Cont Philos Rev (2008) 41:481499 DOI 10.

1007/s11007-008-9094-5

Laughing at nitude: Slavoj Zizek reads Being and Time

Thomas Brockelman

Published online: 20 December 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract Laughing at Finitude interprets Slavoj Zizeks intellectual project as responding to a challenge left by Being and Time. Setting out from discussions of Heideggers book in The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject, the essay exfo liates Zizeks response to the Heideggerian version of a philosophy of nitude both nding the central insight of Zizeks work in Heideggers radical proposal for anticipatory resoluteness and developing Zizeks critique of Being and Time as indicating Heideggers retreat from that proposal within the very book where it appears. Zizek reads Being and Times existential thematic as proposing a radical subjectivism and, unlike other Heidegger-critics, praises this aspect of the project. Indeed, Zizek claims that the weakness of Being and Time as a whole is that it is insufciently radical in its subjectivism. For him, Heidegger is a thinker of ambiguous value, one who develops a program from whose own demands he hides. Laughing at Finitude both articulates this accusation of self-deception in Heidegger and examines the imperatives necessary to avoid it, for a dialectical shift from the tragic voice in existential treatments of nitude and for a revolutionary collectivist re-conception of social Mitsein. It suggests, in the process, Zizeks own intellectual itinerary. Keywords Zizek, Slavoj Heidegger, Martin Finitude Being and Time Modernism Comedy Existentialism 1 Introductory: Zizek as philosopher By now the Heideggerian provenance of Slavoj Zizeks work has often been noted, but for all of its currency, the signicance of the younger Zizeks discipleship to the
T. Brockelman (&) Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: brocketp@lemoyne.edu

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Yugoslav Heidegger school has occasioned little real reection.1 That this is a missed opportunity emerges starkly if we pay close attention to Zizeks most signicant philosophical self-accounts, those contained in The Ticklish Subject (1999) and The Parallax View (2006a), both of which relate the Slovenian philosopher and analysts central insights to Heidegger and particularly to the Heidegger of Being and Time. According to Zizek himself, Heidegger connects all serious contemporary philosophers; for, almost every other orientation of any serious weight denes itself through some sort of critical relation or distance towards Heidegger.2 More particular to Zizek, in tracing his biography back to his years as a Heideggerian, one begins to glimpse also the unity of the concerns that animate his work after his admittedly radical transformation working in Paris with Lacans designated successor, Jacques-Alain Miller. In particular, one sees the emergence of this question: what are the genuine demands of a philosophy of nitude? Now, of course, Heidegger is not the only signicant existential thinker, the only thinker to thus thematize nitude, and we must acknowledge the presence of both Kierkegaard and Sartre as inuences on Zizek. In some ways, as we will see, Kierkegaards notion of a leap of faith draws him closer to Zizeks emphasis on the act, than to Heidegger; while Sartres negative subjecthis maintenance of an Hegelian perspective on human lifeis certainly more Zizekean than is izeks struggle about nitude is, Heideggers Being in the World. Nonetheless, Z both historically and textually, primarily a struggle with the Heidegger of Being and Time; and, for this reason its important to follow out this relationship.3 The question of Heideggers philosophy of nitude, indeed, corresponds with Zizeks own most extensive efforts to outline his philosophical project. As he himself puts it in The Parallax View, Heideggers greatest single achievement is the full elaboration of nitude as a positive constituent of being-human, an achievement which Zizek further species as follows: A human being is always on the way toward itself, in becoming, thwarted, thrown-into a situation, primordially passive, receptive, attuned, exposed to an overwhelming Thing; far from limiting him, this exposure is the very ground of the emergence of a universe of meaning, of the worldliness of man. It is only from within this nitude that entities appear to us as intelligible, as forming part of a world, as included within a horizon of
ek: a For references to Zizeks Heideggerian beginnings in the secondary literature, see Kays Ziz ek: Critical Introduction (Kay 2003, p. 2), Butler: Slavoj Ziz Live Theory (Butler 2005, p. 10) and Parker, ek: a Critical Introduction (Parker 2004, p. 4). Zizek himself discusses this background and its Slavoj Ziz ek. inuence on him in one of the interviews with Glyn Daly included in Conversations with Ziz See Zizek and Daly (2004, pp. 2633). 2 Zizek and Daly (2004, p. 28).
1

We should also note here another possible direction for interpreting the ZizekHeidegger link, this one concerning the traumatic nature of human consciousness. In a recently published manuscript on Zizek, Adrian Johnston pursues the powerful thesis that Zizeks current interest in the Philosophy of Science can be traced back to Being and Time and to Heideggers insight there that Daseins reection only takes ight on the wings of failurespecically, the failure of the projects of the ready-to-hand. Only when things go wrong do we gain the possibility for the specically human response of self-consciousness. While I do not pursue this link between Zizek and Heidegger further, I acknowledge its importance for understanding the trajectory of Zizeks current work (see Johnston 2008).
3

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meaningin short, that we take them as something, that they appear as something (that they appear tout court).4 To the extent that Zizek is a philosopher, he himself would insist that we begin from the question of nitude in understanding his work. And, more than that, we might go so far as to describe the Zizekian philosophical itinerary, with its construction of a marriage between Hegel and the later Lacan, as an immanent critique of the philosophy of nitude sketched out in Being and Time.5 As a way of better understanding Zizeks thought, the following pages undertake the task of clarifying this immanent critique.

2 Finitude in Heidegger: accomplishing the modern revolution The rst step here must be to understand the peculiar doubleness of the nitist theme as it appears in Being and Time. Finitude imposes a limit upon me (I am thrown), but, in so doing, it also opens the possibility for the most important positive possibilities of Daseins existence, possibilities to which Heidegger refers with the word, freedom. Zizeks reading of Being and Time focuses upon how what seems to be an experience of limitation or determination becomes a liberatory introduction to this positive dimension of human nitude. In The Parallax View, Zizek explores such a bond between two aspects of being nite through a comparison between Heideggers insight in Being and Time and a proposal of Descartes in The Discourse on Method. In Chapter 3 of that latter text, Descartes proposes a kind of provisory morality to help him live while he entertains radical doubts about the foundations of his thought, listing among the tenets of this moral code that he will simply follow the modes and customs of his country and that he will act according to those rules in a consistent and persistent manner, imitating in this the example of travelers who, when they have lost their way in a forest, ought not to wander from side to side in it, far less remain in one place, but proceed constantly towards the same side in as straight a line as possible.6 While, as we will see, Heidegger, will himself fail to live up to this insight, Zizeks interpretation of the implicit ethics of nitude is that it contrasts with
4 5

Zizek (2006a, p. 273).

