Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia

A Flight of God: M. Heidegger and R. Girard

Author(s): Anthony W. Bartlett
Source: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T. 59, Fasc. 4, A Herana de Heidegger: Heidegger's
Heritage (Oct. - Dec., 2003), pp. 1101-1120
Published by: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia
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R. P.F.I
59 2003

A Flight of God:
M. Heidegger and R. Girard
Anthony W. Bartlett*

Abstract: A reading of Heidegger's philosophy out of Girard 's mimetic anthropology

warranted by the problem of violence in Heidegger's text and context, and by th

relationship of his thought to biblical revelation. The formative anthropology underlyi

Heideggerean ontology is the permanent sacrificial crisis unleashed by the figure a
message of the Crucified. Heidegger responds to this in his existential analytic in respe

of the pivotal death 0/ Dasein and thefutural temporality governed by this death, and the

in the essential thinking of being and its event fEreignisJ of appropriation and withdraw

Dasein is understood as the victim of sacrificial crisis. The event is the crisis itsel

Heidegger's thought and language are then recruited to enable a more profound reflecti

on the meaning of biblical revelation, removing it from a metaphysical framework, placin

it in an abyssal dynamic of giving that goes beyond the violence of being.

Key Words: Aletheia; Being; Christianity; Crucified; Dasein; Death; Destruktion; Diff

rence; Girard, R.; God; Gospel; Heidegger, M.; Love; Metaphysics; Mimes

Nazism; New Testament; Nonviolence; Ontology; Pain; Revelation; Sacred; Scap

goat; Theology; Victim; Violence.

Resumo: O presente artigo defende que uma leitura dafilosofia de Heidegger a partir

antropologia mimetica de R. Girard estd justificada pelo problema da violencia tanto n

texto de Heidegger como no seu contexto, bem como pela relacdo do seu pensamen

com a revelacao biblica. A antropologia formativa subjacente a ontologia heide

geriana consiste na crise sacrificial permanente despoletada pela figura e a mensag

do Crucificado. Heidegger responde a isto na sua analitica existencial a proposito d
morte pivotal do Dasein e da temporalidade futura governada por esta morte, e dep
no pensamento essencial do ser e do evento (Ereignis) de apropriagdo e retirada
Dasein e entendido como vitima da crise sacrificial. O evento e a crise propriamen
dita. Neste sentido, o artigo recruta o pensamento e a linguagem de Heidegger

ordem a possibilitar uma reflexdo mais profunda acerca do sentido da revelac

biblica, removendo-a de um contexto metafisico e colocando-a numa dindmica abis

de doacdo que vai para alem da violencia do ser.

Palavras-Chave: Aletheia; Amor; Bode expiatorio; Cristianismo; Crucificado; Dasei

Destruktion; Deus; Diferenqa; Dor; Evangelho; Girard, R.; Heidegger, M

Metafisica; Mimes e; Morte; Nao-Vwlencia; Nazismo; Novo Testamento; Ontolog

Revelagdo; Sagrado; Ser; Teologia; Violencia; Vitima.

* Syracuse University; Le Moyne College (Syracuse, NY - USA).

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U02 Anthony W. Bartlett

Heidegger has taught us one thing: that everywhere and i

unutterable mystery which disposes over us, even though

we must do even if, in his own work and in a way that

himself abstains from speech about this mystery, speech w

A Revelation of Anthropology

a page of Heidegger is at once to be confronted with a new

philosophical language and a new horizon of thought. As many have
commented his text has the impact of revelation. The quality of revelation
is not foreign to philosophy; it was there from the beginning, in the oracular
sayings of Heraclitus and the divine voice guiding Socrates. But today the meaning
of "revelation" checks in with a heavy set of clearly-marked theological baggage.
It is powerfully formed by biblical faith and by the historical contents of that faith.
What is the relationship of the dynamic of Heidegger's text to the particular energy

of the biblical tradition? A second and equally important question is formed by

turning this one inside out. What special data on biblical revelation can be brought
to light by Heidegger's thought?
As a way of answering the first question I will turn to the work of Rene Girard,

seeking to show that the permanent sacrificial crisis unleashed by biblical

revelation, in particular the message of the Crucified, is the underlying anthropology of Heidegger's thought of being. The very statement of such a linking is
blasphemy for philosopher purists. But the postmodern environment does not
allow the luxury of metaphysically sealed conceptual realms. The contamination of
one discourse by another is if anything the most significant philosophical advance
made on the basis of Heidegger's own concept of Destruktion, when it becomes
deconstruction in Derrida's investigative strategy about writing and meaning.
Moreover, as will be evident from what follows, Heidegger's philosophical career
is in no way indifferent to, on the one hand, Christian theology and, on the other,
to the crisis of violence produced in Europe by the catastrophe of Nazism. Any

honest reckoning of Heidegger's heritage needs to follow these possibilities

through to term. The results could be truly revelatory.

