Chapter 7: Postmodernist nihilism

The most academically entrenched attack upon humanism, the Enlightenment, and reason are the highly influential philosophical tendencies that go under the name of postmodernism. It is arguable whether this name adequately encompasses such disparate, even idiosyncratic views as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and a constellation of former French leftists such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, to cite the most well-known to an Anglo-American readership.

Yet certain basic commonalities, I believe, justly designate their work as postmodernist or poststructuralist (the two words are often used interchangeably). To be sure, Nietzsche and Heidegger belong to a time when anti-Enhghtenment sentiments were still rooted in the romantic reaction to the effects of the French Revolution and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Although these two thinkers expressed their sentiments in very different tones and formulations, they were alike part of an antimodernist tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. To many elite intellectuals of these generations, the mechanization of society by capitalism and the rise of a growing socialistic working-class movement seemed equally repellent alternatives to a vaguely ‘heroic’ and ‘inspired’ past.

Basically, however, Nietzsche and Heidegger advanced philosophies of disillusionment and disenchantment. The world to winch Nietzsche spoke was undergoing the cultural transition from a seemingly colorful preindustrial society to a gray, deadening commercial one. Heidegger, although himself a product of south German Catholic reactionism, found an audience in Weimar-era disillusionment — not only with German imperial pretensions during the Great War but with the pretensions of the socialist movement, which had patently failed to fulfill the promise opened by the Bolshevik Revolution.

Despite their differences in style and their different social pedigrees, however, both Nietzsche and Heidegger addressed the fragmentation, anomie, and loss of belief in progress that increasingly troubled intellectuals of their respective times. Although a generation apart, they provided a common cultural field, so to speak, within which later thinkers and journalists found the resources for basically antimodernist sentiments, especially as additional disillusionments arose in the troubled postwar world of the mid-twentieth century.

The years following the Second World War produced a new sense of failure, particularly in France, which was not really one of the ‘victors’ in the conflict. Defeated by the Nazis in 1940, France had had to be liberated by mainly Anglo-American armies. Nor was France quite an ‘occupied’ power like most countries the German armies had taken over in Europe; indeed, given the degree of French co-existence and even collaboration with the Nazis in the early years of the wax, many of its citizens joined the Resistance only when it became clear that Germany was destined to lose the war. After the liberation and a brief social honeymoon of national unity — in which leftists, moderates, and conservatives professed to join hands to achieve national rejuvenation — the country was wracked by the Cold War policies of its most prestigious party, the Communists; by the Third Republic’s efforts to retain its holdings in Indochina; by its debacle in Algeria; and in the 1950s, by a Gaullist Fourth Republic that was determined to radically modernize the country, at least economically.

Culturally, French intellectuals tried to relive the hopeful mood of the liberation days for as long as possible, particularly in the form ofJean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, with its strong emphasis on individual autonomy and its professed commitment to humanism. But Sartre and his colleagues had badly misjudged the roots of their largely personaHstic philosophy of ‘existence’ — namely Heidegger and even more absurdly, Soren Kierkegaard, whose angst-ridden personalistic theology never found a congenial home among liberal or radical French intellectuals.

Although Heidegger himself publicly renounced Sartre’s humanistic thrust in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, the German thinker, largely discredited at home because of his Nazi affiliations, had now acquired a Gallic audience for his antimodernism and anti-rationalism — an audience that was to grow significandy and reach into the English-speaking world. Sartre, in turn, behaved with the notorious flippancy that was to be the ultimate undoing of his influence in French cultural life. Skipping from Russian Communism to Chinese Maoism and thence to various shades of anarchism (the latter, as he professed in the last years of his life, was the abiding basis for Iris views), he made somewhat of a political buffoon of himself, despite the influence of his humanism among young independent-minded French radicals.

No minor factor in shaping the direction of postwar French thinking was the Communist Party, which initially seemed to offer a viable foundation for many French intellectuals, who joined it, however temporarily, in considerable numbers. Its enormous influence with the working class — a class that was historically detached from, indeed hostile to France’s seemingly effete intellectuals — appeared to offer an earthy alternative to Sartre’s existentialist ambiguities.

Not that Sartre was oblivious to the social problems of France; quite to the contrary, he was the-engaged intellectual par excellence, however naive and unstable his politics. But the Communists seemed like a pillar of strength beside the cafe intellectualism that Sartre seemed to embody. The morally rejuvenating’ and earthy working class to which the Communists were tied offered a kind of social and personal therapy to all who fell within the party’s orbit.

Examining the problems that besieged French intellectuals from the end of the war to the 1960s helps to understand how French postmodernism arose and, more importantly, how it acquired its enormous influence. So far as the leftist’ postmodernists are concerned — such as Lyotard, Deleuze, and Baudrillard — the influence of postmodernism must be related to the aborted student uprising of May-June 1968, particularly in Paris, and the failure of the uprising to enlist the support of the Communist Party, which turned upon the students with what seemed to many like counterrevolutionary fury.

The student revolt and the working class general strike that erupted in May had nothing to do intellectually with postmodernism, which was still largely unknown even to many politically sophisticated student radicals. The emerging academic ‘stars’ of the 1960s like Michel Foucault did not directiy influence the French student movement and its May-June uprising, or the evenements as they have been called. It was mainly Sartre’s humanism, the largely Parisian libertarian socialism of Cornelius Castoriadis’s Socialisme ou barbarie group, Guy Debord’s Situationists, Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life, and an indefinable cultural anarchism that nourished the views held by most of the radical students.[242]

But the failure of the uprising, together with the decline of the New Left generally in Europe and America, opened the way to a nihilistic reaction whose effects are still being felt to this very day. Postmodernism is not only a nihilistic reaction to the failures imputed to Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and progress but more proximately a cultural reaction to the failures of various socialisms to achieve a rational society in France and elsewhere in our century. This historic failure reached its nadir in the defeat of the May-June events of 1968 — which is not to say that all major postmodern thinkers can be so situated in this historical framework and sequence.

It may well be that the immediate factors leading to the ascendancy of postmodernism will be forgotten in the future and that postmodernism itself will give way to an even more antihumanistic reaction in its academic strongholds. But the specific circumstances that catapulted Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, et al to such prominence in the last two decades of the twentieth century can be located in the inability of revolutionary movements up to and including the 1960s, to eliminate the massive obstacles that an increasingly industrial and commercial society places in the way of achieving a rational society.

Not surprisingly, there is a certain symmetry between the emergence of postmodernism as a widely accepted ideology and the emergence of the social circumstances that have made it so widely acceptable. Various societies do foster ideologies that render their pathologies tolerable by mystifying the problems they raise. From the primitive world through the ancient to the medieval, world views concomitantly sought to uphold the hegemony of those in power and to explain the crises that unsettled those eras. But they also took on a cathartically rebellious form against the established social order. Early Christianity, like Mithraism before it and the Reformation later on, is a striking case in point.

