The huge amount of corpses was a problem for the extermination camps. If the Nazis and their henchmen had been able to kill their victims without producing corpses, their work would have been easier and quicker. The goal of the extermination camps was to murder people, to make Jews and other non-wanted


groups of people disappear, not to produce corpses. The goal of the camps was to provide a solution to the creation of a Jew-free (judenrein) Germany and the corpses were a setback along that road. And the fact remains: the Nazi activist Heidegger says nothing against the goal of a Jew-free Germany, ever.

In his statement Heidegger either willingly or inadvertently understands the purpose of the camps wrongly. The misunderstanding is grounded in focusing too tightly on technological thinking as a way of seeing everything as raw material. This is one of the places where we should part ways with Heidegger, by insisting that a goal of judenrein Germany is not only evil but also—as purification, as final solution—in contradiction with the goals of overcoming metaphysics.

Of course, we are talking about just one sentence inside a whole lecture on the essence of technology, but still the misunderstanding is telling. In the camps, Heidegger sees the fabrication of corpses, not the murder of humans and an at-tempt to liquidate even the bodies. To defend Heidegger by saying that of course he did recognize the humanity of the victims and that such self-evident truths do not need to be mentioned does not work, because it is far from self-evident that Heidegger recognized murder as murder. The fact that he did not publicly condemn Nazi crimes was undermining the whole of Heidegger’s life-work pre-cisely at the time of the Bremen lectures and, consequently, he was giving a lot of thought to the question of how to act so that not everything in his teachings would be swept away with Nazism.67 Furthermore, Heidegger or Heideggerians cannot use the defence of claiming that what is said in the media or the public realm more generally is not important, since Heidegger himself is vexed over the fact that “the world [Weltöffentlichkeit] has no real knowledge of what happens in the camps”;68 he is talking about the POW camps in Russia.

Could Heidegger have said, instead, that industrial agriculture is essentially the same as mass-murder or genocide (which as a side-effect results in the fabrica-tion of bodies)? Maybe. At least this is a claim that can be read out of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. This claim might have been more interesting than the one actually presented in the Bremen lecture, because it points to a European-Western uniqueness more clearly than the claim about the fabrication of corpses. Non-European cultures have occasionally produced large amounts of corpses, for instance, in wars and as results of human-induced natural catastrophes. However, the planned, managed and industrially perpetrated liquidation of whole popu-lation groups or peoples is a uniquely European-Western undertaking, not the least because it is possible only with advanced bureaucratic power, legislation, accounting, information technology and other social technologies. Genocide as the production of unwanted-free purity is a phenomenon of total mobilisation, and therefore a genuinely European, abendländisch, possibility.

Neither the propping up of the subject (a là Žižek) nor the dissolution of the subject (a là Heidegger) can as such certainly save us from the horrors of total

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mobilisation. In general, these levels of abstraction are too thin to ward off mass murder. If Nazism and Stalinism as phenomena show something, then they show at least the myriad reasons, contexts and motivations for mass murder. The only certain way of decreasing the potential of mass murder is to give fewer resources to centralized hierarchies of control and command. This, however, is something that both Heidegger and Žižek fail to consider. When Heidegger writes that the state is the highest form of human realisation and that the essence of the state is formed by the structure of leaders and followers and the rank it creates,69 it may be that Žižek agrees at least in part, but here we can more clearly than anywhere else identify the wrong Heideggerian “twist.” To bind völkisch Dasein to leader-ship and the state not only produces an unhealthy concentration of power and hierarchy but also necessitates the purification that perverts the revolution into the administration of murder. This drive to purification created by statism and leadership is the mistake, the “twist” that Heidegger’s revolution shared with Hitler’s revolution. Consequently, the antidote is not to be found in the notions of sacrifice for the leader or statist collective power or the underlying theory of ahistorical subjectivity. The problem is precisely in the concentration of power into the state and the leader, whether that happens in asubjectivist terms (Heidegger’s Nazism) or in subjectivist terms (Žižek’s totalitarian notions).