Its important to note Heideggers ambivalence about the very term, nitude (Endlichkeit). While Being and Time uses nitude and its cognate, nite in order to indicate a basic existential structure of Daseinits being-toward-death as its own most possibilityto which the existentiell decision of resolution attests, texts in the following years [The Basic Problems of Phenomenology from 1928 (Heidegger 1982) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics from 1929 (Heidegger 1997)] cast some doubt on this terminological gambit. (Heidegger, Being and Time; Sein und Zeit, p. 259; trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, p. 303) and (Heidegger, Being and Time; SZ, p. 97; M & R, p. 343). These later texts problematize nitude, given its metaphysical origin in a theological relationship between creator and creation. See, for example, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: In Kants understanding, Being of a being must be understoodas being-produced, if indeed the producer, the originator also is supposed to be able to apprehend the substance, that which constitutes the being of the being. Only the creator is capable of a true and proper cognition of being; we nite beings get to know only what we ourselves make and only to the extent that we make it (quoted from Heidegger 1993, p. 150). 6 Descartes, Discourse on Method, 24-5/Quoted, Zizek (2006a, p. 274).

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Descartes view. Heideggers most direct answer to thrownness, anticipatory resoluteness (Sect. 62), shares an apparently provisory status with Descartes morality for the doubter, but it also differs essentially. Recall that Heidegger proposes in Being and Time that we should make an ungrounded, abyssal decision to live resolutely. For Heidegger, to decide without guarantees (based on resolute thrownness) is not simply to make do with what were given (the impossibility of knowing the way things really are), as it still is for Descartes. Rather, as Heidegger writes, resoluteness creates the Situation in which Dasein is (The Situation is only through resoluteness and in it.).7 Furthermore, resolve also produces a primordial self-understanding: Dasein is brought face to face with its own uncanniness, its irreducibility to any substantive identity that might later be disclosed for it.8 Following Zizeks interpretation, we might say that, in so deciding, I take the as though in I act as though and make it into my reality. I assume an incomplete reality not just in the way that a reductio argument assumes a conclusion but also in the way that a leader assumes her post. Everything that I do from that time forward is based upon that assumptionto the extent that we cant really imagine the possible context in which we might reverse it. Unlike Descartes doubter, the subject of anticipatory resoluteness makes a commitment. As Zizek sees it, that commitment is to the idea that the condition demanding resoluteness is the way things really arei.e. that there is no order to the cosmos, that the universe is essentially and inherently incomplete and without a totalizing position from which one could make sense of it. It is a resolution, as Heidegger himself puts it, that Dasein gives itself the current factical situation, that the situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something present-athand which is waiting for someone to grasp it. Or, as Heidegger claims, that resolution is a form of holding oneself free.9 In other words, for Descartes, the provisory morality of the doubter amounts to a skepsis, a doubt about the way
7 8 9

Heidegger (1962, M & R, p. 346; SZ, p. 300). Ibid. (M & R, p. 342; SZ, p. 296).

Ibid. (M & R, p. 355; SZ, pp. 3078). Its worth noting the signicant ambiguity of the passage I here refer to. After binding resoluteness with certainty, Heidegger seems to back off from this position precisely to what Im here calling the Cartesian option: he seems to suggest that Dasein holds itself back from any identication with the situation. Such, indeed, is Macquarrie and Robinsons interpretation of a key grammatical ambiguity. Heidegger writes, Dies besagt aber: sie kann sich gerade nicht auf die Situation versteifen, sondern muss verstehen, dass der Entschluss seinem eigenen Erschliessungssinn nach frei und offen gehalten werden muss fur die jeweilige faktische Moglichkeit. Die Gewissheit des Entschlusses bedeutet: Sichfreihalten fur seine mogliche und je faktisch notwendige Zurucknahme. Macquarrie and Robinson translate: Such certainty must maintain itself in what is disclosed by the resolution. But this means that it simply cannot become rigid as regards the situation, but must understand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure, must be held open and free for the current factical possibility. The certainty of the resolution signies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it backa possibility which is factically necessary. However, in a footnote, they add that one could also take the subject of seine (its) to be actually oneself (sich) instead of the resolution. To make sense of the passage by Zizeks interpretation, though, demands that we embrace precisely the translation rejected by Macquarrie and Robinson: we hold (ourselves) free from the situation only to the extent that we may be withdrawn from it by death. Or, as Macquarrie and Robinson are tempted to suggest, the certainty of the resolution signies that one holds oneself free for ones own withdrawal. In other words, the situations necessity stems from our free engagement with it.