Today’s market society is no exception to this rule. The very tendency of mature capitalism to fragment traditional social and cultural relations by means of commodification yields reactionary cultural sequelae of its own: specifically, a consolidating ideology that holds the mind captive to the social order in the very name of fragmentation and its alleged virtues. If the social order cannot make a virtue out of hope, it can try to make a virtue out of despair. I am not claiming that postmodernists necessarily bear a personal intention of becoming ideological supports for any social system or that they are the mere creatures of capital. But what makes any given body of ideas acceptable or academically respectable more often has to do with the social functions it serves rather than with the quality of the insights it offers. Indeed, many of the insights that have made postmodernism so attractive are not very new and have been recycled, often unknowingly, from a warehouse of Western and even Eastern ideas that were available in various forms for several centuries, indeed several millennia.

The more one feels disempowered about the human condition and bereft of social commitment, the more one becomes cynical and thereby captive to the prevailing social order. To the extent that hope and belief in progress are lost, a disarming relativism, ahistoricism, and ultimately nihilism replace any belief in the objectivity of truth, the reality of history, and the power of reason to change the world. Beliefs that foster social quietism and a withdrawal into personal life, in turn, tend to neutralize an activist and interventionist mentality oriented toward the public sphere.

By contending that reason is questionable as a path to ascertaining truth, indeed that it is simply a social artifact and that truth is merely a social artifice, postmodernism advances this process, as does its denial that an objective history exists — a denial that divests the present of any ethical moorings and social meaning. Civilization ceases to be regarded as a realm of rational attainments; indeed the very idea of progress as a basis for hope and social foresight begins to fade, if not disappear completely.

Moreover, such sweeping claims tend to obscure the social factors that have created the ‘postmodern condition’ (to use Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s phrase); in fact, by rendering social analysis anemic, even bloodless, postmodernism tends to underpin the status quo precisely by challenging its effects rather than its underlying workings. Considerations of space make it impossible for me to explore postmodernism generally, still less provide an exposition of its ever-changing, even convoluted ideas. Rather, I shall confine myself to examining those aspects of postmodernism that are antihumanist in the sense I am using the word in-this book — as subverting a belief in the power of reason, science, and technology to render society and the human experience rational and free.

Within this delimited scope, postmodernism can clearly be seen as a fragmenting and relativizing ideology par excellence that reflects the anomie and despair so widespread in the closing years of the century. In this respect postmodernism, precisely because it is a ‘weary’ and nihilistic body of ideas, may very well serve to validate the present society or even render it possible for its acolytes to ‘dwell’ rather innocuously within the existing set of social conditions, however much they regard themselves as social rebels, especially concerning issues that do not challenge the structure of the present society.

Its denigration of reason, coherence, and historicism, can hardly provide a sense of direction for popular restiveness or the intellectual means for contesting the anti-ecological and multinational capitalism of our time, still less provide the bases for a serious project for social change. Rather, it more often leads to a pervasive relativism and to a dismembering of the ‘universalist’ projects initiated by Enfightenment thinkers and their more radical descendants), so as to produce a form of social myopia. Put bluntly: it disarms all serious oppositional tendencies toward the prevailing society, apart from the narcissistic adventures of mere personal rebellion in dealing with the frustrations the society arouses in oppressed but marginal cultural groups.

To understand how this often socially deflective approach of postmodernism has emerged, we must look, if only cursorily, into the proximate ancestors of the postmodern outlook and the way they provided the premises for the devaluation of all values — rather than responding seriously to Friedrich Nietzsche’s call for a ‘transvaluation of all values’.

That Nietzsche’s name appears in nearly every discussion of postmodernism is by no means accidental. Indeed, he has been embraced by otherwise opposing theorists across the philosophical and political spectrums, even before his deadi in 1900, with an enthusiasm that is little less than extraordinary. The extent of his influence today has few precedents, with the exception of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

Until fairly recently, Nietzsche’s name conjured up an elitist belief in a ‘Superman’, a hatred of Christianity, and corrosive attacks on socialism, democracy, and the slavish masses or ‘herd’. Indeed, his philosophy was seen as ideological furniture for the various reactionary beliefs that flourished in his time and that came to terrifying fruition in our own century. The favorable recognition he received from rabid reactionaries, and even the imprimatur of the Nazis on his writings, as edited by Iris reactionary anti-Semitic sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche — together with a personal visit by Hitler to the Nietzsche archives — reinforced the belief that Nietzsche was a precursor of National Socialism.

Yet Nietzsche’s proclivity for slapping the face of bourgeois philistines earned him encomiums from socialists and anarchists as well. Radicals of all kinds delighted in his militant individualism, with its kinship to the ideas of the alleged anarchist Max Stimer. He enjoyed great popularity among militant syndicalists, such as Salvador Segui, a leader of the Spanish syndicalist union, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), and the anarchist, Emma Goldman, who praised his vibrant iconoclasm and hatred of the German state, as did socialists like Jack London. Many Marxists solidarized with Nietzsche’s biting criticisms of bourgeois mean-spiritedness and vulgarity, while the father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, admired his strident contempt for anti-Semites and the praises he heaped on the Jews.

That Nietzsche was neither a German nationalist nor an anti-Semite, as so many supposed, no longer requires elucidation today. He was indeed individualist, and a biting critic of mass culture and the ‘slave mentality’ inculcated in the ‘herd’ by Christianity. His broader philosophical notions of the Ubermensch, of eternal recurrence, of life as the ‘will to power’, and his personal values shall not concern us here.

Nietzsche’s thinking provides a base for postmodernist thought in that, more brilhandy than any other writer of the last century, he made relativism a pivotal tenet of his outlook. By doing so, he called into question all the seeming certainties of traditional philosophies based on objective truth. Not that he denied the existence of an objective world, or, more properly, even cared very earnestly to discuss this traditional philosophical question; the most important conclusion he drew from his relativism was his reduction of facts to interpretations with no objective validity of their own. His views thereby seemed to permit the freedom to shuffle opinions around without concern for whether they ax verifiable independently of the observer who formulates them. Nietzsche’s agnosticism, if such it can be called, implied that it is meaningless to speak of an objective realm in which values, theories, and experience can be based. •

This relativism or ‘perspectivism’, as Nietzsche called his view, is built on Gustav Teichmuller’s notion that every body of ideas is a simple, partial, and incomplete perspective on a highly complex world. Each view of the world, for Teichmuller, was equally valid with any other — a pivotal contribution to postmodern thinking — although his views are rarely, if ever discussed these days. Yet his approach that any body of ideas is partial, indeed that it contributes to an increasingly broader understanding of reality — was hardly new: Hegel, and much earlier Aristotle, assumed such a ‘perspectivist’ approach to the philosophical views that preceded their own. Moreover, Teichmuller assumed that there is a reality, however complex and unfathomable, that is beyond mere interpretation, and that it can be known by reason as well as by experience.

