Kritische Studie from Weak Thought to Hermeneutic Communism

Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 75/2013, p. 553-568

KRITISCHE STUDIE FROM WEAK THOUGHT TO HERMENEUTIC COMMUNISM

by Dimitri Ginev (Soﬁ a)

Th e time has now come to interpret the world. Th e ﬁ nal chord of Vattimo and Zabala’s Hermeneutic Communism perfectly summarizes the political project that both authors have in mind. Th e book is a manifest for communism in a post-metaphysical age. Th e reversal of Th esis Eleven is meant to pave the way “from Heidegger to Marx” (according to the book’s subtitle).1 Th e monograph presents an extremely ambitious project that intends to demonstrate how the end of the metaphysical truth is the beginning of genuine democracy qua hermeneutic communism. Divided into four parts, it accordingly discusses the roots of neo-liberalism’s “framed democracy” in metaphysical realism, the leftist political interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of the “lack of emergencies”, the “anarchic vein of hermeneutics” (its potentiality to transgress the established order and norms), and the trans- ﬁ guration of “weak thought” in a political program of “weakly communist practices”. Hermeneutic Communism continues, in the context of political theory, the pensiero debole leitmotif that the Nietzschean idea of nihilism, under postmodern conditions (and from a leftist perspective), acquires the meaning of emancipation. Nihilism is no longer a mourning of God’s death. In hermeneutic philosophy, it takes on the form of positive/constructive nihilism that unmasks the sacrality of all authoritarian metaphysical essences and calls into question the credibility of the few historical meta-narratives that are still intact.

Dimitri Ginev (1956) is professor of Philosophy of Science and Hermeneutics at the University of Soﬁ a. He is editor of the journal Studia Culturologica. Divinatio. Recent publications: Das herme- neutische Projekt Georg Mischs, Wien, Passagen Verlag, 2011; Th e Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism, Athens (OH), Ohio UP, 2011; Practices and Possibilities, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, forthcoming. 1 G. Vattimo and S. Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism. From Heidegger to Marx, New York, Columbia UP, 2011. All following quotations only indicating a page number refer to this book.

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In their previous publications, Vattimo and Zabala elaborated on philosophical arguments for political doctrines like the non-naturalist treatment of equality as free projectuality, the procedural conception of democracy that eliminates substan- tive values, the federalist option in the construction of supranational political units, and socialism as a programme for liberating politics from the neoliberal postulates of the globalized economy. Th ese doctrines are by no means at odds with (at least a certain form of) the established liberal democracy in certain contemporary societies. What Vattimo, in particular, was eager to defend, could be qualifi ed as “socialism within the order of liberal democracy”, i.e. socialism in terms of a “conception of the state as guarantor of the multiplicity of the communities that compose it, communities in which individuals confer recognition on one another because they are not homogenized into an indistinct mass of citizen-subjects”.2 Th us, Vattimo forged the slogan “Socialism, in Other Words Europe” to indicate that socialism is a radicalized version of liberal democracy (inspired by the secularized ethos of Christianity) and Europe is a political project entirely based on the willingness of citizens and states with equal rights to join. Hermeneutic Communism presents a new stage of the political instrumentalization of the weak thought, in which the very term ‘socialism’ is replaced by the much more demanding term ‘communism’. Th e kind of communism the authors have in mind, is no longer to be integrated into the existing order of a “framed democracy”. Accordingly, the idea and the concept of “the weak” undergo a signifi - cant transformation as well. In the authors’ previous work (especially that of Vattimo), the political meaning of weakening is closely related to the meaning of intensifying democratization. Weakening is more or less disentangled from the status of the “weak” in late modern societies. Consequently, weakening has an impact on all strata of the industrialized societies. Hermeneutic nihilism is under- stood as “disturbing” the existing hierarchies because its criteria are those of universal weakening.3 Presumably, everybody would be aff ected by this disturbance. Weakening exercises a universal emancipatory eff ect. In this regard, the Heideg- gerian ongoing overcoming of metaphysics (die Verwindung der Metaphysik) appears tantamount to the universal process of (postmodern) emancipation. In the book under discussion, Vattimo and Zabala undertake a decisive step of recasting their views by politically committing the weak thought not (only) to the universal process of emancipation/democratization, but to the “weak” in the societies with a framed democracy. Th e communist class-polarity thereby is restored as a polarity between the weak and the strong, created and maintained by growth and globalization. Th e “critique of ideology” (though formulated without reference to any kind of historical determinism) opens the avenue to another signifi cant commitment to the

2 G. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation. Ethics, Politics, and Law. Ed. by S. Zabala and trans. by W. McCuaig, New York, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 129. 3 Ibid., p. 33.