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things are; however, for Heidegger, the resolution of the one deciding itself amounts to an insight about the constitution of reality. Its not exactly a factual knowledge, however, that this Heideggerian disciple of anticipatory resoluteness enjoys; for, the only fact to which someone who takes responsibility for the need to act even though there can be no certainty she/he is doing the right thing responds is not knowing the ultimate nature of reality. On the other hand, when I take responsibility for my life, embracing its groundlessness, I change that life and (through my acts) the lives of those around me. In the attitude of resolve, Heidegger (and Zizek) detect something more, something like a discernment of what must be the case in order for my act to really count in that way, for it do what it is intended to dowhich is to change essentially the situation in which I liverather than a calculation of actuality. The attitude of Dasein in such resoluteness is as far as can be from risk assessment. Quite the contrary, in betting that I will never discover a justifying framework for life, I also decide such meaninglessness must characterize reality itself and so determine it as such. More profoundly, the content of that transcendental what must be the case is that the universe is not simply without meaning but incomplete, lacking ultimate order and closure. For Zizek, Heideggers philosophy of nitude is thus a kind of transcendental articulation of the conditions of possibility for a being without support in a completed cosmos. As Zizek puts it in The Parallax View, with this concept Heidegger accomplished the Kantian philosophical revolution, making it clear that nitude is the key to the transcendental dimension.10 While Zizeks emphases in the above argument might strike the reader as unusual, theres nothing about this approach that openly challenges Heideggerian orthodoxy. However, from this starting point, Zizek draws conclusions that cut across the grain of mainstream Heidegger scholarship and even of Heideggers selfunderstanding. The most important of these is that, precisely in his commitment to nitude, Heidegger pursues a kind of modernist project. That is, to the extent that modernity is dened by a disenchantment of reality, by the challenge to the great pre-modern and medieval synthesis asserting reality to be a meaningful whole assigning each and every being or act an appropriate place, any assertion of nitude belongs to the modern. In asserting nitude to be a structure of ontology itself, Heideggers analysis of Dasein and the ethics of authenticity that accompany such an analysis stand squarely in the modern tradition. Now, there are good reasons why Heidegger himself would resist the modernist label, but there is also one merely semantic issue here that produces the appearance of disagreement where none may exist: and that is, namely, the parochial tendency within academic philosophy to label modern that body of philosophy that runs from Descartes through Kant and underlies the cultural movement called the Enlightenment. While the waters are historically muddied by the intra-philosophical debate between empiricists and rationalists, the modernist project here emerges as something like the ability of the philosopher, given a basic skepticism about the subjects immersion in its world, to offer secure (certain)
10

Zizek (2006a, p. 273).

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foundations for knowledge of that world. To label someone a modernist, within a philosophical context is to suggest that they believe in the possibility of such an epistemological foundation. Heidegger explicitly rejects such a project. Indeed, basic to his existential analysis of Dasein, is a rejection of the very picture of the human being as res cogitans (thinking substance) representing a world of res exstensa (extended substance) for itself. If there is a modernist project in pre-Kehre Heidegger, then, it is clearly not that modernism but rather a commitment to the doubt and uncertainty that originally elicits efforts at foundation-building at all, from Descartes through the Enlighten ment. Perhaps we would best explain Zizeks understanding here by dispensing with the whole, over-freighted language of the modern and speaking instead of Zizeks 11 Kantian Heidegger. Rejecting the common interpretation which sees Kant as the thinker who afrms that it is impossible to conceive of the universe as a Whole and then sees Hegel as deploying the last and most ambitious ontological and metaphysical totalization of Being, Zizek turns the tables: for him the problem with Kant is that he remains too committed to an essentially metaphysical project, unable to complete the Copernican Revolution in thought for which he calls.12 Hegel is the thinker who follows through on the Kantian turn by transforming the negation of the cosmological world, of the harmonious totality delivered by pre-modern fantasy, into a new truththe truth of the subject qua negativity. What if, Kant asks in the preface to the B edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, the failure of philosophy to establish itself as a basis for knowledge lies in the foundational metaphors by which metaphysics seeks to develop a science? What if it is a mistake to treat knowledge as a kind of journey from one thing (the subject) to another (the object)an error that guarantees the end of all philosophical inquiry in skepticism? Whereas, previously, modern philosophers had been stymied by our inability to overcome the limitations created by our consciousness, to escape from inside the mind to gain a knowledge of objects as they really are, Kant turns the tables, demanding that we see the perspectival representation of the object, its imperfection for us, as the precondition of objectivity itself. As Zizek puts it in The Ticklish Subject, Kant forces us to see that the preconditions for knowledge are also the preconditions for an object of knowledgethat when there is knowledge there must also be an object represented for a subject, and that what we therefore mean by object is nothing other than this being for a subject.13 In this way, the shift to a consideration of knowledge in terms only of the perspectival structure of the subjects representations marks a decisive attack on the very idea of a meta-physical or supra-sensible realm necessary to guarantee human existence, a transcendental space of omniscience beyond perspective. As Zizek puts it, the essential thing here is the self-assertion of modernity as a force of radical negativity, dissolving the secure boundaries that
Indeed, Zizek also offers Heideggers book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger 1997) and, indeed, the whole confrontation with Cassirer and other German neo-Kantians as another way into the Heideggerian insight about nitude. See Zizek 1999, pp. 2552. I have further discussed Zizeks eks Imagination: A Kantian reading of the KantHeidegger relationship in an unpublished paper, Ziz Critique of Heidegger (Brockelman, Unpublished). 12 Zizek (1999, p. 55).
11 13

Ibid.

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previously guaranteed reality to be a whole.14 There is no space in common between subjectivity and the object because that is not their relationship. Still, on the other hand, for Zizek Kant necessarily fails to live up to his own revolution, re-ontologizing the conceptual space of objectivity (reality) as both the in-itself of epistemology and the noumenal of practical philosophy. In making his Copernican turn from objects to our faculty of intuition, Kant reinforces the very metaphor that he overcomessuggesting a movement inward, one that puts us rmly back in the camera obscura of the mind from which we had hoped to escape. For Zizek, the inevitable form of persisting metaphysical thought operates in the necessity for Kant of thinking the negativity of the modern subject in opposition to objectivity. That is, Kantian transcendentalism is still shaped or, even better, haunted by metaphysical categories. Even if the object becomes the object of representation, reality remains independent of these perspectival structures, an opaque remainder of wholism. Hegel, in this view, completes the modern revolution by attacking this residual whole. For Zizek, Hegel simply repeats the Kantian move with regard to the objects of consciousness/knowledge by applying it to reality itself: what if, asks Zizeks Hegel, we double Kants insight that the conditions of possibility of our knowledge are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the object of our knowledge, by positing that the limitation of our knowledge (its failure to grasp the whole of Being) is simultaneously the limitation of the very object of our knowledge. Or, in other words, the gaps and voids in our knowledge of reality are simultaneously the gaps and voids in the real ontological edice itself and, therefore, the insufciency of this knowledge with regard to reality signals the more radical insufciency of reality itself.15 Oddly enough, by Zizeks reading of him, the Heidegger of anticipatory resoluteness would amount to a radical modernist in the Hegelian mold, one who would insist upon translating the epistemology of nitude back onto the reality before which we admit our limitations. In other words, it is no accident for Zizek that Heideggers version of the ethics of nitude demands an implicit assertion of realitys nature rather than simply an admission of our limitations in knowing reality. To live nitely is to assert oneself about the world in which we live, or, at least, to commit oneself to the worlds incompletion and our freedom in it. It is precisely in this sense that Zizek speaks of Heidegger as accomplishing the Kantian philosophical revolution, with his transcendental analysis of Daseins nitude, an accomplishment that eluded Kant himself.