Nietzsche questions this traditional conclusion. In a posthumously published fragment he asks:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymns, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, ivhich have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.[243]

By omitting the certainties of truth from his discussion, Nietzsche presents a radical relativism — a subjective, even linguistic relativism — that has entered into postmodernism with a vengeance. Thus:

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena — ‘TJtere are only facts’ — I would say: No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’ ... ‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. — Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretations? Even this is invention, hypothesis.[244]

None of these statements prevent Nietzsche, in principle, from exercising the privilege of saying as much as he cares to say about ideas and reality, least of all within the very philosophical realm he professes to reject. He even has a full philosophy, by no means far removed from the metaphysics he denounces. Nietzsche presents his ‘perspectives’, such as his notion of eternal recurrence, as though they have objective validity or facticity. Notwithstanding recent attempts to give this notion a metaphoric quality, Nietzsche himself actually wanted to study the natural sciences to find ontological evidence for this cyclical belief.

Although a number of Nietzsche’s failings — arguably — were criticized by Heidegger and later by postmodernists, his lasting imprint on postmodernist thought cannot be ignored. By reducing truth to linguistic traditions and facts to interpretations, he provides postmodernists with the means — as well as the stylistic brilliance and fervent militancy — to radically subjectivize truth and facts, and to deny the validity of any objective concept of history as universalistic, indeed as more than a disjointed, variable, and free-floating collection of narratives. The same fragmenting and seemingly subversive strategy could also be applied to science, reason, the subject, and social theory, all of which postmodernists were to cast as specific social or even personal creations.

In a harsh deprecation of ‘man’ and reason, Nietzsche regales us with the fable of an inconsequential ‘star on winch clever animals invented knowledge’ during ‘the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of “world history” — yet only a minute’ in cosmic time, after winch ‘the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die’. Nor does the fable sufficiently illustrate, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.... There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge.’[245]

Nietzsche’s explicit depreciation of humanity, his denigration of reason, and his view of truth as little more than metaphor reverberated among many reactionaries who followed him, people whom he probably would have denounced as Reichsmenschen, as he was to designate Richard Wagner for surrendering to German nationalism. His idiosyncratic mind and his brilliant style lures us too easily into his literary orbit and mystifies us with pithy and colorful generalizations. Yet the misanthropic attitudes that underpin so much of his thought should not be ignored. Nietzsche was no angel, and to his credit, he would-have despised anyone who called him one. His irascibility, at once coaxing and bullying, selfl-certain and contradictory, may account for the ability of his books to speak to a very broad spectrum of thinkers at different times.

As criticism of the late Victorian world whose philistinism infected Germany no less than England, his work is sparkling when it is not recklessly self-adulatory. Waves of metaphors and an unrelenting linguistic brilliance carry the reader away. That his works were taken seriously during a period of social reaction some seventy or eighty years after his death, and elicited a vast number of commentaries on him as one of the three most influential philosophers of our era, side by side with Marx and Freud, is not surprising. Social reaction breeds cultural decadence, and the most articulate academic critics of that decadence, drawn in great part from a disillusioned French left, came to be among the most compelling symptoms of decadence itself

What filiations do postmodernists claim with Nietzsche, and what have they added to his putative insights?

Certainly, Nietzsche’s immediate, indeed ‘programmatic’ contribution is his perspectivism, his radical if undertheorized relativism. To tins we must add his candid anti-rationalism, his linguistic interpretation of facticity, his denial of objectivity, and his view of the subject as something ‘invented and projected behind what there is’ — even to the point where he challenges the existence of ‘an interpreter behind the interpretation’. Not only are these paradoxes dizzying, but Nietzsche himself was hardly prone to deny that they existed unresolved.

In the Paris of the 1950s and early 1960s, however, poststructuralist and later postmodernist intellectuals were not disciplined readers of earlier philosophers and tended to glide over such paradoxes, which often verge on outright contradictions. In fact, they even celebrated, when it was opportune, the needed ‘ambiguities’ that challenge the so-called ‘logo centric’ thinking of modernity and humanism.

The most important of French postwar philosophers to claim the direct heritage of Nietzsche — and stylistically the most bewitching — was Michel Foucault. Eschewing labels like postmodernism, he simply declared, ‘I am a Nietzschean’, shordy before his death in 1984, and with wry humor he deprecated postmodernism as a fad. Although Foucault earned a growing audience with his early works and some distinction as a thinker inside France, he really catapulted into the public eye after the May—June events.[246]

Foucault’s readership grew with the publication of Madness and Civilization in France in 1961 and its translation in an abridged form into English in 1963, followed by his best-selling The Order of Things in 1965. Yet his work seemed no more relevant to the radical culture of the time than Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, to which it was compared in a New York Times book review. His reputation swelled with the publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975, followed by its translation into English within two years. In the nine years that remained to him, Foucault became one of the most lionized, sought-after, and acclaimed intellectuals on the academic scene, not only in France but in the United States. By the 1980s many critics hailed him as the greatest thinker of the late twentieth century.

Why this enormous acclaim for a historian whose work is often anecdotal and who as a speculative thinker is not very searching? Foucault owes a great deal of his immense reputation to the failure of 1968 and its aftermath, not to any role he played as an initiator of or even a major influence on the May—June events. His books unquestionably speak to an intellectual need associated with the evenements: the critique of power, the ideology of the traditional left, and the celebration of marginalized life-styles. He is deeply concerned with the masked forms of domination in everyday life that rarely reach the level of ordinary consciousness. In this respect he often followed paths reconnoitered by Henri Lefebvre, who pioneered the study of everyday life (le quotidien) as far back as the 1940s. Moreover, many of his readers saw Foucault’s books as critiques of civilization as such and of any belief in progress, a view that was to come very much into vogue in the seventies and the decades that followed.[247]

Foucault is above all a chronicler of domination, regarded by many of his readers, all his excursions into language and the ‘human sciences’ no twithstanding; indeed, many present-day Parisians see him primarily as a historian, not as a philosopher. In the early and mid-1970s, Foucault’s critique of domination, if by no means original, seemed particularly appropriate. The 1968 student uprising in Paris had been not only a revolt against the myth that socialism existed in Stalinist Russia but evidence of a growing sensitivity on the part of French academics to youth subcultures that placed an expanded interpretation of selfhood on the agenda of social liberation. In this respect the New Left initially stood in marked contrast to the economistic doctrines of the Old Left, which, in France, at least, was still organized into powerful parties. Freedom and domination seemed to acquire a broader meaning than they had had in the past, especially when colored by a radical estheticism steeped in Dadaist and Surrealist traditions rather than in Marxist or Communist ones.

Understandably, the failure of the May—June revolt did not diminish the new fascination with largely cultural interpretations of social development. Quite to the contrary: radicals of nearly all kinds saw a need for studies of concrete forms of domination; for investigations into the oppressive dimensions of everyday life, whether in the past or the present; indeed, for accounts of subjugation and coercion that eschewed ‘grand’, seemingly abstract, and finalistic theories about history and the future of society.

Foucault’s critique of domination and power now became increasingly popular: it managed to satisfy these needs in varying degrees, earning considerable, and in France, popular acclaim. Not only did his books, interviews, and lectures describe oppressions that ordinarily take the form of rational and humane dispensations, such as asylums that profess to ‘treat’ the insane and prisons that profess to ‘rehabilitate’ their inmates; his criticisms of domination and power were ubiquitous, extending from asylums and prisons to the most minute features of everyday life.

Moreover, whatever he intended his work to achieve, Foucault attacked institutions as such. In one of his most interesting dialogues — with a Maoist, Pierre Victor — he defends the 1792 September massacres during the French Revolution, in which seemingly uncontrolled crowds, fearing ‘internal enemies’ of the Revolution, brutally killed thousands of prisoners in the jails of the Paris area; most of the latter were not political prisoners but prostitutes, debtors, and minor malefactors. The massacres, Foucault declares, were ‘a political act against the manipulation of those in power, and an act of vengeance against the oppressive classes.’ He favorably contrasts this ‘popular justice’ executed by a crowd with the institutionalized ‘authoritarian manner’ in which the Paris Commune of 1792

set about staging a court: judges behind a table, representing a third party standing between the people who were ‘screaming for vengeance j and the accused who were either ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’; an investigation to establish the ‘truth’ or to obtain a ‘confession; deliberation in order to find out what was ‘just’.... Can we not see the embryonic, albeit fragile form of a state apparatus reappearing here?[248]

This passage is plainly directed against institutionalization in any form — as though the crowd’s behavior were entirely spontaneous (which it probably was not) and the Commune’s creation of an ad hoc ‘court’ constituted an ‘embryonic ... state apparatus’ (which it did not, under the circumstances). Lacking any searching theoretical or historical contextuality, Foucault’s statements on the profoundly important issue of just treatment for criminal behavior ax completely reckless and only seemingly radical. To see an ‘embryonic’ state power in institutionalized human interaction, even in its strictly functional and ad hoc forms, is as simplistic as it is misleading. Carried to its logical conclusion, Foucault’s view essentially excludes the possibility that any kind of society can exist without domination, unless it is a free-wheeling mass of individuals who somehow congeal into ‘functional’ bodies like the September crowds. That the arbitrariness of crowd ‘actions’ may undermine the imperatives of organized and rational human behavior seems to have been undertheorized at best or barely reached the level of conscious formulation at worst. Foucault’s anecdotal and almost microscopic treatment of power notwithstanding, his very endeavor to show its ubiquity in fact makes power too cosmic and elusive to grasp. We know the details of power — often quite marginal details — but we do not know the premises and the structure of power, notably, the crucial social relations that underpin it. Seen only as the exercise of coercion (which the crowds of September 1792 cert ainly exercised!), power becomes too ubiquitous to cope with. It is everywhere — and, functionally, beyond comprehension — however much it may vary in degrees or be concentrated by institutions. There is no good reason why the September massacre crowds that brutally slaughtered the prisoners were more ‘free’ or desirable than a court set up by the Paris Commune to sift enemies of the revolution from petty criminals.

More specifically, power itself is not something whose elimination is actually possible. Hierarchy, domination, and classes can and should be eliminated, as should the use of power to force people to act against their will. But the liberatory use of power, the empowerment of the disempowered, is indispensable for creating a society based on self-management and the need for social responsibility — in short, free institutions. It seems inconceivable that people could have a free society, both as social and personal beings, without claiming power, institutionalizing it for common and rationally guided ends, and intervening in the natural world to meet rational needs.

Foucault’s opposition to institutions as such significantiy impairs his critique of power. Not only does the substantial and formal exercise of power vex him; institutionalization in all forms is so integrally related to the exercise of power that his critique is completely reductionist, which is to say, vacuously abstract. Institutions are part of even the simplest of human affiliations, be they families, clans, tribes, or municipalities of one kind or another, not to speak of the multitude of‘estabhshments’ human beings require simply to have a society. Thus, Foucault exhibits litde or no concern about the nature of power. His pseudo-libertarian approach is ultimately so sweeping as to verge on extreme individualism. No distinction is made between power held by state institutions and power claimed by popular institutions or between institutions that lead to tyranny and those that lead to freedom. Not surprisingly, Foucault, a political-activist in his own way, was committed to episodic events: to demonstrations, protests, battles with the police — in short, to discontinuous occurrences, local situations that are entirely ephemeral, that come and go in the flux of mere events and never lead to the formation of broad social movements. Advancing no constructive structural analysis of power as such, Foucault offers no remedies for social change beyond the impact of incidents — tumultuous at best and passive at worst.

Like a gnomic wanderer with a taste for the marginal, Foucault searches historical accounts with an eye for the cryptic episode — the mythic, the masked’, indeed, the irrational, of which he is not a critic in principle, but a celebrant, living below the level of conscious, forthright exploration. If Nietzsche declared that God is dead, Foucault announces ‘the end of man’; but where Nietzsche was militant in his pronouncement, Foucault is hazy and elliptical. The often convoluted prose of The Order of Things, with its emphasis on the ontogenetic role of language, tells us little more than what Nietzsche was to say in his affirmation of human ephemerality.

Indeed, using language mythopoeicafly with a sense of private mystery, Foucault announces humanity’s burial:

Thus, the last man is at the .same time older and yet younger than the death of God; since he has killed God, it is he himself who must answer for his ownfmitude; but since it is in the death of God that he speaks, thinks, and exists, his murder itself is doomed to die; new gods, the same gods, are already swelling the future Ocean; man will disappear. Rather than the death of God — or, rather, in the wake of that death and in profound correlation with it — what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of the masks.[249]

This is a singularly reactionary statement. It heralds the coming of ‘new gods, the same gods’ in ‘the future Ocean’, and with its quasi-mystical and ambiguous prose, it epitomizes Foucault’s rejection of the Enlightenment, which tried to eliminate God from the human condition and bring humanity face to face with itself and with reality by removing its mythic ‘masks’. In the Nietzschean myth of eternal recurrence, as Foucault seems to see it, the ‘death of God’ prepares the way not only for ‘the end of man’, but for the return of other gods and atavistic ‘masks’ — if not the physical destruction of humanity itself in a nuclear holocaust.

