Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 22:06:20 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Considerations on the Frankfurt School


In message <19970917.173049.12286.0.farmelantj-AT-juno.com>, James
Farmelant <farmelantj-AT-juno.com> writes
>James Heartfield raises a very important and interesting question-
>why after WW II did so many important leftist thinkers embrace
>anti-Enlightenment philosophies like Heidegger's when the left
>has historically been rooted in the Enlightenment?  How does James H
>evaluate the current vogue that the ideas of Carl Schmitt enjoy
>among some segments of the European left when Schmitt like
>Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi?  It is said of Schmitt that after
>WW II he unlike Heidegger did not attempt to downplay his role as having
>been an intellectual supporter of National Socialism but openly defended
>his involvement.  

A few years ago I wrote this review of some of the books on the
Heidegger question which I think goes some way to account at least for
Heidegger's popularity. Its quite long, so be warned:Reproduced from
Living Marxism issue 42, April 1992                  THE MARXIST REVIEW
OF BOOKS

James Heartfield examines why France's radical intelligentsia is
apologising for a German fascist

The Heidegger affair

Books discussed in this article include:

   * On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, Tom Rockmore, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 30 hbk
   * Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Jacques Derrida, University
of     Chicago Press, 15.95 hbk, 7.95 pbk
   * Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, Peggy Kamuf (ed), Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 12.95 pbk
   * Heidegger and 'the jews', Jean-Frantois Lyotard, University of
Minnesota Press, 8.50 pbk
   * The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Jean Frantois Lyotard,
Manchester     University Press, 11.95 pbk
   * Heidegger and Modernity, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, University of
Chicago Press, 13.50 hbk
   * Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed),
Routledge, 40 hbk
   * Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, Alan White, Routledge, 8.99 pbk

In 1987, Victor Farias' book Heidegger et le Nazisme was published in
France, establishing beyond all doubt that the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger did not simply turn a blind eye to fascism, but openly
espoused it, renewing his Nazi Party card every year from 1933, when
Hitler took power, to 1945, when the Allies overthrew the fascist
government. The book caused an uproar, with conferences and seminars
held, speeches and books written, as French intellectuals were obliged
to clarify their relationship to Martin Heidegger. Why so much concern?
Because, as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut point out in their clear
presentation of the Heidegger affair, the radical intelligentsia in
France--from Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism to Jacques Derrida and
deconstructionism--has based itself on the anti-rationalist philosophy
of Heidegger and other German irrationalists.

Now Tom Rockmore, who edited the English edition of Farias' book, has
returned to the fray with On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, a
retelling of the tale that includes a critique of Heidegger's
apologists. Rockmore,like many right-wing commentators on
deconstruction, has taken advantage of the association between the
radicals and the Nazi philosopher to press home his attack. His book is
well researched, but marred by an ill-concealed motive to attack all
thoughts radical and Continental. For Rockmore, any expression of German
nationalism is tantamount to fascism, while the French are alternately
parochial and hysterical.

Also, Rockmore virtually ignores the significant Marxist challenge to
Heidegger's thought, such as Hungarian Georg Lukacs' The Destruction of
Reason and Existentialismus oder Marxismus?, because it does not fit his
desire to equate Marx and Heidegger. Where Lukacs situates Heidegger's
fascism within a parallel development of anti-democratic politics and
irrational philosophy, Rockmore reduces the question to one of which of
Hitler's policies Heidegger supported. However, flawed as Rockmore's
book is, it puts the spotlight on the radicals, leaving the real
question of the Heidegger affair: what did they see in him?

The deconstructionists especially had some explaining to do. They had
caused a few eyebrows to be raised when they embraced the German
irrationalism of Friedrich Nietzsche. France, after all, has been the
home of rationalism since Rene Descartes first argued 'I think,
therefore I am'--and Nietzsche's ideas had not previously been thought
of as radical,but more as a precursor to fascism. However, Nietzsche
died before he could be implicated in the rise of the German right, and,
it was argued, his contempt for democracy was more an expression of his
wholesale rejection of modernity, than of any sectional interest.

