Derrida: everywhere and nowhere baby, that's where you're at

christian a. gregory pearl862 at earthlink.net
Mon Sep 6 07:38:00 PDT 1999


As Bourdieu argues, taking a line from _The Jargon of Authenticity_, its only by virtue of this esoteric word play that Heidegger can have _Being and Time_'s analysis of care (sorge) look like a discourse on social welfare. Same kind of phony analytics are involved in Derrida's ruminations on "debt" in a geopolitical context, etc.

Christian


>
> Well, it depends on what you mean by "fascistic". Heidegger wasn't a mere
> propaganda hack of the Nazi regime or a paid agent of the SS per se, but
> his work is part of what might be called the culture of Fascism, in
> the same sense as Leni Riefenstahl's movies or the novels of Celine and
> Wyndham Lewis. The best analysis of Heidegger is in Adorno's "Negative
> Dialectics", where Adorno takes a sledgehammer to fundamental ontology, by
> decoding the historical categories at work beneath the veneer of the
> jargon. In general, Heidegger's word-puns follow the same logic as the
> notorious acronym NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,
> or literally, National Socialist German Workers' Party). Why do you think
> the Nazis put "socialist" and "worker" into their party name? Bogus
> populism, of course; Hitler was always going on about the evils of finance
> capital (Jewish moguls, etc.). The point was to canalize the Leftwing
> critique of capitalism and use it against the Left. The same is true
> of Heidegger, whose categories have this populist veneer to them: they're
> always simple amalgams of common German words, so they project a plebian
> moment, while at the same time they ruthlessly suppress *any* concept or
> cultural moment which has not signed over its content to the supremacy of
> Being. Heidegger's whole philosophy is the supreme effort of not
> permitting himself (or anyone else) to think.
>
> -- Dennis
>
>
>
>



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