Conclusion: Beyond Universalist and Particularist Europocentrism

The focus on finitude and internal strife and, consequently, on the partisan nature of truth, is common to Heidegger and Žižek. What is different, however, is how the strife is interpreted. For Heidegger, finitude and struggle mean that the meaning of Being, our uncovering of the world is always historical and, consequently, his-torical understandings of Being are incommensurable, while for Žižek meanings are at least potentially universal and commensurable. How is this possible? Isn’t the connection between Being and time Heidegger’s major contribution to phi-losophy, one that Žižek, among others, accepts as a starting point? It is precisely here that the name given by Žižek to finitude and struggle, “the subject,” reveals its concrete twist. The subject is, like baron Münchhausen, supposed to turn ontological brokenness and partisanship into universality and commensurabil-ity just by itself. The subject is a structure of finitude, a structure that as such is supposed to guarantee the universality of meaning (not the universality of this or that particular symbolic meaning but of the symbolic überhaupt) even though that universality cannot be found in the broken finitude of the symbolic itself. Here, Žižek’s subject functions in exactly the same fashion as the Cartesian or Husserlian subject, both of which are transcendental anchors of meaning. The difference, and a major one at that, is that whereas for Descartes, Husserl and Kant


the subject is a structural ground and arbiter of legitimate meaning, for Žižek the subject is rather the creator of meaning. Žižek raises the stakes by implicitly admitting that the subject may fail to create a sphere of universality.

Even this raising of the stakes can still be ametaphysical. In other words, the possibility of creating subjects that believe and experience themselves to be universal is acceptable to an asubjectivistic view, such as the Heideggerian, where technological Dasein and understanding of Being is one real historical possibility. In the end, the step that an ametaphysical and asubjectivist philosophy cannot take with Žižek is political and ethical: the step of claiming that becoming an universal and mature subject (in other words, Europeanisation) is not only possible and good but the only right direction of progress for humans.

One of Heidegger’s basic moves that Foucault later develops into an art is to ask with regard to a philosophical concept or claim what kind of work it does, how is it embodied in historical praxis, what it means or produces in human life. This basic move has its reverse, because we are dealing with a genuine chicken-or-egg problem. How is a given concept or conception born out of particular practices and ways of life? With regard to Žižek’s concept of the subject, this two-way ques-tion gives us, first, the question, what kind of work does the concept perform in Žižek’s overall philosophy, and, second, what practices and forms of life give rise to the minimalist subject? As noted above, the most important of the functions of the subject is to make the symbolic sphere commensurable and universal. The subject makes it possible for Žižek to look at the art, religion, science and customs of all times and all cultures as commensurable, as essentially similar symptoms to be analysed by psychoanalytic theory, as if people could only have problems interpretable from a Parisian perspective. No genuinely incommensu-rable problem, struggle or meaning can be encountered in the sphere broken by the minimalist subject.

The concrete twist given to the subject by Žižek does its most harmful work by oversimplifying the theory and blinding it to the empirical possibilities. This should be no surprise, as the very purpose of the subject is to unify, align, and make permanent. Simply put, there are pre- and anti-modern views (philosophies, cultures, traditions, ways of life) that are not based on an assumption of ontological harmony and still do not find the European subject a pinnacle of progress. There are, for example, traditions that closely correspond to the Heideggerian view of human finitude and mortality and the groundless ground of that finitude in the hostile and struggle-filled incompleteness of the ontological. The work of the European philosophy of the subject, including that by Žižek, is here: to cover up these empirical facts and to claim that all premodern and non-European thought is more primitive, immature, counter-revolutionary and so on.70 Here, the Žižekian subject contains more than it is willing to admit.

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Žižek’s answer to the European problems (capitalism, environmental destruc-tion, inequality and so on) is more and better Europeanness. Democracy should be corrected with more democracy, and Europeanness must be corrected with more and better Europeanness. Consequently, the way out of this dead end is to do a Žižek to Žižek and demand a third option, a liveable non-European, collective, willed, non-harmonious way of life. In fact, such a demand is, in part, close to what Heidegger was after in his revolution. What we have to leave out of Heidegger’s revolution is, naturally, the Greek-German axis, and, more importantly, his fixation on the state as the highest mode of human existence, and the Rangordnung and elitism that follow from the statist perversion. In contrast to Žižek, who wants to take a step back from Heidegger’s dissolution of the subject, we have to take a step forward into an experiential democracy, where the qualitative continuum of experience is taken seriously.

University of Tampere

Notes

1. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso 2009), 26.

