Notes

2. THE QUESTION TURNS ON ETHICS

1. The examples here are taken from Devavanitravesika, an Introduction to the Sanskrit Language, Robert P. Goldman with Sally J. Sutherland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 31.

2. W. D. Whitney, Sanskrit Grammar, 12th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 293.

3. Although the English phrase “I was born” looks passive, it would seem to indicate a middle rather than a passive voice. Perhaps it and other expressions such as “I was caught,” “the dishes dried,” “this reads like a novel,” and “the cup broke” derive from the ancient middle voice.

4. See, for example, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962) sections 7, 74, 75, 78, 80; and “Differance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 9-10, where Derrida writes of temporizing, differing, and deferring.

5. Jean Pierre Vernant, “Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretations,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore; John Hopkins Press, 1972), pp. 276-77. I am indebted to Charles Shepherdson, with whom I have discussed this and most other features of both the middle voice and of middle-voiced events and who first called my attention to the significance of the middle voice in the context of Heidegger’s thought.

6. Vernant, “Greek Tragedy,” p. 279.

7. The following discussion reworks and places in a different context material from chapter 2, section 4 of my Language of Difference (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987). I have used it here because the self-over-coming aspect of the idea of will to power in Nietzsche’s discourse best shows how self-overcoming takes place at the most elemental level of his thought.

8. “The ascetic ideal for a long time served the philosopher as a form in which to appear, as a precondition of existence—he had to represent it so as to be able to be a philosopher; he had to believe it in order to be able to represent it. The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world-denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher’s pose par excellence—it is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy arose and survived at all; for the largest time philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloak, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern time the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which alone the philosopher could live and creep about” (GM III 10).

9. The techniques of this turn are discussed in GM III 17-19: the hypnotic muting of sensitivity to the feeling of being alive so that the pain of meaninglessness, mortality, etc., are made tolerable; mechanical, absolutely regular activity such as that of rituals and unthinking obedience, the cultivation of “petty pleasures” that advance the cause of consolation and its communities, and the advance of “orgies of feeling” which maximally deaden the pain of life.

3. ETHICS IS THE QUESTION

1. The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 10-13, hereafter cited as UP. “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 238-43.

2. “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault, ed. Dreyfus and Rabinow, p. 209.

3. “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” p. 231.

4. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview,” Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 388-89. In this part of the interview Foucault develops the interpretation of problematization that I have summarized and his account of the history of thought from which I shall draw in the following discussion.

5. Ibid.

6. “The Subject and Power,” p. 231.

7. Ibid., p. 208.

8. “Preface” (by Foucault), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. xiv.

9. “Le retour de la morale,” Les Nouvelles, June 28, 1984, p. 37.

10. Foucault uses the word archaeology to characterize his work in, for example, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973) and The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. S. Smith (New York: Random House, 1975). He tended to use that word to refer to the study of structures and to use genealogy to refer to the study of the lineage of power-effects. This convenience obscured the fact that for him there is no clear division between structures and power-effects and also led to serious misinterpretations by those who read his ‘archeological’ studies as a hybrid of structuralist methodologies. Although Foucault was later critical of his own insufficient attention to the power-effects of systems of knowledge, none of his ‘archeological’ studies can be accurately read to suggest that there are structures of knowledge that make up a kind of reality in their own right as though there were structures that are independent of institutional, political, and broadly cultural interplays of ordering and subjecting power. Such an interpretation also encourages one to overlook the powers that play through his own discourse in these studies and to think that they are works within the broadly humanistic and historicist traditions. We shall see, for example, that in The Order of Things the powers of the various systems of knowledge are at work in Western societies and that their work constitutes one of the major issues of the book. Consequently I shall use genealogy to refer to the study of formations and deformations of knowledges as well as to studies of the effects of institutional powers. I shall emphasize the power-effects of formations and deformations of knowledge and the close relations of Foucault’s ‘early’ work to his ‘later’ in which genealogy includes studies of knowledges, practices, and selves.

11. MC 115-116. Foucault’s work on transgression in the context of Bataille’s writings provides an image for the play of madness’s silence through Madness and Civilization: “Transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognize itself for the first time, to experience its positive truth in its downward fall . . .). Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to dark the stark quality of its manifestation, its harrowing and posed singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it makes with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity” (LCM 34-35). Madness and Civilization is transgressed by the silence of madness. In this metaphor, madness’s silence is the lightning flash that marks the imminent disappearance and the downward fall of rational discourse. The density of such a discourse is shown in its darkness by the lightning’s space in its radical divergence from common knowledge and good sense. The density of rationalization is broken for a moment by the stark clarity of madness. Madness’s silence in our recent civilization reveals the obscurity of what we have taken to be our enlightenment. In this reversal by which the darkness of delirium illuminates the boundaries of civilized life, the dark folly of rational containment becomes clear for a moment and defines a space for a kind of speaking and writing that strikes us as radically other as the Übermensch is to the last man. Madness and Civilization is transgressed by the silence that it cannot speak. By knowing itself as transgressed, it is both repelled and sprung from the obscurity that it proposes as its best knowledge.