The second question is itself provoked by this method of inquiry. If biblical

revelation has had some profound impact on Heidegger's thought then the
language developed under that impact may itself have something to say to
Christian revelation. From a philosophical perspective what remains at stake is the

relation of human thought to the world, something that Heidegger's thought

formidably addresses. From a theological perspective, however, what is at issue is
the relation of the events of historical faith to the world. Understanding Heidegger

in a Girardian framework helps us approach this nexus of questions in a

dramatically new way.1
1 For the purposes of this article see Rene Girard, Violence And The Sacred, trans.
Patrick Gregory (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and Things

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard jjq3

I am far from the first to note a connection between H

John D. Caputo makes the point of Heidegger's dependen

when he says his key concept of temporality is a ma

secularizing a fundamentally biblical conception of the his

both compounded and betrayed by the radicality with wh

biblical provenance of these operations."2 Jacques Derrid

procal impact of Heidegger's secularized revelation on Ch
imagines an open dialogue between these and Heidegger in
"...we who would like to be authentic Christians think t

essence of what we want to think, revive, restore, in our fa

A brief review of topics shows in outline his dependenc

New Testament theology. New Testament themes he repe

kairological time, the opportune moment for decision a

anticipatory resoluteness in Being & Time;

the absolute centrality of a single death in establishing the me

core constitution of temporality - Dasein's death;

a double coming of the agency of salvation - a first great Gr

second Germanic beginning;

partial and full revelation - truth (aletheia) experienced by

opening and then this thought for its own sake in Heidegger

a judgment and responsibility internal to existence, including

meaning of human being - care (Sorge) and guilt (Schuld).4

And there should be added even more crucial issues at the level of methodolo-

gy, particularly the fundamental role of movement, posited first by Kierkegaard as

Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).
2 John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press),
181.

3 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, Heidegger And The Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington

and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 111.
4 For kairological time see the early Freiburg lectures, Phdnomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einfiihrung in die phdnomenologische Forschung, in Gesamtausgabe
61 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), 137-40, and for anticipatory resoluteness Being & Time,

trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), H. 308; two
beginnings, Introduction to Metaphysics trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959),15, 38-9, "The Self-Assertion of the German University" in The
Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge Mass. & London, England: The
MIT Press), 32-3, "The Question Concerning Technology," in Martin Heidegger, Basic
Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York & London: Harper & Row, 1977), 315; aletheia
see On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York, San Francisco, London: Harper
Torchbooks, 1969), 69-71; the death of Dasein is of course the constant refrain of Being &
Time - for a summation see subheading 174; similarly for "care" \51 & 58.

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1104 Anthony W. Bartlett

central to Christian faith in opposition to sel

Heidegger as key to the understanding of exist

process of Destruktion learnt from Luther

scholasticism in favor of the authentic experien

last connects to the overall method of hermen

discipline and progressed in Heidegger to becom

fundamental interpretation of Dasein.6

This makes a prima facie case, but when we b

the discussion all of these strands fuse togeth
Heideggerean thought inside out. Mimetic ant
beginning with the body of the victim, but t
covered over by history and culture. In contr
Hebrew scriptures through to the New Testam

the victim and presents the character of G

Mimetic anthropology informed and inspired b

in Heideggerean fashion - looking back throug

Greek origins - but points to the lens itself. The

apparatus of culture emerges is the scapego

tensions of the primal group which erupted

discharged themselves in and on the victim. T

repeated in endless permutations of cultural re

and oppression, to persecution, to war, and

reinforces the plausibility of this single origi

philosophy is that the transcendental condition
conceptualization, is the very first victim. The
non-instinctual attention, provides the first st

the primary opening in which world is dis

consonant with that of Heidegger - a pointing

thought. But where for Heidegger this is origin
of which his own thought is shown as the most

anthropology it is the hidden victim at the cor

historical eruption of biblical truth. However

condition of sacrificial crisis which is the bre
culture. In this state and in the absence of a g

there is a continual search for a new surrogate

violent upheaval.

5 For the appropriation of the theme of move

Kierkegaard see John van Buren, "The Young Heideg

-108, and "The Young Heidegger and Phenomenolo

6 Demythologizing Heidegger, 50-51 & 172. Also M

-2. See Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger's 'Introductio

1921-22'," The Personalist, 60 (1979), 312-24.

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard j 105

Thus we note a dramatic convergence between the two frames

as they appear on the surface sharply divergent. At different point

Heidegger share a sense of the deep structure of biblical revelatio

is radically consistent to it while the latter cuts it off at a vital sta

adopt a deconstructive method seeking the facticity of human ex

however, penetrates to an abyssal experience of the victim that I

clearly intuited but systematically diverted back into violent ant

this pattern is conceded it becomes possible to read Heidegger p

Girardian terms, to deconstruct his own thought in the key of v

powerful critical standpoint by which to analyze more acutely

doubling and mutation of Christian motifs in Heidegger's thoug
important and critical, it becomes possible to understand Girard

terms, involving a more adequate recognition of the profou

implications for biblical faith arising in Girard's thought. In w

seek to demonstrate Heidegger's dependence on historical condi
by biblical faith and the distortion of these through his system
violence. At the same time it will open up more radical possibil
standing the anthropological challenge announced in the work of

The Hidden Relationship of Dasein 's Non-relational D

At more than one point one feels Heidegger's real hostility tow

But the hostility is itself formed by a keen insight into the basic m
of Christian faith. He understands the singular historical nature of

it breaks in abruptly to the field of history. "Faith is the believi

mode of existence in the history revealed, i.e. occurring, with the

is an historical mode of being derived from the event of the Cruc

is therefore an essentially positive science, "absolutely different f

Heidegger grasps fully the way in which Christianity is historic

being from within history, and not a transcendental scheme es
conditions of all of history, which is what a fundamental onto
does not refer to the determinative effect such a single in-breaki
other history, seeking to revolutionize history into its own terms.

