Итог

6

Censorship and the Imposition of Form

Louche [skewed]. This word is used, in grammatical contexts, to indicate expressions which seem at first to introduce one meaning but which go on to determine an entirely different one. It is used in particular of phrases whose construction is equivocal to the point of disturbing their clarity of expression. What renders a phrase skewed arises therefore in the specific disposition of the words which compose it, when they seem at first glance to create a certain relation, although in fact they enjoy a different one: just as skew-eyed people seem to look in one direction, while they are actually looking somewhere else,

M. Beauz^e, Encyclopedic methodique. grammairc et litterature, vol. 2

The specialized languages that schools of specialists produce and reproduce through the systematic alteration of the common language are, as with all discourses, the product of a compromise between an expressive interest and a censorship constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulates. This ‘compromise formation', tn the Freudian sense, is more or less ‘successful’ depending on the specific competence of the producer, and is the product of strategies of euphemization that consist in imposing form as well as observing formalities. These strategies tend to guarantee the satisfaction of the expressive interest, biological drive or political interest (in the broad sense of the term), within the limits of the structure of opportunities for material or symbolic profit which the different forms of discourse can procure for different

producers according to their position in the field, that is, in the structure of the distribution of the specific capital which is at stake in this field.¹

The metaphor of censorship should not mislead: it is the structure of the field itself which governs expression by governing both access to expression and the form of expression, and not some legal proceeding which has been specially adapted to designate and repress the transgression of a kind of linguistic code. This structural censorship is exercised through the medium of the sanctions of the field, functioning as a market on which the prices of different kinds of expression are formed; it is imposed on all producers of symbolic goods, including the authorized spokesperson, whose authoritative discourse is more subject to the norms of official propriety than any other, and it condemns the occupants of dominated positions either to silence or to shocking outspokenness. The need for this censorship to manifest itself in the form of explicit prohibitions, imposed and sanctioned by an institutionalized authority, diminishes as the mechanisms which ensure the allocation of agents to different positions (and whose very success ensures their anonymity) are increasingly capable of ensuring that the different positions are occupied by agents able and inclined to engage in discourse (or to keep silent) which is compatible with the objective definition of the position. (This explains the importance which co-optation procedures always grant to the apparently insignificant indices of the disposition to observe formalities.) Censorship is never quite as perfect or as invisible as when each agent has nothing to say apart from what he is objectively authorized to say: in this case he does not even have to be his own censor because he is, in a way. censored once and for all, through the forms of perception and expression that he has internalized and which impose their form on all his expressions.

Among the most effective and best concealed censorships are all those which consist in excluding certain agents from communication by excluding them from the groups which speak or the places which allow one to speak with authority. In order to explain what may or may not be said in a group, one has to take into account not only the symbolic relations of power which become established within it and which deprive certain individuals (e.g. women) of the possibility of speaking or which oblige them to conquer that right through force, but also the laws of group formation themselves (e.g. the logic of conscious or unconscious exclusion) which function like a prior censorship.

Symbolic productions therefore owe their most specific properties to the social conditions of their production and, more precisely, to the position of the producer in the field of production, which governs, through various forms of mediation, not only the expressive interest, and the form and the force of the censorship which is imposed on it, but also the competence which allows this interest to be satisfied within the limits of these constraints. The dialectical relation which is established between the expressive interest and censorship prevents us from distinguishing in the opus operatum between form and content, that is, between what is said and the manner of saying it or even the manner of hearing it. By imposing form, the censorship exercised by the structure of the field determines the form - which ail formalist analyses attempt to detach from social determinisms - and, necessarily, the content, which is inseparable from its appropriate expression and therefore literally unthinkable outside of the known forms and recognized norms. Censorship also determines the form of reception: to produce a philosophical discourse of a duly formal nature, that is, bearing the set of agreed signs (a certain use of syntax, vocabulary, references, etc.) by which philosophical discourse is recognized and through which it secures recognition as philosophical,² is to produce a product which demands to be received with due formality, that is, with due respect for the forms it has adopted or, as we see in literature, for its nature as form. Legitimate works thus exercise a violence which protects them from the violence which would be needed if we were to perceive the expressive interest which they express only in forms which deny it: the histories of art. literature and philosophy testify to the efficacy of strategies of the imposition of form through which consecrated works impose the terms of their own perception: and ‘methods’ like structural or semiological analysis, which purport to study structures independently of functions, are no exception to this rule.

