Heidegger's Volk: Between

National Socialism and

Poetry

James Phillips

Stanford University Press

heideggers volk

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Cultural Memory
in
the
Present
Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

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HEIDEGGERS
VOLK
between
national
socialism
and poetry

James Phillips

stanford university press

stanford, california
2005

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California
2005 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, James, date
Heideggers Volk : between National Socialism and poetry / James Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8047-5070-x (alk. paper)isbn 0-8047-5071-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889 1976. 2. National socialism. I. Title.
b3279.h49p49 2005
193 dc22
Original Printing 2005
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Dedicated with gratitude and affection to

Alexander Garca Dttmann and Jeff Malpas

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Contents

Introduction

1 The Death of Hegel

55

2 Ontological Opportunism

95

3 The Feast

133

4 Toward the Uncanny Homeland

169

5 The Geschlecht of the Poem

218

Conclusion

246

Notes

249

Index

275

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heideggers volk

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Introduction

Martin Heideggers engagement with National Socialism was a philosophical engagement, even though it appearedand more than appearedto be an abdication of philosophy. Accosting Heidegger on a
tram after his early resignation of the rectorship of Freiburg University,
Wolfgang Schadewaldt asked his colleague, Back from Syracuse? But this
question mistakes the philosophical character peculiar to Heideggers engagement. Unlike Plato, Heidegger had not sought out the political realm
as the open space for the implementation of a preconceived philosophy of
the ideal state. What Heidegger desired in 1933, and what he imagined he
could effect by running the university in collaboration with the new regime, was, on the contrary, the irruption of the nonideality of the political
realm into philosophy. He confessed as much to Karl Lwith in Rome in
1936, explicitly identifying his concept of historicality as the basis for his
engagement.1 The political realm, in its essential historicality, was itself to
philosophize under National Socialism, albeit without diverging from its
anti-philosophical character as the realm of the contingent and the nite.
Philosophy, as it had previously interpreted itself, was to be stood on its
head. Heideggers politics are incomprehensible and irrecoverable as an act
of expansion on the part of a metaphysics of eternity, since it is in his critique of just such a metaphysics and of the timeless, abstract presence of
the Platonic Idea and its avatars that an early susceptibility to a folkish
politics can be discerned.
Arguably, for Heidegger, the year 1933 promised that overturning
of the foundation of philosophy on whose necessity for the question of Being he expatiates in Being and Time. The subject, on which liberalism and
modern metaphysics had been raised, was to give way to the people. As the

Introduction

liberal subject, in truly giving way, can but carry with itself the presence
that is its own foundation, National Socialism was to offer the concrete
possibility of a fundamental ontology. The regime extolled a return to the
rootedness in the Volk (people), and in Heideggers ears, this was taken to
announce the repudiation of that abstraction from historicality in which
the subject comes to itself in its autonomy and self-presence. Heidegger
does not formulate the choice at issue here as a choice between autonomy
and heteronomy, but rather as a choice between the alleged autonomy of
the subject and the historicality in which Being is understood as other than
presence. Inasmuch as it comes to itself and is thus present to itself, the
autonomous subject xes on Being only in its presence and thereby cannot think the originary Being of the time in which presence is rst able to
be presence. With respect to an understanding of the ecstatic character of
time, the subject is constricted by the atomism of liberal thought. That
Heidegger was politically reactionary is generally accepted as evident from
the anti-liberalism of his engagement with National Socialism. That his
notion of historicality, which he himself admitted to be the basis for his engagement, is consequently reactionary is nonetheless disputable.2 What has
to be ascertained and not assumed are the relations between historicality
and nationalism and between the historicality of a people and the people
of historicality. This is to ask after that which was to be conserved in Heideggers conservatism and uncovered in his destruction of the metaphysics
of presence.
If Heidegger joined the NSDAP without any prior dealings with the
movement (or, for that matter, with any political movement whatsoever),
the step can nevertheless not be said to have been entirely unforeseeable.
There was a shared privileging of historicality that, to begin with, concealed the divergence in the understanding of historicality. Heideggers initial responsiveness to the Hitlerian demagogy was at once nave and calculated, because what Heidegger chose to hear in it was the long anticipated
resolution of the impasse of Cartesian subjectivity. Within the anti-liberal
and folkish pronouncements of the new regime, he was prepared to hear
an echo of his own philosophical demotion of the subject in favor of historicality. The self-assertion of the German people from under the frail and
allegedly imported liberalism of the Weimar Republic took on the appearance of the possibility of a disclosure of the ontological foundations of the
cogito sum and of its certainty in self-presence. What Descartes, in the inauguration of the metaphysics of subjectity, leaves unthought, and yet nev-

Introduction

ertheless presupposes in abstracting from it, is what Heidegger discusses

in Being and Time under the name of world (Welt). It is the existential,
historical thickness of world that is attened to the monotony of the Cartesian res extensa and that must rst be attened in just this way if the ahistorical and peopleless subject is to be able to assure itself of its own ontological transparency. In a space that can pass for the substratum of every
object because it is always and everywhere only ever present, the subject
does not encounter any challenge to its understanding of Being as presence. The year 1933 was to repoliticize the space of metaphysics by reversing its suppression of historical world.
However enthusiastically Heidegger declared his allegiance to the
new regime, he was always cautious to interpret the Volk on parade in the
streets as no more than the promise of a reversal of the suppression of historicality. Out of opposition to the attening of the world of the people in
the Cartesian foundations of liberalism, Heidegger aligned himself with
National Socialism. Even beyond his disillusionment with the regime, his
thinking undertook to grasp the historical thickness of the world of the
German people. The chauvinism of the Volk was to be thought through
to its essence. For Heidegger, this was a question of an understanding of
historicality rather than eugenics. The conservatism of the regime had
markedly less to do with the contestation of presence through an attention
to historicality than with the preservation of breeding lines in the ahistorical manipulation of genetic material. In its abstraction from historicality,
the regime amounted only to a variation on liberalism. Increasingly, for
Heidegger after 1934, the singularity of the German people on which National Socialism insisted was precisely that which contested the covert liberalism of the regime. The grounds for Heideggers engagement with National Socialism are the grounds for his disengagement: the people of the
question of Being were, in the end, too political for the Weltucht (ight
from the world) of Nazism.
Heideggers disillusionment with National Socialism is not a disillusionment with the notion of the Volk. What is the sense of Volk for Heidegger? And why should it be thought in conjunction with historicality
and fundamental ontology? It is clear from the text of his Address on 11 November in Leipzig that in 1933 Heidegger interpreted the self-assertion
of the German people under National Socialism as a precondition of the
knowledge of the Being of beings. The address in question, rst published
in the volume Bekenntnis der deutschen Universitten und Hochschulen zu

Introduction

Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat (Dresden, 1933) offers the
coup dtat an ontological vindication:
We have renounced the idolatry of a rootless and impotent thinking. We behold
the end of its servile philosophy. We are convinced that the luminous rigor and the
betting condence of the inexorable and simple questioning concerning the
essence of Being are returning. The originary courage either to grow or to shatter
thereon in the confrontation with that which is constitutes the innermost impetus
of the questioning of a folkish science.3

The idolatry of a rootless and impotent thinking has been replaced by the
questioning of a folkish science. Following this account, what distinguishes a folkish science (vlkische Wissenschaft) is its rootedness. Heidegger does not say that a folkish science is rooted in a Volk. Rather, he
says that a folkish science endangers itself in its confrontation with that
which is. The two assertions are not synonymous. In his declaration of
loyalty to the new regime, Heidegger adopts the National Socialist term
vlkische Wissenschaft but refers thereby, not to a science that with its rootedness in a people has grown certain of its stability, but rather to a science
that has become all the more vulnerable. Situating the rootedness of a
folkish science in its originary courage either to grow or to shatter on the
question of Being, Heidegger does not make of the folkishness of a folkish science an orienting frame of reference, a paradigm or weltanschauung. The folkishness of a folkish science calls itself and the science as
a whole into question, since for Heidegger the rootedness of a folkish science is the originarity that is conferred upon it in its questioning concerning the originarity understood throughout his writings as Being. Heidegger does not oppose to a rootedness in the Volk a rootedness in the question
of Being, because implicit in Heideggers Leipzig address is a denition of
the Volk that proceeds by reference to the question of Being. Heidegger ascribes the brittleness of a folkish science to its questioning concerning
the essence of Being, rather than to its deciencies according to the criteria of modern science. The rootedness of a folkish science is not a supplement appended to the notion of modern science that renders it more robust. It is the fragility, intolerable to modern science, whereby the latter
would open itself (precisely in and by means of its inability to begin by
constitutively attening the existential, historical thickness of world) to
that which it could not otherwise think. This rootedness is the obscurantism with relation to the universality of correct claims in which the more
pernicious obscurantism of modern science in its relation to Being might

Introduction

itself be surmounted. Here the question of Being becomes the matter of

knowledge and the guarantor of a folkish science in the face of its cosmopolitan simulacra.
It is in the questionableness of Being that Heideggers exposition
of folkish science differs from the racist doctrine of science advocated,
for example, by Heideggers Marburg colleague Erich Jaensch.4 Having
tied his notion of folkish science to Being rather than to the ahistorical
presence in which the race knows itself as race, Heidegger is not guilty of
Jaenschs inconsistency in challenging the hegemony of a science whose
exactitude and universality rest on a suppression of the organic and the
human, while nonetheless desiring that unimpugnable, and thus universally recognizable, distinctness of the people which is the dream and clandestine cosmopolitanism of racism. For Heidegger, the world of a people
does not possess the atomistic quality that Jaensch attributes to it, by reason of which the latter is structurally bound to retain the cosmopolitan
as the negated universal from which these distinct particular worlds have
won an uneasy independence. If folkish science is the science of Being as
such, it is because it seeks, rather than the derivative correctness of a rootless thinking, the Being of the world that must be knownnot ontically
as race, values, and character, but ontologicallyif anything appearing
against the background of world is to be known in its presence as well as in
the abyssal foundations of its presence. The liberal conception of science,
which bases its claim to scientic status on the darkness in which it remains
with regard to its own rootedness, is never equal to the task of thinking Being in its worldliness. It is this worldliness of Being that favors the rooted
thinking of a folkish science and whose appearance Heidegger wills to
announce itself in the self-assertion of the national. The people of Heideggers folkish science is to appear without becoming present.
Since Heidegger himself in the Leipzig address declares his allegiance
to both Hitler and the question of Being, the prehistory of his political engagement is but sketchily reconstructed by commentaries that fasten on
the lone instance of the word Volk in 74 of Being and Time. It is within
the question of Being that Heidegger addresses the notion of Volk in 1927,
just as it is within the question of Being that he confesses his loyalty to
Hitler in 1933. To clarify the sense of Volk in Being and Time by its sense
in National Socialism is hence reductive and of dubious worth polemically.
An interpretation of the use of Volk in Being and Time that does not simultaneously consider the question of Being is, irrespective of its inten-

Introduction

tion, even apologetic, because it isolates a suspect lexical element in Heideggers thinking as a whole and delivers it up on its own to judgment. The
step from Volk to Hitler is certainly one that Heidegger took, but schematized in this way, Heideggers engagement ceases to be a scandal for philosophy, because the distance between his thinking and the intellectual
squalor of the regime has been minimized. The question of the relation between nationalism and fundamental ontology is thereby settled without
having rst been examined.
Heideggers nationalism is the nationalism of the rootedness of the
Volk. It is not, however, an insurrection of the particular against the universal, if only because such an insurrection is always doomed to failure.
Heidegger should not be seen to be translating Kierkegaards anti-Hegelian
individualism for the NSDAP. A Volk that insists on its singularity, on its
condition as this Volk, is in the end, as Hegel had shown in his analysis
of sense-certainty, always betrayed to the universal by its very thisness, by
the abstractness of singularity as such. A reprise of the nominalist cult of
the particular does not describe Heideggers reaction to Hegels panlogism,
since his critique of the universal pursues a different course from the beautiful souls pathos-laden avowals of the particulars independence. Heideggers rejection of cosmopolitanism and his engagement with a nationalistic
political movement are grounded in his treatment of the universal within
the question of Being. A demonstration of this can at least be attempted
through a consideration, within the context of its critique of traditional
ontology, of the following excerpt from the Introduction to Being and
Time:
Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its universality is to be sought higher up. Being and the
structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an
entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Daseins Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation.5

Being is to be sought higher up than any class or genus because its universality places it beyond them. It transcends them because it is nothing
else than transcendence. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. In a
marginal note to the Httenexemplar (the copy of Being and Time that Heidegger kept in his hut at Todtnauberg) Heidegger claries this statement:
transcendens to be sure not despite every metaphysical echoscholastic and Graeco-Platonic koinovn, but rather transcendence as the ecstatic

Introduction

as temporality. 6 Being is to be sought higher up as that which transcends

class and genus. For Heidegger, Being is that which transcends purely and
simply, because it is time in its overreaching of the discrete now of Zenos
paradoxes. Being nowhere comes to rest in identity with itself and can
therefore scarcely be inferred from the categories as their principle and
law. Only if Being is grasped as the presence of beings, as the ostensible
honesty with which beings give themselves up as they are to the categories
(e.g., as so much and neither more nor less, as in such and such a place and
not elsewhere), does Being stand in a relation to the categories that leaves
the latter intact. The questionability of Being as presence, and not the independence of the particular, is what Heidegger brings up against traditional logic.
Aristotle also denies that Being is a genus, but it is by means of a different argument. In Book B of the Metaphysics, neither Being nor the One
is admitted as the genus of what is, since the differences of each genus have
to be, just as each difference has to be one.7 Even if the scope of a genus is
dened by the diversity of its subordinate species, the genus per seas the
unity and common character of its species cannot contain this diversity
within itself: otherwise, the species of a given genus would be interchangeable. Being and the One are more universal than any genus because they
can be said of species not only with respect to what they share but also with
respect to that by which they differ. For Aristotle, the universality of Being and the One thus does not at all imply a fundamental homogeneity of
what is. Being and the One cannot be taken for granted as constants. Heidegger, in his 1931 lecture course Aristoteles, Metaphysik q 13, accordingly
stresses that for Aristotle, Being is still questionable in a radical sense: All
that is later thrust aside by the thesis: Being is the most self-evident of all
things. (This questionability is a long way from the image that one generally has of Aristotle when one pictures his philosophy in the manner of
the academic preoccupations of a medieval Scholastic or a German professor). 8 In relation to Aristotle, Heidegger sees his task, not as the refutation
of a system, but rather as the resumption and elaboration of a questioning concerning the essence of Being. Being and the One, for Aristotle, are
both said in many ways. But the multiplicity by which Being distinguishes
itself from a genus does not contest the legitimacy of the notion of genus.
Being is to be sought higher up than any genus, yet it is not to be sought
higher up than the One, since Being is not said in a way that would not
also be one. Aristotle does not include among the many ways of Being a way

Introduction

in which Being is not one: despite his own cautions, the multiplicity of Being will remain for the subsequent history of philosophy effectively under
the sway of the understanding of Being as oujsiva, as the substance that is
the propriety and decidability of the genera. Where Aristotle speaks of an
analogy between the ways of Being but leaves the ground of this analogy
unillumined, Heidegger names this ground the understanding of Being as
presence and sets out its limitations. The Being of the differences that are
always one is not Being as such in its transcendence and impropriety, but
rather Being reduced to the substantiality of presence and thereby to the
propriety that it can share with the One. The difference that is, but is not
one, is the unrecognized and unrecognizable difference of transcendence
from the One. Not All is One.9 It is a difference that cannot be collected
into any oneness without ceasing to be transcendence. Such a difference,
because it does not give itself up to be known in unity, is unintelligible for
Aristotle. The basis for intelligibility lies paradoxically in a blindness to the
originary transcendence of time.
That even the One is transcended by Being, by the Being of the time
that exceeds and encompasses the presence of the One, is no more acknowledged by later thinkers. When Kant, in his refutation of the Ontological Argument for the existence (Dasein) of God and within the understanding of logic laid down by Aristotle, says that existence is not a real
predicate, this distinction reformulates Beings difference from a genus but
still in terms of a complementarity instead of an antagonism. For Kant, existence is not a real predicate whereby the possibility or actuality of a thing
could be distinguished within the concept itself, but the bare positing of a
thing.10 Kants polemic against an aspect of medieval theology is the occasion for an exposition of Being within a theory of representation. Earlier in
the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant humbles the understanding in its claim
to totality and sets bounds on the use of its concepts through an account
of the nonconceptuality of the a priori intuitions. Kant grounds the a priori intuitions in human nitude and assigns to existence an essential role
in the determination of knowledge. That which is thereby shown to be irreducible to the concept is less an impetus for the question of Being than
the surety of representation and the propriety of the concepts of the understanding. In the Critique, Kant thus devises a defense of the concepts of
the understanding from their limitations regarding existence:
By whatever and by however many predicates we may think a thing even if we
completely determine itwe do not make the least addition to the thing when we

Introduction

further declare that this thing is. Otherwise, it would not be exactly the same thing
that exists, but something more than we had thought in the concept; and we could
not, therefore, say that the exact object of my concept exists.11

As the existence incorporated in a concepts set of predicates is, for Kant,

not the existence of the object itself, it marks the untruth of the concept.
The Kantian concept relinquishes existence as a real predicate and resigns
itself to representing its object. By this modesty, it acquires something exterior to it, something nevertheless entirely tractable and tamed in advance
by the a priori intuitions of time and space, and in its correspondence to
this object, the concept lays claim to its truth. Furthermore, for the sake of
the traditional understanding of truth as adequation, the equivocation of
Being is to be claried by a distinction between the copula of logic (the
is of propositions of the kind God is omnipotent) and the Being of existential positing (the is of propositions of the kind There is a thaler in
my hand). Kant cannot rest content with rejecting the denition of Being
as a predicate in favor of Being as positing. In the absence of a distinction
between the logical positing of the concept of an object and the existential
positing of the object itself, the concept ceases to be purely representative
of its object: the concept simply is its object and is therefore neither true
nor false in relation to it. The exteriority of Kantian existence is its intelligibility. Like Aristotles Being, Kants Dasein threatens the oneness of neither that which is to be subsumed nor that under which it is to be subsumed. Kant even surrenders Aristotles insight into the equivocation of
the many ways of Being. The equivocation between the ways of Being,
which the Ontological Argument employs in its transition from the being
of thinkability to the being of real existence, and as whose ground, as the
sense of the categorial interconnections of ontology, Heidegger will propose Dasein, is simply shut down. In existence, as the bare positing in the
presence of the light of truth as adequation, the Aristotelian coextensiveness of Being with the One does not become questionable.
Through holding apart the What it is of a being from its That it
is, Kant wanted to place a check solely on the conceptual enthusiasm of
theology, whereas Kierkegaard, in response to Hegels sublation of the distinction, set out to interpret the extralogical character of existence as an antagonism to logic. But with Kierkegaard, the reformulation of the question
of Being is stillborn, since the antagonism of existence to traditional logic
is not substantiated in an account of temporality and the differentiality of
Being but left to the inadequate resources of an obstinate nominalism: Ex-

10

Introduction

istence is always the particular; the abstract does not exist. 12 Kierkegaards
nominalism, which is dictated by his attention to the Christian doctrine of
the incommensurability of the human soul, is of less importance for Heidegger than what inspired it. By neglecting the philosophy of nature,
Kierkegaard gave vent to his polemics against traditional logic entirely
within the question of what it is to be human. The human existence that,
in Kierkegaard, eludes the universal on account of its particularity becomes
the human existence (Dasein) that, in Heidegger, eludes the universal on
account of its nitude. As a result, Kierkegaards confrontation with logic
is renewed on a more originary ground. Heidegger reformulates it as a confrontation with Platos subordination of nitude to the Ideas in the founding of metaphysics. That by means of which a particular instantiation of a
single universal differentiates itself from its universal is set forth as the transitoriness and perishabilitythe existencein which the particular is just
as much not present in an identity with its universal. Existence is to be understood by reference to another temporality than that in which the Ideas
stand fast in the eternity of their presence. And it is to be understood as human because, for Heidegger, it is human beings alone who, in their projects and in the determinative exposure to the truth of their outstanding
deaths, resist any description that would reduce them to what can be apprehended in presence. The human being, less as a particular than as the
Being of ecstatic temporality, is the basis for a polemic against traditional
logic.
And yet in the excerpt from the Introduction to Being and Time cited
above, Heidegger writes: And the transcendence of Daseins Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Is individuation here to be comprehended as a reprise
of Kierkegaards individualism and in opposition to the Volk of 74? To answer tentatively, indicating the line that is to be followed: No. Inasmuch as
it is transcendence that is said to imply the most radical individuation, individuation cannot here be identied with the isolation and distinction of
one being from other beings. Heidegger attributes to transcendence a more
radical individuation than such a process of isolation and distinction. Individuation in the latter sense is an individuation on the level of properties.
The individual never completely shares its set of properties with any other,
but that which is individuated by its properties is in itself, as a raw unit of
presence, always the same. Such individuation is constrained in how much
it can differentiate the individual from the universal by the understanding

Introduction

11

of Being as presence that the individual has in common with the universal.
Heideggers radical individuation breaks with the repeatable because it
breaks with the now as the truth of time. Dasein all the more individuates itself the less it holds itself aloof from the existential, historical thickness of world. It is always already individuated by the corruption through
which it eludes being apprehended in presence. The peculiar distinctness
of the human being, which necessitates a reassessment of the theorization
of temporality in order to do justice to the anticipation of death and projects implication of the future in the present, is obscured in the logical individual abstracted from the world in which alone there can be existence.
But does excluding the individual of traditional logic sufce to bring us, as
Heideggers text seems to assume, to the Volk? Even if the transcendence of
Daseins ecstatic temporality is overlooked in both the abstract individual
and the universal of ahistorical humanity, is the Volk alone what remains
after the exclusion?
Otto Pggeler has objected to the coup de main of an immediate
introduction of the concept of Volk in 74 of Being and Time.13 That Heidegger seeks to downplay the abruptness by introducing the Volk in an
apposition does not mitigate the violence of the coup de main. Two responses, at least, can be given. The abruptness can be held fast as an object
of analysis and the transition from the question of Being to a folkish politics thereby rendered suspect. Such a strategy impedes the use of Heideggers philosophical authority as an argument for fascist politics. It does,
however, make it impossible to understandin anything but an external
sensehow Heidegger was able to see the mission of the Volk as his own.
If the abruptness can be taken as a challenge to come up with alternatives
to the Volk that could also, if not better, meet the requirements of the question of Being, it can also be taken as a violence directed against other connotations of the word Volk. With this second strategy for reading Heideggers coup de main, an immanent critique of one of the central concepts
of National Socialism becomes practicable.
Between the individual and humanity as a whole, there are social formations besides the Volk. Yet Heideggers conservatism expresses itself in an
allegiance neither to the particularist interests of classes nor to the sentimentalist intimacy of the family. Heideggers political engagement, which
in the address in Leipzig, as well as in other texts, he ties to fundamental
ontology, is an engagement with that which affords the chance of overcoming the metaphysics of presence. If Heidegger chooses the people

12

Introduction

and not just any people but the German Volk it is because, in the Volk,
temporality as such becomes a question. This is not to deny that other peoples have histories or that classes and families can be chronicled from their
emergence to their disappearance. The German Volk is the agent of the
question of the relations between Being and time, not because it is the
people whose history is richest in incident, but rather because, for a specic
nationalist discourse, it is the people that, through wanting to distinguish
itself as much as possible from the self-evidence and positivism of the nation-states of its neighbors, long dened itself by its absence. Whether such
a characterization of the essence of the Volk is but the hypostasis of its political backwardness is a question that seemingly does not arise for Heidegger. It is overruled by the question of Being. Heideggers nationalism
will be a nationalism of the assertion of the absence of the Volk that knows
itself to be absent. In contrast to the class that has either already come to
power or whose dialectical lot it is to realize itself as the universal class of
the future, and in contrast to the family whose mythic immediacy hardly
accommodates an interrogation of the understanding of Being as presence,
the German Volk is an embarrassment for traditional ontology. It does not
take its denition from its recognizability in the light of presence. Such an
explanation of Heideggers nationalism, offered here in advance of a commentary on Heideggers various texts on the Volk, answers one question
only to raise another. How is it that Heidegger of all thinkers could have
aligned himself with a folkish movement that set itself the task of eliminating undecidability from the phenomenon of the Volk ? Perhaps, as Heidegger wrote in his defense in December 1945, he believed that the movement could be led spiritually down other paths.14 He misinterpreted the
prevailing involvement with the notion of the Volk as the possibility that
the movement could be directed away from a pseudoscientic elaboration
and concreteness toward an attempt to grasp that absence of the Volk which
is Daseins difference from the present-at-hand. The people of the folkish
uprising of 1933 will turn out to have been, not the people of the recovery
of the world attened by Descartes to the presence of res extensa, but rather
a humanity indistinguishable from a thing.
Undoubtedly, this was to be foreseen, and Heidegger did not succeed
in preventing it. He did not succeed in making Being and Time the bible
of National Socialism. Far more clearly than his postwar critics, the prospective ideologues of the movement were able to recognize that Heidegger, lexical convergences aside, had not written a book in their spirit. The

Introduction

13

Volk that in 1933 inquires into the essence of Being is less the electorate of
the former Weimar Republic than the Dasein of the text of 1927. The Dasein of Being and Time has not passed from the singular to the plural, since
its denition in the 1927 text as Being-in-the-world precludes any differentiation of Dasein and Volk on the basis of traditional grammar. As a multiplicity, as that which is not one, Dasein was already the transcendence
of the Dasein of the Volk. Being and Time is a political text, albeit political in Heideggers sense. Dominique Janicaud, who argues that Being and
Time is abstract and hence apolitical because it addresses the possibility for
any given political attitude, seemingly invokes the very understanding of
possibility that Heidegger criticizes.15 The possibilities of Dasein do not
correspond to the existential neutrality of the abstract concepts of metaphysics, since it is nitudefacticity and Being-with-one-another, in
short, the political realm that grounds possibility for Heidegger.
In 74 of Being and Time, in a passage invariably scrutinized by
commentators on his politics, Heidegger broaches the question of the
people, distinguishing the Volk from a leveling aggregation of subjects:
But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Beingwith-Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as
destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of the people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out
of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. 16 The historizing of
Dasein is always a co-historizing because human beings are, for Heidegger,
essentially political. Their politicality is not one attribute among others
and not one that distinguishes them, as it does for Aristotle, from other animals. It is destiny that stands here between the notion of the Volk and its
formulation as a species composed of individuals agreeing in certain attributes. Destiny is therefore not interchangeable with the racial type (Art ).
It does not unify what is separate. The Volk that it designates knows neither unity nor disunity, because in the transcendence of its historizing, it
has always already reached beyond the isolation of individual subjects, as
well as the isolation of an individual ethnic group. And yet, precisely because it reaches beyond the presence in which a people could recognize itself in its oneness, the Volk can just as little become the humanity that is
the oneness of the peoples. For Heidegger, the Volk is not a point of indifference, and the anarchic attitude that Hans Sluga discerns in the rst division of Being and Time, 9 44, cannot accordingly be said to retreat

14

Introduction

with the appearance of the Volk.17 The discussion of the notion of the Volk
acknowledges the possibility and necessity of Daseins radical individuation
and, that is to say, anarchy.
Certainly a suspension of disbelief is required before considering
whether the German people is the denitive people of co-historizing, but
so long as Heideggers nationalism is taken to be utterly in agreement
with the times, the task of retracing the steps from Being and Time to National Socialism has simply not been addressed. Everybody knows who
the Germans are, but for a certain strand of German nationalism, of which
Thomas Manns Reections of a Nonpolitical Man can be taken as an expression, this is something that cannot be known without overlooking the
Germans distinctness from their positivistic neighbors. Heideggers peculiarity within this strand of nationalism will have been to raise the Germans
from being one question among others to being the questionable as such.
Heideggers philosophy does not nd its way to the Volk as to that which
would be its validating law. The anxiety and alienation of Being and Time
are not resolved by an immersion in the Volk. On the contrary, Heidegger attempts to think the utmost questionability and hence Being of Dasein by means of the Volk. The scandal of Heideggers declarations of the
consistency between his philosophy and his afliation with National Socialism is that he was able to countenance an authoritarian regime for the
sake of a suspected shared devotion to such an understanding of folkishness. These declarations of consistency imply, in deance of the liberal
subject, an understanding of the most radical individuation for which the
Volk is the proper domain.
Daseins possibility and necessity of the most radical individuation
rests with the Volk. Existing essentially as Being-with-Others, Dasein individuates itself as Dasein in the co-historizing that is the destiny of the Volk.
This individuation is not one among others by which Dasein is differentiated. In 72 of Being and Time, Heidegger puts forward the thesis of the
fundamental historicality of Dasein: In analysing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not temporal because it stands
in history, but that, on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist
only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being. 18 Dasein as Dasein stands in history and, following 74, that is to say, in co-history. It always individuates itself co-historically and thus, in line with Heideggers
explication of co-historizing, as the Volk. Other individuations are secondary. The accretion of exclusive properties whereby the individual persons

Introduction

15

within the Volk achieve distinctness simply obscures Daseins radical difference from beings that are present-at-hand. Heterogeneity and homogeneity at the level of properties decide nothing with regard to membership in the Volk. The question of which individuals belong and do not
belong to the Volk is not a question that can be raised without an inappropriate reliance on individuation through properties. In 9, The Theme of
the Analytic of Dasein, Heidegger writes: The essence of Dasein lies in its
existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this
entity are not properties present-at-hand of some entity which looks so
and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for
it to be, and no more than that. 19 This disqualication of properties from
expositions of Dasein is irreconcilable with the biologism of National Socialism. A people that is biologistically recognizable is always a people that
is a class of individuals with common attributes, rather than a destiny.
In 1933, however, Heidegger allows himself to be swayed by the
NSDAPs invocations of the Volk. Heideggers engagement with National
Socialism, which never expressed itself in an endorsement of the latters biologism, was inseparable from the ambition to reform its thinking in accordance with what Heidegger imagined to be its historical promise. Even
after the end of the war, Heidegger admitted a loyalty to this promise, denigrating everyone who was convinced of its unrealizability from the start
and who thus contributed nothing to its realization.20 National Socialism,
grounding its notion of the Volk in biology rather than history, remained
as it were a movement without a destiny, a populism without a people. The
self-assertion of the German people as the self-assertion of the essential historicality of Dasein did not take place.
But if for Heidegger the Volk is necessarily missing from the presentat-hand, how is its self-assertion to be understood? It cannot manifest itself as a visible presence politically. A reply to the question of the nature of
the self-assertion of the Volk can be extrapolated from Heideggers exposition of the differential modes of Being-with-one-another. In 74 of Being
and Time, to continue an earlier quotation, Heidegger further delineates
the notion of destiny by which he denes the Volk: Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Beingwith-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several
Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with
one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for denite possibilities. Only in communicating and struggling does the power of des-

16

Introduction

tiny become free. 21 The power of destiny that is the co-historizing of the
Volk cannot be taken for granted, because it is conditional on communication and struggle. When there is no communication or struggle to confront Dasein with its essence in Being-with-one-another, then the power
of destiny remains inhibited. The historizing of Dasein, which is to say
its co-historizing and the historizing of the people, is covered over. In a
note appended to this passage, Heidegger refers the reader to 26 on The
Dasein-with of Others and Everyday Being-with. There he addresses the
plurality of subjects from which he distinguishes the Volk and derives this
plurality as an interpretation from a Being-with that is constituted, not in
struggle and communication, but rather in disinterest:
So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being. This
cannot be conceived as a summative result of the occurrence of several subjects.
Even to come across a number of subjects [einer Anzahl von Subjekten ] becomes possible only if the Others who are concerned proximally in their Daseinwith are treated merely as numerals [Nummer]. Such a number of subjects gets
discovered only by a denite Being-with-and-towards-one-another. This inconsiderate Being-with reckons [rechnet] with the Others without seriously counting on them [auf sie zhlt], or without even wanting to have anything to do
with them.22

Inasmuch as Dasein is Being-with-one-another, it is unable to isolate itself

from others. Heidegger indicates the dubiousness of its disinterest with
quotation marks. Dasein does not revoke, but conceals its concern. Appearing not to want to have anything to do with others, Dasein forswears
the struggle and communication by which the power of its own destiny
as Being-with-one-another becomes free. This supercial unconcern obstructs the co-historizing of the Volk.
The Volk is missing from the present-at-hand, but that is not to say
that in struggling and communicating, it ceases to be missing. It is missing
in another way. Dasein, according to Heidegger, cannot concern itself with
others as such, and thus with the Volk, by xing its attention on subjects
present-at-hand:
When Others are encountered, it is not the case that ones own subject is proximally present-at-hand and that the rest of the subjects, which are likewise occurrents, get discriminated beforehand and then apprehended; nor are they encountered by a primary act of looking at oneself in such a way that the opposite pole of
a distinction rst gets ascertained. They are encountered from out of the world,
in which concernfully circumspective Dasein dwells. Theoretically concocted ex-

Introduction

17

planations of the Being-present-at-hand of Others urge themselves upon us all

too easily; but over against such explanations we must hold fast to the phenomenal facts of the case which we have pointed out, namely, that Others are encountered environmentally.23

The others, with whom in its concern Dasein is the co-historizing of the
Volk, are not met as beings present-at-hand. They come forward out of the
world of Dasein, and it is as this world that they come forward. The others can only be met in a manner appropriate to their humanity, which is to
say that they can only be met as the transcendens encompassing the presence of the present-at-hand. The others are met as that which, strictly
speaking, cannot be met, since they cannot be reduced to presence. They
can only be met through meeting them as world, through thinking the
absence that is not incidental and remediable, but essential and thus a
provocation for the understanding of Being as presence.
When Dasein does not want to have anything to do with others, it
tries to ignore this provocation. The Volk that is missingalbeit missing
in the sense in which the world in which Dasein, nonetheless, has its Being is missingis then even missing as missing: the Volks difference from
the present-at-hand is itself absent. In the place of the Volk, and in a way as
its reverse, das Man makes its appearance: The Others whom one thus
designates in order to cover up the fact of ones belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part are there in
everyday Being-with-one-another. The who is not this one, not that one,
not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them
all. The who is the neuter, the they [das Man]. 24 Insofar as Dasein denies to itself its essential existence in Being-with-one-another, it denies its
own transcendence. The distance that Dasein keeps from Others in its inconsiderate Being-with does not individuate Dasein, but rather levels it:
This Being-with-one-another dissolves ones own Dasein completely into the kind
of Being of the Others, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable
and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the they is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature
and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the great mass as they
shrink back.25

Contempt for the masses, having itself become a clich, characterizes the
modern phenomenon of the masses. Not content simply to reiterate, at
the distance of a hundred years, de Tocquevilles account of the tyranny of

18

Introduction

the majority, Heidegger introduces a seemingly paradoxical twist. Here

conformity is made an affair of elitist individualism, rather than of membership in the Volk. Denying its transcendence, Dasein stands back from
the Others and thereby stands back from the question of Being. The neglect of the question of Being is the precondition of conformity, because,
by not excluding from discussions of the human the logical notion of the
individual (i.e., the unit of presence as the bearer of properties), it simultaneously creates the possibility of a mass bringing into line. The autonomy of the liberal subject is the beginning of its massication. For Heidegger, the individual is already fundamentally conformist because he or
she is faced in the utmost isolation of individuality with the denial of the
radical difference of transcendence, a denial that he or she has in common
with every individual thing present-at-hand.
In this conformity, communication and struggle are drained of their
vigor: Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. 26
The debasement of struggle and the vitiation of the secret are not the
consequences of an encroachment of the they on the preserve of the individual. Struggle, as well as the possibility of the secret and the force of
its potential communication, presupposes Being-with-one-another and
hence, contrary to the assertion of Georg Lukcs,27 Pierre Bourdieu,28 and
many others, these passages in Being and Time cannot be read as elitist cultural critique. Heidegger is not retreating from the public spaces, and the
opposite of the they is not at all the autonomous subject by which it is
merely differently designated. Heidegger writes:
The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way
[eigens ergriffenen]. . . . If Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] and
brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery
of the world and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearingaway of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which
Dasein bars its own way.29

This authentic self, as Heidegger explains, is not the autonomous subject:

Authentic Being-ones-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of
the subject, a condition that has been detached from the they; it is rather
an existentiell modication of the they of the they as an essential existen-

Introduction

19

tiale. 30 As an essential existentiale, the they is Being-with-one-another,

and the authentic Self that is its existentiell modication is the Dasein that
understands itself as Being-with-one-another. This understanding and its
abstention disclose and conceal Being-with-one-another, but do not prove
anything against it in itself. The power of destiny that can or cannot become free is existentiell because as the co-historizing of the Volk, it is a matter of disclosure, namely, of the essential historicality of Dasein. The power
of destiny in its unfreedom is the double absence of the Volk, just as this
double absence is Daseins obliviousness to its own Being. It could therefore be said that the Volk is not so much a being among beings as the understanding that raises the question of Being.
In 1927, the prospects for understanding were not as bleak as they
would seem to the late Heidegger. Indeed, Heideggers political enthusiasm in 1933 was inseparable from his optimism with regard to the task of
understanding. The Volk was dened by its ontological mission. For Heidegger, the Germans in their ontic conspicuousness under National Socialism quickly proved themselves to be a people doubly in abeyance. In
the lectures on Hlderlin from the mid 1930s and early 1940s, the selfassertion of the German people proclaimed by National Socialism is indefinitely deferred. Heideggers commentary from 1943 on Hlderlins poem
Heimkunft denies, for instance, that the inhabitants of the National Socialist fatherland can claim to have come home to the essence of Heimat
(native place): this homecoming is the future of the historical being of the
German people. 31 Not having yet come home to the essence of Heimat,
the Germans cannot truly be said to be at home. They have still to assert
themselves as a people. More precisely, they have to assert themselves as the
people whose essence lies in the deferral of its assertion as a people presentat-hand. Heidegger does not say that the homecoming of the Germans
will take place in the future, but rather that it is the future: the essence of
the Heimat to which the German people is to come is not something that
can ever be present-at-hand. In a 1934 35 lecture course on Hlderlins
poems Germanien and Der Rhein, Heidegger speaks of the ignorance
in which the German people persists with regard to itself as an ignorance
with regard to its time:
We do not know who we are so long as we do not know our time. Our time, however, is that of the people between the peoples. Who knows this time? No one
knows it in the sense that he could point it out and date it. Even those creative

20

Introduction

ones [ jene Schaffenden] who dwell on the peaks of time do not know it. One thing
alone they know, namely, when the time of the event of the true is not. Hlderlin
says this at the beginning of the poem Die Titanen:
It is not however
The time. Still are they
Unbound. The divine does not strike the indifferent.32

In this passage Heidegger implies that the time of the people between the
peoples is the time of the event of the true. Heideggers people cannot
know itself because it cannot know a time that is not there to be known.
Its coming to itself depends on the unforeseeable event of the true, rather
than on Hitlers seizure of power, and it depends on the event of the true
because it is as the event of the true that this people is to know itself.
National Socialism, with its efforts to secure the distinctness of the
people in the ndings of a compliant biology, was unwilling to think the
people in terms of temporality as such. Heideggers 1933 34 lecture course
Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (On the Essence of Truth) already contains a note
of dissent: There is much talk nowadays of blood and soil [Blut und Boden]
as frequently invoked powers. Literati, whom one comes across even today, have already seized hold of them. Blood and soil are certainly powerful and necessary, but they are not a sufcient condition for the Dasein of a
people. 33 In the more sarcastic language of his 1941 42 lecture course on
Hlderlins poem Andenken, Heidegger contends that a people nding
itself in skull measurements and archaeological digs is unable to nd itself
as a people because it confounds that which is ones own (das Eigene) with
something present-at-hand.34 Temporality, as Heidegger repeats again and
again in Being and Time, is that which is ones own and the essence of Dasein. A people, as Dasein, can therefore only come to itself inasmuch as it
does not come to itself, inasmuch as it knows itself as the temporality that
can never be present to itself. With respect to knowing a people in its essential temporality and thus historicality, the peculiar scientism of National Socialism was, for all its taxonomical ingenuity, an evasion. National
Socialism was only able to persuade itself that it grasped the singularity of
the German people by paradoxically rst suppressing even its difference
from the present-at-hand. The ontological mission of raising a question
against the understanding of Being as presence on the basis of an insight
into the unique temporality of human Dasein was not allowed to become
the German mission.

Introduction

21

For Heidegger, the specicity of a people is reserved for the science

of history and not for biology or the historiography that is archaeology. 76
of Being and Time offers the following negative denition of the science of
history: In no science are the universal validity of standards and the claims
to universality which the they and its common sense demand, less possible as criteria of truth than in authentic historiology. 35 The authentic
historiology of Macquarrie and Robinsons translation is to be distinguished from the science of the they. Universality is compatible with the
they, but incompatible with the historicality by which Heidegger denes
a people. And it is incompatible, not because it misses the ner nuances
of historicality, but because it rests on an understanding of temporality that
presupposes historicality and likewise cannot make sense of it. Heidegger
does not recite the nominalist objection to universality, since what he criticizes is less the legitimacy of the subsumption of particulars than the discrete ahistorical now in which the particular appears in its presence and
thereby appears in the repeatability proper to the universal. The specicity
of a people is not a particular in its irrevocable passage to the universal, but
the specicity of ecstatic time in its unrepeatability. A people apprehended
in presence and analyzed into ahistorical properties is not recognizable as
a people, because its denitive historicality has been neglected. This historicality, inasmuch as it always sets itself at odds with universality, is therefore both the reason for the plurality of peoples and the impossibility of the
proof of this plurality by exact numeration: the lone people would be able
to encounter its integrity only in the oneness of presence, only therefore in
that in which a people could never encounter the truth of its historicality.
Overreaching presence and its visibility, historicality individuates without the surety of a recognition for the differences it effects. Historicality
bastardizes without cease, and yet it never results in the homogeneous. Instead, it always already fragments the peoples and prevents their recuperation into new unities. Historicality, which is less a property of a people
than its world itself, is the impracticability of a demarcation of the horizons
of a world. That is to say, world is only able to be world insofar as it is not
whole and does not sever itself from the transcendence that is the historicality of a people. A people can never assert itself as one people among
many because the world that it is can never fully present itself as something
present-at-hand and hence distinct without ceasing to be world.
Heideggers disillusionment with National Socialism was inevitable.
The regimes hubris did not translate into an elevation of the Volk. The

22

Introduction

people that asserted itself under the regime was not the truth of Being as
the historical truth of time. In place of the bastardized specicity of a
people, National Socialism put forward the distinctness of a being presentat-hand. The particularism of the movement was, for all its vociferousness,
at bottom too timid to break with the logic of the type. In its scientistic
formulations of the specicity of the German people, National Socialism
wanted a specicity that nonetheless could be universally apprehended as
such. The people was to be legitimated in its distinctness because it was to
reveal itself incontestably in the clarity of presence, in the abstraction from
its historicality. With the abstraction from historicality, National Socialism
retained the ontological basis of les droits de lhomme: the autonomous,
ahistorical subject of liberalism is cut from the same cloth as the biologistically apprehended specimen of the Aryan race. It is thus hard to see
how Goebbels, with his consistent reliance on biologism, could have proclaimed in the rst months of the regime the eradication from history of
the year 1789. The National Socialist revolution simply reenacted the
French Revolutions disavowal of that which is a peoples own. While the
Jacobin motto La force de la raison et la force du peuple, cest la mme
chose substituted for a people the they of the cosmopolitan voice of the
liberal subject, National Socialism similarly dehistoricizes the people by a
reication and dissection into properties. In both revolutions, history as
such went unthought and the people failed to appear. Heideggers disillusionment with National Socialism cannot, therefore, be interpreted as a
softening of his opposition toward liberalism, since in its universalist misapprehension of the specicity of the Volk, National Socialism had demonstrated the spuriousness of its own anti-liberalism.
Heideggers people appears neither in 1789 nor in 1933. What appears in the two revolutions is too intent upon its own manifestness and
visibility as a people to be mistaken for such. The self-assertion of a people
is an affair of modesty. A people appears in its undecidable and unnamable
specicity as a caesura, as . . . : its appearance is always the invisibility of
the eld itself of the ontic determinations of Dasein. It is the essence of a
people to be absent. Heidegger, who renews the Romantic longing for the
people, implicitly disputes the National Socialist readings of that longing:
the people that is missing in Romanticism does not await its realization under National Socialism.36 Heideggers position should not, however, be interpreted as a nostalgic depoliticization of the Romantics thinking of the

Introduction

23

German people.37 Heidegger defers the emergence of the Volk precisely in

order to think its historicality and thus the political.
The apoliticality of German Romanticism in comparison with the
Jacobins is itself already deceptive. The people that in the French Revolution appropriated for itself the power of legitimation formerly embodied in
the person of the king did not grasp the political as the site of the historizing of a community. In its pretension to stand as arbiter, it grasped itself as
the universal and confused the political with the domain of the subsumption of traditional logic. The powerlessness of the Volk of Romanticism
should not be too quickly explained, which is to say explained away, by the
negative circumstance of Germanys still larval bourgeoisie. Powerlessness
does not merely distinguish the Volk from the people that had come to
power in the French Revolution; it distinguishes it from the very logic of
power in which the essence of the human goes unthought. Ernest Renan,
naming Germany a land without a people, seemingly laments this absence,
whereby the nation was reduced to seeking its legitimacy elsewhere, in the
titles of successor to the Roman Empire and founder of the Carolingian.38
A people as a people, however, can never be a power of legitimation, because it can never gather itself into a recognizable unity able to impose its
will on and against the political realm.
Giorgio Agamben has argued that not even the people of the French
Revolution was able to seize sovereignty for itself. Between le peuple toujours malheureux of the excluded and indigent masses and the people of an
integral body politic, there is no easy transition. National Socialism announced in its very name the discord of the concept of the people in much
of Western politics. Socialism, as a politics of the excluded, was to be conjoined with nationalism as a politics of sovereignty. Under Hitler, the class
divisions of the German Volk were to be abolished, but this new inclusiveness was not so new as to formulate itself without an exclusion, an exclusion carried to the point of extermination. As the fracture in the people
could not be healed by the elimination of the Jews, the mentally ill and the
carriers of hereditary diseases were next in line for destruction. For Agamben, the entire populations of the so-called Third World are today the object of the murderous and futile attempt of the West to end the internecine
struggle that separates the unitary People of the body politic from the inassimilable people of the biological subsistence of exploitable material, of
bare life. 39 The fracture is irremediable, since it is the originary fracture

24

Introduction

by means of which the being-outside-of-oneself of Being-with-others unsettles any pretensions to the self-identity of the human. What is required
is not an extermination of one pole of the concept of the people so that the
other may enjoy its status as a universal, but rather a break with the alignment of politics with the logic of the present-at-hand.
In his 1934 lecture course Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der
Sprache (Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language), Heidegger discusses the polysemy of the word Volk and endeavors to ascertain its inner truth in contradistinction to an inessential manifold. The
truth of the Volk cannot be grasped as a rabble (Pbel ), a racial group, an
electorate, or the body of workers, just as it cannot be grasped by distilling
a general concept from what these various senses have in common. The
Volk is dened by the decision: We are properly ourselves only in the decision. 40 What properly constitutes the people for Heidegger is the undecidability and impropriety of the decision. The people decides and thereby
throws itself into determination, and yet it is only by deciding, by casting
itself into the openness of decision that it can wrest itself from the determinate and confront itself as an exception to the ontology of the presentat-hand. A people that holds itself back from decision holds itself back
from undecidability. In Homo Sacer, Agamben notes the subtlety of the distinction between Heideggers people of the decision and the National Socialist conception of race: where the Nazi movement formulated the Volk
as a set of facts, Heideggers people is dened by its facticity, by the
existential thickness of the world in which facts have their place.41 The
present-at-hand is that which is decided, but it is not the decision itself.
From the decisionism of the NSDAP Heidegger appears, however, to have
expected a mobilization of Dasein for a necessarily political and historical
understanding of its ontic ambiguity.
In his increasing disillusionment with the simple biologism of the regime, the task for Heidegger after 1934 was to lose rather than to nd the
Germans as present-at-hand. And it could be argued that the Romantics
wanted nothing besides. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari propose that the
absence of a people was not the circumstance of Romanticism, but its goal:
What romanticism lacks most is a people. . . . Germany, German romanticism, had a genius for experiencing the natal territory not as deserted but
as solitary, regardless of population density. 42 The people of Romanticism is scattered in its essential powerlessness. This can be noted even in
the approach to publication: it is, in one respect, contrary to the intention

Introduction

25

of the Romantic folksong that it attract, instead of repel, an audience, as

Georg Lichtenberg was still able to perceive.43 The hermetism of Romantic poetry is by no means a denial of the political realm. On the contrary,
it is the peoples all too easy self-discovery in 1789 and 1933 that constitutes
a denial of the political realm, since the . . . of Being, which is the site of
the historizing of Dasein and its anarchy, is buried beneath the onticality
that is the measure of an integral people.
A people must beware of nding itself too easily. The existentiell
modication of authentic Being-with-one-another that has here been
heuristically identied with the Volk nds itself in understanding and not
in its unied appearance as a being present-at-hand. The revolutions of
1789 and 1933 are thus not so much popular uprisings as inscriptions of the
people in traditional logic. In both cases, the people was formulated in
terms of a universal or type: in the French Revolution, it became a power
of legitimation over each individual and in comparison with which, in the
eyes of the Terror, each individual was, as an individual, automatically in
the wrong: the individual must die so that the nominalist thesis of the reality of individuals and nonexistence of universals might be reversed. Under National Socialism, for its part, the universal constituted the common
and distinct identity of the race. Heideggers Volk, which as an existentiell
modication is not a given, stands in need of an uprising, but not of the
kind in which its universalization is substituted for an understanding of
itself. Universalization falls short of the essence of the Volk, since what is
to be understood in and as the Volk is, for Heidegger, the co-historizing of
Being-with-one-another. This co-historizing is the temporality that eludes
the presence of the discrete now of the universal in its repeatability, because it is the more originary temporality of the ecstases of human Dasein.
As Being-in-the-world, Dasein always already converges with Others, and
hence this convergence cannot be set apart from anarchy and made to depend upon the mediation of a universal.
If subject and Volk are set in opposition in Heideggers writings, it is
not an opposition of the individual and the universal, but rather of the
ahistorical and the historical: a people is not the universal of numerable individuals, and authentic Dasein is itself the Volk. Insofar as it is grounded
in an understanding of Being as presence, the mediation of the universal
and the reied notion of the people it supports are of an entirely other order than the struggle and communication associated with Heideggers notions of destiny and the Volk. It is only in the cessation of both struggle and

26

Introduction

communication, in the cessation of its understanding of ecstatic temporality, that Being-with is able to be seduced by its ahistorical image in the mediation of singular and universal. The conformity of a given people to a
universal, and hence its homogeneity, never reaches its essence as Beingwith, and never distinguishes it as a people among other peoples, because
the plurality of peoples is less the extrinsic numerability of unities than the
difference that a people carries within itself as the transcendence of its historicality and its nonuniversality. For the same reason, a people that presses
its sovereignty over the political realm asserts something other than itself.
The sovereignty of a people is at odds with its essential politicality since,
through becoming a power of legitimation in the shape of a universal, it
forgets the nonidentity proper to itself as the transcendence of Being-withone-another in the constitution of the political. But then a people that does
not seize power does not thereby automatically understand itself. It may
simply be delivering power to a class, a clique, or an individual, rather than
understanding itself in terms of that which in historicality is not present to
be controlled. A people cannot nd itself either in power or out of power,
but only in that which is ontologically prior to power.
Formulated in terms of the question of the nature and role of the
people during the Wars of Liberation, this entails that the Napoleonic dictatorship was not so much to be supplanted as philosophically overcome.
Where the opposition of the Romantics to popular sovereignty is often
seemingly involuntary and de facto, Hegels opposition, by contrast, is de
jure, and at rst sight it might thus appear that Heideggers notion of the
people is closer to Hegels than to the Romantics. Hegel repeatedly addresses the contradictory notion of popular sovereignty, but as his analyses
gure in an apologetics of sovereignty, it is solely in its dissemblance of
sovereignty that the people is exhibited and thereafter passed over. In his
lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel condemns the notion of the
people in the French Revolution by judging it according to the universality to which this people had itself laid claim. Criticizing the purely formal
freedom propagated by the French Revolution for furnishing the popular
state with no more substantial a foundation than a temporary enthusiasm,
Hegel describes the people of this freedom as not so much investing the existing governmental structures as abolishing their concrete universality in
favor of an abstract and thus contradictorily one-sided universal.44 And in
his very last text, The English Reform Bill, Hegel disparages the phrase
the sovereign people in the French opposition press for its vacuity.45 The

Introduction

27

people, through its inability to embody the concrete universal by which

Hegel denes both knowledge and the state, consigns itself to the obscurantist margins of his political thinking. The Philosophy of Right is hence
explicitly conceived as an attempt to set forth that which is but dimly and
extrinsically foreshadowed in the universalist populism of the French Revolution: the book of the Prussian state necessarily and excessively becomes
the book of the truth of le peuple. Any question as to whether the truth of
the people might not deliver itself in a renement of the Napoleonic dialectic of the individual of les droits de lhomme and the universal state of
the First Empire is thereby suppressed.
Hegels assessment of the French notion of popular sovereignty is ultimately faithful to his ideal of nonpolemical criticism. However, with the
people of German Romanticism, with the people that never comes to
power, nothing tempers his hostility. Here it is a matter of simple rejection
rather than of elaboration. In its refusal to press a claim to the universal,
the people of German Romanticism sets itself wholly at odds with knowledge. J. F. Fries in the Philosophy of Right and E. T. A. Hoffmann in the Aesthetics are subjected to ridicule without compunction or concession, because the substantiality of ethical life is exchanged in their writings, not
even for the enthusiasm of revolutionary paroles, but rather for immediate
sense-perception, for magnetism and clairvoyance. Without recourse to
the universal, the Volk dissipates. But it is precisely in this dissipation that
it displays its irreducibility and specicity. Hegel, for whom everything is
a hieroglyph of the concrete universal, is incapable of granting that the
essence of a people could be other than Spirit.
Yet confronted with the self-assertion of the French people as the
people of the universal, the German Volk of the Wars of Liberation could
only truly maintain its specicity through its invention as the people of the
unsublatably specic. At the hands of Romanticism, the abstract universals
of the French Revolution were forced into a grotesque trial of strength with
all that was most virulently parochial, antiquated, and petty in German
culture. Romanticism was never far removed from the art of the saboteur.
Into the smooth space of a Europe that revolutionary imperialism rst created before sweeping across it in conquest, the Romantics injected a fatherland inaccessible beneath its garbage. Germany thereby reasserted itself
in its barbaric specicity, in the idiocy by which the classical world named
that which is inviolably and unenviably ones own. Ahead of the invading
armies, the Romantics depopulated the countryside and the people that

28

Introduction

vanished left behind only the intractable and indigestible fragments of

its superstitions. Ludwig Tiecks Mrchen are not dissimilar in purpose to
the burning of Moscow. The Nature of Romanticism is, in this respect, a
scorched earth. It is only in eeing French civilisation that the German
people comes upon Nature, and comes upon it, ttingly stripped back to
Naturerscheinungen (natural phenomena), as the dystopia of logical mediation. The propensity in later German nationalist circles for biologistic
conceptions of the people has its roots in this political appropriation of Nature by the Romantics,46 no matter how little the appropriation was understood in its intended disruption of the reconciliation of the individual
and the universal. The Nature of German Romanticism is not the ground
on which positivism later established the specicity of the people and secured it for universal recognition, but rather the abyss in which the specicity of the Volk is scattered as hallucinations, secrets, magical interventions, and somnambulism. In its inability to come to itself, this people is
the abolition of the Enlightenment, rather than its sublation in Hegels Absolute Spirit. The abstract universal of the autonomous subject does not
give way to the Prussian state. Instead, the political stage is cleared for willo-the-wisps. Under Romanticism, the povli~ is to be rethought from its
very beginnings.
The Volk is missing, and in the 1920s, in conditions at once reminiscent of and innitely removed from the Wars of Liberation, National Socialism went looking for a people. Repudiating the possibility of democracy in the absence of a people, the movement insinuated into the political
discourse of the Weimar Republic the topoi of Romanticism. As the populism of a people to come, National Socialism could deny itself any accommodation with the existing governmental structures and yet, through
the citation of precedents, insist on a fundamental conservatism. In its indifference to matters of public doctrine and in its devotion to genealogy,
the Nazi movement applied itself to the mass detection of forerunners.
Hence, even as it declared the national revolution in 1933 and set about the
provision of schooling in race doctrine (Rassenkunde) for the people that
had come, the new regime still urged its consanguinity with incompatible
previous formulations of the notion of the German Volk. That Heidegger
could have sought admittance to the NSDAP despite his rejection of its biologism is largely inexplicable without this amorphousness of the ofcial
ideology. Although in hindsight the openness with which the regime appeared to address the question of the people was unmistakably its indis-

Introduction

29

criminate responsiveness to the shibboleth of Volk, Heidegger, for the

sake of what he considered to be National Socialisms promise of a revelation of the absence proper to historicality, turned a blind eye to this lack of
discrimination.
But then the continuity of German nationalism was not in general
subjected to criticism. Patriotic texts such as Fichtes Addresses to the German Nation from 1808 could thus be interpreted by zealots of the movement as an anticipation of National Socialist thinking. Max Wundt, Alfred
Baeumler, and various lesser gures in the Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft, all paid homage to Fichte. But what was the similarity, if any, between Fichtes Germans and the racial specimens of the Nazi movement?
In the seventh address, Fichte famously passes over everything positive to
arrive at his denition of the German people:
All who either are themselves alive and creative and productive of new things, or
who, should this not have fallen to their lot, at any rate denitely abandon the
things of naught and stand on the watch for the stream of original life to lay hold
of them somewhere, or who, should they not even be so far advanced as this, at
least have an inkling of freedom and do not hate it or take fright at it, but on the
contrary love itall these are original men; they are, when considered as a people,
an original people, the people simply, Germans.47

There is nothing of the biological in this denition. Whoever loves freedom is German. By 1808, le peuple of the French Revolution, which had
dened itself by its love of freedom rather than by national characteristics,
had shown, through its submission to the Napoleonic dictatorship, the
spuriousness of its love of freedom. In contrast, the Germans, so long as
they combat their oppression, are seen as the people that loves freedom and
are hence the people. And this people, regardless of the speaker, is also always our people because it is the people that stands closest to us in the
philosophically original freedom of humanity. Inasmuch as Fichtes Addresses to the German Nation were already established as canonical texts of
German nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany, later nationalist movements
invariably seem more indebted to their disquisitions than was, in fact, the
case. The genealogical legitimacy of the nationalism of National Socialism
was a moot point on which the clerks of the movement expended a frantic
ingenuity. The people that asserts itself in 1933 does not, and dares not, entirely renounce its Romanticism.
Given the intellectual promiscuity of National Socialism, it is impossible, as is often noted, to set forth National Socialist thinking in any-

30

Introduction

thing like a comprehensive set of theses. The nationalism of the NSDAP

eludes denition and has always already overtaken every critique directed
at it from a nationalistic position. Heideggers engagement and disengagement with National Socialism are complicated by this equivocation. Deviations become indistinguishable from expansions, and conformances take
on the appearance of containments. Admitting, as it were, the interpenetration of his engagement and disengagement, Heidegger published in 1953
the following remarks on the inner truth of National Socialism: The
works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and
greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)have all been written by men shing in the
troubled waters of values and totalities. 48 This passage from An Introduction to Metaphysics is almost as inscrutable as National Socialism itself.
Its year of publication excludes at least one reading, namely, that Heidegger is here paying lip service to the regime. The parenthesis elucidating the
inner truth of National Socialism is more than likely to date from a period subsequent to the 1935 summer semester in which Heidegger delivered
the text in a course of lectures. Absolute certainty on this point is, however,
impossible, because the page in question is missing from the otherwise
intact manuscript in the Heidegger Archive at Marbach. Rainer Marten,
privy to the consultations surrounding the publication of the lectures, has
divulged that the parenthesis was Heideggers concession to the editorial
assistants advising him to delete the inammatory sentence in its entirety.49
When the parenthesis turned out not to forestall controversy, Heidegger
saw t in a letter reproduced in Die Zeit on September 24, 1953, to endorse
an earlier reading by Christian Lewalter. On August 13, Lewalter had argued in Die Zeit that the sentence, allegedly judging the regime against an
inner truth and greatness alien to its explicit pronouncements and practices, amounted to a condemnation of National Socialism. Heideggers
claricatory intervention was too exceptional a gesture, and its circumstances too obviously crucial to the casting of his postwar reputation, for
anything here to be straightforward. Thirteen years later, the interview
with Der Spiegel on September 23, 1966, Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten (Only a God Can Save Us), is perhaps even more tortuous. There
the rectorship becomes a series of compromises with the NSDAP, and any
tie between Heideggers thinking and the regime is pushed into the background: any attempt at an exposition of this tie is taken as little more than

Introduction

31

a foray into persecution. Was Heidegger a Nazi? Was National Socialism

Heideggerian? These questions do not yet really say anything, however,
and it is thus imperative that those passages in which Heidegger is at least
to some degree open about his engagement not be relinquished. In 1953,
Heidegger is still able to defend the inner truth of the movement against
its usurpation in the value philosophy of Bruno Bauch and the totality philosophy of Ernst Krieck. The ambiguity in the doctrine of the NSDAP that
permitted conicting presentations of its unspoken truth likewise rendered
impossible its own exhaustive realization. Heidegger in 1953 stands by the
inner truth of a movement too nebulous to have received its refutation
in World War II.
Understandably unwilling to countenance the provocation of this
delity, Silvio Vietta neglects the inner truth and xes upon the greatness of the movement in his commentary on the text: Nobody who has
read the Contributions to Philosophy will be able to say that the concept of
quantity, of the gigantic and therefore of greatness is being used here in
a positive sense. 50 Viettas dedication to apologetics represses Heideggers
(retrospective) insight into his engagement with National Socialism and
offersand then only implicitly, such is its reverencethe philosophical
vacuity of an error of judgment.
In 1953, after having carried out a protracted, if undeniably covert polemic against National Socialism in his wartime lectures on Nietzsche and
Hlderlin, Heidegger still maintains that the inner truth of the movement differed from what was, for him, its exoteric truth as the acceleration
and intensication of technicism. Here the reality of the movement is being condemned by its promise.
What Heidegger considers the promise of National Socialism is set
forth at greater length in an earlier, likewise notorious passage from An
Introduction to Metaphysics. Expounding the opposition between German
nationalism and technicism and foreseeing a people that will as a people
avert the destruction of Europe, Heidegger writes:
This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own
throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and
America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are
the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization
of the average man. . . .
We are caught in a pincers. Situated in the center, our people incurs the
severest pressure. It is the people with the most neighbours and hence the most en-

32

Introduction

dangered. With all this, it is the most metaphysical of peoples. We are certain of
this denition, but our people will only be able to wrest a destiny from it if within
itself it creates a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this denition, and takes
a creative view of its tradition. All this implies that this people, as a historical
people, must move itself and thereby the history of the West from within the center of their future happening into the primordial realm of the powers of Being.
If the great decision regarding Europe is not to bring annihilation, that decision
must be made in terms of new spiritual energies unfolding historically from out of
the center.51

With its denition of our people as the most metaphysical of peoples,

this passage employs a trope of German cultural nationalism.52 But Heideggers use of this trope involves a particular understanding of metaphysics. Is the most metaphysical people here the most nationalistic? And
is nationalism to be understood as metaphysics? According to this geophilosophical excursus, America and Russia do not differentiate themselves. The specicity that would belong to them as peoples, and constitute
the basis of a nationalism, is annulled in their programmatic standardization of humanity and their immersion in technicism. Owing to their positions on a periphery imsily characterized by its distance from Central Europe, America and Russia are poor in neighbors and thus not endangered.
The people that is richest in neighbors is the most endangered people and
also the most metaphysical. It confronts the danger, not of effacing itself in
the identity of one of its many neighbors, but rather of losing itself in the
anonymity in which its neighbors have already lost themselves. The nationalism to which Heidegger could be read as exhorting the people of the
center is thus less the assertion of a given peoples distinct identity among
the distinct identities of neighboring peoples than the assertion of the
nonuniversality of a people against global anonymity. What is at issue in
this nationalism is not the identication and documentation of unique
properties, but instead that which in a people as such sets it apart from the
uniform organization of reied humanity. Such a nationalism must ask after that which is not present-at-hand. For Heidegger, this is metaphysics (it
is only in subsequent texts that metaphysics is no longer interpreted as the
question of Being, but rather as the obliviousness to Being). The people
of the center remains as yet the Volk because it is metaphysical. The Volk
thinks the difference of Being from that which is present-at-hand and manipulable by technology, and it thinks this difference as the truth of its own
historicality. The Volk is never anything other than spiritual because it is

Introduction

33

never other than thoughtful. In the language of Being and Time, the Volk
is an existentiell modication. However certain Heidegger may be of the
correctness of his denition (Bestimmung) of the Germans, it is, as a vocation (Bestimmung), also a denition whose time has not yet come: the
deniendum has still to bring itself into agreement with the deniens. Only
as the people of metaphysics will the Germans be able to full their mission. Only as the people that is nothing but a folkish science and an understanding of the worldliness of its Being-with-one-another will they be
able to transpose the West from the unchecked disposability and hence
destructibility of beings under technicism into the originary realm of the
powers of Being. The German mission thus reaches beyond the Germans
by not reaching beyond their essence as a people. The scope of the German
mission is not, however, a clandestine universalism. The Germans are to
raise the promised question concerning the essence of Being less on behalf of other peoples than against the standardization by which the various
peoples have fallen away from the possibility of grasping their own essential historicality.
The new spiritual energies of the center are to unfold historically. Unless Heideggers juxtaposition of spiritual and historically is to
be understood as an uncharacteristic subordination of historicality to
spirit, spirit is not here being given a sense in conformity with the
metaphysics of subjectity. Derrida contends in Of Spirit that, with his opposition to the biologism of National Socialism, Heidegger lapses into the
metaphysics of subjectity:
One cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in
its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an
oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectity,
even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong,
it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come,
state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and
do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name
of an axiomaticfor example, that of democracy or human rightswhich, directly or not, comes back to this metaphysics of subjectity.53

Derridas criticism turns upon a direct association of oppositional determination with the metaphysics of subjectity. Heideggers spirit stands in
opposition to biologism, but that is not to say that it is determined by this
opposition as a being present in its distinctness. Spirit is in opposition to
the matter of American and Russian materialism, and yet it is not the

34

Introduction

spirit that comes to itself as the subject in opposition to matter, in a specious opposition to that which is present-at-hand. It does not come to itself because to do so, to be present before matter in its presence would denote precisely a mitigation of its opposition to the ontological foundations
of matter in the understanding of Being as presence. Heideggers spirit
does not stand in an oppositional determination to the biologism of Nazi
Germany or the technological frenzy of Russia and America because it is
dened rather by the transcendence that precedes and ontologically encompasses all of them. The simultaneous opposition and contamination of
spirit is to be explained by reference less to the mistake of a lapse into
the metaphysics of subjectity than to the very nature of transcendence.
Heideggers metaphysical people is anything but the unambiguous concomitant of a biologistically determined race. Its metaphysicality is not a
property that it would possess in the manner of physical attributes such as
levels of pigmentation. Its metaphysicality is not its identiability, but on
the contrary its historicality and hence undecidability under the categories
of recognition of the understanding of Being as presence.
The essence of the Germans is their mission and this mission is to be
the Volk, to be the spirit that to the extent that it does not become universal is in some way to unfold outward from the center to America and Russia. In his study of the utterances of National Socialism, Jean-Pierre Faye
remarks upon the etymological linkage between the Old High German
word diutisk (of the people) and vlkisch (folkish), calling the Germans
the people of tautology. 54 It is a tautology that Heidegger sets to work.
The Germans are, paradoxically, to be the people for the West as a whole,
since they alone are still capable of preserving a distance from the cosmopolitanism of the technologically undifferentiated. They preserve this
distance in the questionability of metaphysics. This questionability, which
is irreducible to the universal of the they, is the element of the historicality of the Volk, of the struggling and the communicating of authentic
Being-with-one-another. Running away from the vitiated, inauthentic
communication of the universal, a people always runs toward a more authentic confrontation in the question of Being. What is thereby communicated and brought to the fore is the transcendence essential to communication and not any content whose reiterability could be mistaken for the
basis of communication. It is accordingly in terms of a dialogue, in which
everything rests on the between of the parties, that Heidegger in 1937
treats the relations between France and Germany. In the essay Wege zur

Introduction

35

Aussprache (Paths to an Open Discussion), included in the volume Alemannenland: Ein Buch von Volkstum und Sendung, edited by Franz Kerber
(Stuttgart, 1937), he warns against a too placid interpretation of communicating: Authentic understanding of one another does not engender the
tranquillity that at once deteriorates into a mutual indifference. On the
contrary, it is in itself the unrest of the reciprocal self-questioning out of
concern for the shared historical tasks. 55 Understanding between peoples
neither levels nor codies their differences. It calls the identities of the peoples into question. Heideggers nationalism is neither pacist nor isolationist, because a people asserts itself in its questionability against the selfevidence of that which is everywhere the same. National Socialism, which
was likewise neither pacist nor isolationist, nonetheless betrayed its own
folkish promise by not rigorously carrying through its assertion of the
people to a global confrontation with technicism.
For Heidegger, the Third Reich was ultimately too little of a pariah
among the neighboring nations of technicism. The regimes failure to differentiate itself is manifest even in the racial policies for which its military
opponents reserved their greatest vilication. The National Socialist concept of race remains subject to technicism because the beings to which it
applies are exhaustively dened by properties and present themselves as
material for manipulation. For the sake of certainty and the transhistorical iterability of its judgments, the Rassenkunde of the regime situated its
eld of study in the present-at-hand. Unable and unwilling to contest the
thinking of modern science in anything but details, the National Socialist
theoreticians of race brought to the question of the essence of a people an
inapposite and paranoiac demand for certainty. The fancied self-evidence
of the notion of certainty was the excuse for the open stiing of the questionability of the essence of a people as something negligently inexact.
From the incontestability of a distinction grounded in facts, antiSemitism, for instance, was to be invested with a semblance of consistency
and realism. That the biologistic efforts of the movement in Rassenkunde
were directed precisely against the questionability of the essence of a people
can be inferred from the writings of Hitler himself. For the space of a moment in Mein Kampf, Hitler appears to acknowledge the irrelevance of
properties when he recalls an episode from his youth in Vienna:
Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my rst thought.
For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man

36

Introduction

furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature after feature, the more my rst question assumed a new form:
Is this a German? 56

It goes without saying that this incident did not become the occasion for a
deepening of the questionability of the question of a people. When National Socialism comes to put the question on a scientic basis, it is simply
in order to avoid it as a question. The identity of the German people is resolved into the properties of something present-at-hand and rendered certain. The question that asks Who are the Germans? is rephrased to read
What are the Germans? Reication is the safeguard of the peoples purity against the contamination characteristic of existentialia. The question What are the Germans? is National Socialisms invitation to kitsch.
Alpine panoramas and Nordic sagas, granite nudes and granite temples,
blonde braids and trench warfare are all swept up to be reinvented as
fetishes of a people that is missing. This evidentiality of the Germans is simultaneously their bad faith, since what is adduced is never a people. National Socialism was thus incapable of disputing the etymology of deutsch
that Nietzsche proposes in Beyond Good and Evil: the tiusche Volk is the
Tusche-Volk, the people of deceit.57 In order not to deceive, in order to
bring forward das Deutsche in absolute clarity, National Socialism courted
recognition. Letting the question of the people lapse and thus maintaining
world in its oblivion, the regime solicited the attentions of its neighbors
through the mendacious positivism of its conception of the Germans. The
self-determination denied at Versailles was not so much made good as exaggerated to the point of parody: National Socialism was kitsch transformed into imperialism. Having staked German identity on positive attributes, the movement was, in one sense, bound from the start to a military
campaign for global domination. Berlin was to become the aggressive distribution hub for folkish paraphernalia and everything bar the symbol
and stereotype would be eradicated as an obstacle to recognition. Germany
would be recognized at whatever cost. As such illusory self-determination
dares ask no more of the recognizing bodies than a mere acknowledgment
of its compliance to clich, Nazi Germany could at the same time not allow itself to be recognized. Its very recognizability was, in the end, an afiction and a sign of weakness to be remedied by the annihilation of the recognizing bodies. The wars of aggression that National Socialism waged
against its neighbors were, in this respect, reactive. Nazi imperialism was

Introduction

37

the hysteric regurgitation of the symbol and the stereotype, its racism its
very acquiescence to the universal.
Already in 1934, Emmanuel Lvinas was in a position to expose the
anti-cosmopolitanism of the new regime as a sham. In his article Reections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, rst published in Esprit, there is the
following exposition and analysis:
Any rational assimilation or mystical communion between spirits that is not based
on a community of blood is suspect. And yet the new type of truth cannot renounce the formal nature of truth and cease to be universal. In vain is truth my
truth in the strongest sense of this possessive pronoun, for it must strive towards
the creation of a new world. . . .
How is universality compatible with racism? The answerto be found in
the logic of what rst inspires racism involves a basic modication of the very
idea of universality. Universality must give way to the idea of expansion.58

A truth that is mine alone is a contradiction. In racism, according to Lvinas, universality is modied rather than renounced, since it cannot be renounced without likewise renouncing any claim to truth. The military operations of Hitlerian Germany can accordingly be viewed as a half measure,
as testimony to the apprehensiveness with which National Socialism set
about breaking with the universal. Even before it declared war, the regime
was in the wrong, and it was the sentence passed on its chauvinism by the
universal that it sought to reverse by global conquest. Lvinas, who, in the
above quotation, sees the parallel between the universality of an idea and
the universalism of imperialist expansion, does not however hesitate in his
subsequent anti-Romantic exoneration of the idea, for the expansion of a
force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation
of an idea. 59 Contrary to his earlier analysis, National Socialism is thus to
be understood as the unqualied alternative to the universality of the idea
it nevertheless apes. The possibility of a genuine confrontation with the
universal thereby remains unexamined.
Lvinas does not go beyond a morphology of the universal. What he
musters against racist imperialism is the spreading of an idea: the conscience-salving myth of the cultural benevolence of French colonialism receives a new lease on life through the comparison with Hitlers territorial
ambitions. Having no idea to propagate, and thus having nothing to offer
the subject peoples in an exchange, Hitler is able to aspire to nothing
more than a universality maintained by an external and inscrutable force.