As for truth, Foucault declares that it

isn’t outside power, lacking in power contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves . Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint . And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse ivhich it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.[250]

Foucault, in effect, escalates Nietzsche’s own perspectivism without adding any dialectic of truth, of knowledge, of thought, and least of all of history. The reader is left with only the impoverished relativism of a fixed time and place, of power in all its ‘masks’. History appears as ‘data’ organized into ‘regimes of truth’, each of which is essentially hermetic and self-enclosed. Given these specific ‘regimes of truth’, social freedom is essentially impossible because power, as exercised by these ‘regimes’, is integral to social life as such. The ‘regimes of truth’ do depend to one degree or another on each other, in the form of shredded ‘hand-me-downs’, not as a developing continuum, let alone a universalistic one.

There is enough in Foucault’s often equivocal and cryptic writings to suggest that he denies the possibility that we can actually attain social liberation. We may resist the social order perhaps, but only in the defensive actions of ‘local insurrections’, as Foucault calls them. We can defy, protest, strike a blow against the all-embracing authority of ‘regimes of truth’, but a radical breach with the established order and its replacement with a truly liberated one is precluded by the premise that social life and its indispensable institutionalization is essentially a system of subordination and domination that we merely ‘reinscribe’ when we try to replace one social form with another.[251]

There can be little doubt that Foucault was a humane man, viscerally concerned about the injustices that existed in the world, and frequently prepared to act militantly in defense of human rights. But he offers no basic philosophy for his actions and in many ways vitiates the emergence of one. As a critic of power he in fact leaves us quite powerless to change our fate, and foresees, along with Nietzsche, not only the end of God but the end of man. His explicit antihumanism, his rejection of the potentialities opened by the Enlightenment, his ahistoricism, and his treatment of truth as a ‘regime’ of domination are too debilitating in their social effects to support the image of the engaged French intellectual. He drifted from Stalinism to Maoism to a life-style anarchism — more propedy, nihilism — within a span of only two decades. It is as a defining thinker of poststructuralism and postmodernism that his basic ideas are of concern here.

A variety of thinkers who emerged along with Foucault in the early 1960s and flourished after the collapse of the 1968 events laid the basis for what is now generically called postmodernism. The most notable of this group are Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Jean Baudrillard, several of whom made their careers in the United States as well as France. Not all of these writers accept a postmodernist label, but their work rarely justifies this disclaimer and all of them, without exception, can validly be regarded as bitter opponents of the ensemble of ideas I have called enlightened humanism.

Apart from Foucault, the most widely known of the group is Jacques Derrida, a French Algerian of Sephardic Jewish ancestry, whose books, articles, and lectures have had an enormous influence in Anglo-American universities. And it is with Derrida and his intellectual grounding that we will be principally concerned in most of the pages that follow.

If Foucault expressly placed himself in the tradition of Nietzsche, Derrida places himself in the tradition of the later Heidegger. The extent to which these two ‘traditions’ can in fact be clearly distinguished from each other is arguable; Nietzsche could have nourished both French thinkers in formulating their many common and defining views. As we have seen, he had already ‘abolished’ the subject (or ‘interpretator’), the objectivity of truth, and the significance of humanity in the cosmic nature of things. These are major motifs in both Foucault and Derrida. But Derrida himself has insisted upon his filiations with — and transcendence of — Heidegger, particularly in the closing pages of the ‘Ends of Man’ and in his *Of Spirit&, and there is no reason why we should not take him at his word as well as acknowledge his reservations.[252]

Today’s academic investment in Heidegger (as well as in Foucault and Derrida) is so immense that anyone who challenges Heidegger’s status as the ‘greatest philosopher’ of the twentieth century risks garnering opprobrium verging on defamation. Yet the emperor, in fact, is wearing very few clothes indeed. Far from being a significant philosopher, Martin Heidegger is not only grossly overrated as a thinker but he is one of the most reactionary on the spectrum of Weltanschauung thought.

More pretentious and mystical than his acolytes are prone to acknowledge, Heidegger was a product of south German provincialism.[253] The trajectory of his ideas from the 1920s to his last works in the 1970s situates him in what Fritz Stem has called a Kulturreligion that

embraced nationalism ... for it insisted on the identity of German idealism and nationalism. The essence of the German nation was expressed in its spirit, revealed by its artists and thinkers, and at times still reflected in the life of the simple, unspoiled folk.... Common were the lamentations about the decline of the German spirit, the defeat of idealism by the forces of realism in politics and of materialism in business.[254]

Although he was initially trained in theology, Heidegger’s 1920s writings retain a secularity that probably stemmed from his training with Edmund Husserl, the distinguished ‘father’ of modern phenomenology, who called upon philosophers to remove the multitude of assumptions that overlie direct access to ‘the facts’ — an appeal that ended, oddly enough, in a variant of idealism rather than empiricism. As Husserl’s assistant and his chosen successor at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger, far from ‘going back to the facts’, essentially mystified them. In his Being and Time (1927), the work that made his reputation in Germany and abroad and that he dedicated to Husserl ‘in friendship and admiration’, Heidegger’s jargon freights psychological notions with an ‘ontological’ perspective that only superficially resembles ontology as an inquiry into the nature of reality. In fact, Heidegger essentially inteflectualized his regional provincialism and reactionism into a metaphysical psychology — much more than a philosophy — and made intellectual history by transforming moods and sentiments into categories. The work for which he is still best known, Being and Time, published in 1927, found a ready audience in Germany, particularly among young people and academic mandarins afflicted by the alienation, cultural pessimism, and Weltschmerz of the Weimar era.

Heidegger professed to break, root and branch, with what he took to be 2,500 years of Western philosophical thought — that is to say, in fact, with traditional ontology itself. Far from producing a new ontology, he subverted ontology by using traditional categories like ‘Being’ and ‘Time’ to radically redefine its appropriate concerns. From Plato’s time onward, Heidegger contended, ontology had steadily focused on an elaboration of the ultimate foundations of temporal phenomena, be those foundations Platonic ‘forms’, Aristotelian substance, the Cartesian subject, materialism’s matter, or contemporary science’s energy. Heidegger’s complaint, let me emphasize, is not worth a pfennig as criticism, for these traditional foci were and still should be the real concerns of ontology, regardless of whether one agrees with a specific ontological view such as Plato’s or Descartes’s.

But for Heidegger, this line of thought has ‘concealed’ or lost contact with what it means for phenomena ‘to be’ . It straitjackets ‘isness’ or ‘Being’ (Sein) in rational categories, instead of letting specific beings or entities (Seiende) simply ‘be’ or ‘manifest’ themselves for what they ‘really’ are. In the course of this ‘concealment’ , human beings become separated from ‘Being’ , indeed, from ‘things themselves’ , and they develop a productivist mentality that views entities as mere objects for human use. Heidegger reduces ontology to a form of cultural and psychological criticism, overlaid by a verbiage that restates the ontological concept of ‘Being’ as ‘self-realization’ rather than reality in all its forms and characteristics.