It follows that a work is tied to a particular field no less by its form than by its content: to imagine what Heidegger would have said in another form, such as the form of philosophical discourse employed in Germany in 1890. or the form assumed nowadays by political science articles from Yale or Harvard, or any other form, is to imagine an impossible Heidegger (e.g. a philosophical ‘vagrant¹, or an oppositional immigrant in 1933), or a field of production that was no less impossible in Germany at the time when Heidegger was active. The form through which symbolic productions share most directly in the social conditions of their production is also the means by which their most specific social effect is exercised: specifically

symbolic violence can only be exercised by the person who exercises it. and endured by the person who endures it, in a form which results in its misrecognition as such, in other words, which results in its recognition as legitimate.

The Rhetoric of the False Break

The ‘special language’ distinguishes itself from scientific language in that it conceals heteronomy behind the appearance of autonomy: being unable to function without the aid of ordinary language, it must produce the illusion of independence through strategies which create a false break, using procedures that differ according to the field and. when in the same field, according to positions and moments. This language can, for example, mimic the fundamental property of all scientific language: the determination of an element through its membership of a system? The words which pure science borrows from ordinary language derive their entire meaning from the system constructed, and the option (often inevitable) of resorting to a common word rather than a neologism or a pure and arbitrary symbol can only be chosen - in keeping with a correct methodology -through the desire to utilize the capacity sometimes possessed by language to portray hitherto unsuspected relations, when it functions as a depository for a collective endeavour.⁴ The word 'group¹ used by mathematicians is a perfectly self-sufficient symbol because it is entirely defined by the operations and the relations which define its specific structure and which are the source of its properties. Conversely, most of the special usages of the word that are listed by dictionaries (e.g. in painting, ‘the gathering of several characters constituting an organic unity in a work of art¹, or in economics, ‘a set of enterprises united by diverse links’) have only a low level of autonomy in relation to the first meaning and would remain unintelligible for anyone who did not have a working knowledge of that meaning.

The Heideggerian words that are borrowed from ordinary language are numberless, but they are transfigured by the process of imposing form which produces the apparent autonomy of philosophical language by inserting them, through the systematic accentuation of morphological relations, into a network of relations manifested in the concrete form of the language and thereby suggesting that each element of the discourse depends on the others simultaneously as signifier and as signified. Thus a word as ordinary

as Fiirsorge (solicitude), becomes palpably attached by its very form to a whole set of words from the same family: Sorge (care), Sorgfalt (carefulness), Sorglosigkeit (negligence, carelessness), sorgenvoll (concerned), besorgt (preoccupied), Lebenssorge (concern for life), Selbstsorge (self-interest). The play on words of the same root -which is very common in the dictums and proverbs found in all popular wisdom - is only one of the formal means, if doubtless the most reliable, of giving the impression that there is a necessary relation between two signifieds. The association by alliteration or by assonance, which establishes quasi-material relations of resemblance of form and of sound, can also produce formally necessary associations likely to bring to light a hidden relation between the signifieds or, more probably, to bring it into existence solely by virtue of the play on forms: it is, for example, the philosophical puns of the later Heidegger, Denken = Danken (thinking = thanking), or the sequence of plays on words relating to Sorge ah besorgende Fiirsorge, the notion of ‘care as concernful solicitude', which would elicit accusations of verbalism were it not for the pattern of morphological allusions and etymological cross-references creating the illusion of a global coherence of form, and therefore of sense, and, as a consequence, the illusion of the necessity of discourse: ‘Die Entschlossenheit aber ist nur die in die Sorge gesorgte und als Sorge mbgliche Eigentlichkeit dieser selbst' (‘Resoluteness, however, is only that authenticity which, in care, is the object of care, and which is possible as care - the authenticity of care itself).⁵

All the potential resources of ordinary language are used to create the impression that there exists a necessary link between all signifiers and that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is established solely through the mediation of the system of philosophical concepts, ‘technical’ words which are ennobled forms of ordinary words (Entdeckung, discovery or uncovering, Entdeckheit, discoveredness or uncoveredness), traditional notions (Dasein, a word used in common by Heidegger, Jaspers and some others) which are used in a way that implies a slight discrepancy, destined to mark an allegorical deviation (ontological, metaphysical, etc.), neologisms recast to constitute purportedly unpremeditated distinctions or at least to produce an impression of radical overcoming (existentiel and existential; zeitlich, timely, and temporal, temporal - an opposition which moreover plays no effective role in Being and Time).

The imposition of form produces the illusion of systematicity and, by virtue of this and the break between specialized and ordinary language which it brings about, it produces the illusion of the

autonomy of the system. By being inserted into the network of words that are both morphologically similar and etymologically related, and being woven thereby into the tissue of the Heideggerian vocabulary, the word Fursorge (solicitude) is divested of its primary meaning, which is unambiguously conveyed in the expression SoziaF fursorge (social welfare). Once transformed and transfigured in this way, the word loses its social identity and its ordinary meaning in order to assume a distorted meaning (which might be rendered more or less by the word ‘procuration’, taken in its etymological sense). Thus the social phantasm of (social) assistance, symbolic of the 'welfare state’ or the 'insurance state’ denounced by Carl Schmitt or Ernst Junger in a less euphemized language, can manifest itself in legitimate discourse (Sorge and Fursorge are central to the theory of temporality), but in a form such that it does not appear to be there, such that effectively it is not there.

It is the incorporation of a word into the system of philosophical language that brings about the negation of its primary meaning, that is the meaning which the tabooed word assumes with reference to the system of ordinary language and which, although officially banished from the overt system, continues to lead a clandestine existence. This negation is the source of the duplicity authorized by the dual message registered in each element of discourse, always defined by belonging simultaneously to two systems, the overt system of the philosophical idiolect and the latent system of ordinary language.

If one wishes to prise the expressive interest away from the unsayable and the unnameable, and subject it to the transformation necessary for it to accede to the order of what is sayable in a given field, then one must do more than simply substitute one word for another, an acceptable one for a censored one. This elementary form of cuphemization hides another much more subtle one which uses the essential property of language - the primacy of relations over elements, of form over substance, according to (he opposition established by Saussure - to conceal the repressed elements by integrating them into a network of relations which modify their value without modifying their 'substance'.⁶ It is only in the case of specialized languages, produced by specialists with an explicitly systematizing intention, that the effect of concealment through the imposition of form is fully exercised. In this case, as in all cases of camouflage through form and in all due form, as it is analysed by Gestalttheorie, the tabooed meanings, though recognizable in theory, remain misrecognized in practice; though present as subst*

ance they are absent as form, like a face hidden in the bush. The role of this kind of expression is to mask the primitive experiences of the social world and the social phantasms which are its source, as much as to reveal them; to allow them to speak, while using a mode of expression which suggests that they are not being said. These specialized languages can articulate such experience only in forms of expression which render it misrecognizable, because the specialist is unable to recognize the fact that he is articulating it. Subject to the tacit or explicit norms of a particular field, the primitive substance is. as it were, dissolved in the form; through the imposition of form and the observance of formalities it becomes form. This imposition of form is both a transformation and a transubstantiation: the substance signified is the signifying form in which it is realized.

The imposition of form makes it both justified and unjustified to reduce negation to what it negates, to the social phantasm which is its source. Because of the fact that this ‘lifting [Aufhebung] of repression’ - as Freud called it, using a Hegelian term - simultaneously denies and maintains both the repression and the repressed, it allows for a doubling of profits; the profit of saying and the profit of denying what is said by the way of saying it. Il is clear that the opposition between 'authenticity' (Eigenilichkeit) and ‘inauthenticity’ (Un-eigendichkeit), which Heidegger calls the ’primordial modes of Dasein' and around which his whole work is organized (even from the viewpoint of the most strictly internal readings), is simply a particular and particularly subtle form of the general opposition between the 'elite' and the 'masses’. ‘They’ (das Man. literally ‘one’) are tyrannical (the dictatorship of the ’they’), inquisitorial (the ‘they’ gets involved in everything) and reduce everything to its lowest level: they’ shirk responsibility, opt out of their freedom and slide into a tendency to take things easy and make them easy; in short they’ behave like irresponsible welfare recipients who live off society.