But he does go on to assert that the historical mode of existenc

is "the mortal enemy"9 of the historical existence dealt with by p

is Dasein. Such hostility could really only obtain if the two mo

7 "Phenomenology and Theology," in Pathmarks, ed. William McN

England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45, italics original; fr
March 9, 1929.
8 Ibid., 41

* Ibid., 53.

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1106 Anthony W. Bartlett

exactly the same ground, in the same existen

key protagonist of this dispute and brought it

opposition. But neither did he invent it: as the cr

emerged concretely and specifically with th

message could not be so viscerally the enemy o

itself occupied the ground of ontological existe

to light as a possibility. A reading of Western

Christianity and then in particular the develo
shows that the finite temporality of Dasein and

could only become a theme in the light of the

Christ. Classic Greek immortality of the soul

dissolving both into an eternity that has alread
them inescapable by stretching them dynamica

appropriated this radical Christian tempo

breakthrough work. Caputo says in respect of H

temporality in his early Freiburg lectures: "recas

own death, this analysis became a centerpiece

anticipation of its death, its "shattering against

becomes "authentic and wholly transparent."1 l H

Christian temporality and death subordinately

so that being is primitively transparent while D

The temporality of Dasein, therefore, which i

emerges thematically as an alternative to the d
rival and enemy, but only after the Crucified
existential analytic repeats or reiterates the dea

death, as final impossibility. It achieves its

crucifying the Crucified in a post-gospel reaffir

Necessarily a logic of violence then structures t

always been the final framing of Sein zum Tode

works its way out in the later Heidegger. But

& Time that the violence of death is not accid

Heidegger is led internally to exclude the victim

up in heroic metaphysics, and in fact to achiev

on the basis of her death.

A closer glance at the language of Being & Time bears this out. There death is

described as "the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein" and as

unsurpassable (uniiberholbare, not to be outdistanced in any way).12 Then
10 John D. Caputo, Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 140. The Freiburg course was 1920-21, "Einleitung in
die Phanomenologie der Religion."

nft?i/!<fe7im*,H.307,385.
12 Ibid., H. 250.

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard \\^

Heidegger at once adds another phrase: Dasein's death

bezugliche), and he frequently repeats this ascription. D

sibility is non-relation, or as Macquarrie and Robinson als

relationships."13 This immediately suggests something v

death of the Crucified which is paradoxically both

relational. On the other hand it is not entirely true; it does

to being which, as we have just indicated, is a potential f

wholly actualized or transparent in death. The anthropo

helps us understand what this might mean as an Heidegg

From an anthropological perspective the death of Dasei

being to emerge as shining forth or radiance (phainestha

phenomenon. We have seen this is the case in a positi

primordial disclosedness is contained in the event of the

understand the mechanism to be at work on the level of H

his text of phenomenology. By continuously invoking t

"Dasein", breaking itself on the walls of being, Heidegg

presence - not in the form of idea or eidos, for sure, for th

metaphysics where precisely the victim can never come t

achieves is a disclosure of the movement of being, in whic

by virtue of the continual throwness or projectedness of

Existentialists subsequently concentrated on what this m

absurdity of the human condition. Classical Heideggerea

being (Ereignis). Mimetic anthropology views it as bo

manifestation of violent origins whereby the continual v

willingly appropriated, becomes the disclosure to oneself

dynamic being. We are close here to the Wagnerian hero wh

of the world into himself in the drama of his death. But more than this we must

recognize a distorted resonance of the singular death of Christ. The Crucified both
established the horizon of futural death as the meaning of existence and in the same
moment radically exposed the theme of the victim. Heidegger is not simply heroizing

the death of Dasein, he is trading off the powerful eschatological sense invested in
death by Christ, and at the same time he is embracing the theme of the victim in a
deliberate, if inverted, way as the engine by which the logos of meaning occurs.

The following text from 1943 is fully explicit about the sacrifice of human
individuals for the sake of the truth of being. Neither are there missing hints of the

role of the Crucified: for example, the abyssal freedom of Christ in the face of
necessity, something which was standard teaching of medieval theology; and then
the thanksgiving and grace which are so characteristic of the New Testament. But
all is translated into the truth of being.

