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Europe’s right step in the wrong direction: Žižek, Heidegger, and hermeneutic communism Santiago Zabala In Europe, in the year 2000, Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck en- thused about the European Union and its common currency, prophe- sying that it would become the model for the future of humanity. How different the reality is today! The Union is no longer a model but a dysfunctional organization of fanatical right-wing governments and supine social democrats imposing unprecedented austerity measures, unemployment and poverty on working people in order to return to “fiscal discipline.” (Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, The idea of communism, 2010.) One of the many merits of Slavoj Žižek has been his leadership of the philosophical community toward a return to Marxism and communism, which only continental philosophers have responded to. Most analytic philosophers in both the Unites States and Europe have become deaf to this sort of sociopolitical venture. Most continental philosophy (hermeneutics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism) an- 383 Santiago Zabala swer this existential call;1 however, in the United States, too, there is a growing number of intellectuals responding to this Marxist revival as the original work of Jodi Dean, Michael Hardt, and Bruno Bosteels demonstrates.2 These, together with some European philosophers,3 represent not only a return to communism as an alternative and resistance to current neoliberal impositions but also a hermeneutic effort to interpret through Marx such classic thinkers as G. W. Hegel, J. Lacan, and M. Heidegger. Although Žižek does not consider Heidegger the best candidate for a resuscitation of communism, in his mag- num opus, Less than nothing, he refers to him as “a future communist” and also advocates “a communist radical- 384 ization of Heidegger’s politics” since his Nazi involvement should not be interpreted as a mistake, but rather a “right step in the wrong direction.”4 While it is obvious what the “direction” was, what does the “right step” refer to? Ac- 1 On the difference between analytic and continental philosophy existential nature, see S. Zabala, “Being in the university: philosophical educa- tion or legitimations of analytic philosophy?,” Purlieu, v. 1, n. 3, p. 6–19, Fall 2011, Special Edition, also available online at http://purlieujournal. com/3/3_zabala.html. 2 J. Dean, The communist horizon, London, Verso, 2012; M. Hardt and A. Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 2011; B. Bosteels, The actuality of communism, London, Verso, 2011. 3 See the contributions of Terry Eagleton, Frank Ruda, and other European thinkers in C. Douzinas and S. Žižek, eds., The idea of communism, London, Verso, 2010, and Slavoj Žižek, ed., The idea of communism 2, London, Verso, 2013. 4 S. Žižek, Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism, London, Verso, 2012, p. 879, 902. Europe’s right step in the wrong direction: Žižek… cording to the Slovenian philosopher, what Heidegger was looking for in Nazism “was a revolutionary Event” and a “cultural revolution,” but he failed to find them because he “overlooked a non-metaphysical core of modern subjectivity itself” and, most of all, does “not follow his own logic to the end when he endorses the fascist compromise.”5 As an alternative to the metaphysical political powers of Ameri- can liberalism and Soviet communism, which Heidegger was trapped between, Nazism seemed to him “a spiritu- al renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonism and a deliverance of Western Dasein from the dangers of communism.”6 In his analysis Žižek gives par- ticular attention to Heidegger’s 1933-34 seminars, “Na- ture, History, State,” where an extreme ontologization of 385 the state is enacted (“the highest actualization of human being occurs in the state”)7 in order to define the relation- ship between the people and the state in terms of ontologi- 5 S. Žižek, In defense of lost causes, London, Verso, 2012, p. 142, 144; Žižek, Less than nothing, p. 903. This position is a development of B. W. Davis’s thesis in Heidegger and the will, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 2007, on the insufficient deconstruction of the will of subjectivity in the German master. Žižek also relies upon the analysis of Miguel de Beistegui in Heidegger and the political, London, Routledge, 1998, and G. Fried, Heidegger’s polemos: from Being to politics, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2000. 