3 Heideggers subject Now, most of Zizeks criticism of Being and Time and the work following it through the mid-1930s dwells on the impoverished social and political structure underlying its construction. In this way one might think, at rst glance, that Zizeks take
14 15

Zizek (2003, p. 87). Zizek (1999, p. 55).

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follows a pattern that is repeated by multitudinous Heidegger-critics from Karl Lowith through Habermas and Wolin: such criticism starts by observing that it is no accident that the authenticity of Dasein, while always a possibility secondary to its primordial inauthenticity, is dened in classic existentialist terms; in transcending the idle chatter of das Man, in authentic being-towards-death, as its own-most possibility, Heidegger seems to assert a classically subjectivist individual activity dened against a shallow social world. To be authentic is to overcome the they (das Man) in an immediate decision.16 If the problem with Heideggers early thought is that it remains still too individualistic because it is too subjective, then the corrective would be a thinking which eschews the existential individualism of Being and Time. And then attitudes about later Heidegger will divide between those who see Heidegger as redeeming himself from subjectivism after the turn (Arendt, Heidegger himself) when he abandons the remnants of subjectivism along with transcendental philosophy and those who take what Zizek calls the passive receptiveness of the later work as still rooted in a subjectivist irrationalism (Jonas, Lowith, Habermas, Wolin, etc.) In either case, critics blame the residual subjectivism of Being and Time for Heideggers failures, including, most importantly, his attraction to Nazism in the early 1930s. For Zizek, on the other hand, it is precisely the ungrounded nature of Daseins decision, Heideggers radical nitism and even subjectivism here, that is worth saving.17 In Heideggers path from transcendental philosophy through thinking, Zizek would argue that Heidegger should have stuck with transcen18 dentalism. How, then, to square such a point of view with Zizeks repeated turn to criticism of Heidegger as a social or political thinker? Isnt Habermas, for one, right that Heideggers blindness to the nature of the social/political is of a piece with his existential and still too subjective bias? Such a question is especially pressing when one considers Zizeks basic sympathy with readings like that of Habermas, which
See, for example, Lowith (1995) or Habermas (1987). Zizek has long followed Miller and later Lacan in his defense of a radicalized modern subjectivism in his readings of Hegel and Schelling as well as, most polemically, in the very thesis of The Ticklish Subject, whose opening sentences play with the language of The Communist Manifesto as follows: This book thus endeavors to reassert the Cartesian subject, whose rejection forms the silent pact of all the struggling parties of todays academia: although all these orientations are ofcially involved in a deadly battle (Habermasians versus deconstructionists; cognitive scientists versus New Age obscuran tists), they are all united in their rejection of the Cartesian subject (Zizek 1999, p. 2). 18 izeks only Auseinandersetzung with the approach Of course, the line of argument I trace here is not Z in Being and Time: we should also mention the way that any Lacanian position, such as Zizeks, must train a basic suspicion on one of the basic premises of Heideggers phenomenologynamely, its appeal to a vision of language where (originally, tb) statements refer directly to their social context, so that the inauthenticity of Daseins self-expression can be related to forgetting the experiential origins of metaphor (Zizek 2006a, p. 234). Its in that light, of course, that Heidegger considers the task of philosophy to be nothing other than the re-animation of the basic metaphors of a language or tradition (see Being and Time, 1962, Sect. 44). For Zizek, on the contrary, the rst signier is empty, a zero-signier, pure form, an empty promise of a meaning-to-come; it is only on a second occasion that the frame of this process is gradually lled in with content (Zizek 2006a, p. 234). And he explains this pronouncement with Freuds famous statement that, the secrets of the ancient Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians themselves; that is, there is no original meaning in experience to which we might return. Quite the opposite, the appearance of such a meaning, embedded in the seeming fallenness of metaphor in language is what provides the paradigm of how ideology works (Zizek 2006a, p. 234).
17 16

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criticize Heideggers analysis of historical communities of Dasein in Sect. 74 of Being and Time.19 But Zizek never fully explains his own path from Being and Times subjectivism to social and political questions. When pressed to complete his critique of Heideggers philosophy of nitude, both The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject turn immediately to the social and political stakes of Heideggers thought the question of Heideggers Nazism, the possibility of an Heideggerian politics, etc. In other words, Zizek leaves out a step in his argument, and an essential one at thatnamely, the explanation of why Heideggers great social/political error doesnt stem from his decisionism at all and what it does stem from.20 Its to the task of lling out that unarticulated moment in Zizeks argument that I now turn. Let me offer what is admittedly a mere reconstruction of Zizeks argument, an effort to ll in the missing step. While such a method demands that we strike out a little from what Zizek has explicitly written or said, it will not only allow us to bind izeks political critique of Heidegger with his (Zizeks) position on nitude but to Z do so in a fashion that also claries several cryptic Ziziekian statements about the limits of a philosophy of nitude and of Being and Time. While Zizek does a good job of underscoring the radicality of anticipatory resoluteness, the three chapters (at the beginning of Division II) which prepare the way for that concept present more difculties. This is a key section of Being and Time, the part of the book in which Heidegger increasingly concretizes ways in which Dasein might be said to experience its own Being in toto. First in the famous analysis of Being-towards-death (resolved into its authentic understanding as anticipation) and then in the discussion of guilt and resoluteness by which Heidegger claims to give an experiential pinpoint to such pre-theoretical self-understanding, Heidegger builds his bridge between fundamental ontology and existential philosophy; and it is obvious that, if this bridge fails, so does the basic project of Being and Time. My claim here is that a careful Zizekian examination of these chapters in Heidegger would indicate a mis-placed keystone: we might, in fact, use either or both of Chapters 1 and 2, but, for the sake of brevity, Ill stick with the clearer case here, the discussion of existential guilt and resoluteness in the second chapter of Division II. In attempting to connect the existential concepts of Chapter 2 with concrete (existentiell) experiences, Heidegger starts out from the call of conscience, a call which he reduces to its essence as the existential accusation, Guilty! with which Dasein is always faced. Heidegger carefully dissociates this call from any specic remorse over deeds or intentions. Indeed, he argues compellingly that existential guilt underlies the possibility of the more familiar and everyday pangs with which we usually associate the call of conscience.21
19 20

Zizek (2006a, p. 78).

