Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction

Michael Beehler
English
MSU [Bozeman]

In "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," Wallace Stevens tells us that "The poem is the cry of its occasion," and we can readily extend this comment to books of criticism and philosophy as well. For despite pretenses to disinterested inquiry and objective speculation, no book, no thinking, emerges from a vacuum, but rather within an occasion that marks its involvement from the beginning with the messiness of history and the indeterminacies of time.

To assert otherwise is to overlook this essential complicity of thought with temporality: to indulge, that is, in a kind of forgetful immunotherapy designed to isolate a "purity" of speculative thought and criticism from the temporal occasion of thinking, and thereby to produce the foreclosing satisfactions of a "good conscience." But to bring back to the poem--and to critical and philosophical inquiry in general--the question of its occasion, the occasional question covered over by the cry itself, is to retrieve to thought the temporality to which it is originally exposed in a complicity it habitually forgets. It is to think again the non-disinterestedness--the worldliness or inter-essed-ness--of thought.

What is the occasion of William Spanos's new book, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction? For more than twenty-five years now, Spanos has been an influential figure in American literary and cultural criticism. boundary 2, the journal Spanos initiated as founding editor, has provided a forum for the richly provocative interchange between American literary criticism and European philosophy, a grafting that has helped shape what we now call "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism." Even more significantly, Spanos has been particularly instrumental in appropriating Heidegger's thinking on time and temporality to American literary criticism, and to sketching out implications and usefulness of a critical strategy based on Heidegger's "destruction" of the tradition of metaphysics and his retrieval of the question of temporality, of the being of Being, covered over by that tradition. It has been Spanos's project, in his words to

For Spanos, Heideggerean destruction, by disassembling metaphysics' amnesic representations of Being as an essence, retrieves the fundamentally temporal situatedness of human being-in-the-world covered over by these representations. Quite simply, by representing being as Being or essence, the metaphysical tradition forecloses time by spatializing temporal difference into a graspable image or picture, but "destruction" bring backs to these pictures the primordial temporality of being they strategically forget. In the realm of literary criticism, Spanos's appropriation of Heideggerean destruction has had a profound effect on how we read such modern and postmodern poets as T.S. Eliot and Charles Olson, especially on questions concerning the significance and shape of time.

Indeed, one can see Spanos's work in this area as the effort to "destroy" the "spatial form" traditionally associated with a modernist poetics by crossing it with the Heideggerean question of temporality: to effect, that is to say, the retrieval or "disclosure" that, for Spanos, is a distinguishing mark of the postmodern. As he puts it in the earliest-written essay from this collection (the 1976 "Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle"), the function of "postmodern literature...is to perform a Heideggerian destruction of the traditional metaphysical frame of reference, to accomplish the phenomenological reduction of the spatial perspective by formal violence.... This destructive movement of postmodern literature leaves the reader interessé--a naked and unaccommodated being-in-the-world, a Dasein in the place of origins, where time, despite its implication in structure, is ontologically prior to Being rather than the other way around."

Even in this early essay, however, Spanos is alert to the political import of this destruction: "It entails, in other words, an undermining of the privileged status of the 'objective' interpreter, which, grounded on the unexamined (derived) assumption that end is ontologically prior to temporal process, justifies a supervisory or mastering interpretive practice in the name of disinterestedness and the autonomy of the text."

The occasion of Heidegger and Criticism is in fact closely tied to a particularly troubling contemporary repetition of this "mastering interpretive practice" and to the cultural and sociopolitical consequences associated with it. Spanos shapes his book as a response to the recent appropriation by American academics of the question of Heidegger's brief involvement with Nazism. He focuses specifically on the 1989 issue of Critical Inquiry edited by Arnold Davidson, which imported pieces by several distinctly European thinkers, including Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Lacoue-Labarthe, in what Davidson calls a "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism." These European thinkers were themselves provoked by the now-infamous book by Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, but it is the cultural use to which Davidson puts this CI symposium that interests Spanos, a use retrieved to Davidson's apparently disinterested condemnation of Heidegger by Spanos's remarkable and compelling destruction.

Spanos opens this destruction by raising questions covered over by Davidson's indignant indictment of Heidegger, questions that revolve around the occasion of the symposium. "What," Spanos asks, "has incited this resurgence of interest in Europe in the question of Heidegger's politics? And, more important for my purposes, what has prompted the editors of Critical Inquiry to displace this European debate to North America at this particular historical juncture?"

Spanos's response to these questions constitute a powerful demonstration of the link he has elaborated earlier in his work between Heidegger's destructive critique of humanism and Foucault's genealogical analyses of disciplinary societies and the modern "regime of truth," a link that, he suggests, may make possible a critical discourse capable of "overcoming the limitations of the emancipatory discourses presently in circulation" (by which he means specifically, Marxism on the one hand and "various poststructuralist discourses" on the other). "Only a rethinking," he argues, "of the post-Enlightenment in terms of the decentering of the perennially privileged centered circle and its specular metaphysics...can be adequate to the genealogy and critique of modernity whose specular instruments of discreet domination are both lyrical and scientific and whose hegemonic reach is not restricted to the boundaries of the Occident but, as the rhetoric that represents the immediate contemporary occasion as the 'new world order' suggests, extends throughout the planet and beyond."