38

Introduction

Since for Lvinas the desirability of universality is never doubted, the deliberate act of offering that which cannot be accepted and rendered universal is nonsensical. By this account, the peoples detritus by means of
which the German Romantics sought to resist the conquering French liberalism was, in its irreconcilability with the universal, simply detritus. In
this text, Lvinas displays a Hegelian disregard for the essential meagerness
of a people. Isolating racism with regard to its simulation of the universality of the idea, he does not ask whether the question of the people is not
similarly counterfeited in racisms community of blood. Yet, as Lvinas
himself suggests, the logic of what rst inspires racism is not the question
of a people but expansionism. Not the singularity of a people, but rather
an allegedly universal quantitative matter (strength), which in its unequal distribution determines the inferiority and superiority of respective
peoples, is the ultimate foundation of racism.60 Racism is already too removed from race, in the direction of the universal by which the necessarily inessential superiority of a people is judged, for its anti-cosmopolitanism to be substantial. Although it does not propagate an idea in Lvinass
sense of a cultural artifact, it does attempt to compel recognition of its own
claim to instantiate the idea of the power of blood. The ferocity and clamor
with which National Socialism pursued its ethnic policies should not consequently be misunderstood. Having come to signify the ne plus ultra of
racism, the regime nonetheless did not surpass the Romantics in their dedication to the question of the people. The incompatibility of the question
of the people with universality was not acknowledged.
To draw a distinction between racism and the question concerning
the essence of a people does not of course establish the innocence of Heideggers engagement with National Socialism. This engagement is overdetermined. Confronted with its ambiguity, and indignant at a perceived
neglect of the people in Being and Time, Ernst Krieck interprets Heideggers rectorial address as a cynical adaptation to the year 1933.61 Similarly
distancing Heidegger all too quickly from the regime, Jean Beaufret embarked after the war on an almost militant program of exculpation.62 But
that Heidegger would have applied for membership in the NSDAP, with a
view to furthering his career, only once the party was in power seems implausible given his subsequent refusal of more prestigious chairs at the Universities of Berlin and Munich. The explanation of his refusal, Why Do
We Stay in the Provinces? has strikingly less to do with ambition than with
an inventory of the commonplaces of rustic literature. And that Heideg-

Introduction

39

gers involvement with the regime was but a momentary lapse in judgment,
a blind spot inassimilable to his character and work, is a decreasingly tenable interpretation: a 1929 letter by Heidegger, published in Die Zeit by Ulrich Sieg,63 expresses an anti-Semitism that the inordinate controls on the
Marbach archive must be suspected of wishing to conceal. For Heidegger,
more was at stake in 1933 than the question concerning the essence of the
people. If this question can illuminate his political engagement, it nonetheless cannot fully account for it, just as it cannot be conated with every aspect of the Hitlerian regime: contiguity is other than identity.
The absence of this reservation leads Jrgen Habermass presentations of Heideggers thinking into the realm of caricature. In his defense
of the universal, Habermas exploits the overdetermination of Heideggers
engagement with National Socialism. Once the question concerning the
essence of a people has been associated with anti-Semitism, or with any of
the enormities of the regime, the task of a meticulous refutation of Heideggers critique of universality readily appears superuous. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas is keen to suggest a connection
between totalitarianism and Heideggers abandonment of Edmund Husserls denition of truth in favor of the rootedness that he attributes in 1933
to a folkish science. Habermass argument for the philosophical restoration of global intersubjectivity proceeds by innuendo. Referring to the critique of reason that Heidegger grounds in the history of Being, he writes:
It reserves the title of truth for the so-called truth occurrence, which no
longer has anything to do with a validity-claim transcending space and
time. The truths (emerging in the plural) of this temporalized Ursprungsphilosophie are in each case provincial and yet total; they are more like the
commanding expressions of some sacral force tted out with the aura of
truth. 64 Habermas sets forth the truths of the Heideggerian Ursprungsphilosophie (philosophy of origins) as simulacra possessing no more than the
aura of truth. The sacral force of these provincial, yet total, truths is a
mere substitute for the truth dened for Habermas by its transcendence
of space and time. With its mere aura of truth, the Heideggerian truth
occurrence (Wahrheitsgeschehen) becomes a travesty of the universal. To the
extent that it no longer has anything to do with a validity-claim transcending space and time, the truth occurrence has to content itself, according to
Habermas, with issuing decrees. Heideggers destruction of the correspondence theory of truth is made to arrive at the commanding expressions of
ideology, rather than the clearing of beings. If Heideggers so-called truth

40

Introduction

occurrence no longer has anything to do with a validity-claim that absolves

itself from a given space and time, it is not because it is satised with the
narrower scope of a decree. Heidegger pushes the thought of transcendence further than Habermas. For the latter, the transcendence of validityclaims is their ahistorical and atopic presence: it is transcendence as a
merely extrinsic relation to that from which the validity-claims are abstracted and not transcendence as the being-outside-of-itself of the Heideggerian understanding of truth. That by which Heideggers understanding of truth exceeds presence is, for Habermas, its deciency, its dissipation
in the dubiousness of an aura. It is as though, having been bundled under
the rubric of National Socialism, whatever in Heideggers thinking challenges the universal could ipso facto be dismissed. To put it at its bluntest:
Auschwitz again becomes a means of silencing minorities, since the argument that, with an air of probity, expends itself on the nationalism of
genocide slyly takes in every conguration of the social eld that would
contest its identication in Habermass neo-metaphysics. The question
concerning the historical essence of a people is the question of the validity
of the validity-claims that transcend space and timeas such it is suspect
for Habermas. What Habermas misses in Heideggers engagement is that
which is essentially missing: he believes he sees the Volk when all he sees
is Vlkermord.
In Nazi Germany, the people is not that which makes itself visible
everywhere. On this point, Habermas is too credulous. Falling behind
the Romantics, National Socialism also fell behind its own victims with
respect to the modesty of the essence of a people. If this modesty was the
inner truth of the movement, and hence the proof of its outer falsehood,
the folkish politics by which it had characterized itself could not but have
become an unbearable affront in the shape of the minorities existing under its dictatorship. Incapable of carrying through the rupture with the
transnational, the regime visited genocide on the minorities from within
whose powerlessness the question concerning the essence of a people still
sounded. In the end, the bruited Umbruch of 1933, the so-called radical
change that in Heideggers view had portended for the Germans the chance
of a folkish science, was itself the obstruction standing between them
and their vocation as the metaphysical people. Having asserted itself,
only to be diverted at once through technicism and imperialism from its
essence in the question of Being, the Volk had become nothing but its own
impossibility. Giving itself up entirely to its visibility, it surrendered the

Introduction

41

modesty in which it could have asked after the non-presence of Being. It

had asserted itself as the Volk without becoming the understanding of temporality that for Heidegger denes the Volk. It is his attention to this contradiction that excuses the conspicuous alarmism with which Heidegger,
in the years of Hitlers dictatorship, surveys the obliviousness to Being,
since obliviousness to Being, discussed with Spinozistic equanimity in
1927, is an essential possibility of Dasein, whereas it is the impossibility of
the existentiell modication that is the Volk. When Heidegger speaks of a
folkish science in 1933, he speaks of a science that knows itself, rather
than of a science that stands over against the people that it takes for its object. Not every science is folkish, because not every science knows its own
rootedness. It is the knowledge of this rootedness rather than its mere actuality that constitutes for Heidegger the folkishness of a science and the
consummation of knowledge. The Volk knows itself as the Volk, and that is
to say it knows itself in its world in its difference from beings present-athand. A folkish movement that, notwithstanding its folkishness, exacerbated the obliviousness to Being could accordingly have been viewed by
Heidegger only with incredulity and dismay.
And yet, at least to begin with, this was not the case. The people that
was suddenly present everywhere was to be the occasion of the questioning
concerning the essence of Being. Heideggers engagement with National
Socialism is clearly inextricable from his ontology. This thesis, which is familiar from innumerable polemics, remains supercial so long as it is not
elaborated in an exposition of the philosophical course of this engagement.
For Heidegger, in 1933, ontology was the affair of that which, in the jargon
of National Socialism, was denominated vlkische Wissenschaft. This instance of linguistic submissiveness appears scarcely resuscitable. By using
the loaded word vlkisch and not volklich, volkhaft, or for that matter populr, Heidegger marries his notion of a peoples science to the infamy preordained for National Socialism in its entirety. But, it must be asked, to
what extent was Heidegger simply adopting a notion already articulated by
various claimants to the position of party ideologue? When Heidegger in
the late 1930s and early 1940s explicitly criticizes the idea of a vlkische Wissenschaft, it is without abandoning the conjunction of a people and understanding that he endeavored in 1933 to think within the jargon of National
Socialism: vlkische Wissenschaft is criticized as a science not of the people
but of the subject masquerading as a people. For an intimation of what was
at stake for Heidegger in 1933, of what was to be won and of what was lost,

42

Introduction

the conjunction of a people and the understanding of Being has to be examined in its equivocal relations to National Socialism. The Umbruch of
the National Socialist revolution, inasmuch as it interpreted itself as the
overthrow and elimination of Western liberalism at the hands of a folkish uprising, appeared to repeat on a larger scale the partisan response
of the Romantics to the Napoleonic abstract universal. With the attempt
to grasp the world of the Volk, the prevailing understanding of beings as
present-at-hand was no longer to be merely contested but overcome in the
questioning with regard to the unthought essence of Being. For this task,
the Volk of National Socialism proved however to be too Cartesian.
The many scattered anti-Cartesian objections that Heidegger raises
to the ideas of Volk and vlkische Wissenschaft after his rectorship are not
alien to his early thought in their argumentation. It cannot, therefore, be
assumed that through these objections Heidegger disowns that which he
himself had understood in 1933 by the term vlkische Wissenschaft.65 The
objections can be plausibly read as clarications, and even defenses, of the
latter notion.
For example, in the Contributions to Philosophy of 1936 38, Heidegger denounces the expediency that renders a folkish science essentially
cosmopolitan:
Only a thoroughly modern (i.e., liberal) science can be a folkish science [eine
vlkische Wissenschaft ]. Only on the basis of prioritizing procedure over the subject-matter and the accuracy of judgment over the truth of beings does modern
science permit an adjustable shifting to various purposes, depending on need (implementation of extreme materialism and technicism by Bolshevism; introduction of four-year plans; usefulness for political education). In all of this, science is
everywhere the same and becomes, precisely with these various goal-settings, basically and increasingly more uniform, that is, more international. 66

By placing a folkish science in quotation marks, Heidegger indicates that

the term is not to be taken at face value. In disregard of the National Socialist antithesis of liberal and folkish, a folkish science is here said to
be, at bottom, a liberal science. Expediency for the Volk (expressed in the
slogan Wahr ist, was dem Volke ntztTrue is that which serves the
people) is only possible on the provision that the Volk has assumed the cast
of the Cartesian subject and thus stands in an ontic opposition to that
which is to be manipulated and exploited. By prioritizing mathematical
procedure over the matter of thought and certainty over the ecstatic truth
of beings, Descartes attened the phenomenon of world to what could be

Introduction

43

wielded in the service of the needs of the moment. The politicization of

science under National Socialism only made science still more liberal, because its subordination to the good of the biologistically determined Volk
necessitated the hardening of the subjective, de-worlded, and hence cosmopolitan, starting point of modern science. In spite of its polemics
against liberalism, National Socialism retained the place of the individual
in science and saw to it that it was occupied by the people. The modern
identity of expediency and science, which had come under threat in the demythologization of the subject, was to be shored up by sheer weight of
numbers. Through its notion of the people, National Socialism unwittingly revealed itself to be liberalisms response to its critics.67
When, in is 1942 43 lecture course Parmenides, Heidegger dismisses
the antithesis of Volk and individual, he thereby repeats a gesture from
Being and Time but in order to deliver the Volk up at once to liberalism:
The concepts of people [die Volkheit] and folk [das Vlkische] are founded on
the essence of subjectivity and Ego. Only when metaphysics, i.e., the truth of beings as a whole, has been founded on subjectivity and the Ego do the concepts
of nation and people obtain that metaphysical foundation from which they
might possibly have historical relevance. Without Descartes, i.e., without the
metaphysical foundation of subjectivity, Herder, i.e., the foundation of the concept of a people [die Grndung der Volkheit der Vlker], cannot be thought.
Whether one can retrospectively establish historiographical relations between
these two is a matter of indifference, since historiographical relations are always
only the faade, and for the most part the concealing faade, of historical nexuses.
As long as we know with insufcient clarity the proper essence of subjectivity as
the modern form of selfhood, we are prey to the error of thinking that the elimination of individualism and of the domination of the individual is ipso facto an
overcoming of subjectivity.68

In this passage, the Volk is seen to rest on the subject rather than to stand
in opposition to the metaphysics of the obliviousness to Being (Seinsvergessenheit). Is Heidegger therefore criticizing his earlier denition of Volk ?
It seems unlikely, given that in Being and Time, the individualism satirized in the chapter on the they does not make room for a Volk still determined by the self-identity of the modern subject. The Volk that apprehends itself in its certainty as a self is much more the Volk of National
Socialism with its conviction of its oneness and distinctness. Without a
comprehension of the essence of subjectivity, the transition from the subject to the Volk, a transition that Heidegger defends in Being and Time and
that he believes he later greets in the National Socialist revolution, runs the

44

Introduction

risk of being frustrated in a reconguration of the subject. The subjectivity of the subject, and of a people, is the inability to suspect self-certainty
and to question the givenness of beings, that is, both the givenness of the
people-subject and that of the beings always already understood to be
manipulable.
To repeat: what Heidegger holds against National Socialism is its liberalism. The exceptional character of this objectionand certainly it cannot be argued that liberalism and National Socialism are one and the same
on all countshas frequently entailed its summary dismissal.69 In Theodor Adornos view, for instance, Heidegger never ceased to be a Nazi. And,
indeed, on the basis of Heideggers comments concerning the inner truth
and greatness of this movement, it could be claimed that, in the context
of his postwar reticence about the regime, his sole reproach against National Socialism was that it did not live up to expectations. For Heidegger, the NSDAP had turned out to be nothing but Cartesianism for the
masses. The movement was too Herderian, which is to say, too Cartesian,
to think the notion of the Volk through to the other ontology that would
have been the fulllment of its folkish promise. While F. M. Barnard
disputes any connection between Herder and National Socialism on the
grounds of the formers liberalism,70 it is in liberalism that the Heidegger
of the Contributions to Philosophy discerns the basis for the subordination
of science to the good of the Volk. Evading an interrogation of the subjectivity of the subject, National Socialism remained dependent on Herders own derivative formulation of the Volkheit der Vlker and can thus be
said to have been a monstrous relic of the Enlightenment. The movement
did not spring from the sleep of reason but rather from the rationalism that
would allow nothing to remain outside its light. At the expense of an understanding of world, it endeavored to capture the essence of a people in
the clarity of presence and thereby in the ontology of the present-at-hand.
Certainly a biologistic conception of humanity cannot be discovered in
Herder, yet with his thesis of the individuality of peoples, he advances the
notion of their unitarity and equality, and hence ultimately, albeit perversely, their commensurability. Each realizes humanity in a different and
legitimate way. Herders cosmopolitanism is always at risk of seeing beyond
differences. The equality of peoples that he proposes in his essay Von hnlichkeit der mittleren englischen und deutschen Dichtkunst (On the
Similarity of Middle English and German Poetry) as a principle for historiography is more than simply contemporaneous with the equality of in-

Introduction

45

dividuals found in the French Revolution. What the latter constitutes on

the national level, Herders principle constitutes on the global. Herders
open-mindedness toward other peoples, regardless of how incompatible
it is in many respects with National Socialism, is likewise a repression of
what is specic to a people and thus of a people itself. For the sake of commensurability, Herder turns aside from the historicality of a people, and
thereby from the inappropriateness of the universal to this historicality.
The essence of a people is, for Herder, its humanity. This is evident
in his conception of language. In the prize essay Ueber den Ursprung der
Sprache (On the Origin of Language), Herder impoverishes the phenomenon of language to an unadduced common grammar in order to emphasize its planetary unity. The animal rationale is the planetary, and yet
worldless, animal: it enunciates its distinctness from all the endemic species through language, which is declared to be only supercially differentiated by climate, terrain, diet, and so forth. Herder thus acknowledges the
differences between peoples merely so as to stage their disappearance in the
ideal of humanity. Language becomes the universal under which the various peoples are subsumed. A people thereby ceases to speak as a people in
its nitude and worldliness, because it always speaks away from itself and
its historicality to the ahistorical generality of its humanity. In rising above
its world to its humanity, a people acquires an essence that is its transhistorical recognizability and, with this reformulation in eternity, it forfeits the chance to challenge the understanding of Being as presence and
thereby to think its own Being. In contrast to Herders language of humanity, Heidegger emphasizes a language of the world of a people. In his
1934 lecture course Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, Heidegger writes: Language is the sway of the world-shaping and preserving
center of the historical Dasein of the people. 71 A people speaks as a people
by speaking within its world, and it is by this inhumanity that it musters
the greatest opposition to the liberalism of the Nazi doctrine of race.
Nazism is a humanism. 72 This sentence of Philippe LacoueLabarthes faithfully condenses Heideggers account of the movements degeneration and disaster. For Heidegger, the master race of National Socialism (the subject that has become the measure of all things) was defeated
by its own liberalism long before this defeat was revived as farce and referred to the overwhelming military, economic, and technical superiority
of its opponents. The expansionism that was the occasion of this secondary defeat was the regimes grotesque reprise of the ideal of humanity and

46

Introduction

the commensurability of peoples. The master race became the planetary

animal, and its confrontation with other peoples had less to do with the
self-questioning of authentic understanding of one another than with the
self-conrmation of its positivity. German imperialism had always deliberately set itself apart from the specious altruism of the bearers of civilisation. But the egotism that Wilhelmine Germany expressed in its colonialist watchword A place in the sun, and to whose exclusive satisfaction the
Third Reich consigned the conquered territories, did not distance the German people from the ideal of humanity in any fundamental sense: the
people, impossible to ignore in the saturnalia of its gluttony and terror, is
not the Volk in Heideggers formulation, but rather the aggrandized subject
of liberalism. The catastrophe of National Socialism, as it is interpreted in
Heideggers writings from the later years of the regime, was this stillbirth
of the people of the question of Being. A peoples self-assertion can never
be comparable with the self-assertion of the worldlessness of egotism.
If Heideggers objection to National Socialism is that it was too liberal, then it may seem that he positions himself thereby to the right of the
far Right. The persuasiveness of such an appearance has led to a neglect of
the similarities between Heideggers notion of the Volk and, for instance,
Deleuze and Guattaris notion of le peuple venir and thus to the misapprehension that Heideggers Volk is of no importance for anything other
than a reactionary politics. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari themselves overlook the similarities. In Quest-ce que la philosophie? (a book whose title inevitably recalls the lecture Was ist das, die Philosophie? that Heidegger
delivered to a colloquium in Cerisy-la-Salle at which Deleuze was a participant in August 1955),73 Deleuze and Guattari reject Heideggers Volk in favor of minorities: He got the wrong people, earth, and blood. For the race
summoned forth by art or philosophy is not one that claims to be pure but
rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably
minor race. 74 It must be asked whether Deleuze and Guattari, given their
thesis in Anti-Oedipus concerning the fascism of the exclusive disjunction,
can allow their notion of a bastard race to stand forth as clearly as this from
Heideggers people. Admitting that it is not always easy to be Heideggerian, 75 Deleuze and Guattari appear, however, to acknowledge the defensive character of their distinction. Heideggers people, which in the lectures
on Hlderlin is summoned forth by poetry, and which, in Being and Time,
is dened less by purity than by the impurity of its transcendence in cohistorizing, is too unsettling a precursor. And it is unsettling because, in its

Introduction

47

impurity, it could not keep itself clear even of the people of the most fanatical purity of blood. The transcendence of Heideggers Volk did not
come to a halt before the NSDAP. Rather than confronting the new regime
with a simple negation, Heidegger set about effecting a contamination between its notion of the people and his own. In terms of an immediate
resistance to National Socialism, this was to do nothing, and whatever persecution Heidegger claims he suffered after resigning the rectorship is unmentionably trivial in comparison with the measures that the regime was
all too willing to take against millions of others.
Heidegger got it wrong, although Deleuze and Guattari concede that
it is ultimately not a matter of getting it right or wrong: Heidegger lost his
way along the paths of the reterritorialization because they are paths without directive signs or barriers. 76 Given the arguments against a biologistic
conception of humanity that can be drawn from Heideggers own writings,
his engagement is to be understood less in terms of a subscription to the
model of National Socialism than as a blind spot in the interpretability
of his corpus. Heideggers greatest failure as a thinker was also his selfconfessed greatest stupidity of his life. 77 With this failure, Heideggers
thought attains, as well as falls prey to, the radical questionability that
would otherwise have been denied it.
Wanting to explain Heideggers engagement, rather than to excuse it,
Deleuze and Guattari comment:
How could Heideggers concepts not be intrinsically sullied by an abject reterritorialization? Unless all concepts include this gray zone and indiscernibility where
for a moment the combatants on the ground are confused, and the thinkers tired
eye mistakes one thing for the othernot only the German for a Greek but the
fascist for a creator of existence and freedom.78

For Deleuze and Guattari, the stain of Heideggers thinking is not so much
unique as exemplary of the tiredness to which the thinker succumbs. But
what is really explained by this physiological metaphor? Is an inevitability
being attributed to Heideggers engagement with the implicit reference to
the inevitability of tiredness? And how does the tiredness that confuses the
German and the Greek, the fascist and the creator of existence, differ from
the joyful becoming that, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the transitive indeterminacy between polar identities? Interpreting Heideggers engagement
with reference to the inevitability of tiredness, Deleuze and Guattari excuse
more than they explain and, by excusing, forgo an attempt to explain Heideggers unsettling consanguinity. Heideggers people in 1933 is a minority

48

Introduction

in Deleuze and Guattaris sense, because it does not come to itself. It is a

minority because it can nd itself in the presence of neither a people of a
nationalistic self-assertion nor a people that nds itself precisely in not
nding itself as a political majority. It is torn between a political and cultural nationalism. To clarify a nonpositivistic notion of the people, in explicit contradistinction to the biologistic Rassenkunde of the regime, can illuminate Heideggers own notion of the people in 1933 only to the extent
that it establishes the terms of its confusion, which is to say, the terms of its
transcendence. Within this confusion, the minority of the Germans, both
political and cultural, is prolonged. In the minority by which it overreaches
the present-at-hand, the Volk touches uncannily on the Un-thought of
metaphysics: Being is minoritarian.
Was Heideggers political engagement less an engagement with the
self-assertion of the German people in 1933 than with the self-defeating
stupidity of this self-assertion? How, if at all, can the two be distinguished?
Deleuze and Guattari consider the possibility that Heideggers abdication
before Hitler was still a philosophical move: A great philosopher actually
had to be reterritorialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to
meet up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question and sometimes
absolving it through such complicated and convoluted arguments that we
are still in the dark. 79 Heidegger was reterritorialized on Nazism in the
name, as it were, of the ambiguity and impurity of the people. That
Deleuze and Guattari speak of Jews, gypsies, and blacks in their treatments
of the notion of a people, whereas Heidegger speaks of the Germans, ought
not to conceal that it is the status of an ontological exception that comparably inspires these treatments. The people is missing, whether it is in the
works of Kafka and the Brazilian lmmaker Glauber Rocha or in the Germany of Heideggers National Socialism. In his reections on minoritarian
cinema, Deleuze writes: The people exist only in the condition of minority, which is why they are missing. 80 For Deleuze and Guattari, a people
is always a minority because it denes itself by its inability to seize control
of the state apparatus. It is too volatile to rally itself for the subjectity of the
state, or even that of the republic of letters. This ontological volatility
and undecidability is not the defect of a minority, but its essence, since
a minority only acquires an identity through the frustrations, failures,
and deviations of its ight from the majority, either by submitting to an
alien characterology or fabricating its own in servility to extant models. A

Introduction

49

people, in Deleuze and Guattaris sense, as in Heideggers, is a rupture of

the identiable.
Heideggers error, and its vertiginous ambivalence, was that he
sought to effect the rupture at issue here by means of the state. Drawing
their denitions of the state and the people from archaeological and ethnological descriptions of the despotic formations of Asia and the nomadic
tribes intermittently breaking away from them, Deleuze and Guattari shield
themselves from a repetition of Heideggers engagement. For Deleuze and
Guattari, the state is fundamentally capture and a people is fundamentally rupture. In 1934, when any poorly specied opposition to the Asiatic could have been understood as an invitation to racism, Heidegger
writes of the common enemy and task of the people and the European
state: A state is only inasmuch as it becomes, as it turns into the historical
Being of that being which is called a people. The true historical freedom of
the peoples of Europe is after all the precondition for the Wests coming
once more to itself spiritually-historically and for its taking possession of its
fate in the great decision of the earth against the Asiatic. 81 What is the Asiatic here that it composes a party in the decision of the earth? An answer
that fails completely to make sense of the above quotation, but rather
shows up its absurdity, is given twenty-ve years later in Heideggers critique, in Hlderlins Earth and Heaven, of Valrys assessment of the future of Europe:
Immediately after the First World War (1919), Paul Valry published a letter under
the title, The Crisis of the Spirit. In it he poses two questions:
This Europe, will it become what it is in reality (en ralit ), that is, a small
cape of the asiatic continent? Or will this Europe, rather, remain as what it appears
to be (ce quelle parat), that is, the precious part of the whole earth, the pearl of the
globe, the brain of a spacious body?
Perhaps Europe has already become what it is: a mere cape, yet as such, also
the brain of the entire terrestrial body, the brain that manages the technologicalindustrial, planetary-interstellar calculation.82

Valry distinguishes from Asia a Europe that has assumed the ofce of
planetary brain, whereas, for Heidegger in 1959, it is the assumption of this
very ofce that recovers Europe for Asia. If Europes position of global
dominance belittles it by turning it into an appendage of the Asian continent, it is because an equation of the Asiatic and the hegemonic is implied
in Heideggers text. However problematic this equation may be, it cannot

50

Introduction

be denied its long-standing mythic function in identifying the philosophical and political space known as Europe. Coming to itself in Greece, in
its twofold break with Eastern dogmatism and despotism, Europe has, by
denition, always already succumbed to the temptation to absolutize its
difference from Asia. Querying the absoluteness of this difference in 1959,
Heidegger effectively queries whether the Vlkerwanderung was anything
more than an Asian colonial expedition. But, in 1934, it is a matter of securing the absoluteness of the difference. Allegedly at the service of this difference, the state is to become the historical Being of a people. Yet the state
that relinquishes its dominion over a people in order to become this people
itself does not abjure the principle of the Asiatic, since the struggle against
the Asiatic is, in the despotism and dogmatism of its exclusive disjunction, a struggle within the Asiatic for the determination of the entities of
its control. Having to think its ownness other than by the identiable and
controllable, Europe must reassess its critical stand on the pairing of authenticity and idiocy. Europe, if it is to be Europe, cannot risk becoming
more than a phantasm, more than a site of undecidability beyond an unspeciable river or mountain range. Europe as Europe cannot be defended.
But is the absurdity in which the 1959 text reveals the text of 1934 not one
of those absolutions that Deleuze and Guattari believe traverse Heideggers
political engagement? Is it in the very absurdity of the struggle against the
Asiatic to which Heidegger rallies the peoples of Europe that Europe as
such unfolds its absolute difference from despotism? Everything becomes
gray in the abyss of stupidity.
Heideggers hymns to the National Socialist state are too crass in
comparison with his thinking as a whole for these texts not to arouse the
suspicion that here the state is the object of a somber, ignominious humor.
In a speech delivered in August 1934, and thus after his resignation of the
rectorship of Freiburg University, Heidegger appears to forget his authorship of Being and Time:
The essence of the National Socialist revolution consists in the fact that Adolf
Hitler has elevated that new spirit of the community to being the formative power
of a new conguration of the people. The National Socialist revolution is thus not
the supercial appropriation of the power of a state already in place by a party
grown equal to the task but rather the inner reeducation of the entire people toward the goal of wanting its own unity and oneness. Inasmuch as the people wills
its own vocation, it recognizes the new state. The rule of this state is the responsible implementation of that commanding will to which the dedicated trust of the

Introduction

51

people empowers the leadership. The state is not a mechanical apparatus of law
alongside the institutions of the economy, art, science, and religion. On the contrary, the state signies the living conguration pervaded by alternate trust and
responsibility in which and through which the people realizes its own historical
Dasein.83

Can a people, as authentic Being-with-one-another, want, without contradiction, its own unity and oneness? What could be the ontological basis for
the unity and oneness of a people? Heideggers address makes no pretensions to an existential analytic: the people simply wills its own oneness.
Recognition of the state follows upon this manipulated caprice of the
people, and the metaphysics of subjectity in the cast of the peoples oneness
is perpetuated. Those relations between a people and its sovereign that
Hobbes sees as a response to the violence of the state of nature are here,
for Heidegger, the consequence of a bluntly posited education and will.
Indeed, Heideggers address reads like a pastiche of Hobbes. The people
whose unity Hobbes in Leviathan sees represented in the corporeal singleness of its sovereign,84 and whose acceptance of a sovereign denes it in De
Cive in distinction from a multitude,85 is shadowed by a people for whom
the realities of the English Civil War have been replaced by the tabula rasa
of nihilistic voluntarism. Having dispensed with the externality of circumstances, and thus with the measure that they constitute in Hobbes, Heidegger, in 1933, is able to say of Hitler: The Fhrer himself and alone is
the present and future German reality and its law. 86 This proposition with
its unqualied abasement before despotism, like the critique of Valry in
1959, declares the complete bankruptcy of the myth of Europe. Heideggers
obeisance to Hitler marks the death of philosophy because it reverses the
substitution of another ground than that of authority by which Hegel, for
one, and with explicit awareness of the conventionality of the denition,
denes philosophy in his lectures on its history.87 This reversal is the death
of Europe. The death of philosophy of that which in his What Is Philosophy? Heidegger says it is a tautology to call Western 88is nonetheless
what the necessarily phantasmic character of philosophy presupposes. The
Europe that dies in 1933 is the Europe that, in the substantiality of its absolute difference from Asia, never existed as other than an Asian peninsula.
Foundational to the identity of that which has escaped the despotic, the
myth of Europe would only itself be European if it abstained from the capture and determination proper to the Asiatic. The struggle against the
Asiatic thus entails a struggle against the myth of Europe, and where

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Introduction

Heidegger rallies the European states against the Asiatic, and at the same
time preaches unquestioning submission to Hitler, it is the myth of Europe
that yields. Heidegger, accordingly, makes of the state a means to rupture
the Asiatic identity of Europe.
What must, but cannot, be rescued in Heideggers abasement before
Hitler is this rupture. The intoxicated and unreserved acquiescence to dictatorship is inseparable from the suspicion of the contradictory reterritorialization of European identity and yet cannot be vindicated by it. And that
it cannot be vindicated by it is because this acquiescence raises the question
as such, as the proper-improper site of Europes difference from dogmatism, rst of all against itself. Heideggers people is, and is not, the people
of National Socialism. It is the people of National Socialism because it is
the people that National Socialism courted through its promise to break
with the despotism of the cosmopolitan and the universal. And it is not the
people of National Socialism because the NSDAP reneged on this promise. The distance of Heideggers Volk from the movement as well as its insuperable proximity to it lies in its ideality for the movement. The people
that National Socialism courted as the self-assertion of the European essence is, in its truth as the question as such, the critical destruction of the
Hitlerian dictatorship. This people always escapes despotism because as the
phenomenon of world, it is never simply a determinate being for manipulation and control. Heideggers acquiescence to National Socialism was
thus an acquiescence to a despotism grounding itself in the people of its
own ultimate impossibility. The ambivalence of Heideggers engagement is
the ambivalence of National Socialism itself. What for Heidegger, in 1953,
has not ceased to constitute the inner truth and greatness of the movement
is the latters own impossibility, since it is the same impossibility by which
the manipulation of beings in technicism is confronted with its limitations
and brought to a recollection of Being.
If not National Socialism, so much as its impossibility, is what is
equal to the encounter with tevcnh, then Heideggers following remark
from the interview with Der Spiegel is not a retraction of his claricatory parenthesis in An Introduction to Metaphysics: A decisive question for
me today is: how can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system would this be? I have no answer to
this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy. 89 Democracy here
is not being denied as an option alongside other political systemsas
though in the past Heidegger had been convinced of the adequacy to the

Introduction

53

technical age of a given political system. Arguably, for Heidegger, National

Socialism was not one political system among others. The undecidable excess of his engagement lies in its being an engagement with the political per
se. Heideggers engagement overreached National Socialism but could not
leave it behind and cut itself off from it, because the essence of the Nazi
movement, as that with which Heidegger felt himself in solidarity, was not
an unrealized abstract ideal but rather the historical, existential thickness of
world that is always happening but nonetheless neglected. The NSDAP,
solely inasmuch as it was a folkish movement, was to reverse this neglect.
It is the Volk in its irreducibility to reication, rather than any one political system, that is equal to the encounter with tevcnh. To the extent that a
political system gives itself up to differentiation from other political systems and thereby neglects the essential indeterminacy of the people, to that
extent it is unequal to this encounter. For Heidegger, liberalism and despotism, consumed with their differences from each other, are fundamentally the same in their neglect of the people. Heideggers rejection of democracy is inextricable from his attempt to think the people as such.
Democracy, which for Kant is an oxymoron,90 is for Heidegger a debasement of the peoples transcendent nitude, a debasement that reduces it to
the universal by which a people exerts authority over, and in spite of, the
political domain.

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1
The Death of Hegel

When Heidegger introduces the word Volk in 74 of Being and

Time, it is in the course of an exposition of the essential historicality of
Dasein. This historicality, as he claims in the same section, has its ground
in nitude: Authentic Being-towards-deaththat is to say, the nitude of
temporalityis the hidden basis of Daseins historicality. 1 Here Dasein is
said to be historical, not because of any participation in the events of a
peoples public life, but rather because of its nitude. Only once the supposedly more abstruse notion of nitude has been understood will the publicity and eventfulness of the everyday notion of history properly acquire
intelligibility.
In its authentic Being-toward-death, Dasein is already historical and
thus, for Heidegger at least, already the historizing of the Volk. Situating
the ground of historicality in nitude, and mentioning the Volk only to dene its historizing by the destiny of Dasein, Heidegger aligns the people
with the question of death. The people can rise up as the people only in and
for its nitude; it does not face its death in order to overcome it, but on the
contrary to run toward it (in den Tod vorlaufen) and to think the temporality of this anticipation and of the Being thereby revealed as its own in its
irreducibility to presence.
From Being and Time, Heidegger took into his engagement with National Socialism a grotesquely sophisticated receptiveness to its initially
rhetorical calls for self-sacrice. And he did not do so out of simple ingenuousness. Having brought all his perspicacity to bear on the confrontation
with Hegel over the question of death, Heidegger conceived of a response
to Hegel that is not a response to National Socialism. The task of an Auseinandersetzung (critical debate) with Hegel, announced in the nal sen-

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tence of his postdoctoral dissertation,2 in the earliest extant notes of one of

his lecture courses,3 and then addressed throughout his entire corpus, did
not prevent Heidegger from ostensibly emulating his great adversary 4 in
making his way to the state. Opening his rst lecture course as rector of
Freiburg University, Heidegger issues a call to arms: We want to nd ourselves within the fundamental question of philosophy and thereby within
the foundational historizing of our history so that we might open up, extend, and secure the paths of our spiritually folkish destiny. This is to take
place through a historical confrontation with Hegel. 5
The people of the National Socialist state is to rise up against Hegel.
Viewed as a motive for his political engagement, Heideggers reaction to
Hegel could not be more different from either Marxs or Nietzsches. Without ever elaborating a philosophy of the state, Heidegger became a state
thinker. But a state thinker in what sense? Referring to January 30, 1933, the
date of Hitlers installation in power, Carl Schmitt writes: On this day
therefore one can say that Hegel died. 6 Yet where Schmitt merely wanted
to note the politicization of the German bureaucracy, it is arguable that, for
Heidegger, the National Socialist revolution signied much more than the
abandonment of one facet of the Philosophy of Right. Hegels death, as the
determinative negativity of the logic of Absolute Spirit, was itself to die in
yielding to the state of the people of nitude.
In order to ascertain the philosophical foundations of the understanding of the state in Heideggers engagement with National Socialism,
it is necessary to review Heideggers objection to Hegels assimilation of
death and human nitude to an ultimately still conventional logic. As a
result of this assimilation, the Hegelian state remains indifferent to the
essence of Dasein.
The famous passage on death from the Preface to the Phenomenology
of Spirit reads:
The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most
astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that
remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But
that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and
is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own
and a separate freedom this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I. Death, if that is what we want to call this nonactuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires

The Death of Hegel

57

the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking
of her what she cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from
death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it
and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it
nds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the
negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit
is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This
tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This
power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the
immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.7

Death, for Hegel, is simply another name for the negative. Hegel does not
spell out why death should be simply another name for the negative; he
does not press the synonymy, but rather admits, in a subordinate clause, to
its arbitrariness (if that is what we want to call this non-actuality). And
yet this arbitrariness is far from denoting a relaxation in the philosophical
rigor of Hegels text. Hegel imposes a sense on death only after death has
been stripped of meaning by the very starting point of the Phenomenology
of Spirit. Hegels pure ego, whose experience of its own consciousness is set
forth in this work, cannot die because it is nothing other than thought. In
the above passage, Hegel claries almost at once that the purity of this ego
is not the distance at which the life of the Spirit preserves itself from devastation. Death, in such a case, would retain its meaning for the pure ego
in the form of a threat and a determinative opposite. Death cannot menace the ego that, as the thinkability of the thinkable, is the thought, and
hence the rationality and sublation, of its own death. What in death is unthinkable is, for Hegel, merely a hypochondriacs fancy and the consequence of a refusal to think death. In its thinkability, death is not the extrinsic limit of thought, but rather one of its moments. It is identied with
thoughts own power of delimitation and hence with that which Hegel calls
the Understanding. Hegels pure ego cannot die because it is already death
itself, and it is thus as already torn apart that it nds itself. The pure ego
comes to itself only in and as the limits along which the positive is sundered into individual entities. According to Hegel, the pure ego is not so
much nite as nitude, since it is the negation by which all other entities
are contained and determined. As the nitude of what is, the Hegelian
pure ego is the subject in both its ancient and modern senses. It is the sub-

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ject that, as Aristotles substance, stands outside determination and gives

existence to the determinate, and it is the subject that, as thought, stands
outside determination only because it is itself the power of determination.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Being is already Nothing since the existence
(i.e., the Kantian irreducibility of the positivity of what is to a set of determinations) that the subject bestows is the nonpositivity of the determining
negation. Adhering to Spinozas equation of determination and negation,
Hegel grasps the difference of Being from beings in the very work of differentiation effected by negativity. With a provocative similarity to the thesis of Being and Time, the truth of Being is seen to lie in nitude.
In response to Hegels denition of the I as not merely nite (limited) but as nitude (limitation) itself, Heidegger will ask whether, in this
apotheosis of nitude, the genuine question of death is notwithstanding
neglected. Heideggers exposition of death is informed by the question of
Being. The polemic against Hegel enunciated in this treatment is hence
trivialized if it is formulated as the opposition of a realists account of death
to a logicians account. Heidegger does not restore death as a possibility of
the I simply out of delity to appearances. Indeed, adequacy cannot be
the criterion, because adequacy itself must rst be grounded. And it is precisely such a grounding of the correspondence between an account and its
object that Heidegger attempts in his analysis of the being-outside-of-itself
of Daseins Being-toward-death. The traditional understanding of truth as
adequation is made an affair of the transcendence of mortal Dasein. When
Heidegger reproaches Hegels presentation of death with a lack of seriousness, he is therefore not suggesting that Hegels death is a simulacrum:
Negativity as dismemberment and division is deaththe absolute Lord;
and life of absolute Spirit means nothing other than to bear death and see
it through. (But with this death it can never become serious; no katastrofhv possible, no fall and overthrow possible; everything offset and
evened out. Everything is already unconditionally secured and accommodated.) 8 Hegels death is never in earnest, not because it is a counterfeit
of death, but because it is not a catastrophe. The seriousness of death is,
for Heidegger, its character as catastrophe. But a catastrophe for whom?
Hegels death is not a catastrophe and cannot overthrow the pure ego, since
it has always already been appropriated and reconciled. The pure ego is, by
denition, that which cannot be overthrown. In its position of power over
everything that is, the pure ego is not subordinate to any external fate. It is
in no instance simply the patient of a verb. Desiring a catastrophe that is

The Death of Hegel

59

an event and not the element in which Spirit nds itself in being torn
apart, Heidegger conceives of the human being as patient rather than as
agent. In contrast to the permanent and thus feigned catastrophe of the
death that is the self-certainty of the pure ego, Dasein is that which can suffer death as an event, and hence in its seriousness as downfall. Heidegger
even makes of this possibility of suffering death the distinguishing mark of
Dasein and, by the terms of the understanding of the human in Hegels
philosophy, he thereby dehumanizes Dasein.
For Hegel, it is Nature alone that can die, and it must die in order for
Spirit to realize itself in death. In the Zusatz to 376 of his Encyclopaedia of
the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel writes: The goal of Nature is to destroy
itself and to break through its husk of immediate, sensuous existence, to
consume itself like the phoenix in order to come forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit. 9 Death is accordingly the event that befalls that
which is not yet Spirit. In 375, Hegel portrays death as the inevitable lot
of the animal: The universality which makes the animal, as a singular, a
nite existence, reveals itself in it as the abstract power which terminates
the internal process active within the animal, a process which is itself abstract. The disparity between its nitude and universality is its original disease and the inborn germ of death, and the removal of this disparity is itself
the accomplishment of this destiny. 10 The animal thus dies because in its
inadequacy to the universal it is able to die. Given that dying has always
already been overtaken by the self-consciousness of Spirit in which Hegel
sees the essence of the human, when a human being dies, it is therefore
never as a human being: in the Zusatz to the preceding section, Hegel
speaks of the physiological aspects of old age as a return to a simply vegetative life.11
In his or her adequacy to the universal, the human being is relieved
of mortality, which is to say, of a susceptibility to catastrophe. Nothing can
ever happen purely to the thinking agent, and humanity must therefore extract from itself its understanding of time. Time, for Hegel, takes its denition from Spirit. It is nothing other than Spirits partial comprehension of
itself. Insisting on death as an essential possibility of Dasein and denouncing the Hegelian assimilation of catastrophe as simply a means to have
done with the question of mortality, Heidegger seeks to contest the sublation of time in the immanent movement of the concept. Heideggers account of the human being as an entity delivered up defenseless to its own
mortality is not dictated by pessimism or decadence. What is at stake for

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Heidegger is neither brute fact nor an aesthetic, but rather a critique of

metaphysics on the foundation of a more originary understanding of time.
Dasein must die, so that with its very frailty it might wrest the question of
Being from the narrowness and hence decient seriousness of the logic of
what is only ever present.
Heideggers exposition of the catastrophic character of death cannot
be comprehended apart from Hegels exposition of the conceptuality, and
thus ultimate stasis, of time. On the strength of this exposition, of the panlogism that has reappropriated the nonconceptuality of Kants a priori intuitions, Hegel is able to assert that nitude is, in truth, Spirit. Heidegger
will not challenge this assertion merely to reinstate time in its Kantian
complementarity to the conceptual. It is Spirit itself in its self-presence that
is to be interrogated, for in raising time to the concept, Hegel reduces it to
presence. In the Zusatz to 258 of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel asserts:
But in its Notion [Begriff ], time itself is eternal; for time as suchnot any particular time, nor Nowis its Notion, and this, like every Notion generally, is
eternal, and therefore also absolute Presence. Eternity will not come to be, nor was
it, but it is. The difference therefore between eternity and duration is that the latter is only a relative sublating of time, whereas eternity is innite, i.e. not relative,
duration but duration reected into itself.12

For Hegel, the concept (Begriff ) of time cannot, as a concept, be other

than eternal. By conceptualizing time, Hegel does not dispute the eternity
of the presence that Plato attributes to the Ideas. And yet the time in which
concepts demonstrate their eternity through the subsumption of temporally divergent and nite particulars has always had to be distinct from eternity. Were the time in which concepts distinguish themselves from the
transient itself the eternal and absolute present, then the distinction, and
the proof of the eternity of concepts, would be impossible. In what way
therefore can the concept of time amount to the truth of time?
Given his panlogism and his axiom of the ubiquity of the concept, a
proof of the eternity of concepts is something with which Hegel can dispense. It is clear that what is paramount for Hegel in his exposition of time
and space is the revelation of the innity of Spirit. Space will give way to
time, and time will give way to the concept that is Spirit. In 254, Hegel
sets forth the nature of space in such a way that his ultimate goal is unmistakable: The rst or immediate determination of Nature is Space: the abstract universality of Natures self-externality, self-externalitys mediationless

The Death of Hegel

61

indifference. It is a wholly ideal side-by-sideness because it is self-externality;

and it is absolutely continuous, because this asunderness is still quite abstract, and contains no specic difference within itself. 13 Nature, which is
not yet Spirit, and which is thus not yet self-reection, is that which is outside itself. At its greatest remove from Spirit, Nature is this being-outsideof-itself in its barest abstraction as the punctuality of space. And space is
outside itself without thereby creating a difference within itself, since such
a difference would be contrary to its abstraction from all determinations.
Where Spirit, as the negativity of what is, is limitation, space is continuum.
Between these parameters, Hegel means to encompass the Whole in all
the wealth of its articulations. In this, his success has never really been
doubted, because it is the determinate as such and alone that Hegel brings
to thought. Space in its abstractness waits for nothing other than to be determined and, indeed, it cannot but be determined. Hegels space is not so
far removed from Spirit that it escapes the reach of the latters power of determination. In its determinate indeterminacy, Hegels space is already a
continuum. That which does not stand fast, and does not appear in any
determinacy, does not appear at all. Hegels conception of the indeterminate is that which, standing fast in the light of presence, is consistent even
before being determined. For Hegel, time is the truth of the continuity of
space rather than the occasion for a question concerning the presence in
which all beings stand fast.
In 258, Hegel interprets time as the negative unity of the beingoutside-of-itself that he earlier names space: Time, as the negative unity
of self-externality, is similarly an out-and-out abstract, ideal being. It is that
being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is not, is: it is Becoming directly intuited; this means that differences, which admittedly are
purely momentary, i.e. directly self-sublating, are determined as external,
i.e. as external to themselves. 14 Time is the unity, and hence fundamental
homogeneity, of space. It is a negative unity because it is through the negation of the disunity of being-outside-of-itself that space attains to its unity.
Time is not a negative unity in the sense that it is a disruption of unity. On
the contrary, time is the negativity in which being-outside-of-itself is for itself, and it is nothing other than this negativity. Time, for Hegel, is able to
be the truth of space because it is characterized equally by the punctuality
in which space is a being-outside-of-itself. Time is the being-outside-ofitself in which the indifference between one point and another in space be-

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comes the negativity by which the points are related one to the other in an
albeit abstract unity.
The point, which Hegel in 254 designates a being-for-itself and the
negation of space, is negated in its negativity by time. On this rst step toward the absolute negativity of Spirit, Heidegger comments in Being and
Time:
When punctuality as indifference gets transmuted, this signies that it no longer
remains lying in the paralysed tranquillity of space. The point gives itself airs
[spreizt sich auf, i.e., spreads itself apart] before all the other points. According to
Hegel, this negation of the negation as punctuality is time. If this discussion has
any demonstrable meaning, it can mean nothing else than that the positing-ofitself-for-itself of every point is a now-here, now-here, and so on.15

The now-sequence that Heidegger feels obliged to discover in Hegels interpretation of time becomes the basis for a reproach:
No detailed discussion is needed to make plain that in Hegels Interpretation of
time he is moving wholly in the direction of the way time is ordinarily understood.
When he characterizes time in terms of the now, this presupposes that in its full
structure the now remains levelled off and covered up, so that it can be intuited
as something present-at-hand, though present-at-hand only ideally.16

But is the negation of the punctuality of space in time overlooked in this

reading? How can Heidegger attribute to Hegel the vulgar understanding
of time, in which one discrete moment follows inexplicably on another, if
this indifferent punctuality is precisely what Hegel negates in his account
of time?
In her essay The Dialogue Between Heidegger and Hegel, Denise
Souche-Dagues takes issue with what she considers to be the blindness of
Heidegger towards the real meaning of Hegels texts. 17 And yet, as obvious as it is that Hegels account of time differs from the vulgar understanding that Heidegger criticizes, it is not at all clear that, in the violence
of his exegesis, Heidegger has missed Hegels real meaning. Hegels time
negates the indifferent punctuality of the vulgar understanding of time
only to remain itself present-at-hand in its ideality. Thus, Souche-Dagues
unwittingly argues for Heideggers reading when she writes:
Furthermore, there is nothing like a fall of Spirit into time, which would mean
that Spirit descends from an eternity situated out of time. Eternity is for Hegel in
its immanent totalization which is its true innity. The present (Gegenwart) which
is responsible for presenting this absolute unication indicates clearly that time is

The Death of Hegel

63

not in truth the indenite and formal series of here-nows, cancelling themselves in
the etc., etc., of indeniteness.18

Time in Hegel is eternal neither outside of time nor within time, but, on
the contrary, as time. It is time as the totality of all periods of time, and thus
as the concept of time, that is present for Hegel and is present because there
can be no period of time outside its unity in which it would not be present. The vulgar understanding of time is thus manifest in Hegels elevation of time to the concept. Time in the eternity of its concept is that
which is present, and hence, although punctuality is negated in Hegels account of temporality, the vulgar understanding of time remains determinative through the privileging of the present.
Even in its elevation to the concept, time constitutes a fall for the
Hegelian Spirit. It is in this sense that Heidegger speaks of a fall of Spirit
into time (Souche-Daguess rejected descent from an eternity situated outside of time is simply irrelevant to Heideggers text). Quoting Hegel himself from the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger
writes:
Because the restlessness with which spirit develops in bringing itself to its concept
is the negation of a negation, it accords with spirit, as it actualizes itself, to fall into
time as the immediate negation of a negation. For time is the concept itself, which
is there [da ist] and which represents itself to the consciousness as an empty intuition; because of this, spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time as
long as it does not grasp its pure conceptthat is, as long as time is not annulled
by it. Time is the pure Selfexternal, intuited, not grasped by the Selfthe concept which is merely intuited. 19

Time is the conceptthat is, that which mediatesin its immediacy. It

is therefore a contradiction. Time is Spirit that has fallen away from itself,
because it is that negation of a negation that is nonetheless not reective. It
apes Spirit in its self-presence: it is the mediating negation that is external
to itself as mediation. Negating the negativity of the point, time nds itself in the becoming that is, inasmuch as it is not, and is not, inasmuch as
it is. And nding itself in the negativity of becoming, time already shares
the innite nitude in which Spirit is present to itself. The absolute presence of timeits negative unity over the punctuality of being-outside-ofitselfis, as the term indicates, a formulation of temporality from which
transcendence has been shorn. Hegels interpretation of time remains modeled on the discrete now and the vulgar understanding of time is per-

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petuated. To the question of the Being of time, the Hegelian answer is

presence.
The concept is able to become, for Hegel, the truth of time, because
the legitimacy of unity, on which the concept relies, is not allowed to be
challenged by an exposition of the essential ecstasy of time.20 The transitions that negativity effects from one point to the other are not thought
through to an interrogation of the unity of any concept of time of
that which Heidegger, in his 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, calls
meaningless.21
Addressing times place between the nite and the concept, Hegel
states in the Remark to 258 of the Encyclopaedia:
The nite is perishable and temporal because, unlike the Notion, it is not in its own
self total negativity; true, this negativity is immanent in it as its universal essence,
but the nite is not adequate to this essence: it is one-sided, and consequently it is
related to negativity as to the power that dominates it. The Notion, however, in its
freely self-existent identity as I  I, is in and for itself absolute negativity and freedom. Time, therefore, has no power over the Notion, nor is the Notion in time or
temporal; on the contrary, it is the power over time, which is this negativity only
qua externality.22

Accordingly, Spirit, for Hegel, indeed falls away from itself into time, but
in the sense of a fall from the concept to the externality of intuition rather
than from an eternity outside of time. The qualitative difference that Kant
drew between the a priori intuition of time and the concept is reformulated
as simply an obstacle on the path of Spirits self-realization. Whereas, in the
above passage, the nite is said to lie in the power of time because of its inadequacy to its concept, time, for its part, lies in the power of the concept
because of its inadequacy to its own negativity. Having dened time by the
negation of the indifferent externality of being-outside-of-itself, Hegel is
able to recover time for the concept on the basis of a consanguinity: time,
as the negation of the externality of punctuality, and hence as an external
negation, is not yet the absolute negativity in which the pure ego is the determination of what is. Through dening time by negation and the concept by determinative negativity, Hegel brings together what Kant had held
apart. The ostensible radicality of Hegels abandonment of the denition
of the concept as the universal of nite particulars is thus ultimately conservative, since it is intended to stie the question intimated by Kant in his
treatment of the extraconceptuality of time. What Kant had wrested from
the sway of dogmatic metaphysics, Hegel returns. The Kantian afrmation

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65

of nitude is followed by a restoration of the concept. The Hegelian concept is installed as the power of time, and the eternal present reasserts itself
over the transcendence of nitude. The Aristotelian One is secured against
any suspicion of its propriety and primacy. Hegels time stands guarantor
for the foundations of traditional logic because it underwrites, through its
presence, the intelligibility of whatever is. That which falls under the power
of time is accordingly never able to make of its nitude an affront to the
unity in which time itself is collected in its negativity in the absolute present of Spirit.
In his 1930 31 lecture course Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger reformulates his disagreement with Hegel on the issue of nitude:
But one may ask whether setting up a confrontation with Hegel like this is not superuous. Was it not Hegel, in fact, who ousted nitude from philosophy in the
sense that he sublated it or overcame it by putting it in its proper place ? Certainly.
But the question is whether the nitude that was determinant in philosophy before Hegel was the original and effective nitude installed in philosophy, or whether
it was only an incidental nitude that philosophy was constrained to take up and
transmit. The question must be asked whether Hegels conception of innitude did
not arise from that incidental nitude, in order to reach back and absorb it.
The question is whether nitude, as the innermost distress at the heart of
the matter in question, determines the necessity of questioning. If not, then the
confrontation with Hegel is not in opposition to him, in the form of a defense of
the nitude which he has surmounted, but is concerned rather with what he has surmounted and the way in which he did so.23

Hegel evades the problem of nitude by grasping nitude in its essence,

since he grasps it in that by which, as a concept, it is already innite. He
therefore surmounts that which cannot even emerge as a problem for the
conceptualism, and that is to say eternalism, of metaphysics. Heideggers
preoccupation with nitude does not entail xing upon temporality in
Hegel prior to its sublation in Spirit, since the temporality in which Spirit
misapprehends itself is by no means the temporality in which the selfpresence of Spirit is rendered genuinely questionable. Spirit errs in time
without ever straying from the path to its self-realization. It cannot truly
err in time because time itself does not err for Hegel. Times inadequacy to
the self-presence of Spirit is not ascribed to the ecstases of originary temporality, but rather to the partiality of times negativity with respect to the Absolute. The failure of its adequation is situated in a falling short within
presence and not in an overreaching of presence. Hegels time does not

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transcend the One. Time, for Hegel, is the unity whose deciency is not to
know itself as unity. It is a subordinate element that testies to the unity of
the self-knowledge of the Absolute even in the obstinacy of its error.
For Hegel, in his predestinarianism, every error corrects itself in advance and every distress is always already assuaged. By holding to the distress and privation (Not) of nitude explicitly as transcendence, Heidegger
prosecutes a critique of the unitary. Here the confession of lack is not a
confession of servility. On the contrary, it stems from an ambition to think
Being as such and not merely Being as presence. However much Heideggers Not recalls Christian disquisitions on the indigence of humanity, it
cannot be said to be theological, since Heidegger is not concerned with
inculcating an awareness of a dependence on God. It is dependence pure
and simple that is at stake and that, in its lack of the contentment and selfcontainment of presence, is being opposed to traditional ontology. The
neediness in Heideggers conception of humanity is far less an afiction
imposed by an external power than it is the ecstatic essence of the being
that he denes by originary temporality. Heidegger thus defends a nitude
that has not been surmounted by Hegel, because it was never admitted and
could not be admitted without a fundamental interrogation of logic.
In the same 1930 31 lecture course on Hegel, Heidegger suggests that
it is not a case of a mere revision and reform of logic:
With respect to the title Being and Time, one could speak of an ontochrony. Here
crovno~ stands in the place of lovgo~. But were both of these only interchanged?
No. On the contrary, what matters is to unfold everything anew from the ground
up, by taking over the essential motive of the question of being. It is important to
showformulating it with Hegelthat it is not the concept which is the power
of time, but it is time which is the power of the concept.24

Here crovno~ stands in the place of lovgo~. The gathering together in the
One of the lovgo~, by which the entire history of the metaphysical treatment of the question of Being has been governed, is contrasted with the
unrecovered being-outside-of-itself of crovno~. Hegels innitude, which
pretends to be a sublation of nitude, overcomes limits only to be arrested
in its transgression, assuming the shape of delimitation itself. The uprising
against nitude will have left the structure of the real intact. Spirits insurrection against theology will not pass beyond its own investiture as the
One that lets each and every entity be seen in its determinate unity. Is Heidegger, through identifying the lovgo~ in Being and Time with a lettingsomething-be-seen, 25 therefore proposing crovno~ as its antithesis, as a

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67

letting-nothing-be-seen? Heidegger warns against reading the substitution

mechanically. The nothing that crovno~ lets be seen is not an entity that
withholds itself from apprehension in a moment that is no longer or not
yet now, that remains distinguishable in the peculiarity of its comportment
and hence still subject to the One. What crovno~ lets be seen is the indeterminacy that is the originary dissolution of the stable identities of what
is only ever apprehended in the derivative temporality of presence. Time is
the power, that is, the condition of possibility of the concept, inasmuch
as it is within time and an inadequate understanding of time that the conceptthe Hegelian lovgo~ that is self-comprehending Spiritis able to
assert itself in its presence as the Being of beings. Hegels Spirit is the Being of beings in the Greek sense of their visibility and determinacy, which
is to say their presentability.
Moreover, that the Being of beings is identied with nothingness in
the Logic does not involve a questioning of the understanding of Being as
presence, since it is nothingness in the sense of determinative negativity
that is for Hegel the very ground of the presentability of what is. Distinguishing the identity of Being and nothingness in his What Is Metaphysics? from their identity in Hegel, Heidegger writes in the Contributions to Philosophy:
When the sentence from Hegels Logic is quoted in What Is Metaphysics?Being and nothing are the samethat means, and can only mean, an analogue for
bringing together Being and nothing as such. However, for Hegel Being [Seyn]
is exactly not only a certain rst stage of what in the future is to be thought as Being [Seyn], but this rst stage is, as the un-determined, un-mediated stage, precisely
already pure negativity of objectness and of thinking (beingness and thinking).26

Hegels nothingness is no more than the negation that is proper to determinacy as such. Nothingness is already a moment in whatever is, inasmuch
as every being is determinate, for Hegel, in some way or another. In such
an understanding of nothingness, times difference from the visibility of
the present-at-handits nothingnessis not thought beyond the presence in which beings are present and hence conceptualizable. The invisibility of time thereby ceases to be the occasion for a question of the primacy of the concept. Dasein, as the being that is essentially wedded to its
nitude, cannot but be misunderstood by Hegel and subordinated to the
concept. Platos depreciative interpretation of nitude as mh; o[n remains
determinative. Solely from the vantage point of the concept and the unthinkability of the unpresentable is the nitude of the being that has not

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overcome crovno~ to nd itself in the eternity of the concept the condition

of inadequacy to its own conceptual determination. From the vantage
point of crovno~, this conceptual inadequacy is, however, the adequacy to
the more originary power of the indetermination of time.
With the exposition of the primacy of nitude, Heidegger stands the
metaphysical notion of the freedom of the philosopher on its head. Freedom no longer lies in the concept and slavery no longer lies in nitude.
What for an ontochrony accordingly turns out to be subordinate is not
that which is nite but the power of limitation itself, since it is the latter
that has not passed to an identity with the highest power. What has risen
to become the lovgo~ has not become independent of time. As the power
that is the unity of that which is, the lovgo~ falls short of the nonunity that
is ecstatic temporality and remains subordinate to it. Preserving its metaphysical cast, the freedom toward which the Hegelian philosophy directs
itself, and in which it is to be a sublation of nitude, is an identication
with the determinacy of what is.
It is this interpenetration of positivism and innitude that informs
Hegels political thinking. It informs the notorious sentence from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right: What is rational is actual and what is actual
is rational. 27 Certainly other passages in the work make it clear that Hegel
is not rejecting all possible alterations to the status quo as irrational, but
the sentence can notwithstanding be considered positivistic in its aligning
of the determinate with the thinkable. Hegels political positivism has
nothing to do with a navet in the face of the facts and everything to do
with a panlogism and the suppression of the extraconceptual. Through
surmounting nitude, Hegel cannot but arrive in paradise, and yet, as he
nonetheless cannot disguise from himself that he has become an ofcial of
the Prussian state, he has no choice other than to take on the role of its
apologist. Hegels Philosophy of Right is marked by political gullibility only
to the extent that it is marked by philosophical wisdom. Canceling out the
distance from the truth of what is, Hegel has made his way to the sofiva
to which the philosopher merely aspired. He has become, in Alexandre
Kojves words, the Wise Man. Nothing is alien to him (i.e., to his reformulation of traditional logic). The Prussian state ineluctably assumes the
aspect of the concrete universal, and the bureaucracy is revealed as the mediation between the particulars of the corporations. Where Socrates in the
Phaedo awaits wisdom after death, Hegel is already death itself and thus
already wise. The former ees the state through death; the latter becomes

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69

the state through death. The innite and determinative negativity of Hegels death reveals more than a mere kinship with the states immanent organization of the social body. Whatever is not fundamentally at one with
Spirit would amount to an objection against Hegels claim to wisdom.
If Hegels passage to the state is through in-nitude, Heideggers is
through nitude. The death that Heidegger defers and thinks as an event
opens a space for a critique of the One of metaphysics, but it did not
prevent his abasement before Hitler. Drawing back from the wisdom that
ushered Hegel into the service of the State, Heidegger exempted himself,
through the reserve and emphatic filiva of his philosophy, from a repetition of Hegels panegyrics. He does not extol the state whose essence is realized in logic, yet he nonetheless proceeded to a state with little interest in
a conception of humanity at odds with the present-at-hand. The human
being that, as an individual in the logical sense, admits of sublation in the
universal of the Prussian state, will simply have been replaced by the specimen of biological material. In both cases, beings remained determined in
their discreteness and identiability by the metaphysics of presence.
Heideggers conception of the National Socialist state cannot however simply be read off from the historiographically veriable reality of the
regime without a neglect of his condemnation of biologism. A surer indication of the basis of Heideggers conception of the Nazi state is a passage
from the 1934 35 lecture course Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der
Rhein (Hlderlins Hymns Germanien and Der Rhein). In a reection
on the possibility of community, it juxtaposes Heideggers own treatment
of Being-toward-death with the nationalist idealization of the soldier at the
front:
The camaraderie of the soldiers at the front has its foundation neither in the fact
that they had to get along because others who were far away were missing nor, for
that matter, in the circumstance that they met up through a shared enthusiasm.
On the contrary, its foundation lies solely and at its deepest therein that before all
else the proximity of death as a sacrice placed them all in the same nothingness,
so that this became the source of unconditioned co-belonging. Precisely the death
that each and every human being must die on his or her own, that isolates each individual to the utmost, precisely this death and the readiness for its sacrice are
what rst creates the space of community out of which camaraderie arises. Does
camaraderie arise therefore from fear? No and yes. No, if like the petit bourgeois
one understands by fear only the helpless trembling of a cowardly panic. Yes, if fear
is comprehended as the metaphysical proximity to the unconditioned that is bestowed solely on the highest independence and readiness. If we do not force pow-

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ers into our Dasein that, just as unconditionally as death in the shape of free
sacrice, bind and isolate, that is, attack at the roots of the Dasein of each individual, and stand just as deeply and utterly in a genuine knowledge, then there will
not be any camaraderie; at best, what will come about will be an altered form of
society.28