One could list the commonplaces of academic aristocratism which recur throughout this oft-cited passage,⁷ replete with topoi on the agora as an antithesis of scholt. leisure versus school; the horror of statistics (the notion of the ‘average’), which symbolizes all the ‘levelling-down’ operations which threaten the ‘person’ (here called Dasein) and its most precious attributes, its ‘originality’ and its ‘privacy’; contempt for all the ‘levelling’ forces (which others have termed ‘massifying’), first and foremost the egalitarian ideologies which threaten what is achieved through effort (‘the fruits of hard work'), meaning culture (which is the specific capital of the man-

darin, who is the son of his works), ideologies which encourage the easy-going attitudes of the 'masses’; a rejection of social mechanisms like public opinion, the philosopher's hereditary enemy, and which is conveyed once more by the play on offentlich and Offentlichkeit, on ‘public’ and ‘publicness’, and of all the things symbolized by ‘social assistance’, like democracy, political parties, paid holidays (which threaten the monopoly of schole and meditative seclusion in nature), 'culture for the masses', television and paperback editions of Plato.* Heidegger was to put all this much better in his inimitable pastoral style when, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, written in 1935, he tried to show how the triumph of the spirit of science and technology in Western civilization is accomplished and perfected in ‘the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative’ ('die Flucht der Gotter, die Zerstbrung der Erde. die Vermassung der Menschen, der Vorrang des Mittelmdssigen')?

But it is equally clear that among philosophically distinguished minds the opposition between the distinguished and the vulgar cannot take on a vulgar form. Academic aristocratism distinguishes between the distinguished and the vulgar forms of aristocratism. Il is this sense of philosophical distinction¹" which frustrates the attempts of Heidegger's critics to find blatantly Nazi theses in his works and political writings, and which Heidegger’s supporters will always call upon to prove his wish to distance himself from the most marked forms of contempt for the masses." What may be called this 'primary' (in both senses) opposition can function in his work only in the form in which it was initially and permanently introduced, and which constantly transforms itself as his otherwise static system evolves, taking on new but always highly sublimated forms.

The imposition of form is in itself a warning: by its elevated nature it indicates its sovereign distance from all determinations, even from those ‘isms’ which reduce the irreducible unity of a thought system to the uniformity of a logical class; it also indicates its distance from all determinisms and especially the social determinisms which reduce the priceless individuality of a thinker to the banality of a (social) class. It is this distance, this difference which is explicitly instituted at the core of philosophical discourse in the form of the opposition between the ontological and the ontic (or anthropological) and which provides the already euphemized discourse with a second and impregnable line of defence: henceforth every word carries the indelible trace of the break which separates the authentically ontological sense from the ordinary and vulgar one, and which is sometimes

inscribed in the signifying substance by one of the phonological games (existentielUexistential) which have since been so often imitated. Thus the double-sided play with double-edged words is naturally extended to the warnings against ‘vulgar" and ‘vulgarly anthropological’ readings attempting to highlight the meanings that are negated but not refuted, and doomed by philosophical sublimation to the absent presence of a spectral existence: ‘The term “concern” has, in the first instance, its colloquial [vorwissenschaft-liche] signification, and can mean to carry out something, to get it done [erledigen], to “straighten it out”. It can also mean to "provide oneself with something”. We use the expression with still another characteristic turn of phrase when we say "I am concerned for the success of the undertaking". Here "concern" means something like apprehensiveness. In contrast to these colloquial ontical significations, the expression “concern" will be used in this investigation as an ontological term for an existentiale, and will designate the Being of a possible way of Being-in-the-world. This term has been chosen not because Dasein happens to be proximally and to a large extent “practical” and economic, but because the Beingof Dasein itself isto be made visible as care. This expression too is to be taken as an ontological structural concept. It has nothing to do with “tribulation", “‘melancholy”, or “the cares of life”, though ontically one can come across these in every Dasein.'^x2

