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Kritische Studie from Weak Thought to Hermeneutic Communism

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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-met- aphysical 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 meta- physical truth is the beginning of genuine democracy qua hermeneutic commu- nism. 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 hermeneu- tics” (its potentiality to transgress the established order and norms), and the trans- fi guration of “weak thought” in a political program of “weakly communist prac- tices”. 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. doi: 10.2143/TVF.75.3.2990796 © 2013 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved. 996647_TSvFilosofie_2013/3_05_Ginev.indd6647_TSvFilosofie_2013/3_05_Ginev.indd 553553 112/09/132/09/13 008:438:43 554 Dimitri GINEV 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 socie- ties. What Vattimo, in particular, was eager to defend, could be qualifi ed as “social- ism 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 instrumentaliza- tion 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 univer- sal 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 pro- cess 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. 996647_TSvFilosofie_2013/3_05_Ginev.indd6647_TSvFilosofie_2013/3_05_Ginev.indd 554554 112/09/132/09/13 008:438:43 FROM WEAK THOUGHT TO HERMENEUTIC COMMUNISM 555 communist tradition. Since philosophical hermeneutics debunks historical objectiv- ism (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 prac- tices, while preserving democratic electoral procedures. In their imagery, the “eff ec- tive possibility” of weakened communism becomes actualized not through a revo- lutionary 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 eman- cipation should help create a synergy between communist practices and the ongo- ing 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 meta- physical 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 his- tory” 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 develop- ment 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 consensual- ism 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. 996647_TSvFilosofie_2013/3_05_Ginev.indd6647_TSvFilosofie_2013/3_05_Ginev.indd 555555 112/09/132/09/13 008:438:43 556 Dimitri GINEV one hand,
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