13 Ibid., p. 294, n. 4.

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1108 Anthony W. Bartlett

That thinking whose thoughts not only cannot be

ned by that which is other than beings, may be

calculatively counting on beings by means of bein

truth of being. Such thinking responds to the clai

letting his historical essence be responsible to the
that does not necessitate by way of compulsion, but

the freedom of sacrifice. The need is for the truth o

happen to human beings and to all beings. The sa

expending itself - in a manner removed from all c

abyss of freedom - for the preservation of the truth

occurs [ereignet sich] the concealed thanks that

being has bestowed upon the human essence in thi

This was written during the 2nd World War a

events of that period, from the scandalous epis

the Nazi party and from the actuality of blood

appointed rector of Freiburg University on 21

Nazi hierarchy in the first heady days of the

month after Hitler became dictator of German

rapid flood of anti-Semitic legislation. Heidegg

of the same year. His inaugural address as rect

the German University." Here he talks of an

impresses itself on the fate of the German Vo

relationship to science (Wissenschaft). The tas

essence of science in a questioning of being. "T
for our Volk a world of the innermost and m
spiritual world. . . . And the spiritual world o

structure, just as little as it is its arsenal of usef

is the power that comes from preserving at the

are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the

to shake most extensively the Volk's existence.

The address is justly notorious but its combin

ric with authentic Heideggerean themes is ne
Heidegger is caught up in a political and histo

concerned, as philosopher, expresses the de

wellspring of this meaning is a determined will

danger, i.e. violence, which in itself is a spiritu

point clearly inhabits a vague borderland betwe

making of victims on a gigantic scale. My argu

14 Martin Heidegger, "Postscript to 'What Is M

(German in brackets in original).
13 The Self-Assertion of the German University"
italics in original.

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard ^ 109

violence is simultaneously an appropriation of Christian themes

inversion of those themes back into the very project from which t

us. Heidegger's thought is able to profit meaningfully from this p

because it is sacrificial crisis that he invokes, the breakdown of social and

metaphysical order into open mimetic crisis and violence. He does this not in a
transitional sense which would seek the establishment of a new order - the sense in

which Girard normally intends the phrase - but rather as an end in itself. The crisis

of violence will bring to immediacy the phenomenality of being and on a sustained

basis; this is a strategy which must be understood in anthropological terms

The "Self-Assertion of the German University" speaks in a lofty mixture of

philosophical and political rhetoric. But there is another text from the same period
which demonstrates the fearful concreteness to which this thought could arrive. It

is worthwhile citing this for its naked association of Christian themes with the
violent destiny Germany was marching toward at that moment. It is an address by

Heidegger, given a month after his appointment as rector, regarding a certain

Schlageter, a former student at Freiburg, who was shot for acts of sabotage against
the French army of occupation in the Ruhr on May 26, 1923. Subsequently he rose
to the status of Nazi martyr and hero, a Christian and Greek hybrid that speaks
exactly to the distortion I am describing. Here are excerpts from Heidegger's
speech, a kind of Seinsgeschichte Good Friday passion sermon:
In the midst of our work, during a short break in our lectures, let us remember the

Freiburg student Albert Leo Schlageter, a young German hero who a decade ago died
the most difficult and greatest death of all.
Let us honor him by reflecting, for a moment, upon his death in order that this death may

help us to understand our lives.

Schlageter died the most difficult of all deaths. Not in the front line as the leader of his
field artillery battery, not in the tumult of an attack, and not in a grim defensive action

- no, he stood defenseless before the French rifles.

But he stood and bore the most difficult thing a man can bear.

Yet even this could have been borne with a final rush of jubilation, had a victory been
won and the greatness of the awakening nation shone forth.

Instead - darkness, humiliation, and betrayal.

And so, in his most difficult hour, he had also to achieve the greatest thing of which man

is capable. Alone, drawing on his own inner strength, he had to place before his soul an
image of the future awakening of the Volk to honor and greatness so that he could die
believing in this future.

Whence this clarity of heart, which allowed him to envision what was greatest and most
remote?

With a hard will and a clear heart, Albert Leo Schlageter died his death, the most
difficult and greatest of all.16

16 In The Heidegger Controversy, 40-1.

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U10 Anthony W. Bartlett

The gospel themes are multiple - a single d

difficult death of all, defenselessness, darkn
future, belief; and at the same time the sheer
evident - greatest "thing" instead of love, th
heart, hardness of will. The former is inserted

trait into a heroic frame, the frame locating

overwhelming it, distorting it, bending it fr

the artist toward something alien.

This has been the experience of the Christia

into the warrior cultures of barbarian Europ
philosopher Heidegger is carrying through al

the dynamic of the portrait to an ultimate thou

in and from violence.