In our own time, according to Heidegger, we are totally enveloped by a manipulative and technocratic attitude toward things, such that, divested from our contact with ‘Being’ , we are left on our own, leading ‘inauthentic’ fives in which we dread our own finiteness and mortality. Far from heroically affirming the certainty of death and becoming ‘authentic’ in our affirmation of our humanness, or Dasein (literally: Being-there), with its wealth of possibilities, we have disengaged ourselves from nature and retreated into the crude materialism and everyday trivialities that occupy the fives of what Heidegger calls the ‘They’ (das Man) or, equivalently, what Nietzsche called the ‘herd’ . We are permeated by Angst , ‘thrown’ into a wodd that is marked by ‘ambiguity’ , ‘idle talk’ , a ‘falling’ (Verfalien) of Dasein into the ‘herdlike world that renders our ‘Being-in-the-world’ (which Heidegger designates as the basic state of Dasein) increasingly ‘inauthentic’ (uneigentlich).

Being and Time essentially borrows themes from Soren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and anti-Enfightenment ideas from German romantic conservatives to explicate our ‘fall’ or ‘falling’ from authenticity to inauthenticity, using a metaphysical terminology that transforms verbs into nouns. To fall, for example, is a verb, loaded with religious meaning, but it is hard to say what it signifies when it is turned into the metaphysical noun falling, as is the case with ‘thrownness’ , which essentially deals with the fact that we do not create the world in which we find ourselves. It is clear from a reading of Being and Time that we have been ‘falling’ for some time, now, and yet Heidegger’s use of the term suggests a quasi-religious descent that the Bible encapsulated into a single event. Be that as it may, it is hard to avoid the feeling that Heidegger’s ‘falling’ is a secular version of the biblical ‘fall’ and includes the penalty, as we shall see, of a loss for which we are or have been paying a grave, almost apocalyptic penalty in his later works.

Nor does Heidegger always provide us with clear formulations that have, in fact, been stated more succinctly by other thinkers before him. Consider the following dense statement in Being and Time: ‘Even if Dasein is “assured” in its belief about its “whither”’, we are told, ‘all this counts for nothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood brings Dasein before the “that-it-is” of its “there”, which, as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma.’[255] Allow me to suggest that this is overloaded verbiage for a condition that Marx, for example, noted more pithily when he wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted by the past.’ [256]

It is necessary to tear off Heidegger’s linguistic mask — one that hides the ‘authentic’ face of postmodernism generally — if we are to get to the essentials of the Heidegger-Derrida connection. The ease with which Heidegger’s language permits him to engage in circular reasoning; his typically mystical recourse to ‘silence’ as the mode of discourse for ‘conscience’ ; his contradictory emphasis on personalism on the one hand and the subordination of individual inclinations to the collective ‘destiny’ of the ‘Volk’ , on the other — all can be examined only in a book-length account of Heideggerian thought.

But Heidegger’s observation on the relationship of the individual to what seems uncomfortably like a Volksgemeinschaft or ethnic ‘people’s community’ — so central to German reactionary and National Socialist ‘moods’ — is too compelling to ignore. Destiny ‘is how we designate the lustoricizing of the community, of a Volk,’ Heidegger tells us in Being and Time , nor is destiny ‘something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities.’ Indeed, as Heidegger adds a few paragraphs later, given the ‘authentic repetition of a possibility that has been — the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero — is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness.’[257]

In such passages Heidegger is already, as early as in Being and Time, insinuating a ‘leadership principle’ into his ‘ontology’. What is unambiguous is that he is a reactionary elitist, for whom the ‘They’ — bluntly, the Nietzschean ‘herd’ — is the inauthentic raw material of the authentic few, most notably the German reactionary mandarins who are guided by conscience, guilt, care, and a heroic stance toward the certainty of death. In an outstanding study of the relationship of Heidegger’s ‘ontology’ to liis political philosophy, Richard Wofin observes that, following Heidegger’s thought, the ‘They’ , or

those who dwell in the public sphere of everydayness are viewed as essentially incapable of self-rule. Instead, the only viable political philosophy that follows from this standpoint would be brazenly elitist: since the m ajority of citizens remain incapable of leading meaningful lives when left to their own devices, their only hope for Redemption! lies in the imposition of a ‘higher spiritual mission’ from above.[258]

Notoriously, Heidegger became a fervent member of the National Socialist party in 1933 and remained one until the collapse of the Third Reich. Notoriously, too, whatever differences he may have had with more dogmatic approaches to Nazism, he tried to ‘elevate’ it by enlarging its ‘spiritual mission’ , albeit still retaining much of its folk philosophy. To deny this part of Heidegger’s life and philosophy is totally unjustified in the fight of what is now known about his own cynical attempts to conceal his past.

Nor did he show any contrition after the war for his membership in the Nazi Party. His failure to confront the Shoah or ‘Holocaust’ , or even to acknowledge its distinctiveness, is beneath contempt, as are his contrived excuses for removing his original dedication of Being and Time to Edmund Husserl — his former mentor was Jewish — and for his own silence upon Husserl’s death in 1936. Indeed, during the thirties, after he entered the National Socialist Party, his ‘philosophy’ began to acquire an increasingly antihumanistic, abstract, and essentially suprahuman form.

Thus, in Being and Time, Being can only manifest itself through man, or Dasein, which, unlike all other ‘entities’, has a capacity to understand Being. By the 1930s, Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as an individual phenomenon vaporizes into a collective and essentially volkisch concept, and Being acquires a quasi-mystical autonomy. In a pithy and insightful interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘turn’ (Kehre) in the mid-1930s and the 1940s, Richard Wofin observes that the thought of the later Heidegger

appears at times to be a summary justification of human passivity and inaction (Gelassenheit).... Being assumes the character of an omnipotent primal force, a ‘first unmoved mover’ [a function that Aristotle assigned to his ontological God], whose ‘presencing’ proves to be the determinative, ultimate instance for events in the lowly world of human affairs. In its other-worldly supremacy, this force both withdraws from the tribunal of human reason and defies the meager capacities of human description: ‘A Being that not only surpasses all beings — and thus all men — but which like an unknown God rests and “essences” in its own truth, in that it is sometimes present and sometimes absent, can never be explained like a being in existence: instead it can only be “evoked.”’[259]

The collapse of the Third Reich did not eliminate Heidegger’s fingering loyalty to the ‘spiritual mission’ of the ‘National Revolution’ , as Hitler’s ascent to power was called by its adherents — and his emphasis on National Socialism’s regenerative ‘spiritual’ potentialities, as distinguished from its very secular performance, gave Heidegger a great deal of legitimacy among his later French- and English-speaking sycophants. It is hard to tell whether Heidegger was a naif trapped in a misguided skein of fascist intrigue and betrayal or whether his French admirers decided to behave like naifs trapped in an unsavory admiration for the former rector of Freiburg University.