It is this rethinking, enabled by Heidegger and Foucault, that Spanos brings to the question of the occasion of Davidson's indictment and the CI debate. In his stunningly provocative destruction, Spanos retrieves the "ideological subtext" informing Davidson's "scandalized and indignant judgment against Heidegger's silence," his "failure" to speak the name of Auschwitz. While not in any way minimizing the disaster of Heidegger's (still problematic) complicity with National Socialism, Spanos nevertheless shows how Davidson's judgment is part of a larger reactionary strategy to discredit the critique of humanism enabled by Heidegger's writings and by other recent work in contemporary theory.

According to Spanos, Davidson's reading of Heidegger is the manifestation of a discreet and politically charged immunotherapy. Davidson's strategic argument goes like this: since Heidegger is guilty of complicity with Nazism, we can then delegitimize his critique of humanism--especially his analysis that links post-Enlightenment, humanist thought to coercive and disciplinary power--and thereby inoculate philosophy against questions posed to its hegemony by contemporary theory, questions that concern the inter-essed-ness and temporality of be-ing and that thereby retrieve an essential complicity of knowledge and power. These are the questions Davidson's strategy is designed to foreclose by assuming (again) the innocence and disinterestedness of the humanist discourse he deploys in his effort to resuscitate philosophy's "good conscience."

Here is Spanos's take on the interestedness of this manipulative strategy "intended to demonize opposition," a retrieval achieved by exposing Davidson to the Heidegger he would prefer to forget:

Given this inextricable affiliation between Heidegger's thought and contemporary theory, the ideological agenda informing the "opening" of the debate by the editors of Critical Inquiry must also be seen as a significant instance of the mounting initiative of an embattled humanist establishment (ironically unthought, it would seem, by the European contributors to the symposium) to discredit what has variously (and misleadingly) been referred to as the discourse of "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism," but which I prefer to call "posthumanism." I mean the discourse that at this historically specific conjuncture (since the 1960s) threatens not only the hegemony of the discourse of humanism, but also of the disciplinary and neoimperial society at large: the "liberal" or bourgeois/late capitalist democracies this discourse was invented to legitimate and reproduce.

Spanos's forceful and compelling final chapter brings us back to what Davidson takes as Heidegger's most "callous" statement, the critical force Davidson's own manipulations try to cover over. This is the now-infamous equation Heidegger makes in a 1949 lecture between a "mechanized food industry" and other examples of technological thinking: "Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers or the death camps, the same thing as blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." Davidson is outraged here by what he sees as the collapse of distinctions: "Do we have no criteria of evaluation to distinguish between the waste products of technology and the production of human corpses in the gas chambers?" But as Spanos points out, this outrage disguises a refusal to think the identity in essence between these manifestations of the "age of the world picture," an essential sameness whose disastrous effects were exposed by the American war against Vietnam.

Spanos retrieves the "context of the complicity of American agricultural technology with American military technology in the United States' neoimperialist/genocidal intervention in Vietnam" in order to dis-close what is foreclosed by Davidson's self-serving dismissal of Heidegger: namely, the "complicity between philosophy and the sociopolitical practices of domination in the West--especially since the rise to privileged status of representational thought and the advent of the technologized and detemporalized (spatialized) modern 'age of the world picture.'" For Spanos, the reactionary discourse of Heidegger's American humanist critics "does not know itself to be interested (takes itself to be self-evidently original and natural) and thus is incapable of self-criticism." Inoculating itself against the self-criticism that would expose its essential complicity with practices of sociopolitical power, such a humanist, "disinterested" discourse of the "truth" demonizes Heidegger in order to cover over the critical force of his antihumanist project to "make explicit the violence latent in the traditional (representational) understanding of truth."

In Davidson, then, as in other such anti-antihumanist attacks from the likes of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D'Souza, Spanos discloses a "policing action" designed to "delegitimate the discourse of resistance Heidegger's thought has enabled--particularly the discourse of contemporary American posthumanism and its essential insight into the representation of power relations inscribed in the official discourse of humanism." This is a responsible, necessary, and infinitely ethical retrieval, especially in the climate of massive forgetfulness that characterizes contemporary American culture: a retrieval that, by recovering the question of being and time covered over by the modem technologies enabled and repeated by the discourses of modern liberal humanism, destroys the comforts of representational thought and its calculating "good conscience."

As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has pointed out, in a passage Spanos quotes from La fiction du politique: Heidegger, I'art et politique, "Nazism is a humanism," and it is Spanos's retrieval of the cultural politics of destruction that makes this seemingly scandalous equation thinkable. For finally, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy remind us, "A comfortable security in the certitudes of morality and of democracy not only guarantees nothing, but exposes one to the risk of not seeing the arrival, or the return, of that whose possibility is not due to any simple accident of history. An analysis of Nazism should never be conceived as a dossier of simple accusation, but rather as one element in a general deconstruction of the history in which our own provenance lies."

Against this exposure, there cannot be--indeed there must not be--a final immunotherapy. And this is what we can learn from Heidegger and Criticism.