> From: "Charles Brown"
> <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
> > CB: Don't you know that around here the question
> you don't want asked gets asked first ? :>)
> >
> > So, what does Heidegger give us that we didn't
> already have ? ( You don't have to mention his
> politics)
> >
> ====================
>
> The notion that modernity's focus on material
> conditions for the good life lacks a way of
> understanding death that has
> nothing to do with Christianity and other
> non-modernist orientations to death.
>
> Ian
why not focus on 'material conditions for a good life' rather than a good 'way of understanding death'?
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http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1994/ MBrev.html
>...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.