2. Ibid., 18.3. Ibid., 18.4. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” International Journal of Žižek

Studies 1(4) (2007): 1–43.5. Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the

Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 222–23.

6. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 18.7. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, ed. Peter Trawny, in Martin Heidegger, Gesa-

mtausgabe, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrman (=GA) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), (GA94); Überlegungen VII–XI, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), (GA95); and Überlegungen XII–XV, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), (GA96).

8. Not because the published Schwartze Hefte would contain statements the content of which radically differs from what has been previously published, but because of the manner in which they have been written. As the editor Peter Trawny points out (“Nachwort des Herausgebers,” in Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 530) the Notebooks are stylistically unique. Here we find Heidegger not only commenting on contemporary phenomena, but also on himself and his work, steering his thought and ruminating on it. Out of all the publications by Heidegger, the Notebooks are maybe the most revealing psychologically while at the same time presenting a force-


ful and convincing argument against any and all psychologisation of philosophical work (e.g., Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 374, 390, 423). Maybe this could be one of the reasons Heidegger wanted them published last in his Gesamtausgabe.

9. “Rein ‘metaphysisch’ (d.h. seynsgeschichtlich) denkend habe ich in den Jahren 1930–1934 den Nationalsozialismus für die Möglichkeit eines Übergangs in einen anderen Anfang gehalten und ihm diese Deutung geben.” Überlegungen VII–XI, (GA95), 408. Heidegger continues to point out that this made him miss the “inner necessities” of the movement, which included total technological mobilisation. However, he also insists that to think about the historical (geschichtlich) essence of the movement, one has to separate it from its “contemporary Gestalt and the period of its currently visible forms [zeitgenössischen Gestalt und der Dauer dieser gerade sichtbaren Formen].” Überlegungen VII–XI, (GA95), 408.

10. On the difference that Heidegger sees between the vulgar form and his own ideas, see Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 121, 124, 130–33, 134–13, 142; against biological racism 188, 189, 351, 472; against organisation as a form of technology or machina-tion (Machenschaft), 123, 171, 397.

11. “Das Ungeschützte der Lichtung der Verweigerung, das ist der Sturm, der im Seyn selbst weht—das Er-eignis selbst steht auf Sturm. Gewalt—Bändigung, und Brechen und Untergang sind die Zeichen des Seyns.” Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 429.

12. For instance, Heidegger writes how being a slave or being a master are formed through the battle raging in Being itself and thus, in the case a of a slave, “this Being harbours a defeat, a failure, an inadequacy, a weakness, yes, maybe a will to be small and lowly.” (“dieses Sein in sich eine Niederlage, ein Versagen, ein Ungenügen, eine Feigheit, ja vielleicht ein Gering- und Niedrigseinwollen birgt.”) Martin Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit. ed. H. Tietjen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2001) (GA36/37), 94.

13. “Der Rang—wesentlich nicht gradweise genommen—gehört dem Da-sein selbst.” Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 443.

14. “Der Deutsche allein kann das Sein ursprünglich neu dichten und sagen,” Überle-gungen II–VI, (GA94), 27.

15. In Heidegger’s view, in asking about “World Jewry” (Weltjudentum) one is asking how is it possible to take the uprooting of all beings from Being as a world-historical task: “Die Frage nach der Rolle des Weltjudentums ist keine rassische, sondern die metaphysische Frage nach der Art von Menschentümlichkeit, die schlechthin unge-bunden die Entwurzelung alles Seienden aus dem Sein als weltgeschichtliche ‘Aufgabe’ übernehmen kann.” Überlegungen XII–XV, (GA96), 243. On worldlessness, see Über-legungen VII–XI, (GA95), 97, and readiness for calculative rationality that embodies modern machination, Überlegungen XII–XV, (GA96), 46, 56. Heidegger does not even shy away from mentioning supposed Jewish incapacity for Being-historical decision (Entscheidung) as a reason for Husserl’s philosophical shortcomings: “Je ursprünglicher und anfänglicher die künftigen Entscheidungen und Fragen werden, umso unzugänglicher bleiben sie dieser ‘Rasse’ (So ist Husserls Schritt zur phänom-enologischen Betrachtung unter Absetzung gegen die psychologische Erklärung und historische Verrechnung von Meinungen von bleibender Wichtichkeit—und dennoch reicht sie nirgends in die Bezirke wesentlicher Entscheidungen . . .).” Überlegungen XII–XV, (GA96), 46.