The authentic Being-toward-death that, in 1927, is named the concealed

ground of the historicality of Dasein is identied seven years later with the
experience of the trenches. Heidegger is not speaking here at rsthand,
since during his brief period of military service in World War I, he was
never engaged in ghting at the front. Nonetheless, he is not simply paraphrasing a passage from Ernst Jnger either, for example. Heidegger, in a
gesture of continuity with Being and Time, concentrates on fear. As war is
the juncture of circumstances in which human nitude becomes a concern through fear, Heidegger ontologically underwrites the deployment of
the Wehrmacht, and Being and Time is thereby pulled into the German
mythopoeism of the military after World War I. Heideggers account demythologizes war by means of the very elements through which it had been
demythologized. The realism of many postwar narratives, which had been
received as denunciations of the experience of trench warfare, becomes
simply grist for the mill of Heideggers afrmation of fear. Fear turns into
an argument for war. It becomes the task, rather than the evasion, of the
soldier at the front. In 51 of Being and Time, Heidegger speaks accordingly
of a courage for anxiety in the face of death. 29 What Heidegger asks of
the soldier is that he not steel himself in the face of death and thereby grow
numb to the question of his own nitude through a leap into the innite. For Heidegger, the enemy that the armed forces must confront in the
trenches is Hegelian sublation.
Given the very different task that Heidegger sets the soldier at the
front, his notion of sacrice in the 1934 35 text sits uneasily beside the customary right-wing eulogies of the volunteers who fell at Langemarck and
elsewhere. Heidegger does not so much valorize sacrice, therefore, as valorize the readiness for such sacrice. No doubt this is already to go too far
toward accommodating a militarist politics. In the readiness for the fear of
impending self-sacrice, the soldiers at the front are to experience the transcendence and incommensurability of nitude. Through the fear it instills,
war contests the xation on the now in the vulgar understanding of time,
bringing home to Dasein the truth of its being-outside-of-itself. Beside it-

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self with fear, Dasein is a Being-with-others just as it is completely individuated as the unrepeatability of the uncontainable. Its free sacrice is the
event that awaits it as its own and that thus carries it beyond itself without
delivering up its transcendence to an external entity. That for which Dasein
sacrices itself is irrelevant in comparison with the fact that Dasein sacrices itself. Here in Heideggers lectures on Hlderlin, the provocation of
the National Socialist policy of rearmament is accordingly endorsed, since
war is intimated to be indispensable to the fulllment of the movements
promise to ground community. The Reich will not be the being presentat-hand that preexists Daseins self-sacrice and whose defense is the rationale of sacrice. Instead, community will be that which arises in the
readiness for free sacrice. Heideggers community of the trenches does not
stand above its members in arbitration over their lives and deaths, because
it is not cast in the nineteenth centurys pseudoreligious conception of the
state. This community is the bond of nitude itself. Death, which for
Hegel tears apart and mediates everything that is, necessarily grounds a
state of another order than that which arises in the individuation and binding of Heideggers anticipation of death. Heideggers community does not
situate itself in death but rather in the shadow of death. It arises in the expectation of death.
To anticipate death, even to run ahead into death (to translate literally Heideggers expression in den Tod vorlaufen), is not the same as to desire death. Heideggers community exists in a courtship of death. Nonetheless, it can only exist if it simultaneously defers death. It can therefore be
said that what both attracted and repulsed Heidegger in National Socialism was the bare physiological reality of corpses toward which the movement was hurrying. In Being and Time, the basis of Heideggers future politics of a irtation with death is clearly enunciated:
But Being towards this possibility, as Being-towards-death, is so to comport ourselves towards death that in this Being, and for it, death reveals itself as a possibility. Our terminology for such Being towards this possibility is anticipation of this
possibility. But in this way of behaving does there not lurk a coming-close to the
possible, and when one is close to the possible, does not its actualization emerge?
In this kind of coming close, however, one does not tend towards concernfully
making available something actual; but as one comes closer understandingly, the
possibility of the possible just becomes greater. The closest closeness[,] which one
may have in Being towards death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual. The more unveiledly this possibility gets understood, the more purely does

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the understanding penetrate into it as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be actualized, nothing
which Dasein, as actual, could itself be.30

The reality of death is, by denition, not the reality of Dasein (existence).
As Heidegger writes: The end of the entity qua Dasein is the beginning of
the same entity qua something present-at-hand. 31 With death, the ontological exception that Dasein constitutes for the understanding of Being
as presence is annulled. Hegels courage in looking death in the facein
leaping into death to become one with itlies exactly in his refusal to
brook this exception to the understanding of Being as presence. It is a courage that, according to Heidegger, is much more a lack of seriousness with
respect to the question of Being.
With respect to National Socialism, however, Hegels assimilation of
death renders him invulnerable to the regimes promise of catastrophe.
Death always comes too late for it to have any philosophical importance
for Hegel, whereas, for Heidegger, that it should cease to be impending
and nally arrive is not the fulllment of a philosophical promise but its
revocation.
If Heidegger, in his confrontation with Hegel, understands death as
a catastrophe rather than as the element in which Spirit thinks itself, he
does not mean to construe death as an event that takes place at its given
time within a sequence of nows. Such a construction of death would
merely delay the attainment to the presence of death in which Hegel establishes his thinking from the very beginning. Setting out from death,
Hegels system encompasses the whole of life, but the price of its totality is
an inability to grasp the Being specic to Dasein. Hegel sees everything,
but thereby misses that what characterizes Dasein is that there is always
something still outstanding. 32
In 48 of Being and Time, Heidegger writes of the positive nature of
this deciency: That Dasein should be together only when its not-yet has
been lled up is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is
no longer. Any Dasein always exists in just such a manner that its not-yet
belongs to it. 33 The not-yet of Dasein is the space of its possibility.
Death, as the impossibility of Dasein, cannot be viewed as the realization
of this possibility:
With its death, Dasein has indeed fullled its course. But in doing so, has it necessarily exhausted its specic possibilities? Rather, are not these precisely what gets

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taken away from Dasein? Even unfullled Dasein ends. On the other hand, so
little is it the case that Dasein comes to its ripeness only with death, that Dasein
may well have passed its ripeness before the end. For the most part, Dasein ends
in unfullment, or else by having disintegrated and been used up.34

Death is a catastrophe that happens, so to speak, against Dasein. It is not

assimilated to Dasein and it does not realize Daseins possibilities. It does
not make Dasein at last one. The not-yet is consumed in the moment of
death simply by being torn away from Dasein. But with this moment of
death, the vulgar understanding of temporality as a sequence of nows
does not reassert itself in a containment of the transcendence of Daseins
not-yet, since Dasein cannot be at its end, but only toward its end.
Dasein is nite because it has an end, but it does not at all have this end
as a check on its transcendence, since it has its end not as a possession
present-at-hand but precisely as that toward which it never ceases to transcend. Death, in this sense, is itself the not-yet of Dasein. The catastrophic character of Heideggers conception of death is its pure possibility. It is the event that does not take placeits presence is always only
ever a not-yet.
And yet death, for Heidegger, is nonetheless certain. Death is not a
possibility that Dasein may or may not realize. On the one hand, unless
Dasein dies, the possibility of its impending death ceases to be an essential
possibility. The signicance of nitude is overlooked once mortality, hypostasized and shorn of its futural character of the not-yet, is interpreted
as one property among others of the ahistorical essence of human beings.
Death is the decision that always overtakes Dasein, securing the undecidability of its possibility of death at the very moment that it casts the actuality of the corpse present-at-hand. On the other hand, the certainty of
death lies in the very nature of truth itself. That such a certainty could be
derived from the overwhelming spectacle of the trenches is excluded by Being and Time:
We cannot compute the certainty of death by ascertaining how many cases of
death we encounter. This certainty is by no means of the kind which maintains itself in the truth of the present-at-hand. When something present-at-hand has been
uncovered, it is encountered most purely if we just look at the entity and let it be
encountered in itself. Dasein must rst have lost itself in the factual circumstances
[Sachverhalte] (this can be one of cares own tasks and possibilities) if it is to obtain
the pure objectivitythat is to say, the indifference of apodictic evidence. If
Being-certain in relation to death does not have this character, this does not mean

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that it is of a lower grade, but that it does not belong at all to the graded order of the
kinds of evidence we can have about the present-at-hand.35

Death is not certain in the same way that one can be certain of the veracity of the proposition that the battleeld is strewn with corpses. It is of
a different order of certainty, since it is the ground of the certainty of
propositions relating to the present-at-hand. The not-yet of death constitutes the very essence of Dasein and the basis for its identication with
ecstatic temporality. Heidegger accordingly speaks of the certainty of death
as indenite. 36 Death is at once certain and indenite because, as the
not-yet of originary temporality, it is the ground of the certainty of the
present-at-hand without being itself present-at-hand. Foreshadowing his
argument in On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger makes the certainty
of a propositionits correspondence to a state of affairs depend upon
a relation that he assigns to the transcendence of Dasein. Only within
the openness of Daseins not-yet, within an originary nonpresence, can a
proposition and a state of affairs be turned to face each other in deance
of their self-identity. To object that between the being-outside-of-itself
of adequation and the being-outside-of-itself of Daseins Being-towarddeath, there is nothing more than an analogy, involves an inauthentic
understanding of Daseins end: that which can be isolated as a term in an
analogy possesses the distinctness of the present-at-hand. Daseins Beingtoward-death is its Being-in-the-world and it is only with death that Dasein turns in upon itself, becoming self-identical and ceasing to be Dasein.
The essence of truth is the transcendence of the mortal human being. All
certainties come to rely on the indeniteness and excess of the not-yet of
Daseins inevitable death:
Therefore the evidential character which belongs to the immediate givenness of
Experiences, of the I, or of consciousness, must necessarily lag behind the certainty which anticipation includes. Yet this is not because the way in which these
are grasped would not be a rigorous one, but because in principle such a way of
grasping them cannot hold for true (disclosed) something which at bottom it insists upon having there as true: namely, Dasein itself, which I myself am, and
which, as a potentiality-for-Being, I can be authentically only by anticipation.37

Anticipating its death, Dasein anticipates itself because, in thinking that

which can only be thought in its character of a not-yet, it thinks the impossibility of its own full disclosure. As a result, it thinks its nonassimilability to the understanding of Being as presence. Running ahead into

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death, it runs away from the thanatography of National Socialism. In its

anxiety before nothingness, it becomes an iconoclasm with respect to every
presentation of death. Nourishing itself parasitically on the images of death
that it destroys, Heideggers authentic Dasein comes to an arrangement
with the morbidity of the regime. It comes to a fragile arrangement with
commitment to the regime, to the possibility of sacrice conceived purely
as possibility.
In 1933, and with little resistance, Heidegger transforms himself into
an advocate of nationalistic sacrice. On January 23, 1934, in the text The
Call to the Labor Service, he is able to write:
Those who are lame, comfortable, and effete will go into the Labor Service because it will perhaps jeopardize their degree and employment prospects to stay
away. Those who are strong and unbroken are proud that extreme demands are being made of them: for that is the moment when they rise up to the hardest tasks,
those for which there is neither pay nor praise, but only the reward of sacrice
and service in the area of the innermost necessities of German Being [deutschen
Seins].38

What is, for Heidegger, the reward of sacrice? If this reward lies in an
understanding of the essence of Being, a willingness to sacrice has less to
do with the maintenance of the Germany of National Socialism than with
fundamental ontology. The willingness to die for a fatherland present-athand becomes a pretext. The passage on the camaraderie of the front, from
the lecture course on Hlderlin of 1934 35, indicates that community, for
Heidegger, does not preexist the readiness for sacrice, but rather arises
from it. The rst stage of the National Socialist revolutionthe stage of
the conventionality of its nationalism is arguably to give way to a second
stage in which the nation, as the pseudo-religious recipient of sacrice, will
be revealed to be a makeshift for that bond of community that is the readiness for sacrice itself. If Heideggers nationalism, like that of many others,
was informed by the experience of the front (Fronterlebnis), it also bore the
mark of his own meditations on nitude. The community born from the
courage for anxiety in the face of death in the readiness for sacrice does
not shy away from its own nitude. Seeing through the eternals pretensions to originarity, it sees through the logicist nationalism of the pseudoreligious state. Such a state is inappropriate to the being whose death is
an essential possibility. Its immortality is the abstraction from history by
means of which it asserts itself as the universal that rules over and mediates

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between its citizens. Daseins deviation from the logic of the universal and
the particular is that which, for Heidegger, constitutes the insight of the experience of the terror of trench warfare. A nationalism that grounds itself
in the Fronterlebnis cannot but confront the metaphysics of presence. It
could be said that it was in order to participate in this confrontation that
Heidegger enlisted in the NSDAP. Heideggers nationalism in 1933 was not,
therefore, the psychological solution to the anxiety of 1927, but, on the
contrary, its formulation as a philosophical-political program. For the sake
of the reward of the disclosure of the originarity of nitude in sacrice,
Heidegger will commit himself to a dictatorship. But where Heidegger incorporated in his conception of nationalism the horror of the Fronterlebnis,
the regime will reject the accounts in which this horror is depicted and have
them publicly burned. However correct Marcuse may be in his thesis in
Reason and Revolution concerning the irreconcilability of Hegel and National Socialism, for Heidegger, the dictatorship would prove to be all too
Hegelian in its logicist nationalism of the repression of nitude, reneging
on its promise of a continuation of the revolution.
The Hitlerian dictatorship is the state that runs ahead into death, but
it is not the state that extracts from the experience of the impending catastrophe of mortality an insight into Daseins status as an ontological exception. It is the state of control, that is, of the essential controllability of the
present-at-hand. As an apparatus of state terror, it conforms itself far more
conspicuously to Hegels knowability of everything that is than to Heideggers essential unpresentability of Dasein. The regime applies itself to the
task of uncovering all secrets, cataloguing all anomalies, and tracking all
movements. Aspiring to a dictatorship of absolute surveillance, it wants to
be the light of knowledge in which beings are apprehended as they are in
the full truth of their presence. Inasmuch as it refuses to any being an intrinsic unknowability, National Socialism overleaps the constitutive notyet of Dasein and exercises its terror on a population that it cannot distinguish ontologically from the mere presence-at-hand of the dead. The
regimes obsession with death amounted to a theatricalization of Hegels
understanding of death as the determinative negativity of what is, since it
was a state that explicitly and concretely conceived itself as death.
This is not to suggest that Hegel was a proto-Nazi. The genealogical
line is not so narrow. What is at issue in Heideggers exposition of death is,
however, an alternative to traditional ontology as it was brought to its ultimate expression by Hegel and as it underlies and unites National Social-

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ism and all the doctrines of the state that were to stress their opposition to
Hitlers dictatorship. Hegels philosophy of the state, from out of whose
sway the aspiring ideologues of the regime were unable to extricate themselves, is a philosophy that can praise the state in its identity with knowledge because it has rst identied knowledge with control. Even if it is only
later that Heidegger elaborates his critique of tevcnh as the reduction of
knowledge to the art of the manipulation of beings, the existential analytic
of Being and Time already raises an objection against dening knowledge
by control. The essence of Dasein, and thus that which above all must be
known with respect to Dasein, is the not-yet by which it withholds itself from an apprehension of its totality. Already dead, and hence already
present-at-hand, Hegels Spirit is not frustrated in its self-knowledge by
anything outstanding to it. And knowing itself, it knows the knowability
of what is, of that which, in his inaugural lecture in Berlin, Hegel says cannot help delivering itself up to be known.39 Hegels philosophy of the state,
as the philosophy of Spirit in one of its manifestations, will necessarily
place no restrictions on that which it is given to the state to know.
In the Remark to 209 of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel spurns cosmopolitanism for its refusal to press beyond a knowledge of the universal
in its one-sidedness:
It is part of education, of thinking as the consciousness of the single in the form
of universality, that the ego comes to be apprehended as a universal person in
which all are identical. A man counts as a man in virtue of his manhood alone, not
because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, &c. This is an assertion
which thinking raties and to be conscious of it is of innite importance. It is defective only when it is crystallized, e.g. as a cosmopolitanism in opposition to the
concrete life of the state.40

Hegel here advances his thought as the reconciliation of liberalism and nationalism. Where liberalism is criticized for the one-sidedness of its universalism, nationalism is likewise criticized for the one-sidedness of its particularism. In line with such a scheme, it could be said that, in its ambitions
to become the state of total surveillance, National Socialism was checked
by its exclusively racist weltanschauung: the universalism of the pure ego
eluded it. With its imperialism and its adoption of strength as the universal measure of peoples, the regime found its own way to the cosmopolitan.
The casting of the human as a biological sample under National Socialism
is certainly a degradation with respect to Hegels determinative negativity,
yet, for Heidegger, both interpretations of the human essence are already

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degraded in being grounded in the ontology of the present-at-hand, rather

than in an ontochrony. In the Hegelian philosophy, as well as in the Hitlerian dictatorship, it is a logic of control that is at work.
But at once it might be contested that this is simply not a just description of Hegel. What does control have in common with the bacchanalian revel of the Absolute? Is there not a glaring disparity between the
notion of certainty applied by a police state and the self-certainty of
Spirit? Does not the comparison between National Socialism and Hegel
indefensibly conate the certainty of the mere understanding and the certainty of dialectical reason? And are not the frequent concessions that Heidegger makes to Hegel in their altercation simply being passed over here
for the sake of the caricature of a struggle between diametrically opposed
philosophies?
The reductiveness of the present reading has its rationale, however;
namely, to draw attention to the foundations of a logicist politics in Hegels
treatments of nitude and time. By addressing the avowed consistency of
Hegels politics and his philosophy, it is possible to perceive the consistency
of Heideggers critique of Hegels philosophy and his own political engagement. The tenability, for instance, of Jacques Taminiauxs thesis in his
article Finitude and the Absolute: Remarks on Hegel and Heidegger is
thereby subjected to a number of reservations.41 Taminiaux quotes passages
selected from Hegel for their afnities to certain Heideggerian texts, but
whatever similarities can be rendered conspicuous between isolated propositions on truth and on nothingness, these propositions diverge in their
sense when construed in connection with other statements dealing with
politics. In other words, if the difference between Hegel and Heidegger is
to be established, it is better sought in the discourses surrounding their respective acquiescences to the state than in the inconclusive playing off of
the Innite against nitude. That in which Hegels Innite distinguishes
itself from Heideggers nitudenotwithstanding their shared territory in
respect of nothingness, death, and the acquiescence to the stateis the
logicist conception of humanity with which it is bound up. Hegel dies, as
it were, and overtakes his death in order to bring logic to politics. This
could not be demonstrated more clearly than in his denition of Volk in
the System of Ethical Life:
A people is not a disconnected mass, nor a mere plurality. Not the former: a mass
as such does not establish the connection present in ethical life, i.e., the domina-

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tion of all by a universal which would have reality in their eyes, be one with them,
and have dominion and power over them, and, so as they proposed to be single individuals, would be identical with them in either a friendly or a hostile way; on the
contrary, the mass is absolute singularity, and the concept of the mass, since they
are one, is their abstraction alien to them and outside them. Also not the latter, not
a mere plurality, for the universality in which they are one is absolute indifference.
In a plurality, however, this absolute indifference is not established; on the contrary, plurality is not the absolute many, or the display of all differences; and it is
only through this allness that indifference can display itself as real and be a universal indifference.42

Hegels Volk is a concrete universal, neither a purely abstract unity nor a

heterogeneous series of individuals. No matter how much the members of
this Volk may differ among themselves, their identity with one another is
never completely annulled. For Hegel, this identity is ethical, rather than
biological. Such a qualication of the nature of the Volks identity, as much
as it is a necessary acknowledgement of Hegels irreducibility to the Rassenkunde of the NSDAP, cannot disguise the fact that in Hegels logicist
conception, humanity remains equally under the inuence of the thingconcepts (Dingbegriffe) of classical ontology.
Against this inuence, whose interrogation Heidegger declares a continuing task in the closing pages of Being and Time, the earlier analyses of
Being-with-one-another are explicitly conceived. Rather than in an aggregate of subjects, in, namely, the apprehension, comparison, and juxtaposition of distinct entities within the terms of the metaphysics of presence,
Heidegger situates Being-with-one-another in historicality. Being-withone-another is an affair, not of the mediation of the universal and the particular, but of the not-yet by which Dasein always overreaches itself.
With this not-yet, Heidegger attempts to secure the possibility of an understanding of the essence of the human without the interference of Dingbegriffe. In going further than Heideggerin consuming the not-yet to
arrive at death itselfHegel is able to differentiate his conception of the
human as the innite negativity at one with death from the merely positive
of the natural world. Yet this differentiation, for all the starkness of its opposition between the positive and the negative, is not a differentiation that
delimits the scope of Dingbegriffe, since in the self-knowledge of its absolute negativity, Spirit is present to itself and thus perpetuates the mode of
Being that classical ontology ascribed to things. The positive in Hegel thus
proceeds in its dismemberment (Zerrissenheit) only to be re-membered in

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this very violence. It does not scatter to become a being-outside-of-itself

without return. In this respect, Heideggers restraint before death is a more
effective step against the hegemony of Dingbegriffe in the understanding
of the human. The threat of death, and not its reality, scatters Being in the
transcendence of the not-yet and thereby allows for a thought of community that is not an assemblage of discrete entities under a universal. In
the outstanding totality of its not-yet, Dasein is always outside of itself
and always a Being-with. It is thus always within the Volk.
Heidegger introduces the word Volk in 74 of Being and Time in
order to align it with the essential Being-with-Others and Being-in-theworld of Dasein, but in doing so, he says nothing of that which could
exclude Dasein from the Volk. Where Hegels logicist conception of Volk
explains both inclusion and exclusion by the scope of the ethical universal,
Heideggers transcendence cannot, by denition, come up against a limit.
This absence in Heideggers text of a criterion for distinguishing the identities of various peoples is by no means an oversight to be rectied by the
supplement of the exclusive disjunctions of National Socialisms Rassenkunde. Heideggers engagement in 1933 cannot be interpreted as providing
the correction to his earlier one-sidedness. The concentration on transcendence throughout his writings is simply too emphatic for it to be plausible that he should ever have straightforwardly subscribed to a containment of transcendence and a restoration of the metaphysics of presence.
What is at stake in Heideggers refusal, in 1927, to furnish a criterion for
distinguishing peoples is not so much an inclusive humanism as his effort
to rethink the traditional understanding of Being on the basis of the transcendence of Dasein. Without any means to limit itself, Heideggers Volk
does not recoil into the unity of humanity in general, because it is against
unity as such that it denes itself as transcendence. Transcendence is an excess inasmuch as it presses beyond the one, and it is a restraint inasmuch
as it never arrives at the other to the one it has left.
In his 1955 critique of Jnger, Heidegger will characteristically stress
that it is this in between that more than anything else needs to be thought
in the confrontation with the nihilism of metaphysics. Jnger, who wants
to leap from the age of nihilism to a new turning of Being, passes by transcendence, when, for Heidegger, it is precisely by remaining within transcendence that the nihilism of the oblivion of Being is to be brought to the
sobriety of reection. With an unmistakable Hegelian resonance, Heidegger writes:

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The human being not only stands within the critical zone of the line. He himselfbut not taken independently, and especially not through himself aloneis
this zone and thus the line. In no case does the line, thought as a sign of the zone
of consummate nihilism, lie before the human being in the manner of something
that could be crossed. In that case, however, the possibility of a trans lineam and
of such a crossing collapses.43

For Heidegger, the human being is the limit, just as for Hegel, the human
understanding is the delimitation of what is. To be that which faces the
limit as something external to it, irrespective of any success in crossing the
line, is trivial beside the truth of being this limit itself. Jnger is thus much
further from the Un-thought of classical ontology than Hegelhe literally passes over transcendence. For this reason, the altercation with Jnger
is not complicated by the exaggerations, concessions, and ambiguities of
the altercation with Hegel. Given the shared privileging of the limit over
that which it delimits, the question in Heideggers confrontation with
Hegel is what becomes of the limit. The political discourse that follows
from its privileging is not unequivocal. There have been both revolutionary and reactionary politics of the limit. Renaming Heideggers transcendence, Michel Foucault, for instance, sounds uncomfortably like the author of the Philosophy of Right when he nonetheless speaks of the role and
nature of transgression:
Its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit
and to trace the ashing line that causes the limit to arise. Transgression contains
nothing negative, but afrms limited beingafrms the limitlessness into which
it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the rst time. But correspondingly,
this afrmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by denition, no limit can possibly restrict it.44

Transgression is the limitlessness of the limit itself and, in this identity with
Hegels Spirit, it merges paradoxically and inadmissably with the state.
If there is to be a difference from Hegel, and another politics than that of
the Wise Man, it can only come from a transgression that transgresses itself, from a transcendence that does not cease to transcend. Thinking that
which Heidegger was to term transcendence and Foucault, transgression, Hegel attributes an absolute power to the delimiting activity of the
understanding. But with this enthronement of Spirit, its transcendence
and transgression are not unleashed, but rather curtailed. In its absolute
power, Spirit transcends and transgresses whatever is, and yet it stands in
need of the positive for the demonstration of its power. Spirit differs from

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the positive only to the extent that it amounts to the universal that glues
together the entities whose denition has been inherited from classical ontology. The opportunity for an interrogation of the metaphysics of presence is thereby lost, because Spirits distance from the positive is interpreted as its authority overand hence responsibility forwhatever is.
Power over the positive becomes nothing more than the duty to justify the
positive. Crudely put, Hegels response to the Un-thought of classical ontology is the conviction that he must justify to himself the existence of the
Prussian state. As a result, Heideggers objection to Hegel is not that he
purely and simply neglected the question of Being (any number of passages
can be cited from his works for their anticipations of Heideggers thinking), but, on the contrary, that he did not allow his insight into the originarity of transcendence to call the positive into question. Hegel, in effect,
assimilated transcendence to presence.
Yet why is it that Hegel throws the self-evidence of the present-athand into crisis only to rediscover the security of classical ontology in this
very crisis? As far as this decision regarding the crisis of the metaphysics of
presence is political, it can be traced back to Hegels horror of the vacuity
that he perceived in Romanticism. In his predilection for the substantial,
Hegel is drawn to the concrete life of the state. In 257 and its Remark
from the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes:
The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial
will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing
what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge, and activity, while
self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state nds in the state, as
its essence and the end and product of its activity, its substantive freedom.
The Penates are inward gods, gods of the underworld; the mind of a nation
[Volksgeist] (Athene for instance) is the divine, knowing and willing itself. Family
piety is feeling, ethical behaviour directed by feeling; political virtue is the willing
of the absolute end in terms of thought.45

The state is the manifestation and revelation of the ethical Idea. It is the
means whereby the ethical Idea knows itself and likewise the end as which
it knows itself. Through negating the actuality and substantiality of the
state, the ethical Idea knows itself in its difference from the positive. And
through knowing itself only by this negative relation, it simultaneously
takes up this actuality and substantiality as an essential moment in its selfknowledge. Knowledge in Hegel could thus be said to betray itself even as
it exhibits the greatest delity. Hegels insight into the Un-thought of the

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understanding of Being as presence constitutes an advance in the knowledge of beings, and yet it is not a knowledge that can know itself as an advance and enrichment of knowledge without reinstating the understanding of beings that its insight had overthrown. It is perhaps in reaction to
Hegel that Heidegger formulates the imperative in the Contributions to
Philosophy to think Being by itself.
That Hegel does not think Being by itselfthat he thinks it with respect to beings and hence politically with respect to the concrete life of the
stateis not, of course, the grounds of the apparent National Socialist polemic. In Mein Kampf, it is the theorization of the state as the end of activity that Hitler rejects: The state is a means to an end. Its end lies in the
preservation and advancement of a community of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures. 46 But Hitler is not referring to the state as
such. It is the existing apparatus of the purportedly racially indifferent state
of liberalism that he has in view and to whose exploitation in the service of
the new, racially grounded state he aspires. Hegels thesis in regard to the
state as the consummation of the self-knowledge of consciousness is neither afrmed nor denied. It is thus difcult to discern in such a statement
of Hitlers an altercation with the Philosophy of Right, which is to say that it
is difcult to discern any continuity between National Socialisms denunciations of the Weimar Republic and Heideggers commentaries on Hegel.
Were it not for the fact of Heideggers engagement and the importance of
his confrontation with Hegel, there would be little incentive to try to nd
in the regime any encouragement of an anti-Hegelian politics.
What is it, then, in the NSDAP that could have drawn Heidegger to
it? More cautious than many of Heideggers critics, Ernst Cassirer suggests,
in The Myth of the State, that Heideggers relationship to National Socialism has more to do with a lack of resistance than any obvious attraction
and convergence: a theory that sees in the Geworfenheit of man one of
his principal characters [has] given up all hopes of an active share in the
construction and reconstruction of mans cultural life. 47 Cassirer notes in
the thrownness of Dasein the abjectness of resignation, but he misses its
own specic, ontological task. Was Heideggers engagement with National
Socialism fundamentally an engagement with the abjectness of such an engagement, with its affront to the self-collectedness of the liberal subject?
Insofar as the regimes spurious anti-statism furnishes nothing for an altercation with Hegel, it is a matter of looking elsewhere for any polemical inspirations that may lie behind Heideggers engagement.
In 1933, the repellent submissiveness to Hitler that Heidegger enun-

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ciates in propositions that appear at variance with Heideggers earlier

thinking does not leave untouched the question of his relation to Hegel.
There is in these texts a slavishness that outstrips anything in Hegel, as
though Heidegger wanted to arrest the dialectic of Master and Slave. In the
Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegels slave proceeds too quickly from the fear of
death to self-certainty:
For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just
at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every bre of its being, and everything solid and stable
has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of selfconsciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness. This moment of pure being-for-self is also explicit for
the bondsman, for in the lord it exists for him as his object. Furthermore, his consciousness is not this dissolution of everything stable merely in principle; in his
service he actually brings this about. Through his service he rids himself of his
attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.48

The Hegelian bondsman (Knecht) or slave does not rid himself of his fear
of death by work. Work is rather the actuality of the fear of death and the
dissolution of everything stable. It is thus no longer the lasting monument
that cheats mortality. Hegel breaks with the tradition that considers the
fear of death something to be surmounted. Heideggers writings from the
1920s and 1930s are closer to Hegels text, for example, than to the ataraxy
of the Stoics, Boethiuss Consolation of Philosophy, and Montaignes essay
That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die. 49 But the resemblance should
not be overestimated. The fear of Hegels slave receives its denition
from the metaphysical understanding of knowledge: Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal stage, and does
not extend to the known real world of existence. Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become
explicitly for itself. 50
Fear, for Hegel, is most truly fear when it is realized, that is, rendered
concrete in the work. It is not fear as such that is surmounted, only its formalism and mute inwardness. By contrast, in Heideggers account of fear
in 40 of Being and Time, this formalism and mute inwardness will be set
forth as the very essence of fearits realization in the experience that the
thingly is precisely that which is missing. Hegels fear becomes objective

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85

because, within the understanding of Being in which it occurs, the decision

has already been made for the present-at-hand. Not even the nothingness
of fear is allowed to withstand the pull of the actual, since that which is
fully known is that which is known in its concreteness. If the fear of death
is here embraced as the starting point of philosophy, whereas prior to Hegel, philosophy was considered to begin from its repression, it is because
nitude no longer arises as an issue. The absolute, and thus nonimpending, negativity of self-consciousness is the sole experience of this fear.
Hegels slave is incapable of an abasement that would involve even his selfcertainty. He works for the master only to the extent that he works against
him and fashions with the product the reality of his independence.
In the collection of notes Overcoming Metaphysics, Heidegger is
blunt in his appraisal of work: The still hidden truth of Being is withheld
from metaphysical humanity. The laboring animal is left to the giddy whirl
of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in
empty nothingness. 51 Without a relation to the truth of Being, Dasein is
no more than a laboring animal. The work by which the Hegelian slave
raises himself to the element of thinking is that by which humanity, according to Heidegger, is tumbled toward its ruin. But is this note from the
years 1936 46 to be interpreted as a self-criticism? Is it simply a retraction
of the 1934 text The Call to the Labor Service with its differentiation
between the animal and the spirituality of work? Can the earlier text be
taken at face value? If Heideggers engagement truly constituted an adoption of the Hegelian position on work, then a Marxist party would seem a
much more obvious choice than the NSDAP. The Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei is, however, a party of the workers who do not
work in Hegels sense. They work without ever nding in work their independence from the decrees of the Lord, and their fear of death is correspondingly never realized in the concreteness of the product. The Nazi
worker is the slave who has been left behind by the dialectics of the history
of Spirit. The charge cannot be dismissed out of hand that, in his engagement with the NSDAP, Heidegger seeks to become, as it were, the mouthpiece of the lumpenproletariat. That which, from a Marxist-Hegelian point
of view, is repulsive in National Socialism namely, the aborted emergence of class consciousness through workis not what, in itself, attracts
Heidegger to the movement. This aborting of class consciousness is, nonetheless, the corollary of the challenge raised to the metaphysics of presence
by the being-outside-of-itself of fear.

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Heideggers political engagement was directly grounded in his confrontation with Hegel. If this seems implausible, then it should be remembered what Heidegger explicitly stated with regard to communism after the
war in a letter to Marcuse: Concerning 1933: I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of Western Dasein from the dangers of communism. 52 And that communism was, in Heideggers eyes, by no means
an illegitimate descendent of Hegel is clear from the Letter on Humanism. Beneath its supercial generosity,53 the more famous text is a restatement of the belligerent position expressed simultaneously in the letter
to Marcuse and formulated with respect to the Hegelian principle of
work in Overcoming Metaphysics. The merit of Marx is not distinct
from the dangers of communism, since his merit is to provide the philosophical exposition of that fundamental, metaphysical danger of which
communism is but one, albeit overwhelming, manifestation. This danger
is the danger of tevcnh, namely, the danger that according to the contentious parenthesis from An Introduction to Metaphysics cited earlier, it is
the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism to encounter. Marxs
status in the Letter on Humanism is thus similar to Jngers in On the
Question of Being, in that Marx brings a problem to light without understanding it as a problem:
What Marx recognized in an essential and signicant sense, though derived from
Hegel, as the estrangement of the human being has its roots in the homelessness
of modern human beings. This homelessness is specically evoked from the destiny of being in the form of metaphysics, and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up as such. Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is
superior to that of other historical accounts.54

Marx is here praised for placing the experience of estrangement at the center of his account of history, just as On the Question of Being compliments Jnger for his focus on the phenomenon of nihilism. Although
Marxs critique of the expropriation of labor under capitalism, and the reduction of humanity to manipulable material, rests on the notion of estrangement, he does not, in Heideggers judgment, recognize the roots of
estrangement themselves in homelessness. Marx correctly grasps estrangement as the essence of the history of metaphysics, but he does not grasp
that this essence is an evasion with respect to the question of Being.
Continuing to speak of Marxism and its Hegelian legitimacy, Hei-

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degger aligns communism with tevcnh, and thereby indicates what he sees
as the essential danger of communism:
The modern metaphysical essence of labor is anticipated in Hegels Phenomenology
of Spirit as the self-establishing process of unconditioned production, which is
the objectication of the actual through the human being, experienced as subjectivity. The essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology,
about which much has been written but little has been thought. Technology is in
its essence a destiny within the history of being and of the truth of being, a truth
that lies in oblivion. For technology does not go back to the tevcnh of the Greeks
in name only but derives historically and essentially from tevcnh as a mode of
ajlhqeuvein, a mode, that is, of rendering beings manifest. As a form of truth technology is grounded in the history of metaphysics, which is itself a distinctive and
up to now the only surveyable phase of the history of being. No matter which of
the various positions one chooses to adopt toward the doctrines of communism
and to their foundation, from the point of view of the history of being it is certain
that an elemental experience of what is world-historical speaks out in it. Whoever takes communism only as a party or a Weltanschauung is thinking too
shallowly.55

Communism is inadequately described as a party or a weltanschauung because in communism there takes place a primordial experience of beings in
their objectication through labor. Unless it is believed that Heideggers
preference for the NSDAP over Marxism can be fully explained by the attitudes prevalent among the provincial petite bourgeoisie of the 1930s, then
such statements with regard to the philosophical signicance of communism have to be taken seriously as a confession of what Heidegger thought
was at stake in his political engagement. As much as communism is an insight into the essential estrangement of the human being, it is also a danger, because its insight does not reach far enough into the ground of estrangement. Derived from Hegels understanding of labor, Marxs insight
remains metaphysical. The homelessness of modern human beings is not
experienced as such, since it is experienced as the expropriation of labor
rather than as a falling away from the equation of the human essence with
originary temporality. Whereas both Marx and Heidegger criticize the
reication of humanity, Marx, unlike Heidegger, does not argue that any
logicist conception of humanity amounts to a reication. Marxs response
to estrangement is thus inspired by a denition of the human essence
that is still governed, according to Heidegger, by the Dingbegriffe of classical ontology.
That to which Marx objects in capitalism, and in Hegels theory of

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the State, is that the logicist conception of humanity has not yet come to
its full owering. Marx thus condemns Hegel in his Critique of Hegels
Philosophy of Right for deviating from his logic in order to accommodate
the political constitution of his day: It is not a question of developing the
determinate idea of the political constitution, but of giving the political
constitution a relation to the abstract Idea, of classifying it as a member of
its (the Ideas) life history. This is an obvious mystication. 56
Hegels mystication of the positive is, for Marx, an obfuscation of
his own recognition of the absolute negativity of the human being. Hegels
philosophy becomes the expression of the inconsistency of capitalism and
its hypocritical, bourgeois cosmopolitanism. 57 Having emerged into history through the dissolution of the positive in the slaves fear, the universality of human Spirit still lacks the immanent determinative power that
Hegel himself attributes to it. Under capitalism, it remains the extrinsic
universality of homo oeconomicus, that is, the universal of quantiable labor
that regulates trade and allows the disparities in the living conditions of
concrete human beings to persist unchecked. It is accordingly against the
speciousness of bourgeois cosmopolitanism that Marx expostulates, reserving for a genuine cosmopolitanism the deliverance of humanity from its
reication. The reduction of workers to the commodity of their labor is to
be reversed by a substantive dissolution of the particularity of the positive
in the element of the universality of self-consciousness. In Hegel, this dissolution was merely ideological. Hegel, for Marx, is too little a logician,
since his philosophy retains much that is irrational and obscurantist. The
task that Marx sets himself in his own confrontation with Hegel is a perfection of the universalism of the latters thought, rather than its ontological destruction. The estrangement of modern human beings is to be countered in communism by a recovery into the universality of the human
essence (Gattungswesen).
But such a recovery will decide nothing with regard to Heideggers
notion of homelessness, because even in its universality, the human essence
continues to be thought inauthentically. Communism cannot effect a deliverance of humanity from the sway of reication, since the equality of a
genuine cosmopolitanism is grounded in the understanding of Being as
presence. Without the apprehensibility of the distinctness of beings in
presence, there is no foundation for the claim of their equality. Under communism, Dasein will have been disentangled from its identications with
the commodity only to be still thought as a being present-at-hand in the
iterable distinctness of its logicist essence.

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But is the Letter on Humanism really, at bottom, a criticism of

Marx? To overlook the antagonism of its position involves any commentary on Heidegger in a number of difculties. The remark on the dangers
of communism in the contemporaneous letter to Marcuse cannot be reconciled with any endorsement of Marx, just as Heideggers enlistment in a
political party vociferously opposed to Marxism must itself be considered
to indicate, at least, a mistrust of the latters tenets. But if Heidegger
wanted to distance himself from National Socialism after the war, could he
have found a better means than an appeal to the resurgent Marxism of the
French intelligentsia? And yet, inasmuch as this appeal would consist in a
textually unfounded identication of Marxs account of estrangement and
Heideggers account of homelessness, it is hard to envisage how Heidegger,
as a historian of philosophy, could have so forgotten himself. To dwell here
on the unacceptability of the identication may illuminate a negative reason for Heideggers political engagement, namely, his rejection of Marxism. This can be done by addressing a reading of the two thinkers that does
not notice the fundamental difference between their conceptions of alienation and that confounds the universalism of the one with the others suspicion of the well-foundedness of the ontic.
Kostas Axelos, in Einfhrung in ein knftiges Denken: ber Marx und
Heidegger (Introduction to a Future Thinking: On Marx and Heidegger),
seemingly takes for granted Lucien Goldmanns thesis that Being and Time
ends with an exhortation to elaborate and deepen Lukcss (and not, more
plausibly, Husserls) 58 theory of reied consciousness.59 Drawing attention
to a distinction in the young Marx with the purpose of radicalizing Marx
and bringing him closer to his own equally peculiar understanding of Heidegger, Axelos writes:
He speaks of the presupposition of socialism-communism and even writes on
a badly ripped and scarcely legible page of the Paris manuscript: If we still characterize communism itselfbecause as negation of the negation, as the appropriation of the human essence that mediates itself with itself through negation of
private property, accordingly not yet as the true [Marxs emphasis] position that begins from itself but, on the contrary, from private property (p. 264), then that
must mean that estrangement is not actually sublated.60

But is it the object per se that Marx wants to overthrow or simply the institution of private property? Is any object whatsoever an obstacle to genuine cosmopolitanism? Or merely reied humanity in its particularity? For
Axelos, in 1966, the quoted passage from the Economic-Philosophical Man-

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uscripts is, extraordinarily, a reservation on Marxs part with respect to communism, as though Marx considered an absolute recovery of the human
essencethe true negation of that negation which is the externality of,
among other things, private propertyto be the highest political good.
In his 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukcs confesses that it was precisely under the impact of reading in 1930 this text by
Marx that he repudiated his earlier blanket opposition to objectication:
In the process of reading the Marx manuscript all the idealist prejudices of History and Class Consciousness were swept to one side. It is undoubtedly true that I
could have found ideas similar to those which now had such an overwhelming effect on me in the works of Marx that I had read previously. But the fact is that this
did not happen, evidently because I read Marx in the light of my own Hegelian
interpretation.61

Axelos, who translated Lukcss History and Class Consciousness into French,
is perhaps under the sway of the Hegelian Marxism of Lukcss text in interpreting the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. He takes the true sublation of externality to be desirable. A true sublation of externality, as Lukcs
later argues, could only be desirable from a failure to subject the Hegelian
heritage to a thoroughgoing materialist reinterpretation. 62 The consequence of such a sublation would be the very impossibility of materialism:
But as, according to Hegel, the object, the thing exists only as an alienation from
self-consciousness, to take it back into the subject would mean the end of objective reality and thus of any reality at all. History and Class Consciousness follows
Hegel in that it too equates alienation with objectication [Vergegenstndlichung]
(to use the term employed by Marx in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts).
This fundamental and crude error has certainly contributed greatly to the success
enjoyed by History and Class Consciousness.63

The crude error of History and Class Consciousness is that the object was
to be taken back into the subject without remainder: the destruction and
preservation of Hegels Aufhebung (sublation) is reduced to destruction.
That which in Hegel is ideological, namely, the reappropriation of the human essence that nonetheless leaves existing conditions intact, is also what
constitutes the realism of his philosophy. Lukcs acknowledges his own
earlier lack of realism when he compares the identical subject-object in
Hegel with the messianic proletariat of History and Class Consciousness:
Of course, in Hegel it arises in a purely logical and philosophical form when the
highest stage of absolute spirit is attained in philosophy by abolishing alienation

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and by the return of self-consciousness to itself, thus realising the identical subjectobject. In History and Class Consciousness, however, this process is socio-historical
and it culminates when the proletariat reaches this stage in its class consciousness,
thus becoming the identical subject-object of history. This does indeed appear to
stand Hegel on his feet; it appears as if the logico-metaphysical construction of
the Phenomenology of Mind had found its authentic realisation in the existence and
the consciousness of the proletariat. . . . But is the identical subject-object here
anything more in truth than a purely metaphysical construct? 64

In 1967, Lukcs answers in the negative. He has made his peace with objectication, for objectication is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be
eliminated from human life in society. 65 When Axelos attributes to the
young Marx the political ambition of a complete reappropriation of objective reality, it is thus in deance of what Lukcs will have come to view
as the essence of Marxist materialism. And by virtue of his sociohistorical
recasting of Hegel, Axelos is likewise in deance of Heidegger. The solution that Axelos proffers to estrangement is the reappropriation of objective reality, whereas for Heidegger the oneness of such a delivered humanity would still denote an estrangement from the ecstases of originary
temporality.
Heidegger does not attempt to overcome estrangement in the wisdom that is at one with all that is, namely, in Lukcss words, to out-Hegel
Hegel. 66 Instead, Heidegger attempts, one might say, to out-die Hegel.
Heideggers critique of Hegel is, accordingly, informed by a stricter adherence, not so much to universalism, as to the ontological possibilities of
mortality. Hegels philosophy is a philosophy of death that is at once a philosophy of eternity. It begins at a point beyond death and, inasmuch as it
is born in the ruin of sensuous immediacy, it faces from the outset the universal and its absolute present. For Hegel, the Whole is the True, because
he begins at the point at which everything is unconcealed. That which is
essentially concealed, and still announced itself for the Greeks in the genuine contest between ajlhvqeia and forgetfulness, simply does not exist in
his philosophy. Hegel is unable to think the catastrophic character of Daseins not-yet. Being is already resolved into the totality of the mediation
between the universal and the particular, between the subject and the object. It is at least in part Heideggers understanding of death that renders
him insusceptible to a politics that denes itself by the goal of genuine cosmopolitanism or the totality of subject and object. Heideggers rejection of
the universalism of Marxism cannot be wholly ascribed to provincialist

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prejudices but must be appraised also in the context of his interrogation of

the appropriateness of the universal to Dasein. In the essential not-yet of
its Being-towards-death, Dasein never ceases to die and thus never ceases
to defer the moment in which it would be sundered from the ontological
undecidability of sensuous immediacy and handed over denitively to the
absolute present of the universal. What is handed over in death is not Dasein but a being present-at-hand. By its elevation to the universal, humanity is tricked, as it were, into accepting the authority of the Dingbegriffe of
classical ontology. The realization of the universal class in early Marx is, for
Althusser, a religious concept of the proletariat,67 and, indeed, there is
something numinous in a substantive cosmopolitanism. Without a stake
in empirical reality, the proletariat is at once transcendental and hence logically the truth and rule of what is, as though its poverty were best interpreted in the language of Christian and Kantian asceticism. But more than
simply for its religious analogy, the universal class is to be criticized for obscuring Daseins status as an exception to the ontology of the present-athand. The humanity that has come to itself in its universality is no longer
the being-outside-of-itself that transcends the metaphysics of presence.
Where estrangement, for Marx, lies in reied humanitys being outside of
its own universalist essence, for Heidegger the estrangement of reication
lies, in contrast, in humanitys being outside of its essential being-outsideof-itself. And because being-outside-of-itself is originary for Heidegger, estrangement can never be reappropriated. Fallenness (Verfallenheit), as Heidegger stresses again and again in Being and Time, is not a condition to be
rectied or deplored. It is, however, a condition to be understoodand
understood despite the metaphysical determination of understandingin
its foundations in the essential being-outside-of-itself of Dasein. In its lostness in the they, in its fallenness and inauthenticity, Dasein is still essentially and conspicuously a being-outside-of-itself, even as it takes itself for
something present-at-hand. Marxs critique of alienation notes the beingoutside-of-itself of reied humanity, but inasmuch as Marx interprets it as
a condition to be made good in the regulated transcendence of the universal, Marxs critique remains true to its Hegelian roots in its relation to the
Un-thought of classical ontology. In communism, everything is pulled
back to the center of the absolute present of the death of Spirit.
Heidegger wanted to give direction to the Nazi opposition to Marx.
As he makes clear in the 1933 34 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit
(On the Essence of Truth), he wanted to deepen the opposition to Marx to
the point of a contestation with metaphysics as a whole:

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93

Up until today the entire spiritual Dasein of the West has been determined by this
doctrine of Ideas. The concept of God has its source in the Idea, and natural science is also oriented toward it. Christian and rationalist thought converge in
Hegel. Hegel is also the basis for intellectual and ideological currents, for Marxism above all. If there were no doctrine of Ideas, there would be no Marxism. Thus
we shall be able to nish Marxism off for good only if the doctrine of Ideas and its
two-thousand-year history is rst confronted.68

In the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, the visibility and presence of the ei\do~
rises to preeminence at the cost of an obliviousness to invisibility and
transcendence.
It is accordingly not easy to discover what could have attracted Heidegger in the emphatic visibility of the NSDAPs biologism. Heidegger was
receptive to the possibility of the movements hostility to Marxism. It goes
without saying that this hostility did not develop in the direction of a questioning concerning the truth of Being. National Socialism broke with the
consciousness of Hegels pure ego and the class consciousness of the Marxist proletariat, but it did not escape the sway of the metaphysics of presence. In the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger censures a notion of the
Volk that still admits the model of the I: It is only on the basis of Da-sein
that the essence of the people can be grasped and that means at the same time
knowing that the people can never be goal and purpose and that such an
opinion is only a folkish [vlkisch] extension of the liberal thought of
the I and of the economic idea of the preservation of life. 69 Situated
in Daseins Being-there in a world, the essence of the Volk is situated in
that which is lost to view with the abstraction of the I. The people can
never be made a goal or a purpose in, for instance, the propaganda of a
folkish state, because the abstraction presupposed for the setting of any
goal or purpose never comes up with anything that could properly be
called the Volk. Dened by the historicality, that is, the transcendence of
Dasein, the Volk is too indenite to full the role of a purpose. It transcends itself and thus lacks the stability to constitute a measure. The ontic
instability of the Volk is not a shortcoming, but rather a necessary consequence of its originarity. The Volk cannot be modeled on the I, because
it precedes it in the very same sense that the transcendence of Dasein precedes the presence and self-identity of the subject. Nothing needs to be
added to Dasein in order to arrive at the Volk.
Heideggers path to the Volk is not distinct from his excavation of Dasein from the concealed foundations of modern metaphysics. The subject
gives way to the Dasein of the Volk. Without distorting matters too much,

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it could therefore be contended that Heideggers people can be traced back

to Husserls demotion of the epistemological subject of Neo-Kantianism,
since it is in his critique of psychologism and anthropomorphism that
Husserl opened Heideggers eyes to the primacy of intentionality and what
he was to call and rethink as transcendence. With the early theory of the
categorial intuitions, Husserl short-circuits the transcendental subject in
the Logical Investigations. He raises the possibility of no longer conceiving
knowledge as the commerce between the individual intuitions of the phenomenal world and the categories that have their seat in the stability and
unity of the subject of modern metaphysics. The Hegelian sublation of
nitude in Spirit becomes questionable. Hegels pure ego is to be displaced
from its position of authority over what is, and being-outside-of-itself is
not automatically to fall under the rule of the One in being known. The
self-presence of death ceases to be as desirable as its anticipation and deferral. For Heidegger, his political engagement will have been determined in
part by this courtship of death.

2
Ontological Opportunism

Everywhere he goes, Jos Ortega y Gasset encounters the masses.

Suddenly, and without anyone knowing why, the hotels, famous doctors
waiting rooms, theaters, railways, and seaside resorts have become overcrowded. And yet, as Ortega y Gasset notes in his account of European
demagogy, the population has not increased: Approximately the same
number of people existed fteen years ago. 1 For Ortega y Gasset in 1930,
the masses do not dene themselves in terms of a quantitative result, just
as for Heidegger in 1927, a people is not the sum of many subjects. The
congestion with which the masses have enveloped the public places is not
a consequence of a numerical excess, since, for Ortega y Gasset, it is as the
quality of numerical excess per se that the masses appear at all. Endemic to
public places, they necessarily resist the analysis and decomposition into
isolated individuals by which their numerability could be assured. They are
a number that cannot be counted. In their character of a pure too much,
the masses push themselves forward as perverse suitors for the Kantian sublime. At every turn, Ortega y Gasset witnesses the collapse of the spectacle
of the individual under the monolithic quantity of homogeneous humanity. For Ortega y Gasset, lacking Heideggers suspicion of the antithesis between the individual and the they, and thus lacking any insight into the
appeal of his individualism for a fascist readership, the uprising of the
masses is nothing but the failure of individuation. It is thus a population
at a loss what to do with itself that overruns the public places. Heideggers
political engagement was an attempt to assume the leadership of this uprising, as was National Socialism itself.
For Heidegger in 1933, the masses were not to be urged to retreat
from the public places. On the contrary, the uprising of the masses, once

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it had been led beyond a satisfaction with the externality of folkish accoutrements, was expected to become the Volk of the question of Being.
This transformation of the masses was to coincide with a transformation of
the German university. From his position as rector of Freiburg University,
Heidegger wanted to bring the university into line with the ontological
mission of the German Volk. This did not entail imposing a framework on
faculties that had previously been autonomous. In Heideggers judgment,
the apparent autonomy of the faculties was nothing other than their homogenization in the liberal conception of science. The faculties were autonomous merely in the sense that they no longer contested one another in
the understanding of knowledge: the pretense of autonomy rested on an
implicit consensus and apathy regarding the denition of knowledge. The
crisis of the specialization of the sciences was a consequence of the fundamental aimlessness of this homogenization. It is the question of the aim
of the sciences, and of the Volk, that Heidegger raises in the address The
Self-Assertion of the German University.
In his essay But Suppose We Were to Take the Rectorial Address Seriously . . . Grard Granels De luniversit, Christopher Fynsk accordingly
writes:
Heidegger posed the . . . question to the German university: were the sciences to
be? He . . . posed it from the basis of the . . . conception of the universitys founding function, asserting that if the sciences were to assume their possibility, they
would have to recapture their essence in a renewal of the Greek concept of tevcnh
(what Heidegger named . . . the innermost center of the entire Dasein as a people
in its state, the power that hones and embraces Dasein in its entirety). Finally,
he asked this question with [a] revolutionary design. For he argued that only by
recovering their originary revolutionary essence would the sciences be able to
servein the sense of guiding and impellingthe National Socialist revolution.2

The sciences were to guide and impel the National Socialist revolution by
renewing the Greek concept of knowledge (tevcnh). Fynsk, who does not
take the rectorial address seriously enough, omits asking after the aim of a
renewal of tevcnh. That which was to be known in this renewal, and could
be known only by the Volk, was Dasein itself. To the mobilized population
of Hitlers Germany, the truth of Dasein, and thus the fundamental truth
of all the sciences, was to reveal itself. And that is to say, Dasein was to reveal the impossibility of its revelation in the light of the understanding of
Being as presence.
The Self-Assertion of the German University is addressed to a pop-

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ular uprising, but it is concerned with concealment. What interests Heidegger in the sudden publicness of the masses is, not a nostalgia for the privacy of Ortega y Gassets individual, but rather the concealment that is the
essence of the German Volk. In The Self-Assertion of the German University, Heidegger arguably aspires to involve the folkish uprising in his
own confrontation with the metaphysics of presence. Incited in their nationalism and drilled in the denition of the nonpositivity of the German
Volk, the masses were to be led to a collision with what is.
In hindsight, it is easy to see that Heidegger expected too much from
the masses. The cynicism of hindsight, which rests on the positivism with
which it views the past as completely determinate, is incapable of appreciating the task that Heidegger set both himself and the folkish uprising.
For hindsight, Heidegger will always have come too late to direct the uprising down another path. And once the philosophical ambition of the rectorial address has been overlooked, Heideggers political engagement loses
any distance from National Socialism.
In the name of the Volk of the question of Being, in the name of the
Germans long-standing metaphysical mission, Heidegger appealed to the
masses of a nationalist uprising. If Heideggers appeal was to have a chance
of success, the masses had to be nationalistic. The masses had to be open
to an appeal to their nationalism, and inasmuch as an appeal needed to be
made, the masses had to differ as yet from the Volk of the question of Being. Heidegger did not confuse the masses of National Socialism with the
Volk of the question of Being, but he failed to bring about a transformation of the masses.
The people Heidegger addresses in 1933 does not conspicuously differ from the populations public by default in which the various fascist
movements took root. The possibility of the Volk of the question of Being
is overshadowed but not excluded by the reality of a racist mobilization. Indeed, for Heidegger, this reality was not yet assured. It could still be asked
who these masses were that had no means of resisting the public spaces of
National Socialism.
When Heidegger stepped forward as rector of Freiburg University
to preach the fulllment of the promise of ancient Greece with respect to
the understanding of Being, it was wittingly among the grandiose and yet
likewise shabby stage scenery of Blut und Boden. Everywhere the Hakenkreuz declared the break with Christianity and, implicitly, the return of
a proto-Germanic and hence supposedly non-nihilistic, preontological un-

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derstanding of Being (the Sanskrit word svastika derives from the words su
[good] and asti [being]).3 The scandal of Heideggers rectorial address is
that the juxtaposition of ontology and demagogy is without irony.
What could Heidegger have seen in the people of fascism? That the
people was to be seen constituted an imperative of the fascist movements.
The nation is a result rather than the starting point of fascism. It has to be
produced. In his speech The Tasks of the German Theater, delivered on
May 8, 1933, in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, Goebbels notoriously pressed
the movements claim to creativity: I am even of the opinion that politics
is the highest art there is, since the sculptor shapes only the stone, the dead
stone, and the poet only the word, which in itself is dead. But the statesman shapes the masses, gives them statute and structure, breathes in form
and life so that a people arises from them. 4
A people is the work of art for which the masses are the material and
fascism the artist. For Goebbels, as for Heidegger, a people cannot be taken
for granted. Yet, for Goebbels, a people that is missing is not Being-withone-another in its inauthenticity, but dead, unindividuated matter. The
people that is brought to life through the artistry of politicians is not essentially at odds with reication. To the extent that it comes to itself only
inasmuch as it furnishes proof of the will to power of the politician as creator, the people does not come to itself at all, remaining an object over
against an absolute subjectivity. Hence the fascist aestheticization of politics acquires a more sinister meaning than the diremption of public discourse from the workings of government. In fascism, the masses cannot
even be duped, because outside the ction of the politician-aesthete, in
which alone they become animate, they lack the means to be gullible. Here
politics as the highest artas that through which, according to Demokritos (fr. 157), human beings come to praiseworthy successesis reduced to
taking its cue from Shaws Pygmalion.
On May 27, 1933, less than three weeks after Goebbelss speech in
Berlin, Heidegger delivered his inaugural address as the newly elected rector of Freiburg University. The stance taken in this address toward National Socialism and the glory and greatness of this decampment [Aufbruch ] is by no means unambiguous, and not least because after the war,
Heidegger insisted on a recognition of the deance in its title, The SelfAssertion of the German University. This deance is better understood,
however, in terms of Heideggers ontological opportunism. Grounds for
such an interpretation can be drawn from the address itself, and even from

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Heideggers own apologetics. Heidegger was always too convinced of the

philosophical superiority of his motivations to hide completely what was
at stake.
In the text The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts, Heidegger
writes that a rector who had joined the NSDAPbut, unlike himself, not
out of deancewould have chosen another title than Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitt. But in pressing the case for his opposition to the new regime, Heidegger makes a slip:
One could excuse oneself from reection and hold onto the seemingly obvious
thought that, shortly after National Socialism seized power, a newly elected rector
gives an address on the university, an address which represents National Socialism [welche Rede den Nationalsozialismus vertritt ]that is to say, proclaims the
idea of political science, which, crudely understood, says True is what is good
for the people. From this one concludes, and rightly so, that this betrays the
essence of the German university in its very core and actively contributes to its destruction; for this reason, the title should be The Self-Decapitation of the German University [Die Selbstenthauptung der deutschen Universitt].5

What jars with the exculpatory reasoning in this passage is the use of scare
quotes in the original German around the denite article before National
Socialism. It is as though Heidegger in 1945 only wishes to distance himself from the National Socialism of convention. To another and private
National Socialism, such as that with which Otto Wacker, the Baden minister of art, education, and justice, charged him after hearing the address,6
he seemingly retains his loyalty. The Self-Assertion of the German University is thus a title that restricts its deance to the NSDAP. Even in
1945, Heideggers private National Socialism did not cast aside its obvious mask in order to present itself unequivocally as an expression of opposition to the regime. No doubt the motif of a private National Socialism
was Heideggers compromise between exculpation and plausibility. Heideggers National Socialism must be said to have always been private. Being
and Time had not been repudiated by 1933, and its emphatic distinction of
Dasein from the present-at-hand is inconsistent with the conception of
humanity as manipulable material formulated in Goebbelss speech to his
audience in the Kaiserhof Hotel and later put into practice in breeding
programs and extermination camps. This private National Socialism of
Heideggers composes a gray zone of servility and resistance. In The SelfAssertion of the German University, Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Clausewitz,
and Plato are referred to by name, but not Hitler, and yet this appearance

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of a rebuff is contradicted by the assiduity with which Heidegger as rector

oversaw the Gleichschaltung (bringing into line) of Freiburg University.
Heidegger, who boasts in his interview with Der Spiegel in 1966 that no
other rectorial address of the period dared as much in its title,7 nonetheless telegramed Hitler on May 20, 1933, to ask for a postponement of the
planned reception of the executive committee of German universities until the moment when the direction of the university association [Hochschulverband ] has been brought about in the sense of the Gleichschaltung that
precisely here is especially necessary. 8 It would be easy and, within a certain context, justied to dismiss as merely verbal the deance that in a frantic postwar apologetics Heidegger uncovers in the title of his address. To
do so, however, entails forgoing any convincing reconstruction (which is
not the same as a defense) of the terms on which Heidegger could align
himself with a movement whose understanding of humanity was irreconcilable with his own. What is involved in a convincing reconstruction is
more than the continuity and coherence of a biography. The irreconcilability with National Socialism of the understanding of humanity set forth
repeatedly in Heideggers writings is, for its own sake, what must be defended in the face of ad hominem arguments.
The deance of The Self-Assertion of the German University, insofar as it is the text itself that is in question and not just its free-oating
title, lies in an excess, rather than in an opposition. Heidegger does not set
himself against the movement but seeks to follow it through to the point
of exhaustion where it must give way to something else. In this sense, Heidegger is comparable to the Stalinist critics of the 1920s and 1930s who all
but welcomed fascism as the catastrophic preamble to socialism. That Heidegger situates the merit of the mobilization of the German people in its
chance of failure is evident from the extraordinary interpretation that he
offers in the address of a verse by Aeschylus:
Among the Greeks there circulated an old report that Prometheus had been the
rst philosopher. It is this Prometheus into whose mouth Aeschylus puts an adage
that expresses the essence of knowledge:

tevcnh d ajnavgkh~ ajsqenestevra makrw`/

But knowledge is far less powerful than necessity. That means: all knowledge of
things remains beforehand at the mercy of overpowering fate and fails before it.
It is precisely for that reason that knowledge must develop its highest
deance, for which alone the entire might of the concealedness of what is will rst

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rise up, in order really to fail. Thus what is reveals itself in its unfathomable inalterability and confers its truth on knowledge. This adage about the creative impotence of knowledge is a saying of the Greeks, in whom we all too easily see the
model for knowledge that, taking its stand purely on itself and thereby forgetting
itself, counts among us as the theoretical attitude.9

It is noteworthy how little attention has been given to this passage in the
secondary literature. William McNeill, one of the few commentators to
discuss it, nonetheless elides the exhortation to failure.10 Failure is, for Heidegger, not simply a method that knowledge has at its disposal in uncovering what is. Knowledge must fail in earnest, and hence in its every
method, so that what is will reveal itself in its truth. Prior to its failure,
knowledge is not strictly knowledge, but rather an unwitting collusion
with the concealedness (Verborgenheit) of beings.
But why in the rst months of the National Socialist regime did Heidegger expound this failure as the mission of the German university? Curiously, Heidegger declared in 1966 that he would be willing to repeat the
rectorial address, and with a still greater vehemence than before.11 The untimeliness with which he no doubt wanted this confession to imbue the
textan untimeliness that he believed would likewise have marked the
texts repetition in the BRDis, in the circumstances of Heideggers engagement, the untimeliness less of the apolitical than of the opportunistic.
In the name of the failure of knowledge, Heidegger was prepared to disregard the long and public list of Nazi acts of brutality under the Weimar Republic and assume the ofce of rector after the Social Democrat Wilhelm
von Mllendorff had been dismissed by the new regime as unsuitable.
Even if other motivations can be adduced for Heideggers engagement, in
his most signicant text as rector, it is on knowledge dened by failure that
he xes his attention in the altered conditions. Heideggers private National Socialism is the National Socialism of the openly exhorted failure of
knowledge. Bewitched by his own denition of the movement and assured
of its superiority, Heidegger is not cynical in his opportunism. He is not
even able to see his engagement as opportunistic. For Heidegger, the failure of knowledge, by virtue of its status as the limit toward which knowledge must strive in order to be what it is, cannot be anything other than
the truth of knowledge and, ipso facto, of a political movement, whether
in 1933 or 1966. The excess of The Self-Assertion of the German University, and its equivocal deance, is the excess by which it reaches beyond
everything that lies unconcealed before knowledge in order to founder on

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the concealedness of necessity. In reaching beyond whatever lies unconcealed, The Self-Assertion of the German University reaches beyond an
empirical National Socialism to the metaNational Socialism that is the
historical truth of the movement. It is this metaNational Socialism that
will be known when necessity itself is known and knowledge is truly
knowledge of what is.
Heideggers politics is a politics of concealedness. The conception of
politics underlying Heideggers engagement in 1933 is inseparable from the
preeminence of failure before concealedness in his account of knowledge.
If Heidegger, in his address, exhorts the university to genuine failure, it is
because only in genuine failure does knowledge exchange the presumption
of its theoretical attitude for the truth of its ground in beings. As the visibility of what is, qewriva comes to grief on the fate that is both essential
and essentially concealed. With the proposition of the superior power of
fate, Heidegger participates in the National Socialist demotion of the concepts of pure science and academic freedom.12 But Heideggers understanding of fate should not be identied with the common National Socialist understanding of fate and the accompanying supremacy of the
political. The regimes complacent efforts to render the political visible
sufce to indicate a distinction. The regime did not seek to founder on the
invisibility of the political; instead, it sought to pass off the pervasiveness
of its paraphernalia as the politicization of the society (Gesellschaft ) of liberalism. The NSDAP was too positivistic in its understanding of fate. In
the rectorial address, Aeschylus becomes the mouthpiece of Heideggers
own repeated criticism of the ontological presuppositions of the positivism
of modern science. Grounded in classical ontologys inability to think Being as other than that which is present and visible to the gaze of qewriva,
modern science does not see that Dasein cannot be seen.
Genuine failure, as it were, politicizes knowledge, since it tears knowledge from the abstractness in which, forgetting its Being and thus forgetting itself, it believes it stands purely on itself. The event, and not the act,
of genuine failure is the worlding of the world always tacitly presupposed
by knowledge. It is essentially that which cannot be made and thus interrupts the hegemony of technicism (Machenschaft). In its genuine failure,
knowledge encounters its limits as its own questionability and not simply
as proofs of the Hegelian autonomy of Spirit. What it encounters is its own
constitutive unknowable. As the historicality that is arrested and dehistoricized when a being becomes visible in its presence and is known, fate can-

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not itself become visible. It cannot do so because it cannot reveal itself to

knowledge, so long as knowledge, in a disavowal of failure, keeps within
the limits of presence. Fate is the concealedness of the world that is the site
of all political occurrences. It is the possibility of knowledge (objective genitive) and the impossibility of knowledge (subjective genitive). In order really to fail, knowledge must develop the highest deance of the necessity
(Notwendigkeit) of its failure. It must fail utterly and, that is to say, without guile. Following through its ambitions on the innite, it must seek to
encompass world even as knowledge of world is never a knowledge encompassing world, but rather a knowledge encompassed by world. In the
Letter on Humanism, Heidegger writes: As long as philosophy merely
busies itself with continually obstructing the possibility of admittance into
the matter for thinking, i.e., into the truth of being, it stands safely beyond
any danger of shattering against the hardness of that matter. Thus to philosophize about being shattered is separated by a chasm from a thinking
that is shattered. 13
Knowledge that merely counterfeits failurethat mistakes its willful
abdication of the concept for an immediate intuition of what is, for exampleretains the limitations of the theoretical attitude. In the conviction of the authority of its caprices, it secretly still believes it stands on itself. Such knowledge plays its voluntaristic irrationalism off against the
rationalism of Descartes and his successors, but it thereby only varies the
Seinsvergessenheit (obliviousness to Being) of the metaphysics of subjectity.
Such knowledge is illusory because it cannot think the transcendence that
is its own ground. Unable to think the worldliness of its Being, it is excluded from the truth of its essential politicality.
Heideggers political engagement can therefore be said to have been
an engagement for the political, namely, for that which will come solely at
the consummation and defeat of the knowledge of the metaphysics of subjectity. Heideggers National Socialism was governed by the ancient saying
of the Greeks on the impotence of knowledge and the future realization of
the truth of this saying. In The Self-Assertion of the German University,
the actuality of the movement resolves into the possibility of an authentic
politics. And it is as the task of the German people that Heidegger puts forward this possibility:
But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when

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this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.
Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on
whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether
we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and
precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.
But it is our will that our Volk fulll its historical mission.14

The historical task and possibility of the Germans is that they will themselves, not as individuals within the metaphysics of subjectity, but as a
people. According to the above quotation, only the German peoples will
to self-assertion stands in the way of the collapse of the West. But here the
will is to be differentiated from the voluntarism and vulgar Nietzscheanism
propagated within the NSDAP. Precisely because Heidegger never disowned the rectorial address, the polemic against the will to power in his
lectures from the late 1930s and early 1940s cannot be interpreted as selfcriticism. Heideggers Prometheus is not the Prometheus of Goethe or
Shelley. The German peoples will to self-assertion is not its will to take on
the role of the politician-aesthete among the masses of the globe. It is not
its will to absolute subjectivity but its will to the genuine failure of knowledge, and thus to the failure of will and its forgetfulness of world. Daseins
Being-in-the-world is to be recovered from oblivion.
That the self-assertion of a historical-spiritual people is better understood in terms of failure, than in terms of success, is the import of an earlier passage from the rectorial address: This Volk is playing an active role
in shaping its fate by placing its history into the openness of the overpowering might of all the world-shaping forces of human existence and by
struggling ever anew to secure its spiritual world. Thus exposed to the extreme questionableness of its own existence, this Volk has the will to be a
spiritual Volk. 15
Understandably, the Volk cannot win its spiritual world from a superior power. Through its defeat at the hands of the superior power, the Volk
wrests its world from its own forgetfulness. The spiritual world that is secured is secured not against the utmost questionability of a peoples own
Dasein, but, on the contrary, as this very questionability in the openness of
the superior power of fate. The seeming paradox of Heideggers rectorial
address is that the German people comes to itself in its ruinous collision
with fate. It comes to itself and knows itself as other than a being presentat-hand in coming to its ground in the unknowability of world.