The imposition of a sharp divide between sacred and profane knowledge, which underlies the claims of all groups of specialists seeking to secure a monopoly of knowledge or sacred practice by constituting others as profane, thus takes on an original form: it is omnipresent, dividing each word against itself, as it were, by making it signify that it does not signify what it appears to signify, by inscribing within it — by placing it between inverted commas or significantly distorting its substantive meaning, or just setting it etymologically or phonologically within a tendentious lexical cluster — the distance which separates the ‘authentic’ from the ‘vulgar’ or ‘naive" sense.¹³ By discrediting the primary meanings which continue to function as a hidden prop for a number of relations constitutive of the overt system, one provides oneself with the possibility of taking the double-dealing a step further. Indeed, despite the anathema that is poured upon them, these negated meanings still fulfil a philosophical function, since they act at least as a negative referent in relation to which philosophical distance is established, the ‘ontological difference¹ which separates the ‘ontological" from the ‘ontic’, i.e. the initiated from the lay person who alone is responsible,

through his ignorance and perversity, for the culpable evocation of vulgar meanings. By using ordinary words in other ways, by reviving the subtle truth, the etumon. which has been lost by routine usage, one turns the correct relation between words into the principle by which philological/philosophical alchemy stands or falls: 'If an alchemist, uninitiated in heart and soul, fails in his experiments, it is not only because he uses impure elements but above all because he thinks with the common properties of these impure elements and not with the virtues of ideal elements. Thus, once the complete and absolute duplication has been achieved, ideality can be fully experienced.’¹⁴ Language, too, has its subtle elements, liberated by philological/philosophical subtlety, such as the grammatical duality of the Greek word on (being), both a noun and a verbal form, which prompted Heidegger to remark: ‘What is here set forth, which at first may be taken for grammatical hair-splitting, is in truth the riddle of Being.’¹⁵

Thus assured of the effectiveness of philosophical negation, we can even recall censored meanings and find a supplementary effect in the complete reversal of the relationship between the overt system and the hidden system which is provoked by this return of the repressed: indeed, it is difficult not to see this as proof of the powerful ability of ‘essential thought’ to ground in Being such realities as the derisorily contingent ‘social security' - so unworthy of thought that they are named in inverted commas.¹⁽¹ Thus, in this ‘upside-down world’, where the event is never more than the illustration of the ‘essence’, the grounding is grounded by what it grounds.¹⁷ ‘For example, “welfare work” [Fursorge], as a factical social arrangement, is grounded in Dasein's state of Being as Being-with. Its factical urgency gets its motivation in that Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in the deficient modes of solicitude.'¹⁸ This blatant and invisible reference, invisible because it is blatant, helps, by its audacity, to disguise the fact that continuous mention is made of social welfare in an entire work ostensibly devoted to an ontological property of Dasein whose 'empirical [i.e. ordinary, vulgar and banal| need' for assistance is only a contingent manifestation. The paradigm of the stolen letter, which Lacan illustrates with the anecdote, ‘Why do you tell me you are going to Cracow so I'll believe you are going to Lvov, when you really are going to Cracow?’,²⁹ is used by Heidegger to encourage the belief, by proclaiming what he is really doing, that he is not really doing what he has always done. There is. in fact, no doubt: ‘social welfare, Sozialfursorge, is indeed ‘concern for’ and ‘on behalf of

those in receipt of aid, which disburdens them of concern for themselves and authorizes their inclination to be ‘careless’, to ‘take things easily and make things easy', just as philosophical solicitude (Fiirsorge), which is the sublime variant of the former, disburdens Dasein of concern, or as Sartre said (or might have said) in 1943, frees the Pour-soi (self-conscious being) from its freedom, thus dooming it to ’bad faith¹ and the ‘serious-mindedness’ of an ‘inauthentic’ existence. ‘Thus the particular Dasein in its everydayness is disburdened by the "they”. Not only that; by thus disburdening it of its Being, the “they” accommodates Dasein if Dasein has any tendency to take things easily and make them easy. And because the "they" constantly accommodates the particular Dasein by disburdening it of its being, the "they” retains and enhances its stubborn dominion.’²⁰