But the signature example of brutal philosophizing deliberately consigning

humanity to a flood of violence is found in a lecture course from 1935,

Introduction to Metaphysics. Significantly it is in this piece that Heidegger
approaches most closely the scheme of an anthropology in his own right. Derived
as it is from a source of Greek tragedy it also parallels Girard's own method of a

critical reading of Greek drama in order to distill evidence of mimetic

anthropology. Heidegger's own reading is not too far away and offers striking con-

firmation both of Girard's general thesis and of an anthropological deconstruction of Heidegger. He gives a commentary on the first verse of a chorus in
Sophocles' Antigone. He starts by stating that "Man in one word is deinotaton, the
strangest" and he approvingly notes that we do not find here "any sort of blind and
fatuous inflation of human essence from below . . . here there is no suggestion of a
pre-eminent personality. Among the Greeks there were no personalities (and for
this reason no supra-personality)." This decisively refuses the biblical tradition of
the person and her mirroring in a personal God. Instead:
On the one hand deinon means the terrible, but not in the sense of petty terrors, and

above all not in the decadent, insipid, and useless sense that the word has taken on today,

in such locutions as "terribly cute." The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the
overpowering power which compels panic fear, true fear; and in equal measure it is the
collected, silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm. The mighty, the overpowering is
the essential character of power itself. Where it irrupts, it can hold its overpowering power
in check. Yet this does not make it more innocuous, but still more terrible and remote.

But on the other hand deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who uses
power, who not only disposes of power (Gewalt) but is violent (gewalt-tatig) insofar as

the use of power is the basic trait not only of his action but also of his being-there
[Dasein]. Here we use the word violence in an essential sense extending beyond the
common usage of the word, as mere arbitrary brutality. In this common usage violence
is seen from the standpoint of a realm which draws its standards from conventional
compromise and mutual aid, and which accordingly disparages all violence as a disturbance of the peace.

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard jju

The essent [Das Seiende] as a whole, seen as power, is the ov

the first sense. Man is deinon, first because he remains exp
powering power, because by his essence he belongs to being
man is deinon because he is the violent one in the sense desig
the power and brings it to manifestness.) Man is the violent
along with other attributes but solely in the sense that in h
(Gewalttatigkeit) he uses power (Gewalt) against the overpow

Because he is twice deinon in a sense that is originally one, he i

powerful: violent in the midst of the overpowering.17

There are clearly two senses of the terrible here: overpo

the character of being, and man who is violent in his use of

being. In the first sense we are very near to Girard's primi

violence - that which instills panic and fear, and yet is al

(collective) silent awe that "vibrates with its own rhythm
Girardian terms its objective status as religion - is more te
as actual violence. Heidegger secondly identifies the huma
- violence is the use of power and this is the basic trait of D

he sidesteps the ordinary meaning of this if it is to be under

brutality." Thus he invokes human violence and at once s

physical sense. This is the classic strategy of the sacre

pure formula, without invoking the gods, patriotism, nati

things are never far away but directly at this point Heidegge

nearly a pure anthropology. The double aspect of the terr

mimetic anthropology, which sees a fundamental oscillati

physical status achieved by generative violence and cr

where this status breaks down and needs to be renewed. H

"man is the violent one" in this double generative sense bu
writing constructs and welcomes the borderland between t
of the human. This, I believe, is the nature of the anthrop
ontology: the state of sacrificial crisis experienced from
adoption as self-sacrifice by Dasein.

Heidegger resigned the rectorate on April 23 1934 but re

Hitler and the German war aims at least until late in t

philosophical career survived the disgrace of these years an

his work was always conceived somehow "beyond" the bu

and political violence, aiming ultimately at a universal thou

is this latter that is always the central concern and which I t

throughout his whole career. But is possible to see how the

remains active in the more mystical philosophical trajecto
develop unaffected by Germany and the war.

17 An Introduction to Metaphysics, 149-50, italics and Ge

original.

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1U2 Anthony W. Bartlett

The Ontologization of Crisis

In thel930's Heidegger began to focus

proclaiming their faithfulness to an orig
everything subsequently was a falling away
value of staying with being as it emerge

resisting the tendency to produce an objecti

Plato and Aristotle did. Thinkers like Anaximander and Heraclitus describe a kind

of ebb and flow of being which is not yet tied down into the presence of what is
present but rather refers to the experience of unconcealment itself. Yet this is
readable again as the effect of violent crisis and in the case of Heraclitus, fragment
60, it appears explicitly stated as such. "Conflict (polemos) is the father and king
of all. It shows some as gods, some as men. It makes some slaves, and others free."

In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger picks this up as a critique of the

contemporary world, of its dull, two-dimensional appropriation of being, contrasted with a great German destiny in and toward the powers of being. And it is
clear that the element of violence, albeit shrouded in metaphysics, is constitutive
of these powers. "Not only does conflict as such give rise to (entstehen lassen) the
essent; it also preserves the essent in its permanence (Standigkeit). Where struggle
ceases, the essent does not vanish, but the world turns away. The essent is no longer
asserted (i.e. preserved as such). Now it is merely found ready-made; it is datum."18

We can glimpse here with almost photo-like precision the point of crossover from
anthropological violence to essentialized poetic being.

The famous Anaximander fragment states: "The source from which existing
things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction,
according to necessity, for they give justice and make reparation to one another for

their injustice, according to the arrangement of Time." In his 1946 reading

(although drawing on work going back as early as 1932) Heidegger gives a very
different, and difficult, account of this passage. It need not detain us here except to

underline the degree to which he points up the simultaneous emergence and

flowing away of what is brought to presence. As he quips in his commentary, "Will
fact-crazed modernity ever properly grasp or want to grasp the fact that being flits

away?"19 The upshot there is a transitoriness to being which is fundamentally

18 Introduction to Metaphysics, 62. The Greek reads: polemos pantnon men pater esti,

pantdn de basileus, kai tous men theous, edeixe tous de anthropous, tous men doulous
epoiese tous de eleutherous.