12. “Since the end of the nineteenth century, the life of reason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Hölderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud—forever irreducible to those alienations that can be cured, resisting by their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling, doubtless by antiphrasis, the liberation of the insane by Pinel and Tuke” (MC 278). We note that Foucault’s emphasis is not so much on liberation as on the counter-memory that reinherits the caesura of unreason. The liberation of the insane from moral confinement is not a liberation from madness any more than the liberation of people from pastoral power frees them from the brokenness and death that pastoral power both cultivates and deeply fears. No ethic is intended. Rather, Foucault recalls the feared and suppressed aspect of the tradition, thinks it through, writes and speaks in its reinheritance, and holds open the field of thought for what the counter-memory makes possible: the end of ‘man’ and man’s world, the beginning of different discourses.

13. This is also a problem for both transcendental knowledge and the project of self-constitution. When self-constitution, for example, intends to establish a unified being who realizes universal human nature or universal values, it perpetuates discontinuity in its project, and its identity establishes its difference from universality. The identity of both the transcendental field and the self that constitutes itself makes a difference. We shall see that this quandary of perpetuating discontinuity in the effort to eliminate it involves a refusal of the dispersed temporality of both the transcendental field and the self.

14. With reference to the problematic of representation, Foucault asks, “How is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to begin anew?” (OT 50). This is a question integral to his thought as well as to modern thought. He rethinks this issue of place and space in part by recasting time in relation to space under the aegis of the dispersion that recent Western thought has produced but ignored.

15. “For if exegesis leads us not so much towards a primal discourse as towards the naked existence of something like a language, will it not be obliged to express only the pure forms of language even before it has taken on a meaning? And in order to formalize what we suppose to be a language, is it not necessary to have practiced some minimum exegesis, and at least interpreted all these mute forms as having the intention of meaning something? It is true that the division between interpretation and formalization presses upon us and dominates today. But it is not rigorous enough: the fork it forms has not been driven far enough down into our culture, its two branches are too contemporaneous for us to be able to say even that it is prescribing a simple option or that it is inviting us to choose between the past, which believed in meaning, and the present (the future), which has discovered the significant” (OT 199).

16. See The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986) p. 239. The processes of problematization and vigilance that characterize the formation of the ethical subject now recoil on that formation in Foucault’s account of it.

4. THE QUESTION OF DASEIN’S MOST PROPER BEING

1. Although Foucault, in his last interview, stated that Heidegger was, with Nietzsche, the major influence on his thought and that he read Heidegger continuously during his career, Nietzsche, not Heidegger, defines the horizon from which Foucault most often takes his departure. Heidegger’s influence is apparent throughout Foucault’s writing, but it is found in a more Nietzschean context. The element of Heidegger’s thought is different from Foucault’s element, and Heidegger’s style of seriousness of mind defines not only his difference from Foucault and Nietzsche but also the element that, we shall see, most inspires and problematizes his thought.

2. I take the term twisting free from David Farrell Krell’s translation of Herausdrehung and from John Sallis’s use of the term in “Twisting Free: Being to an Extent Sensible,” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987): 1-21.

3. Does this mean that the being of dasein is a transcendental reality that is independent of its history? I discussed this question in detail in chapter 3 of The Language of Difference (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986). The short answer is that the being of dasein, in the terms of Being and Time, must be historically formed and transcendent in its disclosiveness vis-a-vis everyday identities and selfhood. Being and Time begins a process whereby the issue of historicity and transcendence and the terms of the debate concerning them are recast and decisively changed by the priority that Heidegger gives to disclosure.

4. We said that in Foucault’s account of surveillance, the power to observe and judge is also a power to incarcerate. One developing claim in Discipline/Punish and toward the end of The History of Sexuality trilogy is that the state’s manner of enforcing its interests in the welfare of its citizens changes as government changes from regency to forms of democracy. Authority is internalized. Instead of an external state’s surveillance, an interior surveillance forms whereby we become incarcerated by a body of values to which we are taught to give voice: the power of conscience in this sense of the word is the power of a hierarchy of values. Genealogy is the approach Foucault uses to break this power in his writing. Instead of a different authority that counteracts the authority of modern conscience—and hence the authority of modern self—genealogy counteracts conscience by means of disclosing the power-interests that invest self and conscience in the context of those values. So, for example, our predisposition to distaste and disgust regarding dissemblance recoils against the dissemblance that constitutes the values of sincerity and nondis-sembling honesty, the very values that generate our predisposition to disgust regarding dissemblance. In this way the modern conscience and self are in question in his writing.

Although Heidegger, in contrast to Foucault, uses conscience constructively in his analysis, we may also appropriately ask who is looking and judging in the context of his description of conscience. His direct answer is ‘das Man’, the anonymous one of our inherited structures of value. In the function of conscience, however, in its distance from its contingent religious and moral contents, and in the ontological function that Heidegger ascribes to call, language, and guilt, he finds neither a normative self nor the priority of meaning and value. He finds the articulation of dasein’s difference vis-a-vis its daily and traditional observations. Conscience names a movement of dasein that has no surveillance and no judgment, and by conceiving it that way one is in a movement of twisting free from the everyday that puts the priority of value-judgment in question. How are we to think outside this priority?

Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal claims that philosophical reflection as such originated in an ascetic, priestly contemplation that removed people by its activity from alertness to earthly, fragmented existence. Nietzsche’s thought recoils in the strain that it puts on itself as thought and always diminishes itself in the metaphor of will to power and eternal return. Heidegger’s thought, in the context of conscience, diminishes no less its own conscience regarding dasein’s forgetful and banal life. The contents of everyday conscience, its clarity regarding right and wrong, its fearful guilt, its concern over metaphysical security and peace of mind, its predisposition not to question its axioms for conduct—its forgetful banal life—are in question by the recoiling movement whereby it puts itself in question by the values that it holds. This wrenching motion is an aspect of the conscience of Being and Time. It is in question in Being and Time no less than Nietzsche’s philosophical reflection is in question in his reflective account of the ascetic ideal. If the wrenching, recoiling movement is emphasized, rather than the specific and static claims that Heidegger makes regarding the ontological status of conscience, we find the process in which both the subject of the description and the subjectivity of describing are in question.

5. In pathological grief, for example, a person is often traumatized by the interruption of death, and the grief is less over the specific loss than over the mortality that infuses the other and one’s relation with the other.

6. This movement of transformation and self-overcoming is found in Part II of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) in which Heidegger’s discussion moves from an invocation of strict phenomenological method to its Umschlag, its transformation, at the end of the book. We take up this movement in section 5 below.

7. For an elaboration of this question, see David F. Krell’s Intimations of Mortality (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), chapter 3.

8. See the third edition of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt a.m.: Klostermann, 1954).

9. Both this translation and the research on ethos, nomos, nomos are found primarily in Charles Chamberlain, “From ‘Haunts’ to ‘Character’: The Meaning of Ethos,” Helios 11:2 (1984). I have also used H. Frisk’s Griechisches Etymologisches Worterbuch, vol. 2 (Heidelberg, 1960-61), and A Greek-English Lexicon, 2 vols., H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925).

5. THESE VIOLENT PASSIONS

1. Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität; Das Rektorat, 1933/34, (Frankfurt a.m.: Klostermann, 1983). “The Self-Assertion of the German University. The Rectorate 1933/34; Facts and Thoughts,” trans. Karsten Harries, The Review of Metaphysics 38 (March 1985): 467-502. See also “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” trans. Cyril and Liliane Welch, Proceedings of the 20th Annual Heidegger Conference, ed. Manfred S. Frings, DePaul University, 1986. Although I consulted these translations and frequently used their phrasing, I often chose different words and phrases that I found to be more appropriate to Heidegger’s text and that make an important difference in the interpretation.

2. Review, p. 490.

3. Geistige means intellectual, spirited, or spiritual in the sense of ‘of the whole mind’. At times intellectual can be used in spite of the obvious inadequacy of the word. Spiritual is not usually an appropriate translation, although philologically entirely correct, because of the generally religious and quasi-religious overtones of the English word in ordinary usages. Given the wide range of meanings for mind, an adjectival form of that word would be much better, if an acceptable adjective existed for this context. Intellectual does not capture the powerfully synthetic connotation of geistige nor the German word’s ability to indicate a history of culture-forming development and fateful determinations. On the other hand, intellectual points to the mission of the university to form the minds of people by disciplined study. That mission, of course, must be transformed, and intellectual is no less in question than spirited and spiritual.

4. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geof Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

5. Heidegger uses Versagen for the failure of knowing. That word is in contrast to the Spruch or saying concerning the “creative importance of knowing.”

6. Instead of Einlass ‘welcome’, modern existence is characterized by Verlassenheit ‘abandonment’ regarding the question of being. The difference between welcoming the question of being and losing it constitutes the crisis of academic knowledge.

7. It is a preservation that conserves the revealing and concealing of being.

8. Compare paragraph 9 above, which describes the Greek rise above ethnic obscurity and relativity.

9. The English misleads by translating sofern as ‘in that’ instead of ‘insofar as’ or ‘inasmuch as’.

10. If Heidegger had not quoted Clausewitz, one could more easily translate Kampf as ‘struggle’ rather than ‘battle’. Heidegger’s claims can be taken to argue for ‘struggle’. His rhetoric, however, favors ‘battle’.

6. “‘ALL TRUTH’—IS THAT NOT A COMPOUND LIE?”

1. Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt a.m.: Klostermann, 1947). “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), PP. 189-242. The German text is cited in text as LH.

2. Heidegger phrases this occurrence in this way: “Das Denken . . . lasst sich vom Sein in der Anspruch nehmen, um die Wahrheit des Seins zu sagen. Das Denken vollbringt dieses Lassen. Denken ist l’engagement par l’Etre pour l’Etre . . . penser, c’est l’engagement de l’Etre” (Thinking . . . lets itself be claimed by being so as to say the truth of being. Thinking unfolds this allowance in the fullness of its coming to pass. Thinking is the engagement by being for being . . . thinking is the engagement of being), LH 5.

3. Medard Boss has put this claim to work in psychoanalysis by showing that every aspect of the human body is pervaded by one’s appropriation of being. In this way he rethinks psychosomatic medicine and the psychological meaning of physical impairment. See Grundriss der Medizin (Bern: Hans Huber, 1971), Part I. B.

4. LH 236. Compare Nietzsche: “Origin in something else counts as an objection, as casting a doubt on value.” “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” section 4, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968). This “degenerate” idea, according to Nietzsche, is companion to the ideas of ‘highest concept’, unity, and the unconditioned. Heidegger eliminates the idea of causa sui without question, but do these other “last fumes of evaporating reality” pass away in Heidegger’s thought?

5. Ibid., section 5.

6. We may say that being ‘vacates’ by its withdrawal, by its continuous abandonment of human being in its difference from beings. In that sense humans are bereft of being in the granting closeness of being. But that abandonment protects and preserves being in its difference as well as in its granting nearness, its purity vis-à-vis beings. Being continues to enjoy an unquestioned privilege.

7. See David Farrell Krell, On The Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), chapter 6.

8. “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) P-335. “Bauen Wohnen Denken” in Vortraege und Aufsaetze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 158. Unless otherwise noted, quotations in this section will be taken from the translation.

9. “The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction. . . . The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell” (BDT 339).

10. “But that thinking itself belongs to dwelling in some sense as building, although in a different way, may perhaps be attested to by the course of thought here attempted” (BDT 338).

11. The yond of beyond may have the sense of ‘border’ if it is taken adjectivally as ‘at the farther side’. Or it may connote the presently unreachable if it is taken as ‘more distant’. The prefix be intensifies yond and carries the meaning of ‘out of reach’. As a prefix it indicates in our context an intensification of surpassing distance that pre-fixes the space of transmission. It also gives the sense of ‘throughout’ or ‘thoroughly’, of bordering distance that characterizes a situation throughout that situation. Whatever is beyond translation is beyond throughout the process of traveling over and transmission. Improving the translation intensifies the beyond rather than overcomes it. Hence, in discussing Heidegger’s interpretation of being vis-à-vis revealing and concealing, I emphasize being’s ecstatic event with the phrase “beyond translation.” In being near, it translates itself by concealing itself.

12. “Aletheia (Heraklit, Fragment 16)” in Vortraege und Aufsaetze, (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), pp. 257-82. “Aletheia Heraclitus, Fragment B16” in Early Greek Thinking, ed. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 106. Noted quotations are taken from the English translation and cited in this chapter as AH.

13. As Heidegger faces the limits of his own interpretation and gives priority to the text’s questionableness, as he suggests the questionableness of his own reading, he links revealing and concealing with a hyphen rather than the accustomed conjunction and. Does the fragment of Heraclitus’s thought prompt the replacement of the and by the hyphen? He speaks of the “revealing-concealing lightning” in two places (AH 119, 120) and of the “revealing-concealing gathering” on two other occasions (121, 122). But otherwise, when revealing and concealing are used as nouns and not as adjectives, the conjunction and joins them. So we are forced by the grammar to believe that the hyphen connects the words in a proper joining of two adjectival functions without suggesting a beyond that separates them. The emphasis on belonging together never wavers. And he says that the beginning and the end of the fragment name “revealing and concealing” (121, emphasis added).

14. Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959). Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).