Heidegger

—–Oorspronkelijk bericht—–
Van: heidegger-bounces at soca.ecu.edu.au [mailto:heidegger-bounces@soca.ecu.edu.au]Namens Eskandar Sadeghi
Verzonden: zondag 4 juni 2006 2:32
Aan: Discussions pertaining to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Onderwerp: Re: Fascism and Humanitarianism - Questions for Malcolm and anyoneelse interested

Dear Malcolm,

I think many of the points you’ve made are worth serious consideration (I’ll eagerly await the accusation of jumping on the bandwagon). Please don’t take this in a pejorative sense but you analysis, at least to my ears, sounds like a melange of sorts, combining Machiavellian, Foucauldian, and finally Heideggerian strands (the very feasibility of such a balancing act, and I am trying my best not to misrepresent you here, can only be elicited through further discussion). I was actually quite surprised that Foucault’s name never came up directly - was there a reason for this omission? Foucault alongside Nietzsche seems the all too obvious choice for any philosophical discussion of power. Perhaps you think this issue seen through Foucauldian eyes has become tired. Maybe I’ve missed a reference due to my hasty scanning of emails. In any case it would be nice if you could provide some further theoretical elaboration for the concrete examples you alluded to. The predatory ontology you tentatively suggested wasn’t very helpful and seemed like a fairly crude rendition of a Nietzschean will to power. Maybe Heidegger’s analysis of the nihilistic will as embodied in Nazi Germany (which you also mentioned) could provide a more productive encounter. Moreover, you stress the ascendancy of the principle ‘by any means’ in the quest for Lebensraum amongst financial/economic, governmental, and defence sectors, and I’m largely in agreement with you there. But don’t you think that the ideology of humanitarianism (some will interpret this as loaded - that’s fine I’m not sure the word ‘ideology’ is that appropriate anymore either) not only operates as a façade for far more dubious motives such as those you have already outlined but also a genuine content, to which many liberals are all too often forced to capitulate because of its fundamentally proselytizing character - the export of the ‘democratic’ revolution (neo-liberal Trotskyism as Slavoj Zizek puts it) which goes something like if you were for intervention in Kosovo you are thereby equally obliged in the case of Iraq - this is necessary if you are to be ‘morally consistent’. In this pincer move ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘regime change’ are conflated and made to be mutually inclusive. I’ve been prattling on for a while so I’ll try and get to my point. I think you overstated people’s willingness to assent to fascism in order to guarantee the perpetuation of their unabashed consumer lifestyle. I know there is ample proof from the history books to prove I’m wrong and I even have doubts gnawing at my side while I’m writing this. But don’t you think that despite all of the dissemblance, propaganda, disinformation etc… that there are acts of indiscriminate brutality the American, British, German, Israeli etc… publics just won’t stand for if it gets out unsanitized and which could at the very least assuage the rampant expansion of the imperial juggernaut? (the reason why this list is one-sided is because the overwhelming majority of the US, Israeli, British etc… publics are outraged by the indiscriminate murder of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, and rightly so) Of course this is a formidable task especially as one might argue that ‘terror’ (Erschrecken) has itself become constitutive of our being-in-the-world and the fundamental mood of our time.

One thing is the actuality of terror, the news, the things which happen. One can get afraid, terrorized, or not.
A completely different thing is: taking into view the causes of this terror climate. Terror rests on bottomlessness,
loss of fatherland, family, village, incl. the threat of it. Seeing that a bottom is missing, that is Grundstimmung,
and this is ‘ontological’ Erschrecken. My point lately is that Grundstimmung is unreachable, as long as one is
part of the ontic terror. As earlier said: everydayness is not itself sthing everyday-ish. That looks academical,
until the world of everyday appears to be the place which is being terrorized. In case of sthing essential
disappearing, one should always ask: where can it stay?
The *Grundstimmung* of terror, though, is bounded to Verhaltenheit, its Grundstimmung complement.
This combination is the extremest counterpoint to the actual terror. But the two are constantly confounded,
and this has the same ontological background. As long as confusion reigns, the bonds of Gestell will get tighter,
and the crimes more ruthless, of course. We have only just begun, after the artificial new beginning in 1945,
and weare going to beat those holocausts, yeah.
The Heidegger industry - we suspect now that it has nothing to do with Heidegger - is the obsession
to lead all fear back to the actuality of terror, and is so itself part of terror. Like democrats and everything
bearing a name, are just neo-con.

The mixing of 1 terror 2 philosophy of terror is the most fatal, because it takes away the possibility to act.
Aristotle still counts: if one has no idea of what a house is, and whatfor, one cannot build one.
One can use Aristotle in the terror scene, but only to be suicided by him.

We should learn to see problems, esp. the main one: nihilism, in order to be able to act. But we are no longer
supposed to do these oldfashioned things. We are supposed (ordered) to behave and act according to terror
actuality, and how well we obey.
In this sense, an actual terrorist is better understood than the one thinking terror. This one is *felt* to be the real
enemy, because he fathoms the game. Actual terrorists are gifts from heaven. They confirm the climate in which
they rise.

Jünger calls the individual, posing himself upon himself in THESE conditions, the anarch - he manages to stay apart -
in opposition to the anarchist, who always wants to pass the street the moment it is too busy.

that the US would have blown their own tower, is nothing to be morally excited about. Lately i had here a book titled
‘Deception’, on the deceptive nature and skills of the Anglosaxon (military) world, which have *invented* terror in their
hesperic splendid isolation. It is getting intolerably funny to see you all defending yourselves - you have to - , and
sticking to all the deceptive stories, the slander which has been thrown over the world before the bombs.
That would be too much terror - it is true - to see oneself in the mirror, and going back the trail of history -
but it is the only option for those hesitating to go down with it. Not they are the anti-americanists, but the US, as
non-country, is the vastest organization of unconditional americanism threatening the US as country, place for
human life.

Therefore the greatest risk now is moral outrage aganst the neo-cons, and the claim to be better. I see no one better.

rene

I’m not even suggesting that you said otherwise, it’s just a general impression that I got. The Vietnam protests are the obvious example of a possible countervailing movement (and even that example has serious limitations) but then again I hear large numbers of the intelligentsia proclaiming the death of the liberal conscience. Not to mention the telos of so many individuals within the military-industrial complex for a war without casualties (on our side) which of course poses a whole set of other problems. I know you said that you aren’t interested in the moral questions per se - but surely ‘humanitarian’ ideology can itself act as a mitigating factor? This is a shaky and unconvincing argument on my part, and possibly still enamoured to a form of antithetical thinking hostile to the fatalism I felt to be implicit in your view of things (I myself have to try quite hard to avoid a similar degree of fatalism, most of the time failing) - this may even be present in the claim to a-morality which you tried to stringently observe. Looking forward to your response (or anybody one else’s which isn’t simply pointless diatribe).

Best,

Eskandar

Posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
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