Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 28

When Heidegger speaks of the untruth-concealedness-withdrawal as inherent to the truth-event itself, he has in mind two different levels:

1. On the one hand, the way a man, when engaged in inner-worldly affairs, forgets the horizon of meaning within which he dwells, and even forgets this forgetting itself (exemplary is here the “regression” of Greek thought that occurs with the rise of Sophists: what was the confrontation with the very foundation of our Being turns into a trifling play with different lines of argumentation with no inherent relation to Truth).

2. On the other hand, the way this horizon of meaning itself, insofar as it is an epochal Event, arises against the background of—and thereby conceals—the imponderable Mystery of its emergence, in the same way a clearing in the midst of a forest is surrounded by the dark thickness of the woods.

The same ambiguity repeats itself with regard to the earth as that which resists, remains forever obscure and unfathomable: “There always is something resisting and supporting our practices, and that something is very real.”⁴¹ So, on the one hand, the earth designates what resists the meaningful totality of a historical world:

As a world strives to grow back into the earth, it encounters resistance. In the process, the earth appears in a determinate way in terms of the resistance that the world encounters. In building the cathedral, we discover particular ways in which our practices are limited and constrained. […] Our worlds, and consequently our meaningful relations to things, are always based in something that can’t be explained in terms of the prevailing intelligible structure of the world.⁴²

On the other hand, however, what is most impenetrable is the basic structure of the world itself. For example, when we argue that the modernization of Japan was desirable because it brought about a higher gross domestic product and per capita income, one should raise the more fundamental question:

But why one should have just those preferences is precisely what is at issue—if one would prefer the pace and style of premodern Japanese life to an increase of per capita income, then the argument that Japan should modernize in order to increase average income will not be persuasive. […] So it seems that the strength of the drive to establish a new world and destroy the old depends on something withdrawing from view—that is becoming so self-evident that it is no longer open to question: namely, the desirability of the new world itself. This desirability is an earthly thing: it withdraws and shelters the world it supports. […] Our world is supported by our most basic preferences—a taste for efficiency and flexibility—having largely withdrawn from view.⁴³

The earth is thus either the impenetrable abyss of the ontic which withdraws from ontological disclosure, or the horizon of this disclosure itself, invisible on account of its excessive self-evidence—we do not see it as such because it is the very medium through which we see everything. One should make the properly Hegelian move of identifying the two levels: the Beyond and the obstacle-screen that distorts our access to Beyond. So this is not simply Heidegger’s mistake or confusion (to be resolved or corrected by introducing a further notional distinction: one term for the earth as the darkness of what resists disclosure, another for the invisibility of the very horizon of disclosure). The oscillation between the two levels is what defines the earth.

What this also means is that ontological difference is not “maximal,” between all beings, the highest genus, and something else/more/beyond, but, rather, “minimal,” the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing. Insofar as it is grounded in the finitude of humans, ontological difference is that which makes a totalization of “All beings” impossible—ontological difference means that the field of reality is finite. Ontological difference is, in this precise sense, “real/impossible”: to cite Ernesto Laclau’s determination of antagonism, in it, external difference overlaps with internal difference. The difference between beings and their Being is simultaneously a difference within beings themselves; that is to say, the difference between beings/entities and their Opening, their horizon of meaning, always also cuts into the field of beings themselves, rendering it incomplete/finite. Therein resides the paradox: the difference between beings in their totality and their Being precisely “misses the difference” and reduces Being to another “higher” entity. The parallel between Kant’s antinomies and Heidegger’s ontological difference resides in the fact that, in both cases, the gap (phenomenal/noumenal; ontic/ontological) is to be referred to the non-All of the phenomenal—ontic domain itself. However, the limitation of Kant was that he was not able to fully assume this paradox of finitude as constitutive of the ontological horizon: ultimately, he reduced transcendental horizon to a way reality appears to a finite being (man), with all of it located into a wider encompassing realm of noumenal reality.

Here there is a clear link with the Lacanian Real which, at its most radical level, is the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted: it is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint. Recall the well-known Adornian analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (the Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic version and the Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible; we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher “dialectical synthesis,” and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself. However, in a second approach, one should merely take note of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing already is the thing itself—the fundamental feature of today’s society is the irreconciliable antagonism between Totality and the individual. What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns to its place,” namely, as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances. In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

It seems that Heidegger was not ready to draw all the consequences from this necessary double meaning of “unconcealedness,” which, to put it bluntly, would have compelled him to accept that “ontological difference” is ultimately nothing but a rift in the ontic order (incidentally, in the exact parallel to Badiou’s key admission that the Event is ultimately nothing but a torsion in the order of Being). This limitation of Heidegger’s thought has a series of philosophical and ethico-political consequences. Philosophically, it leads to Heidegger’s notion of historical destiny which delivers different horizons of the disclosure of Being, destiny which cannot and should not be in any way influenced by or dependent on ontic occurrences. Ethico-politically, it accounts for Heidegger’s (not simply ethical, but properly ontological) indifference towards the Holocaust, its leveling to just another case of the technological disposal of life (in the infamous passage from the conference on technique): to acknowledge the Holocaust’s extraordinary/exceptional status would equal recognizing in it a trauma that shatters the very ontological coordinates of Being. Does this indifference make him a Nazi?