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At times during the rectorate, the struggle to secure the spiritual

world of the Volk seems indistinguishable from the regimes own struggle.
Heidegger, like Hitler, calls the German people to struggle.16 This struggle
does not involve contests between like-minded opponents such as those
that characterized the Greek ajgwvn. The struggle is against the enemy. But
who is the enemy? In the 1933 34 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit
(On the Essence of Truth), with its exposition of Heraclitus, Heidegger asserts, again like Hitler, that the real enemy lies in wait within the people:
An enemy is whoever poses an essential threat to the Dasein of the people and its
members. The enemy does not have to be external, and the external enemy is not
even always the more dangerous. And it can accordingly seem that there is no enemy. It is then a fundamental requirement that the enemy be found, brought to
light, or even created so that this stand against the enemy may take place and Dasein not become torpid.
The enemy can have established himself in the innermost root of the Dasein
of a people, opposing himself to the latters essence and working against it. The
struggle is all the more erce, severe, and arduous because only to the smallest degree does it consist in an exchange of blows; it is often far more difcult and timeconsuming to detect the enemy as such, to ush him out, to refuse to be fooled
by him, to hold oneself in readiness for attack, to maintain and intensify a constant state of alert, and to begin the long-term assault with the goal of complete
extermination.17

Is this a slab of anti-Semitic rhetoric? How much credit can be given to the
image of a post-Nazi Heidegger when he was able for decades to tolerate
the persistence of such a passage in his unpublished writings? That Heidegger never expunged it cannot be excused by a commitment to the historical integrity of the edition of his works. The incident with the missing
page of An Introduction to Metaphysics (see p. 30 above) indicates the limits of his commitment in the face of a general outcry. Heideggers condence in the inoffensiveness of his private National Socialism was never
easily disturbed, and it is not itself proof that between his description of an
internal, treacherous enemy of the people and Nazi vilications of German
Jewry, no bond should be discerned. Consistently rejecting the biologistic
foundations of Nazi racism, Heidegger is nonetheless recklessly able to accommodate the regimes culture of hatred within the language of his own
thought. The invisibility of the assimilated Jew becomes an issue for Heidegger as invisibility. The struggle is to be a struggle against the invisibility of the enemy. The most dangerous enemy is the one that is invisible,

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because with this enemy not even the clearing of beings in the light of presence is shared. Not to struggle against this enemy, not to grasp the struggle
as a struggle of life and death is to relinquish the chance of questioning the
ontological foundations of the understanding of Being as presence. To be
sure, Heidegger does not name the Jews as the enemy, and indeed the enemy cannot be named at its most dangerousand hence at its ontologically most essentialbecause of its invisibility. This reservation has to be
put forward should Heidegger be charged with anti-Semitism in this passage. It is neither very much nor nothing. Likewise, Heidegger advocates
extermination of the enemy as a goal because it is through extermination
as a goal, and not as a realization, that the ontological power of struggle
comes to the fore: beings are only in their constancy and presence when
they are governed and protected by struggle as their ruler. 18 Victory in the
struggle would be disastrous for the question of Being, but victory is only
possible against an inessential enemy, an enemy that can be disentangled
from invisibility and destroyed as something present-at-hand. Hence, for
Heidegger, the struggle against German Jewry to which the SA and the SS
were committed was an inessential struggle beside the struggle of the university against concealment itself. Heidegger, who goes along with the
Nazi cult of death, also goes along with its fear of enemies. Even if he pulls
away before arriving at the destination of suicide and genocide, he still goes
further than the task of a redenition of knowledge requires. For the sake
of mobilizing the people against classical ontology and the metaphysics of
subjectity, Heidegger concedes too much.
As the universitys will to knowledge is the means to the collision
with fate, it is the university and the universitys struggle against invisibility that is the proper means to the eruption of the political from under the
metaphysics of subjectity. It is the university that founds a people. In favor
of such a denition, Heidegger in his rectorial address does not hesitate
in rejecting the negative notion of academic freedom proper to an autonomous institution within the liberal state. Instead, in a sentence at once
imperious and subservient, he contends: The will to the essence of the
German university is the will to science as the will to the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk as a Volk that knows itself in its state. 19
The prospects of the National Socialist revolution are thereby tied up with
the prospects of Heideggers own rectorship. Already, in the 1928 29 lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie (Introduction to Philosophy), Heidegger speaks of the Fhrerschaft of the university and of its role in guid-

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ing the destiny of the people.20 The political self-assertion of the German
people does not merely coincide with the self-assertion of knowledge, since
the political, in the broadest sense as the site of the clearing of beings, is the
truth toward which knowledge aspires.
In 1933, Heidegger did not want a private National Socialism. He
did not want to come across merely as an opportunist and a fellow traveler.
Born in the same year as Hitler, Heidegger even alters his moustache in his
aggressive design to become Hitlers doppelgnger. Under the cover of the
euphoria of his commitment and the peculiarly dogmatic haziness of the
ofcial doctrine, Heidegger endeavored to foist his private National Socialism on the new Germany as its thought. The ontological revolution of
Being and Time was to be taken up as the work of the Volk. Vom Wesen der
Wahrheit attests to this ambition:
The decision in the sense of the abandonment of something that had been selfevident for the Greeks is that which had carried and determined Platonic philosophizing. In The Sophist, Plato goes so far as to say that he must become the
murderer of his own father (Parmenides) by abandoning the proposition that
something either is or is not. Plato thereby reveals the depths into which this decision reaches down. By means of this decision, the world is seen in a fundamentally different way.
Today, we ourselves have been standing not just for a year but rather for a
number of years in a still greater decision of philosophy, which in grandeur, scope,
and depth far exceeds the former decision. In my book Being and Time, it is given
expression. A transformation from the ground up.
What is at stake is whether the understanding of Being is transformed from
the ground up. It will be a transformation that will rst of all provide the project
for the spiritual history of our people. This cannot be proven; on the contrary, it
is a belief that must be borne out by history.21

As far as Heidegger is concerned, the Nazi seizure of power one year before
was less important than the publication of Being and Time. His faith in the
ontological future of the German people was, needless to say, abashed.
When the attempt to lead the leadership foundered and the regime collapsed in obloquy and murder, Heidegger quickly redrew the boundaries
of his private National Socialism.
In a letter from December 15, 1945, to the chairman of the university
committee investigating political activities under the Nazis, Heidegger
urges against taking his dealings with the regime, such as the telegram to
Hitler, at face value: When the word Gleichschaltung is used in the tele-

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gram, I intended it in the sense in which I also understood the name National Socialism. It was never my intention to deliver the university up to
the doctrine of the party, but quite the reverse, to try from within National
Socialism and in relation to it to initiate a spiritual transformation. 22 Accordingly, in the language of Heideggers unintentionally private National
Socialism, the Gleichschaltung of Freiburg University is not the bringing of
the university into line with the regime, but rather the bringing of the regime into line with the university under Heideggers leadership.
Whether a Gleichschaltung of any kind was needed is not a doubt that
Heidegger could have entertained, given the conception of the political underlying his private National Socialism. Wanting the concealedness of
fate to reveal itself, Heidegger wanted the German Volk to reveal itself. The
Volk was to be the consequence of Gleichschaltung, rather than that which
was to be brought into line. All efforts were to be directed toward the ontological mission of the German people, since it is on a fulllment of this
mission that the knowledge of the truth of beings depends. Heideggers vision in the rectorial address is of the university with which the state has
been brought into line and mobilized for the highest of all tasks. The concealment of fate is to be deed, so that the truth of the historicality of Dasein might be understood in its originary character. In other words, and in
the language of the regime, the truth of the Volk is to be placed above the
truth of the abstract subject.
Heidegger concurred with Nazi policy on the desirability of a politicization of the sciences, but he differed in his understanding of politicization. In Only a God Can Save Us, Heidegger says of the National Socialist position on science: Science as such, its sense and value, is assessed
with reference to its practical usefulness for the people. The counterposition to this politicizing of science is specially expressed in the rectoral address. 23 Heidegger wanted to politicize the sciences through an interrogation of their foundation in the world of a people, where the regime wanted
to subordinate the sciences to the maintenance and amplication of its police and military apparatus. The choice for Heidegger was not between the
autonomy of the faculties and the Gleichschaltung of totalitarianism, but
rather between a Gleichschaltung in the question of the historicality of Being and a Gleichschaltung in a racist organization of control.
With regard to Heideggers veritable totalitarianism of the university,
the rectorial address is timelier in 1933 than it would have been in 1966. But
if the totalitarianism of the Hitlerian dictatorship sought the liquidation of

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the abstract subject by ultimatum, and on this account was unable to break
with the metaphysics of subjectity, Heidegger, in 1933, advances an utterly
singular strategy of epistemological exhaustion. His private National Socialism was to be the National Socialism at least capable of attempting to
carry out its program of politicization, since it remained considerably more
faithful than the movement itself to its distinction between the abstract
subject of liberalism and the political. As the foundations of the subject are,
for Heidegger, philosophical, it is only by a painstaking philosophical confrontation with these foundations that the subject can be overcome and the
political inaugurated. If Heidegger intimates to Hitler in his telegram that
he is going too fast, he thereby voices nothing but his appraisal of the Nazi
movement as a whole.
What is frequently overlooked in The Self-Assertion of the German
University is this sobriety. The afatus of Heideggers private National
Socialism blows very coolly on the triumphalist reckoning that the revolution had already taken place. Having implied that the revolution against
liberalism and the metaphysics of subjectity rests with the failure of knowledge, Heidegger cautions: If, however, the Greeks needed three centuries
just to put the question of what knowledge is on the proper footing and on
the secure path, then we certainly cannot think that the elucidation and
unfolding of the essence of the German university can occur in the present
or coming semester. 24
The German university, which is to demand more of itself than
simply the question of what knowledge is, needs time. Through dispensing
with the development of knowledges highest deance, a revolution by at
amounts solely to a variation of the terms laid down in the metaphysics of
subjectity. The National Socialism of Hitler (if such a locution can be permitted for the moment) was unequal to the task of overcoming the subject,
since the domain of the subject must rst be accurately delimited before it
can be overcome.
For Heidegger, the revolution has rst and foremost to be an enquiry
into the foundations of knowledge and the ontological presuppositions
of the epistemological subject. Translated as knowledge, the tevcnh of
Aeschyluss verse thus signies something quite different in 1933 from the
manipulative ingenuity of advanced industrial societies by which Heidegger would later understand technicism. In The Self-Assertion of the German University, tevcnh is characterized by its deance of the superior
power of fate, rather than by any obliviousness to fate. Tevcnh does not as-

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pire to the mastery of material, but to the impossible illumination of its

own blind necessity, to the unconcealedness of what is essentially concealed
in its difference from the present-at-hand. For Heidegger in 1933, tevcnh is
to jump over its own shadow, to borrow more than an image from What Is
a Thing? 25 The necessity that is the unacknowledged ground of the theoretical attitude is, in unavailing deance of this denition, to become the
object of the theoretical attitude. Heidegger accordingly repeats speculative
idealisms project of absolute knowledge precisely in order to come up to
its failure. He endeavors to seize hold of the nitude of knowledge, where
Hegel jumped away from it into the metaphysical sun of the dialectic. Heideggers private National Socialism, in one respect and in contrast to the
Blut und Boden mysticism of the regime, wants to be more Hegelian than
Hegel, since it wants to think rigorously the nitude of world that Hegel
ultimately evaded through its conceptualization. And if it wants to be more
Hegelian than Hegel, it is nonetheless so as to have done with Hegel. Heideggers long-standing desire to outdo Hegel in sobriety complements his
deriding of the subaltern antics of irrationalism. Both can be derived from
his assessment of the scope of metaphysics and the corresponding magnitude of the especially philosophical task of its destruction. As it is formulated in Heideggers private National Socialism, the revolution is the selfassertion of sobriety within metaphysics.
Sobriety, rather than the intoxication of blood, is Heideggers response to the metaphysics of subjectity. The idea of a folkish science
(vlkische Wissenschaft) that, under National Socialism, circulated as the repressed truth of the cosmopolitan notion of science lacked sobriety and
stringent enquiry into the foundations of knowledge. It could scarcely
hope to pass off its irrationalism by which it fell short even of the cosmopolitanism of the concept, and thus avoided a confrontation with the
conceptas the understanding of world before which the concept falls
short. In such a folkish science, knowledge does not so much fail as hold
itself aloof. It cannot really, which is to say openly, fail, because it dares
not call its own determinacy into question. Knowledge is accepted as
knowledge only inasmuch as it is an expression of the positivistically determined German Volk.26 The German Volk has become the truth of the
cosmopolitan notion of science, but only in the sense that it has arbitrarily
replaced it.
The embarrassment in which the various Aryan sciences ignominiously expired does not nd its unambiguous apology before the fact in

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Heideggers rectorial address. In one respect, the failure of these sciences

has little in common with Heideggers understanding of failure. The object
of deance in The Self-Assertion of the German University is not the
global community of scientists but necessity; not the liberal notion of science but its Un-thought. When Heidegger uses the term folkish science
in 1933, it is not to denote a contraction in the range of the liberal notion
of science, as though a science were folkish, that is, German, only to the
extent that it forfeited its claims to validity outside an identiable people.
Such a relativistic doctrine of science is alien both to Heidegger and to National Socialism in general.
A folkish science, inasmuch as it more than pretends to seek to be
the truth of the liberal notion of science, must make itself a party to the latter at the scene of its determination through the forgetting of world. And
as it is through the concept that the liberal notion of science forgets world,
recoiling from its rootedness into the ahistorical repeatability in presence
with which it equates knowledge, it is only by holding to the concept, and
specically to the violence of its retreat, that a science might still confront
its world and become the truth of its own folkishness. A folkish science, therefore, dares not renounce the concept. One year after the rectorial address, in the lecture course Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der
Sprache (Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language), Heidegger declares: What is at stake is the overcoming of the denition of the
concept as a husk. Consistent with this is not the deposing of the concept,
but rather the higher necessity of conceptual questioning. 27 For Heidegger, the romantic objection to the lifelessness of the concept is itself objectionable. Deposing the concept in favor of an immediate intuition of what
is does not solve the problem presented by the concepts lifelessness. The
absolute and voluntaristic subjectivity that convinces itself of its ability to
issue binding decrees on the concept perpetuates the abstraction from
world for which the concept is reproached. Wherever the concept is said to
have been deposed, the forgetfulness of world rather lords it all the more
peremptorily in the absence of proper criticism. A truly folkish science
does not begin with the Volk in the manner of a perspective or as the guarantor of its immediate intuitions. Instead, only at the very end does it come
to its people as the world that reveals itself in its concealedness in the genuine failure of knowledge.
What a folkish science awaits from the concept is the birth of the
Volk that would be thoughts own. This people would be the world as it has

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always eluded thought and preceded it as its ground. Understood in its irreducibility to the metaphysics of subjectity, the people of a truly folkish
science is not identiable by physical properties or cultural practices, but is
rather the world as the broadest dimension of the political. Such a people
is the transcendence of Being-with-one-another and can thus never fully
reveal itself in the presence of knowledge. Knowledge in its metaphysical
determination has always proceeded from an ignorance of the people. The
loyalty of Heideggers folkish science to the concept is necessarily a tactical loyalty, since what this science sets out to know with the concept is that
which is not conceptualizable because it is not knowable within the limits
of presence. A folkish science must fail in its conceptualization of the
Volk. It awaits from its failure an unrecognizable people. Heideggers folkish science is the science of the absurdity of German racism, because it is
the science of the reserve of the world of the Volk, of that which is never
present-at-hand. As such, it has the most to gain from the failure of racist
nationalism and from the rebuff to the latters claims on the world of the
Volk. Spying its chance in a nation that mistakes its integration in a peoplesubject for the uprising of world, Heideggers folkish science cynically
incites this nationalism to grasp fate itself in order that it might fail all the
more thoughtfully. A folkish science, in Heideggers denition, is essentially opportunistic. It always seeks to outwit nationalism, but in the end
it is perhaps too clever: on account of its philosophical sophistication, it
is taken for the truth of what it attempts to exploit. Contributing to the
Gleichschaltung of the German nation under Hitler, Heidegger sees beyond the unication of the masses in a people-subject to the collision of
this people-subject with necessity. Heideggers extreme, yet nonetheless
tactical, nationalism merges with an anti-nationalism. But it was Heidegger, the one sober participant at the saturnalia of German nationalism, who
would be asked for an explanation after the war.
Given the metaNational Socialism of The Self-Assertion of the
German University, it would be inexact and therefore misleading to ascribe Heideggers resignation of the rectorship in April 1934 to his disillusionment with the regime as such.28 In and for itself, the regime was not
the object of his engagement. Strictly speaking, Heideggers disillusionment was with the regimes amenability to his leadership. That which was
never expected to turn out well had within a year proved itself intractable
to an unfolding of the philosophical possibilities of its inevitable failure:
Hitler was no more Heideggers puppet than he had been Papens. In his

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letter of December 15, 1945, defending to the university what he could of

his rectorate, Heidegger scrambles to muster a still broader appearance of
navet:
Already in 1933 34, I stood in the same opposition to the National Socialist
weltanschauung teachings. I was, however, then of the belief that the movement
could be led spiritually down other paths and considered this attempt compatible
with the social and general political tendencies of the movement. I believed that,
after assuming responsibility for the entire people in 1933, Hitler would rise above
the party and its doctrine, and that everything would come together on the basis
of a renewal and rallying to a responsibility for the West. This belief was an error:
I recognized it as such from the events of June 30, 1934.29

On what grounds could Heidegger have believed that Hitler was destined
to undergo a change of heart after seizing power in January 1933? Such credulity verges on the implausible. That many other adherents of the regime
expressed a similar credulity does not render Heideggers statement any
more plausible: it simply indicates the conventionality of the defense. And
if, by his reference to June 30, 1934, Heidegger is implying that his engagement was an innocent dream from which he was awakened only by the
bloodbath of the Night of the Long Knives, then the SA itself would have
had to have been known in its time as something other than organized
thuggery. In his postwar apologetics, Heidegger frequently overreaches
himself. As much as its distance from the regime must not be overlooked,
Heideggers metaNational Socialism cannot be converted into a position
of resistance.
After 1934, Heidegger is considerably more wary of nationalisms
prospects of failure. The failure that is quickly seen to lie beyond the grasp
of National Socialism now becomes the affair of poetry. In this respect,
Heideggers commentary from 1939 on Hlderlins poem Wie wenn am
Feiertage . . . reads as an epilogue to The Self-Assertion of the German
University and as a repudiation of its opportunism. The deance to which
the university and the state as a whole are admonished in the rectorial
address is, in the later text, the duty of the poet. Aligning the Open of
Hlderlin with that which he terms world, 30 Heidegger arguably retains
the same understanding of the concealedness of the superior power:
The open mediates the connections between all actual things. These latter are
constituted only because of such mediation, and are therefore mediated. What is
mediated in that way only is by virtue of mediatedness. Thus, mediatedness must
be present in all. The open itself, however, though it rst gives the region for all

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belonging-to and -with each other, does not arise from any mediation. The open
itself is the immediate. Nothing mediated, be it a god or a man, is ever capable of
directly attaining the immediate.31

The Open mediates and, by virtue of its mediating, is that which itself cannot be mediated. Through its immediacy, the Open humbles gods and human beings in their ambition to mediate it. In the face of the impossibility
of mediation, the poets nonetheless cannot resign themselves: The poets
must leave to the immediate its immediacy, and yet also take upon themselves its mediation as the unique. 32 And if the poets are able to mediate
the immediate, the success of this deance of their limitations does not fall
to their credit: When the grasping and offering of their hands is permeated by a pure heart, these poets are capable of the task that has been entrusted to them. . . . The pure heart is not meant here in a moralistic
sense. This phrase means one kind of relation, and one manner of correspondence to all-present nature. 33
The pure heart is not a property of the poets. It names their relation of correspondence to omnipresent Nature. In this commentary on
Hlderlin, where the impossible mediation of the immediate is said to begin at the point of the poets reconciliation with the Open (or omnipresent
Nature), the deance that is to fail before fate in the rectorial address is still
discernible. The discord of the earlier taxonomy, however, is missing. In
place of the violent rupture between the theoretical attitude and necessity,
there is not even so much as a transition from the poet to omnipresent Nature, since it is only within the latter that the poet, for Heidegger, truly is
a poet. This tranquillity in the 1939 text does not follow from any intervening peace with the subject, because the poet has nothing in common
with the theoretical attitudes abstraction from world. Heideggers tranquillity is more calculating than resigned. In 1933, on the basis of his antisubjectivism and its accompanying Manichaeism, Heidegger is able to
make concessions to a voluntaristic political movement with an opportunists eye to its other side.34 Yet the beyond to which he aspires remains
by the logic of reversal he would later expound in his lectures on Nietzsche determined by the metaphysics of subjectity. With time, Heideggers wariness of nationalisms prospects of failure gives way to a wariness
of failures prospects. Whereas the early Heidegger seemingly wishes to
push everything to its point of crisis, the late Heidegger will no longer be
prepared to break even a jug.35 By the end of the 1930s, the invocations
of power (Macht), violence (Gewalt), and mastery (Herrschaft) that mark

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An Introduction to Metaphysics, for instance, recede in favor of meditations on releasement (Gelassenheit) and that which is free from power (das
Macht-lose).
Heideggers disengagement with the regime has to be thought
through as a disengagement with his own metaNational Socialism. As
National Socialism itself was not the object of his engagement, it often
seems that Heidegger is closer to the movement after 1934 than he ever
was during his rectorship. A virulent suspicion of the ontic, for instance,
renders the early Heidegger proof against kitsch. With the interrogation
of this suspicions entanglement in the metaphysics of subjectity, there
emerges in later texts a susceptibility to the charms of Bodenstndigkeit
(indigenousness) painfully redolent of the idylls of Nazi literature.
In dissolving the agonistic taxonomy of his rectorial address, Heidegger dissolves precisely that which, in 1937, Clemens August Hoberg,
who subsequently established himself in the police apparatus as an expert
on the Jewish question, nds incompatible with National Socialism. At
the start of his polemic against Heidegger, Hoberg declares that his objections arise not from a philosophical system, but rather from the simple,
straightforward attitude of a young German; 36 in short, that it is his intention to play misre in this game of cards. Reducing the passage on failure in the rectorial address to a personal admission of the author,37 Hoberg
proceeds to situate National Socialism in that same relaxation of the exclusive disjunction toward which Heidegger likewise directs his thinking after
1934. For Hoberg, National Socialism is not itself a crisis: The decisive difference between Heidegger and us consists in the fact that, in everyday life,
we create and make ourselves felt, rather than lose ourselves in mere bustle. So long as we are active in the work assigned to us, Heideggerian dread
cannot possibly rise up in us and compel everything to appear for us in its
nullity. 38
The work stands between self-absorbed bustle and the Nothing, and
thus against the volatility of their alternation. What might further determine the work is, for Hobergs purposes, superuous information. For
Hoberg, the National Socialist revolution resolves the Heideggerian dilemma of triviality and dread. By assigning work, Hitler showed himself to be the answer to the Manichaeism of the early Heidegger. On the
basis of Hobergs polemic, it could be contended that National Socialism
comes to the jargon of authenticity, and its bathos of unquestioning obedience, before Heidegger and in opposition to him. Having earlier sought

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to outwit the movement, Heidegger renounces the dualism of his meta

National Socialism only to nd himself ostensibly recuperated.
In 1933, Heidegger joined the NSDAP out of a philosophically motivated shame, and his inaugural address as rector turns upon the hope of
a failure of the theoretical subject. As an obstacle to the truth of that which
is, this subject is consumed with shame of itself and works toward the fulllment by which it is not entrenched but overcome. Through the absoluteness with which he distinguishes knowledge and necessity in 1933,
Heidegger seeks from necessity a revolution in which the subject might be
swept aside but thereby also retain its externality. The anti-liberalism that
expresses itself in shame over the subject is still too liberal. It continues to
forget world as the clearing of beings, because it does not make it as far as
the world in which the subject also has its Being for itself.
In this respect, The Self-Assertion of the German University belongs, alongside Ernst Jngers 1930 treatise The Worker, to a class of texts
composed between the two world wars that remains under the sway of liberalism in the manner of its opposition to it. As much as he stresses the irrelevance of the subject for the gestalt of the worker, Jnger only arouses
the suspicion that this declaration of irrelevance is the half-hearted disguise
of an absolute subjectivity. In passing from the individual human being to
the gestalt of the worker, Jnger does not overcome the subject. Instead, he
discovers that conguration of the subject in which its abstraction and autonomy could escape the commonly perceived debunking of the liberal
subject. The myth of the subject, which a lone individual cannot maintain
in the face of the reality of technical civilization, is to nd its defense in the
unied masses. Jngers worker is the subject that can work and still maintain its abstraction as a subject. Rather than working on account of any
subordination to circumstances, it works because it lies in its declaimed
transcendental denition as the worker to work. In comparison with the
rectorial address, the sleight of hand in Jngers overcoming of the subject is risibly clumsy.
Dening itself by its opposition to liberalism, The Self-Assertion of
the German University renounces the possibility of developing an antiliberalism that would not at once be dialectically reappropriated. It wants
to think the superior power of necessity through the failure of the theoretical attitude and thus wants to think necessity in its absence from the
knowledge yielding itself to the theoretical attitude. Necessity, which had
been forgotten by the autonomous subject of liberalism, is to take its re-

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venge without ceasing to be forgotten. Instead of remembering its world,

the subject shatters on the emergence of its world that is for it properly a
nonemergence. The subject comes to grief on the severity with which
world withholds itself from that which is present (das Anwesende). On the
one hand, world, as that which, for Heidegger, is not present because it is
the presencing (Anwesung) of that which is present, cannot be sufciently
distinguished from that which is present. Its distinctness, on the other
hand, cannot be made distinct, since as the presencing of beings in the light
of knowledge, world is the possibility and domain of distinctions. In 1933,
Heideggers choice within this dilemmaand the crux of his inverted liberalism is to insist on the distinctness and to think the presencing of
world by itself as absence. The Self-Assertion of the German University
concentrates on the forgetfulness in the forgetfulness of Being and thus
concentrates on the philosophical traditions relation to Being, rather than,
as it were, on Being itself. That which is forgotten by the subject is to be
remembered as forgotten, and thereby remembered in a distinctness alien,
so to speak, to Being as such. The theoretical subject, in its shame, is not
so much to heed the voice of conscience, as it is analyzed in 54 60 of
Being and Time, as to provoke its wrath. The subject is not called back to
the authenticity of its Being-in-the-world and thus to the transcendence by
which Dasein undecidably differentiates itself from that which is present.
Instead, the subject suffers defeat for the sake of the problematic clarity of
the ontological difference.
Heideggers anti-subjectivism in 1933 was intended to contest classical ontologys understanding of Being as presence. This contestation, in the
very radicality with which it ventured to think absence and to seize hold of
it in its distinctness, solidied into simply the complement of the Seinsvergessenheit of classical ontology. As such, it was an error one, however, that can be recognized but not rectied. The error can only be committed differently: in later Heidegger, it appears in the serenity before
classical ontology that, by comparison, refrains ab ovo from a contestation.
If, in 1966, Heidegger declares that he would repeat the rectorial address
with a still greater vehemence, it is perhaps more with a regard to the necessity of thinking through its error than out of a protectiveness for any of
its discernible truths. It is the inevitability of the error of not thinking Being as such that is, for later Heidegger, thoughts innermost provocation.
In 1933, Heideggers error in relation to classical ontology is that he
endeavors to overcome it by a reversal. Heideggers concomitant error in

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relation to National Socialism is that he chooseswithout, however, any

unavoidabilitynot to foresee how the movement would quash a contestation of classical ontology. National Socialism failed, but its failure was
not the failure of knowledge exhorted in the rectorial address. From the
overtaxing of the regimes paranoiac classications and monitoring of the
social eld, Heidegger was to await in vain the presencing of that which is
present, the revelation of the Being of beings in its precedence to governmental control. Even in its failure, National Socialism refused to allow the
question of Being to become the overt and pervasive question of Germany.
It ensured that Dasein would either quickly nd itself in its everydayness
in the task of the reconstruction of an occupied Germany or not nd itself,
in death. World was not permitted to light up in the failure of the regime,
since the question of the state, of its relation to its world, was not revived
in response to the collapse of the National Socialist dictatorship, but settled
in advance by the occupying powers. A Germany outside the control of a
state, and thus outside the understanding of Being as presence fundamental to control, was not something to which either the Nazis or the Allies
aspired. In a sense, the dictatorship was a failure of failure and, on that account, it was perhaps the exemplary system of control. Having in 1933 wagered on the worlding of the world in the regimes failure, Heidegger after
the war can only rue his opportunistic hopes for an exposure of the ontological foundations of control.
Heideggers engagement with National Socialism rests on a misprojection. In Hitlers seizure of power, he insanely managed to see the chance
of a fundamental redenition of the political. The ontology presupposed
in the classical understanding of the povli~ was to be contested by the simultaneous emergence and nonemergence of the Being of the German
Volk. Heidegger wants to stand the povli~ on its head and to ground the
new Germany in concealedness. To the Greek povli~ of the full visibility
of the glorious deed, of the deliverance from anonymity and the establishment in the lasting fame of presence, Heidegger opposes the povli~
that, by its failure rigorously to defend its claim to self-groundedness, lies
open to Being in its essential withdrawal. Heideggers povli~ is the povli~
that knows its own essential unknowability. It is the povli~ whose selfknowledge reaches the point of the failure of knowledge. Implicit in the
rectorial address, and therefore unobtrusive in its absurdity, is the conception of a National Socialism that would reach beyond the controllability of
beings (their recognizability in presence as the bearers of such and such

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properties, and thus their trackability) to their truth in the transcendence

of Being. The povli~ of the recollection of Being is the povli~ of concealment rather than of control. It is without glory but not privatively. In An
Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger sets forth the relations between the
Greek notion of fame and the understanding of Being as presence:
To glorify, to attribute regard to, and disclose regard means in Greek: to place in
the light and thus endow with permanence, being. For the Greeks glory was not
something additional which one might or might not obtain; it was the mode of
the highest being. For moderns glory has long been nothing more than celebrity
and as such a highly dubious affair, an acquisition tossed about and distributed by
the newspapers and the radioalmost the opposite of being.39

Heidegger does not disparage the celebrity of radio and newsprint simply
out of nostalgia for the Greek notion of glory. Greek glory is here suggested
only to be preferable.40 Heidegger dismisses celebrity as almost the opposite of Being: the understanding of Being as presence is inherited without
being appropriated, let alone contested in a questioning concerning the
essence of Being. If Heidegger, in 1933, evokes a tragic conception of the
povli~ as a whole and an accordingly anonymous catastrophe before necessity, it is because the question of Being can only be raised anew by calling
glory itself into question. For Heidegger, the aim of the Gleichschaltung
(falling into line) under Hitler was not to bring about the unity of the public realm and its reformation as the site of the full visibility of the glorious
deed. Instead, its aim was the mobilization of the masses for the knowledge
of the concealment at the heart of unconcealment, of the inglorious essence
of glory. Heideggers povli~ is to ask more of itself than glory, because it is
to ask after that which is never merely present. Raising the question of Being, this other povli~ endeavors to think Dasein in its uncontrollability.
Control is to be overcome for the sake, not of a pacist utopia, but of the
violence of time tearing identity away from itself in presence. The Being of
Dasein, which for Heidegger is temporality, is no longer to go unthought.
In glorys understanding of Being as presence, the debasement of Dasein
has its inconspicuous, and thus insidious, beginnings. Appealing to their
love of glory, classical ontology was able to estrange the Greeks from their
other great lovefalsehood.41 The powers of untruth, which still convulsed the povli~, retreat before the increasing veriability of beings. From
the glorious deed of the Greek povli~, a genealogical line can be traced
down to the breeding programs dear to National Socialism. Heidegger, in
the rectorial address, thus covertly goads Hitler to failure so that Dasein

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might be recovered for its world from the derivative certainty of selfgroundedness. Within the new regimes prospects of failure, Heidegger believes he makes out, if there alone, an understanding of the transcendence
of Dasein at variance with the espoused biologism. Out of an attention to
failure, the praiseworthy deed, in which Aristotle situates the causa nalis
for the institution of the povli~,42 comes under a suspicion that is likewise
the most arrant gullibility with respect to the truth of the failure in store
for Nazi Germany.
As much as National Socialism failed, it did not thereby usher in the
era of Daseins authenticity. The understanding of Being as presence, in
which the glorious deed enjoyed its recognizability, and recognizability deployed itself as state control, did not yield to an understanding of the transcendence of Dasein. Dasein was delivered up to death and the administrative measures of the occupying powers, since the regime refused to be
survived by its failure. Not unlike Heidegger, but out of Byronic hypochondria rather than opportunism, it ultimately viewed its failure as its
work and achievement. Once the regime could no longer appropriate its
own failures, it strove instead to assimilate itself to the catastrophe that was
befalling it. National Socialism would make this disaster its own by contributing to it. As it had created everything, everything would have to accompany it in its destruction. The Fatherland that the regime had invented
as a sponge for surplus labor was not to remain behind. In the name of national defense, the NSDAP had preached rearmament and courted military disaster for the purpose of an immediate economic remedy. In the
event, the regime was not prepared to defend its ad hoc Fatherland by a
surrender on conditions.
National Socialism was state suicide. It is by this aspect that Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattari, following Paul Virilio, distinguish it from Stalinism: Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of ight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of ight, which
it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that
from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were
bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and
the death of the Germans. 43
The Nazi regime knew how to turn away from the understanding of
Being as presence, but only by carrying all beings with it into a black hole.
From the insight into its own unviability as an enduring state, it grasped
that if it were to prove its control over life and death, it had to do so as

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quickly as possible through destruction. National Socialism cannot be said

to have been an anti-state simply because it was suicidal. It was rather a
grotesque parody of a statea state running fast. The war would thus
not have been over the question of the state as such, but over its tempo, as
Deleuze and Guattari suggest: Conversely, if capitalism came to consider
the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity and centralization of
the latter was more classical and less uid. 44
If dissolution was nally perceived by capitalism as the real danger, it
was not because it announced the reemergence of the stateless and borderless Germany of literary myth. No Romantic Volk of poets and thinkers was about to raise the question of Being against the very possibility of
control.
In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt recalls that Heidegger was
not alone in his appraisal of the situation:
The changed mood reected Germanys defeat, the point zero (as Ernst Jnger
called it) that for a few years seemed to promise a new beginning. In Heideggers
version: Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation
our planet has ever undergone . . . ? [Or] do we gaze into the evening of a night
which heralds another dawn? . . . Are we the latecomers . . . at the same time precursors of the dawn of an altogether different age, which has already left our contemporary historiological representations of history behind? It was the same
mood that Jaspers expressed at a famous symposium in Geneva in the same year:
We live as though we stood knocking at gates that are still closed. . . . What happens today will perhaps one day found and establish a world. This mood of hope
disappeared quickly in the rapidity of German economic and political recovery
from point zero; confronted with the reality of Adenauers Germany, neither
Heidegger nor Jaspers ever expounded systematically what must very soon have
appeared to them as a complete misreading of the new era.45

National Socialism did not go quietly, needless to say. Neither the Hitlerian dictatorship nor the occupying powers were prepared for the state to retreat to a minimal threshold of control, let alone to yield to the transcendence of Being-with-one-another.
That Heidegger, in 1933, could have harbored any expectations of a
survival from the failure of the Western state is perhaps in the end less a
sign of his navet than of his desperation. It may have been that, with none
of the condence that follows from a scrupulous assessment of existing

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conditions, Heidegger joined the NSDAP on the off-chance that the

course of the movement might be directed toward the failure in which Dasein would be recovered for its world. Inasmuch as the NSDAP was a German nationalist movement, its course, in Heideggers eyes, was already set
for the failure of knowledge in the encounter with the truth of the Volk. It
was a matter of maintaining its course. However unfathomable Heideggers
engagement was with regard to the divide between his conception of humanity and the regimes, it was not arbitrary. Heidegger mistook the fragility of National Socialism for the weak point in the hegemony of reication,
and he chose its insanity over the insanity of doing nothing. No doubt the
choice was for Heidegger, in his cruder sympathies, a little too easy. The
object of his choice, moreover, did not simply perpetuate the nihilism of
the reication of humanity, but dedicated itself to its aggravation.
Heideggers intimations of a povli~ of Being in the rectorial address
are exposed to misinterpretation through contiguous passages. The SelfAssertion of the German University does not always abstain from employing the motifs of the NSDAP. But neither does it restrict itself to bare
citation. Unlike other, less heterodox texts from his term as rector, Heidegger did not disown the address. He did not disown it, just as he did not
disown his private National Socialism. The rectorial address is, for Heidegger, the point of continuity between his writings before and after 1933.
As such, it is the most overt expression of that private National Socialism
which arguably is to be discerned elsewhere in his work. This private National Socialism is the politics of the failure of knowledge, of the truth that
confers itself as both the punishment and reward of the deance of concealedness. In his engagement with the Nazi regime, Heidegger did not
interrupt the thinking on the essence of truth that runs through his writings of the 1930s. What Heidegger all too cursorily sets out in the commentary on Aeschylus in the rectorial address can thus be read in conjunction with his more expansive treatments. Indeed, it must be read in this
manner if the radicality of his other understanding of the political is to be
ascertained.
In speaking of a deance of concealedness in the rectorial address,
Heidegger is not referring to knowledges quantitative progression into the
unknown. Concealedness is not to retreat before knowledge but is itself
to become the matter of knowledge. Concealedness is to reveal itself as
concealedness and thereby confer on knowledge the truth of beings. In
his 193132 lecture course Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet (Platos

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Parable of the Cave and Theaetetus), Heidegger contends that the Greek
denition of truth rests on an evasion of the task of a knowledge of
concealedness:
The signication of Being in the sense of presence is the reason that ajlhvqeia (unconcealment) is ground down to mere presence-at-hand (not gone), and concealment correspondingly to mere being-gone. This means however: the classical understanding of Being prevents the already dawning foundational experience of the
concealment of beings from being able, at its origin, to unfold itself in its proper
depth.46

Concealedness, according to this early reection on the dilemma of any

exposition of the ontological difference, is neither present nor absent. For
classical ontology, concealedness is, by contrast, the condition of that which
is not present. Whatever does not stand determinate in the light of knowledge is, for classical ontology, nonetheless able, inasmuch as it is, to stand
in the light of knowledgethe obstacles to a beings unconcealedness
are ultimately extrinsic to what it is in itself. Concealedness thus does not
become the occasion of a questioning of the understanding of Being as
presence, because it is subordinated to presence and dened negatively by
it as absence. Never permitted to confront knowledge with that which essentially cannot stand in its light, with that which is absent even as it is
present, concealedness does not reveal itself as concealedness to classical
ontology.
Classical ontology does not ask after the secret of concealedness,
which for Heidegger is the being that he names Dasein. It shies away
from a meditation on its uncanniness such as that which Heidegger reads
in Greek tragedy. In his lectures on Hlderlins hymn Der Ister, Heidegger addresses the chorus from Antigone in order to confront the ontological exception that is the human being: Uncanniness does not rst arise as
a consequence of humankind; rather, humankind emerges from uncanniness and remains within itlooms out of it and stirs within it. The uncanny itself is what looms forth in the essence of human beings and is that
which stirs in all stirring and arousal: that which presences and at the same
time absences. 47
The uncanniness of Dasein is its undecidability with respect to the
understanding of Being as presence. As the ecstases of originary temporality, Dasein essentially conceals itself from the presence in which knowledge
stands xed. Dasein conceals itself from the knowledge that only comes to
itself by falling away from a knowledge of the temporality from which its

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presence is derived. Knowledge can thus only fail in its deance of the superior power of concealedness and, in its failure, it must open up presence
to the truth of Dasein. Only in that failure of knowledge which is likewise a failure of presence will an authentic understanding of humanity
arise. Within such an understanding, the transcendence of Being-withone-another at the basis of the povli~ would no longer be reduced to the
controllable identity of the subjects of a state. The autonomy of the subject, the abstraction by which it won to the independence that was likewise
and still more its controllability, is exchanged for the anarchy of time.
In the failure of the German university, the state itself is to fail.
Through committing itself to the mission of the German university, the
state commits itself to a knowledge of that which cannot be known and
that notwithstanding, as the foundation of knowledge, is that which
knowledge must above all seek to know. In the rectorial address, the desirability of this failure is assumed, rather than proved. Why the truth of what
is should resist being known, and why it should confer itself on the knowledge that fails is set forth in On the Essence of Truth. The latter text, according to Otto Pggeler, was in its rst version much closer to the language of the rectorial address: The discussion in the 1930 lecture was . . .
about Daseins standing up against the concealment of beings as a whole,
about a stand which shatters on the power of concealment. 48 The published version from 1943, in which the later Heideggers notion of releasement is already evident, appears alien to the tragic conception of the rectorial address. But even in this version, the less occasional and more
expansive On the Essence of Truth lends itself to attempts to interpret
the 1933 text. Failure in The Self-Assertion of the German University, as
a failure with relation to knowledge, is error in On the Essence of Truth.
How can error, then, be desirable? The belief in its undesirability, as
Heidegger writes in the 1933 34 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,
and as Hegel had argued before him, is itself the error: We have no logic
of error, no real elucidation of its essence because we always take error negatively. This is the fundamental error that dominates the entire history of
the concept of truth. 49 Knowledge is to fail but not in the way that failure
is understood and contained in theodicies. In saying that there has never
been a logic of error, Heidegger asserts that even in theodicies, error is
taken negatively. The explanation and exoneration of error in the Hegelian
theodicy, for instance, is a negation of the inexplicability and inexcusability specic to error. Heideggers proposed logic of error would not explain

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away error by subordinating it to truth as unconcealment. Error is to be

elucidated by being acknowledged in its questionability. The exhortation
to failure in the rectorial address has to be set out in terms of the task of
a logic of error. The objection to National Socialism is that it erred too
little. After 1933, Heidegger cannot simply put the error of his own engagement behind him.
In its reliance on the argument of the earlier lecture On the Essence
of Truth, The Self-Assertion of the German University resolves into the
same fundamental thesis regarding freedom. The apparent arbitrariness of
Heideggers adoption of the word freedom for an enquiry into the
essence of truth is belied by the exposition of Dasein in which it occurs.
The lecture On the Essence of Truth, properly speaking, does not adopt
the meaning of the word freedom, but rather denes it with an originarity from which the freedom of the autonomous subject at once derives and
deviates. The freedom of the latter, as the freedom of a subject determined
by an abstraction from its world by at, presupposes an understanding of
Being in which beings have been established in their distinctness. Heideggers enquiry into the essence of truth is an enquiry into the claim to originarity of this understanding of Being. In the conventional denition of
truth as adequation, the distinctness of beings ensures the plurality in
which the referentiality of both true and false judgments is deployed, as
well as the unequivocality in which true judgments consist. But the referentiality itself of adequation goes unexplained in an understanding of beings in which each being is held apart in the fullness of its presence.
Discussing adequation in the example of a statement and a coin, Heidegger stresses the convergence alongside the divergence:
How can what is completely dissimilar, the statement, correspond to the coin? It
would have to become the coin and in this way relinquish itself entirely. The statement never succeeds in doing that. The moment it did, it would no longer be able
as a statement to be in accordance with the thing. In the correspondence the statement must remainindeed even rst becomewhat it is. In what does its
essence, so thoroughly different from every thing, consist? How is the statement
able to correspond to something else, the thing, precisely by persisting in its own
essence? 50

The statement, according to Heidegger, is adequate to its object only inasmuch as it remains in its distinctness and does not converge with it. Yet by
remaining in its distinctness, it is unable to converge with its object and
state its truth.

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This convergence is not the matter of the distinctness of beings, but

rather of that which Heidegger calls the Open:
As thus placed, what stands opposed must traverse an open eld of opposedness
[Entgegen] and nevertheless must maintain its stand as a thing and show itself as
something withstanding [ein Stndiges]. This appearing of the thing in traversing
a eld of opposedness takes place within an open region, the openness of which is
not rst created by the presenting but rather is only entered into and taken over as
a domain of relatedness. The relation of the presentative statement to the thing is
the accomplishment of that bearing [Verhltnis] that originarily and always comes
to prevail as a comportment [Verhalten].51

The adequation of a statement to an object is a relation consummated in

neither the statement nor the object. Truth has to be sought elsewhere,
namely, in the comportment that brings about the relation because it alone
is free to do so: The openness of comportment as the inner condition of
the possibility of correctness is grounded in freedom. The essence of truth,
as the correctness of a statement, is freedom. 52 The essence of truth, as the
condition of possibility of reference, is the ontological freedom that transgresses the distinctness of beings.
Heidegger immediately cautions against interpreting this proposition
as ascribing the essence of truth to human caprice. Certainly, the human
being is introduced in the discussion with the notion of comportment, but
the human being is to be rst dened by the notion of comportment in the
essence of truth: Consideration of the essential connection between truth
and freedom leads us to pursue the question of the human essence in a regard that assures us an experience of a concealed essential ground of the human being (of Dasein), and in such a manner that the experience transposes us in advance into the originarily essential domain of truth. 53
It is with a notion of freedom obtained through a meditation on truth
that Heidegger comes to the question of the human in the sense, as he
claries in a parenthesis, of Dasein. Heideggers ontological notion of freedom is not simply imposed as a further attribute on the human; rather, it
brings to the fore the ontological freedom that is proper to Dasein itself in
its transcendence. Emphasizing that the human being is to be understood
as Dasein, Heidegger is emphasizing in this passage that which has traditionally been considered as other than an attribute, namely, existence. The
human being is to be understood in its relation to originary temporality,
that is, to the nitude of its existence, rather than in terms of the attributes
by which it is apprehended as a being present-at-hand. For Heidegger, only

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the human being exists and is Dasein, because only the human beingin
his or her projects and Being-toward-deathhas a denitive relation to
temporality as such, and not simply to the present.
The enquiry into the essence of truth turns to the human being as a
being that exists and must exist because the understanding of truth as adequation remains inexplicable on the basis of beings that are present-athand and whose identity is dened without recourse to the temporality
that reaches beyond the discrete now. The actuality of adequation is accordingly a proof of existence, of mortality and of the freedom of existence.
It is a proof of a being that is able to hold together two distinct beings and
overcome even the greatest separation in the moments of their apprehension. The synthesis in adequation, which is the achievement of memory
and projection, cannot be ascribed to a faculty of a being present-at-hand
without at once relinquishing any insight into the role of ecstatic temporality in the traditional understanding of truth. Dasein is the freedom of
time itself. Freedom, as it is disclosed in the essence of truth, is not the
familiar freedom of the subject. It is not a property that accrues to the
subject in the abstraction from its world and that, given the questionable
feasibility of this abstraction, must always remain a tenuous possession.
The freedom of the essence of truth is the truth of the vitiated freedom
with which the subject raises only a feeble protest against its reication.
This other, originary freedom does not belong to a humanity whose denition already does not essentially distinguish it from an object. Freedom, according to Heidegger, is transcendence: The human being does not possess freedom as a property. At best, the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent,
disclosive Da-sein, possesses the human beingso originarily that only it
secures for humanity that distinctive relatedness to beings as a whole as
such which rst founds all history. Only the ek-sistent human being is
historical. 54
Freedom is not a property of the human being. As existence, as existence grasped etymologically in its standing outside of itself, freedom
belongs to a different understanding of Being than that according to which
beings stand within themselves and deliver themselves up to a recognition
of their properties. For classical ontology, the presence of beings is their unconcealment and thus their truth. But the properties of that which is unconcealed can, for Heidegger, never constitute the truth of Dasein. Dasein
is freedom. It is the freedom of originary temporality as it makes sense of
the now-sequence by which the conventional understanding of time issues

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in aporias. For Heidegger, the freedom of humanity is not its elevation

above history into the presence that is simply the neglect of originary temporality. Instead, humanity is freedom precisely to the extent that it is historical. The historicality of humanity, and thus its freedom, is its rootedness in the world of a people. By adhering to this rootedness, and not by
repudiating it, Dasein escapes the identiability consequent on an abstraction from its world and the reduction to a being present-at-hand. A people
is Daseins power of indetermination and the basis of its title to the essence
of truth. The freedom that as the truth of adequation transgresses the distinctness of the statement and its object is the historicality of Dasein.
Only inasmuch as Dasein is historical, only inasmuch as it is always
being carried beyond the presence that can never be its own but is rather
the presence of the things in its world, is adequation between a statement
and an object possible. Adequation takes place in the openness of Dasein,
in the openness that is its Being-with. But this openness, which is the
essence of truth, of unconcealment (ajlhvqeia), is not itself unconcealed,
since it always transcends the presence in which it could be apprehended
in its openness. After isolating the attunement of beings in adequation
from these beings themselves, Heidegger thus suggests that the essence of
Dasein is concealment:
Letting beings be, which is an attuning, a bringing into accord, prevails throughout and anticipates all the open comportment that ourishes in it. Human comportment is brought into denite accord throughout by the openedness of beings
as a whole. However, from the point of view of everyday calculations and preoccupations this as a whole appears to be incalculable and incomprehensible. It
cannot be understood on the basis of the beings opened up in any given case,
whether they belong to nature or to history. Although it ceaselessly brings everything into denite accord, still it remains indenite, indeterminable; it then coincides for the most part with what is most eeting and most unconsidered. However, what brings into accord is not nothing, but rather a concealing of beings as a
whole. Precisely because letting-be always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole.
Letting-be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing. In the ek-sistent freedom
of Da-sein a concealing of beings as a whole comes to pass [ereignet sich]. Here
there is concealment.55

In the freedom of Dasein there is concealment. This freedom is the essence

of ajlhvqeia, but it is also that which refuses to be unconcealed. As such,
freedom is the originary un-truth of ajlhvqeia. It is the error that is inextricably both the failure and fulllment of knowledge. In the concealment of

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Dasein, the revelation of beings as a whole occurs and thus does not occur.
The revelation of beings as a whole reveals itself as concealment. Truth, understood in its essence, merges with the darkness of error. If to know the
truth of a given being presupposes a knowledge of the essence of truth, beings can only be known in the presence of truth by rst being known in the
failure to apprehend Dasein. It is as the world intangible to everyday reckoning, and not as subjective caprice, that Dasein is the truthand essential error of beings. Daseins freedom is that which never fell within the
scope of classical ontology, because it constituted the Un-thought of its understanding of Being as presence. Metaphysics did not set itself the task of
failing before a knowledge of time. The enduring dissatisfaction of metaphysics with the denition of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus (already
disputed, as it were in advance, by Plato in the Theaetetus) never passed beyond dissatisfaction. An inquiry into the essence of truthin which an
understanding of humanity irreducible to reication could have gained
groundwas not undertaken.
In 1933, Heidegger believed the opportunity had arisen for a confrontation with the truth of Dasein. The Self-Assertion of the German
University is testimony to that conviction. How could National Socialism and not merely in retrospecthave encouraged such a conviction?
The 1933 34 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit says of Hitler:
When today the Fhrer repeatedly speaks of reeducation in conformity with the
National Socialist worldview, this does not mean teaching a few slogans. On the
contrary, it means bringing about a complete change, a world schema on the basis of
which he educates the people as a whole. National Socialism is not one doctrine
among others, but rather the change from the ground up of the German and, as
we believe, also the European world.
This beginning of a great history of a people, as we see it with the Greeks,
extends to all dimensions of human activity. With it things step into openness and
truth. But in the same moment human beings also step into untruth. The latter
begins only then.56

Hitler is the promise of an encounter with untruth. What criteria could

have determined the philosophical success of the encounter without at once
proving, through the certainty of the judgment, that an encounter with the
abyssality of error had not taken place? Even if the question is unavoidable,
even if the philosophical project of 1933 appears unfeasible (in the sense
that it could never be carried to the point of a clear result), it does not excuse reading the rectorial address simply for what it says in the jargon of

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the regime. Beyond what it all too clearly says in the worst of rhetorics, 57
The Self-Assertion of the German University speaks of a deance of
concealment that in all likelihood has no counterpart outside Heideggers
own writings. The interpretation of the verse by Aeschylus is Heideggerian rather than National Socialist. But Heideggers refusal to keep his
philosophical utterances separate from his utterances as a proselyte of the
NSDAP means that he himself was persuaded of the convergence between
his thinking and the regime. Inasmuch as what is at issue is a convergence
and not an identity, the relations between jargon and philosophy in the
rectorial address are not without a noticeable friction. This friction was
seized upon by Heidegger after the war and exaggeratedly depicted as antagonism. The trade-offs and the insane stratagems that unify the text, and
that rendered possible its attempt at a redenition of National Socialism,
were thereby pushed to the rear.
Under Heideggers leadership, the German university was to assert itself in accordance with its essence as the will to knowledge. It was to assert
itself as a deance of concealment, rather than as a deance of Hitler. National Socialism was to be incited to participate in the failure that is reserved for the deance of concealment. In the rectorial address, the only
enemy of National Socialism is invisibility. Even after 1933, in his criticisms
of the regimes nihilism, Heidegger does not admit any other opponent.
Whatever stands in the presence of the light of knowledge stands already
in the forgetfulness of the concealment of Being, and as it shares this with
National Socialism, it is never able to mount an opposition on the basis
of an alternative. Heideggers private National Socialism in his rectorial
address is the substitution of the regimes fundamental alternative for the
regime itself: the essence of National Socialism ceases to be an apparatus
of control resting on classical ontology and becomes the chance of an encounter with the concealment from which control denitively retreats.
This substitution in the rectorial address explains the laudatory tone
in which Heidegger greets the new era and for which he has been both
justly and unjustly reproached. The justice and the injustice of the reproach involve, not Heideggers person, but the question of a response to
the enduring reality of fascism. To wish to hear nothing in the rectorial address of the other National Socialism that is the other of National Socialism is to wish to hear nothing of the ambiguity that is arguably the element
of a fundamental confrontation with fascism. The rectorial address offers

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concealment by way of an alternative to National Socialism and, in a sense,

thereby offers nothing by way of an alternative. What it rallies against National Socialism is the power of the false. An alternative to the regime that
stood against it in the clarity of an exclusive disjunction would have mitigated its opposition through its very distinctness. The principle of the control of beings, of which National Socialism was the exemplary implementation, would not have been contested.
Heideggers private National Socialism is the alternative to National Socialism that is at the same time the essence of its truth. It is the
thought of the originary concealment of beings on which the regime rested
and on which it could not, in its certainty concerning the controllability of
beings, acknowledge itself to rest. Heideggers private National Socialism
is not so much the theory of the fascist revolution of 1933 as the thought of
the povli~ that is always already founded in concealment before it is
brought to light and established in its identity within presence. This other
povli~ is other only inasmuch as it is the povli~ that is never other, since,
in the transcendence by which it is a Being-with, it never fully reveals itself
as one povli~ set apart from another. It is the povli~ that is the community
of the erring of transcendence. According to the lecture course Hlderlins
Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, the povli~ is comparable in its originarity to poetry and thought. With the comparison to poetry, Heideggers
povli~ is distinguished from Platos conception. It is distinguished for the
sake of that ambiguity (i.e., the concealment, not the polysemy) of the poetic word which led Plato to banish poets from the povli~ that is to be
founded in presence. Heideggers povli~ is the inconspicuous povli~ that
precedes foundation in presence, because it is the povli~ of the transcendence that is the originary concealment of Dasein. In its failure, knowledge
is to open itself up to this other povli~. It is to open itself up to the authentic Being-with-one-another by which Heidegger understands the German Volk.
The Self-Assertion of the German University is a folkish text. Its
folkishness does not conne itself to a few terminological concessions
made to the regime but rather reaches into the heart of Heideggers thinking. In 1933, Heidegger attempts to lead the masses of National Socialism
to the confrontation with classical ontology from which the Volk might
have been born. The opportunism of Heideggers engagement marks even
the peroration of the rectorial address. Heidegger concludes:

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We can only fully understand the glory and greatness of this decampment, however, if we carry within ourselves that deep and broad thoughtfulness upon which
the ancient wisdom of the Greeks drew in uttering the words:

ta; ... megavla pavnta ejpisfalh`

All that is great stands in the storm . . .
(Plato, Republic, 497d, 9) 58

Heideggers translation of Platos text is infamously inaccurate. But the

storm that in the jargon of National Socialism substitutes for what
Friedrich Schleiermacher had translated as thought-provoking (bedenklich) is likewise the storm of a total mobilization for the task of provoking
thought to its failure before fate. The philosopher is no longer to shelter
against a wall from the storm of dust and hail with which Plato compares
the lawlessness and impiety of political life (496d), since the great has its element in the storm as much as it is threatened by it. Everything great is at
risk (to give yet another, and more conventional, interpretation of the line
quoted from Plato), and for Heidegger in 1933, it is the decision implicit in
risk that seemingly constitutes greatness.

3
The Feast

Heideggers resignation of the rectorship of Freiburg University in

1934 cannot be understood as a simple withdrawal from politics. The question of the essence of the German people, which Heidegger raises repeatedly in the months of his open engagement with National Socialism, does
not surrender its sudden prominence in his writings with the transfer of
ofce. Instead, this question becomes the site of a confrontation with the
regime and its understanding of the political, because it becomes entwined
for Heidegger with the question of the essence of poetry. The alleged apoliticality of the latterthis most innocent of occupations 1assumes a
critical force.
It lies, however, in the nature of this confrontation to risk being overlooked. In Heideggers lectures on Hlderlin, poetry is not presented in rivalry with National Socialism. It is not shown to contend with National
Socialism for power. What poetry disputes, according to Heidegger, is not
so much the regimes possession of power as the very denition of the political underlying disputes over the possession of power. Refusing to dispute the possession of power, poetry refuses the commensurability with
National Socialism that a common object would guarantee. And through
this refusal, it rebuffs the claim of the universal to arbitrate over politics.
Poetry challenges National Socialism by not challenging it. It cannot contend with it for possession of the German people, because only within a deracinated politics does a people cease to be the political itselfthe openness of the povli~ and the clearing of beingsand become an object of
struggle. The more originary politics of poetry, and its auspiciousness for
the question of the essence of the Volk, consists in its irreducibility to the
Dingbegriffe (logical categories) of classical ontology. Poetry is itself the po-

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litical: Heideggers texts in the 1930s and early 1940s think through this
identity in distinction from a politics of the present-at-hand.
That Heideggers question concerning the essence of poetry, as it is
formulated in numerous lectures in the years following the resignation of
the rectorship, is a question against National Socialism appears to be Heideggers own estimation in the interview conducted with Der Spiegel in
September 1966, where he says: After I stepped down as rector I limited
myself to teaching. In the summer semester of 1934 I lectured on Logic.
In the following semester I gave the rst Hlderlin lecture. In 1936, I began the Nietzsche lectures. Anyone with ears to hear heard in these lectures
a confrontation with National Socialism. 2
Out of impatience with the delay in his rehabilitation, Heidegger
pronounces the confrontation in his lectures unmistakable. This declared
unmistakability, nonetheless, can scarcely be brought into agreement with
the conventional sense of confrontation. What is unmistakable after the
lecture course Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache is that Heidegger elaborates its treatment of both language and the Volk into a critical destruction of aesthetics. It is in the meditations on artwithout any
clear precedent in the texts composed before the resignation of the rectorshipthat Heideggers disaffection with National Socialism is to be discerned. For Heidegger, with the question of art, the question of the German essence is raised.
The confrontation in the lectures on Hlderlin and the confrontation in the lectures on Nietzsche, however closely related in their focus on
art, are by no means reducible to the one stratagem. Although Hlderlin
did not escape appropriation by the regime (in 1943, the one-hundredth
anniversary of his death was the occasion of a visit by Hitler to his grave
and the founding of the Hlderlin Gesellschaft under Goebbelss patronage), Heidegger never asserted that there was ultimately a consistency between Hlderlin and National Socialism. But, as Heidegger wrote to the
new rector of Freiburg University on November 4, 1945, with Nietzsche it
was another matter:
Beginning in 1936 I embarked on a series of courses and lectures on Nietzsche,
which lasted until 1945 and which represented in even clearer fashion a declaration
of spiritual resistance. In truth, it is unjust to assimilate Nietzsche to National Socialism, an assimilation whichapart from what is essentialignores his hostility to anti-Semitism and his positive attitude with respect to Russia. But on a

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higher plane, the debate with Nietzsches metaphysics is a debate with nihilism as
it manifests itself with increased clarity under the political form of fascism.3

Whether even on a higher plane the assimilation of Nietzsche to National

Socialism is justied has become a familiar question through the commentaries of Deleuze, Derrida, Klossowski, and others. For Heidegger, the
higher plane on which Nietzsche reveals his afnity with National Socialism, his essential truth as a thinker, is the doctrine of the will to power. The
interrogation of the preconditions of this reading, such as its reliance on
the magnum opus manufactured by Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche, its decient suspicion of the admissibility of the National Socialist appropriations and its systematization of a corpus that owes more to the feuilleton
than to scholasticism, has not of itself diminished the force of Heideggers
critique of National Socialism. In certain respects, Nietzsche functions
largely as an expedient cipher in this critique.
Nietzsche becomes the proper name of nihilism just as Hlderlin
becomes, as is explicit in the title of the 1936 lecture in Rome, the proper
name of poetry. As such, Heidegger views them in the lecture course
Hlderlins Hymne Andenken (Hlderlins Hymn Andenken) as poles in
the question of the essence of the people: Nietzsche and Hlderlinan
abyss separates the two. In abyssally different ways, both of them determine
the nearest and the most distant future of the Germans and of the West. 4
The abyss that divides Hlderlin and Nietzsche is the abyss that divides poetry and National Socialism. And it is in this abyss, rather than on a common ground, that the confrontation takes place. If Heidegger claims that
his lectures on Hlderlin amount to a confrontation with the regime, it is
because he exhibits Hlderlin as the poet who promises another Germany
than that of National Socialism, the more originary Germany portrayed by
Hlderlin as the priestess at the feast of the peoples. This other Germany
is not present-at-hand. As the question concerning the essence of poetry
involves, for Heidegger, a destruction of the understanding of Being as
presence, it is a question that involves the ontological mission of the German Volk. Raising the question of the Un-thought of nihilism, the lectures
on Hlderlin inform the critique offered in the lectures on Nietzsche. Heideggers resignation of the rectorship is not an abdication before the political as such. In his subsequent lectures, he undertakes a critique of the politics of the present-at-hand and its constitutive inability to question the
will to power and, hence, to think the Un-thought of nihilism. To attempt

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a repetition of Heideggers thinking on the essence of poetry is thus to seek

to understand the nature, and positive inspiration, of his disavowal of National Socialism.
For Heidegger, his confrontation with nihilism in the 1930s and early
1940s was a confrontation with National Socialism. Yet, inasmuch as he
was permitted to lecture until the end of the war and at the height of the
terror, the confrontation must be said to have been ambiguous. National
Socialism itself was expressly a confrontation with nihilism in the guise
of liberal democracy. In his 1936 lecture course on Schelling, Heidegger
still subscribes to this view, praising Hitler and Mussolini for introducing
countermovements to nihilism.5 The nihilism that Heidegger, in the reigning atmosphere of denunciation, disputed in Hlderlins name came to encompass National Socialism because it encompassed a general conception
of the political. Although the regime is criticized, it is never on account of
its particularity as one political formation among many. Heideggers confrontation with National Socialism is likewise ambiguous because Heidegger retained the Nazi topoi of German renewal and the lament over nihilism. Everything thus depends on the way these topoi are used.
In order to establish poetrys irreducibility to nihilism and thus the
peoples irreducibility to National Socialism, it must be asked in what Heideggers conception of nihilism consists. How does it differ, if at all, from
the National Socialist caricature of liberal democracies? In his 1942 lecture
course Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, Heidegger subscribes to this caricature
of the declared enemies of Germany:
We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland [Heimat], and that means: the commencement of the Western world. Whatever has the character of commencement is indestructible. Americas entry into this planetary war is not its entry into history;
rather, it is already the ultimate American act of American ahistoricality and selfdevastation. For this act is the renunciation of commencement, and a decision in
favor of that which is without commencement. The concealed spirit of the commencement in the West will not even have the look of contempt for this trial of
self-devastation without commencement, but will await its stellar hour from out
of the releasement and tranquillity that belong to the commencement.6

It is difcult to see a confrontation with National Socialism in such a passage. Indeed, Heideggers spiritual resistance never formulated itself, in
either his lectures or even his posthumously published private notes, in
terms of a solidarity with the enemies of the regime. Heidegger suggests

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that the entry of Roosevelts America into the war does not pose a threat to
the Europe of National Socialist imperialism. Nihilism, which the movement never failed to attribute to Anglo-Saxon America, is manifest in the
latters self-devastation just as the originarity of Europe ensures its invulnerability. Heideggers thesis is that victory lies with the originary, and
hence danger arises not from an opponents military and industrial superiority but from an inability to remain within the origin. Such reasoning appears little more than propaganda. But is the origin the Germany of National Socialism? Heideggers confrontation with the regime enacts itself as
the drawing of a distinction between the two.
In the 1941 42 lecture course Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, Heidegger is explicit on the character of the origin and the danger it faces:
The sporadic abandonment of the German essence to Americanism already reaches the disastrous point at which Germans are ashamed that their
people was once called the people of poets and thinkers. 7 The essence
and originarity of the German people is to be the people of poets and
thinkers. And that this should be their essence and originarity is not because they are, ineluctably, a people of poets and thinkers, but rather because they will be essential and originary only as such a people. In 1941 42,
the Germans are surrendering their essence and hence the essential. Germany itself threatens the people of poets and thinkers. It is in delity to the
essential that the Volk attests to its originarity and thus to its invulnerability. By breaking with the denition of the German people as the people of
poets and thinkers, by mobilizing the population as workers and soldiers,
and hence by emulating that which Jnger in The Worker considers AngloSaxon Americas preeminent achievement, National Socialism relinquishes
its only possibility of withstanding invasion. National Socialism mistakes
what is to be defended and surrenders the very moment it begins preparations for war.
For Heidegger, invulnerability rests with the maintenance of the
essence of a people and not with the survival of the biologically determined
entities of which it is seemingly composed. Nihilism, rather than death, is
the seemingly fateless danger that lies in wait for a people and its historical, that is, mortal, essence. As the people of poets and thinkers, Germany
is made perfect in military and industrial weakness. In Hlderlins Hymnen
Germanien und Der Rhein, Heidegger accordingly favors Hlderlins
image of Germany as a maiden lost in reverie and hidden in the forest over
the Niederwald monuments bloodthirsty gure with a giant sword.8 On

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the assumption that its distance from the perceived practices of AngloSaxon America preserves the Volk because it preserves its essence, Heidegger regards the motorization of the armed forces with the hostility toward
technology characteristic of his works of this period. In a note from the
incompletely delivered lecture course Nietzsche: Europischer Nihilismus
(Nietzsche: European Nihilism), he writes: Within the horizon of bourgeois culture and intellectualism one might, for example, view the complete, that is, fundamental motorization of the military from the ground
up as a manifestation simply of untrammelled technicism and materialism. It is in truth a metaphysical act that in its range certainly surpasses,
for instance, the abolition of philosophy. 9 The devastation that Heidegger fears is a withdrawal of the essence of the Volk. This devastation by
which nihilism announces itself can occur as much through military success as through military defeat.
In 1943, while lecturing on Heraclitus, Heidegger refers to the devastation of the cities on the Rhine and the Ruhr but proclaims that the real
disaster lies elsewhere. Everything pales before the calamity of nihilism:
Let us, however, posit the moment when the possibility of saying and understanding is is withdrawn from human beings. Let us attempt to think through,
even if only for a few minutes, what would then become of humanity. No catastrophe that could break over the planet can be compared with this most inconspicuous of all events in which the relation to is is suddenly taken from humanity. But this catastrophe has already taken place; it is simply that no one has yet
noticed it in its essence. Historical humanity has gone so far as to forget is and
Being, renouncing all thought of that which is named in this word. Indifference
toward Being lays siege to the planet. Humanity allows the ood of the forgetfulness of Being to wash over it. In truth, however, there is no longer even a diving within this ood, since for that to be the case, the forgetfulness of Being would
still need to be experienced. This forgetfulness of Being is itself already forgotten,
which, of course, conforms with the essence of forgetfulness, drawing down into
itself like a whirlpool everything that enters its vicinity.10

Another name for this obliviousness of Being is given in An Introduction to

Metaphysics: To forget Being and cultivate only beingsthat is nihilism.
Nihilism thus understood is the ground of the nihilism which Nietzsche exposed in the rst book of The Will to Power. 11 Nihilism, by which the
essence of the Volk is surrendered, shows itself in the inauthentic captivation with beings. In losing sight of Being for that which is and which as
such inhabits the repeatability of the now, classical ontology was itself ni-

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hilisticits legacy places itself between the Volk and its essential mission
of the question of Being. Classical ontology is the ground of the nihilism
that Nietzsche analyses in various contemporary manifestations without
ever grasping it in itself. Heidegger believes he thus comes to Nietzsches
assistance by furnishing both a single foundation for nihilism and the possibility of thinking its Un-thought.
A note from 1887 included in The Will to Power confesses:
Nihilism. It is ambiguous:
A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.
B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive
nihilism.12

Taking the term nihilism from Turgenev, Nietzsche extends its range
but, in doing so, renders the term ambiguousNietzsche does not grasp
that which Heidegger will name the essence of nihilism. For both Heidegger and Nietzsche, and in contrast to many National Socialist pronouncements, nihilism is everywhere. For Heidegger, however, it is everywhere
precisely because it names the temporally derivative structure of the repeatable: nihilism is the fundamental meaning of everywhere. In itself,
the ubiquity of nihilism betrays the irreducibility of Being to presence. The
people of poets and thinkers that disappears within nihilism is the people
of Being and, that is to say, of the alignment of the denitions of poetry
and thought with the question of Being.
Heideggers analysis of the planetary catastrophe of nihilism in the
passage from the lecture course on Heraclitus quoted above does not,
therefore, need to be understood as a retraction of his deant remarks a
year earlier. The indestructibility that he attributes to the originary in 1942
is not the spurious indestructibility of the untried, since the intervening
military offensives of Anglo-Saxon America have no bearing upon the hidden spirit of the originary. The originary is indestructible because, as the
Un-thought of a ubiquitous nihilism, it cannot be found and hence cannot be destroyed. That the originary withholds itself is, in 1942, grounds
for disregarding the escalation of hostilities, whereas, in 1943, it is itself
the catastrophe. The one proposition does not contradict the other, and it
is from within their coherence that Heidegger asserts: The planet is in
ames. The essence of humanity is out of joint. Only from the Germans,
assuming that they nd and defend what it is that is German, can the
world-historical sobriety [Besinnung] come. 13 That which is German (das

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Deutsche) is hidden from the Germans themselves and in its secrecy it consigns the planet to ruin. National Socialism is, properly speaking, a consequence, rather than a cause of the ruin of the age, which is alternately called
the forgetfulness of Being and the withholding of what it is that is German.
In the same lecture course, Heidegger explains that the sobriety that
is to come from the Germans will only come from them in their as yet unattained specicity as the people of Being:
Irrespective of the substance and manner in which the external fate of the West
may be articulated, the greatest and proper test of the Germans still lies ahead, that
test in which, at the hands of the ignorant, they are perhaps to be tested unwillingly as to whether they, the Germans, are in harmony with the truth of Being,
whether they are strong enough over and above a readiness to dieto save the
originary in its inconspicuous brilliance against the small-mindedness of the modern world.
The danger in which the holy heart of the peoples of the West stands is
not that of a decline; it is rather the danger that, in confusion ourselves, we will capitulate to the will of modernity and be driven along with it.14

Hlderlins holy heart of the peoples faces a test in which it is to prove itself properly German through the defense of the originary. The National
Socialist topos of German renewal is cited here without simply being replicated. The originarity of the German people, by which they stand in a contestation with modernity, is not, for Heidegger, the rustic gloss of a program of industrialization, but rather the priority of Being as it presses on
them its claim as the Un-thought of modern technicism. Heidegger advocates a willingness to die in the defense of this Un-thought in a war necessarily other than the one being waged by the regime. A Germany dened
as this Un-thought and nonetheless defended by the means of modern
technicism is a Germany left undefended before nihilism. The campaign
against nihilism by which his writings recall National Socialism is likewise
what distinguishes Heidegger from the regime.
In Overcoming Metaphysics, a collection of notes from this period, Heidegger refuses the world war, on account of the nihilism of its parties, any fundamental oppositionality or crisis. He thus suggests that the
confrontation will not take place between National Socialism and the alliance of its military opponents, but between power and that which is forgotten in power: The struggle between those who are in power and those
who want to come to power: on every side there is the struggle for power.
Everywhere power itself is what is determinative. Through this struggle

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for power, the being of power is posited in the essence of its unconditional
dominance by both sides. [. . .] This struggle is [. . .] in its essence undecidable. 15
In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger will reiterate that the war has
decided nothing.16 The decision must come from elsewhere. As the war has
not issued from a conict, there is no dispute that could be resolved in order to arrive at a peace. The difference between war and peace, according
to a further note from Overcoming Metaphysics, is inessential to the nihilism of the manipulation of beings:
There are effects everywhere, and nowhere is there a worlding of the world and yet,
although forgotten, there is still Being. Beyond war and peace, there is a mere
erring of the consumption of beings in the plans self-guaranteeing in terms of the
vacuum of the abandonment of Being. Changed into their deformation of essence,
war and peace are taken up into erring, and disappear into the mere course of
the escalating manufacture of what can be manufactured, because they have become unrecognizable with regard to any distinction. The question of when there
will be peace cannot be answered not because the duration of war is unfathomable,
but rather because the question already asks about something which no longer exists, since war is no longer anything which could terminate in peace. War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace.17

As the originary, and thus as that which is inconspicuous within the manufacture and consumption of beings, Germany is not at stake in such a war,
just as it falls to none of the parties in such a peace. It is this other Germany
that must be defended and yet, as this other Germany, it cannot be defended, at least not in the sense of safeguarding the integrity of geographical borders. As the Un-thought of modern technicism, Heideggers Germany is not a being among beings, which might thus be preserved rather
than exploited. Its defense involves the defense of the people within Being.
In order to defend this other Germany, the people must rst nd themselves within Being. The Germans must defend themselves by becoming
the people of poets and thinkers that they never were except in literary
journalism. Needless to say, it is not a matter of producing verses and treatises in place of armaments. The people of poets and thinkers is the people
that denes itself otherwise than through production. It is the people that
does not produce, because it does not tear beings away from nothingness
and place them in the light of presence and the possibility of their manipulation. In Heideggers confrontation with National Socialism, poetry and
thought are attributed an irreducibility to the nihilism of production.