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communist tradition. Since philosophical hermeneutics debunks historical objectivism (as teleology, eschatology, or cumulative progressism) and unmasks the manip- ulative power of all policies that are based on the idea that there is objective truth in history, it can serve the function of a critique of ideology — an idea suggested for the fi rst time by Adalbert Fogarasi in 1918.4 But the philosophical theory of interpretation can do something much more important in a political context. Vattimo and Zabala believe that hermeneutics has the potential for the renewal of communism in our world. Th e doctrine of hermeneutic/weakened communism purports to update classical Marxism and actualize possibilities of communist practices, while preserving democratic electoral procedures. In their imagery, the “eff ective possibility” of weakened communism becomes actualized not through a revolutionary transformation of society, but via practices that step-by-step weaken the established order and lead to a social contract based on (something like) Rorty’s edifying-conversational solidarity.5 Th e constructive nihilism that promotes emancipation should help create a synergy between communist practices and the ongoing devaluation of metaphysical supreme values like objectivity, naturalism or scientifi c acceptability. As “accomplished nihilism” the hermeneutic weakening of the “man of modernity’s life” should enrich the communist imagery through pro- posals for alternative ways of life (p. 137). Th e conversational devaluation of metaphysical values that creates Rortyan solidarity has to replace the dictatorship of the proletariat. Weakened and spectral communism is portrayed as an emancipatory utopia whose messianic power (and regulatory ideal) should promote the liberation of the weak. Th e political agenda of philosophical hermeneutics is the long-standing project of Gianni Vattimo.6 Long before Fukuyama he drew attention to the “end of history” as a way of living postmodern experience in never-ending late modernity. In fact, Vattimo’s interpretation of this expression actually displayed an alternative to Fukuyama’s fi nalism before the emergence of the latter. It was an interpretation strongly infl uenced at once by Arnold Gehlen’s view of post-history (as a development characterized by a “profound immobility” in the technological world), on the

4 See Fogarasi’s manuscripts ‘Kritik des historischen Materialismus’ and ‘Umrisse einer Th eorie der Interpretation’, published in É. Karádi und E. Vezér (Hrsg.), Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis, Frankfurt am Main, Sendler, 1985. 5 Vattimo and Zabala state that the society of hermeneutic communism “could also be called a society of ‘dialogue’, had this term not been abused so much by the dominating classes to justify the conservation of the status quo” (p. 116). However, they are preoccupied with countering the threat to the reduction of conversational solidarity to “dialogical realism” that under neoliberal conditions assures the conservation of the “ontological structure of framed democracy” (p. 29). On another claim, dialogues “exclude the very possibility of transformation, because they impose truth on any form of dissent from the prevailing scientiﬁ c order” (p. 27). It is the regime of dialogical consensualism that prevents, in a framed democracy, the occurrence of any “emergency” that can disturb and shatter the established order. 6 See in this regard, for instance, D.M. Leiro, ‘Gianni Vattimo, el ultimo comunista’, Utopia y Praxis Latinoamericana 39/2007, pp. 143-152.

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one hand, and Walter Benjamin’s view of the “dissemination of histories”, on the other. Th e dissolving of historicity (that includes the lack of subversive novelties) in the secularized, post-industrial world — so the argument goes — produces conditions of post-historicity that make possible (on the political level) the dissemination in question. Th us, Vattimo’s discussion of the “end of history” in the early 1980s initiated an anticipatory critique of Fukuyama’s apology of liberal democracy’s political order in which the global antagonisms are offi cially banished. His inten- tion was to elaborate on a nihilistic interpretation of hermeneutic ontology (i.e. an interpretation that weakens the dichotomous tendency in construing the ontico- ontological diff erence in the existential analytic) and use this to forge a foundation- less image of existence.7 Th e mode of existence that resists metaphysical substantiation and axiological justifi cation (because of the de-evaluation of all supreme values), being at the same time a realization of Christianity through its secularization is the shortest charac- terization of post-historicity.8 (Notoriously, Vattimo makes this claim in the context of interpreting the theological concept of kenosis in terms of the dissolution of any metaphysical transcendence. On this construal, kenosis proves to be a human- izing of God’s will that in its turn enables the postmodern rediscovery of Christian- ity.) In the mode of existence under discussion, the confl icts between the established order of “framed democracy” and the increasing number of life-forms that cannot be integrated into it become commonplace. In fact, Vattimo’s picture of post-historicity suggests an anticipatory critique not only of the apology of the current legitimate form of government, but also of Robert Kagan’s view that recent geopolitical confl icts have led to a renewed age of divergence, implying the return of history. In this view, again a meta-historical (and metaphysical) status is ascribed to framed democracy’s world order. In contrast, post-historicity does not claim it such a status. Its main feature, to emphasize again, is the dissolution of history in the form of a dissemination of histories. Th e doctrine of hermeneutic communism seems to be the ultimate specifi cation of the concept of post-historicity.9 Santiago Zabala, Vattimo’s most prominent pupil, has followed his own way from weak thought to hermeneutic communism. His book Th e Remains of Being presents an ambitious attempt at deriving the political consequences from “the ontology of remnants”, i.e. the remains of ontological experience after modernity’s

7 See, in particular, G. Vattimo, La fi ne della modernitá, Milano, Garzanti Editore, 1985, pp. 7-10. Starting in the early 1930s with Georg Misch, who is the fi rst important critic of Being and Time, there is a long tradition of attempts at weakening and dissolving the dichotomous construal of the ontico-ontological diff erence. Th is tradition includes fi gures like Ricoeur and Derrida. 8 In post-historicity “postmodern nihilism (the end of meta-narratives) is the truth of Christian- ity” (G. Vattimo, ‘Th e Age of Interpretation’, in: R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, Th e Future of Religion. Ed. by S. Zabala, New York, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 51). 9 For the series of these specifi cations, see D. Ginev, ‘Th e Political Vocation of Post-Metaphysical Hermeneutics. On Vattimo’s Leftist Heideggerianism and Postmodern Socialism’, Critical Horizons 11/2010, pp. 243-264.

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“forgetting of Being”. (Th e remnants are fragmentary remains of Heidegger’s destruction of the metaphysical tradition.) Th e observation that the metaphysical tradition — so Zabala’s argument goes — cannot be completely overcome from within, serves to fi gure out a post-metaphysical discourse for approaching the character of late modern democratic process in terms of the “history of Being”. At the demise of foundational ontology, the process of “generating Being from within” promises to point democracy in other directions, which correspond to various remnants of Being.10 Th e rise of hermeneutic communism is an “event” that has to be subsumed under the heading of “the return of the political”. Th e concept of the political is regarded as referring to a reality of an agonistic pluralism that is irreducible to the reality of politics qua sphere of public life with characteristic societal organization, institutions, professional ethos, and so on. Treated in this irreducibility, the political is an “ontological condition” of sociality that is inherent to every human society.11 All conceptions that plead for the return of the political oppose the claim of the fi na- lization of history through the triumph of liberal democracy by stressing that the left (or the “multitude”, or the “weak”) still has enough resources to provoke a signifi cant change of the established order. Th us, the time of global confl icts is not over, and consequently, there is no Hegelian completion of history. No doubt, Heidegger’s “epochal history of Being” provides a reliable framework for articulating this perspective.12 Th e return of the political (as considered in a Heideggerian framework) is not necessarily a rehabilitation of the agonistic struggle of political subjects as represented by parties. Th is return consists rather in post-ideological cultural confl icts and antagonisms between traditions, life-forms, and practices. Since the current societal forms of organizing politics serve the function of preserving neoliberal capitalism and framed democracy, the return of the political as “spectral communism” promises to undo the present organization of political life. Accordingly, this communism would institute (without much ado) new forms of politics that serve the emancipation of the weak. Quite intentionally, however, Vattimo and Zabala avoid any concrete vision (blueprint) of these forms. As I will

10 S. Zabala, Th e Remains of Being. Hermeneutic Ontology after Metaphysics, New York, Columbia UP, 2009, p. 111. 11 Some authors go on to assert that the “political diff erence” (the diff erence between politics and the political) specifi es Heidegger’s ontological diff erence in several post-metaphysical and post- ideological discourses. See, in particular, O. Marchart, Die politische Diff erenz, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 2010. 12 In fact, the (leftist) conceptions that strive for the return of the political by rejecting the belief that one can dispense with the notion of antagonism in political theory, are either post-Schmittian (the most typical case in point here is Chantal Mouff e’s conception) or post-Heideggerian. While the rebirth of the political antagonisms for the post-Schmittian left is recognized in the political subjects that mutually negate their identities (see Ch. Mouffe, Th e Return of the Political, London, Verso, 1993), the post-Heideggerian left places emphasis upon the emergence of confl icting histories after the end of metaphysics. In both cases, forms of authentically conservative thinking are transformed into leftist projects.

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point out, they have good reasons for disentangling hermeneutic communism from blueprint utopianism. Combining the framework of the epochal history of Being with a view of the return of the political leads to what nowadays is called the “Heideggerian left”. This is a slightly amorphous category. Fortunately, the champions of hermeneutic communism offer an appropriate specification of this kind of leftism that allows one a precise philosophical-political identification: The Heideggerian leftists strive for a philosophical discourse that can avoid violent ideological revolts and therefore defend the weak. In scrutinizing this decisive specification, Vattimo and Zabala stress their principal difference from revolutionary philosophical Marxists like Badiou, Negri, Hardt, or Zizek. The hermeneutic communist does not believe that the twenty-first century calls for revolution, because the forces of the enemy “are too powerful, violent, and oppressive to be overcome through a parallel insurrec- tion” (p. 3). The weak can only be defended by a post-Nietzschean and post- Heideggerian hermeneutics that implies a continuous weakening of modernity’s objectivism and the rigidity of metaphysical realism. The framed political order that oppresses the weak is at once codified and legitimated by metaphysics.13 This is why even a minimalist version of metaphysics (for instance, the one retained in Habermas’s communicative or Apel’s transcendental conditions of rationality) cannot be employed for liberating the weak. Only an interpretative philosophizing that does not need to ground its critical function in metaphysical ideals can play the role of a genuine critical theory. Generally speaking, the portrait of hermeneutic communism depicted by both authors is quite spare in concrete characteristics. Weakened communism (freed from metaphysical foundations, blueprint utopias, ideological eschatology, epistemological scientism, and objectivism about historical truth) is the only way to come to terms and cope with the weakness of communism in our world.14 Vattimo and

13 In Vattimo and Zabala’s perspective, metaphysics serves a multidimensional legitimation function. Metaphysical foundations provide a philosophical-political legitimation of the dominant powers and the order of “framed democracy”. In this regard, they also speak of “metaphysical democracy” as a system sustained by those who fi nd themselves at ease within the established order of facts, norms, and institutions (p. 37). Also relying on metaphysical principles is the epistemological legitimation of “scientifi c-objective realism”, which in its turn is a prerequisite for founding politics on the epistemologically stylized concept of truth. To this form of legitimation also the “dissolution of philosophy into the objective sciences” belongs. For Vattimo and Zabala, this dissolution is a dimension of the completion of metaphysics. At the same time, the incorporation of philosophy into the objective sciences — so their argument goes — subjects philosophical discourses to the dominant political powers. Th e teleological and meta-historical legitimation of the winner’s history within the Western rationalistic tradition (including the legitimation of the victory over those who do not accept the established framed democracy) stands or falls with the completion of metaphysics. Th is completion promotes the triumph of liberal democracy’s idea of growth — the triumph that supposedly brings to naught all discourses resisting the submission to modernity’s rationalism. 14 To reiterate, hermeneutic communism presupposes and requires the weakening of metaphysics, i.e. its on-going overcoming that never reaches a fi nal point. Th e guiding belief of hermeneutic communists is that both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the post-2008 crisis of capitalism are symptoms

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Zabala have no illusions about the destiny of political communism in the 21st century. Th ey know very well that the neoliberal capitalistic democracies have managed to reduce communism to a residue of the past. But with Derrida they believe that the ghost of communism never dies, it lingers on, always to return. It is precisely in its “spectral form” that communism becomes an objective necessity today because of “the discharge of capitalism”. For them, to say that communism is now functioning as a spectre is tantamount to claiming that it is not a political programme that off ers a rational strategy for unfettered development, but “a movement that embraces the programmatic cause of de-growth as the only way to save the human species” (p. 121). Th e recent South American return of spectral communism in the form of communist policies and “social missions for community projects” set up without violence but entirely through democratic electoral procedures forms the authors’ main source of inspiration. Th ough rejecting naturalism, objectivism, and scientism, hermeneutic communism is by no means an anti-rationalist doctrine. Vattimo and Zabala endorse the special epistemological (and rational) status of their doctrine’s claims. Th ese are trans-subjective claims independent of the historical agents’ will that nevertheless cannot admit a nomological form. Th eir contextual validity is vindicated in the horizon of the post-metaphysical weakening of metaphysics, but the validity itself is not verifi ed/falsifi ed by standardized epistemological procedures. Th e possibility of such a verifi cation/falsifi cation would imply an (at least methodical) priority of epistemology over hermeneutics that would contradict the tenets of weak thought. By implication, the specifi c rationality of the doctrine of hermeneutic communism requires an elaborated philosophical argumentation for the primacy of hermeneutics and the derivativeness of epistemology. Th is argumentation would simultaneously advocate the rationality in question. Unfortunately, Vattimo and Zabala do not off er such an argumentation, and this omission forms the basic philosophical defi cit of their doctrine. Consequently, it remains unclear how they incorporate “interpretative elements into Marxism and communism”, thereby eff ec- tuating the “hermeneutic turn” (p. 115). Th e enterprise of this interpretative recasting also invokes the following question: Does the hermeneutic turn of communism require (i) a replacement of the objectivist-epistemological concept of truth with an interpretative-practical concept of truth, (ii) a replacement of the forms of realism based upon the metaphysics of presence with a kind of hermeneutic realism that draws on Heidegger’s idea of the world’s transcendence, and (iii) a replacement of the kind of essentialism implied by traditional political philosophy’s view of collec- tive subjectivity with an anti-essentialist view of hermeneutic trans-subjectivity?

of the end (not the completion) of metaphysics. Soviet communism and the neoliberal defence of capitalism are the ﬁ nal ideological positions founded upon modern metaphysics. Th e advocacies of the objective truth of history and the truth of market laws are inspired by the same metaphysics of history that emphasizes the idea of growth. Th e belief in an objective truth behind society’s structures and culture’s historical dynamics is the source of all ﬂ aws and shortcomings attributed to these ideological positions.

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It is regretful that Vattimo and Zabala do not off er defi nite answers to this three- dimensional question. To be sure, without a scenario of incorporating weak conceptuality into the doc- trinal kernel of Marxism, hermeneutic communism cannot function as a political programme, but only as a “specter”. Yet this is exactly what Zabala and Vattimo want. Th e break with the agenda of “scientifi c socialism” (as a condition for reviv- ing communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall) requires getting rid not only of metaphysical foundations but of any programme that proposes new ways for growth/development as well. Th ere are several strange claims associated with the insistence on the spectral character of weakened communism. Th e most bizarre among them is the claim that South America’s leftist governments led by Castro, Chávez, Morales, Ortega, etc. have created a political “emergency” for framed democracies. It is an emergency that disturbs and shocks those who prefer not to refl ect on the consequences of modern growth. No doubt, many critical questions come to the fore when policies of land reforms, the nationalization of industries, and reduction of poverty are interpreted in terms of the Heideggerian concept of emergency. My expertise in this regard is limited and my observations may be wrong, but I have the impression that these governments are trying to intensify growth and modernization in their regions by implementing strong socialist programmes and practices. Th ese programmes are committed to the metaphysical project of modernity, to my knowledge, not to the post-metaphysical universalizing of hermeneutics. I do not see, for instance, how the movement against the eradication of coca crops off ers an alternative to this project. (Besides, the policies of nationalization may run against the spirit of globalization, but they are in perfect agreement with the metaphysical foundations of modernization. In addition, there are many more prosaic political issues that Vattimo and Zabala must not avoid when drawing their conclusions. Th e most prominent among them is the issue about the “weakening” of the situation of human rights in Cuba, Venezuela or Bolivia.) Do the demo- cratically elected South American leftist politicians, with their indisputable achieve- ments and completely justifi ed struggle against the dictatorship of the Monetary Fund, indeed explicate the political project of philosophical hermeneutics as it has been developed after Dilthey and Nietzsche? Is it not too easy to identify the Latin- American socialist weakening of the neoliberal impositions of framed democracies with the hermeneutic weakening of metaphysics? Of course, when Zabala and Vattimo speak of weak communism in Latin America, they introduce political criteria for recognizing this “specter”. Nonetheless, the short circuit between post- metaphysical discourse and political reality remains in their line of reasoning. Let me now systematize my criticism of hermeneutic communism by addressing fi rst the way in which Heidegger’s ideas are employed in weakening revolutionary Marxism. Th e doctrine is chiefl y inspired by Heidegger’s late philosophy. Yet motifs of hermeneutic phenomenology and of Heidegger’s philosophizing before the Kehre play a crucial role in this doctrine as well. Th us, the idea of existence as a “thrown”