The play with the palpable forms of language is most accomplished when it bears on pairs of terms rather than isolated words, i.e. on the relations between contradictory terms. In contrast to straightforward philosophical puns based on assonance and alliteration, ‘primordial' puns, those which orient and organize Heidegger’s thought in depth, play on verbal forms to exploit them both as palpable forms and as forms of classification. These total forms, which reconcile the independent necessities of sound and sense in the miracle of an expression that is doubly necessary, are the transformed form of a linguistic fabric that is already moulded politically, that is. moulded by objectively political principles of opposition, and which is recorded and preserved in ordinary language. There is no other way of explaining the predilection of scholarly languages for binary thinking: what in this case is censored and repressed is not a taboo term taken in isolation, but a relation of opposition between words which always alludes to a relation of opposition between social groups.²¹

Ordinary language is not only an infinite store of palpable forms available for poetical or philosophical games, or. as with the later Heidegger and his followers, for free associations in what Nietzsche called a Begriffsdichtung: it is also a reservoir of forms of apperception of the social world and of commonplace expressions, in which the principles which govern the vision of the social world common to an entire group are deposited (Germanic/Romance or Latin, ordin-ary/distinguished, simple/compiicaled, rural/urban, etc.). The structure of class relations is only ever named and grasped through the forms of classification which, even in the case of those conveyed by ordinary language, are never independent of this structure (something forgotten by the ethnomethodologists and all the formalist

analyses of these forms). Indeed, although the most socially 'marked' (vulgar/distinguished) oppositions may receive very different meanings according to usage and users, ordinary language, as the product of the accumulated labour of thought dominated by the relations of power between classes, and a fortiori scholarly language, as the product of fields dominated by the interests and values of the dominant classes, are in a way primary ideologies which lend themselves more 'naturally* to usages conforming to the values and interests of the dominant classes.²* But whereas the ordinary practice of euphemization (as it is pursued in 'political science', for example) substitutes one word for another, or visibly neutralizes the ordinary meaning of an excessively marked word by an explicit caution (inverted commas, for instance) or a distinctive definition, Heidegger proceeds in a manner that is infinitely more complex: by using the ordinary word, but in a network of morphologically interconnected words, he invites a philological and polyphonic reading that is able to evoke and revoke the ordinary sense simultaneously, able to suggest it while ostensibly repressing it, along with its pejorative connotations, into the order of vulgar and vulgarly ‘anthropological’ understanding.²³

The philosophical imagination - which, like mythical thought, rejoices when the purely linguistic relation, materially exemplified by homophony, is superimposed on a relation of sense - plays on linguistic forms which are also class! ficatory forms. Thus, in the essay The Essence of Truth ( Von Wesen der Wahrheif), the opposition between the ‘essenf (VVejew) and the 'non-essent* (Un-wesen) is superimposed on the underlying opposition, simultaneously evoked and revoked, between order - a kind of phantom term - and disorder, one of the possible senses of non-essent. The parallel oppositions, unequally euphemized variants of certain ‘primordial’ oppositions, themselves roughly reducible to one another, numerous examples of which appear in Heidegger’s work subsequent to his 'reversal*, reaffirm - in a form which is sublimated and which, the more it is rooted in misrecognition, is all the more universal in its applications (like the opposition between the ontic and the ontological) - the founding opposition, itself subject to taboo. In so doing, they constitute that opposition by inscribing it in Being (the ontologizing effect) while denying it symbolically, either by reducing an absolute, total and clear-cut opposition to one of the superficial and partial secondary oppositions that can be derived from it, or even one of the most easily manipulated terms of a secondary opposition (as in the example above of the non-essent), or, by a strategy that does not exclude the former, simply and purely by denying the founding opposition through a fictitious universalization of one of the terms of the relation - in the way that

infirmity’ and ‘powerlessness’ (Ohnrnacht) are inscribed in the universality of Dasein, grounding a form of equality and solidarity in distress. The puns on the non-essent harness these effects and achieve a reconciliation between opposites that can only be compared with what occurs in magic: rendering absolute the established order (conjured up only by its opposite, in the way that, in dreams, clothes can signify nudity) which coincides with the symbolic negation, through universalization, of the only visible term in the relation of domination which establishes this order.²*