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For Heidegger, the Germans will only survive the war as well as its
peace if they become the people of Hlderlin. In the 1934 35 lecture course
Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, Heidegger calls Hlderlin the founder of German Being. 18 As it is Hlderlin who grounds the
people of the Un-thought of nihilism, it is in the commentaries on Hlderlin that Heidegger attempts to think the confrontation between art and
National Socialism. What is brought to the fore in this confrontation is the
originary Germany forgotten by Nietzsche, National Socialism, and its
military opponents.
Poetry, for Heidegger, does not exhaust itself within nihilism. Such a
claim as yet says too little. Its resemblance to certain formulations of Nietzsches on arts relation to nihilism should not be overestimated. A passage
that Heidegger himself quotes from Nietzsches literary remains (and,
again, it is solely the Nietzsche of Heideggers polemic who is at issue) imputes a distance between art and nihilism. But signicantly, it is as the
power of enervation, and not as the obliviousness of Being, that Nietzsche here understands nihilism: Very early in my life I took the question
of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in
the face of this discordance. My rst book was devoted to it. The Birth
of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another beliefthat it is
not possible to live with truth, that the will to truth is already a symptom
of degeneration. 19
The decadence of the will to truth is its opposition to life. Heidegger quotes this passage in a reading of Nietzsches exposition of Platonism as nihilism. Summarizing this exposition, Heidegger writes:
The major debility of the basic force of Dasein consists in the calumniation and
denigration of the fundamental orienting force of life itself. Such defamation of
creative life, however, has its grounds in the fact that things are posited above life
which make negation of it desirable. The desirable, the ideal, is the supersensuous,
interpreted as genuine being [das eigentlich Seiende]. This interpretation of being
is accomplished in the Platonic philosophy. The theory of Ideas founds the ideal,
and that means the denitive preeminence of the supersensuous, in determining
and dominating the sensuous.20

To overcome nihilism is here, for Nietzsche, to overturn Platonism. Heidegger continues:

Overturning Platonism means, rst, shattering the preeminence of the supersensuous as the ideal. Beings, being what they are, may not be despised on the basis

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of what should and ought to be. But at the same time, in opposition to the philosophy of the ideal and to the installation of what ought to be and of the should,
the inversion sanctions the investigation and determination of that which isit
summons the question What is being itself ? If the should is the supersensuous, then being itself, that which is, conceived as liberated from the should, can
only be the sensuous. But with that the essence of the sensuous is not given; its
denition is given up. In contrast, the realm of true being, of the true, and thereby
the essence of truth, is demarcated; as before, however, already in Platonism, the
true is to be attained on the path of knowledge.21

With respect to the question of Being, Nietzsches inverted Platonism is as

reductive as the metaphysics it overturns, since both ground themselves in
the conviction that the truth of beings is a matter to be expounded in theories of knowledge. As a result, truth remains, with Nietzsche, that which
must be isolated from its doubles. Nietzsches afrmation of the sensuous,
of what he terms life and art, constitutes simply a further variant of the
nihilism of the obliviousness of Being. It is an afrmation that is fundamentally a negation, and not simply because the sensuous that is afrmed
denes itself as the negative of the supersensuous. The negation is the continued exclusion of Being as such through forgetfulness. Nietzsche retains
the antithesis of the sensuous and the supersensuous and thereby retains
the ontology of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. The confrontation with the
reductive ontology of nihilism cannot, for Heidegger, take place through
the sensuousness of the work of art. It is not by a single aspect that the work
of art presents this confrontation; it is not even by its entirety, since this
entiretyas the distinct assemblage of qualitiesfalls within the understanding of truth as adequation. The work of art, which for Heidegger is
essentially poetry, enacts a confrontation with nihilism because it restores
truth as adequation to its other origin in the concealment and unconcealment of Being.
Yet why should this be the privilege of the work of art? To what extent does Heidegger thereby replicate the nihilistic one-sidedness of Platonism and its Nietzschean inversion? These objections are addressed in
Heideggers most explicit response to the task of dening the work of art.
In The Origin of the Work of Art, composed in the period of the lectures
on Nietzsche and Hlderlin, Heidegger writes: The work as work sets up
a world. The work holds open the open region of the world. 22 The privilege of the work of art thus disappears into the world it establishes. That
the work of art is never simply itself for Heidegger can be read in his

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commentary, in The Origin of the Work of Art, on an inexactly specied

painting by van Gogh: Van Goghs painting is the disclosure of what the
equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This being emerges into
the unconcealment of its Being. The Greeks called the unconcealment
of beings ajlhvqeia. 23 Van Goghs painting discloses what the pair of peasant shoes truly is. This is not to disclose the peasant shoes in conformity
with the understanding of truth dominant in the natural sciences. What
emerges into unconcealment in the painting is not the comprehensive set
of properties of a being present-at-hand, but rather the Being of the peasant shoes. What is thus unconcealed in van Goghs painting is the very
questionability of unconcealment. Van Goghs painting reveals the limits
of revelation. Through depicting an object, it remains within the conventional understanding of representation and yet it likewise depicts the unrepresentable. In being depicted, the peasant shoes step beyond their ontic
self-evidence into the truth of their Being and the existence (Da-sein) of
their truth. The painting, Heidegger continues, restores to the shoes their
world: But above all, the work did not, as it might seem at rst, serve
merely for a better visualizing of what a piece of equipment is. Rather, the
equipmentality of equipment rst expressly comes to the fore through the
work and only in the work. 24 The true object of depiction in the work
of art is the objects otherwise overlooked equipmentality. In van Goghs
painting, equipmentality is the peasants world of the open elds in which
the use of the shoes is sustained. That the disclosure of equipmentality is
not being identied in The Origin of the Work of Art with an insight
into the optimal use of a piece of equipment is clear from Heideggers own
expansive description:
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the
worker stares forth. In the stify rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform
furrows of the eld swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the eld-path as evening
falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening
grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry eld.
This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread,
the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.25

For Heidegger, van Goghs painting discloses the peasant womans Beingin-the-world. That which denes the peasant shoes as equipment, namely,

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that which is their equipmentality, is the phenomenon of world in all its

fullness. In van Goghs painting of a pair of peasant shoes, a world appears.
But why should a pair of peasants shoes become so voluble through
being depicted in the work of art? In what way is the equipmentality that,
according to The Origin of the Work of Art, comes to light only in the
work of art different from the equipmentality disclosed, according to Being
and Time, in the broken, inappropriate, or missing tool? Perhaps the exclusiveness of the emergence of equipmentality claimed for the work of art
in the later text is not to be interpreted as a revision of the treatment in the
earlier text. Perhaps the work of art is nothing other than a broken, inappropriate or missing tool and can be nothing other if it is to be the means
of a confrontation with technicism. The Volk of the Un-thought of nihilism and the immersion in the manipulation of beings would therefore
more clearly be the people of the poets.
In Being and Time, art does not feature as a matter for exposition. In
what way is the argument of The Origin of the Work of Art pregured,
if at all, in Heideggers earlier examination of the disclosure of the equipmentality (Zeugsein) of the equipment (Zeug)? In 15 of Being and Time,
Heidegger writes of the character of readiness-to-hand that is proper to the
tool: The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its
readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw [zurckzuziehen] in order
to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. 26 That which is ready-to-hand,
and can thus be used as a tool (Zeug), is only ready-to-hand by means of
the withdrawal whereby, as Heidegger explains, the context of its readinessto-hand effaces itself. Without this context, a tool ceases to be a tool, and
yet this context must also withdraw if the tool is to be a tool: Taken
strictly, there is no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any
equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be
this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially something in-orderto . . . [etwas um-zu . . . ]. 27 In presenting itself immediately for use, a tool
cannot present the mediation of the equipmental totality whereby it is
what it is as something ready-to-hand. The totality of equipment is not the
sum of interrelated tools, but rather the context, in the fullest sense, of the
use of a given piece of equipment. Absorbed in the use of a tool, Dasein
overlooks its context and ignores the open-endedness of its in-order-to. So
long as it is employed, the tool keeps the world in which it is employed
secret. Alongside its individual function as a given piece of equipment,
equipmentas equipment that is employedhas the function of ward-

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ing off threats to Daseins immersion in the realm of that which Heidegger
in Being and Time describes as the everyday:
To the everydayness of Being-in-the-world there belong certain modes of concern.
These permit the entities with which we concern ourselves to be encountered in
such a way that the worldly character of what is within-the-world comes to the
fore. When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most
closely ready-to-hand may be met as something unusable, not properly adapted for
the use we have decided upon. The tool turns out to be damaged, or the material
unsuitable. In each of these cases equipment is here, ready-to-hand. We discover its
unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather
by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is
thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This conspicuousness presents
the ready-to-hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-to-hand.28

Here the inappropriate or damaged tool, like the unwearable peasant shoes
of van Goghs painting in The Origin of the Work of Art, discloses its
world.
But is world in Being and Time to be understood differently from
world in The Origin of the Work of Art? Certainly the style in which
they are described is different, but the prose of the earlier text does not imply that it is a prosaic world that is at issue. If Heidegger in 1927 had meant
by world only the systematic interrelations of a production process, then
Being and Time would be a work of simple pragmatism rather than of fundamental ontology. Reecting on the misinterpretations of his work, Heidegger writes in 1941:
For Heidegger, the world consists only of cooking pots, pitchforks, and lampshades. He has no relationship to higher culture, not to speak of Nature, because none of that is to be found in Being and Time.
The actual basis for this misinterpretation does not lie however in the sheer
superciality of the reading, but rather in the fact that one takes it for granted
that the author can be ascribed a desire to put forward a system of the world,
while something nonetheless quite different is being asked.29

The conspicuousness of equipment in the text of 1927 is not the clarity

with which it presents itself to the skilled eye of a time-and-motion expert.
This conspicuousness has to be understood more radically, as a rupture in
the very understanding of Being. Where readiness-to-hand presents itself, it is the transcendence of Daseins constitutive engagement with the
world that is at issue. The commentators who are unable to nd Nature in

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Being and Time have arguably placed limits in advance on Daseins transcendence and can thus make nothing in 15 of the readiness-to-hand of
poetic Nature: If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this
Nature itself can be discovered and dened simply in its pure presence-athand. But when this happens, the Nature which stirs and strives, which
assails us and enthralls us as a landscape, remains hidden. 30 As this excerpt
suggests, the world of Being and Time is not narrower than the world disclosed by the work of art.
The claim in The Origin of the Work of Art that it is only in the
work that the equipmentality of equipmentits readiness-to-handrst
comes to the fore does not contest the radicality of the ontological rupture
in Being and Time. The work of art does not exclude broken, inappropriate, or missing equipment, and neither is it simply interchangeable with
such equipment. Instead, it is its truth. The work of art sets up the world
that broken, inappropriate, or missing equipment merely discloses. The
disclosures of broken, inappropriate, or missing equipment are thus dependent on the work of art. Such a claim is, of course, no less peculiar than
the claim that the work of art is nothing other than a broken, inappropriate, or missing tool. But with the assertion of the priority of the work of
art, Heidegger endeavors to overcome the incidentality and fortuitousness
of the disclosures of broken, inappropriate, or missing equipment. The
work of art becomes the truth of these disclosures inasmuch as it is essentially that which the tool is only accidentally, namely, the occasion for the
question of Being. The work of art is, as it were, the tool that is at once broken, inappropriate, and missing in its very essence.
In van Goghs painting, the equipment of the peasant womans shoes
is missing, and it is a loss that can never be made good and can never be
overlooked. Readiness-to-hand does not withdraw behind the ready-tohand. The missing tooland it is its absence that the work of art presents
through the nonpresentation of depictionnever reveals merely itself. In
Being and Time, Heidegger writes:
Similarly, when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its everyday
presence [Zugegensein] has been so obvious that we have never taken any notice of
it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers.
Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the rst time
what the missing article was ready-to-hand with, and what it was ready-to-hand
for. The environment announces itself afresh.31

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The absence of the object of depiction is never a simple defect of the work
of art, because it exposes the objects transcendence (its in-order-to . . . ). Van
Goghs painting does not show a pair of peasants shoes, so much as the environment (Umwelt) in which they are worn. The shoes present themselves
to circumspection (Umsicht), insofar as the painting does not present a tool
for use. The work of art frustrates the call for a tool in offering only its image, and yet by this frustration, it gives more than the tool itself: it gives the
world from which technicism sustains itself in forgetfulness.
In conformity with his critical destruction in the 1930s of the nihilism of the traditional understanding of truth, Heidegger is emphatic in
The Origin of the Work of Art that the truth of the work of art is not to
be measured by the accuracy of the image of its object. More is at stake:
Agreement with what is has long been taken to be the essence of truth. But then,
is it our opinion that this painting by van Gogh depicts a pair of peasant shoes
somewhere at hand, and is a work of art because it does so successfully? Is it our
opinion that the painting draws a likeness from something actual and transposes
it into a product of artisticproduction? By no means.32

In painting the peasant shoes, van Gogh paints more than their mere imageand the measure of the work of art is thus not the measure of its representational accuracy. The above extract does not banish the notion of
representation from discussions of art.33 Heideggers rejection of the view
that the truth of art lies in its adequation to an extant object does not
amount to an appeal against the sentence that Plato lays upon mimesis in
The Republic. In order to follow Heideggers confrontation with both Platonism and its Nietzschean offshoot, the common underestimation and
supercial rebuttals of Platos thinking of mimesis must rst be dismissed.
In Book X of The Republic, Plato contends that mimesis is not the
preserve of the artist but also characterizes the product of the manual
worker in its distance from the Idea and thus from truth:
And what of the maker of the bed? Were you not saying that he too makes, not the
idea which according to our view is the real object denoted by the word bed, but
only a particular bed?
Yes, I did.
Then if he does not make a real object he cannot make what is, but only
some semblance of existence; and if anyone were to say that the work of the maker
of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.

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Not, at least, he replied, in the view of those who make a business of these
discussions.
No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth.34

As truth does not lie with the extant object, truth for Plato cannot be ascribed to the work of art on the basis of its adequation to an extant object.
Heidegger writes therefore in Nietzsche:
The distance from Being and its pure visibility is denitive for the denition of
the essence of the mimhthv~. What is decisive for the Greek-Platonic concept of
mivmhsi~ or imitation is not reproduction or portraiture, not the fact that the
painter provides us with the same thing once again; what is decisive is that this is
precisely what he cannot do, that he is even less capable than the craftsman of duplicating the same thing. It is therefore wrongheaded to apply to mivmhsi~ notions
of naturalistic or primitivistic copying and reproducing. Imitation is subordinate pro-duction.35

It is not its distance from the extant object but its distance from Being determined as presence in the Idea that is decisive for Platos thinking on the
work of art. With differing inspirations, both Plato and Heidegger consider art as a relic of a nonmetaphysical understanding of Being.36 Heidegger, for whom the possibility of a confrontation with the nihilism of Platonism rests with this distance from metaphysics, thus proposes mimesis as
the denition of art. In what is other than an impartial citation of Plato, he
asserts: But mivmhsi~ is the essence of all art. 37
It is worth noting that this sentence does not express a blindness to
nonrepresentative art, since the disavowal of an adequation with an extant
object that such art practices does not affect its subordination to its ijdeva.
The ijdeva of a nonrepresentative work of art, as of any work of art, is its appearance, its ei\do~. It is thus not because mimesis is the essence of all art
that Heidegger later queries, in The Principle of Reason, with its analysis of
an age of the total manipulation of material, whether abstract art is indeed
art: That in such an age art becomes objectless testies to its historical appropriateness, and this above all when nonrepresentational [ gegenstandlose]
art conceives of its own productions as no longer being able to be works,
rather as being something for which the suitable word is lacking. 38 Such
nonrepresentational art still appears and is thus, for Platonism, still subordinate to its ijdeva.39 Yet it endeavors to suppress the possibility of the question that mimesis offers to the understanding of Being as presence.40 Such
art seeks to erase its distance from its ijdeva.

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In Platos Doctrine of Truth, a reading of Plato almost as frequently

contested as his reading of Nietzsche,41 Heidegger claries the meaning
of appearance in Platonism: Plato does not regard this visible form as a
mere aspect. For him the visible form has in addition something of a
stepping forth whereby a thing presents itself. Standing in its visible
form the being itself shows itself. 42 That which is presents itself in its appearance as it is, and it is the ijdeva that presents itself:
The idea does not rst let something else (behind it) shine in its appearance
[erscheinen]; it itself is what shines, it is concerned only with the shining of itself.
The ijdeva is that which can shine [das Scheinsame]. The essence of the idea consists
in its ability to shine and be seen [Schein- und Sichtsamkeit]. This is what brings
about presencing, specically the coming to presence of what a being is in any
given instance.43

Every work of art appears as its presence but also fails to appear as its presence. It falls short of its own ijdeva and therefore cannot be said to be true
even to itself. And that it fails to appear as its presence is because it does not
emerge into the constancy of knowledge.
Already in the 1924 45 lecture course Platos Sophist, Heidegger expatiates on the relation between presence and knowledge: And the pure
letting the world be encountered is a making present. As such, it is only
temporally that it can express itself in the appropriate speaking about the
world: the Being of the world is presence. 44 Knowledge in Platonism is explicitly dened as encounter. Mimesis is the frustration of the encounter.
The work of art, for Plato, is obscure because it does not fully give itself up
to be known. It cannot do so, because its perishability is its essential possibility of absence. The work of art deceives, but the substitution of a depiction for an extant object is incidental to the deception of mimesis. The
work of art offers itself but never ceases to offer itself because its offer is
never accepted, its subordination to the ijdeva is never revoked in consummation. The act of offering, as its distance from presence, deprives it of Being and, that is to say, of appearance. In one respect, the essence of the work
of art is, for Plato, the threat of invisibility. The work of art, contrary to
Nietzsches complementary readings of art and Platonism, refuses itself to
the sensesit withdraws from the gaze of knowledge.
The truth of metaphysics has to be won in the face of this secretiveness, as Heidegger writes: Everything depends on the ojrqovth~, the correctness of the gaze. Through this correctness, seeing or knowing becomes

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something correct so that in the end it looks directly at the highest idea and
xes itself in this direct alignment. In so directing itself, apprehending
conforms itself to what is to be seen: the visible form of the being. 45 The
gaze has always, as it were, to look beyond the work of art in order to behold the truth that the work of art itself is, because appearance grants its
immediacy solely to presence. That which is not present deludes. Truth, as
that which is, retracts in Platonism into the opposite of nonbeing. Rediscovering the alternative to presence in the work of art, Platonism denes
the work of art by the indigence that can but compel the work of art to seek
adequation with that which is present. The representation of an extant object becomes the sum of the truth of the work of art.
This contraction of truth into presence is, for Heidegger, the ground
of nihilism that Nietzsche himself failed to recognize and thus failed to
challenge in his overturning of Platonism. Nietzsche adheres fundamentally to the understanding of Being that arises with the contraction of truth:
Nietzsches determination of truth as the incorrectness of thinking is in agreement
with the traditional essence of truth as the correctness of assertion (lovgo~). Nietzsches concept of truth displays the last glimmer of the most extreme consequence
of the change of truth from the unhiddenness of beings to the correctness of the
gaze. The change itself is brought about in the determination of the Being of beings (in Greek: the being present of what is present) as ijdeva.46

By following Plato in dening truth within an antithesis with the false,

Nietzsche does not see beyond the corresponding contraction of Being.
For Heidegger, Nietzsche is the most unrestrained Platonist in the history
of Western metaphysics, 47 because his opposition to Plato never develops
into a confrontation on the basis of an alternative. Nietzsches maintenance
of truth in an antithesis prevents him from raising a question against the
determination of Being as presence and against the nihilistic conception of
art dependent on this determination. Nietzsche, according to Heidegger,
abolishes the distance that falsehood opens between the work of art and
the Platonic determination of Being. In so doing, he ostensibly afrms art
when it is precisely arts failure within Platonism that carries the possibility
of thinking through nihilism. Nietzsches conception of art as the true remains nihilistic, in Heideggers sense, because it is, so to speak, too afrmative. The will to power hinders Nietzsche from grasping failure as such.
Everything becomes a manifestation of will to power. Even the false is absorbed into the presence of its appearance. Heideggers response to Plato,

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by contrast, does not involve disputing the denition of art as the failure
of presence. Heidegger wishes to grasp this failure as failure, since it is an
understanding of this failure that puts into question the entire metaphysics
of presence from Plato to Nietzsche.
To this end, Heidegger repeats the judgments of metaphysics on
the failure of art.48 The afterword to The Origin of the Work of Art acquiesces to Hegels judgment on the supersession of art in order to keep
in view arts distance from metaphysics. The passage is worth quoting at
length, and not merely on account of its implicit critique of Nietzsches
afrmation of art:
In the most comprehensive reection on the essence of art that the West possesses
comprehensive because it stems from metaphysicsnamely, Hegels Lectures
on Aesthetics, the following propositions occur:
Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth obtains existence for itself.
One may well hope that art will continue to advance and perfect itself, but
its form has ceased to be the highest need of spirit.
In all these relationships, art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.
The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot be evaded by
pointing out that since Hegels lectures on aesthetics were given for the last time
during the winter of 1828 29 at the University of Berlin, we have seen the rise of
many new artworks and new art movements. Hegel never meant to deny this possibility. But the question remains: Is art still an essential and necessary way in
which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no
longer of this character? If, however, it is such no longer, then there remains the
question as to why this is so. The truth of Hegels judgment has not yet been decided; for behind this verdict there stands Western thought since the Greeks. Such
thought corresponds to a truth of beings that has already happened. Decision
upon the judgment will be made, if at all, from and about this truth of beings. Until then the judgment remains in force. But for that very reason, the question is
necessary as to whether the truth that the judgment declares is nal and conclusive, and what follows if it is.49

Hegels judgment remains binding in spite of Nietzsche. Hegels judgment

that art has ceased to be the highest form in which truth attains existence
does not incite Heidegger to restore art to its alleged earlier dignity, since
the sentence expresses a thoroughly metaphysical reading of arts irreducibility to metaphysics. As it is only with metaphysics, and its contraction of Being to presence, that truth begins to attain existence in higher and

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lower forms, neither art nor anything else is able to yield preeminence to
metaphysics. Art is thus not so much superseded by metaphysics as obscured in its other understanding of truth. The constitutive absence of a
highest form, rather than its historical loss, denes this other understanding, which within metaphysics can only be recalled as failure.
This failure has to be grasped as what it is in itselfand not merely
as an incidental negation of the highest form if the truth of Being is
not to be overlooked in the preoccupation with presence. The failure of
art is Beings failure to be merely present. To grasp the failure of presence
as the essence of art is to grasp art as indeterminate. It is to grasp art as
the questionability of the apprehension of beings in the light of presence.
Through distinguishing itself from the originary understanding of Being,
the highest form of truth establishes that from which it distinguishes itself as the distinct entity known as art. Metaphysics hence reies even
that from which it distanced itself for the sake of the reication of beings
as a whole in the light of presence. It is the distinctness of the entity known
in metaphysics as art that risks interposing itself and reformulating Heideggers question here concerning the essence of truth as the property of
a superseded form in which truth attains existence. Once art becomes a
being among beings, the question of Being loses its urgency, because the
originary understanding of truth has become regional. Heideggers thinking on art seeks to answer to the essence of truth by grasping failure in its
originarity as a contestation of the determination of Being as presence. For
Heidegger, what is at stake in the Auseinandersetzung is a disclosure of the
modesty of Being in contrast to the triumphalism of the will to power.
Arts distance from nihilism is its failure before presence. It falters in
the reproduction of its ijdeva and through its faltering it shows more than
its ijdeva: it shows the world that the ijdeva otherwise conceals. With the
example of the van Gogh painting in The Origin of the Work of Art,
Heidegger is not proposing that the work of art is necessarily the depiction
of a tool, but rather that any object of depiction, as ijdeva, is restored in the
work of art to the world suppressed in its presence. Heideggers example recalls the exposition of equipmentality in Being and Time, but in the later
text there has been a shift from the accidental to the essential. The work of
art sets up the world that the broken, inappropriate, or missing tool discloses in deviations from their use. That the work of art sets up a world is
not because it is a distinct entity, falling within the purview of metaphysics,
but rather because it is the understanding of the Being of the phenomenon

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of world. Quarantined in the metaphysically determined entity known as

art, this other understanding still announces itself in its transcendence.
Arts failure before presence recovers beings for Being, and in this uncontained failure, it is the originary failure of Being. The failure is ecstatic and
transcends presence. Failing before presence, art is never itself, never a distinct identity, and thus the privilege of truth with which Heidegger endows
the work of art is never an exclusive privilege in a further variation of the
hierarchical thinking of Platonism. In short, it is not as any given extant
and identiable work of art, but rather as the failure of presence that the
work of art restores adequation to the Open of the essence of truth.
And yet the work of art is a work. It is present and yields itself to sensuous appreciation. It brings beings to a stand and allows them to appear.
This, however, is not a shortcoming in the work of art with respect to its
opposition to the understanding of Being as presence. The work of art is a
work in the Marxist sense, as well as a failure of work, a breakdown in the
processes of externalization and reication. And it must be such, occupying the zone of undecidability between the two, in order for presence to
fail: the nonwork, pure and simple, does not contest the understanding of
Being as presence because its determinate absence maintains the presence
of the recognizable. Krzysztof Ziarek, in The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, claries the transformed essence of
work in Heideggers writings on art:
Art ceases to be a work in an organic sense, a unied object accessible to and
judged by the aesthetic gaze. Transferring the emphasis from the work as an object that is produced or created to work in the sense of the working of art, of setting into work that takes place in art, opens the door to the idea that art works by
unworking its own articulations. . . . The work crosses into the unwork; the line
between working and unworking becomes increasingly ne, like the corresponding play between concealment and unconcealment.50

Ziareks exposition of the work of art in Heidegger uncovers, beyond the

similarity to Blanchots dsuvrement, a Kantian resonance. The work of
art works and unworks, reveals and conceals and thus announces itself as
an heir to the presentation of the unpresentable in the Analytic of the Sublime. As a warning against the dogmatism that unmoors Ideas from their
grounding in the phenomenal world and drifts off into an incorrigible conceptual enthusiasm, the Kantian Idea must present itself in the world of the
senses even as it cannot present itself there. Heidegger, who is even more
suspicious of the empiricaltranscendental divide, writes of the presenta-

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tion in the work of art of that which can never be present. The work of art
is the work of undecidability. It is the decision between the empirical and
the transcendental rather than their Hegelian reconciliation, as it is in the
undecidability of this decision that ontology acquires its proper space.
The work of art is the thing that fails in its thingliness, just as it fails to be
other than a thing. Does the work of art, in its dual nature, thereby reformulate the aporias that confronted the Fathers of the Church? From the
sixth century, Christian art is seen to respond, by means of a strictly paradoxical delity to the prohibition of images, to the dilemma of either the
heresy of pantheism or the heresy of the Gnostic conception of the deus absconditus. The work of art, for Heidegger, makes this impossibility an affair of ontology.
That which in its distance from the ijdeva is understood within Platonism as failure cannot, however, in its ecstasy be derived from presence.
For Platonism, the distance from the Idea becomes a frustrated movement
toward the Idea. The mimhthv~ is unable to create, because mimesis is, by
denition, the inability to overcome the distance from presence. The
works of the mimhthv~ remain shadowy and insubstantial (mh; o[n). They do
not enunciate a clean break with nothingness and hence waver in undecidability between presence and nothingness. It is the inability of the mimhthv~
that Heidegger retains and formulates as the originarity of art. The work of
art does not create because world as world cannot be severed from nothingness in order to be created. World fails; it is the suppression of this failure that constitutes the essence of creation as the ascendancy of presence
over nothingness.
In The Symposium, Diotimas denition of poetry and all the crafts
mistakes the derivative for the originary and offers a speciously antiPlatonic appraisal: By its original meaning poetry means simply creation,
and creation, as you know, can take very various forms. Any action which
is the cause of a thing emerging from non-existence might be called poetry,
and all the processes in all the crafts are kinds of poetry, and all those who
are engaged in them poets. 51 The opportunity to interrogate presence
is forgone. Here poetry is exhibited as the essence of handicraft because,
more than the names of the other arts, it signies creation. In The Origin
of the Work of Art, Heidegger retains this precedence of poetry, but for
other reasons: All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of
beings, is as such, in essence, poetry. 52 It is its relation to the truth of beings, and not its creativity, that establishes poetry, in Heideggers view, as

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the essence of art. As the historical name of that from which metaphysics
had to disentangle itself in order to come to itself in presence, poetry is,
for Heidegger, the name of a nonmetaphysical understanding of truth. It
is in this sense that Heidegger is able to speak of poetry as the essence of
art in a text whose chief examples are a van Gogh painting and a Greek
temple. And that poetry is not to be interpreted in the sense of creation
is also the admonition in a note from Metaphysik und Nihilismus (Metaphysics and Nihilism) from 1940 41: Poetry no longer as art; with the
end of metaphysics the end of art tevcnh. 53 As poetry (Dichtung) is neither poivhsi~ nor tevcnh, as it neither creates nor produces, its status as the
essence of the arts must have another, more originary foundation.
For Heidegger, it is because poetry is language that it constitutes
the internal condition of possibility of the other arts. In The Origin of the
Work of Art, he asserts of language: It not only puts forth in words and
statements what is overtly or covertly intended to be communicated; language alone brings beings as beings into the open for the rst time. 54 Poetry is the essence of the arts, and language is that which alone brings
beings as beings into the open. The work of art, inasmuch as it is language,
reveals beings as such and thus reveals them in their Being. Revealing them
not merely in the presence of their apprehensibility, it reveals them in their
truth. The essence of all art is poetry, because poetry, in its turn, is dened,
for Heidegger, by languages foundation of world. In comparison with its
foundation of world, all other characteristics of language are inessential.
Insofar as it founds a world, the work of art is language.
Language founds because it fails to create. If the work of art functionsand thus does not functionas a broken, inappropriate, or missing tool, is language itself a tool of this kind? Heidegger in Hlderlin and
the Essence of Poetry denies, however, that language is a tool at all: Language is not merely a tool which man possesses alongside many others;
rather, language rst grants the possibility of standing in the midst of the
openness of beings. 55 As the precondition of every tool, language cannot
be a tool among others that the human being possesses. It is, nevertheless,
of the concealed essence of language that Heidegger writes, as a remark
from the Letter on Humanism emphasizes: Language still denies us its
essence: that it is the house of the truth of Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafcking as an instrument of domination over beings. 56 Language itself becomes a tool to be restored to its
world through the work of art. In Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry,

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it is the work of art that is rather the precondition of language: Poetry is

a founding: a naming of being and of the essence of all thingsnot just
any saying, but that whereby everything rst steps into the open, which we
then discuss and talk about in everyday language. Hence poetry never takes
language as a material at its disposal; rather, poetry itself rst makes language possible. Poetry is the primal language of a historical people. 57
What is essential to the work of art, to language, and to poetry is the foundation of world. But that the foundation of world is essential does not
mean that it is an invariant of the positivistic entities known as the work of
art, language, and poetry. The foundation of world is the highest task, and
it is by means of the execution of this task that the work of art, language,
and poetry prove themselves to be essential to whatever is. Poetry as poetry,
which is to say, in its essence as the foundation of world, precedes language
understood as a material at its disposal. Poetry is languages condition of
possibility and as such it sustains, regardless of whether it is acknowledged
or not, not only every discourse, but also every activity. Poetry itself is the
clearing of beings.
Heideggers turn to poetry after the resignation of the rectorship was
not a turn away from any given being. As the turn to poetry was an engagement with the essential, it cannot be equated with a renunciation of
the political. Poetry is itself the truth of the povli~. The decision that delimits the domain of the political as one domain among others presupposes
the grounding of beings in poetry. Every essence becomes poetic with the
establishment of the originarity of poetrys understanding of Being. In addressing the question of the essence of poetry, Heidegger addresses the
question of the essence of the political. But why should poetry be a privileged point of access to the essence of the political? It is because, in the context of National Socialism, the essence of the political had withdrawn from
politics. In his confrontation with Nietzsche and the Hitlerian dictatorship, Heidegger has recourse to a notion of poetry as the Un-thought of
the will to power. Poetry becomes that which hesitates and it thereby
founds world in the openness that nihilism suppresses in its drive to the absolute presence of beings. Judged by the criteria of metaphysical nihilism,
poetry is a failure. Only when language fails, that is, only when it is more
than the unambiguous transmission of items of information, does it disclose its essence and show itself to be poetry. That language is essentially
not a tool in the mobilization of the masses is the suspicion initiated
through its being broken as a tool in poetry. The disclosure of the essence

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depends on an abuse of mere serviceability, since use in general, for early

and middle Heidegger, is opposed to a revelation of essence. The essential
is the unmanageable. A tool displays its essencethe world within which
it is employed and explainedwhen it is broken, missing, or inappropriate, and thus its use always presupposes a neglect of the task of understanding its essence. It is, in a sense, always a broken, missing, or inappropriate tool that is unwittingly being used. To the extent that the work of art
has been traditionally dened by being at odds with unmanageability, by
the fashioning of its material, by its creating and bringing forth, it is less a
work of art, for Heidegger, than a gure of the secondary realm of tevcnh:
only the inessential knows perfection. Where National Socialism evaded
the foundational failure composing, in the shape of poetry, the essence of
the political and the ground of a historical people, it promulgated the nihilism of the obliviousness of Being under the cover of its achievements.
Technicism can never be the essence of a people; the essence of a people is
always to be a people of the failure of world to reduce itself to presence.
It is on account of the priority of failure over technicism that the ultimate foundation of a people is poetry. In Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien
und Der Rhein, Heidegger writes:
Poetization is foundation, it is a realizing [erwirkend ] grounding of the enduring.
The poet is the one who grounds Being. That which, in the everyday, we name the
real [das Wirkliche], is, at bottom, unreal. Because the sign of the gods is, as it were,
built by a poet into the foundation walls of a peoples language (perhaps without the peoples suspecting this at rst), Being is founded in the historical Dasein
of the people, and in this Being a directive and a dependence are laid and left
behind.58

Poetry composes the historical ground of a people, inasmuch as it is that

which is not reducible to the ahistoricality of presence. Its distance from
presenceand it is distant from presence only inasmuch as it always overreaches presenceis its distance from the unreal. That which we are accustomed to call real is ultimately unreal, because its transparency and familiarity is the consequence of its abstraction from world. Technicism,
realizing itself in the obliviousness of world, does nothing but produce its
own realization, and yet all the proofs it creates of its reality are, for that
very reason, insufcient. It merely proves its remoteness from Being and
hence, for Heidegger, its unreality.
In the 1941 lecture course Basic Concepts, Heidegger traces back to
Nietzsche the retreat of the originary poetic foundation of the people in fa-

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vor of the mobilization of the worker and the soldier and the hegemony of
tevcnh:
In the interim, it has been decided that the worker and the soldier completely
determine the face of the actual, all political systems in the narrow sense notwithstanding. These names are not meant here as names for a social class or profession.
They indicate, in a unique fusion, the type of humanity taken as measure by the
present world-convulsion for its fulllment, giving direction and foundation to
ones relation to beings. The names worker and soldier are thus metaphysical
titles and name that form of the human fulllment of the Being of beings now become manifest, which Nietzsche presciently grasped as the will to power. 59

The worker and the soldier are distinguished by their engagement in

reality, but Heidegger queries whether such experience can satisfy its claims
to essentiality:
But do workers and soldiers, in virtue of this experience, also know the Being
of beings? No. Yet perhaps they no longer need to know it. Perhaps the Being of
beings has never been experienced by those who directly shape, produce, and represent beings. Perhaps Being was always brought to knowledge merely by the
way, like something apparently superuous. 60

Inasmuch as they are absorbed solely in that which is, the worker and the
soldier disavow Being and hence the ground, that is, the reality, of their
engagement. Being lies elsewhere. A people, if it is to ground itself, must
ground itself within Being, and for Heidegger, it is within the failure of
production that is poetry that Being offers itself as ground.
Here Heideggers critique of metaphysics is the elaboration of a topos
of German conservatism. That the essence of the people rests with the Unthought of tevcnh is a contention not at all alien to the strain of German
nationalism that sought to make a virtue of the countrys economic backwardness, and even of its defeat in war.61 Expounding the contingency of
momentary underdevelopment as spiritual resistance to industrialization,
this nationalism prided itself on the absence of any achievements outside
the very constricted sphere it dened as culture. Modernization, insofar as
it challenged the preponderance of this sphere and involved leveling differences between Germany and its Western neighbors, was demonized as
an assault on the national character. Economic development was cultural
regression and an aping of the foreign. Even though Heidegger is perhaps
the most eloquent and profound advocate of this version of German nationalism, its tone and principles are to be heard in Thomas Manns Reections of a Nonpolitical Man, Hofmannsthals address Literatur als geistiger

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Raum der Nation (Literature as the Spiritual Space of the Nation), and
notwithstanding its corrective cynicism Adornos brief text On the
Question: What Is German? What is peculiar to Heideggers critique of
industrialization is that he does not hypostasize the nations backwardness
as its essence but rather denes its essence in relation to a future other than
modernization. That Germany has not yet realized itself is an assessment
that Heidegger shares with the exponents of industrialisation.62 But, for
Heidegger, Germany is to realize itself in the future as such, that is, in the
future as ecstasis rather than as a present whose time is yet to come. Germany awaits itself, and it must await itself if it is to maintain a distance
from presence and the nihilism of tevcnh.
In Abendgesprch in einem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Ruland
zwischen einem Jngeren und einem lteren (Evening Conversation in a
Russian Camp Between a Younger and an Older Prisoner of War) [1945]),
Heidegger accordingly draws together the notions of the people, poetry
and waiting:
the elder: My supposition is that the poetic character of your

thinking lies rather in its nature as a waiting and that basically

your thinking already was a waiting even before it was raised for
you today into clear knowledge.
the younger: Perhaps the poets and thinkers of a people are nothing other than those who are waiting in the noblest sense, through
whose presence [deren Gegenwart, whose wait toward] toward the
coming the word is reached into the answer of the human essence
and thus brought to language.
the elder: Then indeed the people of poets and thinkers would be
in a unique sense the waiting people.63
The Volk waits because it is poetic, and it waits in relation to the essence of
the human. It is, however, essentially backward with regard to its own
essence. As it is always awaiting itself, it is unable to submit itself in its presence to the manipulation of tevcnh and thus preserves the human in its essential distance from reication. Heidegger suggests that the inviolability
of this people lies in its absence:
the younger: The people that is waiting would necessarily be for

others even quite useless, because that which always simply waits
and forever awaits the coming yields nothing tangible that could
be of use for progress and the upswing of the performance curve
or for the expeditious course of business.64

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This people is not so much waiting for something as waiting away from
something. It is a people that waits precisely in order not to be the people
whose essence is present-at-hand. Heideggers Volk is the people of mimesis and of the treason of the false priest Hlderlin.65 It waits in order not
to produce. It waits against presence in order not to emulate its neighbors
obliviousness to the undecidability of Being in the prosecution of the extant. A people that does not waitthat Being abandons to presenceis
a people without a future and without a past. For Heidegger, industrialization is not a plan for the future of a people, but rather a means for abolishing the future in favor of the nihilism of that which is solely present. Being is lost to view behind material, which remains fundamentally the same
whether it is accumulated in peace or devastated in war.
To lose sight of Being is arguably for Heidegger also to lose sight of
the political. The reication of everything that is in the understanding of
Being as presence secures the undisputed reign of the logic of universals
and the neglect of the political realms incompatibility with such a logic.
Once the political has been demarcated as the eld of the struggle for recognition as the universal, the essential specicity of the Volk becomes apolitical. The resulting apoliticality of the specicity of the Volk denotes, not
simply a neglect of the question of the essence of the Volk, but also an impoverishment of the concept of the political itself. A politics of the universal is political only in spite of itself, since the universality toward which it
strives constitutes the extirpation of the political: the openness of the povli~
is to be replaced by the constrictedness of the oi\ko~, in which the universal exercises its paternalism unchallenged.66 The Volk composing the public realm, and in its essential specicity forever opening a distance from the
universal, is the Un-thought of the struggle for power. The openness of the
people is likewise its furtiveness, because the denitive politicality of its
historical specicity renders it invisible within the prevailing nihilistic
struggle for power.
Of the uncanny guardians of the openness of the politicalthe poets and thinkers, priests and rulers who are the true founders of the State
Heidegger writes in An Introduction to Metaphysics: Preeminent in the historical place, they become at the same time a[poli~, without city and place,
lonely, strange [Un-heimliche], and alien, without exit amid the entirety of
beings, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and
order, because they themselves as creators must rst create all this. 67 Occurring in a commentary on Antigone, this passage denes the creator of

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the povli~ rather than reects on the amoralism of the tyrant. The creators
of the povli~ in Heideggers sense stand outside the povli~ as the eld of the
struggle for power. Their creativity is negative: they found the povli~, but
they found it in the openness of that which has not yet been created, that
is, fully determined and rendered positive. The apoliticality of these creators is the condition of possibility for the statutes and limits, structures
and orders under which the openness of the political nonetheless disappears from view. They are a[poli~, without city and place, but for that very
reason they are not at the mercy of the homelessness of the universal. The
povli~ rst grounds itself in their refusal of the struggle for power just as
the universal grounds itself in the disavowal of the povli~. The strangeness
of the creatorstheir Un-heimlichkeit is the corollary of their originarity and unrecognizability within the universalist light of presence.
Heideggers commentaries on Hlderlin in the 1930s and early 1940s
address the uncanniness of the originary. In these texts, Heideggers nationalism, as an attention to the uncanniness of the originary, is at odds
with the nationalism expressed, for instance, in Max Kommerells commentary on Hlderlin. Kommerell in the late 1920s writes of the notion of
the people in Hlderlin: The doctrine that a century nds intolerable is
the doctrine of which it stands in the greatest need. In ours, Hlderlins occupies this position: when a people is truly a people, its war is a holy war.
Just as the individual through beauty or great deeds enters upon its higher
reality, so does a people through war; indeed, it requires an opponent in order to glorify itself. 68 Hlderlin here becomes the poet of a Hitleresque
nationalism. Whereas for Heidegger Hlderlins poetry promises the nationalism of the Un-thought of nihilism, for Kommerell it promises military expansion and the struggle for recognition. Irrespective of his affection
and esteem for Kommerell, Heidegger is consistent in his antagonism toward the illusoriness of such politicizations of the work of art.
In the collection of notes published under the title Besinnung, Heidegger asserts that the work of art is as alien to the National Socialist realm
of the struggle for recognition as it had been earlier to the interiority of
bourgeois criticism: It remains essentially withdrawn as much from the
public as from private play, belonging solely to the persistence in the decline (Untergang) that alone can become a history in keeping with the essential, and that leaves in its wake a clearing of Being. 69 The work of art
commits itself to neither internal migration nor public spectacle. It is withdrawn from the choice between the individual in its Cartesian isolation and

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the universal of the deracinated masses. Persisting in its decline and thus its
nitude, the work of art eludes the abstraction from historicality by which
the autonomous subject and the they are determined. The essential decline of the work of art is the originarity of its other understanding of Being. It declines in transcending its presence and, through its decline, it retires from the struggle for recognition. The work of art never gives itself up
to be apprehended in the light of presence. It is originarity that renders it
too frail for the struggle, because power, as Heidegger continues, is the
property of the derivative:
Only now in the history of humanity does the obliviousness of Being come to its
position of total power. But what if this abandonment of beings by Being were the
beginning of an originary history in which Being [Sein] is Being [Seyn], so that the
actual in its ever greater actuality would be ever more hopelessly cast out from Being, from Being [Seyn] as refusal, to which no power and no supremacy could be
equal because they must necessarily and always mistake the essence of the utterly
power-less. The powerless can never be deprived of power. This, however, is not
attributed to it as a deciency. On the contrary, it is merely a consequenceand
one not even necessary and tting of its nobility.70

For Heidegger, in contradistinction to the medieval metaphysics of actus

and the modern metaphysics of the will-to-power, Being is power-less. It
is not so much without power as before power. The originary is always misjudged in its powerlessness because it has not the strength to reduce itself to presence. Hlderlin, who speaks of tragedy as a revelation of the
originary in its weakness,71 speaks likewise of the revelatory caesura of
tragedy: 72 the originary shows itself in letting nothing appear in the
midst of the present-at-hand. By the criteria of technicism, the originary is
decient because beings have not yet come to the presence on which their
manipulability rests. Hlderlin, as the poet of weakness, is, for Heidegger,
the poet of the impossibility of National Socialism. He is the poet of the
Un-thought of the movements nihilism, the poet of the properly political,
of, namely, the unamenability of Being-with-one-another to the categories
of power and making. In the 193132 lecture course Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet, Hlderlin is not even included in a list of great poets.73 Although Heidegger had been familiar with Hlderlins texts since
1908,74 it is only after 1933 that the poet of modesty becomes the essential poet.
In this regard, Heideggers reading of Hlderlin displays less of an
afnity with Kommerell than with Benjamins early text Two Poems by

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Friedrich Hlderlin, with its discussion of a passivity central to the

hymns.75 Moreover, a complementarity could be said to exist between
Benjamins and Heideggers readings: for the one, passivity alone is able to
serve as a point of mediation and occupy the center, because, for the other,
weakness is the essence of the originary. Inasmuch as the center is reserved
for the weak, a nationalism unavailable to National Socialism is to be heard
in the concluding strophe of Hlderlins hymn Germanien with its interpretation of the geographical centrality of central Europe:
Yet at the centre of Time
In peace with hallowed,
With virginal Earth lives Aether
And gladly, for remembrance, they
The never-needy dwell
Hospitably amid the never-needy,
Amid your holidays,
Germania, where you are priestess and
Defenceless proffer all round
Advice to the kings and the peoples.76

The paranoia and megalomania of National Socialism are missing from

Hlderlins patriotism. Germany occupies the center neither as the common object of the rapacity of her neighbors nor as the seat of a military empire. Instead, defenselessly Germany gives counsel to the kings and the
peoples assembled around her in the feast.
Germany is the priestess among the nations and must remain such
for their sake as much as for her own. For Heidegger, the essence of the
German people is not to be one people among others, but rather to be the
people of the essential. The eschatological pretensions of National Socialism concerning the German people are shadowed in Heideggers writings
by the elaboration of the mission of the German people in the history of
Being. The German essence is to be found in the task of priestess among
the nations. Through bringing themselves into conformity with their
essence, the Volk serves the other peoples as their priests.
The sobriety that will come over the world from out of a discovery and defense of that which is German will not be the sobriety of unlimited rational communication. It will be the sobriety of an insight into das
Eigene, into the transcendence proper to Dasein as it is secured in the
mimesis and technicist incompetence of the holy heart of the peoples. The
world-mission of the Germans is to instantiate transcendence, and hence

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the unrepeatable and nonglobal, in a confrontation with the globalism of

tevcnh. This mission of a staging of the unpresentable is necessarily impracticable, but it is in the attempt and its failure that Heidegger situates
the Auseinandersetzung with technicism.
In his commentary on Hlderlins hymn Germanien, Heidegger
develops his notion of the priest as the tender of the Un-thought of tevcnh:
Just as at the beginning of the ight of the gods, it is the priest who is rst affected
(it goes without saying that it is not ministers of the established churches who are
in question), likewise for a new advent of the gods, a priest or a priestess must
again be the rst affected, awaiting, hidden and unknown, the messengers of the
gods, so that temple, image, and custom might lovingly follow them. If that does
not occur, then regardless of aircraft, radio, and conquest of the stratosphere, the
peoples will tumble irretrievably toward their end. If matters are to turn out differently, then the gods-lessness [Gtterlosigkeit] of historical Dasein in its entirety
must rst be experienced, that is, Dasein must be open to such experience and if
it is not, it must be made so, precisely by those who truly endure the ight of the
gods. They are the ones who doubt, the legend of that which has been dawns and
darkens [dmmert] about their heads, and they are those of which not one of them
knows what is happening to them, while the self-certain and robust know-alls always know what happens to them, because they punctiliously take care that nothing at all can happen to them.77

The sobriety that will come from the German people is the questioning of
the priest. The priest introduces hesitation into the self-assurance of technicism, but not in order to temper this self-assurance, to see it vindicated
in a more encompassing success. The doubt of the priest restores tevcnh to
its essence in the originarity of doubt. This involves less the abolition of
the tool than its fracture, since the doubt of the priest is not a call to return
to an ethnologically fantastic toolless society but, rather, the anticipation
of the recovery from the reductive ontology of tevcnh into its essence as
world.78
Germany is the priestess among the nations only so long as she is
the incompetent among the nations. Her hesitation before tevcnh is the
feast day on which the nations assemble around her. In the lecture course
Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, echoing the remarks to the College of Sociology that Roger Caillois had made only a few years earlier concerning
the feast, Heidegger reviews the conventionally negative denitions of the
holiday: Celebrating the feast [ feiern] means in the rst place: not working. It can thus come about that the feast days stand in exclusive relation
to workdays, that they are an interruption in the time of work and a change

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in the routine of labor, and ultimately a pause introduced solely for the
benet of work. 79 The cessation of labor is however an inessential denition of the holiday: Now the cessation of work is no longer essence and
ground of the celebration of the feast. On the contrary, it is already a consequence of that catching of oneself which seemingly brings human beings
back only to their egos, but which in truth transposes them out into that
region to which their essence clings. Wonder begins or else terror. 80 The
feast day is recuperative, not because it allows human beings to replenish
the stores of energy expended in labor, but because it exposes Dasein to
its essential possibilities of wonder and terror in the face of the worlding
of the world. Like the work of art, the feast day is the essence of that which
the broken, missing, or inappropriate tool is only accidentally. Alluding to
the sun in Platos parable of the cave, Heidegger writes: At the time of the
festival and on feast days, the proper [das Eigene], the ground itself of history, comes purely to appearance; but that which appears is there not an
object for observation, that which appears [das Erscheinende] is a shining
[ein Scheinen] in the sense in which we say: the sun shines. 81 The sun that
shines on the feast day is the Un-thought of tevcnh. World in its originary
weakness illuminates Dasein and every tool discovers itself as essentially
broken, missing, or inappropriate. No longer ready-to-hand, the tool reveals its essence in the temple. The temple is the work of art that raises itself on the feast day in its distance from labors immersion in presence. In
this distance from presence lies its title to mimesis and thus to the name of
art. The feast day, with its focus on the temple, is the recollection of the
unsettling origin of the everyday: Celebrating the feast is a becoming free
from the usual through a becoming free for the unusual. 82 This becoming
free for the unusual is the beginning of wonder or terror. The feast day is
never entirely distinguishable from misfortune, from the uncanniness of
the originary rupture in which the world of a people worlds.
Heideggers denitions of the work of art and the feast day are both
directed toward the Un-thought of tevcnh. The work of art and the feast
day are a failure of the self-certainty of tevcnh and it is within this failure
that a people becomes the people of poets and thinkers. The Greeks, who
made a show of despising the bavnausoi, nonetheless did not go far enough
in criticizing tevcnh, because in their love of glory, they shunned the
anonymity and concealment of failure. The Volk of poets and thinkers is
not a revival of the Greek povli~ so much as a revival of the missed opportunity of the Greeks to raise the question of Being. This Volk is the people
of the fundamental failure of presence.

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Incompetence is the essence of arts revelation. This proposition,

implicit in Heidegger, is explicit in Kafka. Josephine in the tale Josephine
the Singer, or the Mouse Folk cannot sing, yet it is precisely her failure as
an artistthe discrepancy between her claims and her achievementthat
reveals her people to themselves and binds them to her. Kafka writes of the
nature of her performances:
And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers,
condentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why
not? Piping is our peoples daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long
and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and
it sets us free too for a little while.83

Josephines voice rediscovers the world in which the piping of the mice has
its place. It does so, not because it is more than a piping, but because it
claims to be more. It is an instrument that is inappropriate to its task, and
in this distance from its concept, in its abject subordination to its ijdeva, Josephines piping is, in Platos sense, art. Josephine is able to impose on not
a single one of the listeners gathered around her. She is even encouraged in
the extravagant claims of her art, regardless of the danger to which she at
times exposes her people:
Josephine exerts herself, a mere nothing in voice, a mere nothing in execution, she
asserts herself and gets across to us; it does us good to think of that. A really trained
singer, if ever such a one should be found among us, we could certainly not endure at such a time and we should unanimously turn away from the senselessness
of any such performance. May Josephine be spared from perceiving that the mere
fact of our listening to her is proof that she is no singer.84

Josephine is considered an artist among the mice only so long as she fails
to sing. The failure is the essence of her art. For Plato and Kafka, the artist
is the one who fails the most conspicuously.
Certainly, National Socialism failed to substantiate its claims, but
inasmuch as its failure came through its defeat at the hands of other powers, its distance from its Idea did not become the occasion of the question
of the Un-thought of metaphysics. Instead, this failure became the (still
prevailing) argument for the claims of its Western conquerors: liberal democracy proceeded to consummate its relations with its own Idea. To be
the Volk of poets and thinkers is to be the people that failsas clearly as
possible of itself. Germany, as the land of poets and thinkers, is the land
of industrial backwardness. Its poetry and its thought are not to be registered in any accumulation of volumes in the worlds libraries, but rather

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in its failure to execute the actions by which the economies of other nations are sustained. It fails and thereby tears open the distance between the
essential possibilities of Dasein and the degradation of the realized selfpresence of things. Heidegger and Kafka are both of the conviction that if
failure is to be grasped as such, it can be neither contemptuously dismissed
nor blunderingly afrmed.
It is between these two misinterpretations of failure that Heideggers
commentary on Hlderlins understanding of Germany in Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein must be read:
The poet does not mean that Germany of those poets and thinkers as the rest of
the world imagines and wishes them: the simple dreamers and innocents who then
at decisive moments are easily persuaded and made into fools for everyone else;
rather he means that poetizing and thinking that plunges into the abysses of Being, not content with the shallow waters of a universal world-reason, that poetizing and thinking that in the work brings the being new and primordially to appearance and to a stand.85

Germany is the land of poets and thinkers because it is the land that can
only ever dream of what it might be. Heidegger is not arguing against the
discrepancy so much as against the inability of nihilism to grasp and maintain the discrepancy. Nihilism mistakes for the validation of tevcnh the
failure of poetry and thinking that precisely as failure is to contest the hegemony of tevcnh. This ambiguity is a consequence of the undecidable ontological status of failure. It is in this ambiguity that Heideggers nationalism exhibits its irreducibility to National Socialism and likewise forgoes an
open confrontation. It limits itself to failing before the will to power.