19 "The Incipient Saying of Being in the Fragment of Anaximander," in Martin

Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press), 90. Translation here of Anaximander's fragment is from Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic

Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels' 'Fragmente der

Vorsokratiker,' trans. Kathleen Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 19.

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard jjj3

characteristic, to the degree that Heidegger makes it coinciden

capitalized S, which in turn becomes a synonym for be

contains in itself that Same, whence coming to be and w

presence; indeed, transition is the pure emerging of that Sa

itself."20 In this kind of statement there is a presentation of to

in the very process of movement. It would not be hard to

anthropological level the intrinsic movement in generative v

crisis to order again.

The immediate sense of the fragment lends itself to anth

tation in these terms and Girard himself has indeed read it thi

from sacred order, to mimetic crisis and vengeance, to a new

and new order. And he suggests that Heidegger came close

of the scapegoat mechanism but failed to grasp it.21 My own f

because he deliberately sought the renewed operation of

sacrificial realization of the thought of being. As far as
concerned we are here at the apex of his thought and his i

explicitly to discount any anthropological reading. But in th

anthropology the move to misrepresentation flows natural
violence - to disguise its own origins. Heidegger both repea

also recognizes this gesture in his general account of W

beginning with an originary light which is progressively fals

then left after these hints and intimations appears very mu

of "eternal return," of a cyclical universe, of coming and

destruction and creation again, all stated with a kind of divin

different from traditional sacred order is that crisis and fl

account - everything is certainly not set in stone - and th

metaphysics is never really metaphysical: it contains the u

sacrificial crisis and achieves its "peace" only by runni

transition and the same, indistinguishably into each other.

In The Letter on Humanism written in 1946 in response t

French disciple and his first publication after the war, the
mythic stress becomes the leading thought and he also sign
(Kehre) or reversal to the start-point of Being & Time whi

question of being.22 From this symbolic moment on ex

thought of being can be multiplied. Commentary on one w

fifties, because it is perhaps Heidegger's most famous celeb

sacrificial ontology and because once again the simultan

distance to Christian themes are evident. Heidegger is com

20 Basic Concepts, 103.

21 Unpublished paper presented by Rene Girard at Boston Colleg

22 Basic Writings, 208.

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1114 Anthony W. Bartlett

Georg Trakl called "A Winter Evening". Here

a table set with bread and wine, and wandere

snow. The last stanza gives the line: "Pain ha

Heidegger has much to say about "world" her

overall fourfold, of earth, sky, mortals a

recognizably mythic, but the key comment is

"(W)hat is pain? Pain rends. It is the rift. But

fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separ

draws everything to itself, gathers it to itsel
rending that divides and gathers. Pain is the
threshold. It settles the between, the middle of

joins the rift of the dif-ference. Pain is the di

The threshold is the boundary that joins tog

Pain creates the unity of difference, a world

another. If Heidegger were to have written th

were seen simply as a daring metaphor for dif

draw anthropological conclusions. But the mak

business; he is a philosopher uncovering the u

has an unmistakably final quality in this com

excludes pain as anthropological, as human, as

ontological status. So once again we have t

powerfully invoked and simultaneously deni

order stand forth. But once we affirm the prio

pain, then the threshold can at once take on a

connotations of foundation sacrifices, of hum

make a wall strong, a door faithful, a home a

the door jambs of history, how many wome

pregnable, how many familiar spirits haunt
mimetic anthropology does not simply open t
us in fact that Heidegger is scientifically corr
stable gathering of meaning, the absolute pr
arose with the surrogate victim, breaking into
mimesis, separating the out from the in, the
them, founding thus the human universe. He
human truth: "pain" is a joining together of t
fixed point that both gathers all and differen
that anchors the phenomenal world even as it
Heidegger's philosophy is visibly sacrificial
because it has to be. If he is to be faithful to

23 Poem and commentary in "Language" (1950)

Interpretation of Texts, ed. and introd. David E. Klem

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard jjj;

derived as we have argued from the Christian message, the

and the crisis at its core must always be brimming on the sur

successful stillness of the sacred. This cycle of crisis is the

human world, the primordial phenomenon of the human u

come to the level of philosophy it necessitates the simult

denial of Christian revelation. At a fundamentally critical

is parasitical on this revelation. He could never have concoc

sacrificial crisis and epochal ontology without the simult

jection of this revelation. Adoption because it announces c

logical theme; rejection because the victim at the heart of t
Relating Trackl's bread and wine to Christian symbolism

"Heidegger seals the poem off from Christian bread

inextricably tied to cut flesh and spilled blood."24 But this is

a formal necessity of his philosophy. Heidegger could only

sacrificial crisis by virtue of Christian revelation and by v

exactly the same movement. The text of Heidegger produ

revelation but only to plunge them into the depths of night.