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project — the central idea of Daseinsanalytik — is interpreted “as an alternative to the pure static discipline of the politics of descriptions, founded on dominion in all its forms” (p. 139). But how can this comprehension of existence be contextualized politically in order to be instrumental in opposing the “politics of descriptions”? Vattimo and Zabala’s lack of answers to that question invites various speculations. According to one of the most plausible among them, the very claim that existence projects its being upon possibilities, contains a political dimension, since the political is the state of agonistic pluralism that results from the appropriation of alternative possibilities and alternative modes of “interpretative articulation of the world” (in the sense of Being and Time). In this sense precisely the political is an existential- ontological condition of social life. Th us considered, the being-towards-possibilities (which is another expression for “existence as a thrown project”) is not a potentiality- for-being of a homogeneous existence but a potentiality for a plurality of competing modes of being-in-the-world. Of course, this reading is a sort of “productive mis- understanding” of existential analytic. However, it implies one of hermeneutic communism’s central claims: History’s openness (which involves the continuous return of the political) and the chance for the disturbance and transformation of the neoliberal order of framed democracy do not depend on the clash of ideological meta-narratives, but on the interpretative being-in-the-world qua thrown project’s principal ontological characteristic. Yet this reading (which is perfectly in line with Vattimo and Zabala’s intentions) poses problems that the doctrine of hermeneutic communism cannot avoid. Basically, these are problems with the concept of emancipation — the most important and the most obscure concept in the doctrine under discussion. Notori- ously, the idea of emancipation is generated and articulated within the metaphysical project of modernity. Th is idea (to which classical Marxism is also committed) rests on strong rationalist foundations that are at odds with post-metaphysical hermeneutics. Nonetheless, Vattimo and Zabala search for the conditions of the weak’s emancipation. More speciﬁ cally, they are looking for a political emancipation (of those who live in modernity’s “defeated history”) as a continuation of the emancipation from metaphysics. But again, in what sense does this concept of (political) emancipation diﬀ er from the aforementioned idea developed within the metaphysical project of modernity? If one follows the suggested “productive misunderstand- ing” of existential analytic, the answer should be related to the problematic of authentic existence. Th e alternative modes of interpretative articulation of the world constitute (in the sense of hermeneutic phenomenology) alternative life-forms, each of them distinguished by its own “criterion for resoluteness” and mode of authentic existence. On this reading, emancipation is the achievement of a life-form’s authen- ticity within the cultural world it articulates.15 Th e political contextualization of the idea of existence as a thrown project is in full harmony with this conclusion.

15 Th us considered, emancipation has nothing to do with the secularization of religious mentality and eradication of traditional prejudices.

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However, the champions of hermeneutic communism are by no means inclined to accept it, for political reasons. Regardless of all essential diff erences between hermeneutic and classical communism, the former still requires a homogeneous society for carrying out communist practices. Even the most weakened communism cannot rid itself of the spirit of collectivism (and consensualism, though Vattimo and Zabala are strong opponents of it). Moreover, hermeneutic communism still requires a unitary (however weak) centre of power.16 Th ere is no form of communism that can be married to cultural (and/or political) pluralism. Even if one goes on to admit that communism knows no central government, but only an automated system for distributing the means and the yield of production, the aversion and intolerance to cultural diversity (that can produce alternative economic models) remain. Th is is why, in my view, Vattimo and Zabala avoid drawing pluralist consequences from the existential analytic’s political circumscription. Instead, they place the concept of emancipation in the context of Heidegger’s late philosophy. In this context, the notion of “emergency” comes to the fore. It is the positive- nihilistic construal of this notion that provides the clearest vision of the passage from a post-metaphysical philosophizing to a political project. In Heidegger’s Con- tributions to Philosophy, “emergency” (die Not) is the event in which being emerges. Notoriously, this postulate sets the stage for an “epochal history of Being” in which each particular epoch is characterized by a unique event of appropriation and Being’s unique concealment/unconcealment. Vattimo and Zabala are mostly inter- ested in Heidegger’s claim that in a time in which everything is held to be calcula- ble (and Being is fi nally replaced by manipulable beings) the only emergency is the lack of emergency. From this claim they proceed to treat emergency as the “eff ective condition for emancipation”. It would be wrong to claim that there is in embryo a political project or a project for political criticism in Heidegger’s Contributions.17 Yet there are two motifs with several implications for a critique of the modern idea of politics: (a) the motif of the new beginning and (b) the motif that the recollec- tion of modernity’s specifi c forgetting of Being becomes that which in a state of emergency can save us. Contributions codifi es ontologically (within the framework of what Heidegger calls seynsgeschichtliches Denken, being-historical thinking) the conditions under which human beings can dwell in the world in an entirely diff erent way. Th e implications for the critique of politics take shape when the tradition gets reproached with oblivion to the emergency of Being. Th e blindness to this emergency is a matter of a kind of meta-politics to which Heidegger is committed.