Though he does not build this argument with regard to Being and Time, Zizek has, since the manuscript of the present argument was written, to some extent addressed my criticism here. Both in Why Heidegger was right in 1933 and in In Defense of Lost Causes (Zizek 2008), which incorporates much of the discussion from Why Heidegger was right, he offers an understanding of the ontological errancy underlying Heideggers political error. My discussion here ties this errancy directly to Being and Time.
21

See Heidegger (1962, M & R, pp. 327329; SZ, pp. 281284).

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Whence comes this omnipresent and foundational mood? As Heideggers analysis reveals, Dasein is guilty in having evaded its own voice and thus being seduced by the comforting everydayness of the They, with its elimination of ambiguity and uncanniness. Thus, for Heidegger, Dasein itself in its uncanny nothingness is the caller who breaks up the party of inauthentic deniteness, who challenges our identication with our publicly dened selves and their projects.22 The key moment of guilt here is one that happens to us (a situation into which we are thrown) and its force seems to come from the tension between inauthentic common understandings and those which are my own-most possibilities.23 Heidegger characterizes resoluteness in the face of such guilt as wanting to have a conscience, i.e., as understanding and aligning ones Dasein with the indeniteness of our care. While, given the sordidness of the life I have lived by following the accepted self- and world-understanding, my guilt will always, primarily take the form of self-accusation, I respond resolutelyauthenticallyto this raggedness by acknowledging its inevitability. And I do that by choosing some coherent subset of concrete life projects, understandings and relationships. The existential choice here amounts to what I called commitment above, a complete investment in, and transformation through the situation in which it occurs. Certainly, we can make sense experientially of why somebody acting resolutely might speak of nding themselves, but, really, whats at stake is projecting or even producing a self. Recall here Zizeks emphasis upon the way that the commitment of anticipatory resoluteness attacks any conceptual space (i.e., the world, the self) constituting a limit to nitude. To afrm resoluteness is to act in a manner beyond good and evil or beyond, in any case, the remorse by which such moral categories of selfhood are enforced. Thus, the chapter on the call of conscience gives us a second moment, a resolution of guilt, in which authenticity is dened not by the pair theirs/mine but rather determinate/open and openness is realized precisely through a determining act of choice. In fact, the issue here is the role of the authentic self itself. Heideggers concept of authenticity has two antecedents: on the one hand, from its introduction in the rst chapter of Being and Time the term, Eigentlichkeit, (authenticity) is associated with mineness (jemeinigkeit), with, then, an honesty to oneself as individuatedeven if this self must be conceived as irreducibly worldly and even insubstantial. On the other hand, Heidegger also associates authenticity with Daseins ability to decide or choose.24 In this view, I am my choosing as well as the trail of my past decisions. To this extent, the issue of
22 23

Heidegger (1962, M & R, p. 321; SZ, p. 276).

See ibid. (M & R, p. 316; SZ, p. 271): Dasein fails to hear itself, and listens way to the they; and this listening-away gets broken by the call (of conscience, tb.) if that call, in accordance with its character as such, arouses another kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that is lost, has a character in every way opposite. If in this lost hearing, one has been fascinated with the hubbub of the manifold ambiguity which idle talk possesses in its everyday newness, then the call must do its calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience.
24

Ibid. (M & R, pp. 6768; SZ, p. 42).

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authenticity is not so much one of individuality versus group think (falling, idle chatter, etc.) as it is a kind of understanding of its world which frees it from even internal measures of its being. (There is no essence of me which predetermines who I am.) Which is just to afrm Heideggers own insight that, with such resoluteness, we nd an essential freedom, a spontaneity. In the light of this ambiguity, we might say that, Heidegger, unacknowledged, changes the subject of his analysis between the Dasein of experience in general and authentic Daseinmoving from a Romantic, individuated self to a chosen, created subjectivity. And, in retrospect, doesnt Heideggers own forced description of the categories in both Chapters 1 and 2 of the second division hint at this shift? Since it is ready for anxiety, anticipation is no longer simply anxious Beingtowards-death, a state into which Dasein is born. Since it wants to have a conscience, resoluteness is no longer simply the existential call to conscience in its traumatic presence (Guilty!) (see Heidegger, Being and Time, Sect. 45). Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that anticipatory Dasein is no longer anxious and that her resolute doppelganger is no longer guilty. Now, of course, its important not to exaggerate this division in Being and Time between two Daseins. The very convincingness of the image of the resolute individual, authentically facing her own death and nullity, forbids such exaggeration. There is, after all, a certain intuitive rightness about the existentialist ethic that largely explains the enduring inuence of Heideggers early book. At a psychological level, nobody would deny that such an individual, as master of anxiety, still experiences something of it. Fortunately, though, a Zizekian understanding of the dialectical relationship between the two subjects of existential analysis allows us to understand this psychology, while also moving beyond it. Recall that Being and Time introduces the concepts of care and Beingtowards-death as gures for, more or less, the uncanniness of Daseins Being the way that its existence is never present-at-hand to it as a mere object for analysis. Now, the value of existential conscience as a moment in Heideggers analysis is that it suggests a concrete dimension in which such uncanniness obtrudes upon our everyday consciousness without becoming such an epistemological object.25 Uncanniness isnt missing from the rst subject, guilty Dasein. As Heidegger is at pains to indicate, the virtue of authenticity is that, in it, Dasein is in-the-Truth, namely, the truth that is constituted by its own uncanniness all
25 Here, I must note a terminological difculty: within Zizeks Lacanian discourse, Heideggers notion of an objectless anxiety is mistaken. Anxiety indicates, not the lack of an object, but the presence of a particular object, objet a. While this distinction is important for understanding the specic praxical bond that Zizek identies between analysis and revolution, it need not enter our considerations here. For more on this, see Zizek 2006a, p. 198, and Zizek 2006b, pp. 116119. Its also worth noting the parallel between Heideggers and Freuds anxiety accounts, both of which distinguish between some form of fear (or phobia), as object-directed and anxiety, as too overwhelming to attach to a particular object. In Freuds version, the consistent note sounded from his letters to Fliess (1896) through Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety is the traumatic nature of anxiety. Because, as he puts it in The Ego and the Id, the origin of anxiety lies in a fear of being overwhelmed or annihilated, what it is that is feared cannot be specied (Freud 1974, p. 57). It is only when, later, we are able to anticipate anxietys onset, associating it with the presence of particular objects, that we can place it within an economy of the pleasure/reality principles.