4
Toward the Uncanny Homeland

In a manuscript from 1796, Hegel discusses the mythologies then acceptable to the tastes of the German reading public and concludes with the
question: Is Judaea, then, the Teutons Fatherland? 1 For National Socialism, such a question was strictly unutterable. But that the question
could never have been enunciated does not mean that it went unanswered.
Finding itself incapable of establishing the living national mythology upon
whose absence Hegel reects, National Socialism declared that the Germans indeed possessed a Fatherland that lay elsewhere, and that the name
of this unheimliche Heimat (unhomelike home) was Greece.
At the very time when the Greece that had been degraded into the
paradise of anti-Semites announced itself in the sullen clumsiness of Speers
architecture, in the callisthenics of an embryonic Wehrmacht, and in a
bookish and expedient paganism, Heidegger was lecturing on the necessity
for the German people of a confrontation with classical Greece. The simultaneity is not fortuitous. Heideggers texts of the late 1930s and early 1940s
are distinguished by a heightened tone of opposition toward the legacy of
Greek thought: Greece, without ever being confounded with its National
Socialist travesties, is set forth as that which must be overcome. Since the
imperialism and spectacle by which National Socialism recreated for itself
a distinctly Roman antiquity were, according to Heidegger, nothing but a
consequence of an increasingly pernicious complacency regarding Greek
thought, it is in an interrogation and destruction of the latter that the
other beginning (der andere Anfang) might be anticipated and the forgetfulness of Being retrieved. In itself, a return to Greece would not be a solution to nihilism. Greece is to be made to give way to its Un-thought.
For Heidegger, the name of this Un-thought is Being. Asking after that which was not revealed in Greece, Heidegger does not ask simply

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after that which was revealed elsewhere. That which has been revealed elsewhere is still too Greek by virtue of its having been revealed at all. To bring
to the confrontation with classical Greece a positive content with a different genealogy is to conceive the confrontation within the terms of the
Greek privileging of the visible. Such a confrontation is decided in advance
in favor of Greece. And as the confrontation with Greece implies a confrontation with the neoclassicism of the NSDAP, no one should be surprised that Heidegger did not oppose a warmed-over liberal humanism to
the movements warmed-over paganism. What Heidegger ranges against
the legacy of Greece is the concealed as such. In place of the visibility of beings in ajlhvqeia, Heidegger invokes the prohibition of images.
By asking after the non-Greek, Heidegger calls the whole of the West
into question, and yet he does so with a question by which the West has
likewise come to dene itself. The question, as it has been raised against
metaphysics by Luther and Kierkegaard as the denitive question concerning the essence of Christianity, is the question of the other, namely, Judaic
origin of the West. Denying this other origin and endeavoring to demonstrate its independence from Judaea, National Socialism slavishly courted
a resemblance to Greece. Anti-Semitism can be suspected not only in the
movements neoclassicism but also, beyond its aesthetics, in the general,
obsessive cultivation of the visible.
The dilemma of National Socialism was that the German people
could assert themselves in their originarity as a people of the West solely as
either Greek or Jewish. National Socialism did not invent this dilemma: it
is pregured in the eighteenth century in that bifurcation of the national
literature into Weimar classicism and Christian romanticism on which
Hegel, among others, comments. At stake in the contest between the visibility of Greece and the invisibility of Judaea is the denition of the German Volk. The Volk is the people of the constitutive impossibility of the
West. That which is specic to this people, that which it can receive as a
possession neither from the Greeks nor from the Jews, is the contradiction
itself between the visible and the invisible itself. To attend to its specicity, this people has to grasp, without mitigation, the unity of this discord.
The Volk nds itself in the confrontation with Greece, not as the Other of
Greece, but as the confrontation itself. If it is at home in the denitively
non-Greek, it is in order, however, to enact the confrontation with Greece
that is proper to it. The Volk must become Jewish in order to become itself. In deance of National Socialism, it must counterbalance the xation

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on the visible by plunging into the invisible: it has to think through to its
essence the unnameability of Judaea.2
In the 1933 34 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, Heidegger refuses to return to Greece simply to take up where it left off:
It means: learning to comprehend that this great beginning of our Dasein stands
thrown ahead and in advance of us as that with which we have to catch upnot,
however, in order to bring to completion a Greek world [ein Griechentum] but,
on the contrary, in order to draw out the fundamental possibilities of the protoGermanic ethnic essence [die Grundmglichkeiten des urgermanischen Stammeswesens] and bring them to power.3

Heidegger here uses the sinister vocabulary of Rassenkunde, but what he

understands by the fundamental possibilities of the proto-Germanic ethnic essence does not lend itself to a biologistic racism: the essence of the
Volk is not Greek enough to nd itself in classical ontology and thus in the
basis for such a racism.
As little as it understood Greece, National Socialism was still too
Greek to be German. That the movement failed to be German had less to
do with its neoclassical aesthetics and anti-Christian rhetoric than with
its ensnarement in the categories of classical ontology. National Socialism
was too Greek to grasp the irreducibility of the world of the Volk to metaphysics. The movements trumpeted rootedness in a self-evident homeland
does not differentiate it from Greece, since this rootedness was not seen to
be incompatible with the extendable space of Lebensraum. The quantiable and culturally indifferent territory of the National Socialist Heimat remained modeled on the homogeneous space of classical geometry. Heideggers question in the late 1930s and early 1940s concerning the other
beginning does not issue, as might have been expected from its precedents, in a moral or religious critique of National Socialism. Instead, it
gives rise to an immanent critique of National Socialisms abortive nationalism, since it is with the other beginning and the overcoming of metaphysics that the homeland can at last be thought. The otherness of the
other beginning is the chance it provides, in the context of the prevailing
homelessness of nihilism, of thinking the homeland as such.
Is Judaea to become the fatherland of the Germans? Heidegger does
not speak of a confrontation with the Jewish people, but inasmuch as he
speaks of a confrontation with the Greeks, he aspires to the radical differentiation of the German people that would render a confrontation practicable. The Germans are to become other than Greeks, when within the his-

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tory of the West it has always been the Jews who have counted as the denitive non-Greeks. Heideggers Germans resemble the Jews, not only in their
character of being different from the Greeks, but also in the way that they
are different. Through dening the Volk by its resistance to the positivism
of its neighbors, Heidegger brings the essence of the Germans into contact
with the people of the prohibition of images. And yet Heidegger does not
acknowledge the contact. He does not admit that his conception of the
Volk has a model, but then the possibility of an Auseinandersetzung with
Greece requires a disavowal of the Platonic logic of the subordination to
the Idea. Once the Volk has a model, once it models itself on Judaea, positivism and the Greek privileging of the visible and the present reassert
themselves.
Certainly, it cannot be said that Heideggers spiritual-historical conception of the Volk would have gained anything by the extermination of
the Jews. To have erased the Jewish model physically would not have liberated the Volk from its last trace of positivism, since the denition of
the Volk would then have been dependent, implicitly if not explicitly, on
the fact of Auschwitz. What remains in question is whether Heideggers
silence on the Jews positions them alongside the many other peoples who,
viewed within the history of Being, are seemingly expendable or whether
that silence functions as a disavowal of the Jews excessive proximity to his
conception of the Volk. In Heidegger et les juifs, his response to the controversy provoked by Victor Farass Heidegger et le nazisme, Jean-Franois
Lyotard ascribes to Europe as a whole a constitutive disavowal of the
jews, of which Auschwitz would be the absolute manifestation. Lyotard
recognizes that he himself, as a European, cannot escape this disavowal,
and that he must admit this continually, in the use of scare quotes. But the
senses in which Lyotard speaks of disavowal are inconsistent. Auschwitz
will always have come too late for its disavowal of the jews not to be superuous, since it can mount only a grotesquely ontic reenactment of the
Wests initial scene, substituting European Jewry for the unnameable . . .
of primal repressions constitutive disavowal: the jews, in Lyotards account, become (once again) scapegoats. When Lyotard writes that Vernichtung, the Nazi name for annihilation, is not so different from foreclosure, Verleugnung, 4 he overlooks the incompatibility of the respective
objects of extermination and primal repression. The hubris of National
Socialism, and the error in which Lyotard fails to catch it out, was that it
sought to achieve a transformation of the ontological ground of the West

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by an eradication of the ontic traces of a people and culture. National Socialism underestimated the proximity of Judaea. It believed that the Being
of the West was not always already contaminated and that the work of puricationbecause it need concern itself only with the domain of beings
present-at-handwas therefore feasible. Properly speaking, the regime
did not disavow Judaea. Instead, it insisted on its reication, on its maintenance as a stable object within the eld of perception in deance of the
prohibition of images by which Judaea has marked the West.
Disavowal is not incidental to the Judaea that has created the West
and that the West has created for itself, since Judaea exists as the exception
to the present-at-hand. It is ungraspable precisely because it is too close
to be grasped. Christianitys comparable irreducibility to metaphysics harbors itself outside the limits of the ontic as the interiority of the soul. The
existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time constitutes a critique of
the subjectivization and delimitation of this exception to the ontic, but it
will stop short of abandoning the proximality attributed to it in JudeoChristian thought. That which is ownmost, for Judeo-Christian thought
and for Heidegger, is that which is not assimilable to the thingly. The exception to the hegemony of the ontic carries with it, in its Judeo-Christian
denition, the chance of understanding the nearness of the homeland.
Heideggers nationalism depends for its viability on Judaea. An exposition
of Heideggers Semitism cannot mitigate the odiousness of his occasional
anti-Semitic utterances. At best it can announce the nature and problematic provenance of the question that Heidegger sought to address in his
meditations on the Volk and on the Fatherland.
Under the cover of the qualied Hellenism he shares with Hlderlin,
Heidegger writes of the Fatherland in terms more suggestive of the Jewish
Diaspora than of the National Socialist uprising.5 In the 1941 42 course on
Hlderlins poem Andenken, there appears the following: That which is
most our own [das Eigenste], the Fatherland, is the highest, but it stands for
that reason under the heaviest prohibition. Thus only at the end will it be
found, after protracted searching, after many sacrices and severe exertions. . . . The national [das Vaterlndische] is found only if the highest is
sought. Seeking the highest means keeping quiet about it. 6
The Fatherland, as the highest, stands under the heaviest prohibition.
For Heidegger, it is prohibited to nd the Fatherland too easily. The Fatherland is the highest because it is what is most proper to us, and as what
is most proper to us, it can never be found in the way that something

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merely present-at-hand is found. It will be found, if at all, as missing from

the realm of the thingly. In the realm of the thingly, the Fatherland is found
as that for which we must seekfor Heidegger in the 193738 lecture
course Grundfragen der Philosophie, the goal of the Germans is the search
itself.7
Inasmuch as Heideggers Fatherland lies outside the scope of classical
ontology, it recalls the missing homeland of Franz Rosenzweigs The Star of
Redemption:
To the eternal people, home never is home in the sense of land, as it is to the peoples of the world who plough the land and live and thrive on it, until they have all
but forgotten that being a people means something besides being rooted in a land.
. . . In the most profound sense possible, this people has a land of its own only in
that it has a land it yearns fora holy land. And so even when it has a home, this
people, in recurrent contrast to all other peoples on earth, is not allowed full possession of that home. It is only a stranger and a sojourner. 8

The land of this people never fully surrenders itself to possession. It is to

be found as yearning and not as property, as oujsiva. At the end of World
War I, Rosenzweig writes from within the millenary absence of a Jewish
state, whereas Heidegger, two decades later, employs the same topos of the
missing homeland at the zenith of German imperialism. How is the similarity to be understood? As an instance of the expropriation of Jewish
Eigentum (property) under Hitler or as sabotage of the objectives of the
Wannsee Conference by means of a Verjudung ( Judaization) of the essence
of the Fatherland?
Both, in a secondary sense, are at issue. And that both might be at
issue is because Heidegger, following Hlderlin, believes that the Germans are compelled to seek out a way to differentiate themselves from the
Greeks. Hlderlins texts and Heideggers commentaries can be read for
what they say regarding the necessary and promised non-Hellenism of the
German people. Only once this task of differentiation has been outlined
will it be possible to query to what degree both Hlderlin and Heidegger
admit of rediscovery within the literature of the Jewish Diaspora. Of
course, such an admittedly strained interpretation simply inverts Alfred
Rosenbergs fatuous image of Hlderlin as a proto-Nazi.9 What is properly
at stake is a treatment of the essence of the national overlooked by the
Greeks and never even suspected by National Socialism.
Heideggers reiterated objection to National Socialism was that it was
insufciently national. The so-called politicization of every sphere under

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the regime did not hesitate to style itself as Greek and to assume that the
essence of the political was exhaustively understood in classical Greece. In
the 1942 lecture course Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, Heidegger criticizes
the classical scholarship of the period for conating the Greeks and the
NSDAP: Todayif one still reads such books at all one can scarcely
read a treatise or book on the Greeks without everywhere being assured
that here, with the Greeks, everything is politically determined. In the
majority of research results, the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists. 10 For Heidegger, these works are unjust both to the Greeks and to
the National Socialists. The specic task of a German nationalist uprising is overlooked and Greece is misrepresented as the model or precursor
of the Nazi mobilization. It is simply assumed in these works that the political determination of everything that is draws the Greeks and the National Socialists together.
The failure to understand the political, notwithstanding its compulsive invocation, that Heidegger observes in his contemporaries is a deciency that he then proceeds to attribute, albeit to a lesser degree, to the
Greeks themselves. The authentic understanding of the essence of the political depends on a revelation of the essence of the povli~:
Who says that the Greeks, because they lived in the povli~, were also in the clear
as to the essence of the povli~? Perhaps the name povli~ is precisely the word for
that realm that constantly became questionable anew, remained worthy of question, made necessary and indeed needed certain decisions whose truth on each occasion displaced the Greeks into the realm of the groundless or the inaccessible. If
we therefore ask: What is the povli~ of the Greeks? then we must not presuppose
that the Greeks must have known this, as though all we had to do were to enquire
among them.11

The povli~ resists historiographical reconstruction from the utterances

of the ancient Greeks; it resists it because the povli~ is the precondition
of these utterances. Heidegger further writes of the povli~: It is neither
merely state, nor merely city, rather in the rst instance it is properly the
stead [die Statt ]: the site [die Sttte] of the abode of human history that
belongs to humans in the midst of beings. 12 For Heidegger, the povli~
thus has to be understood more fundamentally as the clearing of Being:
The pre-political essence of the povli~, that essence that rst makes possible everything political in the original and in the derivative sense, lies in
its being the open site of that tting destining [Schickung] from out of
which all human relations towards beingsand that always means in the

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rst instance the relations of beings as such to humansare determined. 13

Again, in the 1942 43 lecture course Parmenides, Heidegger speaks of the
povli~ in this way: The povli~ is the essence of the place [Ort], or, as we
say, it is the settlement [Ort-schaft] of the historical dwelling of Greek humanity. Because the povli~ lets the totality of beings come in this or that
way into the unconcealedness of its condition, the povli~ is therefore essentially related to the Being of beings. Between povli~ and Being there is
a primordial relation. 14 This interpretation of the povli~ as the clearing of
Being follows from and illuminates a fragment by Hlderlin that Heidegger quotes:
do you think
It will proceed
Along the course of old? Namely, they wanted to found
A realm of art. But thereby
The national [das Vaterlndische] was neglected
By them and pitifully
Greece, the fairest of all, was destroyed.
Now presumably matters
Stand otherwise.15

For Hlderlin, the Greeks neglected the national. This appears a perverse
claim because the Greeks, in their attachment to the graves of their ancestors and in their refusal of anything above their respective cities, are usually said to have possessed the preeminent sense of place and of Heimat.
But this preeminence of the Greeks is relative to other Western peoples and
not absolute. For Heidegger, that which the Greeks neglected, namely, the
essence of the povli~ as the site of their historical Dasein, they could not
but have neglected without a contestation of classical ontology. In the
1934 35 lecture course Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein,
the conjunction receives its sharpest form: The Fatherland is Being [das
Seyn] itself. 16 The imperative that informs Heideggers destruction of the
ontological tradition is the task of addressing the national. So long as the
hegemony of the ontic remains unchallenged and Being unthought, even
the most vehemently proclaimed patriotic renewal will amount to a dereliction of the Fatherland. In the history of Being, National Socialism gures as cosmopolitan.
As the Fatherland is explicitly associated with the central question
in Heideggers thinking, it cannot be interpreted as a nonphilosophical
residue in an otherwise stringent corpus.17 However aphoristically Hei-

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degger speaks of the Fatherland, he does so within the context of his elaboration of the question of Being, rather than in the form of asides. Having
been identied with Being (das Seyn), and thus with the Un-thought of the
Greeks and the hegemony of the ontic, the word Fatherland is differentiated from the jargon of the regime. The degree of difference is easily
underestimated given the cursory nature of Heideggers presentation, and
it is thus not redundant to set out this difference at greater length. It has
rst to be asked on what grounds Heidegger identies the Fatherland with
Being. Between the discourses of nationalism and metaphysics, there is
no obvious transition. The Fatherland is what it is only as Being, because
whatever the originarity to which the Fatherland lays claim, it claims it as
the originarity of Being. The Fatherland of conventional nationalism,
which marks itself off straightforwardly from other countries as the country of origin, has to dispute with Being for the title to the originary. In this
dispute, conventional nationalism nds its claims rebuffed.
Why this should be so and why the Fatherland has in the end to be
understood as Being is the import of Heideggers treatment of Beingin-the-world in Being and Time. Already in the 1927 text, the origin of Dasein is shown to lie elsewhere than among beings. As Being-in-the-world,
Dasein cannot have its originin the sense of its groundin any being
present-at-hand. In the distinctness of a geographically determinate Fatherland, Dasein would be unable to recognize the ground of its own status as an exception to the ontology of the distinct. It has to turn instead to
the world in which the distinct rst appears and that thus precedes the Fatherland of conventional nationalism. Where National Socialism neglected
the ontic indeterminability of world in favor of a Fatherland with border
controls and commissions for cartographers, it subscribed to classical ontology and the apprehensibility of what is. The Fatherland, in the thingliness whereby it was recognizable, was also discovered to be manipulable
and to lend itself to expansion. For the purpose of thinking that which is
most our own, National Socialism had at its disposal only relics of the
thing-concepts of classical ontology. Heidegger, in contrast, conceives that
which is most our own as the Un-thought of tevcnh and hence of that planetary domination under which the inner truth of National Socialism was
forgotten. The inner truth of the movement was the truth constituted by
the ownmost (das Eigenste). Since neither among the Greeks nor among
the later peoples sustained by their legacy was the originary ever grasped
in its essence, it cannot justiably be interpreted as the preserve of reac-

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tionaries. The originary, in the incomprehensibility with which it haunts

tevcnh, is less the reassuring habitat of backward Luddites than the still indiscernible site of the disclosedness of beings.
If, for Heidegger in 1934 35, the Fatherland is Being itself, it is because the Fatherland is the world of the Volk. The world in which the German people carries out its mission of thinking the question of Being is itself
the clearing of Being. The conspicuous untimeliness of Heideggers dictum
in Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein is not explained away
by equating Being with the world of the Volk, since the use Heidegger
makes elsewhere of world and Volk is itself untimely with relation to
the nationalist discourse of the Nazi regime. Even though Heidegger never
speaks of the Fatherland in Being and Time, the basis for his denition of
the Fatherland in 1934 35 can be ascertained in the earlier text with its
discussions of the ontological status of world and the worldliness of the
Being-with-one-another of the Volk. Only as Beingthat is, only as the
untimely Un-thought of the age of metaphysicsis the Fatherland truly
the world of the Volk and not, for instance, an intraworldly (innerweltlich)
object of exchange in the territorial struggles of Social Darwinism. As the
world of the Volk, the Fatherland is that which is at once closest and least
tangible. Its proximity cannot be grasped as the proximity of an object
present-at-hand, since as the clearing of beings in which an object rst appears, it is closer than any object. It is the condition of possibility for the
closeness of an object. The proximity of the Fatherland has to be grasped
differently from the proximity of one object to another. It is in the way this
difference is worked out, and in the question that thus arises concerning
the scope of thing-concepts , that the fervor of Heideggers nationalism reveals itself as inimical to the Nazi regime and its metaphysical foundations.
The proximity of the Fatherland is its originarity. For conventional
nationalism, this originarity is unambiguously manifest in ones country of
origin. But does ones country of origin truly stand on itself in distinction
from that which is derivative and not originary? For Heidegger, the Fatherland does not lie at any given moment at a greater or lesser distance in
space from the Volk, since what is at issue is not a xed point on the globe
from and toward which one might move at will. The Fatherland is originary, not in the sense that it constitutes the backdrop of an act of parturition, but rather in the sense that its proximity is insuperable. In its originarity, the Fatherland is that which is essentially nearest. The Fatherland is
the origin and thus whatever can be shown to be derivative is, ipso facto,

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not the Fatherland. Heideggers idiosyncratic nationalism is, accordingly,

already in evidence in his destruction of the philosophical tradition. Once
the tradition has been destroyed, once the ground of all previous philosophy has been laid bare, the originary, which is to say the Fatherland in Heideggers sense, will have been secured. Nationalism, inasmuch as it takes
the notion of originarity seriously, cannot evade the task of philosophical genealogy and must exclude the derivative from its denition of the
Fatherland.
In this respect, Kants cosmopolitanism is a more rigorous nationalism than the territorial bigotry of the Nazis because it is more originary:
the measurable Lebensraum of the latter presupposes the homogeneous
space in which the Kantian subject asserts its rights as a citizen of the
world. If Heidegger rejects this most philosophical of cosmopolitanisms,
in turn, as derivative, it is without disputing its philosophical superiority
over the sundry aborted nationalisms postdating the Critique of Pure Reason. For Heidegger, the insuperable proximity of the Fatherland is not spatial because the Fatherland is nearer than space itself, let alone any object
contained within space, and it is nearer because, as Being (Seyn), it is ontologically prior.
Heideggers nationalism, and its pertinence to his thought as a whole,
lies in an attempt to think the nearness of the nearest. As the nearest, the
Fatherland is necessarily Being in its originarity. Advancing such a denition, Heidegger is by no means ransacking the vocabulary of philosophy
simply in order to furnish the Heimat of National Socialism with an ontological gloss. On the contrary, Heidegger thereby concisely states his opposition to the nationalism of the regime. Inasmuch as the Heimat of National Socialism in its ready convertibility into Lebensraumwas the
quantiable territory of an organism and not Being, that which is essentially nearest to the Volk, and hence that which is the Volk itself, became
a quantum. The reication of Dasein propagated in the biologism of the
regime thereby had its counterpart in an understanding of the Fatherland
as an object in space. Whatever the quantitative aggrandizement of the Fatherland through military expansion, its initial debasement to an object
within space, and thus to that which is doubly derivative, was not redressed. The Fatherland of imperialist discourse, inasmuch as it is more a
geometrical gure than a Heimat, is inseparable from the theorization of
space established by the Greeks: both rest upon classical ontologys neglect
of the essence of the povli~. This is why an opposition to imperialism that

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simply falls back upon the cosmopolitanism of the spatially indifferent is

always inadequate. Where Heidegger criticizes homogeneous space in the
name of the many ways of Being, he does so, not in order to ground philosophically the otherwise rhetorical immediacy of a fetishized fatherland,
but rather in order to interrogate in homogeneous space the ontological
presuppositions of a reied Fatherland. Since what identies a Heimat is
not a spatial immediacy but the nearness by which it is ones own, this nearness must be the matter of an existential analytic before it is, if at all, the
matter of geometry.
The question of Being, as that which is existentially nearest, is the
question of the Heimat of Dasein. Being-at-home, by which a Heimat is
recognized as such, is thus, for Heidegger, an orientation within the question of Being. In this sense, orientation is not an orientation among objects
but an orientation within the non-thingly. Heideggers Heimat is recognizable as such by that which is not recognizable in it, by that which is uncanny. Orientation becomes an orientation by that which stands too close
to be an object, and then not because it is the subject itself, since it is still
closer than the subject. Any orientation that is a nding of oneself as a subject among and over against objects is thus, properly speaking, a disorientation, because the exception to the understanding of Being as presence,
the exception that is nearest to Dasein and by which Dasein has rst of all
to orientate itself, is forgotten. Orientation within the Fatherland of Being
is, conversely, a disorientation with regard to the objectivity of the objects
in ones vicinity. Orientation within a Fatherland that has been reied and
subordinated to geometry proceeds by a mensuration between objects: it is
less a being-at-home in what is closest to Dasein than an inclusion of Dasein in an inventory of the present-at-hand.
But, then, orientation within the homogeneous space that is the cosmopolitan subjects native element is also a forgetting of Daseins Being, because homogeneity in general is inconceivable without a suppression of
transcendence. Heidegger already formulates this objection to the originarity of homogeneous space in the covert treatment of the notion of the
Fatherland that is the existential analytic. To see how much of Heideggers
nationalism was in place by the late 1920s, and how little he received from
the hands of the Nazis, the existential analytic can therefore be reread for
what it says on orientation and that which is nearest to Dasein. Heidegger
criticizes there the cosmopolitanism of homogeneous space but without offering a premature defense of the parochialism of the Nazi regime. Criti-

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cizing this cosmopolitanism in the course of his exposition of the phenomenon of orientation, Heidegger does not have recourse to the realism
on which National Socialism prided itself and on which the practicality of
orientation is conventionally believed to rely. On the contrary, Heideggers
criticism follows from a completely novel denition of orientation. Orientation within the question of Being replaces orientation within the reality of objects and the homogeneous space into which this reality must,
as Kant had argued, collapse.
Heideggers reading of Kants text What Is Orientation in Thinking? can easily give the impression of obtuseness, because it does not share
Kants denition of orientation and cannot, accordingly, be seen to improve on it. For Heidegger, Dasein as Being-in-the-world is always already
oriented, and orientation, as it is set forth by Kant in his friendly critique
of Moses Mendelssohns metaphysics, is but one mode of Daseins Beingin-the-world. To explain orientation with reference to the subject is to
risk all understanding of the worldly constitution of Dasein. In Being and
Time, Heidegger repeats his objections from History of the Concept of Time
to the meaningfulness of Kants reconstruction of orientation from the difference between the left and right sides of the body:
Left and right are not something subjective for which the subject has a feeling;
they are directions of ones directedness into a world that is ready-to-hand already.
By the mere feeling of a difference between my two sides I could never nd my
way about in a world. The subject with a mere feeling of this difference is a construct posited in disregard of the state that is truly constitutive for any subject
namely, that whenever Dasein has such a mere feeling, it is in a world already
and must be in it to be able to orient itself at all. This becomes plain from the example with which Kant tries to clarify the phenomenon of orientation.
Suppose I step into a room which is familiar to me but dark, and which has
been rearranged [umgerumt] during my absence so that everything which used to
be at my right is now at my left. If I am to orient myself the mere feeling of the
difference between my two sides will be of no help at all as long as I fail to apprehend some denite object whose position, as Kant remarks casually, I have
in mind. But what does this signify except that whenever this happens I necessarily orient myself both in and from my being already alongside a world which is
familiar? The equipment-context of a world must have been presented to Dasein. That I am already in a world is no less constitutive for the possibility of orientation than is the feeling for right and left. While this state of Daseins Being is
an obvious one, we are not thereby justied in suppressing the ontologically constitutive role which it plays. Even Kant does not suppress it, any more than any
other Interpretation of Dasein. Yet the fact that this is a state of which we con-

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stantly make use does not exempt us from providing a suitable ontological explication, but rather demands one. The psychological Interpretation according to
which the I has something in the memory [im Gedchtnis ] is at bottom a way
of alluding to the existentially constitutive state of Being-in-the-world. Since Kant
fails to see this structure, he also fails to recognize all the interconnections which
the Constitution of any possible orientation implies. Directedness with regard to
right and left is based upon the essential directionality of Dasein in general, and
this directionality in turn is essentially co-determined by Being-in-the-world.
Even Kant, of course, has not taken orientation as a theme for Interpretation. He
merely wants to show that every orientation requires a subjective principle. Here
subjective is meant to signify that this principle is a priori. Nevertheless, the a
priori character of directedness with regard to right and left is based upon the subjective a priori of Being-in-the-world, which has nothing to do with any determinate character restricted beforehand to a worldless subject.18

This passage needs to be read carefully. The difference between left and
right, inasmuch as it is a nonconceptual difference, too quickly becomes
for Kant a matter of mere feeling. But that which Kant names a feeling
cannot be reduced to the subject without contradiction. A worldless, hence
bodyless, subject is not able to feel a difference between left and right that
in the circumstances simply does not exist. With its feeling for the difference between its two sides, the Kantian subject does not, strictly speaking,
make sense of its world, since it is rather world that in advance makes sense
for the Kantian subject of the difference between its two sides. Insensitive
to its own Being-in-the-world, the Kantian subject discovers what has already been uncovered yet discovers it by nonetheless mistaking its nature.
In other words, it successfully orientates itself within its world, not by
grasping world as such, but rather by piecing together its feeling for the difference between its two sides and an object whose position it remembers.
What the Kantian subject discovers in the moment of its reorientation is
that which was already there for it, albeit without the familiarity of the
everyday. Orientation, in Kants account, ceases explicitly to be an existential mode of Dasein and becomes an epistemological problem for the
subject.
Heidegger and Kant thus differ in the sense they give to nding oneself in the world. For the former, what is involved is an understanding of
the world in which one nds oneself even as one is disoriented within it,
whereas, for the latter, one nds oneself in the world at the moment one
overcomes the disorientation by which one is, so to speak, outside the
world. Presupposing its orientation as Being-in-the-world and yet turning

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aside from it as a question, the Kantian subject in its momentary and supercial disorientation searches among phenomena for the point of familiarity by which it could assure itself of the continuity of its world and feel
orientated. In Kants example, the point of familiarity is the object in the
darkened room whose position he remembers and from which he is then
able to reassemble the context of his everyday activity. For Heidegger, what
is important is less the reestablished context of everyday activity than the
world in which Kant rst remembers an objects position and whose ontological explication he notwithstanding omits. Hoping to pass off the skeletal marriage of proprioception and a remembered object as the richness of
the phenomenon of orientation, Kant swiftly passes over their common
ground in Being-in-the-world to the successful orientation within the unworlding of world in everyday activity.
If Heidegger stresses the subjectivity in Kants account of orientation,
it is not in order to suggest that orientation, for Kant, is solely the affair of
the feeling for the difference between the two sides of ones body. The casualness with which Heidegger hears Kant introduce the object whose position he recalls is, for Heidegger, the casualness with which one might
speak, not so much of a superuity, as of something self-evident. It is this
appearance of self-evidence and its uninterrogated ontological presuppositions that Heidegger seeks to address and that he can only address by
abandoning the conventional denition of orientation as a familiarizing of
oneself with ones environment. Being-in-the-world, as the possibility of
orientation and hence as the site of the distinction between the familiar
and the unfamiliar, can never be the point of familiarity by which the subject orientates itself and recovers itself for the immersion in everyday activity. For the sake of an understanding of its primary orientation as Beingin-the-world, Dasein has therefore to resist the seductions of the familiar
and the comfort of feeling itself oriented within the context of its everyday
activity.
This resistance, in turn, cannot without contradiction become a voluntary activity. It cannot become the enduring task that develops into the
point of familiarity by which Dasein orientates itself within as well as
against its world. Dasein must lose itself even in its disorientation, since
only then can it hope to nd itself in world as such. In the denitive example of orientation, the sun on the basis of whose familiarity one is
able to align the horizon with the points of the compass and continue
on ones way does not illuminate Being-in-the-world, but rather con-

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tributes to its obfuscation under the reassertion of everyday activity. By

xing his attention on the world that is tacitly presupposed in Kants account of orientation, Heidegger does not, as it were, ll out a lacuna in
Kants account, because this account is adequate to its denition of secondary, i.e. everyday orientation only so long as Being-in-the-world is not
thematized.
Heideggers reading of What Is Orientation in Thinking? does not
succeed as an immanent critique of Kant. Heidegger freely admits that
Kant had set himself a quite different task: Kants interest in treating orientation was to show that every orientation by the familiar involved a subjective principle. In several respects, Kants brief essay of 1786 constitutes
a digest of the earlier Critique of Pure Reason. By means of his opening
description of orientation in a darkened room, Kant arrives at the subjective principle that is none other than the a priori intuition of space, and
from this reprise of The Transcendental Aesthetic, he then proceeds to
a comparable discipline of theology. Orientation is, for Kant, the occasion
to demonstrate, once again, the complementarity of intuition and concept and thereby to reprove the exclusive conceptualism of dogmatic metaphysics. Given the task that he had set himself, Kant has to extract from
the phenomenon of orientation, not world as such, but that which is at
once nonconceptual and a priori. Already in his precritical writings, Kant
had adduced the difference between the two sides of ones body as an example of a nonconceptual difference. And in the feeling of this difference,
on account of the role it plays in every orientation, Kant willingly notes the
a priori and thereafter turns to his critique of Mendelssohn.
As it is not his aim in What Is Orientation in Thinking? to confound empiricism, let alone nationalism, Kant makes very little of exposing a transcendental moment in orientation. On his way to his encounter
with dogmatic metaphysics, Kant thus calls into question with what right
any phenomenon could be taken for that which is most familiar. Whenever it orients itself, whenever it feels that it is at home, the Kantian subject has recourse to the feeling of the difference between left and right. This
a priori feeling is more familiar than any of the various objects that must
combine with it in the process of orientation. The Kantian subject is thus
more at home in the a priori than it is among any given phenomena. Its
well-known cosmopolitanism is the consequence of this demotion of the
familiarity of phenomena. What is decisive for the Kantian subjects being-

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at-home is the application of the subjective principle, rather than the spatial immediacy of a Heimat. For Kant, the object whose position he remembers in the darkened room is not superuous to orientation, but its
familiarity is certainly subordinate to the familiarity of the difference between the two sides of his body.
Heidegger does not protest this subordination. In his reading of
What Is Orientation in Thinking? Heidegger does not rescue the object
in the darkened room. He does not seek to reverse the demotion of its familiarity and to enter an empiricists claim for the originarity of phenomena. What Heidegger protests is the disregard of the world that rst renders familiar both the object and the subjective principle of the difference
between left and right.19 It is Being-in-the-world that is, for Heidegger, the
true a priori of orientation, just as it is Being-in-the-world that is experienced by Dasein, however, as disorientation when it is torn from its immersion in the everyday.
The true a priori, as that which is ontologically closest to Dasein, is
the true Heimat. It is neither the feeling for the difference between right
and left nor an object whose position one remembers: it is the ground of
these individual components by which Kant reconstructs the phenomenon
of orientation. Being-in-the-world can never become familiar. It is also,
one might say, the strangeness at the heart of what is taken to be familiar.
When ones surroundings are experienced as unsettling and alien, this is
for Heidegger not a merely subjective disturbance in the apprehension of
things as they are. What a thing is said to be in its everyday acceptation,
how an object can appear familiar within a darkened room, presupposes
the suppression of the undecidability of Being-in-the-world. Heideggers
account of orientation effectively concludes with the statement that orientation, in Kants sense, is impossible: the more meticulously one studies
ones surroundings and endeavors to grasp them philosophically as they are
so as thereby to become oriented, the more one is overwhelmed by the uncanniness of Being-in-the-world.
Kants account of orientation thus undergoes in Heideggers reading
a suggestively oriental, that is to say Jewish, destruction. The stability of the
points of reference by which Kant orients himself is undermined in Heidegger by the intrusion of that which refuses to stabilize. In its resistance
to reication and to its incorporation in a frame of reference, Being-in-theworld stands under the prohibition of images. Kant orients himself in spite

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of Judaea. With a northerners perception of the suns position at noon,

Kant writes:
To orientate oneself, in the proper sense of the word, means to use a given directionand we divide the horizon into four of thesein order to nd the others,
and in particular that of sunrise. If I see the sun in the sky and know that it is now
midday, I know how to nd south, west, north, and east. For this purpose, however, I must necessarily be able to feel a difference within my own subject, namely
that between my right and left hands.20

Kant supplements the constancy of the Orient as the xed point of orientation with the constancy of the subject. For Heidegger, however, it is not
a matter of nding what is constant, since making sense of the subject,
which in Kants exposition makes sense of the sun, is the inconstancy of
the transcendence proper to Being-in-the-world. In his destruction of
the traditional account of orientation, Heidegger does not come upon the
xed point whose stability is grounded in classical ontologys understanding of Being as presence. Heideggers Orient does not turn out to be Greek.
For Heidegger, orientation is a being-at-home in Being-in-the-world.
As Dasein is essentially Being-in-the-world, Dasein is always at home. But
Dasein misunderstands the character of its Heimat. In confusing its Heimat
with a given intraworldly being or a subjective principle, Dasein convinces
itself that is at home in what is at a remove from its Being. It is only in
Being as such that Dasein can be at home and it is at home to the extent
that it is disconcerted. Dasein is always at home because it is always in some
manner disconcerted. When Dasein errs in believing that it is at home in
a familiar environment, it nonetheless nds itself at home in the bewilderment of its error.
By comparison, Descartes arguably retains the conventional denition of the security of Heimat when he grounds modern metaphysics on
the terra rma that is subjectivity. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel discusses the transition from the philosophy of the Middle
Ages to the philosophy that, with Descartes, knows itself as self-consciousness and is at home:
Philosophy in its own proper soil separates itself entirely from the philosophizing theology, in accordance with its principle, and places it on quite another side.
Here, we may say, we are at home, and like the mariner after a long voyage in a
tempestuous sea, we may now hail the sight of land; with Descartes the culture of
modern times, the thought of modern philosophy, really begins to appear, after a
long and tedious journey on the way which has led so far.21

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Here the considerable differences between the Cartesian res cogitans and
Hegels Spirit are not brought into play, so that the identity with respect
to the self-certainty of thought might be all the more conspicuous. The
Cartesian doubt that questions everything except the certainty of itself as
doubt is that alienation from the thingly by which the subject is forced
to or more precisely, created bythe acknowledgement that, henceforth, it is only with itself that it can feel at home. With the guarantee of
this self-certainty of alienation, a knowledge of what is can again be attempted. But by retaining the conventional denition of the security of
Heimat in the foundation of his metaphysics, Descartes conceals from
himself the questionability of requiring certainty from a starting point. He
begins from what is familiar and certain and employs its familiarity and
certainty as the stable measure of beings.
Kant, who inherits from Descartes the conviction of the desirability
of certain foundations, is too ready to nd a use for the constancy of the
transcendental subject. The certainty with which the transcendental subject can be held to repeat its I think alongside every judgment and
thereby provide the foundation for possible syntheses is not itself originary.
The repetition and constancy of the transcendental subjects I think is
only conceivable within the discrete nows of derivative temporality. The
certainty of the transcendental subject, as the immutability of that which
can be taken for granted, is its reication into that which is always only ever
present-at-hand. Kants cosmopolitanism is a being-at-home everywhere,
because it nds itself everywhere in the very possibility of judgment. It encounters itself in whatever is, since the encounter always involves the I
think of original apperception. But in being only ever present-at-hand,
the cosmopolitan subject is shut out from the originary as such and is properly homeless. The true Heimat, judged by the originarity of originary temporality, cannot be present-at-hand.
Strictly speaking, Heidegger does not reassert in the phenomenon
of orientation the object that Kant pushes to the background in concentrating on the subject. Heidegger dwells on the object whose position Kant
remembers not for its own sake but for the sake of its foundation in Beingin-the-world. Heidegger pulls the object back to the foreground in discussions of orientation in order to interrupt the process by which the Kantian
subject nds itself at home in subjectivity, rather thanmore originarily
in Being-in-the-world. He recalls Kants dependence on the object in
orientation and disputes the plausibility of the subjects absolute with-

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drawal into itself. With the reassertion of the object in orientation, Heidegger recovers Being-in-the-world from its suppression in the founding of
the metaphysics of subjectity.
Contending that the subjectivity of the subject precedes any relation
to an object and underplaying Daseins Being-in-the-world, Kant makes
the a priori intuition of space the native element of the subject. In the
Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant argues of space:
Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective
condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us. Since,
then, the receptivity of the subject, its capacity to be affected by objects, must necessarily precede all intuitions of these objects, it can readily be understood how the
form of all appearances can be given prior to all actual perceptions, and so exist in
the mind a priori, and how, as a pure intuition, in which all objects must be determined, it can contain, prior to all experience, principles which determine the
relations of these objects.22

Receptivity, which always remains receptivity in the face of the variety of

the empirical intuitions received, becomes for Kant the independent form
in which these intuitions are received. On the basis of the constancy of
its reception, the subject is situated in the ideality of the pure a priori intuition here named space. That Kant does not ask whether a receptivity in
abstraction from every reception is meaningful is of course explained, albeit not justied, by his desire to salvage the integrity of geometrical space
from what he understands to be Humes critique. As the form of all possible appearances, space is present in all objects and its homogeneity lies in
the denitional invulnerability with which it continues to be affectivity
through every instance of affection. It is the abstract form of appearances,
but this abstractness cannot be converted into homogeneity without reinstating space as a concept, namely, as the genus common to all appearances.
What is at stake in Heideggers reading of What Is Orientation in
Thinking? is not a restoration of the heterogeneity of the space of preKantian empiricism. The heterogeneity of Being-in-the-world, which
Heidegger sets against homogeneous space, is not a set of sundry objects
but rather the transcendence by which Dasein steps beyond its containment in self-presence.
It is in this sense that Heideggers remark on geometrical space in History of the Concept of Time needs to be understood: What is homogeneous
is the pure space of metrics, of geometry. For these have destroyed the peculiar structure of aroundness only in order to arrive at the possibility of

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the discoverability of homogeneous space. 23 The peculiar structure of

aroundness is misapprehended if it is resolved into the objects in ones
vicinity. Aroundness, for Heidegger, precedes the discovery of homogeneous space and it cannot therefore be grasped in a cobbling together of
homogeneous space and objects that are only incidentally dened by their
proximity. Unless the proximity of the objects is understood as what is essentialand that is to understand objects no longer in terms of the topological indifference of the objectivity of the object and thus no longer,
strictly, as objectsthen the presence in which the objectivity and potential reproduction of the object stands and in which space is discovered
as homogeneous remains determinative. The structure of aroundness is the
sitedness of each respective Dasein in the transcendence to and of its world.
Destroying this structure rst establishes the objectivity and realism of
the object. The nitude of the peculiar structure of aroundness is thus not
overcome in order to arrive at the possibility of the discoverability of homogeneous space, since it is in a retreat from this structure that homogeneous space rst opens itself up. The innity of this space is the consequence of its retraction into the uniformity of presence. The peculiar
structure of aroundness is always beyond the reach of the subject and, given
the originarity of this structure, the subject cannot be held ever to be at
home. It is only that which exceeds the subject, not numerically but ontologically, that can ever be at home. Only Dasein, in its transcendence of the
presence by which the subject is dened, nds itself in the originarity of
aroundness. Aroundness precedes the pure space of metrics because the latter presupposes the difference between left and right, a difference that is inconceivable for a disembodied subject in homogeneous space but not for
Dasein amid the ontic articulations of its world. The directedness of the
three lines of the purportedly ahistorical denition of a triangle, for example, only makes sense because Dasein rst makes sense of the difference
between left and right in the historical and corporeal thickness of its world.
This historical thickness, as what comes rst, is the true Heimat and the
Being-with-one-another of the Volk.
It is a people, as authentic Being-with-one-another and not as an
aggregate of territorially minded subjects, that dwells in a Heimat and, as
Being-in-the-world, even is this Heimat. When Kant raises his famous
question What is man? in the introduction to his lectures on logic, and
does so explicitly within the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy, it is without any consideration for the question of the historicality of a people.24

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This question is in fact closed to Kant because in the consistency with

which he expounded the understanding of Being as presence, he could not
hesitate between the abstract individual subject and the rediscovery of this
subject everywhere: it is therefore not without a tacit reference to Kants
transcendental subject that Heidegger in Being and Time analyses the way
of Being of the they.
In the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger summarizes his objection to Kantian space:
What one otherwise and up to now has thought about space and time, which belong back into this origin of truth, isas Aristotle for the rst time worked out
in the Physics already a consequence of the previously established essence of beings as oujsiva and of truth as correctness and of all that which follows from that as
categories. When Kant calls space and time intuitions, that is within this history only a weak attempt to rescue what is ownmost to space and time. But Kant
had no access to the essential sway of space and time. In any case the orientation to
I and consciousness and re-presentation mislays all the ins and outs.25

Here Heidegger disowns his earlier thesis in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics regarding the grounding in originary temporality of the I of
Kants transcendental apperception. Kants attempt to rescue what is ownmost to space and time through their theorization as a priori intuitions
founders on subjectivity. Having set forth a distinction between intuition
as the domain of nonconceptual differences such as that between left
and rightand concept, Kant does not carry this distinction to the point
of a rupture with classical ontology. The repetition by which the subject
is convinced of both the formal independence of its receptivity and the
purity of space does not ultimately differ from the repetition in which
the concept manifests its authority over a plurality of appearances. In the
Transcendental Aesthetic in the second edition of the Critique of Pure
Reason, Kant writes:
Space is represented as an innite given magnitude. Now every concept must be
thought as a representation which is contained in an innite number of different
possible representations (as their common character), and which therefore contains these under itself; but no concept, as such, can be thought as containing an
innite number of representations within itself. It is in this latter way, however,
that space is thought; for all the parts of space coexist ad innitum. Consequently,
the original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept.26

The difference between concept and intuition is conned to the way in

which they contain representations. Where a concept admits an innite

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number of representations, the innity does not so much lie in the concept itself as in that by which the individual representations differ from
their common character, that is, from their concept. With space, the differences between its representations can themselves be spatial. In the scope
of both intuition and concept, the previously established essence of beings
as oujsiva grounds the possibility of repetition and of the innite number of
representations. Kant does not sever space from the concept by severing it
from the foundations of the concepts ahistoricality in the intelligibility of
Aristotelian substance. Indeed, Kant makes the critical philosophy a new
bastion of the doctrine of the substantiality of space: in the Anticipations
of Perception, Kant prides himself on providing a transcendental proof of
the uniformity, which is to say, for Kant, the intelligibility of space where
earlier attempts at an empirical proof had failed.27 The substantiality of
space as an a priori intuition is the substantiality of the transcendental ego,
namely, of that of which The Paralogisms of Pure Reason is a critique in
the Kantian sense rather than a refutation (the transcendental ego is the intelligibility of what is, even if it is not itself intelligible). With the substantiality of a space that is everywhere fundamentally the same, the Heimlichkeit and originary undecidability of Being-in-the-world has, however,
little to do. Betraying the promise of the distinction between concept and
intuition, Kant expels the unrepeatable from a priori space: within the
publicness of Kants cosmopolitan space, Dasein lacks the means to do anything but keep the whereabouts of its singular Heimat to itself.
Does the fact that Heidegger criticizes the cosmopolitanism of homogeneous space sufce to make him an advocate of the National Socialist Heimat ? Heideggers notion of Being-in-the-world is clearly not the
theoretical justication of the smugness and xenophobia of the sanctioned
but politically unrepresentative cultural products of the regime. The Fatherland that remains recognizably the same is already an abandonment of
the existential thickness of world for the objectivity of positivism. A patriotic literature that does not allow its upsurge of feeling to derail the epistemological categories by which the Heimat is apprehended as a stable and
distinct entity is not a literature of the originarity of the world of a people.
Emotive descriptions of a landscape within the national borders bring together feeling and the object, but the union remains external: abstracted
from Being-in-the-world, feeling and the object rub up against each other
without calling their abstraction into question. The facticity of mood
(Stimmung) is reduced to being an ornament of the Fatherland, when it is

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rather a central phenomenon of the originarity of Daseins Being-in-theworld.

Politically more important, Hitlers Lebensraum is also incompatible
with Heideggers notion of Heimat. Indeed, alongside the muddled reading of Darwinian theories on which the notion of Lebensraum rests, there
can be discerned in Hitlers conception a cosmopolitan indifference to
place.28 Hitlers biologistically conceived Volk faces the task of conquering for itself a territory from whose resources it will then be able to sustain
itself: the exigencies of the struggle for survival do not permit any sentimental predilection for ones native soil. In the notion of Lebensraum,
space remains thought within the understanding of Being as presence, because territory takes on the stability and thingliness of that which is recognized in presence. With its plans for the exploitation of resources and its
absolute subjectivity, the biologistically conceived Volk bears an unmistakable resemblance to the entrepreneur of high capitalism. Under the guise
of the animal, Nazi Germany thus remained in the thrall of the model of
nineteenth-century England, and the spirit of emulation for which it reproached the Grnderjahre of the Hohenzollern Reich went unchecked.
On the rst anniversary of Hitlers installation in power, Heidegger criticized this biologism as it was put forward in an earlier address by the cultural functionary Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer:
Kolbenheyer does not see, he cannot and does not want to see:
1. that the biology in question from 1900 rests on the basic starting point of Darwinism and that this Darwinian doctrine of life is not something absolute, that it
is not even biological. On the contrary, it is historically spiritually determined by
the liberal view of humanity and human society as it prevailed in English positivism in the nineteenth century.29

One might say that for Heidegger, the biologistically conceived Volk of
National Socialism would have had to seek its Heimat, if anywhere in the
positivity of nation states, in Manchester. Yet National Socialism was imperialistic not because it sought a Heimat, but rather because, in its subjectivity, it had no proper comprehension of Heimat. In the abstractness with
which it stood over against its environment, it had already come to the possibility of an expandable and domitable territory that is the inspiration of
imperialism.
If Heidegger, in his 1934 35 lecture course on Hlderlin, speaks of
the Fatherland as Being itself, it is, therefore, in order to initiate a discourse

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that, despite every appearance, had not yet begun. Heideggers nationalism, as an interrogation of the originary, understands das Deutsche through
the question of Being. That which is German is not self-evident. For Heidegger, the otherness of the other foundational reception of Being that is
das Deutsche is only to be fully revealed through the encounter with the
Greeks. In this, he heeds Hlderlins exhortation to such an encounter. But
although Heidegger follows Hlderlin, he interprets him in an elaboration,
rather than a rejection of his own earlier thinking. Intimations of a discourse on Heimat and das Deutsche can be discovered in Heideggers writings before his engagement with Hlderlin. To address these notions with
reference to Hlderlin is, however, to address them with reference to the
Judeo-Christian legacy that Heidegger, as a philosopher, believed he had
to disown and silence. In Hlderlin, this legacy, which has nothing to do
with the continuity of a tradition, stands more clearly, if still polemically,
out in the open.
Repeatedly in his commentaries on Hlderlin, Heidegger devotes
his attentions to Hlderlins letter to Casimir Ulrich Bhlendorff of December 4, 1801. It is here, in the course of offering Bhlendorff a response
to his drama, Fernando oder die Kunstweihe, that, in Heideggers exegesis,
Hlderlin sets forth the question of what it is to be German. The passage
reads:
We learn nothing with more difculty than to freely use the national. And, I believe that it is precisely the clarity of the presentation that is so natural to us as is
for the Greeks the re from heaven. For exactly that reason they will have to be
surpassed in beautiful passionwhich you have also preserved for yourself
rather than in that Homeric presence of mind and talent for presentation.
It sounds paradoxical. Yet I argue it once again and leave it for your examination and use: in the progress of education the truly national will become the ever
less attractive. Hence the Greeks are less master of the sacred pathos, because to
them it was inborn, whereas they excel in their talent for presentation, beginning
with Homer, because this exceptional man was sufciently sensitive to conquer the
Western Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian empire and thus to veritably appropriate what is foreign.
With us it is the reverse. Hence it is also so dangerous to deduce the rules of
art for oneself exclusively from Greek excellence. I have labored long over this and
know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks
and for usnamely, the living relationship and destinywe must not share anything identical with them.
Yet what is familiar must be learned as well as what is alien. This is why the

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Greeks are so indispensable for us. It is only that we will not follow them in our
own, national [spirit] since, as I said, the free use of what is ones own is the most
difcult.30

It is worthy of note that nowhere in this passage does Hlderlin use the
word German (deutsch). For Heidegger, it is, however, understood that
the national (das Nationelle) of which Hlderlin writes is the nationality
of the German. Thus the lecture course Hlderlins Hymn The Ister reprises the letter to Bhlendorff in the following manner:
What the Germans lack, what must therefore rst come to be encountered by
them as that which is foreign to them, is the re from the heavens. It is this that
the Germans must learn to experience so as to be struck by the re and thereby
to be impelled toward the correct appropriation of their own gift for presentation. Otherwise the Germans will remain exposed to the danger and the weakness
of suppressing every re on account of the rashness of their capabilities, and of
pursuing for its own sake the ability to grasp and to delimit, and even of taking
their delimiting and instituting to be the re itself. It is therefore the pure selfexperiencing of his own poetizing when Hlderlin says of the Germans, as distinct
from the Greeks: whereas the main tendency in the manners of representation in
our time (i.e. the time of the Germans) is the ability to hit on something, to have
destiny [Geschik], since the lack of fate [das Schiksaallose], the duvsmoron, is our
weakness. 31

Rather than securing the interpretation, Heideggers parenthesis (i.e. the

time of the Germans) betrays its peremptoriness. How is it straightforward that the time that Hlderlin names as our time in its difference
from the time of the Greeks in the Remarks on Antigone is the time
of the Germans? By what authority can Heidegger assert that Hlderlins
use of the rst person plural here limits itself to an evocation of the community of the Germans? Yet, conceivably, Heideggers parenthesis is neither an elucidation nor a stopgap whereby a presupposed rift between
Hlderlins text and a general comprehensibility is sealed. The expression,
the time of the Germans is, if anything, more obscure than Hlderlins
our time. It is Hlderlin who elucidates rather that which Heidegger intends by the time of the Germans. And indeed, according to Heidegger,
this is how it should be. In the lecture course Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, Heidegger writes of Hlderlin:
He is the poet of the Germans. But Klopstock and Herder, Goethe and Schiller,
Novalis and Kleist, Eichendorff and Mrike, Stefan George and Rilke are German

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poets as well, belonging likewise to the Germans. Yet we do not mean it in that
sense. Poet of the Germans not as subjective genitive, but rather as objective genitive: the poet who rst poetizes the Germans. But have not the others also, and in
their way, said and sung the German essence? To be sure,and yet Hlderlin is
in the superlative sense the poet, that is, founder of German Being, because he has
projected the latter the furthest, namely, cast it out and ahead into the furthest
future.32

The sense of Hlderlins our time is consequently not so much to be elucidated as enforced: for Heidegger, his employment of the rst person plural decides the German essence. When Hlderlin, in the letter to Bhlendorff, speaks of the West and Heidegger hears only the Germans, there is
thus a double aggression. It is not merely that all the peoples of the West
have been subsumed under the rubric Germanthe Germans themselves, in their historical and geographical contingency, have disappeared
before the arrival of this other Germany: we, the non-Greeks . . .
Clearly the precise nature of the negation in this formula is not to be
grasped in a bare allusion to dialectics. It is not enough to say that the
Greeks and the Germans stand in a negative relation to each other. The
identity of the Germans does not remain as a residuum once the stable, selfreferring identity of the Greeks has been subtracted, because the Greeks, in
the sobriety of their gift for depiction, are to all appearances the most Western and thus the most German of peoples. The essence of the West is to
be encountered, if it is to be encountered at all, in the alienHlderlin
would say, orientalterritory of Greek art. In what sense, then, can the
Germans be more German than the Greeks, when every appearance suggests that it is the Greeks who are the Germans? Given that Hlderlin
writes that what is ones own must be learnt just as much as that which is
strange, the two principles by which Hlderlin denes Western and Greek
artnamely, clarity of depiction and holy pathos do not differentiate
the Greek and Western peoples. The differentiation becomes, rather, a future task: I. . . know by now that, with the exception of what must be the
highest for the Greeks and for usnamely, the living relationship and
destinywe must not share anything with them. Hlderlins rst person plural, and hence Heideggers Germans, are the people who are not
permitted to be Greekwe, the Germans, must not share anything with
them. What alone distinguishes the Germans is the imperative under
which they stand.

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In the essay The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity, Hlderlin explicitly presents this imperative as the necessity of an
insurrection against antiquity:
We dream of education, piety, p.p. and have none whatsoever; it is appropriated
we dream of originality and autonomy; we believe to be saying all kinds of new
things and, still, all this is reaction, as it were, a mild revenge against the slavery
with which we have behaved toward antiquity. There seems to be indeed hardly
any other choice than to be oppressed by what has been appropriated and by what
is positive, or, with violent effort, to oppose as a living force everything learnt,
given, positive. What seems most problematic here is that antiquity appears altogether opposed to our primordial drive which is bent on forming the unformed,
to perfect the primordial-natural so that man, who is born for art, will naturally
take to what is raw, uneducated, childlike rather than to a formed material where
there has already been pre-formed [what] one wishes to form.33

The despotism of Greece is not to be eluded through the choice of the material to be fashioned into a work of art because the very fashioning of material is Greek. Under such conditions, the human being who is born for
art prefers the crude and shapeless, which in the absence of any articulation
and formation never emerges as such into the light of day. The artist who
is not Greek creates nothing. Such an artist, without ceasing to be an artist, lives under a prohibition of images and can thus never be at home in
the ontic.
Once Greece has been dened, however summarily with respect to
the art of other cultures, as the essence of the positive, a confrontation with
Greece and Greece alone becomes indispensable, if the task of a radical differentiation is to be adequately formulated. Greece, as the essence of the
positive, becomes the origin of every manifest culture: in November 1802,
in the second of his two extant letters to Bhlendorff, Hlderlin can thus
speak of his journey through the south of France as an encounter with
Greece.34 Heidegger similarly absolutizes Greece. As the site of the determination of the essence of the planetary culture of the West, Greece is recalled by everything that is. It is the rst beginning, which must be exhaustively thought through to its Un-thought merely in anticipation of the
other beginning. The scope of Greece, as the scope of classical ontology, is
not to be underestimated.
In one of the rst studies dedicated to Hlderlin, let alone to his relations to antiquity, Wilhelm Michel perceives an occidental turn (abendlndische Wendung) in the late poetry and interprets it as an ultimately

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unavailing defense against the heavenly re of the Greeks.35 But what is the
West toward which Hlderlin is said to have turned? The earlier poetry is
not lacking in Swabian place-names, just as the later is not lacking in Greek
onesthat which Hlderlin opposes to the Greeks is not a matter of cartography.36 The imperative voiced in the letter to Bhlendorff, as Hlderlins recent realization of the limits imposed on his labors in the sphere of
Greek art, does not and cannot issue in a poetics for the establishment of
a specically Western poetry. The imperative is left to sound by itself. The
negation that announces itself at rst as a failing and as a deciency (the
inability to equal the Greeks) is to be reclaimed as an afrmative divergence in another art, a non-art. Hlderlin, as the founder of German Being, founds a people in this poverty and necessity.
For Heidegger, it is this very poverty and necessity that constitute the
afrmative divergence of Hlderlins poetry:
Hlderlin puts into poetry the very essence of poetrybut not in the sense of
a timelessly valid concept. This essence of poetry belongs to a denite time. But
not in such a way that it merely conforms to that time as some time already existing. Rather, by providing anew the essence of poetry, Hlderlin rst determines
a new time. It is the time of the gods that have ed and of the god who is coming. It is the time of need because it stands in a double lack and a double not: in
the no-longer of the gods who have ed and in the not-yet of the god who is
coming.37

Hlderlins art is the negation of art and, in the age of a double not and
its crisis, it is the essence of poetry. Hlderlins art is the art of the gods who
have ed and of the god that is coming because it is the most mimetic, the
most rigorously deferring. It is too poor in reality to be nihilistic. As the
art that is the furthest removed from reality, it is the closest to the nonnihilistic essence of a nihilistic age. It is the art of the inconspicuous.
Listing in his commentary on the hymn Der Rhein three reasons
for choosing Hlderlin as his subject, Heidegger contends that this art has
to be known in its inconspicuousness:
1. Hlderlin is the poet of the poet and of poetry. 2. In accordance with that,
Hlderlin is the poet of the Germans. 3. Because Hlderlin is this concealed and
difcult thing [dieses Verborgene und Schwere], poet of the poet as poet of the Germans, he has not yet become the power in the history of our people. Because he
has not yet become this, he has to become it. To contribute to this is politics in
the highest and authentic sense, so much so that whoever achieves something here
has no need to talk about the political. 38

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Inasmuch as they neglect a confrontation with the concealment and difculty of Hlderlin, the Germans are oblivious of their essence and, that is
to say, of the political character of their essence. Strictly speaking, therefore, the Germans as Germans do not yet exist and their Fatherland cannot yet be thought. The impropriety that Hlderlin intimates to Bhlendorff as the possession specic to the West remains to be grasped as such
and thus truly possessed. This impropriety is the caesura of the decision between art and non-art, between Greece and Judaea.
The counterfeit witticism on the emptiness and hence indecisiveness
of Heideggers thinking of decision that circulated among the auditors of
his lectures in the late 1920s (I am resolved, but to what I dont know)
belittles Heideggers attempt to grasp the impropriety of the caesura. For
Heidegger, it is in the impropriety of resoluteness that Dasein properly
gathers itself into its distance from the reication holding sway in the
thought of humanity since the inauguration of classical ontology. The
people that comes to be within the decision would not be Greek, and not
because of any extant and thus decidable and mutually exclusive attributes.
Even before the explicit concern with Hlderlins poetry, Heidegger,
in the 1934 lecture course Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache,
approaches the question of what it is to be German by way of the existential of resoluteness. What denes the Volk is the decision under which it
stands and by which it is directed into the happening of the future. The
Volk is not a fact but the openness of the temporal in which the cast of the
factual is decided. Having rejected as unduly metaphysical all expositions
of the essence of a people based on notions of the body, the soul and the
spirit, Heidegger declares that the question Who are we? and its answer
We are the people remain incomprehensible unless the nature of decision is rst claried.39 But who constitutes the we in this passage? The
people composed of Heidegger and the racially monitored student body
of 1934? To be sure, in this lecture course, Heideggers fascination with
the new regime frequently appears undisguised. At one point, he suggests
that a museum is the tting resting place for the airplane that had recently
conveyed Hitler to his meeting in Venice with Mussolini.40 The suspicion
cannot therefore be dismissed that Heidegger is promoting a National Socialist conception of the Volk. And yet it would likewise be suspect to assert that nothing besides a National Socialist conception of the people is at
work in these lectures. Heidegger, who in 1934 discourses on the people of
the decision and commends service in the SA, retains, in the later lectures

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on Hlderlin, the same denition of the people and yet employs it polemically against the existing populism. It is as though National Socialism had
revealed itself as a feeble makeshift for Hlderlin.
The essence of Heideggers Volk is its decision. The Volk cannot take
itself for granted but must rally itself for the decision under which it stands
and learn that which is its own. That a given people should be confronted
with its essence as with something alien is a paradox from which Hlderlin does not shrink and upon which he insists in the rst letter to Bhlendorff. It is the same paradox that Freud in 1919 and Heidegger in 1927 will
discuss as the uncanny. Since the passage in question in Being and Time
reads implicitly as a critique of the Freudian position it nonetheless in several aspects resembles, it is perhaps worthwhile to place Freuds text openly
beside Heideggers. Doing so will also enable us to give closer attention
to Heideggers notion of the ownmost (das Eigene). That which is ownmost
to Dasein, that which is its essence as an exception to classical ontology, is
that which it is the mission of the Volk to understand.
Meticulously determining the domain of the uncanny (das Unheimliche), Freud begins his text of that title:
The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich [homely],
heimisch [native]the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is uncanny is frightening precisely because it is not known and
familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. We can only say that what is novel
can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but
not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar
in order to make it uncanny.41

Having urged that what is not the one is not necessarily the other, Freud
then queries whether the opposites themselves are exclusive. After quoting
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm on the connotations of heimlich as that which
is disguised and perilous, private and hence mysterious, he continues:
Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction
of ambivalence, until it nally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. 42 Freud thereupon allows a usage of the word uncanny to illuminate this relation:
It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each
one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. . . . In this case too, then,

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the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prex un [un] is the token of repression.43

The origin has become something alien as a consequence of repression.

40 of Being and Time will speak similarly of the uncanny as the origin that has become alien and disquieting, but there the agent of repression
is not so much Oedipus as classical ontology. In the exposition of Angst
(Macquarrie and Robinsons anxiety), Heidegger describes the uncanny:
Anxiety pulls Dasein back from its falling-away emergence in the world.
Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein is isolated, but isolated as Being-inthe world. Being-in enters into the existential mode of the not-at-home.
Nothing else is meant by our talk about uncanniness. 44 The world from
which anxiety withdraws Dasein, and for which Heidegger employs ironizing quotation marks, is the worldliness of chatter and curiosity. Dasein is
thrown back upon itself in the uncanny and, in being thrown back upon
itself, it is bereft of its familiarity with its environment. And yet it is world,
now without quotation marks, that suddenly emerges from under the instrumentalization by which Dasein falls away from itself in falling toward
the cosmopolitan realm of its inauthenticity. The world that emerges is
Daseins Being-in-the-world even as Dasein suffers on account of its intense strangeness: That in the face of which one has anxiety [das Wovor der
Angst] is Being-in-the-world as such. 45 Dasein abruptly nds itself both
within the world and not at home. Heidegger stresses: From an existentialontological point of view, the not-at-home must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon. 46 In the being-outside-of-itself of anxiety, Dasein
experiences the truth of its originary transcendence.
Elaborating on this more originary phenomenon as it manifests itself
in anxiety, Heidegger writes: That in the face of which one is anxious is
completely indenite. Not only does this indeniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells
us that entities within-the-world are not relevant at all. Nothing which is
ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the
face of which anxiety is anxious. 47 Through anxiety the hegemony of the
ontic is challenged. Something else, something that exists besides reication and that is thus nothing, makes itself felt.
Like Freud, Heidegger permits himself an elucidatory example:
Anxiety can arise in the most innocuous Situations. Nor does it have any
need for darkness, in which it is commonly easier for one to feel uncanny.
In the dark there is emphatically nothing to see, though the very world it-

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self is still there, and there more obtrusively. 48 The night is not nothing,
but in the dark Dasein no longer sees itself surrounded by the objects of its
everyday existence. It becomes disoriented, and so long as it sets about orientating itself, it is still disoriented. Orientation, as the experience of the
uncanniness of Being-in-the-world, becomes an issue for Dasein. Although
it otherwise neglects the uncanniness of Being-in-the-world, in its dread
before nothingness, Dasein is unable to reorient itself in its everyday environment by disorienting itself in its understanding of its own Being.
Strictly speaking, Dasein never reorients itself in the everydayits reorientation in the everyday is not the culmination of the process of orientation as the understanding of Daseins Being-in-the-world but rather its
abandonment. Orientation as such, because it brings into play the undecidability of Daseins Being-in-the-world, is always a disorientation. Dasein
is no longer and not yet at home in the everyday, and it cannot make itself
at home. No longer confronted with beings, Dasein nds itself in the uncanny before the Nothing. It exists authentically in orientation and the uncanniness that it encounters in its vicinity is its own Being-in-the-world. In
anxiety, Dasein experiences the origin that is the alienation of Being from
the world.
The proper homeland of Dasein is its disorientation in the ontic and
not any object to which its genesis could be attributed. Heimat, which is
dened by originarity, acquires, with Heideggers exposition of the not-athome as the more primordial phenomenon, a sense at odds with its conventional signication. Heideggers Heimat is proximal to the extent that
it is uncanny. It is uncannily familiar, but not because it recalls something
that momentarily cannot be specied. What is at once familiar and unsettling in the not-at-home is Daseins own Being. Heidegger does not follow Freud in providing an ontic answer to anxiety. The homeland of Daseins originarity pushes itself to the fore in anxiety by its proximity to the
being that Dasein itself is: it is that which is nearest in an essential sense.
This nearness, in its metaphysical unthinkability, is nowhere: That which
threatens cannot bring itself close from a denite direction within what is
close by; it is already there [da], and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is
oppressive and sties ones breath, and yet it is nowhere. 49 In anxiety the
Da itself of Dasein slips out of reach. Anxiety comes not from anything
that is close by, but from the insuperable nearness of the Da as it suddenly
shatters the faith in the manipulability of what it otherwise allows to appear present-at-hand. The Da of Dasein is in anxiety nowhere because it

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disrupts the familiar contexts in relation to which it could be recognizably

somewhere in particular.
In The Origin of the Work of Art, in an apothegm reminiscent
of Heraclitus, Heidegger again addresses the uncanny nature of the proximal: The familiar is ultimately not familiar [ geheuer]; it is monstrous
[un-geheuer]. 50 The becoming-monstrous of the familiar is its becomingworld. The homeland is always, and by denition, monstrous. As an essential possibility of the everyday, Heimat is not threatened but threatening. It is not an object whose threat is incidental to its essence; it is the
threatening itself as it bears down upon Dasein before it is obscured by being explained with reference to a given ontic cause. Angst before the nothingness of Being is the mode of dwelling in the fatherland.51 Can it be said
then that for Heidegger, in some sense, it was the victims of the National
Socialist terror still living uncertainly within the Fatherland who were its
proper inhabitants? Here the legitimacy of a claim to the title of inhabitant of the Fatherland demands of the claimant an inability to make of the
title a prerogative. To dwell truly in the Fatherland is to dwell in the consternation of the undecidability of Being. In dread the originarity that is
denitive of any notion of Heimat is experienced in its most radical cast as
the being-beside-oneself of ecstatic Being.
Heidegger differs from Freud through a complicity with the uncanny. He refuses any explanation of the phenomenon whereby the rupture it effects in the everydays character of self-evidence might be made
good through its reication. For Heidegger, the uncanny does not admit
of resolution into an object. That Freuds maternal body has been removed
from the scene leads Luce Irigaray to criticize Heidegger for perpetuating
repression, the reduction to nothing of that whence, matter-esh, he proceeds. 52 But in what manner could repression not be perpetuated? Certainly, Heideggers theorization of Angst, to the extent that it interprets it
as a mode of authentic Dasein, prizes the return of the repressed in its unavowable shape as . . . and thus maintains repression. And yet, in naming this . . . as the maternal body, Irigaray has recourse to an object, and
hence to the recognizability instituted by metaphysics, in order to repress
the challenge to the hegemony of the ontic that Heidegger seeks to hear in
the silence of the uncanny.53
Although Heideggers text is later than Freuds, it says less, because it
wishes to think the uncanny as such. A decipherment of the uncanny, a
treatment that solves its riddle claries only by obscuring the essence of
the phenomenon. As the uncanny ceases to be uncanny once it has been

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explained and the explanation accepted, Freuds explanation of the uncanny is entailed by a curative practice dedicating itself to the preservation
of Dasein in its reication: Dasein is to be safeguarded in its domesticity
among beings. Heidegger does not propose an explanation of the uncanny. In naming the Fatherland as Being and in discussing anxiety as the
experience of the originarity of Being-in-the-world, he does not place the
Fatherland in simple rivalry with Freuds maternal body. The Fatherland
that is dened as Being, and thus by inference as Nothing, cannot be encountered within metaphysics as an object. Its repression cannot be overturned as it cannot stand in the light of presence as a distinct entity. The
Fatherland is too near to acquire substance and, for that reason, it can neither be defended nor extended.
In his commentary on Hlderlins poem Heimkunft, anticipating
the meditations on nearness from the 1949 lectures in Bremen, Heidegger
thus writes:
The nearness that now prevails lets what is near be near, and yet at the same time
lets it remain what is sought, and thus not near. We usually understand nearness as the smallest possible measurement of the distance between two places.
Now, on the contrary, the essence of nearness appears to be that it brings near that
which is near, yet keeping it at a distance. This nearness to the origin is a mystery
[Geheimnis].54

Nearness to the origin is essentially a secret (Geheimnis) because there cannot come a time in which it is divulged. The secretiveness of this nearness
derives from the reserve with which the origin stands toward the light
of presence. The origin that is not a secret, that exhibits itself in the public spectacle of a nationalistic uprising is never originary in Heideggers
sense. What is originary in the National Socialist Heimat is neither the Blut
und Boden of the Aryan type nor the Lebensraum of German monopoly
capitalism what is originary in this Heimat is the dread experienced by
the victims of this nationalistic uprising. The Fatherland was the secret
(Geheimnis) that the victims of National Socialism could not but keep to
themselves.
It is thus with an idiosyncratic patriotism that Heidegger in Being and
Time is on the alert for uprisings of the uncanny: This uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is a threat to its everyday lostness in the they,
though not explicitly. 55 Dasein is shadowed by the experience of its own
originarity, of the Heimat that is its Being-in-the-world. Uncanniness constantly threatens to recover Dasein from the worldless cosmopolitanism of

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the they. When anxiety overtakes Dasein, it disorients it, disrupting the
impoverished frame of reference by which Dasein orients itself in the way
of Being of the they. In the grip of anxiety, Dasein is no longer and not
yet able to differentiate between its left and right sides and is thus unable
to orient itself in the attened world of Kantian cosmopolitanism. In anxiety, world recovers its existential thickness, disturbing even the stability of
the environment by means of which Heidegger is able to advance directedness within a world as the truth of the Kantian ability to differentiate
left and right. Dasein is thrown back on itself as transcendence. And orienting itself in the more primordial phenomenon of the not-at-home,
Dasein does not come to itself as the pure ego of Hegelian negativity.56 It
does not get the better of fear and compose its ontological apology for the
metaphysics of subjectity. Dasein remains a being-outside-of-itself in the
essential not-at-home of its Heimat. The home of Dasein eludes it as a
stable possession and must elude it in order to remain the Nothing. Dasein
is born from nothingness in the sense that any other derivation would
amount to its reication, just as it lives in nothingness as the uncanniness
of its orientation in Being-in-the-world.
World, revealing itself in the Nothing, does not reveal itself. Even in
the overwhelming experience of the uncanny, it continues to be a secret
(Geheimnis). Dasein is able to say neither where it comes from nor where
it is without reifying the Nothing. The home of Dasein is a secret because
it is too private (heimlich) to ecstatic temporality for it to assume the cast
of a repeatable entity. To put it differently, it is the untransmittable that,
for Heidegger, constitutes the Heimat of Dasein, since transmission is the
substance of the they, of the everyone that is everywhere. The strangeness
of the Heimat is the impenetrable idiocy of time.
Heideggers provincialism, notwithstanding its conventionality and
occasional kitschiness, never lies far removed from the question of an understanding of originary temporality. Heimat, for Heidegger, is dened
by the unrepeatability of the originary. The following passage on dialect
from Language and Homeland thus needs to be read for its polemic
against the understanding of language as the vehicle for the transmission of
information:
The essence of language has its roots in dialect. If dialect is the mothers language,
the homeliness of the home, the homeland has its roots in it as well. Dialect is not
only the mothers language but, at the same time and still more so, the mother of
language. Yet at the present hour, as we heed what has just been said, I refer to the

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world-historical hour of our age, the inherited and traditional relations between
language, mother tongue, dialect, and homeland are already out of joint. Humanity appears to be losing the language fatefully allotted to it in each age, becoming in this sense speechless, although never in human memory has the globe
been so uninterruptedly encircled by chatter. Humanity appears to be becoming
homeless, so that the pronouncement holds good that Nietzsche in 1884 delivered
to the future in a poem with the title Ohne Heimat:
The ravens shriek
And in whirring ight head toward the city:
soon it will snow,
Woe to him who does not have a homeland.57

Dialect, and with it language as a whole, retreats before universal exchange

and its necessary deracination from the world founded by language. The
superiority of a dialect is that it does not erase its world, that it knows how
to keep secrets. A dialect is, as it were, a secret to the highest degree because
it can never be divulged: it has no other content apart from its secretiveness. A dialect says the incomprehensibility of world. For Heidegger, a universal language is anathema: Language in the singular does not exist. To
put this more cautiously: language in the sense of a universally comprehensible and uniquely binding world-language does not yet exist, even
though there are many indications that it is readying itself for a dominance
that only to a small degree rests on human planning and intrigues. 58
What a dialect has to say is less important than the manner in which
it says it, in which it does not say it. The content of an utterance in dialect
is its point of weakness regarding a universally comprehensible language,
since it is the content that admits of transmission and that is consequently
the promise of a global language. The dialect in its secrecy stands opposed
to reication and in place of an extralingual object, it harbors Heimat as the
originary idiocy of Dasein. Dialect is dialect only if it is uncanny, if, by failing to transmit something intact into another dialect, discourse, or language, it thereby communicates the Nothing. In this failure that is, properly speaking, its merit, dialect discloses itself as originary: it is the language
of originary temporality. The essential provincialism of Dasein rests on its
utmost exposure to nothingness. In not reaching beyond its world, dialect
reaches beyond the limits of classical ontology.
That there might be something other than simple bigotry in Heideggers provincialism is never conceded by Theodor Adorno, who in his
essay devoted to Hlderlin, Parataxis, writes: Hardly anywhere did Hl-

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derlin prove his posthumous champion more wrong than in his relationship to what is foreign. Hlderlins relationship to it is a constant irritation
for Heidegger. For Heidegger, the love of a foreign woman requires an
apology. She is the one who at the same time makes us think about our native land. 59 Heideggers provincialism here becomes a disavowal of the
exotic. But is such an interpretation the only one possible? Does the exotic
suggest that which is native merely as its opposite? In order to accuse Heidegger of a misinterpretation of the letter to Bhlendorff, Adorno passes
over the interplay between the exotic and the national, between what is assigned (Aufgegebenes) and what is consigned (Mitgegebenes) in Hlderlins
and Heideggers texts and arrives at the conclusion: The exiled Hlderlin,
who said in the same letter to Bhlendorff that he wished himself away in
Tahiti, is made into a trustworthy German living abroad. 60
On the basis of the published archival material, it can be argued that
Heideggers nationalism is not as straightforward as Adorno pretends. In
his 1944 lecture notes Einleitung in die Philosophie: Dichten und Denken
(Introduction to Philosophy: Poetry and Thinking), Heidegger again comments upon Nietzsches poem Ohne Heimat (or, as it is given in the critical edition, Abschied) and its counterpart, Antwort. The second poem,
clarifying the rst, reads:
God have mercy!
He thinks I was longing
For German warmth,
For the stiing joys of German domesticity!
My friend, that which here
Hampers me and holds me back is your understanding,
Compassion for you!
Compassion for German wrong-headedness! 61

For neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger is the homeland an object of conventional nostalgia. As Heidegger writes in his commentaryand as Hlderlin writes to Bhlendorffit is something that must be won: In the complementary poems Ohne Heimat and Antwort, there speaks this doubly
directed compassion that suffers back and forth between the incapacity of
the former homeland and the heights of the future homeland. 62 The incapacity of Bismarcks and of Hitlers Germany follows from its homelessness. This helplessness is belied neither by military victories nor by increases in production, because such successes reveal themselves precisely
as a ight from nothingness to the realm of reication and calculation. Fly-

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ing from nothingness, imperialism ies from the question of world, from
the question of Being-in-the-world that can be raised only in a challenge
to the hegemony of the ontic and that alone contests homelessness.
Hlderlins poetry, by contrast, stands fast within the uncanniness
that he expounds as the tragic caesura. In a letter to Erhart Kstner, Heidegger writes: What does Hlderlins poetry say? Its word is: the Holy. It
speaks of the ight of the gods. It says that the ed gods spare us. Until we
are capable and of a mind to dwell in their vicinity. This place is that which
is unique to the homeland. 63 What characterizes the homeland is the
nearness of the gods. The absence of the gods is equivalent to the absence
of the homeland. The gods who have ed before onto-theology have borne
the homeland with them as the nothingness that is the Un-thought of
metaphysics: what metaphysics cannot think constitutes the specicity of
the homeland. It is the homeland as such that metaphysics cannot think in
its rush toward the universal, in its pursuit of the reication that is the precondition of exchange.
Standing in the caesura between the no-longer and the not-yet of
the gods, Hlderlin says the homeland that is missing. He does not think
so much the challenge to the hegemony of the ontic as the absence of this
challenge. On account of the absence of this challenge, it cannot be said
that we have any understanding as yet either of nothingness or of Heimat.
Hlderlin, more than any other poet, is the founder of German Being
because he experiences, more than any other, the national as a question
against rather than of metaphysics. Hlderlin founds German Being as a
question that is nonetheless still unheard. That is to say, he founds the possibility of a people that would be, in the true sense, the German Volk.
Insofar as Hlderlin can found only the possibility of a people, it can
be said that, in one respect, there has never been a people. A fragment preserved in the Homburg folio notebook, and quoted earlier, suggests that
the Greeks were not for themselves a people:
do you think
It will proceed
Along the course of old? Namely they wanted to found
A realm of art. But thereby
The national was neglected
By them and pitifully
Greece, the fairest of all, was destroyed.
Now presumably matters
Stand otherwise.

