In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

the difficult truth to admit is that Heidegger is “great” not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement, that this commitment is a key constituent of his “greatness.” Imagine a Heidegger without this passage, or a Heidegger who, after World War II, had done what many colleagues expected of him: namely, publicly renounce his Nazi engagement and apologize for it—would this not somehow have occluded the radicality of his insight? Would it not have constrained him to humanitarian political concerns which he so bitterly despised? Miguel de Beistegui makes a perspicuous observation on the fundamental ambiguity of Heidegger’s disillusionment with Nazism: it was his “resignation and his disillusionment with what, until the end of his life, and with a touch of regret at not having seen it develop its potential, he referred to as ‘the movement’.”³³ Is, however, this not the reason why Heidegger’s later withdrawal from political commitment also cannot be conceived only in the terms of his insight into the nihilism of contemporary politics? De Beistegui concludes his book with the statement that Heidegger

      will not be caught out in [a belief in the redemptive power of political engagement] twice: having burned his fingers in politics, and lost his illusions in the failure of Nazism to carry out a project of onto-destinal significance, his hopes will turn to the hidden resources of thought, art and poetry, all deemed to carry a historical and destinal power far greater than that of politics.³⁴

      But is Heidegger’s refusal to be caught twice in the act of political engagement and thus burning his fingers again not a negative mode of his continuing melancholic attachment to the Nazi “movement”? (His refusal to engage again in politics was thus similar to a disappointed lover who, after the failure of his relationship, rejects love as such and avoids all further relationships, thereby confirming in a negative way his lasting attachment to the failed relationship.) Is the premise of this refusal not that, to the end of his life, Nazism remained for Heidegger the only political commitment which at least tried to address the right problem, so that the failure of Nazism is the failure of the political as such? It never entered Heidegger’s mind to propose—say, in a liberal mode—that the failure of the Nazi movement was merely the failure of a certain kind of engagement which conferred on the political the task of carrying out “a project of onto-destinal significance,” so that the lesson to draw was simply a more modest political engagement. In other words, what if one concludes from the failure of Heidegger’s political experience that what one should renounce is the expectation that a political engagement will have destinal ontological consequences and that one should participate in “merely ontic” politics which, far from obfuscating the need for a deeper ontological reflection, precisely open up a space for it? What if even the very last Heidegger, when he expressed his doubts as to whether democracy was the political order which best fitted the essence of modern technology, had still not learnt the ultimate lesson of his Nazi period, since he continued to cling to the hope of finding an (ontic) political engagement which would fit (be at the level of) the ontological project of modern technology? (Our premise, of course, is that the liberal engagement is not the only alternative: Heidegger was right in his doubt about liberal democracy; what he refused to consider was a radical leftist engagement.)

      Therein resides the importance of the link between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt: what is at stake in the difficult relationship between Heidegger and Arendt is Heidegger’s much-decried aversion to liberalism and (liberal) democracy, which he continuously, to his death, rejected as “inauthentic,” not the idiosyncrasies of their personal liaisons. Arendt was not only opposed to Heidegger along the double axis of woman versus man and a “worldly” Jew versus a “provincial” German, she was (which is much more important) the first liberal Heideggerian, the first to try to reunite Heidegger’s insights with the liberal-democratic universe. In a closer reading, of course, it is easy to discern what enabled Arendt to support liberalism while maintaining her basic fidelity to Heidegger’s insights: her anti-bourgeois stance, her critical dismissal of politics as “interest-group” politics, as the expression of the competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie. She shared the great conservatives’ dissatisfaction with the lack of heroism and the pragmatic-utilitarian orientation of bourgeois society:

      Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with the prewar age and subsequent attempts at restoring it (from Nietzsche to Sorel to Pareto, from Rimbaud and T.E. Lawrence to Juenger, Brecht and Malraux, from Bakunin and Nechayev to Aleksander Blok) is to overlook how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie.³⁵

      The opposition Arendt mobilizes here is the one between citoyen and bourgeois: the first lives in the political sphere of public engagement for the common good, of the participation in public affairs, while the second is the egotistic utilitarian fully immersed in the process of production and who reduces all other dimensions of life to their role in enabling the smooth running of this process. In Aristotelian terms, this opposition is that between praxis and poiesis, between the “high” exercise of virtues in public life, and the “low” instrumentality of labor—the opposition whose echoes reverberate not only in Habermas’s distinction between communicative action and instrumental activity, but even in Badiou’s notion of the Event (and in his concomitant denial that an Event can take place in the domain of production). Recall how Arendt describes, in Badiouian terms, the suspension of temporality as the defining ontological characteristic of ontic political action: acting, as man’s capacity to begin something new, “out of nothing,” not reducible to a calculated strategic reaction to a given situation, takes place in the non-temporal gap between past and future, in the hiatus between the end of the old order and the beginning of the new which in history is precisely the moment of revolution.³⁶ Such an opposition, of course, raises a fundamental question formulated by Robert Pippin:

      how can Arendt separate out what she admires in bourgeois culture—its constitutionalism, its assertion of fundamental human rights, its equality before the law, its insistence on a private zone in human life, exempt from the political, its religious tolerance—and condemn what she disagrees with—its secularism, its cynical assumption of the pervasiveness of self-interest, the perverting influence of money on human values, its depoliticizing tendencies, and the menace it poses for tradition and a sense of place?³⁷

      In other words, are these not two sides of the same phenomenon? No wonder then, that, when Arendt is pressed to provide the outline of the authentic “care of the world” as a political practice that would not be contaminated by utilitarian pragmatic calculation of interests, all she can evoke are forms of self-organization in revolutionary situations, from the early American tradition of town-hall meetings of all citizens to revolutionary councils in the German revolution. Not that she is not politically justified in evoking these examples—the problem is that they are “utopian,” that they cannot be reconciled with the liberal-democratic political order to which she remains faithful. In other words, is Arendt with regard to liberal democracy not the victim of the same illusion as the democratic Communists who, within the “really-existing socialism,” were fighting for its truly democratic instantiation? Arendt is also right when (implicitly against Heidegger) she points out that fascism, although a reaction to bourgeois banality, remains its inherent negation, that is, remains within the horizon of bourgeois society: the true problem of Nazism is not that it “went too far” in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris of exerting total power, but that it did not go far enough, namely, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised. (However, Heidegger would also have been right in rejecting Arendt’s Aristotelian politics as not radical enough to break out of the nihilist space of European modernity.)

      Arendt would thus have been justified in countering Pippin’s all-too-easy version of a contemporary political Hegelianism; his basic claim is that while, of course, from today’s perspective, Hegel’s notion of a rational state no longer works, its limitations are evident, and these very limitations should be addressed in a Hegelian way:

      In some fairly obvious sense and in the historical terms he would have to accept as relevant to his own philosophy, he was wrong. None of these institutional realizations now looks as stable, as rational, or even as responsive to the claims of free subjects as Hegel has