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along. However, neither the anxiety of Being-towards-death nor even the guilty! of the call of conscience directly thematize this indeniteness as self-understanding. In existential guilt we know our selves in being struck by what we are notour everyday they selves with our denite self-understandings and projects. However, to know that we are not the denite person we thought ourselves to be or even any such denite character is not yet to understand ourselves as the indeniteness of care or Being-towards-death. If such Dasein (admittedly fundamentally inarticulate) were forced to articulate its self-understanding, wouldnt it be something like, I am not what I thought myself to be, nor what others think of me? Heidegger himself acknowledges that while the true meaning of conscience is present from the start in the call of conscience, such meaning only appears when the call is rightly understood and that only happens when we hear it authentically in a factical taking-action.26 We might say that, lacking such a praxical response, Dasein remains wedded to a view of itself as a kind of subject tragically opposed to a meaningless world. From the viewpoint of the Dasein experiencing guilty! there is still a court of appeal before which my everyday self is accused: there, I am call(ed) forth and summon(ed)to Being-guilty, forcing me away from my everyday self and world.27

4 The comedy of revolution: what Heidegger couldnt bear In other words, Im suggesting that the shift from the call of conscience to resoluteness mirrors the movement Zizek nds from Kant to Hegel, a parallax shift from an incomplete to a complete modern dialectic. The only difference in my example from Being and Time is that Heidegger does not, indeed cannot, acknowledge the shift whose assertion underlies Hegel. Rather than admitting the difference made by the movement from a Kantian framework wherein a nite subject faces off against the noumenal or the in-itself to a nite being, Heidegger projects the characteristics of those Kantian structures (such as guilt) onto the viewpoint of the authentic subjectso that, the authentic person exemplies a kind of dour Germanic individualism in their reticence and certainty, etc. In Zizeks words, this side of Being and Time models an ultraserious heroic confrontation with our destiny.28 For this reason, it remains unclear whether Heidegger suggests that we should not take the end of a philosophy of nitude to be a tragic situation in which a humanized subject faces off against a meaningless universe.29 But Zizek unambiguously demands that we push our
26 27 28 29

Heidegger (1962, M & R, p. 341; SZ, p. 294). Ibid. (M & R, p. 341; SZ, p. 295). Zizek (2006a, p. 110).

In his recent writing (Critchley 2002, 2007), Simon Critchley, himself an expert on Heidegger, criticizes precisely this tragic seriousness in Heideggers worktracing it back to a massive and complex privileging of the tragic in post-Kantian Germanaphone philosophy (Critchley 2007, p. 75). My thanks to an anonymous reader for this and several other helpful suggestions in the nal preparation of this manuscript.

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understanding of nitude in another direction. We must move away from the utter seriousness, the all-pervasive pathos of the merely existential Heidegger.30 To describe his differences with Heideggers classical existentialist philosophy of nitude, Zizek suggests an alternative type of comedy to the classical one: such a comedy depends not upon the symmetrical and harmonious resolution of a potentially tragic situation but rather upon an a-symmetrical doubling of tragedy upon the infection of the subject of annunciation by the negation otherwise reserved for reality.31 Zizek reminds us of an old grafto from May 68 in Paris. Somebody crosses out an original inscription, God is Dead: Nietzsche, and writes over it, Nietzsche is dead: God. Now, for Zizek this is not yet the alternative comic dimension and indeed represents the worst kind of ideology; for the implicit result of the joke would be that God is alive and able to have the last word on Nietzsche. Thus, Zizek follows Alenka Zupancic in suggesting that the joke really should have read, God is Dead. And, as a matter of fact, I dont feel too well, either.32 Without this gesture oddly preserving subjectivity in a wavering half-existence we necessarily revive God by maintaining the tragedy of existentialism: either God is dead so that the tragic hero Nietzsche must suffer or Nietzsche is dead, proving that he was never anything but a speck manipulated by the divine consciousness. Whether we tell the story as the death of God or of Nietzsche the tone is Byronic, outsized, tragic. And isnt this just the symptom that the narratives purpose is one of reassurance rather than exploration or challenge? In this overly theatrical subject of nitude we nd an abandonment of the genuinely nite dimension. Indeed, as Simon Critchley has pointed out in a series of writings about Lacan and partially in conversation with Zizekthe virtue of a comic or humorous subject is the deation of such a theatrical, tragic self. For example, writing of Freuds late essay, Humor, Critchley embraces the idea that in the humorous, the super-ego makes the ego itself look tiny and trivial with the result that I nd myself ridiculous.33 This deation of the ego precisely allows the world itself to appear as nothing but a game for childrenessentially incomplete, an appropriate eld for the act.34 It is obvious that reading Zizek is a very different experience than reading Heidegger, a difference which is quite intentional. In a recent interview, Zizek notes his deep distrust of the Heideggerian pathetic stylea distrust which, he insists, underlies his compulsion to vulgarize his own writing, lling it with references to German toilets, sex acts and reality TV.35 My suggestion would be that
30 31

Zizek (2006a).

Locating its central articulation in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, Alenka Zupancic articulates this alternative comic dimension in some detail, dwelling particularly on the way in which it answers the philosophy of nitude. See Zupancic (2006). 32 Zizek (2006a, p. 109: see, also, Zupancic 2006, p. 196).
33 34 35

Critchley (2007, p. 79). Critchley (2007, p. 80, quoting Freud). Zizek and Daly (2004, p. 44).