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16. “Die große Erfahrung und Beglückung, daß der Führer eine neue Wirklichkeit erweckt hat, die unserem Denken die rechte Bahn und Stoßkraft gibt. . . . Die literarische Existenz ist zu Ende.” Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 111.

17. Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1998).

18. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Zu Ernst Jünger “Der Arbeiter,” ed. P. Trawny, (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004) (GA90), 230–31, Überlegungen XII–XV, (GA96), 149–57, and Heidegger’s correspondence with Marcuse after the war: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/40spubs/47MarcuseHeidegger.htm.

19. Besides giving some off-hand comments to Löwith on the low intellectual quality of the leaders and the lacking commitment of the intelligentsia, and similar comments to Blochmann on the surprisingly vigorous resistance by the Christian churches; see Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 (London: Continuum Interna-tional Publishing Group—Athlone, 1993), 60; and Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918—1969 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998), 37, 46.

20. Slavoj Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 3.21. Ibid., 3–4.22. Ibid., 29.23. Ibid., 30.24. Ibid., 3.25. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit, 225: “Wenn heute der Führer immer wieder spricht

von der Umerziehung zur nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung, heißt das nicht irgendwelche Schlagworte beibringen, sondern einen Gesamtwandel hervorbringen, einen Weltentwurf, aus dessen Grund heraus er das ganze Volk erzieht. Der Nation-alsozialismus ist nicht irgendwelche Lehre, sondern der Wandel von Grund aus der deutschen und, wie wir glauben, auch der europäischen Welt.”

26. Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI, (GA95), 48: Überlegungen VII–XI, (GA95), 55.27. Martin Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik”

(1937/38), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann 1984) (GA45), 41.28. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 31.29. Slavoj Žižek, “Lenin’s Choice,” Afterword in Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings

of Lenin from 1917, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso 2002).30. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 18. Žižek writes also: “In today’s

Germany there are many CD’s on the market featuring old GDR revolutionary and Party songs but we look in vain for a CD featuring Nazi Party songs.” Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press 2006), 289. As it happens, the book by Žižek with this statement was published almost simultaneously with the news of a large demonstration held in support of the release of the Neo-Nazi musician Michael Regner from Tegel prison (“Neo-nazis rally for jailed singer,” BBC World News, October 21, 2006).

31. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 39–40; Žižek, The Parallax View, 286–95.

32. Otto Pohl, “Stalin’s genocide Against the ‘Repressed Peoples,’” Journal of Genocide Research 2 (2002): 271.


33. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Penguin, 2009); and Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2007).

34. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 31.35. Bret Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Chicago: Northwestern

University Press, 2007).36. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 34. 37. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 26.38. Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” foreword in F. W. J. von Schelling, Ages of the

World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).39. Translation quoted from Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 286–87. 40. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 34–35.41. Heidegger warns against an anthropomorphic reading of Anaximander in Holzwege,

(GA5), 33242. In Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Zurich:

Weidmann, 1985), B1: “ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν,” most often (Heidegger agrees) the passage authentically by Anaximander is thought to be “κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας.” G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), 118, translate: “For they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in according to the assessment of time.”

43. Heidegger, Holzwege, (GA5), 343.44. Ibid., 361.45. Translation by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten

Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 274.46. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 278.47. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, (Frankfurt: Klos-

termann 2000) (GA7). 48. Quoted from Thomas Sheehan (“Heidegger and the Nazis,” The New York Review of

Books 35(10) (1988)), who has translated the passage from Wolfgang Schirmacher’s Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber 1983): “Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushungerung von Ländern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben.”

49. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 35.50. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit, 297.51. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 36.52. Ibid., 37.53. Ibid.54. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” ed. S. Ziegler

(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980) (GA39), 134: “Der Name Heraklit ist nicht der Titel für eine längst verflossene Philosophie der Griechen. Er ist ebensowenig die Formel für das Denken einer Allerweltsmenschheit an sich. Wohl aber ist es der Name einer

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Urmacht des abendländisch-germanischen geschichtlichen Daseins, und zwar in ihrer ersten Auseinandersetzung mit dem Asiatischen.” See also Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, ed. P. Jaeger (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983) (GA40), 66, and Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 113: “’Das Geringste Ermat-tung und wir werden umgerissen’ und fallen in der Gemeinverständlichkeit des kurz tragenden Getues—der Auftrag ist für uns nicht mehr da. Er wird nur bewahrt im Kampf (vgl. Heraklit).”