Then there was Paul De Man, a literary critic who did so much to further
the cause of deconstruction, until he was discovered to have been a
propagandist for the Dutch Nazi Party during the war. De Man was quietly
shelved, though even then some argued that his political affiliations
were not the issue. But then the bombshell--Victor Farias' Heidegger et
le Nazisme. Once, after all, could be an accident, twice a coincidence,
but three times?

The deconstructionists' response to the Heidegger affair is represented
here by Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question and
Jean-Frantois Lyotard's Heidegger and 'the jews', as well as the survey
by Ferry and Renaut. Taking the opportunity to look again at
deconstruction through the prism of the Heidegger affair, three things
emerge. First, the French deconstructionists have much more in common
with German irrationalism than they have differences with it, and they
are not prepared to give up the essence of Heidegger's ideas without a
fight. Second, in sofar as deconstruction differs from classical
irrationalism, it only succeeds in a further degeneration of the morbid
subjectivity of that outlook. And third, the French intelligentsia's
rejection of the Enlightenment aspiration to reason is an unthinking
reaction to the degradation of socialism by Stalinism, that ends up
reproducing the central fault of Stalinism, its narrowly national
orientation.

The various attempts by deconstructionists to explain the relationship
between fascism and Heidegger's philosophy all seek to detach the real
lesson of Heidegger from his political affiliations. Lyotard explains
his purpose in rethinking the Heidegger affair as avoiding the trap: 'if
Heideggerian, then Nazi; if not Nazi, then not Heideggerian.' (p51)
Indeed,the characteristic argument is that Heidegger's fascism was a
consequence not of his hostility to the Enlightenment tradition of
rationality, but rather of his unwillingness to make a complete break
with rationalism.Remaining implicated within a humanist tradition of
rationalism, Heidegger,against his better judgement, must follow the
inexorable path from Enlightenment to fascism. As Derrida's pupil
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has it, 'Nazism is a humanism' (Ferry and
Renaut, p2).

Derrida identifies Heidegger's failure to break with the Enlightenment
as his remaining commitment to humanism. Heidegger's insistence on the
superiority of man to animal 'cannot avoid a certain anthropocentric or
even humanist teleology' (p55). The expression of that humanist
teleology for Derrida is Heidegger's concept of Spirit which is
implicated in fascism: 'One could say that he spiritualises National
Socialism' (p39).Well, one could, but isn't it asking too much that we
should believe that if only Heidegger had wanted to save the whale he
would not have turned out to be a speciesist Nazi?

The confidence with which the deconstructionists trace the lineage from
Enlightenment to fascism is disconcerting. One only has to demonstrate
some lingering attachment to Enlightenment values to explain fascist
affiliations. The ease of this conflation of Enlightenment with fascism
is the clearest sign of the common ground between German irrationalists
like Heidegger and deconstructionists like Derrida. For, though they
differ on their assessment of fascism, they agree on the overriding
wickedness of Enlightenment rationalism.

Now that fascism is discredited, irrationalists assume that fascism's
barbarism arose from its roots in rationalism, not its break from
rationalism. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe even goes so far as to cite
Heidegger's own apologetic description of the final solution from 1949:

'Agriculture is now a mechanised food industry; in essence it is no
different from the production of corpses in the gas chambers and death
camps, the embargoes and food reductions to starving countries, the
making of hydrogen bombs.' (Quoted in Heidegger and 'the jews', p89)

Lacoue-Labarthe is cautious enough to say that this is 'scandalously
insufficient' and yet 'absolutely correct' (as if something could be
both insufficient and absolute), because it places the extermination
camps on their true stage, that of technology (quoted in Heidegger and
'the jews',p85). The assumption that the application of human reason in
technology and industry is a negative thing is so strong in both
irrationalism and deconstruction alike, that fascists, farmers and
scientists are all pretty much as guilty as one another.

In fact the relationship between the irrationalist Heidegger and
Enlightenment thinking is misunderstood by the
deconstructionists.Heidegger is not somebody who made a brave attempt to
escape from the totalitarianism of Enlightenment thought but failed.
Rather, Heidegger was engaged in a reaction against Enlightenment reason
that, if it did not necessarily oblige him to sign up for the Nazi Party
(some things we must allow to choice), was, nonetheless of the same
order as the fascist revolt against democracy.