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In wanting to found a realm of art, the Greeks neglected, not the nation,
but the national and thereby initiated their decline. Hlderlins choice of
the substantive das Vaterlndische (here translated as the national) works
against any interpretation that here the Greeks are being reproached with
impracticality. Certainly, the national is distinguished from the realm of
art, yet the national cannot be taken to refer to the defenses of a country,
to the maintenance of its economy and public order. These matters are to
varying degrees of concern in every nation and, in themselves, do not make
the nation national. In their neglect of the national, the Greeks neglected
that which was specic to them. It is by means of this neglect that they fell
into decline. It was the beautiful that they put in place of the national. As
a result and contrary to traditional accounts, Greek decline is not subsequent to the age of outstanding achievements in Greek art: the Greeks created works of art precisely in falling away from themselves as a people.64
The inauthenticity of Greece is its beauty, and it is this beauty, rather than
any foreign invasion, that signals and consummates its decline. As the most
beautiful, Greece sentenced itself to decline because it neglected the specicity and privacy of world in its unpresentability for the sake of the universality and presence of art. The world of the Greeks disappears in its
surrender to the recognizability of the public sphere. Greece manifested
itself as the realm of art and thereby fell away from the Nothing of its
world. That which was specic to the Greeks, and thus necessarily private,
could not be made present in the work of art without becoming an item
of exchange in the trafc of peoples. Art reveals too muchit tears too
much from the native earth.65 Having transformed themselves into the
people of art, the Greeks no longer possessed a homeland and, in complicity with their unacknowledged diaspora, they even forgot what it was not
to be homeless.
Hlderlin is not the only artist of his age who brings to the querelle
des anciens et des modernes, a suspicion of art itself. In the Aesthetics, Hegel,
from the vantage point of his thinking, has to denounce the nonproductive artist of Romanticism: For what is supreme and most excellent is not,
as may be supposed, the inexpressiblefor if so the poet would be still far
deeper than his work discloses. On the contrary, his works are the best part
and the truth of the artist; what he is [in his works], that he is; but what remains buried in his heart, that is he not. 66 For Hegel, production is existence. Greece exists in having produced itself. For Hlderlin, a people that
does not wish to produce, that does not want to be recognized, which is to

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say, that does want to be recognized as Greek, is the people that nds itself,
as it were, in not existing. Not neglecting its specicity, not destroying itself through art, this people is an invisible people, a people that is as missingan uncanny people.
Hlderlin, in the letter to Bhlendorff, does not speak of national
arts. Art, for Hlderlin, is essentially anational. The distinct gifts of the
Greeks and the Hesperians do not hinder them from approaching a common art; instead, these gifts establish the differing tasks by whose execution the goal is to be attained. Art draws the peoples together. Hlderlins
essay On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit rejects one-sided denitions
of the work of art in favor of the coordination of those operations as not
merely primordial simplicity of the heart and of life where man feels himself uninhibitedly as in a restricted innity, nor merely attained simplicity
of the spirit where that very sensation which is puried to a pure [and] formal mood receives the entire innity of life, (and is ideal), but which is instead spirit reanimated by the innite life, not chance, not ideal, but is accomplished work and creation. 67
One of the most deeply classical aspects of Hlderlins poetry is this
emphasis on reconciliation. The bridal feasts shared by gods and humans
at the center of many of the hymns depict, at the very least, the celebration
of that peace among the nations which is promised by art.
And yet, in the Remarks on Oedipus, the bridal feast becomes
the monstrous violence at the heart of tragedy.68 Here reconciliation loses
its innocence but remains arts dominant imperative. Hlderlin, notwithstanding his increasing sense of the magnitude of the task of reconciliation,
is unable to conceive of an art that does not aspire to reconciliation, and
he thus gures within eighteenth-century aesthetics as its impossibility.
The notion of the beautiful that in Kants Critique of Judgment aligns itself
in part with a universal accord of the respective judgments and that in
Schillers On the Aesthetic Education of Man is dened by the reconciliation of sense and intellect receives an extraordinary reformulation in
Hlderlins Hyperion. There the e{n diafevron eJautw`/ (The One differing
in itself ) of Heraclitus is interpreted in terms of beauty, since the beautiful has become the community of beings as a whole.69 It is not that Hlderlin (and with him the eighteenth century) does not question whether arts
concern is with the beautiful. He does, but it is for the sake of the beautiful that art rst assumes its importance.
Greece, as the most beautiful, cannot but neglect the national since,

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as the most beautiful, it is the site of reconciliation and thus also the most
cosmopolitan. Hlderlin writes in the fragment from the Homburg folio
notebook quoted earlier:
Now presumably matters
Stand otherwise.

The Greek neglect of the national is no longer tting. Something other

than art is required, because the unity effected in the beautiful had been revealed as pernicious. Greece, the most beautiful, fell into ruin. That which
is now required as other than art is required on the grounds of that which
in it is not beautiful. This negative quality is not ugliness, but the irreconcilable, since the beauty of a work of art is its harmoniousness. And this
harmoniousness, as the decline of Greece demonstrates, was never more
than ostensible. Art reconciled only by suppressing the intractable and the
failure of its reconciliation was the failure of Greece.
Hlderlin confesses to Bhlendorff that the study of Greek art has instilled in him a desire for self-assertion: I have labored long over this and
know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for
the Greeks and for usnamely, the living relationship and destinywe
must not share anything identical with them. We must differ from the
Greeks, so that the living mediation and destiny, shared with them as the
highest, might not lack that resistance from which the vitality of mediation
and destiny issues. The difference, as Hlderlins letter to Bhlendorff
makes clear, is not to be found in the realm of art where the inhabitants of
Greece and of Hesperia converge, if by separate paths. Hlderlin is not able
to say where the difference would lie and it is this inability that maintains
the force of the imperative. The visible failure of Greek art is precisely its
visibility, the ease with which it occupies the public sphere and abandons
the secrecy of the intimate and the originary: the imperative to differ from
the Greeks is the call of the uncanny.
Hlderlin asks of himself the impossible. Witnessing the fall of Greece
through art, he nonetheless does not renounce poetry. What Hlderlin
asks of himself is a differentiation from the Greeks that does not depart
from their realm. Poetry is to retain the concreteness of the reied and
yet it is to heed the uncanny of the national. The beauty of such a poetry
is to lie in its reconciliation: it would, in effect, be the poetry of the ontological difference, reconciling beings and Being without suppression. Being, which announces itself in the uncanny as the nothingness of world,

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would here be heard even in the reication by which it has otherwise concealed itself. Such a poetry, in which the work of arts question against
metaphysics would no longer be misinterpreted, is as it were commanded
by the age:
Now presumably matters
Stand otherwise.

The national, as the originarity that is forgotten in reication, no longer allows itself to be neglected, although why that should be so is not apparent
from these verses.
If there is a neglect that Hlderlin admits and endeavors to rectify in
his later poetry, it is a neglect of Christianity. Certainly, a poet will seem
more national in a Christian country if his poetry addresses Christian
themes, but nationality and Christianity are to be thought in a more demanding sense in Hlderlins poetry. In the lecture course on the poem
Andenken, Heidegger suggests that the nationality and Christianity of
the later poetry receive their sense only in the elaboration of the question
of Greece: The new relationship to Greece is not a turning away, but
rather a more essential turning toward Greece and a pressing for a more
originary confrontation, without of course seeking in Greece the origin
and ground of the proper [Grund des Eigenen]. 70 It is in the quest for this
origin and ground of the proper that nationality and Christianity open up
in their abyssal character as the Un-thought of Greece. This search for the
origin is, for Hlderlin, a poetic search.
Hlderlins own experience is that he cannot be a Christian poet: poetry is in some way inimical to Christianity. An die Madonna contains
the confession:
And many a song which to
The Highest, the Father, I once was
Disposed to sing, was lost
To me, devoured by sadness.71

Der Einzige, with its wish to bring together Christ and the gods of
Greece, is more expansive on the nature of this melancholy:
And now my soul
Is full of sadness as though
You Heavenly yourselves excitedly cried
That if I serve one I
Must lack the other.72

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The reconciliation for which Hlderlin sought has been withheld. He admits to Christ:
And yet a shame forbids me
To associate with you
The worldly men.73

The gods of Greece are here presented as profane men among whose number Christ is never to be counted. The poems nal lines read therefore as
an objection:
The poets, and those no less who
Are spiritual, must be worldly.74

Poetry, as that which fundamentally concerns itself with the beautiful, cannot submit to a failure of the reconciliation of the urbane and the spiritual.
Christ can ll Hlderlin as a poet only with sadness. This sadness turns in
the second version of Der Einzige to rage:
For since evil spirit
Has taken possession of happy antiquity, unendingly
Long now one power has prevailed, hostile to song, without resonance,
That perishes in masses, the violence of the mind.75

Antiquity has given way to a monotheism that, in its hostility to the urbane, declares itself the enemy of song. It is intractable and therefore refuses the beautiful. The Christianity that is suggested by these lines is too
ascetic to be representative either of the German churches of Hlderlins
day or of the churches as a whole. What this violently recalcitrant Christianity represents is, instead, the ultimate task of poetry as reconciliation.
Hlderlins rage cannot therefore permit itself to terminate in a rejection. As that which is intractable to reconciliation with the urbane, as that
which cannot be sung, as that which stands apart from all that is, Christianity here discloses itself as a challenge to the hegemony of the ontic. Poetry can no longer continue in the Greek manner, since with the sounding
of this challenge in the Christian revelation the beautiful is only attained
through a reconciliation still more inclusive than that undertaken by the
Greeks. The ontic can no longer pretend to constitute the domain of the
beautiful. The poet who now accomplishes the reconciliation of the beautiful will be the poet of poetry and, as such, this poet will be, according to
Heidegger in Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, the poet of
the Germans.

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213

The reconciliation of Being with beings is the task of German poetry.

A true reconciliation differs from a leveling compromise. The beauty of
German poetry will not entail a neglect of the national; on the contrary,
the beauty of German poetry will think Being as it is not even thought in
the Judaic prohibition on images. The poet of the Germans, reconciling
Being with beings, will think Being in the transcendence whereby it at
once differs from beings and is contaminated with them. The Being of
German poetry will be more originary and hence nearer to Dasein precisely because it will not hold itself back and congure itself as a privilege
and as the determinate Heimat of the elect. Such a Heimat, in its absolute
difference from the thingly, vitiates this very difference by the distinctness
that it shares with the thingly. German poetry will say the Nothing more
clearly than silence and nonproduction because it will say it in the undecidability of the decision between the work and silence. The poet of the
Germans must heed the challenge of the Christian revelation and heed it
all the more as he appears to betray it by his engagement with the sensuousthat is his agony and misfortune.
For Hegel, the Christian revelation likewise enacts a rupture within
the classical world. Both Hegel and Hlderlin acknowledge the adverse
conditions henceforth facing the production of a work of art. Yet whereas
Hegel asserts that philosophy alone is able to achieve the reconciliation by
which art was once dened, because in the modern age only philosophy
can encompass the revealed negativity of Spirit, Hlderlin seeks a poetry
that does not neglect the national, because it heeds its challenge to the hegemony of the ontic. Hegel and Hlderlin are thus at odds in their explanations of the decline of Greece. For Hegel, it was rather the Greeks absolute immersion in the national to the exclusion of the dawning negativity
that was responsible for their downfall:
Just as external and actual appearance was essential for the Greek spiritual artform, so too the absolute spiritual destiny of man was accomplished in the phenomenal world as a real actuality [the state] with the substance and universality of
which the individual demanded to be in harmony. This supreme end in Greece
was the life of the state, the body of the citizens, and their ethical life and living
patriotism. Beyond this interest there was none higher or truer.76

In Hegels account, the exhibition of autonomous subjectivity in the

person of Socrates places an intolerable strain on the reconciling powers
within the Greek povli~. The innite and denationalized negativity of the
self-reective subject opens a ssure in the concrete life of Greek politics

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and Greek art. As the transcendental, this denationalized subject becomes

the deterritorialized territory of the Christian faith as it is formulated in
and as Hegels philosophy. The rupture that Hlderlin and Heidegger explain in terms of the national appears, in Hegels eyes, as the awakening of
Spirit: the encounter with the Nothing becomes the liberation of the subject from all other beings, so that it might nally encounter itself.
Hlderlin does not see that the task in the postclassical age is the reconciliation that would encompass even the universal of absolute subjectivity. The fact that, for Hlderlin, even the Greeks neglected the national indicates that it is toward the specic that art must now turn in order to bring
about the reconciliation by which he understands the beautiful. Art has
always been too one-sidedly ontic to be beautiful. It has always been too
much under the sway of the thing-concepts of classical ontology. Even as
mimesis, it has always been too present to interrupt the particulars subsumption under the universal. The evil spirit in the hymn Der Einzige is
the enemy of song, and its unitarity cannot be equated with the universal.
Its singleness denotes its jealousy, not its universality. Hlderlins Christianity, with its Judaic cast, confronts art with its limitations from below,
setting against arts universality, not the sublation of the concrete notion,
but the recalcitrance of the private.
As the enemy of song, the evil spirit that seized hold of antiquity harbors the possibility of thinking the national. In Book X of the Confessions,
Saint Augustine invokes Jerusalem the chaste, our only homeland. 77
More than any other province of the empire, Judaea staged the failure of
the cosmopolitanism of the Roman peace. Neither the destruction of the
Temple under Titus nor the enforced exile of the Jews under Hadrian
sufced to extinguish Jewish particularism, and even the later ordination of
the Jewish people as bankers and intellectuals, as agents of circulation,78
did not dispel the myth of their secretiveness. In many respects, Judaea was
seen to constitute an exorbitant revolt against the commensurable. Christianity, inventing itself as the absolute secret, spread from Judaea to affront
the classical world with a pure and internal barbarism. Its secret was simply
its rejection of glory. When Jesus rejects the public realm in which the
Pharisees performed their good deeds and preaches that in carrying out
charitable acts, the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing,79 he privileges secretiveness over that which stands in the light of presence. The people of the ear was to mark out its difference from the people
of the eye. Christianity was an uprising of the concealed with respect also

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to language. Although the glossolalia of the Gnostics and early Christians

occupied the space of language, it yet offered nothing that on account of
the universality of its content could be translated. It said the Nothing
not the negativity of the Hegelian ego, but the nothingness of the asignifying. In glossolalia, the harmony of meaning and material, by which
Hegel denes classical art, is not disrupted by the preponderant meaning
of the Christian Logos. Only within an anachronistically theological interpretation of the early Church is it possible to imagine that the disgust felt
by the classical world for Christianity and for Judaism can be explained as
a pagan reaction to monotheism. What horried the classical world was
more the secretiveness, the privileging of the private and idiosyncratic (in
short, that which was, for the classical world, the idiotic) over the public,
the transmittable, the comprehensible and commensurable. Sensitive to
this aversion, Saint Paul cautioned in the First Letter to the Corinthians
against speaking in tongues, voicing his apprehension that outsiders might
hold believers in contempt as mad.80 Glossolalia is absolute dialect. In focusing his attention on dialects inability to transmit information, Heidegger proposes an understanding of dialect reminiscent of the early Christian
polemic against unconcealment.
Hlderlins wish to be a Christian poet, expressed in Der Einzige
and An die Madonna, is outed by Christianitys refusal to be reconciled
with the light of presence in which the work of art stands. Hlderlins wish
is to be the poet of that which is unsayable within the limits of poetry laid
down by the Greeks. Hlderlins inability to be a national poet is his inability to be a Christian poet. It is the inability of poetry as such, rather
than any inability peculiar to Hlderlin, because in both the national and
the Christian, at least in Hlderlins sense, poetry confronts that which is
intractable to reication. For Hlderlin, the Fatherland is essentially Christian. It is Hlderlins absolute ambition as a poet, not any personal Heimweh, that determines the national as an object of aspiration. Hlderlin aspires to the Fatherland because he wants more than has ever been wanted.
In the lecture course Heraklitus, Heidegger draws attention to this aspect
of Hlderlin as it is embodied in the name and gure of the eponymous
hero of his novel: Uperivwn is the name of the one who goes further than
the others, even to that which for rational human beings always goes too
far. 81 For both Hlderlin as a poet and for Heidegger as a thinker, Greece
is the point of departurethe Fatherland lies elsewhere as its unfamiliar
complement.

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Yet in a fragment Hlderlin writes:
About the Highest I will not speak.
But, like the laurel, forbidden fruit
Your country is, above all. To be tasted last
By any man,82

The national neglected by the Greeks is here for Hlderlin just as much
forbidden fruit as the laurels that the Greeks did not neglect. Heidegger
quotes this fragment at the beginning of his lectures Hlderlins Hymnen
Germanien und Der Rhein and continues:
The Fatherland, our Fatherland Germaniaforbidden to the utmost, withdrawn
from the hurry of the everyday and the blare of commotion. The highest and thus
the hardest, the last because fundamentally the rstthe concealed origin.
Thereby we have already said what our beginning with Germania does not
mean. It is not a question of offering something amenable and useful for daily requirements, thereby securing testimonials for the lecture series so that the pernicious opinion could arise that we are wanting to provide Hlderlin with a cheap
timeliness. We do not want to bring Hlderlin into accordance with our time,
rather the very opposite: we want to bring ourselves, as well as those to come, under the poets measure.83

Heidegger does not want Hlderlin to appear timely in the winter semester of 1934 35. He does not want Hlderlins patriotism to appear to anticipate National Socialism. That which makes Hlderlin seem untimely
the prohibition upon the Fatherlandis, for Heidegger, not something
that can be held against Hlderlin, since it is Heideggers age that is out of
step. The Fatherland must be prohibited in order to remain the Fatherland:
in 1934 35, its time has not yet come. Hlderlin is, for Heidegger, the poet
of the no-longer of the Greeks and the not-yet of the Fatherland. He is the
poet of the task of the reconciliation of the cosmopolitan with the national,
but he is not the poet of the reconciliation itself. For Hlderlin, both the
laurels of the public realm and the Fatherland of the secret are forbidden,
since he is the poet for whom the necessity of their reconciliation is not to
be forgotten through an absorption in the one to the neglect of the other.
Hlderlins poetry, therefore, is not strictly beautiful, even though it records the promise of the greatest beauty. It is neither national nor transnational. Instead, it promises a nationalism more deeply rooted than any
chauvinism and a reconciliation more inclusive than any cosmopolitanism.
The impossibility at the heart of Hlderlins poetry is its position
within the cleft between the ontic and the ontological, between Greece and

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Judaea. This cleft constitutes the impossibility of the West. It is the and
in the title of Shestovs Athens and Jerusalem, which Shestov himself refused
to countenance, preferring a mutually exclusive and global disjunction.84
(Shestov does not want to know anything of that which Derrida calls the
clefts hypocrisy.) 85 For Hlderlin, as a poet, there is no choice but to remain within the cleft and to attempt the reconciliation of the thingly and
the iconoclastic. If it is ever to be beautiful, poetry has to disorient itself
within its Greek positivity, to open within itself a distance from the ontic.
It must set out for that Hesperia which as the undecidable other of Greece
is the Dis-orient, the uncanny orientation of Dasein within the Nothing
and the Un-thought of classical ontology. Hesperia, or that which Heidegger names as the Fatherland, is Being. Inasmuch as Greece could thus
never have been a Fatherland, even for the Greeks, Klopstocks question Is
Achaea the Teutons Fatherland? becomes senseless.86

5
The Geschlecht of the Poem

From its cursory employment in Being and Time, the word Volk
ares up to a dominance in Heideggers thinking in the 1930s and early
1940s that was not subsequently sustained. An exception to the apparent
ban imposed on Volkwhich is also not an exceptionlies in the polysemy of Geschlecht (species, ethnic group, gender, family, stock, generation, etc.). In the 1952 essay on Georg Trakl, Language in the Poem,
Heidegger addresses the polysemy of Geschlecht as an occasion for the
question of Being. Has the German Volk been relieved of its ontological
mission? Given that, for Heidegger, the essence of the Volk was its mission,
the later text cannot be interpreted as either relieving the Volk of its mission (as though it were but one of its properties) or replacing it with the
Geschlecht. That which in 1952 is named Geschlecht is better understood as
a clarication of that which had previously been named Volk. The clarication lies in an emphasis characteristic of late Heidegger on the role
of difference in the question of Being.
What is important to note is that Geschlecht is not simply a cynical
substitute for Volk. In his essay on Trakl, Heidegger is not transcribing the
reections on Germania and the Volk from his lectures on Hlderlin with
an eye to a public wary of the National Socialist lexicon. If Heidegger
speaks of the West (das Abendland ) and no longer of Germany, he could
hardly expect to evade the charge of chauvinism by a mere expansion of
borders. The West for Heidegger in 1952 is no more a determinate territorial entity than the Germania of the lectures on Hlderlin. Having refused
to accommodate his understanding of Germania to the times, Heidegger
is unlikely to have considered his notion of Heimat as baggage to be jettisoned. The change in terms has a philosophical motivation. Among the
questions with which he opens his 1946 text on Anaximander, and in

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which Arendt discerns a new mood in response to the so-called Year

Zero, Heidegger asks if the West has ever existed. The West, as the land of
evening (das Abendland ), perhaps only rst becomes a possibility in the
historical darkening of the world. Unlike Germania, das Abendland bears
in its name the darkness of that which, not pulling back from the night of
nihilism, is in a position to think it through to its non-nihilistic essence.
The mission of the West, of that which is to be the West, is the mission of
that which Heidegger once called the Volk.
The West is the land of evening, of lateness and decay: it is the
Heimat that Trakl calls neither Germany nor Austria. In the essay on Trakl,
Heidegger rethinks the originary in terms of lateness and dissolution. One
could accordingly argue that the Volk, notwithstanding its alignment in
Heideggers thinking with Mitsein and transcendence, is too haunted by its
unitary and exclusionist character in German nationalism to continue as
the agent or, more precisely, the site of the question of Being. Grounded
in the reproach that the Cartesian subject is not ecstatic and thus unable to
understand Being as other than presence, Heideggers political engagement
in 1933 is the assigning of the task of metaphysics to the Being-with-oneanother by which he denes the German people. In 1952, the being that is
still more ecstatic than the Volk, still more dissolute and hence more auspicious for the question of Being is the riven being of the Geschlecht: the
Geschlecht is a multiplicity.
This polysemy of Geschlecht, according to Heidegger, is not external to the individual signications of the word: Our language names the
human essence shaped from a single blow [Schlag] and misshapen [verschlagen] in this blow the Geschlecht. The word signies the human species [Menschengeschlecht] in the sense of humanity, as well as Geschlechter in
the plural sense of tribes, houses and families, all of these stamped again in
the twoness of the Geschlechter. 1 A Geschlecht can never be integral, because it is, by denition, stamped with a twoness.2 The people that, for
Heidegger in 1952, survives in Geschlecht survives only in being given up to
division:
With what has this Geschlecht been struck, that is, cursed? Curse in Greek is
plhghv, our word Schlag [blow]. The curse of the decaying Geschlecht consists
therein, that this old Geschlecht has been struck apart into the discord of Geschlechter. Out of discord each Geschlecht strives into the unleashed uproar of the isolated
and sheer wildness of wild game. Not twoness as such, but rather the discord is
the curse. Out of the uproar of blind wildness, it carries the Geschlecht into strife,

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where it is struck with untrammeled isolation. Thus cleft and shattered, the decayed Geschlecht can on its own no longer nd its proper cast. The proper cast lies
only with that Geschlecht whose twoness leaves discord behind and wanders ahead
into the gentleness of a simple twofold, namely, is strange and thus follows the
stranger.3

The decayed Geschlecht does not nd its proper cast in being made
whole. The Geschlecht is cursed, not in being divided, but rather in the aggravation of its division to the point of discord. Falling upon a community
as upon the other senses of Geschlecht, the proper cast of Geschlecht returns
it to its essential, yet seemingly paradoxical, solidarity in the loneliness of
its members. The Geschlecht cannot come to its twofold self within the narrow and paranoiacally regulated unity of National Socialism, because such
a unity never encompasses Geschlecht in its fragmentary whole and thus
merely testies to discord. The Geschlecht nds its proper cast in the decay and opening up of a unity such as Hitlers Volk.
As a letter from 1938 might be taken to suggest, National Socialism
prompted in Heidegger an attachment to loneliness: I believe that an age
of loneliness must break over the world if it is once more to draw breath
for action that restores to things their essential force. 4 Arguably, the loneliness of which Heidegger is speaking is not the loneliness of the isolation
that aficts the Geschlecht in its open discord. In his 1937 lecture course on
Nietzsches doctrine of the Eternal Return, Heidegger writes of loneliness:
In this loneliest loneliness, there is nothing of isolation as separation. On the contrary, it is that isolation which we have to understand as the bringing about of
authenticity [Vereigentlichung ] where human beings, each in his or her self, become peculiar [eigen] to themselves. The self, authenticity, is not the I but rather
that Da-Sein in which the relation of the I to the Thou and of the I to the We and
the We to the You is grounded.5

That which is most proper to the self and that on which we are thrown
back in loneliness is the openness and mediation of the site of Dasein.
Loneliness is the truth of Being-with-Others, because it rst raises the
question of who the Others are. The loneliness that appears when the
Geschlecht is frozen into reactive and antagonistic determinations bears
scant resemblance to the loneliness of the relation to the essential. Heidegger speaks of an age of loneliness that is to break over the entire world. Accordingly, he does not situate the loneliness of the relation to the essential
in the idiosyncrasy of a numerical minority. The essential is itself the element of loneliness. In its originarity and hence in its difference from the

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positive, the essential offers nothing against which a being could determine
and recompose itself. Once it has set out on the path to this other loneliness and the curativeness of the indeterminacy of the twofold, it is doubtfulas Trakl was well awarethat the Geschlecht can remain recognizably
human.
But what does it mean in any case to be human? Heideggers essay on
Trakl often recalls his earlier expositions. Yet that which elsewhere appears
peremptory and conventional becomes unsettling in the text on Trakl.
Heidegger sets himself the task of thinking through Trakls notion of humanity: The Geschlecht of humanitys decayed form is what the poet calls
the decaying Geschlecht. 6 Trakls humanity decays as Geschlecht. If it is in
the grips of decomposition, if it is not itself, it may then, Heidegger argues,
be something else. After having for decades drawn a distinction between
the animal and the human, Heidegger in 1952 problematizes the distinction with reference to Trakls blue deer:
Who is the blue deer to whom the poet calls out that it recollect the stranger? Is it
an animal? To be sure. Is it only an animal? By no means. For it is said to recollect. Its face supposedly looks out for . . . and looks to the stranger. The blue deer
is an animal whose animality presumably does not lie in the bestial, but rather in
that watchful recollection after which the poet calls. This animality is still distant
and scarcely visible. The animality of the animal here in question thus oscillates in
the indeterminate. It has not yet been brought into its essence. This animal,
namely, the one that thinks, animal rationale, humanity, remains, according to an
expression of Nietzsches, not yet rmly established.7

Heidegger is not anthropomorphizing Trakls gures as though only the

human were a t matter for poetry. On the contrary, it is because the human has not yet become recognizable as a distinct entity that it cannot be
absolutely distinguished from a blue deer. Heidegger continues:
The proposition does not mean in any way that humanity has not yet been factually established. It has been only all too denitely. What is meant is that the
animality of this animal has not yet been brought home, into rmness, the ownness of its concealed essence. This determination has been the goal for which Western European metaphysics has been struggling since Plato. Perhaps it struggles
in vain.8

The animality of the animal that is the human being has not yet been understood. However recognizable the human being is said to be, it has not
yet become recognizable as human. Whatever is passed off as human, out
of impatience and short-sightedness, is simply an imposition: The blue

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deer, where and when it essences [west], has left the previous essential form
of humanity behind. Humanity, as it has been known up to now, decomposes insofar as it loses its essence [Wesen], that is, decays [verwest]. 9 The
blue deer is the essence of humanity. It emerges with the decay of that
which has been understood as humanity. In decaying, humanity wrests
apart articial congurations of its essence. Decay undermines the rigidity
and hence discord through which the Geschlecht nds itself cursed. It restores the Geschlecht to the gentleness of its double nature.
Decay is not a calamity that befalls the Geschlecht from outside, since
it is the essence of the Geschlecht to decay. The lmmaker Federico Fellini,
who likewise did not see decay as a calamity, coined the word procadence
in the conviction that the negative prex de in decadence is misleading. In Trakls poetry, decay cannot be said to be an unequivocal object of
lament. For all the evocations of decay in his work, it is only in the prose
poem Traum und Umnachtung, with its wish that it be spring, that there
is anything approaching an aversion. Otherwise, Traklunlike, for instance, the great body of satirical literatureforgoes contrasting and condemning decay with images of what might be taken for a prelapsarian humanity. In themselves, the representations of decay in Trakls poetry offer
little by way of eulogy:
Decay glows in the green puddle.
(Kleines Konzert, v. 9)
Lepers who perhaps decay at night
Read the scattering signs of bird ight.
(Traum des Bsen, vv. 13 14)
A herdsman decays on an old stone.
(Im Dorf, v. 2)
Soul sang death, the eshs green decay.
(An einen Frhverstorbenen, v. 11)

These verses do not express an opposition to decay. Given the impassivity

with which they are described, the lepers and the herdsman seem not so
much to be aficted by decay as to have decay as their way of Being. These
gures are at home in decay. And that is to say, inasmuch as they have not
congealed into an inalterable form, they are human.
To be human, to be that for whose determination metaphysics struggles in vain, is to be nothing else but decaying and the decadence of nitude. That the blue deer could be human is because it itself hesitates in its

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essence: In the poetizing name blue deer Trakl calls that human essence
whose countenance, whose countering glance, is seen by the nights blueness in its thinking of the strangers steps and is thus illumined by the holy.
The name blue deer names mortals who recollect the stranger and who
would wander with him through the ownness of the human essence. 10
The blue deer appears in the decay of humanity in response to the
promise of the latters essence. Appearing with the decay of every reication
of humanity, the blue deer cannot appear with the factuality of something
present-at-hand. The blue deer essentially hesitates, and thus hesitates in
its appearance, because it wanders, and it wanders because it dies. The
death that Heidegger elsewhere denies the animal 11 is here granted the blue
deer. The blue deer dies; it does not merely perish. By means of its essential nitude, it departs in search of that which is proper to the human and
hence not present-at-hand. The blue deer, since it is mortal, decays and it
is by decaying that it sets out on its quest for the nonpositivity of the human. It embarks for what is most distant without having to move from its
place.
The blue deer, because it is never itself, cannot die in the sense of being extinguished. Death changes its nature in Trakl, as Heidegger notes:
In the poem, Psalm Trakl says:
The madman has died.
The next strophe says:
The stranger is buried.
In the Siebengesang des Todes, he is called the white stranger. The last strophe
of Psalm ends with the line:
In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.
The deceased lives in his grave. He lives in his chamber, so quietly and lost in
thought that he plays with his snakes. They can do nothing against him. They have
not been strangled, but their evil has been transformed.12

As a gure of decay, the white magician lives even in his grave. He lives
by dying and not perishing. He continues to live by decaying.13 As it is
by decay that the strife of the individuated is mollied, the uproar of the
determinate against the determinate yields in the grave to quiet play. For
the white magician, his snakes cease to be evil. The curse of the Geschlecht,
which had brought the snakes into open discord with him, has been lifted.
In his decay, the white magician surrenders the ontic ground for his differentiation from the snakes. He dies away from the determinate toward the
becoming of decay. He dies toward his snakes.

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To be dead here, as Heidegger writes, is not to be no more:

The deceased is the madman. Is this a question of someone who is mentally ill?
No. Madness [Wahnsinn] here does not mean a thinking [Sinnen] that imagines
[whnt] nonsense [Unsinniges]. Wahn comes from Old High German wana and
means: ohne [without]. The madman thinks, and he thinks even as no one else
has yet thought. But he thus remains without the sense [Sinn] of others. He is of
another sense. Sinnan signies originally: to journey, to strive after, to strike out
in a direction; the Indo-Germanic root sent and set means way. The one who
has departed is the madman, because he is under way in another direction.14

The dead and the mad are both engaged in a pursuit of the essence of the
human. That is to say, they have both turned away from every determination of humanity. Accordingly, it is among the dead and the mad that Being and Time nds its true readers. In their eyes, Dasein is compelled to
stand forth from the anthropomorphizations and reications concealing
and debasing it.
Humanity is in decay. Decay is not a property of the human being,
let alone a property that would be predated by every other property. On
the contrary, decadence is the origin from which humanity falls away.
Ceasing to be itself in acquiring its extant, and hence recognizable, attributes, the Geschlecht stands under the curse of no longer decaying. What
Heidegger writes of decay in Trakls poetry does not place it in opposition
to the origin: The language sings the song of the departed homecoming,
which from the lateness of decay comes to rest in the earliness of the quieter, still un-been beginning. 15 The lateness of decay converges with the
earliness of the beginning that continues to have been ( gewesen) because
it is not past (vergangen) and extinguished as an earlier discrete now.
Trakls language sings the homecoming of decadence away from its misapprehended, negative nature into its truth as the originary. Decay is not to
be overcome for the sake of a return to the origin. Instead, it is to be understood as the originary.
Heidegger accordingly does not ascribe to Trakl a motif of regeneration, as the following lines on the site of his work make clear: The sitedness of the site [die Ortschaft des Ortes] that gathers Trakls work into itself
is the concealed essence of departedness and is called Evening Land, the
Occident. This land is older, that is, earlier and therefore more promising
than the land conceived as Platonic-Christian, let alone as European. 16
Platonism and Christianity constitute neither the site of Trakls work nor
its promise. For that matter, the Occident is not the site of Trakls work.

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On the contrary, the Occident is the manner in which this work is situated at all. Its occidental site is a being vespertine rather than a geographical location, and it is decadent rather than regenerative. The true Heimat
of the West, contrary to what the National Socialists believed, is not distinguished by hygiene and racial purity. Precisely because it is decadent, the
Evening Land is closer to the origin than the land conceived as PlatonicChristian. In its decay, it does not submit to the Platonic-Christian imperative of purication and thus does not set itself apart from the indeterminacy of nitude. Trakls Evening Land would only be identiable as the
distinct geographical entity known as Europe if it submitted to the Platonic-Christian imperative. As the poet of the Occident, Trakl is the poet
of the originary. As the poet of the originary promise of decay, he does not
subscribe to any Platonic-Christian model of regeneration.17 That which
does not decay, that which in its a-historical immutability informs the Platonic doctrine of Ideas and the Christian doctrine of the soul, has always,
in itself, fallen away from originary temporality. The immutability of the
Idea and the soul is proof, not so much of their dignity, as of their fallenness, since this immutability is grounded in the derivative understanding
of temporality. The soul and the Idea have their roots in the presence of the
atomistic now.
In order to extricate Trakl from the vulgar concept of time, Heidegger opens his text with a violently expropriative reading of a line from the
poem Frhling der Seele (v. 22):
The soul is strange to the earth.

By means of an examination of the etymology of fremd (strange), Heidegger here refuses a Christian interpretation of the soul: But fremd , the
Old High German fram, really means: forward to somewhere else, under
way toward . . . onward to that which has been kept in store for it. 18 The
soul does not set itself apart from the earth. On the contrary, it is a moving-toward-the-earth. It is not present-at-hand either in heaven or on
earth. The soul is ecstatic because it is strange ( fremd ), and it therefore
cannot be contained in the presence of Christian immortality.19 Trakls
soul is a being that has transcendence as its Being. It decays within the origin and it is as originary temporality, and hence as Dasein, that it decays.
The origin in Trakl is, for Heidegger, too originary to be metaphysical. It is the essence and homeland seen and thought only by the
madman:

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Trakls poetry sings the song of the soul, which, strange to the earth, wanders the
earth precisely as the quieter homeland of the homecoming Geschlecht.
Dreamy romanticism on the periphery of the technico-economic world of
modern mass existence? Orthe clear knowledge of the madman who sees and
thinks differently to the reporters of the topical who exhaust themselves in the recounting of whatever is contemporary, whose calculated future is only ever a prolongation of what is current, a future that is forever without the advent of a destiny that could ever concern humanity at the beginning of its essence? 20

Trakls soul is strange to the earth and the origin, but the earth and the origin are, for that reason, not that which is familiar to the reporters of the
topical. Heidegger is not attributing to Trakls soul nostalgia for the lost Bodenstndigkeit of the familiar. He is not appealing to the origin, to homecoming, and to the homeland in order to substantiate on the periphery
of the technico-economic world some reactionary cult of the authenticity
of the autonomous subject. It is not the petit bourgeois whom he opposes
to the leveled existence of the modern worldbut then nor is it, as he earlier stresses, the individual who alerts a symptomatology of mental disorders. Heideggers madman is to be thought differently.
In the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes: In the history
of the truth of Being, Dasein is the essential incident [Zwischenfall ], that is,
the intervention of that in-between [Zwischen] into which humanity must
be deranged [ver-rckt] if it is ever again to be itself. 21 A human being does
not so much become mad as become human only in madness. That which
now passes for human must hence be torn out of its determinations into
the kairological interval that is the madness of Dasein in its essential ecstasy
as originary temporality. The mad, following Heidegger in his etymology
of Wahnsinn, cannot be said to have embarked on a journey as though it
were an activity undertaken by grammatical subjects. The mad are the
journey in the same exhaustive and essential sense that Dasein is transcendence. Consequently, the origin is the destination of the journeythat toward which the strange soul is under wayinsofar as it does not denote
its conclusion, but rather its consummation as journey. The origin is to be
understood as ecstatic, and thus as that which is properly human.
In 1952, madness thus comes to name the Un-thought of classical
ontology, and it is to the mad that Heidegger entrusts the question of Being. The essay on Trakl is, accordingly, a further attempt at that critical destruction of the metaphysical tradition undertaken since the 1920s. Where
The Self-Assertion of the German University appealed to the Volk, Lan-

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guage in the Poem appeals to the mad and the dead. Precedents, therefore,
suggest themselves for that which Heidegger seeks to think with the word
Wahnsinn. Nonetheless, the consistency should not be taken for granted.
What Heidegger earlier thinks with transcendencethe most obvious
precursor for his etymology of Wahnsinnmust be rethought in the
light of the later text and its reappraisal of the human. To do so is to ask after the linkages between Dasein, the Volk, and the mad. It is to ask after
the nature of the humanity of the being that raises the question of Being.
In the 1929 30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger offers his most extensive treatment of the difference between the animal and the human. Discussing the essential transcendence
of Dasein, he writes:
For the being-there of Da-sein means being with others, precisely in the manner of
Dasein, i.e., existing with others. The question concerning whether we human beings can transpose ourselves into other human beings does not ask anything, because it is not a possible question in the rst place. It is a meaningless, indeed a
nonsensical question because it is fundamentally redundant. . . . Being-with belongs to the essence of mans existence.22

Dasein always already transcends. It is not possible for human beings to

transpose themselves into other human beings, since to attribute transcendence to human beings as a possibility is to transform what is essential into
what is optional.
In 1929 30, Heidegger distinguishes between the essential transposition of the human being, the limited transposability of the animal and the
nontransposability of the inanimate object:
In contrast with the stone, the animal in any case does possess the possibility of
transposability, but it does not allow the possibility of self-transposition in the
sense in which this transpires between one human being and another. The animal
both has something and does not have something, i.e., it is deprived of something.
We express this by saying that the animal is poor in world and that it is fundamentally deprived of world.23

Heidegger stresses that this last proposition is not to be understood as an

additional property of the entity that has long been the domain of zoological enquiry:
Where does the proposition the animal is poor in world come from? We can answer once again that it derives from zoology, since this is the science that deals with
animals. But precisely because zoology deals with animals this proposition cannot

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be a result of zoological investigation: rather, it must be its presupposition. For this

presupposition ultimately involves an antecedent determination of what belongs in
general to the essence of the animal, that is, a delimitation of the eld within which
any positive investigation of animals must move.24

Admittedly, Heidegger, who thereupon proceeds to talk of earthworms,

moles, and beetles, does not appear in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics to wish to challenge the traditional delimitations of the zoological.
Twenty years later, however, he calmly announces that a blue deer
is human. Why? Because it thinks. At once it seems that he is invoking
the arguments of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics on the humanity of thinking. There, in 58, Heidegger writes: Captivation is the condition of possibility for the fact that, in accordance with its essence, the
animal behaves within an environment but never within a world. 25 What
stands between the animal and a world is its captivation (Benommenheit).
The nature of this captivation is not to be a captivation with something as
such. Indeed, in the absence of a grammatical agent for the captivation,
Benommenheit could be more suitably (and more conventionally) translated by dazethe captivation that denes itself as an inability to be captivated by something as such. For Heidegger, as for Aquinas, this captivated daze in which the animal lives without relating either to itself or
anything outside of itself prevents a world from emerging in the wealth of
its articulations:
When we say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word
rock in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in
some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock. If we cross out
the word we do not simply mean to imply that something else is in question here
or is taken as something else. Rather we imply that whatever it is is not accessible
to it as a being.26

For late Heidegger, as is well known, it is the word Being that we ought
to cross out, in order to indicate that Being as such is not accessible to us.
Without access to the Being of beings and thus to what beings are as such,
we are not free of the captivation in which the animal lives and perishes.
However, in 1929 30, the question of Being has not yet fully undermined the metaphysical distinction between the animal and the human.
The lizard lies on a rock, but it does not lie knowingly on a rock. The rock
as such withholds itself. The world refuses itself to the animal in general
because it is accessible only to the being that knows. World becomes the

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prerogative of the human as the being that knows. Heideggers choice of

examples for discussion from the animal kingdom is seemingly dictated by
a desire to avert suspicion from the denition of the human as the being
that knows. The behavior of bees while feeding furnishes Heidegger with a
convenient further example of a being that does not know:
[T]he bee recognizes that it cannot cope with all the honey present. It breaks off
its driven activity because it recognizes the presence of too much honey for it. Yet,
it has been observed that if its abdomen is carefully cut away while it is sucking, a
bee will simply carry on regardless even while the honey runs out of the bee from
behind. This shows conclusively that the bee by no means recognizes the presence
of too much honey.27

The honey as such does not appear for the bee. Not knowing what it is doing, the bee does not behave within a world.
But what does it mean for world to be tied to the knowability of what
is? How can Heideggers argument in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics be brought into agreement with his demotion of epistemology in
13 of Being and Time? There he writes: But a commercium of the subject
with a world does not get created for the rst time by knowing, nor does it
arise from some way in which the world acts upon a subject. Knowing is a
mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-the-world. Thus Being-in-theworld, as a basic state, must be Interpreted beforehand. 28
Being-in-the-world is the basis of knowledge and earlier in the same
section, Heidegger asserts, Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated
[benommen] by the world with which it is concerned. 29 In Being and Time,
Dasein knows because it is Being-in-the-world. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the bee is not Being-in-the-world because it does not
know. There is an asymmetry between the two propositions. In Being and
Time, Being-in-the-world is the presupposition of knowledge, whereas in
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics knowledge is the proof of Beingin-the-world. Yet in what way can knowledge be a proof of Being-in-theworld? Beings are knowable because they are cleared in the clearing of beings that is Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is the knowability of
what is and Dasein is the being that knows. But Dasein is not the being
that knows in the sense that it is a subject that stands over against an object that it submits to scrutiny and about which it draws binding conclusions. Dasein is the being that knows because it is the clearing of beings.
The bee is not the being that knows because it is a being that appears in the

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clearing of beings and is not the clearing itself. In Heideggers example of

the bee, the distinction between the animal and the human is illustrated,
but not without ambiguity. The poverty of the bees world lies in its difference from the knowability of what is, rather than in its nonsensical
behavior. In Heideggers example this is ambiguous. Being-in-the-world
appears to be susceptible to verication by a test of expediency. The bee
without an abdomen expends energy in the consumption of honey that it
cannot retain and thus behaves irrationally: it is not the animal rationale
and it is not Being-in-the-world. Is this ambiguity, whereby the clearing of
beings converges with the being with the most developed sense of the economical, simply a lapse on Heideggers part?
If it is a lapse, it is one that is rectied in the essay on Trakl. In this
later text, Heidegger is much more careful to avoid encouraging readings
that would anthropomorphize the clearing of beings. The greater caution
alters the cast of the animal in Heideggers thinking. The question that
Derrida raises concerning the tenability of the distinction between the animal and the human in other texts by Heidegger is thus preempted by the
essay on Trakl. In Geschlecht II: Heideggers Hand, Derrida examines the
passage on the ape from What Is Called Thinking? and addresses his attention to the sentence, Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do
not have hands. 30 Here Heidegger reserves the hand for the human and
puts it at a distance from any organic functionalism. Derrida, in response,
advances a criticism of the differentiation proclaimed in this sentence and
of the logic that informs its counterparts in other texts:
In its very content, this proposition marks the texts essential scene, marks it with
a humanism that wanted certainly to be nonmetaphysicalHeidegger underscores this in the following paragraphbut with a humanism that, between a
human Geschlecht one wants to withdraw from the biologistic determination . . .
and an animality one encloses in its organico-biologic programs, inscribes not some
differences but an absolute oppositional limit.31

Heidegger certainly retains the traditional notion of a radical difference between human beings and animals, yet his reasons for doing so are not traditional. For Heidegger, the ape gives itself up to the organic analysis of biology, and as an animal it cannot do otherwise. With the human being, it
is another matter. Between the ape and the human being, there are not
merely differences in the plural and hence on the level of properties. There
is a difference of essence. The humanism that Derrida attributes to Heidegger lies in this incommensurability. Derrida questions whether this ab-

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solute oppositional limitby which the Geschlecht would be set rigidly in

the discord between the human and the animal does not collapse of itself. Derridas question, however, presupposes the vulnerability of Heideggers thinking to a Hegelian criticism. Is the incommensurability of the ape
and the human really the matter of an absolute oppositional limit? Is the
human dened as an extant being by the negativity of its opposition to the
ape and thus contaminated by the ape in its very essence? For Heidegger,
the incommensurability is not a difference between two essences distinct
in the same way. The incommensurability is the difference between the
clearing of beings, which is thus always already contaminated through its
Being-with, and a being that appears in the clearing and allows its enclosure in organico-biologic programs. And yet the clearing of beings has
hands. This, however, is not an objection, since it is the clearing of beings
that rst has anything. Humanism would mark Heideggers text only if
it were denied that the clearing of beings has paws.
Heideggers distinction between the human and the animal is better
understood as an inclusion of the one in the other than as a mutual exclusion. In his 1938 39 lectures on the second of Nietzsches Untimely Observations, Heidegger regrets the possibility of misinterpretation adhering to
his discussion of the difference between Dasein and animals in Being and
Time.32 In 1927, the Being of animals is to be understood privatively with
respect to the Being of Dasein, but privation is a poor way of approaching the difference between Being and beings, since it lies in the nature of
the viscidity of Being that whatever can be said to differ from Being as such
must nevertheless also be acknowledged, in its very difference from Being,
to be. An animal is privative in relation to humanity, not in the sense that
it is a crippled or stunted human being but in the sense that it falls short,
precisely as a determinate being, of the transcendence in which Dasein is
swept away from any self-identity. What is at stake for Heidegger is an ontologization (which is to say, an indetermination, a de-anthropomorphization) of humanity rather than an anthropomorphization of Being. Ontologically, the animal that, in 1929 30, is seemingly not thought beyond its
comprehension in the prevailing biology relies on humanity in its being an
animal as such. A sentence such as the following from the Letter on Humanism has therefore to be read for what it does not say in the language
of humanism: Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective
environments but are never placed freely in the clearing of Being which
alone is world, they lack language. 33 Plants and animals are never placed

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freely in the clearing of Being because they, unlike Dasein, are not the clearing of Being itself. Plants and animals do not speak, but then it is not one
being among other beings that is here said to speak. The human is not, for
Heidegger, a privileged being. Its difference from other beings as the being
that speaks is the difference of Being from beings. Heidegger thus endows
the human with a dignity surpassing that of any earlier humanism. But
Heideggers apparent humanism is, properly speaking, an anti-humanism,
inasmuch as it does not perpetuate the Christian myth of the human being as a being set apart from, and over, all other beings. This myth, which
endorses the exploitation and manipulation of beings in the service of modern technicism, does not nd expression in Heidegger. On the contrary, by
identifying the human with the Being of beings Heidegger does not align
the manipulability of beings with the human, but rather names with the human being the essential resistance of beings to tevcnh. The human becomes
the essential unpresentability of whatever is. It becomes the worlding of the
world in which beings are present but which, as their condition of possibility and thus their truth, is not present itself. And it is not present because
it is the nonpresentability of time. Whereas for Aristotle the human is the
only being that perceives time, for Heidegger the human is time.34 It is in
the ecstases of temporality that the human both announces its incommensurability with the animal and gives itself up to contamination.
In Language in the Poem, the blue deer is human not simply because it thinks and knows what a bee cannot know. It is human because, in
its harkening to the stranger, it follows him elsewhere and thinks madly,
that is, differently. Since Christian humanism distinguished the human
from the thingly but did not question the distinctness as such of the human, it never reached beyond matters of detail to the madness of a thorough critique of reication. It never thought Being as such. A famous sentence from What Is Called Thinking? (the series of lectures delivered in the
same period as the composition of Language in the Poem) reads: Most
thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not
thinking. 35 The blue deer, which does think because it thinks differently
from the thought that is properly a nonthought, accordingly satises the
denition of the human being as the thinking animal (Heideggers less
than honest translation of animal rationale). Yet it can be said to satisfy this
denition only by overlooking the fact that the otherness of its thought
calls any denition whatsoever into question. Its thought is less a stable
property of its animality than its madness and decay: the humanity of the

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blue deer is its indeterminacy. We who do not yet think are not yet human.
Metaphysics prevents us from strictly meeting its denition of humanity as
the animal rationale because it prevents us from thinking. But in what way
are we the human beings who do not yet think? To what degree? Heideggers response in the text on Trakl is unmistakable: to the degree that we are
not under way, that we resist the decomposition essential to the human.36
In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the animal does not
grasp beings as they are. And it cannot do so because it is not Being and
hence not that which is the knowability of beings. The animal is insufciently ecstatic and thus insufciently decadent. The blue deer bears witness to the humanity that thinks itself in the animal. The humanity of the
animal is the transcendence that cannot be denied to the Being of any being. To deny the animal knowledge of beings as such is not to deny it transcendence, since inasmuch as the animal is, it is transcendent. The constitution of its identity takes into account the world from which the animal
is continuously differentiated and toward which it must always be transcending in order for the differentiation to take effect. And if Heideggers
bee is essentially always more than a bee, can it only everunthinkingly
be mistaken for a bee? The ecstasy that Heidegger endows with the
name of human is the Being of beings. The exclusiveness of humanitys
title to Being is dictated by the nature of ecstasy itself rather than by a recollection of the Christian hierarchy of terrestrial beings, since a plurality of
titles to transcendence would entail the demarcation of regions of Being
in deance of its ecstatic character. Within this ecstasy, beings emerge in
the distinctiveness of their individual properties by way of a suppression of
their transcendent humanity. A stone, a twig, a length of thread, as that
which is merely present-at-hand, gure among the debris of originary temporality in its disintegration into the atomistic nows of reication. Decay is not a secondary effect of the object; rather the object is a secondary
effect of decay. Where the blue deer can be said to think, it is because in
following the stranger, it transcends more unreservedly than the unthinking consciousness of the epistemological subject. Thought, in the proper
sense as the thought of Being, is not a procedure of an extant subject, but
the essence of the being-outside-of-itself of originary temporality. The blue
deer that truly thinks does not pass beyond itself only as far as an object in
whose reection it then recovers; instead, it thinks so intensely that it decays into the humus of the human, disappearing after the stranger into the
origin.

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If it is immediately objected that such an interpretation overlooks

what is traditional in Heideggers meditations on humanity, then this appearance of conventionality would need to be demonstrated as being more
than an appearance. Certainly, the Greek denition of the human being
zw`/on lovgon e[conis retained by Heidegger: Nor is the capacity to speak
merely one capability of human beings, on a par with the remaining ones.
The capacity to speak distinguishes the human being as a human being.
Such a distinguishing mark bears in itself the very design of the human
essence. 37
That which is human speaks. The proposition occupies in Heidegger, however, the status more of a problem than of a denition. What precisely it means to speak is the question that the essay on Trakl and the other
essays in the collection On the Way to Language attempts to raise. Heidegger repeatedly insists that the essence of language does not disclose itself in
its instrumentalization. Language is misunderstood as soon as it is held to
be a means of the transmission of information; evidence of comprehension
within a discourse does not in itself prove an agents humanity.
In its efforts to demarcate the animal and the human, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics has recourse to a discussion of the nature of
language that is considerably more wary, in comparison with its discussion
of knowledge, of suggesting any philosophy of consciousness: The fact
that there is an essential distinction between the vocal utterance of the animal (fwnhv) and human discourse in the broadest sense is indicated by Aristotle when he says that human discourse is kata; sunqhvkhn, which he interprets as o{tan gevnhtai suvmbolon. 38
Heidegger stresses to his audience in 1929 30 that current theories
of the symbol are inadequate for the purpose of understanding Aristotles
sense. What then is the symbol? Heideggers answer closes the circle: What
Aristotle sees quite obscurely under the title suvmbolon, sees only approximately, and without any explication, in looking at it quite ingeniously, is
nothing other than what we today call transcendence. 39 The notion of the
human that Heidegger denes by transcendence is thus not illuminated by
the additional reference to language, since language is likewise dened by
transcendence. Dasein speaks: a tautology whose deliberate emptiness displays its distance from positive determinations of humanity and of language. Dasein is whatever speaks, and in the liberated world of decay of
Trakls poetry a blackbird begins to banter with the dead cousin (Winkel
am Wald) and the ocean begins to sing (Psalm). Decay is the gift of

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tongues, and on the near side of reication everything begins to speak.

Once language is expounded as transcendence, and not as the comprehensibility of utterances, can it be said that the community it founds, the
Being-with-others with which Heidegger equates Dasein, is in any way exclusive? Would it not be a proof of the decient transcendence of a community, and therefore of its decient humanity, if it were to distinguish itself from another, from an Other?
In 1934, in the lecture course Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der
Sprache, Heidegger denes the Volk by language.40 Given his earlier denition of language, Heidegger is not substituting the exclusive community of
the speakers of a particular language for the exclusive community of the
specimens of a particular racial type. The Volk of transcendence is a people
that cannot extricate itself from other beings. It is incapable of standing
over against beings as a subject and it is thus incapable of a more or less humane comportment toward them. Its humanitas is shown in the check that
it places on the exploitation of beings by withdrawing itself, as the truth of
beings, from the domain of tevcnh.
As the Volk is dened by transcendence, it cannot come up against
another Volk from which it would be distinct. There can be only the one
Volk. But, as Heidegger makes clear in his meditations on the Geschlecht,
this is very far from amounting to a declaration of the homogeneity of the
being that raises the question of Being. The community that assembles in
the ecstases of originary temporality is the community of the ontological
difference. In order for it to be homogeneous, it would rst have to surrender to its reication within derivative temporality, whereby it would obtain in the light of presence the properties of its recognizable consistency.
Heideggers community is transcendent only because it is different, only
because it is the transcendence that is difference itself. To grasp the Volk in
its specicity as the Volk, rather than as an extant entity among extant entities, can mean nothing other than to grasp it as difference.
In 1952, the question of Being is the question of the Geschlecht. Having become the name of the being that raises the question of Being, the Geschlecht thinks the question in terms of its own difference. The Geschlecht
does not think the Being of beings as the Hegelian differentiatedness of
beings. Difference is to be thought on its own. Certainly, early Heidegger
speaks in the same way of transcendence, rejecting all interpretations that
situate it as a relation between the subject and the object.41 But, as the ambiguity of the example of the bee in The Fundamental Concepts of Meta-

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physics shows, transcendence is not always sufciently distinguished from

the knowledge that one being has of another being. Transcendence, as the
possibility of community, is that which later becomes the difference of the
Geschlecht. It is the ontological difference, of which Heidegger writes in
The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics:
Thus we think of Being rigorously only when we think of it in its difference with
beings, and of beings in their difference with Being. The difference thus comes
specically into view. If we try to form a representational idea of it, we will at once
be misled into conceiving of difference as a relation which our representing has
added to Being and to beings. Thus the difference is reduced to a distinction,
something made up by our understanding (Verstand ).42

The difference between Being and beingsin short, transcendenceis

reduced to a distinction belonging to the positivity of the understanding
when it is formulated as a distinct being that relates Being and beings as
though from outside. In order to avoid such a reication of the ontological difference, it is necessary to think this difference in its immanence to
Being and beings. It is necessary to think it in its originarity as the clearing
of both Being and beings.
Heideggers lecture Language endeavors to rethink difference in the
course of an exegesis of Trakls poem Ein Winterabend: The difference
[Unter-Schied ] is neither distinction nor relation. The difference is in the
highest instance the dimension for world and thing. 43 Heidegger here hyphenates the German word for difference, Unterschied, and in thus drawing attention to its elements, unter (under) and Schied (division) suggests a
possibility of understanding difference that is more originary than division
and that is hence neither distinction nor relation difference as the sublime, as the passage under the threshold between entities and as the condition of possibility of beings in their multiplicity. This originary difference
is not, for Heidegger, the Being that Hegel identies with the differentiatedness of beings. This originary difference clears Being even in its withdrawal from the recognizability of the differentiatedness of beings. It is the
difference of the Geschlecht and the basis for its community.
In his reading of Trakls verse Ein Geschlecht (One Geschlecht) in
Language in the Poem, Heidegger again emphasizes that difference is not
the product of negotiations within a binary:
The one in one Geschlecht does not mean one instead of two. The one
also does not mean the monotony of dull equality. One Geschlecht does not at

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all name any biological fact, neither the condition of being of the one sex
[Eingeschlechtlichkeit] nor that of being of the same sex [Gleichgeschlechtlichkeit]. In
the emphatic one Geschlecht, that uniting element conceals itself which unies
out of the spiritual nights gathering blueness.44

Heidegger discounts here a series of interpretations of Trakls verse on the

basis solely of their one-sidedness. Oneness, when coupled with the
Geschlecht, becomes the oneness of multiplicity. Trakls one Geschlecht is
not so much a unity as that which unies, although it does not unify in the
same way as the Greek One of unconcealment. Trakls one Geschlecht
conceals itself as the unifying element of the ontological difference. It
names the humanity of this difference, as Heidegger writes: Accordingly,
the word Geschlecht here retains the full manifold meaning already
named. It names at once the historical Geschlecht of man, humanity in its
difference from all other living beings (plants and animals). The word
Geschlecht names then the Geschlechter, tribes, clans, families of this human Geschlecht. At the same time, the word Geschlecht always names the
twofold of the Geschlechter. 45
The Geschlecht that is insinuated to be difference itself cannot be distinguished from other living things, as though it were one living thing
among others. It is different from them as the difference from which they
break toward their distinct identities as plants and animals. It is the Geschlecht informing them as the possibility of their determinacy and indeterminacy.
Geschlecht is a word that names difference because it is a poetic word.
What it names is originary and, for that reason, can only be named poetically. As Heidegger asserts elsewhere in On the Way to Language, the poetic
has nothing to do with the secondariness and derivativeness of the ornamental: Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and
therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any
longer. 46 As everyday language is a used-up poem, it is not by adding
senses to the univocality of everyday language that one arrives at poetry.
Geschlecht is a poetic word in its multiplicity, but this multiplicity is poorly
understood as the aggregate of its senses. The multiplicity has to be thought
in its originary simplicity. The meaning of the word Geschlecht is manifold
because it lies in the poetic character of this word not to give itself up to
the unequivocality of that which is apprehended in the light of presence.
The manifold meaning of the word is a consequence of the originarity that

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prevents it from ever fully being unconcealed. The poetic word Geschlecht
thus names the human in its status as an exception to the understanding of
Being as presence. In this respect, the Geschlecht is a descendent of the German Volk of Heideggers commentaries on Hlderlin. But with the essay on
Trakl in 1952, the being that raises the question of Being has shed its overt
ties to nationalism and aligned itself with difference.
Heidegger begins Language in the Poem with a question about the
site of Trakls poetry and suggests that it is difference itself: The site gathers unto itself, supremely and in the extreme. That which gathers penetrates and pervades everything. The site, that which gathers, draws into itself, preserves that which it has drawn in, not like an immuring capsule,
but rather by illuminating and shining through what has been gathered,
and which only thus is released into its own essence. 47 Only difference is
able to unify as well as preserve. As the site of Trakls work, difference is, in
a sense, this work itself. And because difference cannot be hypostasized, the
work is in some way a non-work: The poem (Gedicht) of a poet remains
unspoken. None of the individual texts (Dichtungen), not even their totality, says everything. Nonetheless, each text speaks out of the whole of the
single poem and at every turn enunciates this poem. 48 Just as there is only
the one Geschlecht for Heidegger and Trakl, there is for Heidegger only the
one poem. And that which allows the poem and the Geschlecht to unify
hinders them from being present-at-hand.
Exactly why the poem of a poet remains unspoken is not stated. In
Nietzsche, however, Heidegger explains why the thought (more precisely,
the Un-thought) of a thinker remains unsaid. There, in a very un-Hegelian
manner, he speaks of the inevitable transgression in commenting upon the
Un-thought of another thinker:
Every thinker oversteps the inner limit of every thinker. But such overstepping is
not knowing it all, since it only consists in holding the thinker in the direct claim
of Being, thus remaining within his limitations. This limitation consists in the fact
that the thinker can never himself say what is most of all his own. It must remain
unsaid, because what is sayable receives its determination from what is not sayable.
What is most of all the thinkers own, however, is not his possession, but rather belongs to Being whose transmission thinking receives in its projects.49

For Heidegger, the Un-thought of a thinker is not a deciency for which

the thinker can be held to account. Unlike Hegel, for whom the task of
thinking is the task of bringing everything to thought, Heidegger concerns
himself with the Un-thought for the sake of its resistance to presence.

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Commentary on the work of a poet is, as it were, a matter of attending to the determining element of the unspoken poem. Commentary takes
as its object less the plurality of distinct poems by which the Geschlecht has
been cursed than the decay that is their unity and condition of possibility. The charge of misreading repeatedly leveled at Heideggers text on
Trakl registers, but fails to understand, that it has taken the unspoken
poem as its object.50 The violence of Heideggers reading, as it bears on the
discord of that which is said of the Geschlecht, is a corollary of the attempt
to think the Geschlecht in the un-said gentleness of its simple twofold.
In any case, the question must arise for even the crudest understanding of Trakls poetry whether delity is itself an appropriate criterion in
judging discussions of his texts. Fidelity to what? Sense is conspicuously a
side-effect in these compositions. On account of the repetition and repositioning of images, Modesto Carone Netto ascribes to Trakl a technique
and practice such as that which William Burroughs later employed and
propagated under the name of cut-up. 51 Trakls poetry has been analyzed
as a montage of quotations by Alfred Doppler,52 as well as by Rudolf D.
Schier,53 who discovers in two verses by Trakl allusions to the Book of
Samuel, the Gospel of Saint John, Hlderlins Der Winkel von Hahrdt,
and Ammers translation of Rimbaud. Trakl develops an art of quotation
quite distinct from that of his contemporary Karl Kraus. The quotation in
Trakl is not the object of attack. It is more the symptom of a decomposition. Krauss personality, which stands over against the quotations and
unites them, has no exact counterpart in Trakl. Trakl simply plagiarizes.
This defect is, strictly speaking, his great strength. Trakl withstands the
temptation to produce a work: the deterritorialization of the individual
quoted verses is not thwarted by a reterritorialization on any notion of the
poets authentic voice. Trakls singular poem is elsewhere. The Geschlecht
is hidden. And it cannot be more thoroughly hidden than on the surface:
Richard Detsch contends that Trakls verse Ein Geschlecht is itself a quotation of Novalis,54 whereas Ursula Heckmann believes that Otto Weininger is its inspiration.55 The singularity of the Geschlecht does not isolate
the Traklian corpus as its determining principle, since it must for its own
part be understood from out of that abyssal absence of such a determining
principle which is Trakls innovation as a montage artist.
Commenting on the notion of singularity in Language in the
Poem, but misapprehending its abyssal character, Derrida justly asserts
that Heidegger is unwilling to position Trakl within metaphysics, let alone

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Christian theology: On the contrary, he intends to show that Trakls Gedicht (his poetic work if not his poems) has not only crossed the limit of
onto-theology: it allows us to think such a crossing [ franchissement] which
is also an enfranchisement [affranchissement]. This enfranchisement, still
equivocal in Hlderlin . . . is univocal in Trakl. 56 For Heidegger, as Derrida writes, Trakls Gedicht is beyond metaphysics. Trakls Gedicht has
crossed the limit of onto-theology and thereby accomplished what On
the Question of Being declares to be impossible. By means here of an allusion to Heideggers critique of Jngers conviction of the violability of
the limits of nihilism, Derrida attempts to implicate Heidegger in a selfcontradiction. Yet the analysis promptly breaks off before it has become evident that Heidegger understands Trakls Gedicht metaphysically. Only if
Trakls Gedicht is understood in terms of an exclusive identity, could it be
said to resemble the entities of metaphysics it is claimed to have left behind
on this side of the limit of onto-theology. But Trakls singular poem is not
a distinct entity present-at-hand, and although Derrida acknowledges in a
parenthesis that Heidegger draws a distinction between Trakls poem and
poems, he does not allow the singular poems difference from the extantness of the poems to interfere with his criticism. Heidegger does not advance Trakls missing poem as an alternative and rival to metaphysics.
Trakls missing poem is not to be encountered with metaphysical distinctness on the supposed other side of the limit of onto-theology. The Gedicht
is more originary than metaphysics because it is decadent. It is too decadent to cross the line and survive intact.
The Gedicht is, furthermore, too decadent to bear the discrete and
proper name of Georg Trakl. Heidegger reads through the individual poems to Being. Unless Georg Trakl is seen as a cipher in Language in the
Poem, unless his poem, following Heidegger on the very rst page of the
text, is grasped as absent, little more than a mythologization of a poetic corpus may appear. The decadence that emerges within Trakls poetry does
not come to a halt before the proper name. Decay liberates, within the poetry itself as well as the poetry from itself. In an important respect, Trakl
reads like the Baroque poets he studied. Generic gures populate his poemsthe stranger, the shepherds, the lepers, the lonely, the soldiersand
yet decay works against the consolidation of any given role. In Ruh und
Schweigen (v. 1112), Trakl writes:
A radiant youth
Appears the sister in autumn and black decay.