16 To my knowledge, the leftist governments in Latin America can weaken various sorts of impositions, but these do not lead to weak centres of political power. 17 One can argue with Miguel de Beistegui that in this text Heidegger thinks a number of “origi- nary topoi” to which the political remains ultimately subordinated. In other words, the political is thought within the “topology of Being”. In this manner of treatment, the political as such is never “at the very forefront of the discussion, but always, structurally as it were, in its margins or at the periphery, if not in the background” (M. de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, London/New York, Routledge, 1998, p. 7).

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In this regard, he criticizes the programmes of liberal democracy, communism, and fascism for their blindness to the event of appropriation (the “appropriating event”, the “enowning”, das Ereignis) in the modern epoch. Th ese programmes are doomed to failure for their lack of resources to address the current crisis as related to the emergency of Being in modernity. Th e attempt to fi nd a way out of the crisis provoked by the oblivion of (the emergency of) Being involves a political project alternative to the three aforementioned programmes. Do Vattimo and Zabala try to continue and further elaborate on the aforementioned critical implications of Contributions? By no means. Th ey work out a rather quasi-Heideggerian concept of emergency by identifying the idea of the oblivion of Being with Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” and “defeated history”. In “On the Concept of History” Benjamin raises the claim that the break of the continuum that levels everything off provides the chance for the constitution of a genuine tradition. By the same token, Vattimo and Zabala argue that emergency is every dis- continuity of the neoliberal continuum of framed democracy that challenges the “winner’s history”. Yet an important Heideggerian moment is still involved in this reception of Benjaminian “weak messianism”. In my estimation, it does not derive so much from the Contributions concept of emergency as from the basic motif of “Th e Question Concerning Technology”. If the lack of emergency is the only emergency in late modernity, where the destination of living in the winner’s established order is the extreme danger, then this only emergency should bring the “saving power” of weakened communism. To put it in a more Heideggerian fashion, the post-ideological unfolding of framed democracy harbours in itself the possible rise of the saving power.18 It is the on-going completion of metaphysics in the framed democracy’s order that constantly generates a post-metaphysical leeway of practices of weakening this very order, thereby creating discontinuities in its continuum. Like Heidegger, the hermeneutic communists avoid any specifi cation of the saving process’ outcome. Th eir utopianism contains only a regulative ideal that is laden with a “weak messianic power”. Vattimo and Zabala confess their iconoclastic anticipation of communist emergency that repudiates the strong messianism of classical communism (though Marx had always been a decisive opponent to blueprint utopian visions). Th e weak messianic power presupposes an on-going creation of discontinuities that is never completed and transformed into despotic power and violence against any disclosure toward a diff erent future. Weak political thought in this context is the thought nurtured by the regulative ideal that guides the never- ending communist battles and the spectral appearances of communist practices. Th e weak messianic power prohibits utopian visions that “map out the (only

18 For Heidegger, the essential unfolding of technology as “enframing” (Gestell) harbours the saving power that lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence. (M. Heidegger, ‘Th e Question Concerning Technology’, in: D.F. Krell (Ed.), Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 337.)

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possible) future in inches and minutes.”19 A detailed utopian vision (as suggested, for instance, by some Soviet functionaries) would contradict the regulative ideal and imply a strong messianic power leading to a despotic hegemony.20 However, does not the very concept of a regulative ideal necessarily call into being a determined/unitary vision of what should come to pass? Th is is a rhetorical question, because in order to be eﬀ ective the regulative ideal of hermeneutic communism demands a blueprint utopia.21 Derrida cogently makes the case that the communist promise with its undetermined messianic hope (“the messianic without messianism”) summons a social order that will never reach the form of full presence. Th e messianic opening to what is coming is at the same time the opening of a gap between the (blueprint involved in the) inﬁ nite communist promise and the inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this blueprint/promise. Th is opening (as implied by the regulative ideal’s messianic hope) constitutes “the very place of spectrality”.22 Since weakened communism stands or falls with this spectrality, it must keep intact the gap opened by the regulative ideal’s determined/unitary vision of what should come to pass. Th us, the anti- visionary insistence on contingent and local practices that promise to open up a never-ending process of emerging discontinuities and disruptions in the established order is not to be reconciled with the insistence on the “regulative ideal of any communist battle in the world” (p. 117).

19 R. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect. Utopian Th ought for an Anti-Utopian Age, New York, Columbia UP, 2005, p. XIV. Jacoby contrasts blueprint utopianism with iconoclastic utopianism as distinguished by a romantic and mystical longing for the future that resists detailed visions. To be sure, hermeneutic communism is committed to a kind of iconoclastic utopianism. Yet together with the opposition between blueprint and iconoclastic utopias there is another contradistinction between global and local utopias. A consequent iconoclastic utopianism would subscribe (in accordance with the weak messianic power) to series of local utopian projects corresponding to various innovative and revolutionary practices and policies. Does hermeneutic communism combine iconoclastic utopianism with a kind of globalism? I doubt it. Nevertheless, the status of utopian thinking in hermeneutic communism remains unspeciﬁ ed. 20 Interestingly enough, the misguided blueprint utopianism of classical forms of communism was criticized by Gustav Landauer (in his classical work For Socialism, 1911) from an anarchistic point of view. He denounces Marxism for the lack of a “poetic vision” and an interpretative spirit that is indispensable for breaking with the reverence for technological progress. In Landauer’s perspective the continuous creative-anarchist weakening of capitalism goes hand in hand with eschew- ing blueprint utopianism and messianism. Landauer therefore seems to be a much more appropriate partner for Vattimo and Zabala in their enterprise of weakening than Castro and Chávez. 21 Indeed, in two cases the regulative ideal does not demand a blueprint utopia: (a) the classical Kantian one; and (b) the understanding of democracy not as substance, but as procedure. In case (a) the regulative principle is a formal rule for everyone. In case (b) the regulative principle contains a set of procedures for achieving optimal democratic order. Th ough Vattimo very often expresses a positive attitude towards democracy as procedure in his work, hermeneutic communism appeals to democracy as substance when trying to forge alternatives to framed democracy. By implication it cannot avoid making use of a regulative ideal that demands a blueprint utopia. Otherwise, hermeneutic communism would only be a version of neo-Kantian liberalism. 22 J. Derrida, Specters of Marx. Trans. P. Kamuf, New York/London, Routledge, 1994, p. 65.