Heidegger stands in the tradition of the Enlightenment only in the sense
that he attacks it for not fulfilling the promise of subjectivity that
Descartes made when he 'broke down the door' to 'the sovereignty of the
Earth'. Heidegger explains the failure of the French to resist the
German invasion of 1940 as their failure to live up to Descartes, being
unequal 'to the metaphysics born of [their] own history' (quoted in
Ferry and Renaut, p62).

German irrationalism decries reason in favour of the Nietzschean 'will
to power', a celebration of the Enlightenment value of the subjective
will over that of rationality. Even here subjectivity is either
restricted in its application, as with Nietzsche, who felt that a
handful of supermen can exercise it while the rest of us plebs keep our
mouths shut, or subjectivity is ossified, as with Heidegger, for whom
subjectivity found its high point in the national spirit.

Deconstruction, by contrast, lacks even the perverse subjectivity of
German irrationalism, and in that is a descent from the low point of
Heidegger and Nietzsche.

On the face of it deconstruction would seem to be subjectivity in
spades,with its celebration of differance over the subjugating
universals that it seeks to undermine. Peggy Kamuf's comprehensive
Derrida reader reproduces the founder of deconstruction's original 1968
lecture, 'Differance', which demonstrates an early hostility to the
subject:

'What differs? Who differs? What is differance? In effect, if we
accepted the form of the question, in its meaning and its syntax...we
would have to conclude that differance has been derived, has happened,
is to be mastered and governed on the basis of the point of a present
being, which itself could be some thing, a form, a state, a power in the
world to which all kinds of names might be given, a what, or a present
being as a subject, a who.' (Between the Blinds, p68)

The celebration of difference, then, is prior even to the subject. It is
not a question of my difference from you; that would be to tie
difference down to one person. Instead we have a blind differance that
disrupts all unity, even the unity of the individual subject. Most of
all, though,difference disrupts the possibility of communication between
individuals.So, where Derrida places differance before the subject,
Lyotard places the differend beyond all possible commensurability:

'A differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two
parties,that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of
judgement applicable to both arguments.' (The Differend, pxi)

The emphasis upon difference made in both of these terms--differend and
differance--need not be too mysterious. Both are attempts to avoid the
lifeless abstractions that characterise classical capitalist ideology,
and socialist ideology, the deconstructionists would add. However, in
the blanket rejection of the universal for the particular,
deconstruction forgets a far richer conception of their relation in
Marxism .

'To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is
man himself.' Karl Marx praised the Enlightenment resolution of the
overarching religious conceptions in to their human, and hence
universal, essence in his 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'
(Early Writings, 1975, p251),but he went further. The challenge then was
to explain how specific ideas arose from a specific social reality.
Instead of abstract man, one had to work from historical man in the real
conditions of his existence:

'Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But
the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.
In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.' ('Theses on
Feuerbach', Early Writings, p423)

The concept of specificity, as opposed to that of differance, alights on
the particular without losing sight of universality. As in biology,
species implies genus. Differance, however, implies nothing but
differance. It is an abstract dogma--'attend to difference'--like the
autocratic rule: 'there are no rules'. In this way differance is
asserted as an already given abstraction, whereas specificity is a guide
to investigation that avoids the unmediated reduction of particulars to
universals, but retains the aspiration to universality.

Derrida's hostility to universality is such that he fears he sees it in
Heidegger's occasional references to Spirit. Derrida suspects Heidegger
of giving nationalism a universal existence as Spirit, and eschews even
this mystified attempt at universalism. His criticism of Heidegger's
Spirit is not that it is an insufficient basis for agreement, but that
in presuming to lay the basis of agreement, Heidegger is falling into
the old rationalist trap. Derrida would rather have many leprechauns,
all giving voice to their differance, than one Spirit. Here one can say
that even Heidegger's sordid mystification of German society has the
advantage over Derrida's non-judgemental respect for every point of view
in that it can at least be refuted.

The popularity of the German irrationalists for the French radical
intelligentsia is that they seem to provide an alternative viewpoint to
Stalinism that remains critical in its approach to modern society. In
fact,the very terms of the break with Stalinism show that the radicals
remain within the Stalinist trajectory away from the universalism of
Marx and the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ferry and Renaut explain the attraction of German irrationalism to the
intelligentsia as 'the chance to condemn, no longer on the basis of Marx
but of Heidegger, the economic exploitation of the world, the false
values of the industrial culture' (p86). In the absence of a credible
Marxism, the irrationalist opposition to modern society appears to be a
suitably oppositional one for the intelligentsia.

In Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, Alan White makes clear that the
critical posture he takes from Nietzsche is as much directed at the
presumption of opposition as at the status quo, if not more so.
Nietzsche provides 'a doctrine that denies gods, afterlives, and even
radically different futures(Marxist or technological utopias, or Kantian
indefinite progress)--a doctrine that insists life is as it is, now,
that it will never be anything else' (p103). The authors of Nietzsche
and Modern German Thought provide a less adulatory treatment, but retain
the hope that 'Nietzsche "follows" the achievements of Marx by adding
yet another vast dimension to the potential for human understanding'
(p163).

None of this affection for the German irrationalists' retrograde attack
on modern society would make sense if it were not for the perceived
failure of Marxism to fulfil the intelligentsia's aspirations to a
progressive end to capitalist society. In the events of 1968, when
students and younger workers occupied their colleges and factories, the
French Communist Party(PCF) opposed them. Radical critics of the party
drew the conclusion that the PCF and the bosses were much of a muchness.
The student slogan 'no leaders' summed up the hostility to all forms of
organisation, whether called communist or capitalist.

As a reaction to the bureaucratic stranglehold of the Stalinists on
workplace organisation, the students equation of bosses and the PCF was
understandable, but as a method of social investigation it was
disastrous.The formalistic identification of all organisation--whether
repressive,reformist or revolutionary--turned away from the process of
critical analysis in favour of blanket condemnation. All that had to be
done was to characterise a point of view as ideological, or as a 'grand
narrative', and no further explanation was necessary: the ideology was
exposed, the narrative was deconstructed.

In Of Spirit the echo of the slogans of '68 can still be heard.
Associating the left with the right, Derrida writes 'discourses...state
their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to Nazism, to
fascism,etc...[they] do this in the name of (the) spirit, in the name of
an axiomatic' (p40). Derrida means that to take a definitive stand
against fascism is to adopt the totalitarian outlook of fascism. In The
Differend Lyotard is more explicit: 'The party must supply the proof
that the proletariat is real, but it cannot, no more than one can supply
a proof for the ideal of reason.' (p172) Hence Marxism is just as
idealistic as rationalism. This method is nothing but formalism. Formal
similarities between different phenomena--racism and anti-racism, the
proletariat and the ideal of reason--are emphasised at the expense of an
investigation of their true specificity.

The formal method of deconstruction, far from providing an alternative
to Stalinism, gave a more forceful expression to its inner trajectory--
the disintegration of the international communist movement. The
radicals,victims of their own formalism, saw in Stalinism only an
excessive totalitarianism. However, the bureaucratic methods of the
communist organisers masked the subordination of internationalism to
national particularism. Stalin's instruction to the communist parties to
orient themselves to their own national roads to socialism was not only
the defeat of Lenin's universalising synthesis of internationalism, but
also the pre-history of the politics of difference.

When the French students counterposed autonomy to the French chauvinism
of the PCF, they were in fact taking the disintegration of the left into
new territory. Stalin had already laid the basis for the collapse of the
international communist movement along national lines. With the politics
of difference, even unity within a nation state is held to be too
abstract.The deconstruction of Lenin's internationalism which began as
socialism in one country, ends up as difference in one living room.

Indeed, Lyotard, an opponent of Stalinism in the sixties, now accepts
its basic premise, seeking only to draw its consequences out
further:'Internationalism cannot overcome national worlds because it
cannot channel short, popular narratives into epics, it remains
"abstract".... Even the communist epic of workers' liberation splits off
into national-communist epics.' (The Differend, p161)

The collapse of the Stalinist-inspired left has visited lasting and
often humiliating defeats upon the working class movement. But the
ideological confusion of the once radical intelligentsia makes a virtue
of necessity.In place of Marx's attack on the chaos of capitalism, it
embraces the irrationalist condemnation of modern society's excessive
rationality. In place of Lenin's universal programme of
internationalism, it follows Stalin's path of national particularism.
The alternatives of chauvinism and irrationalism demonstrate the need to
rebuild an internationalist opposition.

-- 
James Heartfield


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