Rambunctiously fascistic and nationalistic in his speeches and lectures during the early 1930s, Heidegger’s metaphysics now acquired a more ‘restful’, indeed fatalistic tone, turning to poetry, particularly Holderfin’s, the ontogenetic role of language, and philosophical allusions to a quietism that are redolent of Asian theisms. His postwar writings were permeated by mysticism, indeed by an apocalyptic theism. In an interview he gave to the German weekly Der Spiegel in September 1966 (on the •condition that it be published posthumously), he confronted the threat of the ‘technological state’ and philosophy’s role in resisting its encroachment with the following conclusions:

If I may answer quickly and perhaps somewhat vehemently, but from long reflection: Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.[260]

In a sense, the interview was Heidegger’s testament — and also a fascinating clarification of his views which can be traced back even to Being and Time, It is often safer to take Heidegger’s statements at face value than to rely on his exegetists to adorn them with overloaded interpretations that remove us from the essential meaning of his words — a solution, to be sure, that would bankrupt many commentators on Heidegger who have managed to render his works and postmodernism a hermetic world accessible only to devout initiates.

The entry of French postwar philosophers into the murky waters of Heideggerian thought was a disaster to serious reflection — and we are still bearing the burden they imposed as this century nears its end. Whatever Nietzsche and Heidegger wrote, their French admirers ratcheted up to even more obscure, and in many respects, more antimodern levels than the two Germans achieved, albeit short of turning to fascism and nationalism. One of the most vexing members of this crew is Jacques Derrida, whose use of Heidegger left a trail of wreckage in Anglo-American literary criticism that has also passed over into social thought.

An indefatigable writer and lecturer with an enormous following, Derrida has made paradox, contradiction, linguistic juggling, and’ inchoate thinking into virtues. Many of his verbal gymnastics derive from Heidegger, although he cannot be denied the responsibility for generating considerable confusion in his own right. To enter into the Derridean skein of criss-crossing ideas, assertions, inscriptions, and convoluted ‘horizons’, ‘spaces’, and self-indulgent queries that, in my view, muddle rather than clarify a viewpoint is beyond the scope of this book. Indeed, more than one book would be needed to give Derrida his due — and I do not mean this in any complimentary sense.

The relationship of Derrida to Heidegger has been meticulously chronicled, step by step and word by word, in an essay by Charles Spinosa.[261] Despite his rather easygoing style, Spinosa’s comparison is demanding, and I shall do no more than take up the salient commonalities that he identifies.

The conventional belief has been that Derrida’s filiations with Heidegger began wdth Heidegger’s ‘turn’ from a more or less traditional ontology to explicit antihumanism after the war. Yet Spinosa shows quite inadvertently that Being and Time feeds as much into Derrida’s thinking as does Heidegger’s very influential postwar antihumanist essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, as well as other essays of the late 1940s and 1950s.

This relationship is not simply an academic issue. Derrida has emphasized that in Being and Time, written in the late 1920s, and particularly in his 1930s writings, Heidegger was still tied to a ‘metaphysics of presence’ — that is, a metaphysics of underlying foundations that characterized the traditional ontologies of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and even including Nietzsche. For Derrida, this ‘metaphysics of presence’ constitutes the premises of humanism, anthropocentrism, science, and rationalism — which, yes, led ultimately to fascism! Indeed, if I read Derrida’s analysis correctly, National Socialism is a result of humanism, possibly even its apogee.

Thus it is worth referring to one of Heidegger’s more repulsive Nazi ‘texts’, most famously his ‘Self-Assertion of the German University’, the lecture he gave on assuming the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1933, to get a sense of what Derrideans regard as Heidegger’s explicit or latent ‘humanism’. Laced with references to ‘spirit’ and the ‘spiritual leadership’ that the university must undertake in serving the Third Reich, Heidegger’s address actually pivots around a rejection of academic freedom as merely ‘negative liberty’ and appeals for the more ‘substantive’ claims of service by students that result from ‘three bonds’. All three are largely Hitlerian: ‘The three bonds by the people, to the destiny of the state, in spiritual mission — are equally primordial to the German essence. The three services that are from it — Labor Service, Military Service, and Knowledge Service — are equally necessary and of equal rank.’[262]

Nor was Heidegger free of the jingoistic and racist rhetoric of the time when he referred to ‘Spirit’. He told his listeners:

Spirit is not empty cleverness, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor the boundless drift of rational dissection, let alone world reason; spirit is the primordially attuned knowing resoluteness toward the essence of Being. And the spiritual world of a people [Volk] is not the superstructure of a culture any more than it is an arm ory filled with useful information and values; it is the power that most deeply preserves the people’s earth- and blood-bound strength as the power that most deeply aroused and most profoundly shakes the people’s existence.[263]

It requires enormous credulity — or naivety — to regard such passages from the rectoral address as spiritual, still less as being in accord with a traditional, presumably humanistic metaphysics of spirit; rather, it is an odious exercise in fascist rhetoric. In their devastating account of ‘the “French Heideggerians” gathered around Jacques Derrida’, Luc Ferry and Alain Renault observe that, confronted ‘with the question of Heidegger’s Nazism’, they

have irrevocably chosen their side and found their concept through an extraordinary recommendation: if Heidegger was a Nazi, which no one now can dispute, it certainly was not because he condemned the world of democratic humanism and thus saw the appeal of a conservative revolution; and if as one student of Derrida’s [Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe] coolly asserts, c Nazism is a humanism ’ (sic), we should judge that the Heidegger of 1933 was naturally led to Nazism because he ivas still in the grip of a humanistic and spiritualistic tradition he had not yet adequately deconstructed, Q.E.D.[264]

In fact, Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question bears out that Ferry and Renault have taken aim with considerable accuracy.[265] Derrida’s ‘text’ begins with a tangled series of questions on the meaning of‘Spirit’ (Geist) that leads the reader into an increasingly abstract discussion of the rectoral address. It requires no intellectual astuteness to see that, however much Heidegger used philosophical verbiage to give a high tone to his address, it was meant to serve the needs of the Nazi regime. This fact does not elude Derrida, but his comments on the address are marked by numerous equivocations, in which he seems to take Heideggers manipulation of philosophical terms, particularly spirit’, in a stricdy philosophical sense. Accordingly, Derrida observes that ‘one could say that [Heidegger] spiritualizes National Socialism. And one could reproach him for this, as he will later reproach Nietzsche for having exalted the spirit of vengeance into a “spirit of vengeance” spiritualized to the highest point’ — as if Heidegger’s words and Nietzsche’s were of comparable significance in this connection and Heidegger were dealing essentially with philosophical issues in his rectoral address:

‘But on the other [!] hand,’ Derrida proceeds, treating both sides of the argument as if they were equally valid,

by taking the risk of spiritualizing nazism, he might [!] have been trying to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation [!] (spirituality, science, questioning, etc.), By the same token, this sets apart Heidegger’s commitment and breaks [!] an affiliation. This address seems no longer to belong simply [!] to the ‘ideological’ camp in which one appeals to obscure forces — forces which would not be spiritual, but natural, biological, racial, according to anything but spiritual interpretation of earth and blood.’[266]