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At this point we are ready to turn to a central question that has been carefully avoided so far: Who are the weak to whom the weak thought has to off er alternatives by means of the Verwindung of the present metaphysical-social-economic- political-historical order? On Vattimo and Zabala’s answer, those who share the destiny of being involved in the “tradition of the oppressed” are not only particular political subjects, social classes, cultural communities, escapists, outsiders, under- privileged, minorities … Not even the totality of the 99% represented by the occupy movement. Th e weak are the “losers of history”. Th is is an interesting but hardly original identifi cation of the weak. Many years ago Ivan Illich suggested a prima facie similar approach to identifying the weak. Vattimo and Zabala do not refer to his work, however. Illich focuses on a particular defeat of the weak in the “war for modernity” — the destruction of the environmental conditions for subsistence and their replacement by commodities produced within the frame of the new nation state. Th e losers were all those engaged with popular cultures and vernacular domains. Th eir areas of subsistence were dev- astated on all levels. Illich argued that Marxist historians are not less blinded to the values of the losers that were destroyed than their bourgeois, liberal or Christian colleagues.23 In combining the value-themes of the war for modernity with the analysis of the public discussion concerning the limits to growth at the beginning of the 1980s, Illich investigated the identity of the weak by looking for those who cannot be assigned to Louis Dumont’s category of the homo economicus. In this regard, the weak are not to be identifi ed by standard sociological criteria. Th is cat- egorisation should rather be accomplished in terms of cultural theory. Th e weak are the great variety of life-forms whose existence is organized around subsistence activities. Th e weak are those who want to remain autonomous and to defend the autonomy of their non-integrated life-forms, thereby resisting the unifi cation entailed by the values of modernity’s humanism. Th e protagonists of these life- forms are sceptical about the claims of growth and globalization. Th ey are discon- tent with modernity’s idea of emancipation underscoring these claims. Again, what the weak strive for is cultural (and sometimes economic) autonomy, not the improvement of democracy as a procedure (or, a procedural democratic consensus) that is instrumental in achieving growth and globalization. In my view, the weakest political thesis of the weak thought is the claim that the procedural democratic consensus does not diff er very much from the essence of hermeneutics (p. 79). Th e identifi cation of the weak in terms of life-forms’ losers of the war for modernity presupposes the writing of a history of modernity from the viewpoint of the losers. Illich did not succeed in outlining such a history. But the message he left is clear: Th ese various categories of losers have developed and tried to accomplish autonomous projects of modernity. Th ey are losers and weak because their projects have not had the chance to become a historical reality. Illich was a critic of Marxism, and within his critique he managed to disentangle the struggle for the autonomy of

23 See I. Illich, Shadow Work, London, Marion Boyars, 1981, p. 139.

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the weak’s plurality of life-forms (and life-worlds) from the ideas/ideals of growth and globalization. In my view, the very notion of communism prohibits such a disentangling. Th e communist emancipation (even the non-revolutionary one) requires growth and globalization. Otherwise, it would not be a communist emancipation.24 Nevertheless, Vattimo and Zabala plead for de-growth (the only programmatic claim in their doctrine). It goes without saying that in their considera- tions the link between emancipation and de-growth remains unspecifi ed.25 However original the Heideggerian concept of emancipation is, it does not provide suffi cient critical distance from (not only the metaphysical values of modernity but also) the traditional fl aws of classical Marxism. Th e promise of emancipation through disruptions is still charged with the danger of “compulsive freedom”. Recast- ing emancipation in terms of disruptions and emergencies hardly helps to gain the necessary distance from the historical realities of communism. I do not see how Vattimo and Zabala can even meet the trivial argument that the communist regimes in Eastern Europe provoked massive disruptions and emergencies in the name of the emancipation of the working class. By imposing communist policies and nationali- zations, the ruling parties weakened and destroyed cultural life-forms and traditions that were obstacles to attaining emancipated societies. Th ey destroyed the weak much more eff ectively than their liberal-democratic partners did. Th e communist regimes were successful in destroying the societies’ life-worlds as the only places where the improvisatory rationality of free initiatives was generated. It is my conten- tion that even the most liberal and weakened forms of communism are intolerant to the life-world’s non-normative (and deeply hermeneutic) rationality. As the place of the political but nevertheless resistant to the control of politics, the life-world’s rationality is treated as a threat to all communist policies. Th e liberal and weakened forms of communism can only tolerate the pluralism of civil society (as this is re- located by Gramsci in the political superstructure) and public sphere. It is only this kind of pluralism that is in line with the communist universal emancipation.26

24 Communism (even a hermeneutic version) and de-growth cannot be reconciled. Several neo- communist schools of thought nowadays try to adumbrate a kind of coexistence between the struggle for emancipation and the appeal to de-growth. I do not see, however, how de-growth could be advocated without rejecting the communist mythology of emancipation. 25 Vattimo and Zabala refer positively to Georgescu-Roegen’s conception of de-growth. At least for two reasons, however, I cannot see how this conception can help them to create a communist view of de-growth. First, Georgescu-Roegen’s arguments (as based on the entropic model of economic growth and the economic relevance of the Second Law Th ermodynamics) are entirely “scien- tistic” and appeal to “objective truth” according to Vattimo-Zabala’s criteria. (Th is is why the claims of Georgescu-Roegen can only be countered by another scientiﬁ c theory — for instance, an economic theory based on Prigogine’s approach to dissipative structures.) In other words, these arguments are inacceptable from the viewpoint of weak thought. Second, it is hard to imagine how the strongly anti-communist position of the author of Th e Entropy Law and the Economic Problem would ﬁ t in a context of rehabilitating communism. 26 Th e logic of emancipation assumes a centre of rationality that, after achieving the state of total emancipation, is to be transformed into a centre power — in particular, the “power of weakening”

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Does philosophical hermeneutics as a post-metaphysical discourse entail a political project? Vattimo and Zabala’s greatest merit consists in tackling this question, which is unavoidable for all champions of the hermeneutic turn in philosophy. Th ey are absolutely right in holding that hermeneutics does not actually represent a political position, “but rather it is political in itself” (p. 77). After their work one can no longer ignore the task of explicating the hermeneutics’ concept of the political and its political consequences. But the project in question does not amount, in my view, to the project of hermeneutic/weak communism. As I argued, at the heart of it lies not the struggle for emancipation, but the struggle for life-forms’ genuine authorities. Following a central motif of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, in this struggle interpretation (as a painful narrative construction of a life-form’s identity) should recollect and re-appropriate the traditional (non-political and even anti-political) authorities’ power. Th e return to the authentic historical prejudices (in the Gad- amerian sense) that have been concealed by modernity’s growth is hermeneutics’ principal goal. Paraphrasing Odo Marquard’s celebrated dictum, the more intensive this growth becomes, the more necessary is the refl exive return to the life-forms’ forgotten authenticities/authorities. With regard to the “hermeneutic logic of question and answer” (in which each answer is a question), the question of the specifi c- ity of hermeneutics’ political project is an answer to the question of how life-forms’ authentic autonomy is to be attained. Among the best pages of Hermeneutic Communism are those devoted to “interpretation as anarchy”. Vattimo and Zabala cogently argue that such an interpretation of interpretation opens the door to the political consequences of hermeneutics. With Reiner Schürmann they state that the anarchic resistance to principles, con- ventions, and categories is not the end of the political project of hermeneutics but its beginning. Stressing the transgressive moment inherent in various kinds of interpretation does not suffi ce, however, to disclose a leftist political project in hermeneutics. Th e question as to whether interpretation is really intimately related to the political values advocated by the weak communists remains without a satisfactory answer during the whole path from Heidegger to Marx. Th e anarchistic impetus (the impetus of self-interpretative autonomy) involved in interpretation is hardly congruent with any communist practice. Addressing the discordance between the strategy of universal emancipation and the scattered (disseminated) micro-projects of self-interpretative autonomy as a prerequisite for the constitution of autonomous life-forms is the challenge the hermeneutic philosophers have to meet in

that should produce communist policies. (Vattimo and Zabala’s insistence on disruptions and emergencies does not reject the need for such a centre. On my reading, they suggest that communist centres of power have to be modelled on the political realities of Castro’s and Chávez’s governments.) Th e main deﬁ ciency of classical communism is not overcome in this manifest of hermeneutic communism. However weakened, communism has to redeem the promises of emancipation. Weakening communism is not a reliable way to surmount the weakness of communism. However modiﬁ ed, communism has to homogenize its political practices through a centralized politics. Again, the only way to do this is by creating new centres of power.

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articulating the political tenets of interpretation (qua both existential phenomenon and a non-metaphysical alternative to the metaphysical foundation of modernity). Still more tellingly, it is the endeavour of a life-form to respect its own traditional authorities as a requisite for the historical reproduction of its life-world that reveals the basic political meaning of interpretation. To reiterate, the latter aims at a recol- lection of a lost autonomous order informed by the conservative ethos of a life- form. My position is that the genuine political project of philosophical hermeneutics is a doctrine that should be labelled conservative anarchism. But let me here conclude my discussion of hermeneutic communism.27

Summary

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s book Hermeneutic Communism continues the leading motif of “weak thought” in the context of political theory. Weak thought is characterized by the idea that under postmodern conditions (and from a leftist perspective), the Nietzschean idea of nihilism has acquired the sense of emancipation. Th is book presents a new stage of the political instrumentalization of weak thought in which the very term ‘socialism’ gets replaced by the much more demanding term of ‘communism’. Th e kind of communism the authors are striving for is no longer to be integrated in the existing order of “framed democracy”. Th e present critical study of Vattimo and Zabala’s enterprise focuses on the relationship between the kind of hermeneutic nihilism implied by weak thought and the leftist political project the authors try to retrieve from the residuals of Marxism. Th e main criticism is concentrated on the concept of emancipation as arising out of this relationship.

27 I would like to express my gratitude to Veerle Achten, who has improved the language of this article.

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