6 M. Heidegger, in “An exchange of letters: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger controversy: a critical reader, ed. Richard Wolin, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993, p. 163 7 M. Heidegger, Nature, history, state: Heidegger’s Seminar of 1933- 1934, with essays by Robert Bernasconi, Peter Eli Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel, and Slavoj Žižek, trans. and ed., and intro., Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, London, Bloomsbury, forthcoming. Santiago Zabala cal difference. Even though Heidegger failed to find an ad- equate political response for his time, it must be acknowl- edged that he “risked and took a position,”8 something that too many philosophers avoid today. “The paradox,” Žižek concludes, “is thus that, in order to save Heidegger from Nazism, we need more will and struggle and less Gelas- senheit,” in other words, less release, abandonment, and interpretation.9 As we can see, Žižek seems to imply that Heidegger did not proceed within the Nazi party for the same reasons he never endorsed democracy or communism: his own inabil- ity to overcome metaphysics. While this interpretation is in part correct, as Heidegger’s political declarations in the 386 Spiegel interview demonstrate, it must be stressed that his enthusiasm for Nazism ended as soon as the party’s metaphysical “will” and “struggle” became evident. In the university, where Heidegger carried out his political activity, this disillusionment become manifest when he began to op- pose the technical organization of the faculties, which has 8 As Žižek always says: “You must risk and have a position,” S. Žižek and G. Daly, Conversations with Žižek, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004, p. 45. 9 Žižek, Less than nothing, p. 902. Žižek goes on to explain how “the problem with Hitler was that he was ‘not violent enough,’ his violence was not ‘essential enough.’ Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive” (Žižek, Less than nothing, p. 902). A detailed analysis of this problem in relation to technology can be found in T. Brockelman, Žižek and Heidegger: the question concerning techno- capitalism, London, Continuum, 2008, p. 22. Europe’s right step in the wrong direction: Žižek… been completed today. As we can see, the problem for Hei- degger was the metaphysical consequences these political systems involved, that is, the existential subordination of Beings to beings. This is also why in the early 1930s he emphasized how it would not take long for “science to real- ize that its liberal essence and its ideal of objectivity are not only compatible with the political national orientation but also indispensable to it.”10 Žižek, in order to demonstrate Heidegger’s preoccupation with political subordination to science, refers to the German philosopher’s comments re- garding the Holocaust in a letter Herbert Marcuse of 1946 and in his essay “Das Gestell” of 1950: To the serious legitimate charges you express “about a regime that murdered millions of Jews, that made terror into an everyday phe- 387 nomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spir- it, freedom, and truth into its bloody opposite,” I can merely add that if instead of “Jews” you had written “East Germans” [i.e., Germans of the eastern territories], then the same holds true for one of the al- lies, with the difference that everything that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people.11 In the mean time, however, even the tending of the fields [die field- bestellung] has gone over to the same requisitioning [Be-Stellen] that imposes upon the air for nitrogen, the soil for coal and ore, the ore for uranium, the uranium for atomic energy, and the later for orderable destruction. Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and 10 M. Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy (from enowning), trans. R. Emad and K. Maly (1989), Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1999, p. 103. 11 M. Heidegger, in “An exchange of letters: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger,” p. 163. Santiago Zabala extermination camps, the same blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.12 The manufacture of corpses is a consequence of a political stance subordinated to science’s ideal of objectivity, and not the other way around. After all, “total subordination of reason to metaphysical reality,” as Herbert Marcuse point- ed out, always “prepares the way for racist ideology.”13 In sum, we can predict the only political position Heidegger would probably have endorsed is one that would not ac- commodate itself to the metaphysics of our technological age. While his political involvement in the thirties certain- ly represents an enthusiasm for a nonmetaphysical political project, his abandonment of National Socialism should not 388 be interpreted as an unwillingness to respond but rather as the only possible internal resistance. What I wish to suggest is how “a communist radical- ization of Heidegger’s politics,” as Žižek proposed, is nec- essary not only to save the German master from Nazism but also, and most of all, to save ourselves from the Euro- pean Union project.

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