55. In “Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit,” in Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. H. Heidegger (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983) (GA13), Heidegger claims that Gelassenheit is beyond activity and passivity, and that it entails an attitude that says both yes and no to technological equipment.

56. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, ed. F. W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981) (GA4) contain famous passages on the inhuman powers of truth, but also in the supposedly “harmonious” memorial essay “Gelassenheit,” in Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, ed. H. Heidegger (Frankfurt: Klostermann 2000) (GA16), Heidegger notes the imper-sonality of truth in art. This is a constant in Heidegger. Already the letters to Elfride Petri in 1918 speak about the vehemence of the Geist that strikes whomever it will: Martin Heidegger, “Mein liebes Seelchen!” Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride 1915–1970, ed. Gertrud Heidegger (Munich: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 2005), 82–83. See also Überlegungen VII–XI, (GA95), 391: “Die ‘harmonischen Naturen’ . . . scheinen zuweilen das Göttliche selbst zu verkörpern: aber dieser ‘Schein’ verhängt nur ihre Bezuglosigkeit zu Göttern. Zerrissene Menschen, denen der Riß durch ihr Wesen zieht, sind dagegen aufgeklafft, so daß ein so geartetes Öffnen einen Abgrund bereithält, in den Nähe und Ferne der Götter und die Unruhe ihrer Unentschiedenheit hereinstrahlen kann.”

57. Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece, trans. John-Panteleimon Manous-sakis (Albany: State University of New York Press 2005), 13.

58. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” 242–44.59. Quoted from Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis.”60. How could an ahistorical subject engage in the destruction of other ahistorical

subjectivities? And can such subjectivity be destroyed? These are not rhetorical questions, as shown by the views of Emmanuel Faye in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. Faye is a universalist and rationalist, defending timeless and intersubjective philosophy against Heidegger’s attacks. Therefore when it comes to the obvious effectiveness of Nazi propaganda, especially Hitlerism, Faye is at a loss. In explaining how people could lose their rational selves and fall for the asubjective national experience of Nazism, Faye has to resort to talking about “possession,” a phenomenon that according to his own theory of subjectivity is impossible. While Žižek does not, of course, see human existence as exclusively rational, his insistence on ahistorical subjectivity as the only viable bulwark against face-to-face Nazi evil sounds less than convincing from the point of view of his own materialistic and Lacanian theory.

61. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2002), 360–62.


62. Slavoj Žižek, “Why Cynics Are Wrong,” In These Times (November 13, 2008). http://inthesetimes.com/article/4039/why_cynics_are_wrong/.

63. Immanuel Kant, Der Streit die Fakultäten (1798), quoted in Žižek “Why Cynics Are Wrong.”

64. Žižek, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” 10.65. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit,

ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983) (GA29/30), 263.66. Moreover, researchers have also discovered that some animals do possess a rudimen-

tary symbolic function; the cries are not only responses to stimuli or direct signs, but refer to larger abstract constructs, such as “predator in the air,” “predator on the ground” or “unspecified alert”; K. Arnold, Y. Pohlner, and K. Zuberbühler, “A forest monkey’s alarm call series to predator models,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 62(4) (2008): 549–59; K. Arnold and K. Zuberbühler, “Language Evolution: Semantic Combinations in Primate Calls,” Nature 441 (2006): 303; doi: 10.1038/441303a.

67. Heinrich W. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 48–53.

68. Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918–1969, 95.69. “Der Staat . . . ist die wirklichste Wirklichkeit, die in einem neuen, ursprünglichen

Sinn dem ganzen Sein einen neuen Sinn geben muß. Die höchste Verwirklichung menschlichen Seins geschieht im Staat,” cited in Faye, Heidegger, 149.

70. Heidegger argues against seeing European history as development or progress (Ent-wicklung), e.g., in Überlegungen II–VI, (GA94), 483–84.

Good Revolutions Gone Bad: Žižek’s Critique and Praise of Heidegger’s Nazism

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