This deconstruction of the address is all the more unsavory because Heidegger’s address was eminently ideological and did appeal to these ‘obscure forces’, such as ‘the people’s earth- and blood-bound strengths’, even dignifying them with sweeping references to Plato, Greek philosophy, Hegel — and General von Clausewitz, the theorist par excellence of German militarism.[267]

As to Heidegger’s and Derrida’s similarities: despite their different emphases — notably, Heidegger’s on the rural craftsman in his shop and Derrida’s on language — the distinctions between the two are not particularly significant. Heidegger’s notion of‘equipment’, the tools and techniques with which a craftsman works, corresponds to Derrida’s notion of differance, or the way we linguistically understand definitions. Our understanding of phenomena depends on differences or contrasts in meaning such as true/false, real/imaginary, discovered/invented, and so forth. For Derrida, a ‘signified concept is never present in and of itself’. Indeed, ‘every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences.’[268]

I will not belabor the way Heidegger’s ‘equipment’ and Derrida’s differance converge in practice except to note that Derrida is only too conscious of their similarities in the closing pages of his essay ‘ Differance’; and that we are not examining a post-turn’ or postwar Heidegger but the author of Being and Time himself. Spinosa goes on to show that Derrida’s differance

comes very close to Heidegger’s notion of revealing (being) once we make adjustments for seeing things in terms of systems of differences instead of practices or components, ... No person controls differance. That would be like thinking that someone controls language. We might as well say that [when] a new ivay of revealing is happening this amounts to putting Derrida’s insight about differance into Heidegger’s language.[269]

At times, in fact, Derrida seems to out-Heidegger Heidegger. For it is not ‘persons’ who ‘control differance — still less society — but, vaguely and impersonally, ‘systems’, thereby reifying beyond lived experience and history the way in which differances ‘reveal’ themselves. Aside from the similarities between the two men, the differences between them are advances and retreats, clarifications and obfuscations, around their respective degrees of antihumanism. Where Derrida (as of this writing) shares Heidegger’s view that philosophy is the originating source of all our cultural achievements — and problems — he adds no tiling to the basically idealistic claim that Heidegger made early in Ins career, when he saw metaphysics as the determining factor in human behavior.

Although a good deal more can be written about the correspondences between Heidegger and Derrida, the parallel ends in the way that the two men focus on ‘the Other’. In Heidegger’s case, the section on ‘Every Being-one’s-Self [as an individual — M.B.] and the “They”’ or, shall we say, using Nietzschean language, ‘the herd’, addresses in Being and Time the leveling down process induced by the ‘herd’, with its later implications of an authentic elite and a ‘hero’. In Derrida’s case, the ‘play of differences supposes ... syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself’, so that ‘no element can function as a sign without referring to another element.’[270]

In both cases, there does seem to be a ‘leveling’ down process, be it accommodation to the ‘They’ in Heidegger’s case that leads to an elite or hero, or a link in the ‘chain’ of ‘differences’ in Derrida’s case that are expanded into ‘othernesses’ by the ‘play of differance’ to include all that traditional philosophy tries to suppress by creating an ossifying ‘metaphysics of presence’ with its forms, a priori categories, prime movers. Viewed from this abstract philosophical perspective, Derrida, like Foucault, exhibits a concern for the ‘Others’ that literally constitute the ‘margins of philosophy’.

From a literary standpoint, this suppressed ‘Other’ includes the hidden meanings within a ‘text’; from a social standpoint, it includes the suppressed ‘Other’, such as women, non-Westem peoples, marginals, and the like — in both cases the victims of Western ‘logocentrism’ . ‘Deconstruction’ , to cite the practice that Derrida brings to textual analyzes, undermines ‘logocentrism’ and an all-pervasive ‘metaphysics of presence’ by revealing the element of differance — the hidden referents — whose exposure subverts the seeming coherence of a particular work. In ‘mankind’, for example, deconstruction finds traces of the repressed other, ‘womankind’ — or perhaps kind as such, man or woman. Deconstruction decenters the privileged sign — say, man — that ‘inscribes’ itself on a ‘text’. These privileged signs are continually undermined by radically unstable or marginal signs, (‘undecidables’) and very significantly by ‘deferment’, in which one sign always refers to other signs that are implicit in a given work, thereby destabilizing a ‘text’s’ ‘logocentric’ claims to coherence. One can thus think of deconstruction as a sort of octopus whose arms are continually extending outward toward hidden or implicit ‘others’ that serve to undermine the centrality of a ‘text’s’ structure and identity — indeed, a sort of free association, which allows the critic to wander unrestricted in any direction he or she chooses.

Deconstruction is thus a formula — and practice — for incoherence in the name of in-depth critique. Immanent critique, to be sure, is eminently desirable, as long as it is not arbitrary. But by virtue of its anti-‘logocentrism’ , deconstruction can mean almost anything. In current usage it can range from the most flippant criticisms to almost incomprehensible ‘metaphysical’ analyzes. In 1968, Derrida himself described it in apocalyptic terms, when apocalypses were highly fashionable, after which its meaning seems to have aged with time from a ‘radical trembling’ to a fatalistic recognition that Western rationalism is so completely with us, even in ‘traces’, that ‘breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone’.[271] By privileging the written ‘text’ over speech, deconstruction removes the reader from the author of a work and places him or her completely in the hands of the interpreter — or at the mercy of Harold Fromm’s ‘invisible puppeteer’. (See Chapter 4.)

In fact, deconstruction so depersonalizes the ‘text’ that it safely removes the reader from heated issues that are often raised in a literary work. Freed of that existential content, these deracinated writings can be coolly manipulated into any configuration one chooses like checker pieces on a blank board. Arthur C. Danto observes:

To treat philosophical texts after the manner of Derrida, simply as networks of reciprocal relationships, is precisely to put them at a distance from its readers so intraversable as to make it impossible that they be about us in the way literature requires. They become simply artifacts made of words, with no references save internal ones or incidental external ones , And reading them becomes external, as though they had nothing to do with us, were merely there, intricately wrought composites of logical lace-work, puzzling and pretty and pointless.[272]

Danto, if anything, is too kind to the Derrideans and deconstructionists. Often deconstructionists subject the reader to a barrage of elusive questions, so characteristic of Derrida’s own ‘texts’, that they turn from hortatory queries into unrestrained free association. In a pointed illustration of deconstruction at work, David Lehman shows how an eight-line elegiac poem expressing bereavement for the death of a girl, ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, from the ‘Lucy’ series by Wordsworth, was contorted by a prominent deconstructionist, J. Hillis Miller, into a drifting jargon-laden interpretation. The poem is short enough to be cited in full: