Facticity, Heidegger->Levinas

[Which is not the same sort of coupling of facticity-towards/from-the-outside that I was writing about....I don't think - Heidegger's sense of the body's thrownness into the world via time, comprehended as fascism as an ontology of pure presence...I am sort of fascinated by presence as this sort of ontological-moral error, and the way that dialogues with the hyper-affectivity of ptsd and other affect-disordered states, livelihoods.]

In Homo Sacer, (Agamben) PART THREE: THE CAMP AS BIOPOLITICAL PARADIGM OF THE MODERN 88

Precisely this immediate unity of politics and life makes it possible to shed light on the scandal of twentieth-century philosophy: the relation between Martin Heidegger and Nazism. Only when situated in the perspective of modern biopolitics does this relation acquire its proper significance (and this is the very thing that both Heidegger’s accusers and his defenders fail to do). The great novelty of Heidegger’s thought (which did not elude the most attentive observers at Davos, such as Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas) was that it resolutely took root in facticity. As the publication of the lecture courses from the early 1920s has by now shown, ontology appears in Heidegger from the very beginning as a hermeneutics of tactical life (faktisches Leben). The circular structure by which Dasein is an issue for itself in its ways of being is nothing but a formalization of the essential experience of factical life, in which it is impossible to distinguish between life and its actual situation, Being and its ways of Being, and for which all the distinctions of traditional anthropology (such as those berween spirit and body, sensation and consciousness, I and world, subject and properties) are abolished. For Heidegger, the central category of facticity is not (as it was for Edmund Husserl) Zufälligkeit, contingency – by which one thing is in a certain way and in a certain place, yet could be elsewhere and otherwise – but rather Verfallenheit, fallenness, which characterizes a being that is and has to be its own ways of Being. Facticity does not mean simply being contingently in a cettain way and a certain situation, but rather means decisively assuming this way and this situation by which what was given [cid che era dote] (Hingabe) must be transformed into a task (Aufgabe). Dasein, the Being-there who is its There, thus comes to be placed in a zone of indiscernability with respect to – and to mark the definitive collapse of – all traditional determinations of man. In a text of 1934 that may well even today still constitute the most valuable contribution to an understanding of National Socialism, Levinas proves himself the first to underline the analogies between this new ontological determination of man and certain traits of the philosophy implicit in Hitlerism. Judeo-Christian and liberal thought, according to Levinas, strive for the spirit’s ascetic liberation from the bonds of the sensuous and historico-social situation into which it finds itself thrown, thus ultimately differentiating, in man and his world, between a realm of reason and a realm of the body, to which the realm of reason is irreducibly opposed. Hitler’s philosophy (in this respect similar to Marxism) is instead, Levinas argues, founded on an absolutely unconditional assumption of the historical, physical, and material situation, which is considered as an indissoluble cohesion of spirit and body and nature and culture.

The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident that relates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is an adherence that one does not escape and that no metaphor can confuse with, the presence of an external object; it is a union that does not in any way alter the tragic character of finality. This feeling of identity between self and body… will therefore never allow those who wish to begin with it to rediscover, in the depths of this unity, the duality of a free spirit that struggles against the body to which it is chained. On the contrary, for such people, the whole of the spirit’s essence lies in the fact that it is chained to the body. To separate the spirit from the concrete forms wirh which it is already involved is to betray the originality of rhe very feeling from which it is appropriate to begin. The importance attributed to this feeling for the body, with which the Western spirit has never wished to content itself, is at the basis of a new conception of man. The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the past for which rhe body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being problems that are subject to a solution put forward by a sovereignly free Self. Not only does the Self bring in the unknown elements of these problems in order to resolve rhem; the Self is also constituted by these elements. Mans essence lies no longer in freedom but in a kind of bondage . . . Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. Truth is no longer for him the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in which man is himself the actor. It is under the weight of his whole existence, which includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his no. (“Quelques reflexions” [1934] > PP- 205-7)

Though Levinas text was written at a time when his teacher’s support of Nazism was still searing, the name Heidegger appears nowhere. But the note added at the time of the text’s republication in Critical Inquiry in 1990 leaves no doubt as to the thesis that an attentive reader would nonetheless have had to read between the lines – namely, that Nazism as an “elemental evil” has its condition of possibility in Western philosophy itself, and in Heideggerian ontology in particular: “a possibility that is inscribed in the ontology of Being’s care for Being – for the being dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht [‘for whom Being itself is an issue in its being’]” (“Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” p. 62). There could be no clearer statement that Nazism is rooted in the same experience of facticity from which Heidegger departs, and which the philosopher had summarized in his Rectoral Address in the formula “to will or not to will one’s own Dasein.” Only this essential proximity can explain how Heidegger could have written the following revealing words in his 1935 course, Introduction to Metaphysics: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man); these works have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of Values’ and ‘totalities’” (Einführung, p. 152). From Heidegger’s perspective, National Socialism’s error and betrayal of its “inner truth” consists in its having transformed the experience of factical life into a biological “value” (hence the contempt with which Heidegger repeatedly refers to Rosenberg). While the greatest achievement of Heidegger’s philosophical genius was to have elaborated the conceptual categories that kept facticity from presenting itself as a fact, Nazism ended with the incarceration of factical life in an objective racial determination and, therefore, with the abandonment of its original inspiration. Yet what, beyond these differences and from the perspective that interests us, is the political meaning of the experience of facticity?

For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to assume “values” external to it in order to become politics: life is immediately political in its very facticity. Man is not a living being who must abolish or transcend himself in order to become human – man is not a duality of spirit and body, nature and politics, life and logos, but is instead resolutely situated at the point of their indistinction. Man is no longer the “anthropophorous” animal who must transcend himself to give way to the human being; man’s factical essence already contains the movement that, if grasped, constitutes him as Dasein and, therefore, as a political being (“polis signifies the place, the Da, where and how Dasein is insofar as Dasein is historical” [Einführung, p. 117]). This means, however, that the experience of facticity is equivalent to a radicalization without precedent of the state of exception (with its indistinction of nature and politics, outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion) in a dimension in which the state of exception tends to becomes the rule. It is as if the bare life of homo sacer, whose exclusion founded sovereign power, now became – in assuming itself as a task – explicitly and immediately political. And yet this is precisely what characterizes the biopolitical turn of modernity, that is, the condition in which we still find ourselves. And this is the point at which Nazism and Heidegger’s thought radically diverge. Nazism determines the bare life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue in which biopolitics continually turns into thanatopolitics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political space. In Heidegger, on the other hand, homo sacer – whose very own life is always at issue in its every act – instead becomes Dasein, the inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being, of subject and qualities, life and world, “whose own Being is at issue in its very Being.” If life, in modern biopolitics, is immediately politics, here this unity, which itself has the form of an irrevocable decision, withdraws from every external decision and appears as an indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold.