In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek

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the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (the Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic version and the Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible; we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher “dialectical synthesis,” and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself. However, in a second approach, one should merely take note of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing already is the thing itself—the fundamental feature of today’s society is the irreconciliable antagonism between Totality and the individual. What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns to its place,” namely, as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances. In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

      It seems that Heidegger was not ready to draw all the consequences from this necessary double meaning of “unconcealedness,” which, to put it bluntly, would have compelled him to accept that “ontological difference” is ultimately nothing but a rift in the ontic order (incidentally, in the exact parallel to Badiou’s key admission that the Event is ultimately nothing but a torsion in the order of Being). This limitation of Heidegger’s thought has a series of philosophical and ethico-political consequences. Philosophically, it leads to Heidegger’s notion of historical destiny which delivers different horizons of the disclosure of Being, destiny which cannot and should not be in any way influenced by or dependent on ontic occurrences. Ethico-politically, it accounts for Heidegger’s (not simply ethical, but properly ontological) indifference towards the Holocaust, its leveling to just another case of the technological disposal of life (in the infamous passage from the conference on technique): to acknowledge the Holocaust’s extraordinary/exceptional status would equal recognizing in it a trauma that shatters the very ontological coordinates of Being. Does this indifference make him a Nazi?

       Heidegger’s smoking gun?

      There are two of Heidegger’s seminars which clearly disturb the official picture of a Heidegger who only externally accommodated himself to the Nazi regime in order to save whatever could be saved of the university’s autonomy: Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat (On the Essence and Notion of Nature, History, and State, Winter 1933—34, protocol conserved in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar); Hegel, uÈber den Staat (Hegel, on the State, Winter 1934—35, protocol also conserved in the DLA). Significantly, the first of the two is not included in the official Gesamtausgabe by Klostermann Verlag—a fact that renders problematic its designation as a “complete edition.” These two seminars are the closest one can get to the proverbial smoking gun, since they enact precisely what, according to the official Heideggerian doxa, did not, could not, and should not have taken place: full-bodied support for Nazism formulated and grounded in Heidegger’s innermost philosophical project. (It is nonetheless wrong for a philosopher to invest too much into finding smoking guns: they only confirm what is already there in the formal structure of a thought.) However, one should not lose one’s nerve too fast here and let oneself fall into the standard liberal condemnation: Heidegger’s failure is not as easy to locate as it may appear. The atmosphere of Heidegger’s political references in his texts and courses from the 1930s (the examples he uses, etc.) is, as expected, ominous—suffice it to recall the beginning of the paragraph which questions the being of a state: “A state—it is. In what consists its being? In that the state police arrests a suspect […]?”44 The very example he uses to illustrate what Hegel means by his claim about the speculative identity of the rational and the actual is, again, ominous: “The treaty of Versailles is actual, but not rational.”45

      Heidegger’s starting point is a defense of Hegel against the famous proclamation by Carl Schmitt that Hegel died in 1933, when Hitler took over: “It was said that Hegel died in 1933; quite the contrary: it was only then that he first began to live.”46 Why? Heidegger endorses Hegel’s thesis on the state as the highest form of social existence: “The highest actualization of human being occurs in the state.”47 He even directly “ontologizes” the state, defining the relationship between the people and the state in terms of ontological difference: “The people, the existing, has a fully determined relationship towards its being, towards the state.”48

      However, in what follows, it soon becomes clear that Heidegger only needs Hegel in order to assert the emerging Nazi “total state” against the liberal notion of the state as a means to regulate the interaction of civil society; he approvingly refers to Hegel’s deployment of the limitation of the “external” state, the “state of necessity,” the “state of Understanding,” the system of civil society:49 “[…] we cannot grasp what Hegel understands as freedom, if we take it as an essential determination of a singular I. […] Freedom is only actual where there is a community of ‘I’s, of subjects.”50 But Hegel understands by “freedom” also this: he insists on the “modern” principle of the individual’s “infinite right.” For Hegel, civil society is the great modern achievement, the condition of actual freedom, the “material basis” of mutual recognition, and his problem is precisely how to unite the unity of the state and the dynamic mediation of civil society without curtailing the rights of civil society. The young Hegel, especially in his System der Sittlichkeit, was still fascinated by the Greek polis as the organic unity of individual and society: here, social substance does not yet stand opposed to individuals as a cold, abstract, objective legality imposed from outside, but as the living unity of “customs,” of a collective ethical life in which individuals are “at home,” recognizing it as their own substance. From this perspective, cold universal legality is a regression from the organic unity of customs—the regression from Greece to the Roman Empire. Although Hegel soon accepted that the subjective freedom of modernity has to be accepted, that the organic unity of polis is forever lost, he nonetheless insisted on a need for some kind of return to renewed organic unity, to a new polis that would offer as a counterpart to individuals a deeper sense of social solidarity and organic unity over and above the “mechanistic” interaction and individualist competition of civil society.

      Hegel’s crucial step towards maturity occurs when he really “abandons the paradigm of the polis ”51 by way of reconceptualizing the role of civil society. First, civil society is for Hegel the “state of Understanding,” the state reduced to the police apparatus regulating the chaotic interaction of individuals each of whom pursues his egotistic interests—such an individualistic-atomistic notion of freedom and the notion of legal order as imposed on individuals as the external limitation of their freedom are strictly correlative. The need thus arises to pass from this “state of Understanding” to the true “state of Reason,” in which the individuals’ subjective dispositions are harmonized with the social Whole, in which individuals recognize the social substance as their own. The crucial step occurs when Hegel fully develops the mediating role of civil society: the “system of multilateral dependence” whose ultimate modern form is the market economy, the system in which particular and universal are separated and opposed, in which every individual pursues only his private goals, in which organic social unity decomposes into external mechanic interaction, which is in itself already the reconciliation of the particular and the universal in the guise of the famous “invisible hand” of the market, on account of which, by pursuing private interests at

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