Abstract
Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marxrepresents the most recent—and perhaps the most provocative—attempt to harness a reactionary, conservative philosophy for politically progressive ends. Until now, such forced marriages have ended only in divorce. Like thinkers ranging from Herbert Marcuse to, more recently, Richard Rorty and Peter Sloterdijk, Vattimo and Zabala are forced to admit that irreconcilable differences loom on the horizon of their project. Nevertheless, their book offers a suggestive reimaging of the tradition of “Left Heideggerianism,” which makes it perhaps even more relevant than before. But will rescuing Heidegger for the Left will help to rescue us from the relentless march of global capitalism? This essay explores “Left Heideggerianism” as an intellectual tradition, and asks how, when, and why philosophy should intervene in politics.
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Notes
- 1.
A similar historical reversal can be found in Vattimo’s essay, “Nietzsche, Heidegger’s Interpreter,” in Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 181–189.
- 2.
On communism’s intellectual legacy, see, for example, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, eds., The Idea of Communism (New York: Verso, 2010); Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2009); Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2010). On the continued debates about Heidegger’s politics, see, most recently, Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009).
- 3.
For just two examples, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) and Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2010).
- 4.
Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 33.
- 5.
Ibid., 35. In making such claims, Vattimo and Zabala are very much in line with the claims made by John McCumber in his book, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2001). For a critique of McCumber’s thesis, see my Heidegger in America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 193–195. See also George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed American Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) and Joel Isaac, “Tangled Loops: Theory, History and the Human Sciences in Modern America,” Modern Intellectual History 6:2 (August 2009), 397–424.
- 6.
Ibid., 135.
- 7.
Intellectual historians such as Joel Isaac and Andrew Jewett, for example, have argued that the human and social sciences in the United States have been the sight of many debates, exchanges, and transformations throughout the twentieth century, and especially in the years after the Second World War, the high watermark of scientism as a research ideal in the American academy. See Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2012) and Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012).
- 8.
On the persistence of Heidegger’s radical conservativism throughout his career, see Daniel Morat, Von der Tat zur Gelassenheit: Konservatives Denken bei Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, und Friedrich Georg Jünger, 1920–1960 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007) and, more recently, “No Inner Immigration: Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and the Early Federal Republic of Germany,” Modern Intellectual History 9:3 (November 2012): 661–679.
- 9.
Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 13.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West, trans. Jon and Marella Morris (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2001).
- 12.
Hermeneutic Communism, 1.
- 13.
Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale UP, 200), 40, 41.
- 14.
Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Geopolitics in the Third Reich,” in Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, A Companion to Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001): 226–249.
- 15.
Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 40.
- 16.
Anson Rabinbach, “Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ as Text and Event,” In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 97–128. Speaking of Heidegger’s postwar “Letter on Humanism,” Rabinbach puts it bluntly but rightly: “The “Letter’ is a gesture of defiance in the clock of humility. Heidegger’s complaints about the ‘peculiar dictatorship of the public sphere,’ the conflict of ‘isms,’ and his tilt toward Marxism reveal his barely disguised contempt for the occupation [of Germany]. It is also a direct answer to the call for a reckoning with the Nazi past and an opening to democracy, which Jaspers issued in The Question of German Guilt […], which he and the university committee found so utterly lacking in Heidegger” (115).
- 17.
While some scholars have seen Marcuse as being heavily indebted to Heidegger, and especially his understanding of technology—see, for example, Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York: Routledge, 2005)—more recent interpreters have emphasized Marcuse’s deep and continuing commitment to Marxism. See, for example, John Abromeit, “Left Heideggerianism or Phenomenological Marxism? Reconsidering Herbert Marcuse’s Critical Theory of Technology,” Constellations 17:1 (March 2010): 87–106.
- 18.
Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, eds. Richard Wolin and John Abromeit (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
- 19.
Wolin, “Introduction: What is Heideggerian Marcism?” Ibid., xviii.
- 20.
Marcuse, “On Concrete Philosophy,” Ibid., 34.
- 21.
Ibid., 44.
- 22.
Ibid., 46, 47.
- 23.
Ibid., 45.
- 24.
Ibid., 42.
- 25.
Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (1956; Munich: C.H. Beck, 1961).
- 26.
Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, trans. William Q. Boelhower (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 30.
- 27.
Ibid., 35.
- 28.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed., Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 144.
- 29.
On Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger’s pseudo-concreteness, see Wolin, “Introduction,” xx.
- 30.
Günther Stern (Anders), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8:3 (March, 1948): 337–371, quote on 347. I discuss Anders’s critique of Heidegger at greater length in my Heidegger in America, 66–78.
- 31.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Kurt Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973).
- 32.
See Habermas, “Public Space and Political Public Sphere—The Biographical Roots of Two Motifs in My Thought,” in Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity, 2008), 20.
- 33.
Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, trans. William McCuaig, foreword by Robert T. Valgenti (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), xxxi.
- 34.
Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires with the assistance of Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 53.
- 35.
Vattimo, Farewell to Truth, 23, 22. Zabala also discusses the idea of “an ontology of actuality” in his The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), 10 ff.
- 36.
Rorty, “Foreword,” Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, & Law, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia UP, 2004), ix.
- 37.
See Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 87.
- 38.
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000). I discuss Havel and Chakrabarty at greater length in my essay, “Provincializing Human Rights? Human Rights from Charles Malik to Dipesh Chakrabarty,” in José Manuel Barreto, ed., Human Rights from a Third-World Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 65–101.
- 39.
Hermeneutic Communism, 65.
- 40.
Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality, edited and with a preface by Bettina Bien Greaves (1956; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 26.
- 41.
Ibid., ix.
- 42.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 7, 76.
- 43.
Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008).
- 44.
Zabala, The Remains of Being, xii.
- 45.
Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, 36.
- 46.
Valgenti, “Foreword,” to Ibid., xiii.
- 47.
Vattimo, A Frewell to Truth, 21.
- 48.
Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 82.
- 49.
Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” Open letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990, selected and edited by Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage, 1992), 125–214. For more on Havel and the influence of Heideggerian philosophy on his thought and politics, see my “Provincializing Human Rights?”
- 50.
Franz J. Hinkelammert, “Liberation Theology in the Economic and Social Context of Latin America: Economy and Theology, or the Irrationality of the Rationalized,” in Batstone et al., eds., Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas (New York: Routledge, 1997), 48.
- 51.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 15th anniversary edition with a new introduction by the author, trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988), 139.
- 52.
Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” Consequences of Pragmatism—Essays: 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 53–54.
- 53.
Ibid., 54.
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Woessner, M. (2017). Hermeneutic Communism: Left Heideggerianism’s Last Hope?. In: Mazzini, S., Glyn-Williams, O. (eds) Making Communism Hermeneutical. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59021-9_5
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