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Under the pressure of decay, the cosmological division of labor yields and
the sister changes and does not change her sex. She becomes. That she appears a gleaming youth is an illusion fomented by decay, whereby decay
is both noted and overlooked. The image of the gleaming youth collects itself within decay and steps forth from it consistent and recognizable. Decay as such never appears and it never can appear as such. Decay, like Trakls
poem and like Being, is missing.
Trakls singular poem decays into discrete verses. It falls away from itself in becoming the extant work. Decay is by no means unilateral: the
verses decay toward the singular poem and the singular poem decays toward the verses. Or again, the singular poem is decay itself. The composed
is a decomposition of decomposition. That Heidegger, in his commentary,
wishes to mark such a distinction within decay is explicit in his description
of Elis: Elis is not one who has died and who decays [verwest] in the lateness of the lived-out. Elis is the dead who dis-essences [entwest] into earliness. This stranger unfolds the human essence forward into the beginning
of what has not yet come to be borne. 57 The Entwesung of Elis is a decay
that is not so much a falling-away as a falling-toward, since it is in and as
decay, and the demolition of all previous articulations of humanity, that the
human essence comes to light in its originarity. Falling away from this
essence, succumbing to a resistance to decay, humanity is estranged from
itself. Heidegger comments: The wanderers who follow the stranger at
once see themselves parted from loved ones who, for them, are others.
The othersthat is the cast [Schlag] of the decayed form of humanity. 58
In their rst steps after the stranger, the wanderers are still under the curse
laid upon the Geschlecht. They view themselves as different from other beings rather than as difference itself, rather than as decay. The curse that
drives the Geschlecht out of the unity of difference into the discord of the
opposed effects itself in the decay of decay. The curse, however, does not
bring about a reversal of decay, since it conceals rather than heals. But in
any case is decay something to be healed?
In a letter to Jean-Michel Palmier, Heidegger insists that decay is to
be understood neither existentially nor anthropologically, but ontologically.59 In Being and Time, to whose passages on decay (Verfallenheit) Heidegger refers Palmier, there appears the following: In falling [als verfallendes], Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which
it has already fallen away. And it has not fallen into some entity which it
comes upon for the rst time in the course of its being, or even one which

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it has not come upon at all; it has fallen into the world, which itself belongs
to its Being. 60
Dasein can never not be decaying as it essentially transcends. At
most, it can disguise its worldhood in the opposition of discord. The intimacy of decay, of transcendence and of being-outside-of-itself is never
simply cancelled out by discord, since it is the precondition of the latter.
Only within the unity of the Geschlecht can dissension arise. This
unity, which is the difference of the Geschlecht, cannot accordingly be opposed to discord as though the one excluded the other. They are not options facing human communities. It is not a matter of instantiating,
within a specic social body, the differential unity of the Geschlecht in the
name of an imputedly Heideggerian politics. The feasibility of such an instantiation would depend upon a restriction of the unifying scope of the
Geschlecht, and thus upon its demotion from difference itself. The unity of
the Geschlecht is not a Utopia waiting to be realised.61 From the realization of its unity, the Geschlecht can only expect impoverishment through
the loss of the ages in which it was not realized and in which, as supposedly unrealized, it still gathered itself as its difference from its realization.
Heideggers voluntaristic tone when he speaks of the Geschlecht is
ambiguous: The proper cast lies only with that Geschlecht whose twoness
leaves discord behind and wanders ahead into the gentleness of a simple
twofold, that is, is strange and thus follows the stranger. Heidegger is not
here detailing a course of action undertaken by knowing subjects assembled in the Geschlecht and by which they differentiate themselves from
others. The Geschlecht of which he speaks is the ubiquitous, yet everywhere
concealed, Geschlecht of Being. Being is always geschlechtlich, but there is no
chosen Geschlecht. Every Geschlecht has always already been chosen and any
comportment on its part toward difference can never appropriate its election, since difference is prior to comportment and overreaches it. The subject that comports itself toward difference, with the gentility it imagines
appropriate, merely aligns itself with discord. By its comportment the subject cannot make good the discord in which it is grounded in its opposition to the object and by which the Geschlecht is cursed. The unity of the
Geschlecht is not identical with the reciprocated indulgence of the subjects
of liberalism. The last thing that Heidegger could be expected to say is that
the curse of the Geschlecht is lifted in liberal democracies with their prided
tolerance. In any case, the curse cannot be lifted in favor of decay, since the

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curse is itself also decaythe condition of possibility for that atomization

manifest in the discord of the Geschlecht lies, for Heidegger, in the decadence of derivative temporality (die verfallende Zeitigungsart).
The gentleness of the twofold of the Geschlecht is thus too inclusive
to be taken for a political model. Derrida, in Geschlecht IV, Heideggers
Ear: Philopolemology, dwells upon the equivocality of the gure of the
friend in Being and Time and thereby emphasizes the distance between
Heideggers conception of community and a peaceful coexistence:
[A] larger context . . . seems to indicate that for Heidegger filei`n, on the nonpsychological, nonanthropological, nonethicopolitical plane of the existential analytic
and above all of the question of being or fuvsi~, welcomes within itself, in its very
accord, many other modes than that of friendliness, but as well opposition, tension, confrontation, rejection, . . . if not war, at least Kampf or povlemo~. . . . To be
opposed to the friend, to turn away from it, to defy it, to not hear it, that is still to
hear and keep it, to carry with self, bei sich tragen, the voice of the friend.62

The friendship that, as Being-with, is denitive of the human being lies

outside the gift of the subject. Dasein is essentially and thus inalienably befriended. Even in its seemingly most fundamental isolation, Dasein continues within a community of some kind and of which it stands forever in
need, if only so that its isolation might assert itself. Throughout the discord
between the isolated individual and the community, there prevails the tenderness of the unitary Geschlecht in its transcendence. The Being-with of
the Geschlecht that is denitive of the human being disappears from view
in discord. As a result, Dasein connes itself to its isolation and yet sets itself at variance with solitude. It never beholds itself as fully human and
never knows itself as estranged simply from an oxymoronic image of the
human. That is to say, in the discord that is the element of its reication
the subject fails to perceive its inhumanity. The community from which
Dasein can never break is the community of difference. Its specicity is not
constituted by exclusion. Hence it cannot limit itself to the concourse of a
given species of primates. The age of loneliness, which in 1938 Heidegger
believes must fall over the earth, is to scatter the spurious communities that
settle in the discord of the Geschlecht, disclosing as it were the ecstatic community of the lonely.
Already in the 1934 35 lecture course Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, Heidegger writes: The manner of togetherness of
the singular, its world-character, is solitude. It does not separate and expel,

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but rather bears forth into that originary unity which no community has
ever attained. 63 It is for such a nonexclusive community that Heidegger
reserves the words friendship and tenderness. And that he should tear
these words away from any oppositionality, denying that friendship excludes antagonism, that tenderness is at odds with decay, is not irrelevant
to his ambition to think difference as other than a binary and a curse.
But in what sense do the binary and the curse nonetheless remain in
place? Heidegger, inquiring into the nature of the language in Trakls poetry, declares:
It speaks by answering to that journey on which the stranger moves in advance.
The path upon which he has struck out leads away from the old degenerate
Geschlecht. It offers company on the way to the decline into the preserved earliness
of the unborn Geschlecht. The language of the poem that has its site in departedness answers to the homecoming of the unborn human Geschlecht into the peaceful beginning of its quieter essence.64

Does the unborn Geschlecht still fall under the sway of discord, inasmuch
as it distinguishes itself from its degenerate double? Such a conclusion appears inescapable if the notion of homecoming in the above passage is
stripped of its radicality. The home of the Geschlecht cannot properly stand
over against the homelessness of its degeneration and reication unless it
is indeterminate, and as indeterminate its opposition is therefore essentially an inclusion. The path of the stranger leads nowhere, and it is in this
nowhere that the Geschlecht nds its home. The place of Trakls poem is,
strictly speaking, a no-place. And yet Heidegger writes: The sitedness
of the site that gathers Trakls work into itself is the concealed essence of
departedness, and is called Evening Land, the Occident. The West as
the land of evening, as the land of decay, is too dissolute, however, to be
present-at-hand. Decay is not something that has struck the West. On the
contrary, it is its essence. If, in 1912, Trakl wonders whether he should emigrate to Borneo,65 then there is no necessity that dictates that this should
be interpreted as a fantasized ight from the decadence of high capitalism.
Decay in Trakls poetry cannot be reduced to a moral phenomenon and
just as Rimbaud, in LImpossible, discovers the East in the West, Trakl
may have been hoping to come upon the truth of the West in the tropical,
and thus more rampant, decomposition of the Indonesian archipelago.
When Heidegger ascribes to Trakl a single, yet missing, poem, it is perhaps
with an intimation that the decay in Trakls poems was, for Trakl, himself

The Geschlecht of the Poem

245

decient. The substantiality of the poems is, as it were, an obstacle to the

decay that they invoke. Trakls singular poem is the non-work of the West,
and it is by means of the absolute and Utopian decay of its impossibility
that it satirically condemns, and in condemning embraces, the partially decomposed gures of the poems themselves. The Geschlecht, like the Volk, is
missing, but only as such can it constitute human community.

Conclusion

Heideggers conception of the Volk cannot be extricated from his engagement with National Socialism. Its importance as a factor in his decision to join the NSDAP was simply too great. And yet its role in determining Heideggers commitment to Hitler is an insufcient reason for
identifying Heideggers conception of the Volk with the National Socialist
conception of the Aryan type (Art). Heideggers people does not take its
denition from biologism. It is, however, through the very radicality with
which he rejected biologism that Heidegger is unable to keep his conception of the Volk at a distance from the Nazi reication of humanity. Rejecting biologism even to its foundations in the thing-concepts of classical
ontology, Heidegger elaborates a conception of the Volk that does not rely
on the metaphysical understanding of Being as presence.
Heideggers people is not a being that gives itself up to be apprehended in the light of presence, biologistically or otherwise. It is a beingoutside-of-itself. As such, it is essentially corrupt and therefore lacks the
means to avoid contamination with the purity of the Aryan type. But in
the fundamental impurity of Heideggers Volk, in the stain of its Nazism,
there has also to be discerned a resistance to the regime that extends further, philosophically, than any other resistance. Heideggers opposition
is nonetheless inextricable from acquiescence because it derives from an
opposition to the understanding of the distinctness of beings on which
Nazism erected its apparatus of terror and in terms of which the enemies
of the regime conceived their resistance. The stain on Heideggers people
is a consequence of its undecidability and the challenge it presents to the
very possibility of control. Philosophically, Heideggers conception of Volk
cannot hold itself back from contact with Nazism: that Heidegger, on the

Conclusion

247

basis of his cruder political sympathies, did not merely not hold himself
back is another matter. After the war, the Volk does not cease to be corrupt;
instead, in the essay on Geschlecht this corruption is carried further to include the animal.
For Heidegger, undecidability is the essence of the German Volk. It
is likewise the essence of Dasein. But is undecidability not annulled
through its determination as German? And does not the direct association of the Volk with Dasein reduce non-German peoples, in a gesture reminiscent of Nazi racism, to beings present-at-hand? What Heidegger means
by German is, however, at once orthodox and heterodox. The undecidability of Heideggers Volk is the consummation and destruction of the
complacent anti-positivism of the tradition of German cultural nationalism. Heideggers people does not congeal into a stable identity over against
the present-at-hand. With Heidegger, the anti-positivism of German
cultural nationalism is thought through to a conception of the Volk that
contests the determination of beings under the metaphysics of presence.
German nationalism hence becomes, for Heidegger, inseparable from the
question of the Being of Dasein. The Volk, through understanding its own
difference from the present-at-hand, is able to understand the Being that is
proper to Dasein and that has gone unthought since the inception of classical ontology. The Volks direct association with Dasein is its proximity to
an understanding of its Being. Accordingly, the uprising of the German
people under Hitler was able to assume in Heideggers eyes the aspect of a
drive to the question of Being. In the prevailing preoccupation with the
specicity of the Volk, Heidegger was willing to see an engagement with the
ontological specicity of human Dasein as such, rather than a hierarchization of races.
In the name of the Volk of the question of Being, Heidegger expressed his allegiance to the Hitlerian dictatorship in 1933. And in the name
of this conception of the Germans, Heidegger likewise resigned the rectorship of Freiburg University and directed his attention to poetry. Heideggers people is the people promised rst by Hitler and then by Hlderlin. The transition from the state to poetry was not a transition from
the biologistically distinct people of National Socialism to the people of
Hlderlins nonpositive nationalism. In 1933, Heideggers Volk is arguably
still more of a being-outside-of-itself than the Volk of the subsequent lectures on poetry, because it is the people whose impurity encompasses even

248

Conclusion

biologism. In Heideggers refusal and overdetermined inability to extricate himself from National Socialism, the Volk remains in an uncanny play
of substitution with the specimens of the Aryan race. Heideggers people thereby evades the mission of thinking Daseins difference from the
present-at-hand and nonetheless thinks this difference in the impurity
proper to it.

Notes

introduction
1. See Karl Lwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933, excerpt
translated as My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936 by Richard Wolin
in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 142.
2. Cf. Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heideggers Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 126: Even
if, however, the section on historicality stood alone and were not preceded by the
sections on falling and on conscience and solicitude, one sees easily that Heideggers concept of historicality is identical to Hitlers and Schelers ideas of history
and thus politically on the Right. Without the mythical past of the pure race or
the restoration of objective ethical values, it is not at all easy to see that Heideggers concept of historicality is identical to either Hitlers or Schelers. However, the
more general charge of the reactionary character of Heideggers concept of historicality is not so quickly answered.
3. Heidegger, Ansprache am 11. November in Leipzig, in Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, ed. Hermann Heidegger, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt
a/M: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 16: 191. Further references to Heideggers Gesamtausgabe (1975 ) use the abbreviation GA. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
4. See Erich Jaensch, Die Wissenschaft und die deutsche vlkische Bewegung
(Marburg: N. G. Ewert, 1933).
5. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(London: SCM Press, 1962), 62. All emphases in the quotations in this book are
to be found in the original.
6. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1977), in
GA, 2: 51n.
7. Aristotle, Metaphysica, in The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1908 52), 8: 998b.
8. Heidegger, Aristoteles, Metaphysik q 13, ed. Heinrich Hni (1981), in GA,
33: 47.

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Notes to Introduction

9. In the 1951 text Logos (Heraklit, Fragment 50) in Vortrge und Aufstze,
ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (2000), in GA, 7: 21134, Heidegger offers
a seemingly less oppositional reading of the fragment of Heraclitus better known
by the paraphrase All is One. It is a characteristic of Heideggers exegeses of foundational philosophical texts that he avoids open polemics and rejections. The
reservation that Heidegger utters with regards to the prevalence of the One is thus
easily overlooked. The One, for Heidegger, gathers; it is not a fait accompli.
10. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), A 598 B 626.
11. Ibid., A 600, B 628.
12. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1992), 330.
13. Otto Pggeler, Martin Heideggers Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987), 251 n. 32.
14. Heidegger, Erluterungen und Grundstzliches in Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 414.
15. Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought, trans. Michael Gendre
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 37 41.
16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436. Translation modied.
17. Hans Sluga, Heideggers Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 136.
18. Heidegger, Being and Time, 428.
19. Ibid., 67.
20. Heidegger, The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Gnther Neske and Emil
Kettering, trans. Lisa Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 19.
21. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436.
22. Ibid., 163.
23. Ibid., 155.
24. Ibid., 164.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 165.
27. Georg Lukcs, Die Zerstrung der Vernunft (Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand, 1962), 440.
28. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter
Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 79.
29. Heidegger, Being and Time, 167.
30. Ibid., 168.
31. Heidegger, Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones, in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 48.

Notes to Introduction

251

32. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, ed. Susanne
Ziegler (1980), in GA, 39: 56.
33. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, ed. Hartmut Tietjen (2001), in GA, 36 37: 263.
34. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, ed. Curd Ochwadt (1982), in
GA, 52: 131.
35. Heidegger, Being and Time, 447.
36. On the people that is born in Romanticism, see Ernst Anrich in his foreword to a wartime edition of Ernst Moritz Arndt, Germanien und Europa (Berlin:
W. Kohlhammer, 1940), 7: In the hard struggle to distinguish properly the completely new from both the ideas of 1789 and the powers of absolutism, this minority was not able to come to a full inner victory or to penetrate the nation to
such an extent that, even after 1815, the nation could retain the thought in its clarity. What rather took place in the nineteenth century was the reversion and renewed collapse into the ideas of rationalism. Only the far more encompassing and
consistent breakthrough of the same idea in the National Socialist revolution has
repulsed this.
37. Cf. Marxs letter of May 1843 to Arnold Ruge in Early Texts, trans. David
McLellan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 74, in which he rebuffs him for quoting
the well-known denunciation of the Germans in Hlderlins Hyperion as a description of present conditions: Your letter, my dear friend, is a good elegy, a
choking elegy; but it is denitely not political. No people despairs. Marxs objection is that what in Hlderlin had been politically apposite has, in the space of a
few decades, become merely literary.
38. Ernest Renan, La Guerre entre la France et lAllemagne, in Quest-ce
quune nation? (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1996), 163.
39. Giorgio Agamben, What Is a People? in Means Without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), 35.
40. Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, ed. Gnter
Seubold (1998), in GA, 38: 58.
41. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 152.
42. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 340.
43. See Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1990), 78: Even if they were of use for
nothing else, the poets of antiquity at least enable us here and there to get to know
the opinions of the common people. . . . For our folksongs are often full of a
mythology known to no one but the fool who made the folksong.
44. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956),
45153.

252

Notes to Introduction

45. Hegel, The English Reform Bill, in Political Writings, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 329.
46. For a discussion of the politicization of Darwins theories in nineteenthcentury Germany, see Daniel Gasman, The Scientic Origins of National Socialism:
Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald, 1971).
47. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 107.
48. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 199.
49. Rainer Marten, Ein rassistisches Konzept von Humanitt, in Badische
Zeitung, Dec. 19 20, 1987, 14.
50. Silvio Vietta, Heideggers Kritik am Nationalsozialismus und an der Technik
(Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 9192.
51. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 3739. Translation modied.
52. See, for instance, Hegels comments on the decline of philosophy in all nations except Germany in his Rede zum Antritt des philosophischen Lehramtes
an der Universitt Berlin, in Vorlesungsmanuskripte II (1816 1831), in Gesammelte
Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995), 18: 15: This science has taken its refuge
among the Germans and lives alone still in them; to us the preservation of this holy
light has been entrusted, and it is our vocation to care for it and to feed it, and to
see to it that the highest that man can possess, the self-consciousness of his essence, is
not extinguished and destroyed.
53. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 39 40.
54. Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 199.
55. Heidegger, Wege zur Aussprache, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed.
Hermann Heidegger (1983), in GA, 13: 17.
56. Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifin,
1943), 56.
57. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1990), 176.
58. Emmanuel Lvinas, Reections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, trans.
San Hand in Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 70.
59. Ibid.
60. See Hitlers remarks to Speer on the justice of the German defeat as quoted
in Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London: Odhams Press, 1952), 707.
Once Germany had been thwarted in its imperialist aspirations, Hitlers reverence
for strengthas that which realizes the universalled him to acknowledge Russias superiority. Eugenics and German nationalism here part ways. The Volk,
which had been privileged on the basis of its potential for being bred into the Herrenvolk (the restoration of an allegedly pure bloodline was conceived as a means to
this end), had not realized itself. For both Hitler and Heidegger, the essence of the

Notes to Introduction

253

Germans is tied to the future, but for Hitler it was a future in which the presentat-hand was to hold uncontested sway. Hitler argues more like a breeder than a
Darwinian when he speaks of the malleability of the Germans, since what is at issue is not Darwins challenge to the immutability of species but rather the breeders
traditional axiom of the mutability of varieties. And as much as he derides for their
unworldliness and bloodless absolutes the idealist and Christian conceptions of
humanity, Hitler perpetuates the latters divide between Man and Nature. He misinterprets the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the ttest, absolutizing tness
and ignoring that for Darwin it is always a question of an organisms tness for a
specic environment. Fitness takes on a Platonic cast, as can be observed in the regimes attitude to the bearers of physiological abnormalities. The decision of Nature in the struggle for existence was declared to be simply anticipated in the clinical murder of these individuals. But euthanasia is a caricature of the workings of
Nature, since the abnormalities are being judged against a necessarily abstract
model human being rather than in terms of their effects in the volatile continuum
of factors by which Darwin understands environment. Given the volatility of the
environment and the multitude of elements composing any organism, it is not
possible to deduce from the death of an individual a judgment on the part of Nature with respect to that individuals particular deviation. In National Socialism,
the t human organism, notwithstanding all the strained attempts to furnish a
biological explanation for the relative technological superiority of the Germans, is
an emanation of the homogenizing procedures of technicism. The practical bloodthirstiness of the regime is a corollary of its ideological anaemia.
61. Ernst Krieck, Germanischer Mythos und Heideggersche Philosophie, in
Volk im Werden (1934), included in Nachlese zu Heidegger, ed. Guido Schneeberger
(Bern, 1962), 225 26.
62. See, e.g., Quest-ce que lexistentialisme? (1945), 146 47, and L Enormit de Heidegger (1974), 162, in De lexistentialisme Heidegger, ed. Jean Beaufret (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986).
63. Ulrich Sieg, Die Verjudung des deutschen Geistes, Die Zeit (Hamburg),
December 22, 1989, 50. An excerpt from Heideggers letter to Victor Schoerer,
Ministerialrat and head of the Baden department of higher education, reads: it
concerns nothing less than the urgent reection on the choice before which we
stand, either to bring once again to our German spiritual life genuine native forces
and educators or to deliver it up denitively to the growing Judaization in the
broader and narrower sense.
64. Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 154.
65. Cf. the reading of the Contributions to Philosophy offered in Alexander
Schwan, Heideggers Beitrge zur Philosophie und die Politik, in Martin Heidegger: Kunst-Politik-Technik, ed. Christoph Jamme and Karsten Harries (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 1992), 185: Heidegger is consequently now no longer able to associate himself with this folkish science and weltanschauung as in 1933.

254

Notes to Introduction

66. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth

Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 103. Translation modied.
67. Cf. the exposition in Richard Polt, Metaphysical Liberalism in Heideggers Beitrge zur Philosophie, Political Theory 25 (October 1997): 665: Liberalism
concerns itself with the maintenance and defense of the I; Nazism concerns itself
with the maintenance and defense of the Volk, which in this worldview reduces to
nothing but a larger Ia willing, representing, power-seeking ego on the scale of
an entire race. In both cases, the essence of man is taken for granted and is a form
of subjectivity; what is lost is historical openness to Being. However, Heidegger by
no means abandons the idea of the Volk but makes the essence of the people reside
in an elite who are capable of creatively interpreting the truth of Being. Once elitism has been attributed to Heidegger, his critique of subjectivity and the will to
power loses its coherence.
68. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andr Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 137.
69. See, e.g., Robert J. Dostal, The Public and the People: Heideggers Illiberal Politics, Review of Metaphysics 47 (March 1994): 552: The over-generalized absurdity of Heideggers critique is similarly apparent in his attack on leading Nazi
intellectuals and on Nazi peoples science (vlkische Wissenschaft) as liberal. Here
we see the truth of the claim that Heidegger was unknowing about politics and
apolitical.
70. F. M. Barnard, Herders Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment
to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 166 67.
71. Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, in GA, 38: 169.
72. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the
Political, trans. Chris Turner (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 95.
73. For a report on this colloquium, see Jean-Paul Aron, Les Modernes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1984), 122.
74. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994), 109.
75. Ibid., 108.
76. Ibid., 109.
77. Reported in Heinrich Wigand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929 1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37.
78. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 109.
79. Ibid., 108.
80. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 220.
81. Heidegger, Die gegenwrtige Lage und die knftige Aufgabe der deutschen
Philosophie, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 333.
82. Heidegger, Hlderlins Earth and Heaven, in Elucidations of Hlderlins
Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 200 201.

Notes to Inroduction and Chapter 1

255

83. Heidegger, Die deutsche Universitt, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines
Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 302.
84. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 114.
85. Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983),
151.
86. Heidegger, Zum Semesterbeginn (3. November 1933), in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 184.
87. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1955), 1: 60.
88. Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde
(London: Vision Press, 1956), 31.
89. Heidegger, Only a God Can Save Us, trans. Maria P. Alter and John D.
Caputo in Heidegger Controversy, ed Wolin, 104. See also Otto Pggeler, Die Frage
nach der Kunst: Von Hegel zu Heidegger (Munich: Alber, 1984), 30, where Pggeler records a remark by Heidegger from 1974 lamenting the destructiveness of
democracy.
90. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 324.
chapter 1
1. Heidegger, Being and Time, 438.
2. Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, in Frhe
Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1978), in GA, 1: 411.
3. Heidegger, The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview, in
Towards the Denition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Athlone Press,
2000), 81.
4. Hans A. Fischer-Barnicol, Spiegelungen-Vermittlungen, in Erinnerungen
an Martin Heidegger, ed. Gnther Neske (Pfullingen: Gnther Neske, 1977), 100:
I remembered that Heidegger had once described Hegel as his great adversary.
5. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 14.
6. Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933), 32.
7. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 18 19.
8. Heidegger, Die Negativitt: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel aus dem
Ansatz in der Negativitt (1938/39, 1941), in Hegel, ed. Ingrid Schler (1993), in
GA, 68: 24.
9. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 444.
10. Ibid., 441.

256

Notes to Chapter 1

11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 36.
13. Ibid., 28.
14. Ibid., 34.
15. Heidegger, Being and Time, 482.
16. Ibid., 483.
17. Denise Souche-Dagues, The Dialogue Between Heidegger and Hegel,
in Heidegger: Critical Assessments, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Routledge,
1992), 2: 249.
18. Ibid.
19. Heidegger, Being and Time, 485.
20. Cf. Jere Paul Surber, Heideggers Critique of Hegels Notion of Time,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (1978 79): 358 77. Surber attempts
to weaken Heideggers critique of Hegels understanding of time by drawing attention to the one-sidedness of any claim about a particular moment in Hegels
system. Yet it is the philosophical basis of the very notion of totality that is at stake
in Heideggers retrieval of the ecstatic character of transcendence.
21. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 21.
22. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, 35.
23. Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 38 39.
24. Ibid., 100.
25. Heidegger, Being and Time, 56.
26. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 188. Translation modied. Heideggers Was ist Metaphysik (1929) is translated under the title What Is Metaphysics?
in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
27. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952), 10.
28. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
72 73.
29. Heidegger, Being and Time, 298.
30. Ibid., 306 7.
31. Ibid., 281.
32. Ibid., 279.
33. Ibid., 287.
34. Ibid., 288.
35. Ibid., 309.
36. Ibid., 310.
37. Ibid.
38. Heidegger, The Call to the Labor Service, trans. William S. Lewis, in
Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 55.

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257

39. Hegel, Rede zum Antritt des philosophischen Lehramtes an der Universitt Berlin, in Vorlesungsmanuskripte II (1816 1831), in Gesammelte Werke, 18: 18:
The taciturn essence of the universe does not have in itself any power that could
offer resistance to the daring of knowledge; it must open itself up before it, and lay
its wealth and its depths before its eyes and deliver itself up to be enjoyed. This
eroticization of knowledge will be complemented and unsettled in Kafka by an
eroticization of the condition of being known. See the last of the Reections on
Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way, in Franz Kafka, Wedding Preparations in
the Country, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Secker & Warburg,
1954), 53: There is no need to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Dont
even listen, just wait. Dont even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world
will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it cant do otherwise, in raptures it will
writhe before you.
40. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, 134.
41. Jacques Taminiaux, Finitude and the Absolute: Remarks on Hegel and
Heidegger, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), 187208.
42. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 144.
43. Heidegger, On the Question of Being, trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 311.
44. Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1977), 35 36.
45. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, 155.
46. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 393.
47. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1974), 293.
48. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 117.
49. See Montaigne, That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die, in The Complete
Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958),
60: Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned how
to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an evil.
50. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 119.
51. Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 69.
52. Heidegger, Letter from Heidegger to Marcuse of January 20, 1948, trans.
Richard Wolin, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 162.
53. Cf. Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, ed. Hans Saner (Munich:
R. Piper, 1978), 79. Jaspers decries the irresponsible afrmation of Marxism that
he sees in the Letter on Humanism.

258

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

54. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, 258 59.
55. Ibid., 259.
56. Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph OMalley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 14 15.
57. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, trans. S. Ryazanskaya (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), 168.
58. See E. Oldemeyer, Eher auf Husserl als auf Lukcs zielend, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, March 3, 1988, 9.
59. Lucien Goldmann, Lukcs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, trans.
William Q. Boelhower (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 13 et passim.
60. Kostas Axelos, Einfhrung in ein knftiges Denken: ber Marx und Heidegger (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1966), 17.
61. Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London: Merlin Press, 1971), xxxvi.
62. Ibid., xx.
63. Ibid., xxiiiiv.
64. Ibid., xxiiiii.
65. Ibid., xxiv.
66. Ibid., xxiii.
67. Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Penguin Books, 1969),
222n.
68. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie 2. Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 151.
69. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 224. Translation modied.
chapter 2
1. Jos Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London: Unwin, 1961), 10.
2. Christopher Fynsk, But Suppose We Were to Take the Rectorial Address
Seriously . . . Grard Granels De luniversit, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
14 15 (1991): 342 43.
3. It is hard, and arguably reprehensible, to imagine what the Nazi symbol
once suggested. Consider Marie von Thurn und Taxiss description of Rilkes
living quarters in Muzot in her 1932 Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke (Frankfurt a/M: Insel, 1966), 112: Beside it the meager bedroom and the little house
chapelabove the narrow Gothic door, strange and mysterious, the swastika.
Everything seems to have been made for the poet.
4. Joseph Goebbels, Goebbels spricht: Reden aus Kampf und Sieg (Oldenburg:
Gerhard Stalling, 1933), 75.
5. Heidegger, The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Gnther Neske and Emil
Kettering, trans. Lisa Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 22.

Notes to Chapter 2

259

6. Ibid., 23.
7. Heidegger, Only a God Can Save Us, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin,
95.
8. Heidegger, Telegramm an den Reichskanzler, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 105.
9. Heidegger, The Self-Assertion of the German University, trans. William
S. Lewis in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 31. Translation modied.
10. William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends
of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 140.
11. Heidegger, Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten, in Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 657. This is one of the sentences that, without Heideggers knowledge, were deleted by the editors of Der Spiegel from the rst
published version of the interview. See the relevant editorial notes in the Gesamtausgabe.
12. See, e.g., Ernst Kriecks rectorial address, Die Erneuerung der Universitt
(Frankfurt a/M: H. Bechhold, 1933), 11: Once the barriers between the various
sciences have been broken through, from within every specialist question the view
would open on the great ideological [weltanschaulich] interconnection of sense,
whereby the organic union, the living exchange between all individual disciplines
would be produced.
13. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, 261.
14. Heidegger, Self-Assertion of the German University, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 38.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Rdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald
Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), ascribes to the rectorial address a central metaphor of struggle, which he believes can be narrowed to
the metaphor of a shock-troop engagement (p. 243). But argument by analogy
is, by nature, poor criticism.
17. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosphie 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 90 91.
18. Ibid., 9192.
19. Heidegger, Self-Assertion of the German University, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 30.
20. Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame and Ina SaameSpeidel (1996), in GA, 27: 7 8.
21. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosphie 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 255.
22. Heidegger, Erluterungen und Grundstzliches, in Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 410 11.
23. Heidegger, Only a God Can Save Us, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 95. Translation modied.

260

Notes to Chapter 2

24. Heidegger, Self-Assertion of the German University, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 37.
25. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch
(Chicago: Regnery, 1967), 150.
26. See, e.g., Ludwig Bieberbach, Die vlkische Verwurzelung der Wissenschaft
(Typen mathematischen Schaffens) (Heidelberg: Kommissionsverlag der Weischen Universittsbuchhandlung, 1940). For Bieberbach, in what amounts to a
vulgarization of Pierre Duhems work on the differences between French and British physics, the theories of various modern mathematicians can be seen to betray
the race of the exponent and simultaneously their profundity or articiality.
27. Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, in GA, 38: 122.
28. Heideggers letter of resignation to the minister in Karlsruhe is dated
April 14, 1934, and is reproduced in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges,
in GA, 16: 272. The date of this letter contradicts Der Spiegel s claim, which Heidegger gladly takes up, that he resigned in February 1934. See Heidegger, Only a
God Can Save Us, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 100.
29. Heidegger, Erluterungen und Grundstzliches, in Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, in GA, 16: 414.
30. Heidegger, As When on a Holiday . . . , in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 86.
31. Ibid., 83.
32. Ibid., 93. Translation modied.
33. Ibid. Translation modied.
34. For all his evocations fo the pre-Socratics, Heidegger is often closer to late
antiquity, specically to the inversions of Gnosticism. Hans Jonas, in an appendix
to The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), discusses what he considers
to be the Gnostic elements in Heideggers thought. But he does not treat the antinomianism that is a characteristic of early and middle Heidegger and that comes
to its fullest expression in the strategy of failure in the rectorial address.
35. Compare the lecture The Thing from 1950, with its meditation on the
void of the intact jug, with the rag-and-bone mans fascination for broken equipment in Being and Time.
36. Clemens August Hoberg, Das Dasein des Menschen: Die Grundfrage der
Heideggerschen Philosophie (Zeulenroda: Bernhard Sporn, 1937), 8.
37. Ibid., 90.
38. Ibid.
39. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 103.
40. Acknowledging Heideggers reservations about preclassical Greece, Reiner
Schrmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans.
Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), curiously
sees therein his distance from the German Romantics. In what way were the Romantics intent on reviving experiences inspired by pre-classical Greece (p. 218)?
Schrmann does not elaborate. Indeed the most obvious example of a work in-

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

261

spired by preclassical Greece, Kleists Penthesilea, invokes the heroic age in order to
subject its notion of glory to the Romantic gure of the secret.
41. Falsehood and glory were by no means considered mutually exclusive in
pre-Socratic Greece, as Jacob Burckhardt is at pains to stress throughout his Greeks
and Greek Civilization, trans. Sheila Stern (London: Fontana, 1998).
42. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London: William Heinemann,
1932), 1253.
43. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 230.
44. Ibid., 214 15.
45. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 188 89.
46. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet, ed. Hermann Mrchen (1988) in GA, 34: 143.
47. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, trans. William McNeill and Julia
Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 72.
48. Pggeler, Martin Heideggers Path of Thinking, trans. Magurshak and Barber, 249 n. 20.
49. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosphie 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 231.
50. Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, trans. John Sallis, in Pathmarks, ed.
McNeill, 140.
51. Ibid., 141.
52. Ibid., 142.
53. Ibid., 143 44.
54. Ibid., 145 46.
55. Ibid., 147 48.
56. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie 2. Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 225.
57. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Transcendence Ends in Politics, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 287.
58. Heidegger, Self-Assertion of the German University, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 38 39. Translation modied.
chapter 3
1. The rst of the ve quotations from Hlderlin that Heidegger discusses in
the lecture Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry, in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 51.
2. Heidegger, Only a God Can Save Us, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin,
101.
3. Heidegger, Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,
trans. Richard Wolin, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 65.

262

Notes to Chapter 3

4. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, in GA, 52: 78.

5. Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Ingrid
Schler (1988), in GA, 42: 40.
6. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, trans. McNeill and Davis, 54 55.
7. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, in GA, 52: 134.
8. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39: 17.
9. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Europischer Nihilismus, ed. Petra Jaeger (1986), in
GA, 48: 333.
10. Heidegger, Der Anfang des Abendlndischen Denkens: Heraklit, in Heraklit, ed. Manfred S. Frings (1979), in GA, 55: 83.
11. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 203. Translation modied.
12. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 17.
13. Heidegger, Heraklit, in GA, 55: 123.
14. Ibid., 180 81.
15. Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 82 83. Translation modied.
16. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968), 66.
17. Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics, in Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, 84 85.
18. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
220.
19. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1979), 1: 74.
20. Ibid., 159.
21. Ibid., 160.
22. Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, trans. Albert Hofstadter, in
Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 170.
23. Ibid., 161.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 159.
26. Heidegger, Being and Time, 99.
27. Ibid., 97.
28. Ibid., 102 3.
29. Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, ed. Gnter Seubold
(1991), in GA, 49: 44.
30. Heidegger, Being and Time, 100.
31. Ibid., 105.
32. Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 162.
33. Cf. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 318 et seq. Derrida argues that
Heidegger cannot without contradiction claim to see a pair of peasants shoes

Notes to Chapter 3

263

when he conrms fully that his project was to go beyond the picture as representation (p. 321).
34. Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1953), 2: 597ab.
35. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. Krell, 1: 185.
36. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Caesura of the Speculative, in Typography, ed. Fynsk, 231, discusses this agreement as it relates to Heideggers enquiry
into the essence of truth in his readings of Hlderlin: It is true that Heidegger
constantly sought in Hlderlin the possibility of backing up from the assumption in the speculative mode of adaequatio and of exiting from within the ontotheologic. This is why the logic of ajlhvqeia can also be inscribed as the logic of
Ent-fernung [-loignement or (dis)distancing]. But who knows whether this logic
itself (including, too, what ceaselessly carries it off in its most demanding moments) is not also penetrated throughout by (if not subject to) mimetology? The
implication of this logic within mimetology is not pursued by Lacoue-Labarthe to
its ground within Heideggers own thinking.
37. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. Krell, 1: 186.
38. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34.
39. Cf. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: George Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1966), 30 31n.: Non-representational painting does not, as it thinks,
create works which are as real as, if not more real than, the objects of the physical
world, but rather realistic imitations of non-existent models.
40. Quoting the passage from The Principle of Reason in his essay Im Horizont der Zeit: Heideggers Werkbegriff und die Kunst der Moderne, in Kunst und
Technik: Gedchtnisschrift zum 100. Geburtstag von Martin Heidegger, ed. Walter
Biemel and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann,
1989), Gottfried Boehm discusses the paintings of Mondrian and Tobey and disputes whether Heidegger does not mistake the nature of their art (pp. 279 84).
The apparent conservatism of Heideggers position derives from his adherence to
Platos denition of art. Boehms genuine obscurantism is manifest in his assumption of the self-evidence of his denition of art for which Mondrian and Tobey are
presented as illustrations and the de facto delimitations.
41. For an objection, which is itself a review of the objections, to Heideggers readings of Platos meditations on the essence of truth, see Robert J. Dostal,
Beyond Being: Heideggers Plato, in Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, ed.
Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1992), 2: 61 89. However much the
distortions and oversights in Heideggers readings of both Plato and Nietzsche
count against them as strict exegeses of philosophical texts, the problem of presence that they help to delineate, and that elucidates the conception of the political
shared by National Socialism and its military opponents, retains its status.
42. Heidegger, Platos Doctrine of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, 164.

264

Notes to Chapter 3

43. Ibid., 173.

44. Heidegger, Platos Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andr Schuwer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 440.
45. Heidegger, Platos Doctrine of Truth, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, 177.
46. Ibid., 179.
47. Ibid., 174.
48. Cf. John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 33n. Sallis proposes mimesis as a denition of that which in Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics is discussed as repetition. Mimesis would thus be the
repetition that discloses the Un-thought of that which is repeated (Heideggers
thinking of mimesis is to be traced to his own hermeneutic practice).
49. Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 204
5. Translation modied.
50. Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde,
and the Event (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 35.
51. Plato, The Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1951), 205c.
52. Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 184.
53. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, ed. Hans-Joachim Friedrich (1999),
in GA, 67: 108.
54. Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 197.
55. Heidegger, Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry, in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 55 56.
56. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, 243.
57. Heidegger, Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry, in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 60.
58. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39: 33.
59. Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 32.
60. Ibid., 34.
61. See Wilhelm von Schramm, Schpferische Kritik des Krieges, in Krieg
und Krieger, ed. Ernst Jnger (Berlin: Junker & Dnnhaupt, 1930), 31 49.
62. For an account of the similarly non-nostalgic, yet protechnological conservatism that was exploited by the Nazis in reconciling modernization with German nationalism, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture,
and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
63. Heidegger, Abendgesprch in einem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Ruland
zwischen einem Jngeren und einem lteren, in Feldweg-Gesprche (1944/45), ed.
Ingrid Schler (1995), in GA, 77: 232 33.
64. Ibid., 234.
65. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana

Notes to Chapter 3

265

Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 98n, where they discern
in Hlderlin an art of waiting as a defense against contiguity.
66. See Hannah Arendts treatment of the distinction between oiko~ and
povli~ in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 28
37.
67. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 152 53. Translation modied.
68. Max Kommerell, Der Dichter als Fhrer in der deutschen Klassik (Frankfurt
a/M: Klostermann, 1942), 474.
69. Heidegger, Besinnung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1997), in
GA, 66: 37.
70. Ibid., 190 91.
71. Hlderlin, The Signicance of Tragedies, in Essays and Letters on Theory,
trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 89.
72. Hlderlin, Remarks on Oedipus, in Essays and Letters on Theory, trans.
Pfau, 1012.
73. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet, ed. Hermann Mrchen (1988), in GA, 34: 64.
74. See the recollection in the foreword to the rst edition of his Frhe Schriften in Frhe Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, in GA, 1 (1978): 56.
75. Walter Benjamin, Two Poems by Friedrich Hlderlin, in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 1: 34.
76. Hlderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 407.
77. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
100.
78. The coherence between Heideggers account of the revelation of world in
the experience of broken, missing, and inappropriate equipment and his denition
of the world-historical mission of the Germans in the encounter with tevcnh is obscured by Hubert L. Dreyfus in his identication of world with cultural practices.
What could other peoples be expected to gain from an insight into the unarticulated know-how of being German? That world, for Heidegger, is not cosmopolitan does not at all imply that the differentiality of world resolves into different
worlds, each standing apart from the others. World is not cosmopolitan, because
it can only truly be world as the Being that in its transcendence is still higher than
the Aristotelian One and its presence. Cf. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Heidegger on the
Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics, in The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 295: It would make no sense for us, who are active, independent,
and aggressive constantly striving to cultivate and satisfy our desiresto relate
to things the way the Japanese do; or for the Japanese (before their understanding
of being was interfered with by ours) to invent and prefer Styrofoam teacups. Is

266

Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

not the fact of interference proof that the Japanese understanding of being was always already open to the questionableness of its own unity? Heidegger explicitly
discusses the questionableness of the unity of the worlds of various peoples when
he elaborates Hlderlins account of the constitutive and vertiginous interrelations
between Greece and Germany. Even if, chronologically, Heidegger gures in intellectual histories between Oswald Spengler and Thomas S. Kuhn, his thinking
is poorly expounded so long as its radical difference from talk of the souls of cultures and paradigms is underplayed.
79. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, in GA, 52: 74.
80. Ibid., 75.
81. Ibid., 113.
82. Ibid., 66.
83. Kafka, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, trans. Willa and Edwin
Muir in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books,
1972), 370.
84. Ibid., 367 68.
85. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
290.
chapter 4
1. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Gloucester: Peter
Smith, 1970), 149.
2. Taking up Paul Ricoeurs questions to Heidegger at Cerisy on the Hebraic
tradition, Marlne Zarader writes in La Dette impense: Heidegger et lhritage
hbraque (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 213 14: What, therefore, seems to me objectionable in the Heideggerian text is not that the Hebraic component is passed over in
silence (one could indeed admit that this silence is legitimate), but rather that it returns without ever being identied, that it returns in a text that does everything to
render the identication impossible. Zarader, who here takes Heidegger to task
for omitting to identify the return, elsewhere theorizes the impossibility of identication that is intrinsic to this return.
3. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 89.
4. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Heidegger et les juifs (Paris: ditions Galile, 1988),
trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts as Heidegger and the jews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 29. And see Victor Faras, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987).
5. Cf. Friedrich Franz von Unruh, Friedrich Hlderlin (Stuttgart: Georg
Truckenmller, 1942), 6: The longing, whichpeculiarly enoughfor a millennium beheld the Holy Land in the exotic, nds its way home. Unruh sees
solely an opposition to Judaea in Hlderlins presentation of Germany as the Holy
Land. Whether through its substitution for the Holy Land, Germany can, indeed,
break with Judaea is never doubted.

Notes to Chapter 4

267

6. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, in GA, 52, 134 35.

7. Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1984), in GA, 45: 5.
8. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 300. Originally published as Der Stern der
Erlsung (Frankfurt a/M: J. Kauffmann, 1921).
9. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen,
1934), 426.
10. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, trans. McNeill and Davis, 79 80.
11. Ibid., 80 81.
12. Ibid., 82.
13. Ibid.
14. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Schuwer, 90.
15. Hlderlin, Smtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1946 ), 2, 1: 228.
16. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
121.
17. Cf. David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-philosophy
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c1992), 179: Heideggers nationalism . . .
will escape unscathed the rigors to which Heidegger almost everywhere else subjects his heritage.
18. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143 44.
19. Cf. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1991), 137. Dreyfus mistakes the nature of Heideggers correction, believing that
Heidegger merely shifts the focus from the body to the accessibility of equipment.
20. Kant, What Is Orientation in Thinking? in Political Writings, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 238.
21. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 3: 216.
22. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 26 B 42.
23. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 230.
24. Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 29.
25. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 49.
26. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 39 40.
27. Ibid., A 174 B215.
28. For an exposition of his concept of Lebensraum, see Hitlers speech of
February 15, 1942 in Es spricht der Fhrer: 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden, eds.
Hildegard von Kotze and Helmut Krausnick (Gtersloh: Signert Mohn, 1966),
305 28.
29. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie 2. Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA, 36 37: 210.

268

Notes to Chapter 4

30. Hlderlin, Selected Letters. No. 236. To Casimir Ulrich Bhlendorff, in

Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Pfau, 149 50.
31. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymn The Ister, trans. McNeill and Davis, 136.
32. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
220.
33. Hlderlin, The Perspective from Which We Have to Look at Antiquity,
in Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Pfau, 39.
34. Hlderlin, Selected Letters. No. 240. To Casimir Ulrich Bhlendorff, in
Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Pfau, 152.
35. Wilhelm Michel, Hlderlins Abendlndische Wendung (Weimar: Feuer,
1922), 7.
36. In Das abendlndische Gesprch, in Zu Hlderlin: Griechenlandreisen,
ed. Curd Ochwadt (2000), in GA, 75: 79, Heidegger cautions against reading place
in Hlderlins poetry geographically.
37. Heidegger, Hlderlin and the Essence of Poetry, in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 64.
38. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
214.
39. Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, in GA, 38: 70.
40. Ibid., 83.
41. Freud, The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and
Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953 75), 17: 220 21.
42. Ibid., 226.
43. Ibid., 245.
44. Heidegger, Being and Time, 233. Translation modied.
45. Ibid., 230.
46. Ibid., 234.
47. Ibid., 231.
48. Ibid., 234.
49. Ibid., 231.
50. Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, in Holzwege, ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann (1977), in GA, 5: 41.
51. In his reading of the Jewish inuence in Heideggers notion of Heimat,
John D. Caputo ignores the essential unpresentability of the Fatherland as it is experienced in anxiety and does not allow the prohibition of images and the comparable task of thinking Beings difference from beings to ground critiques of the
territorialism and racism of Nazi Germany and the modern state of Israel. See Caputo, People of God, People of Being: The Theological Presuppositions of Heideggers Path of Thought, in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer and
Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 99: We need
to break with the deeply hierarchical logic of original and derivative, with the
myth of the originary language, the originary people, the original land, by means

Notes to Chapter 4

269

of which Heidegger reproduces the myth of Gods chosen people, of Gods promised land, which is no less a problem for religion and the root of its violence. We
need to break with the logic that allows the myth to ourish that certain human
beings speak the language that being or God would speak, had they vocal chords
and lungs and writing instruments, the murderous twin myths of the people of
God and of the people of being, myths which license murder in the name of God
or in the name of the question of being.
52. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth
Mader (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 166.
53. Of the reduction to nothingness that he put in place between the other
and himself so as to return to an other that is already produced by him. That is
already ensnared in his world, Irigaray writes of Heidegger and alterity, with unavowed irony (ibid., 98) This is the same irony that a few years later appears in
Lyotards thinking of the jews as the . . . of primal repression. Irigaray, unlike
Heidegger, knows the name of the Other and thereby exposes herself to the irony
of crossing the line without truly leaving classical ontology.
54. Heidegger, Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones, in Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry, trans. Hoeller, 42.
55. Heidegger, Being and Time, 234.
56. Cf. Emil Kettering, Nhe: Das Denken Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1987), 201: Not-being-at-home is not simply the fortuitously given starting point that is to be left behind as quickly as possible and that for itself is without foundation. Instead, the experience of not-being-at-home is constitutive for
becoming-at-home. Only the conscious appropriation of not-being-at-home renders becoming-at-home possible. Kettering is led astray by the occasional Hegelian reminiscence in Heideggers exposition to a valorisation of consciousness. Dasein does not become at home through becoming conscious that it is not at home.
On the contrary, it becomes (always already) at home through the consternation
of that which, as its being at home in the ontic, is named consciousness.
57. Heidegger, Sprache und Heimat, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, in
GA, 13: 156 57.
58. Ibid., 155.
59. Theodor Adorno, Parataxis, in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 117.
60. Ibid., 117.
61. Nietzsche, Antwort, in Werke: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), 7, 3: 38.
62. Heidegger, 1. Nietzsches Metaphysik 2. Einleitung in die Philosophie: Dichten
und Denken, ed. Petra Jaeger (1990), in GA, 50: 124.
63. Martin Heidegger and Erhart Kstner, Briefwechsel, ed. Heinrich W. Petzet (Frankfurt a/M: Insel, 1986), 59.
64. Hlderlins assessment of the transnationality of Greek art recalls Goethes
remarks to Eckermann on January 31, 1827, but, needless to say, omits Goethes en-

270

Notes to Chapter 4

dorsement of world literature. See Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans.

John Oxenford (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), 165 66.
65. When in her Heideggers Philosophy of Art, in Heidegger: The Man and
the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), Sandra Lee Bartky
treats the notion of earth in The Origin of the Work of Art, she interprets it
as the material medium: Here that pervasive obscurity which is so prominent a
feature of Heideggers style . . . tends to disguise the vacuousness of what is expressed (p. 264). But the vacuousness here attributed to the notion of the material medium of the work of art is the vacuousness of that which is merely imagined
to be self-evident. The non-Greek who is born for art takes to the material medium whose strict formlessness is its invisibility, its concealment in that which
Heidegger names the earth. The formlessness of the material medium is the
Nothing: to give form to the material medium, to found a realm of art is to work
against the Nothing, to neglect the concealment of the national and to think truth
as presencein short, it is to be Greek. Heideggers opposition of earth and
world in The Origin of the Work of Art, contrary to Bartky, has to be understood in relation to the dilemma of the exposition of the ontological difference.
World, as the presencing of Being in that which is present is to be corrected in
its slide toward presence by earth, as the absence of Being from beings, which in
its turn has to be corrected in its simple inversion of presence.
66. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
290 91.
67. Hlderlin, On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit, in Essays and Letters
on Theory, trans. Pfau, 80.
68. Hlderlin, Remarks on Oedipus, in ibid., 107.
69. Hlderlin, Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece, trans. Willard R. Trask, in
Hlderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1990), 67.
70. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymne Andenken, in GA, 52: 141.
71. Hlderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Hamburger, 519.
72. Ibid., 449.
73. Ibid., 451.
74. Ibid., 453.
75. Ibid., 459.
76. Hegel, Aesthetics, 509 10.
77. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Cofn (Harmondsworth,
U.K.: Penguin Books, 1961), 243.
78. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 172.
79. Matt. 6: 3.
80. 1 Cor. 14: 23.
81. Heidegger, Heraklit, in GA, 55: 31.
82. Hlderlin, Poems and Fragments, 537.

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

271

83. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39: 4.
84. Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1966).
85. Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of
Emmanuel Lvinas, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 153.
86. Klopstock, Der Hgel und der Hain, in Klopstocks Werke, ed. R. Hamel
(Berlin: W. Spemann, n.d.), 3: 139.
chapter 5
1. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Errterung von Georg Trakls
Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (1985),
in GA, 12: 45 46. In translating Geschlecht, Peter D. Hertzs English translation,
Language in the Poem, in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row,
1971) offers at each turn, with inescapable arbitrariness, only one of its senses.
Hertz translates the last instance of the word Geschlecht in the quoted passage
as sex. Certainly sex is one of the senses of Geschlecht and among those not
yet listed the predominant one, but is duality enough to identify sex and thus
justify the translation? Heideggers increasing linguistic purism after Being and
Time denies him the Latinate Sex for denoting sex to the exclusion of all the
other senses of Geschlecht. Robert Minder, in Heidegger und Hebel oder die
Sprache von Messkirch, in Hlderlin unter den Deutschen und andere Aufstze
zur deutschen Literatur (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1968), 86 153, discerns xenophobia in Heideggers linguistic purism.
2. That this twoness of the Geschlecht is to be interpreted as the difference between the human male and female of metaphysical biology is the reductive presupposition of David Farrell Krells essay Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On
a Theme in Heidegger and Trakl, in Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of
Martin Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press,
1978), 238 58. Heideggers text leaves open the question whether twoness determines the Geschlecht as sex or submits this signication itself to another folding.
3. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA, 12:
46.
4. Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918 -1969, ed.
Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 91.
5. Heidegger, Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendlndischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen, ed. Marion Heinz (1986), in GA, 44: 23.
6. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 46.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 42.

272

Notes to Chapter 5

10. Ibid.
11. See the central discussion in 479 in Being and Time.
12. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 48 49.
13. Cf. Jean-Daniel Krebs, Georg Trakl: Les Pomes du non-retour, Germanica 1 (1987): 32 48. Krebs brings out a motif of homecoming to the grave in
Trakls poetry. But it must be asked whether death in Trakl instantiates a notion of
stasis or whether pilgrimage arrives at the accelerated decomposition of death as
the homeland of nonpositive humanity.
14. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 49.
15. Ibid., 70.
16. Ibid., 73.
17. Egon Vietta, in Georg Trakl in Heideggers Sicht, Die Pforte 5 (1953), dismisses any reading of the beyond in Trakl in terms of Christian eschatology. See
ibid., 355: The beyond of this poem becomes all the more unheimlich, particularly
since everywhere it is evident that it is the poem of a journey: a journeyto the
Occident.
18. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 37.
19. Cf. Peter Schnemann, Georg Trakl (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 53: Behind the experience of Christ on Golgotha, frequently presented in the lyrics of
Trakls nal years, there appears a primordial image in which the fear of being
abandoned by God is extinguishedthe deeper fear alone remains: the soul, it
too, is in the end mortal.
20. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 76.
21. Heidegger, Beitrge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 1989), in GA, 65: 317
22. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William
McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
205 6.
23. Ibid., 211.
24. Ibid., 186.
25. Ibid., 239.
26. Ibid., 198.
27. Ibid., 242.
28. Heidegger, Being and Time, 90.
29. Ibid., 88.
30. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Gray, 16.
31. Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht II: Heideggers Hand, in Deconstruction and
Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 173 74.

Notes to Chapter 5

273

32. Heidegger, Zur Auslegung von Nietzsches II. Unzeitgemsser Betrachtung, ed.
Hans-Joachim Friedrich (2003), in GA, 46: 243 44.
33. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Pathmarks, ed. McNeill, 248.
34. Cf. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie, ed. Franz-Karl
Blust (1993), in GA, 22: 311, where he discusses Aristotles De anima and the human beings imputedly exclusive perception of time on the basis of a supposed
ability to resist its instincts.
35. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Gray, 6.
36. Although Descartes refuses the denition of humanity as animal rationale
because it is a denition proceeding by genus and specic difference, this refusal
does not prevent the reication of the human in Cartesian thought. Humanity
congeals in its new abstraction.
37. Heidegger, The Way to Language, trans. David Farrell Krell, in Basic
Writings, ed. Krell, 397.
38. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 307.
39. Ibid., 308.
40. Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, in GA, 38: 169.
41. Cf. Heideggers own emphatic correction of readings of Being and Time in
The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 168: Transcendence, being-in-the-world, is never to
be equated and identied with intentionality. Transcendence is to be understood,
Heidegger stresses, as the transcendence toward Being of beings.
42. Heidegger, The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics, in
Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),
62.
43. Heidegger, Die Sprache, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA, 12: 23.
44. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 74.
45. Ibid., 74 75.
46. Heidegger, Language, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 208.
47. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 33.
48. Ibid.
49. Heidegger, Recollection in Metaphysics, in The End of Philosophy, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 7778.
50. An early example is W. H. Rey, HeideggerTrakl: Einstimmiges Zwiegesprch, in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 34 (1956): 89 136.
51. Modesto Carone Netto, Metfora e montagem (So Paulo: Perspectiva,
1974), 154 55.
52. Alfred Doppler, Bemerkungen zur poetischen Verfahrensweise Georg

274

Notes to Chapter 5

Trakls, in Sprache und Bekenntnis, ed. Wolfgang Frhwald and Gnter Niggl
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1971), 355.
53. Rudolf D. Schier, Afra: Towards an Interpretation of Trakl, Germanic
Review 41 (1966): 270n.
54. Richard Detsch, Unity and Androgyny in Trakls Works and the Writings
of Other Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Authors, in The Dark
Flutes of Fall: Critical Essays on Georg Trakl, ed. Eric Williams (Columbia, S.C.:
Camden House, 1991), 115.
55. Ursula Heckmann, Das veruchte Geschlecht: Motive der Philosophie Otto
Weiningers im Werk Georg Trakls (Frankfurt a/M: Peter Lang, 1992), 206.
56. Derrida, Of Spirit, 86.
57. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12, 51.
58. Ibid., 45.
59. Heidegger, letter of May 9, 1972, to Jean-Michel Palmier, translated as a
frontispiece in Jean-Michel Palmier, Situation de Georg Trakl (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1987), 10.
60. Heidegger, Being and Time, 220.
61. Cf. the denition of communism in terms of Mitsein and the consequent
reassessment of the betrayal of the various communist regimes proposed in JeanLuc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 115.
62. Jacques Derrida, Heideggers Ear: Philopolemology, trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 176.
63. Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, in GA, 39:
22728.
64. Heidegger, Die Sprache im Gedicht, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in GA,
12: 70.
65. See letter of April 24, 1912, to Erhard Buschbeck, in Georg Trakl, Nachlass
und Biographie, ed. Wolfgang Schneditz (Salzburg: Otto Mller, 1949), 28.

Index

Abstract art, 149

Adenauer, Konrad, 121
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 44,
160, 205 6
Aeschylus, 99f, 102, 109, 122, 130
Agamben, Giorgio, 23f
Althusser, Louis, 92
Anaximander, 218
Animal, 13, 59, 85, 192, 221, 223, 22734,
237, 247
Animal rationale, 45 46, 221, 230, 232
33, 273n36
Anrich, Ernst, 251n36
Anti-Semitism, 39, 105 6, 134, 169 70,
173
Aquinas, see Thomas Aquinas, Saint
Arendt, Hannah, 121, 219
Aristotle, 7 8, 9, 13, 58, 65, 120, 190f,
232, 234, 266n78
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 251n36
Augustine, Saint, 214
Axelos, Kostas, 89 91
Baeumler, Alfred, 29
Barnard, Frederick M., 44
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 270n65
Bauch, Bruno, 31
Beaufret, Jean, 38
Benjamin, Walter, 163 64
Bieberbach, Ludwig, 260n26
Bismarck, Otto von, 206
Blanchot, Maurice, 154
Blut und Boden, 20, 97, 120, 203
Boehm, Gottfried, 263n40

Boethius, 84
Bhlendorff, Casimir Ulrich, 193 99,
206, 209f
Bourdieu, Pierre, 18
Burroughs, William, 239
Caillois, Roger, 165
Caputo, John D., 269n51
Carone Netto, Modesto, 239
Cassirer, Ernst, 83
Christianity, 10, 66, 92 93, 97, 155, 211
15, 232f, 253n60; and Judaic legacy,
170 71, 173, 193, 214; and Trakl, 224
25, 240, 272n17, 272n19
Clausewitz, Carl von, 99
Communism, 86 90, 92, 274n61
Cosmopolitanism, 110, 176, 179 92 passim, 200, 203f, 210, 214, 216, 266n78
Darwin, Charles, 192, 253n60
Das Man (the they), 1719, 21f, 34, 43,
92, 95, 163, 190, 203 4
Death, 51, 60, 84 85, 94, 106, 137, 144,
222 23, 253n60, 257n49, 272n13; and
Dasein, 10 11, 55 59, 68 76, 78 80,
9192, 127; and the state, 56, 68, 71,
75 76, 78, 118, 120
Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 46 50, 120f, 135,
265n65
Demokritos, 98
Derrida, Jacques, 33, 135, 217, 230 31,
239 40, 243, 263n33
Descartes, Ren, 2, 12, 42f, 103, 162,
186 87, 219, 273n36

276

Index

Detsch, Richard, 239

Dialect, 204 5, 215
Doppler, Alfred, 239
Dostal, Robert J., 254n69, 263n41
Dreyfus, Hubert L., 265 66n78, 267n19
Eckermann, Johann Peter, 270n64
Eichendorff, Joseph von, 194
Equipmentality, 144 47, 153, 181,
260n35, 265n78, 267n19
Eugenics, 3, 252n60
Facticity, 13, 24, 191
Failure, 47, 100 104, 109 16, 118 22,
124 25, 128 32, 15155, 15759, 165
68, 260n34
Faras, Victor, 172
Faye, Jean-Pierre, 34
Fellini, Federico, 222
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 29
Folkish science, 4 5, 33, 39, 40 42,
110 12, 253n65
Frster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 135
Foucault, Michel, 81
French Revolution, 22 29 passim, 45,
251n36
Freud, Sigmund, 199 203
Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 27
Fritsche, Johannes, 249n2
Fynsk, Christopher, 96
George, Stefan, 194
Gnosticism, 155, 215, 260n34
Goebbels, Joseph, 22, 98f, 134
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 104, 194,
270n64
Goldmann, Lucien, 89
Granel, Grard, 96
Grimm, Jacob, 199
Grimm, Wilhelm, 199
Guattari, Flix, 24, 46 49, 50, 120f,
265n65
Habermas, Jrgen, 39 40
Hadrian, 214
Heckmann, Ursula, 239

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 9,

26 27, 51, 55 69, 7172, 76 88, 90
94, 110, 124, 152, 155, 208, 235ff, 238,
252n52; and being-at-home, 169f,
186 87, 204, 213ff, 269n56
Heimat, 136, 176, 180, 185 87, 189, 193,
2017, 213, 218f, 225, 269n51; and
National Socialism, 19, 169, 171, 179,
19192, 202
Heraclitus, 105, 138ff, 202, 209, 215,
250n9
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 43, 44
45, 194
Hitler, Adolf, 23, 50 52, 56, 83, 99f,
105 19 passim, 129f, 134, 136, 198,
249n2, 268n28; and biology, 35 37,
192, 246f, 252 53n60
Hobbes, Thomas, 51
Hoberg, Clemens August, 115
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 27
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 159
Hlderlin, Friedrich, 131 43 passim,
161 65, 173 76, 192 99, 203, 205 18,
238ff, 247, 263n36; and Heideggers
lectures, 19 20, 31, 46, 49, 69, 71, 75,
113f, 123, 156, 168, 178
Hume, David, 188
Husserl, Edmund, 39, 89, 94
Individuation, 6, 10 11, 14 15, 17, 21,
71, 95, 223
Irigaray, Luce, 202
Jaensch, Erich, 5
Janicaud, Dominique, 13
Jaspers, Karl, 121, 258n53
Jesus, 214
Jonas, Hans, 260n34
Judaism, 170, 213 15
Jnger, Ernst, 70, 80 81, 116, 121, 137,
240
Kafka, Franz, 48, 167 68, 257n39
Kant, Immanuel, 8 9, 53, 58, 60, 64,
95, 154, 209; and space, 179, 18191,
204

Index
Kstner, Erhart, 207
Kettering, Emil, 269n56
Kierkegaard, Sren, 6, 9 10, 170
Kleist, Heinrich von, 194, 261n40
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 194, 217
Klossowski, Pierre, 135
Kojve, Alexandre, 68
Kolbenheyer, Erwin Guido, 192
Kommerell, Max, 162f
Kraus, Karl, 239
Krebs, Jean-Daniel, 272n13
Krell, David Farrell, 267n17, 271n2
Krieck, Ernst, 31, 38, 259n12
Kuhn, Thomas S., 266n78
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 45, 263n36
Lebensraum, 171, 179, 192, 203, 268n28
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 263n39
Lvinas, Emmanuel, 3738
Lewalter, Christian, 30
Lichtenberg, Georg, 25
Lwith, Karl, 1
Luddism, 178
Lukcs, Georg, 18, 89, 90 91
Luther, Martin, 170
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 172, 269n53
McNeill, William, 101
Manichaeism, 114 15
Mann, Thomas, 14, 159
Marcuse, Herbert, 76, 86, 89
Marten, Rainer, 30
Marx, Karl, 56, 85 93, 251n37
Mendelssohn, Moses, 181, 184
Michel, Wilhelm, 196
Mimesis, 148 50, 155, 161, 164, 166, 197,
214, 263n36, 264n48
Minder, Robert, 271n1
Mllendorff, Wilhelm von, 101
Mondrian, Piet, 263n40
Montaigne, Michel de, 84
Mrike, Eduard, 194
Mussolini, Benito, 136, 198
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 274n61
Neo-Kantianism, 94

277

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36, 56, 99, 104; and

Heideggers lectures, 31, 134 35, 138
39, 142 43, 148 52, 157ff, 205f, 220f,
231, 238, 264n41. See also Will to
Power
Nominalism, 6, 9 10, 21, 25
Novalis, 194, 239
Ontological Argument, 8 9
Ontological difference, 117, 123, 210,
235ff, 270n65
Orientation, 180 88, 190, 201, 204, 217
Ortega y Gasset, Jos, 95, 97
Palmier, Jean-Michel, 241
Papen, Franz von, 112
Parmenides, 107, 176
Paul, Saint, 215
Plato, 67, 99, 107, 122, 129, 131f, 142 43,
221, 224f, 264n41; and Ideas, 1, 10, 60,
93, 143, 148 51, 172; and art, 131, 143,
148 52, 154f, 163, 166f
Pggeler, Otto, 11, 124, 255n89
Polt, Richard, 254n67
Race doctrine (Rassenkunde), 28, 35, 48,
79f, 171
Renan, Ernest, 23
Ricoeur, Paul, 266n2
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 194, 258n3
Rimbaud, Arthur, 239, 244
Rocha, Glauber, 48
Romanticism, 22 29, 37 42 passim, 82,
111, 121, 170, 208, 226, 251n36, 261n40
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 137
Rosenberg, Alfred, 174
Rosenzweig, Franz, 174
Ruge, Arnold, 251n37
Safranski, Rdiger, 259n16
Sallis, John, 264n48
Schadewaldt, Wolfgang, 1
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
von, 136
Schier, Rudolf D., 239
Schiller, Friedrich, 194, 209

278

Index

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 132

Schmitt, Carl, 56
Schnemann, Peter, 272n19
Schrmann, Reiner, 260 61n40
Schwan, Alexander, 253n65
Shaw, George Bernard, 98
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 104
Shestov, Lev, 217
Sieg, Ulrich, 39
Sluga, Hans, 13
Social Darwinism, 178, 252n46
Socrates, 68, 213
Souche-Dagues, Denise, 62 63
Sovereignty, 26 27, 51
Space, 3, 9, 27, 39f, 60 62, 171, 178 81,
184, 188 92
Speer, Albert, 169
Spengler, Oswald, 266n78
Spinoza, Benedict de, 58
Stalinism, 100, 120 21
Stoics, 84
Surber, Jere Paul, 256n20
Taminiaux, Jacques, 78
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 228
Thurn und Taxis, Maria von, 258n3
Tieck, Ludwig, 28
Titus, 214
Tobey, Mark, 263n40

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 17

Trakl, Georg, 218 19, 22126, 230, 233f,
236 41, 244 45
Truth, 37, 39f, 58, 74, 110 11, 122 29,
142 44, 148 57, 190, 235
Turgenev, Ivan, 139
Unruh, Friedrich Franz von, 267n5
Valry, Paul, 49, 51
Van Gogh, Vincent, 144 48, 153, 156
Vietta, Egon, 272n17
Vietta, Silvio, 31
Virilio, Paul, 120
Wacker, Otto, 99
Weimar Republic, 2, 13, 28, 83, 101,
265n62
Weininger, Otto, 239
Will to Power, 98, 104, 135, 151, 153, 157,
159, 163, 168, 254n67
Work, 84 86, 115 16, 137, 143 59, 165
66, 208 15 passim, 238, 245
Wundt, Max, 29
Zarader, Marlne, 266n2
Zeno, 7
Ziarek, Krzysztof, 154

Cultural Memory in the Present

Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories

James Siegel, Naming the Witch
Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/ Thinking Paul: On Justice
Eduardo Mendieta, A Post-Philosophical Politics: Interviews with
Richard Rorty
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine
Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology
of Perception
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art
Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History
in Modern China
James Phillips, Heideggers Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry
Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience
Istvn Rv, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism
Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger
Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art
Marie-Jos Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of
the Contemporary Imaginary
Cecilia Sjholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of
Feminine Desire
Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . :
A Dialogue
Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber
Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath . . . Traveling
with Jacques Derrida

Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing

Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Painting
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul
Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible
Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany
Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and
the Sign Hypothesis
Stanley Cavell, Emersons Transcendental Etudes
Stuart McLean, The Event and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity
Beate Rssler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations
Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and
Western Discourses
Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends Of Mourning: Psychoanalysis,
Literature, Film
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy
Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difcult?
Academic Writing in the Public Arena
Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks
Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical
Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann
Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in
Film Theory
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Dorothea von Mcke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale
Marc Redeld, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender,
Romanticism
Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape
Dan Zahavi, Husserls Phenomenology
Rodolphe Gasch, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kants Aesthetics

Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies
of Deconstruction
Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews
on Moral and Political Philosophy
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology of
Givenness
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy
Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in
Wittgensteins Early Thought
Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 19711998,
ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg
Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American Boom in
the Neoliberal Marketplace
Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities,
and the Fictive Imagination
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media
Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Re-Describing the Descriptions
of Modernity, ed. and introd. William Rasch
Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays
Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity
Gil Anidjar, Our Place in Al-Andalus: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature
in Arab-Jewish Letters
Hlne Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils
F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation
F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation
Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity
(Baudelaire and Flaubert)
Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History,
Spacing Concepts
Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media
Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca

Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegels bon mots)
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malrauxs Anti-Aesthetics
Jan Patocka, Plato and Europe
Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City
Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant
Women Writers
Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Jacques Derrida
William Rasch, Niklas Luhmanns Modernity: The Paradoxes of
Differentiation
Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine
Kaja Silverman, World Spectators
Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition
Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans
in the Epoch of Emancipation
Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity
in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan
Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy
David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity
Rodolphe Gasch, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation
Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge
Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition
Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hlderlin
J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or,
Boustrophedonic Reading
Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism
Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning
Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of
Origin
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation:
Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia

Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codication of Intimacy

Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis:
Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation
Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion

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