I am not a philosopher, by the way, but a GPSG (General Purpose Software Grunt).
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I just finished Pierre Bourdieu's "The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger" (Stanford University Press, 1991). It wasn't what I expected on the basis of something written somewhere -- a direct attempt to trace the hermetic excesses of the postmodern jargonizing back to Heidegger's style -- but a study of the sources of Heidegger's thought in the radical conservatism of pre-WWII Germany -- the influence of Heidegger's "habitus" (Bourdieu's term for social position and "inherited" milieu of social thought) on the way he negotiated the philosophical "field" by transforming the language of such popular thinkers as, say, Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler (grandiose conservative laments over the "decline of civilization") into his post-Kantian quite mystical ontology. In one brief, if complex, synopsis: "Heidegger is close to the spokesmen of the 'conservative revolution', many of whose words and theses he consecrates philosophically, but he distances himself from it by imposing a form which sublimates the 'crudest' borrowings by inserting them in a network of phonetic and semantic resonance which characterizes the Holderlin-style Begriffsdichtung of the academic prophet" (p. 54).
The book was written before the last humanities flare-up about Heidegger's support for the Nazis and has the virtue of not focusing merely on what Heidegger did or didn't do as a university Rector under the Nazi regime, or on how strong a supporter of Nazism he was (not as strong as some), but on the actual content and rhetorical strategies of his philosophical writing.
One might call Bourdieu's book a "deconstruction" of Heidegger, except that it exhibits very little of the waffling word-play of a Jacques Derrida. Bourdieu is much more interested in how the "Mandarin" philosopher attempts to ground the authority of the social commitments of his philosophical texts (far removed from any concrete study of any social actuality, or even any interest of the philosopher in gaining any experience of it). So we get the story of the clever and conservative young Heidegger having to establish his claim to philosophical legitimacy in an age and place where neo-Kantianism constituted the reigning mode of philosophical thought: "Taking up and using against him the finitude that can be glimpsed through Cohen's affirmation of the imperfection of knowledge, Heidegger re-establishes the privilege of intuition and Aesthetics, making existential temporality the transcendental foundation of pure, but sensory Reason" (p. 59). In other words, Kantian "understanding," associated by Heidegger with "technology" and other bad modern things, gets opposed to "concrete thought," now replacing "Reason," that somehow reveals itself in the oracular poetry of philosophical meditation on Being.
This ontological mystery, however, gets its authority precisely from the poetic use of language to suggest relationships between ideas that may in fact be dubious, or, as Bourdieu demonstrates, "euphemized" -- like Heidegger's distinction (based on the idea of authenticity) between between "inauthentic mass man" (das Man) and "authentic individual being" (aware of its orientation towards death). Deployment of etymologies, poetic affinities between sounds of words, rhetorical insistence that "Being" expresses itself through language, Heidegger's preemptory warnings against the (virtually inevitable) "misappropriation" of his ideas (as if ideas are supposed to be "original," quasi-sacred, and hence useless to other people). Bourdieu explores a whole range of such strategies by which Heidegger creates an "elevated" ("sublime") philosophical style.
Take, for example, this unravelling of Heidegger's poetic condensation: "'Die Entschossenheit aber ist nur in der Sorge gesorgte und als Sorge mogliche Eigentilichkeit dieser selbst.' (Resoluteness, however, is only the authenticity which, in care, is the object of care, and which is possible as care -- the authenticity of care itself.)"(p. 75). Heidegger might have said, "resoluteness involves authentic caring," or that "the true, authentic individual, by nature, makes decisions that are caring." But who is the "authentic individual"? Not "mass man," but more likely the philosophical thinker or heroic statesman "bearer" of thought. (Stalin and Hitler were very "resolute" about their decisions; were their decisions "caring" by nature?) So what's going on in this folding of language onto itself? The equivalent of verbal lint (Bourdieu's translator says "flanel") that gets us so wrapped up in the verbiage that we fail to see the ambiguous implications that are never addressed.
How would I characterize Bourdieu's book? Perhaps as an excellent case study of how to become a "philosopher" by tweaking the ordinary social language of ideas into an indigestible philosophical form that requires endless reinterpretation by grad students who want to become philosophers. The difficulty (nay, the virtual impossibility) of unravelling internal references or divining their meaning in prose that "foregrounds its own signifiers" (Lacan played that game with psychoanalysis) might incapacitate one from looking further into the relationship between the language and other language that surrounds it in its social context. An expose of "philosophy" as a clever obscure language game to establish one's position in the academic hierachy? Yes, the way Heidegger sets it up, according to Bourdieu.
I am tempted to quote the title of one of Slavin' David's tunes (he's a local blues musician): "Watch Out for the Flim-Flam Man."
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Okay, maybe that doesn't capture all of it. Here are a couple more thoughts:
1. If there are "Heideggerian Marxists" out there who believe that Heidegger's concept of the history of "Dasein" (in "Sein und Zeit") actually has anything to offer, maybe you could try to enlighten me. It has been a long time since this former "lit critter" has encountered that one.
2. I started writing something about Dennis Redmond's quotation of Theodore Adorno's "Negative Dialectics" in response to the post of a review by Edward Skidelsky of Alain Badiou's book on "Ethics." Then I discovered that Dennis is actually TRANSLATING Adorno's "Negative Dialectics" and decided to leave the issue alone and attribute the quotation of Adorno to Adorno enthusiasm. But I really wish that Dennis had explained the relationship of the quote to the review, because there was not a "fit" between Adorno's approach to ethics and what was attributed to Badiou. Has anyone actually READ Badiou's book to determine whether the Badiou actually has any merit or whether the claim is somewhat accurate that he is another incoherent eclectic leftie French academic celebrity who sacrifices integrity of analysis or argument on the altar of the need to sound "avant garde"?
It seems to me like the criticism of Kantian subjective ethical universalism (it ignores history, context, and above all, social power differentials) has been around for a long time. Is Badiou just dressing it up in tattered postmodern garb?
As for Adorno vs. Heidegger: I have not "studied" Negative Dialectics, but from other writings (the stuff on the culture industry) I generally do not think of Adorno as being "obscurantist." Difficult at times, like Bourdieu, but not obscurantist.
============================================================= Peter Kosenko Email: mailto:kosenko at netwood.net URL: http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko ============================================================= "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe."--Benjamin Franklin