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the stylistic difference between the anxious but resolute Heideggerian and the oddly comic Zizek is precisely what, in Zizeks analysis, nitude really demands. In other words, we have to pass beyond the seriousness of all existential accounts to do justice to the demand inherent to the nite call. Not in heroic quaking before the nullity of death but rather in quietly but systematically kicking away the crutches of everyday existence can we redeem the niteness of human life. Its a process that even removes the comfort of the tragic self facing the void but which, for all that, reaches more deeply into the nothing which Heidegger rightly discovers at the center of human experience than could Being and Time. All of which would explain why Zizek combines repeated encomia of Heideggers philosophy of nitude (as summarized in anticipatory resoluteness) with warnings about its limitationswarnings that extend, indeed, to an imperative that we resist any temptation to rewrite a good Being and Time.36 That is, to the extent that the project of Being and Time as a whole demands we overlook or minimize the shift in perspective between the existential structures of Daseins Being and the existentiell stances denitive of its authenticity, it cannot be saved. And such a demand is surely inherent in the very project of grasping the structure of Being as a whole from the pre-reective experience of Dasein: that is, Heideggers very project demands that he draw a straight line from the pre-reective dimension of our throwness to authentic understandings of that state. Above all, though, Zizeks warning against rewriting Being and Time speaks to the foundational limitation Heidegger imposes on any social or political thoughta limitation which returns us to the difference between his critique and Jonas or Habermas condemnation of a formalistic decisionism in Heidegger. To see Zizeks point, we might begin from the observation that the movement from, for example, guilt to resoluteness takes us from a subject which is necessarily dened by the categories of individuality (my-ownness, for the most part absorbed in the they, etc.) to one which, in Zizeks take, dees description by such categories. The decision of authenticity, redening reality itself by projecting that possibility which is essential to Dasein at that time no longer ts the way that we normally understand individual identity formation. For one thing, such a decision can issue from the socially transformative collective or revolutionary group just as well as from an individual.37 Let me clarify this: the point is not that resoluteness allows us to substitute a larger subject for the individualized Dasein of the call of conscience. Quite the contrary, the key here is that there is a an untranslatable shift of consciousness between the kind of subjectivity which individuates in structures like anxiety and guilt and the authentic enactment of these structuresa heterogeneity in continuity which dissolves the constituted relationship between the individual and social.38
36 37 38

Zizek (2006a, p. 278). Ibid.

A recent essay of Zizeks, Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933, makes this argument with regard to the period following Being and Time, the period in which Heideggers texts have often been taken to be fatally and symptomatically lled with proto-Nazi references to a communal will. Indicating Heideggers derivation of this language from his seminars on Anaximander and Heraclitus, Zizek demonstrates that the meaning of such willing is hardly subjective in the sense of a closed position

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More specically, the same movement which forbids guilt in the second moment also makes traditional identity obsolete: to act resolutely is to leave behind the effort to nd out who I am, or to enforce the strictures of social inclusion and exclusion from an identity.39 We get the breakdown of precisely that distinction between the individual and the social that is conceivable as providing the content of individual Daseins world through traditions. On the other hand, this breakdown also means that the authentic subject is neither the traditionally understood form (individual) nor content of her world. We have, instead, at least the possibility of a new kind of socius, the self-producing, self-dening collective. Indeed, such a collectivist theme, which his theological writing associates with St. Pauls decision to dene Christianity as a practical orientation rather than an, identity, is essential to Zizek. As opposed to Judaism, where the chosen people could still conceive itself as a dened religious or even ethnic group, for Pauline Christians, Holy Spirit designates a new collective held together not by a MasterSignier, but by delity to a Cause, by the effort to draw a new line of separation that runs beyond Good and Evil, that is to say, that runs across and suspends the distinctions of the existing social body. The key dimension of Pauls gesture is thus his break with any form of communitarianism: his universe is no longer that of the multitude of groups that want to nd their voice, and assert their particular identity but that of a ghting collective grounded in the reference to an unconditional universalism.40 If you like, the collective suspends the basic fantasy by which reality has been pre-given, pre-formed, the fantasy, as Zizek puts it in The Ticklish Subject of a space from and for which our world is presented as a totality.41 That Heidegger misses this possibility for understanding Daseins social Being, that he settles instead upon the double inadequacy of Mitsein and the picture of traditions as providing the content for Daseins merely formal existential decision (Heidegger, Being and Time, Sect. 74), explains the broad force of Zizeks various political critiques of Heidegger-the-Nazi: Heidegger is constantly retreating from his own insight in Being and Timea retreat that begins in that
Footnote 38 continued from which and for which Being is framed. Quite the contrary, in Zizeks interpretation at least, Heideggers will must be related to Anaximanders disorder, a primal disturbance in the historicity of the fugue of Being which cannot be ironed-out (Zizek 2007, p. 37). Seen not as the hegemonic claim of power over the whole of Being, but rather as a primordial disruption of totality itself, will means something much more like what Freudians get at with drive (Zizek 2007, p. 37).
39 Both guilt and identity, as attested in Freuds Ur-myth for the founding of society from Moses and Monotheism, assume a socially constituted reality conceived from a totalizing perspectivesome whole in which the individual is given a pre-ordained place. 40 Zizek (2003, p. 130). 41 See Zizek 1999, p. 57. So the gap that forever separates the domain of (symbolically mediated, i.e. ontologically constituted) reality from the elusive and spectral real that precedes it is crucial: what psychoanalysis calls fantasy is the endeavor to close this gap by (mis)perceiving the pre-ontological Real as simply another, more fundamental, level of realityfantasy projects on to the pre-ontological Real the form of constituted reality (as in the Christian notion of another, suprasensible reality).