The Double Movement of Being or a Singular Mom

The argument of none of the above is intended to r

anthropology, rather to present them as inseparable. There w

thought faithful to itself within itself. But from a theologic

begin to think without listening first to biblical anthropology

begin to understand thought. Therefore it is at the level w

resonances of Heidegger's thought become clear that we c
thought theologically. For even as it distorts the meaning of

the Crucified it shows profound responsiveness to what res

this can suggest to us an authentic mode in which theolog

can distinguish its collusion with the violence exposed by th

begin to learn the way it makes language and thought to r

movement provoked by Jesus in the depth of the human situ

The character of the metaphysical for Heidegger is tha

presence of what is present, without a thought for that wh

being. Considerably indebted to Heidegger is the more

philosophy of Jacques Derrida and here it is language/writi

or the mechanism which supplements for what is in fact

24 Demythologizing Heidegger, 151.

25 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tra

Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Pres
Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

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1116 Anthony W. Bartlett

Girardian anthropology the ground-zero of p

contained in every sense the mimetic chaos an

this very containment the reality of presence

of what it contains. It is an act of mythologiz

what is in truth absent, both because the vict

profoundly, because what the victim "is" afte

movement, constructed as order. What is in f

of mimetic crisis and its very absence-in-pr

about the metaphysical reality of the univer
flictual mimesis and violence are both real hum
the epiphenomena of the bottomless abyss w

revelation which proclaims this abyss, wh

emptiness and over against the proclamation o

this space into endless giving. The message o

formation of conflictual movement by virtu
Crucified in the abyss.

When the early Heidegger analyzes the pri

uncovered did he not reproduce the authenti

"Dasein means: being held out into the no

experience of abandonment opened up in the

so central to Western culture? It is certainly
Luther, in The Concept of Anxiety, and Heideg

to this work for his own analysis of anxiety

existential anxiety but a state first made cultu

"shock and terrible emptiness overcame (Jesu

26 "What Is Metaphysics?" in Basic Writings, 105

27 See footnote in Being & Time: "The man wh

phenomenon of anxiety - and again in the the

exposition of the problem of original sin - is Soren

John D. Caputo, "Kierkegaard, Heidegger and

International Kierkegaard Commentary, Vol. 6, e

Mercia University Press, 1993), p. 201-224. Kierk

existence. It was this that made existence infinitely

the consciousness of sin that arises with Christia

acquires its overwhelming power. The individual

was, for sin-consciousness bars the way back to th

by the route of recollection and return. "This is th

time, which prevents the individual from relating

now he comes forwards into being in order to beco

time" (S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientif

intro. Walter Lowrie [Princeton: Princeton Univers

is Kierkegaard's indirect and doctrinal phrase for t

28 Mark 14.33, ekthambeisthai kai ademonein, m

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard mj

It's not necessary to underline that these experiences

revelation of being: "Nothing" belongs to the essential u

being of beings.29 The turn toward being (which is

Heidegger's thought from the beginning but he goes o

profound reflection. He thinks aletheia, unconcealmen
mysterious pathway of thought. What grants unconcealm
this itself is a condition of what is, an open region for

a primal phenomenon which gathers and protects everyt

as unconcealment concealment, lethe, belong to the hear

has as pivotal a role as unconcealment. It is the mystery of

A concomitant way of stating this is that even as b

withdraws. "Being appears primordially in the light of

This double-sidedness, of being, and of aletheia that gra

central feature of his developed thought. Broadly spea

unconcealment and concealment, of phenomenon

thinking. They are what maintains its mystery and prev

traditional metaphysics. Ereignis is another key express

double motion. In ordinary German this word means "

derives from it the sense of "appropriation" (from eig

Thus simply told the event of being is the appropriation

once with appropriation the sense of expropriation

appropriation mysteriously expropriates itself from being

order to preserve itself. Concealment, withdrawal and ex

concepts interwoven with their converse expressions,

and appropriation.

There is a further powerful companion to this chain

ment" of being (Seinsverlassenheit). This becomes a ma
contemporary historical condition - above all as it is c
but it is also and primarily an event of being, not a subj
Abandonment of beings by being means that being with
themselves. This then brings human beings into a state

even though they may be hardened against it. Yet the di

of "a total transformation"32 at the same time as it is t

29 "What Is Metaphysics?" in Basic Writings, 1 10

30 "On the Essence of Truth" in Basic Writings, 140. See a
and the Task of Thinking" ibid., 390-91.

31 On Time and Being, 22-3; also "Overcoming Metap

Controversy, 73.

32 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From En

& Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 199

1936-8, published in German as Beitrdge zur Philosophie (V

Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989).

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1118 Anthony W. Bartlett

The awakening of this distress is the first dis

(Zwischen) where chaos drives forth at the same

"between" is, however, not a "transcendence" with

opposite: that open to which man belongs as the f

sein he is en-owned [appropriated] by be-ing itself
other than enowning [appropriation/Zsre/gms].33

Here yet again we have a pattern of sacrific

thought. What is new is the explicit mention o
This is not the same thing as the death of Go

departing, and it could in fact return. In oth

perhaps be born. But also Heidegger is asserti
phical truth of the "between," which is the op
himself as founder and preserver and yet at th
of what owns him, of ownership itself. This is
rather it is the opposite, an underlying state w

This confirms an awareness of sacrificial or

losophical understanding of their openness, th

necessity, in other words their fundamental r

philosophemes oscillating around unconceal

should be understood in this way. They reflec

doubled movement, approaching and receding o
truth slips away and gathers again as violence.

interpreted as a rigorous reading of undifferenti

Greek ontological terms, rather than in terms

redemptive terms.

If we then return to look at the death of Je

space described by Heidegger we can both rec
himself opened up and understand his death as
this space. First, the thought of the opening of
the simple experience of unconcealment which

Heidegger himself who asserts this.34 The com

thought assumed by Heidegger is to be satisfac

within the stream of revelation produced by

takes a stand beyond the Greeks, claiming a re

at the abyssal point of his own tradition, and

human, has first provided it. The real nature o
in itself incarnates undifferentiation, and so

33 Ibid., 19; the explications in square brackets

translators' way of representing Heidegger's adop

Heidegger intends to mean being that is not grasped

Sein which continues to be understood metaphysical

34 See "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Th

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M. Heidegger and R. Girard jjj9

/concealment, phenomenon/withdrawal, appropriation/ex

difference is that the whole scheme is read the othe

deconstructed: the concealment is seen first rather than the manifestation of

phenomena. Jesus as victim - and behind Jesus every other victim - is seen as a
life primordially ex-propriated in order that being may be ap-propriated, that the
world may be appropriated to itself, that the proper and property may become truth,

and truth the proper. In which case fundamental ontology is itself nothing more
than a drawing near to the appropriating-expropriation (Ereignis) of the victim, and

Heidegger's lifelong thought has been a philosophical (mis)reading of this event,

first as a phenomenology of individual existence and then a mystique of undifferentiation at the root of the world. None of Heidegger's descriptions would have
intelligibility except in the aftermath of the cross. As he says we think "above and
beyond the Greek." By what cultural power is it possible to think beyond those who

invented thinking except the tradition that made the abyss the place of human
truth?

Here again is a biblical deconstruction of Heidegger. But this is not an end in

itself, for the insight of his dependence on the gospel becomes in turn an ex-

plication of the gospel itself. We can move forward here by virtue of the
language Heidegger has given us in response to the pressure of biblical revelation.
If the primordial event of the human world, its condition of possibility, is the
appropriating-expropriation of the victim then the critical work of Jesus in bringing
this to thought cannot itself be a fulfillment of this pattern. It must somehow stand

outside of the world, go beyond it, be in fact that revelatory non-ground that
Heidegger claimed. And this could only be the case if the expropriation that he
suffered was not in truth expropriation, if it did not take its place in the closed
economy of the proper, of possession and exchange. It could only occur if, on the
contrary, there was an element of infinite giving that exceeds and continues to
exceed appropriation/expropriation by the measure in which such excess is found
impossible in this world, by the measure of a something that is essentially and
qualitatively unknown in human experience until Jesus indeed revealed it. In Cross

Purposes I called this abyssal compassion, emphasizing the suffering and

forgiveness of human violence into its uttermost depths.35 But at the level of

Heidegger's thought of being we could also think of this something as truly

otherwise-than-being, as beyond and below ontology and absolutely alien to it. We
would then have reached a thought of "expropriation" as giving-away, something

that is at once so apparently constitutive of the world and yet exceeds it so

absolutely that when it was experienced in the person of Jesus it very quickly
became identified with and as the Creator God, as the Father of Jesus who could
not have been and was not known truly until Jesus. We have in fact reached here a

35 Anthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes, The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement

(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001).

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1120 Anthony W. Bartlett

name of God that is giving-away and is a giv

former part of the formula means the infinit

order to breach and replace the closed and dea

part means the continuing surrender of the

order continually to re-experience God accor
introduced by Jesus. The former is a matter

praxis that draws close to Heidegger's own praxi

because it thematically forfeits the element

into its abyss of undifferentiation in order to o

follows Jesus into the abyss of love in order

begin to think in a manner consistent with this

Traditional analogy of being has always c

appropriation/property of creation and therefo

the meaning of violence. But giving away

absolute interruption of being and institutes a p

transcendence of being in favor of love. This

temporality otherwise than being, a tempora

radically toward the other as the transformat

death as its reaffirmation. This temporality is

cross. It is the New Testament that truly esta

human experience, constructing time's revolu

endlessly to the other. This happens in the de

of expropriation that is the situation of the

metaphysics. Within this sphere Christ is

manifests the beyond being even as he bring

metaphysics into the undifferentiation of viole

the transcendental of transcendentals in the

construction that is breaking up even as it is un

that Heidegger celebrated the undifferentiation

violence as a glory of meaning. But instead th

transformed meaning in the very midst of be

a movement, flowing like sand through an ho

glass is constantly re-inverted to return being

an absolute flowing away into the absolute

abolition of being-in-the-world, including w

from itself toward the absolute other which

is not to revert back into the same, into viole

Christ in this way, in letting this phenomeno
Christ's death, the universe is reborn, and Go

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