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book itself. Indeed, Zizek would ask us to go further and take such retreat as denitive of Heideggers path. Heidegger retreats in order to evade accepting the full threat of the anticipatory resoluteness he himself projects, in order to tame its disruptive force under what I might call a personalist ethic of authenticity, an authenticity dened as being true to oneself. Heidegger is, in Zizeks Lacanian/ psychoanalytic understanding, fundamentally an hysteric, someone who protests loudly precisely in order to be sure that nothing changes. How does Heidegger see the world so as to justify his own reaction, to miss the revolutionary potential of his own thought? For Zizek, the answer lies in his ambivalent commitment to and revulsion before modernity. While holding and even radicalizing an existential view of Dasein, Heidegger also resists the degradation of Daseins world in an increasingly bureaucratic and technocratic universe. Heideggers rationale for Nazism, as announced in The Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935 is that the inner greatness of this movement lies in the encounter between global technology and modern man.42 The modern scientic/technological apparatus both empties the world of its traditional content (which combines economic technological determination with the sphere of Mass culture) and trivializes the self, which is captured all the more decisively by the structures of inauthenticity (idle chatter, the they, etc.) The brilliance of Nazism for Heidegger lies in its convenience with such an ambivalence about the modern world. First of all, he can hold onto the existentialist thematicalbeit by sacricing what weve seen to be genuinely compelling about it. When Dasein is reduced to my-ownness, the shift from individual to the people is simply a matter of ination: being true to myself becomes being true to ourselves. From Zizeks viewpoint, such ination marks a structural error. Just as the dialectical continuity between guilt and resoluteness encouraged the projection of an authentically resolute individual who would share the personal qualities of its merely inauthentic forebear, so also such continuity invites misinterpretation of social identity as a multiplied version of the individual. We miss out entirely on the potential of anticipatory resoluteness for a more insightful understanding of the social, an understanding which no longer conceives the we as a mere enlargement of the I.43 In other words, because Heidegger fails to see how resolute decision transforms Dasein, so that my ownness no longer denes it, he falls easily into the Nazi error of conceiving collectivity as a simple magnication of individuality, as a larger subject. But the seduction of the mega-subject is only half the story of Heideggers Nazitemptation: the Nazi mythology always presents itself as renewal of tradition. While maintaining the kind of subject to which Heidegger clings dogmatically, it also
42 43

Heidegger (1979, p. 199).

As Habermas points out, in the following passage from one of Heideggers 1933 propaganda pieces, the individualizing language of Being and Time is simply translated into the rst-person plural: in propagandizing for the elections of 1933, Heidegger writes that Hitler gives the German people the direct possibility of the highest free choice: whether the entire people wills its own Dasein or not.Heidegger, article in the Freiburger Studentenzeitung of November 10, 1933, translated and quoted in Habermas 1987, p. 157.

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gives it a reassuring contentindeed, encourages him to conceive the worldshaping quality of social Dasein as content for the form of Daseins decision.44 That is, National Socialism allows precisely the synthesis of formal action now enacted by such a corporate subject with the traditional content upon which Heidegger insists. We have precisely the formalist decisionism that the entire German intellectual world from Jonas onwards has decried. Or, one might also say that Nazism leaves room for modernization while limiting its effects. As Zizek puts it in The Parallax View, with Nazism for Heidegger we have technology, not asceptic traditionalism, but combined with roots, Volk, authentic decision, not das Man.45 All of which is to suggest the specic way in which for Zizek Nazism really represented a crisis in Heideggers misinterpretation of his own insightthe furthest possibility for addressing the problems created by the modern world within his still formalist and existential self-interpretation. Beyond this opportunity lies the only genuine option, revolution in accord with the most radical structure of anticipatory resoluteness. In the sense that he embraces an apparent social revolution (Nazism) in order to prevent such a real revolution (the threat of modern technology, the elision of the formal relationship between Dasein and its social context), Heidegger represents for Zizek a typical fascist. Such is the case insofar as fascism in all its variants is, the paradigmatic case of a pseudo-Event, of a spectacular turmoil destined to conceal the fact that, on the most fundamental level (that of the relations of production), nothing really changes. The fascist revolution is thus the answer to the question: what do we have to change so that ultimately nothing will really change?46 Which, of course, indicates for Zizek how far Heidegger would have had to go to live up to the task given by anticipatory resoluteness. One cannot say the same thing that Zizek says about fascism with regard to Leftist revolutions: the Soviet experiment may have failed dismally to transform the fabric of society, with horric human consequences, but that was not a problem with its intention. Quite the contrary, the Soviets really tried to overturn the existing social order, and it was their initial success in doing precisely that which produced the vehemence of the Stalinist backlash.47 Thus, for Zizek, we can express Heideggers failure to live up to his own conception of nitude as his failure to see that he really should have embraced the Soviet opportunity rather than the Nazi pseudo-alternative. For Zizek, it was only Soviet Communism which, despite the catastrophe it stands for, did

Thus Zizek reminds us that in Sect. 74 of Being and Time Heidegger does indeed treat the individuals resolute decision as merely formal, since Daseins existential possibilities are not to be gathered from death (Heidegger 1962, M & R, p. 434; SZ, p. 383). In this situation, Heidegger proposes that the content of resoluteness derives from the communal heritage in which Daseins existence is caught up (Ibid., M & R, p. 435; SZ, p. 383; Zizeks translation, 2006a, p. 278). 45 Zizek (2006a, p. 284).
44

Zizek (1999, p. 21). See Zizek 2006a, p. 283: Stalinist Communism was inherently related to a Truth-Event (of the October Revolution).
46 47

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possess true inner greatness.48 Had he remained in the Truth of his own insight, Heidegger would have had to become a Communist! Thus, also, a project for todayto develop a genuine philosophy of nitude or, if we are to eschew the existential seriousness of nitude as Zizek suggests, to follow out the implications of Heideggers own pursuit of nitude, implications before which he himself gave way. The very unfullled promise of Heideggers work calls for a radically different kind of philosophy, oddly comic and, above all, embracing the possibility of genuine social revolution. In the obvious waysand eks the reader will perceive here my argument that precisely this constitutes Ziz itinerarysuch a project will not look or sound Heideggerian at all: indeed, when Zizek pursues it, it leads to the Parisian door of Jacques-Alain Miller and then to a peculiar synthesis of the later Lacan and Hegel. Nor, of course, do I wish to claim that the path from Heidegger to Zizeks mature work is anything like selfconsciously straight. As is always the case with such inuences, the steadiness of the call of Heidegger only emerges in retrospect. Nonetheless, a return to Being and Time and to Zizeks reading of that book, gives a remarkably clear and coherent understanding of Zizeka thinker whose Protean and enigmatic thought is notorious. In a vital sense, Zizek follows a map that Heidegger gave him.

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