Everything is thus arranged so as to rule out as indecent any attempt to apply to the text the violence whose legitimacy Heidegger himself recognized when he applied it to Kant, and which alone allows one to ’grasp the sense beyond the obstinate silence of language’. Any exposition of the originary thought which rejects the inspired paraphrase of the untranslatable idiolect is condemned in advance by the guardians of the sanctuary.²⁵ The only way of saying what words mean to say, when they refuse to say innocently what they mean or, what amounts to the same thing, when they keep saying it but only indirectly, is to reduce the irreducible, to translate the untranslatable, to say what they mean in the naive terms which their primary function is precisely to deny. ‘Authenticity’ is not a naive designation of the exclusive quality of a socially designated ‘elite’. It indicates a universal potential - like ‘inauthenticity’ - but one which only really belongs to those who manage to appropriate it by apprehending it for what it is and at the same time by managing to ‘tear themselves away' from ‘inauthenticity’, a kind of original sin. thus stigmatized as a fault guilty of its own failing, since the chosen few are capable of being converted. This is clearly stated by Junger: ‘Whether to assume one’s own destiny, or to be treated like an object: that is the dilemma which everyone, nowadays, is certain to have to resolve, but to have to decide alone . .. Consider man in his pristine state of freedom, as created by God. He is not the exception, nor is he one of an elite. Far from it: for the free man is hidden within every man, and differences exist only in so far as each individual is able to develop that freedom which was his birthright.’²⁶

Though equally free, human beings are unequal in their ability to use their freedom authentically and only an ‘elite’ can appropriate the opportunities which are universally available for acceding to the freedom of the ‘elite’. This ethical voluntarism - pushed to its limit by Sartre - converts the objective duality of social destinies into a duality of relations to existence, making authentic existence an ‘existential modification’ of the ordinary way of apprehending every-

day existence, that is, in plain speaking, a revolution in thought,²⁷ When Heidegger makes authenticity begin with the perception of inauthenticity, in that moment of truth where Dasein is revealed through anxiety as projecting order into the world through its decision (a kind of Kierkegaardian ‘leap' into the unknown),** or, conversely, when he describes man's reduction to the state of an instrument, another way of apprehending 'everyday existence’, the way which ‘they’ adopt when they treat themselves as tools and ‘care about’ tools for their instrumental utility, and thus become instruments themselves, adapting themselves to others as an instrument adapts to other instruments, fulfilling a function which others could fulfil just as well and. once reduced in this way to the state of an interchangeable clement in a set. forget themselves in the fulfilment of their function - when Heidegger discusses existence in terms of this alternative, he reduces the objective duality of social conditions to the duality of the modes of existence they obviously encourage in a very unequal manner; and he thereby considers both those who ensure their access to ‘authentic’ existence and those who ‘abandon themselves’ to an ‘inauthentic’ existence to be responsible for what they are. the former for their 'resolution'³¹' in tearing themselves away from everyday existence in order to exploit their potential, the latter for their ’resignation’ which dooms them to ‘degradation’ and ‘social welfare’.

This social philosophy fits perfectly with the form in which it is expressed. In fact, one has only to resituate Heideggerian language in the space of contemporary languages where its distinction and social value are objectively defined in order to see that this particularly improbable stylistic combination is rigorously homologous to the ideological combination it is responsible for conveying: that is, to highlight the pertinent points only, the conventional and hieratic language of post-Mallarm^ poetry in the style of Stefan George, the academic language of neo-Kantian rationalism in the style of Cassirer, and lastly the language of the ‘theorists’ of the ‘conservative revolution’ like Moller van den Bruck*’ or, certainly closer to Heidegger politically, Ernst Junger.³¹ In opposition to the highly ritualized and purified language (above all in its vocabulary) of post-Symbolist poetry. Heideggerian language, which is its transposition in the philosophical order, welcomes, thanks to the freedom implied in the strictly conceptual logic of the Begriffsdichtung, words (e.g. Fiirsorge) and themes which are excluded from the esoteric discourse of great experts³² as well as the highly neutralized language of academic philosophy. Taking his cue from the philosophical

tradition which encourages the exploitation of the infinite potentialities of thought contained in ordinary language³³ and common-sense proverbs. Heidegger introduced words and things into academic philosophy (according to the parable of Heraclitus’ oven, which he relates with self-satisfaction) that had previously been banned, but by conferring a new nobility on them through the imposition of all the problems and emblems that characterize the philosophical tradition, and by integrating them into the fabric woven by the verba) games of conceptual poetry. The difference between the spokespersons of the ‘conservative revolution’ and Heidegger, who introduced virtually all of their theses and many of their words into philosophy, lies entirely in the form which renders them misrecog-nizable. But the specificity of Heideggerian discourse would doubtless be lost if the totally original combination of distance and proximity, of loftiness and simplicity, which is realized in this pastoral variant of professorial discourse, were reduced to one or other of its antagonistic aspects: this bastard language embraces perfectly the purpose of the elitism which is within reach of the masses and which offers the most ‘ordinary’ people the promise of philosophical salvation, provided they are capable of hearing, above the corrupt messages of wicked pastors, the ‘authentic’ thoughts of a philosophical Fuhrer who is never more than a Fursprecher, a humble advocate serving the sacred word and thereby made sacred.

Internal Reading and the Respect for Forms

Fritz Ringer was no doubt right to identify the truth about the reaction of the German ‘mandarins’ to National Socialism in the words of Spranger, who. in 1932. believed that The national students’ movement is still authentic in its content, but undisciplined in its form'.⁵⁴ For academic logocenlrism, whose limit is set by the verbal fetishism of Heideggerian philosophy - the philo-logical philosophy par excellence - it is good form which makes good sense. The truth of the relation between philosophical aristocratism (the supreme form of academic aristocratism) and any other type of aristocratism - including the authentically aristocratic aristocratism of the Junkers and their spokespersons - is expressed in the imposition of form and the prohibition against any kind of ‘reduc-tionism', that is, against any destruction of form aimed at restoring discourse to its simplest expression and, in so doing, to the social conditions of its production. The only proof one needs of this is the

form taken by Habermas* reflections on Heidegger: ‘Since 1945 the issue of Heidegger’s fascism has been raised in diverse quarters. It is essentially the rectoral address of 1933. when Heidegger celebrated the "upheaval in Germany’s existence”, which has been at the heart of the debate. Any criticism which stops there, however, remains schematic. What is much more interesting, on the other hand, is to discover how the author of Being and Time (the most important philosophical event since Hegel’s Phenomenology), how such a great thinker could stoop to such an obviously elementary mode of thought, which any lucid analysis can discern in the unstylized pathos of this call for Lhe self-assertion of German universities.’³⁵ It is clearly not enough to guard against the ‘elevated’ quality of ‘Martin Heidegger's linguistic posture as a writer’³⁶ in order to break with the concern for the ‘elevation’ of discourse, that sense of philosophical dignity which is fundamentally expressed in the philosopher’s relation to language.

The ‘elevated’ style is not merely a contingent property of philosophical discourse. It is the means by which a discourse declares itself to be authorized, invested, by virtue of its very conformity, with the authority of a body of people especially mandated to exercise a kind of conceptual magistrature (predominantly logical or moral depending on the authors and the eras). It also ensures that certain things which have no place in the appropriate discourse, or which cannot find the spokespersons capable of putting them in the correct form, are not said, whereas others are said and understood which would otherwise be unsayable and unacceptable. In ordinary speech as in learned discourse, styles are hierarchical and hierarchizing; an ‘elevated’ language is appropriate for a ‘top-level thinker’, which is what made the ‘unstylized pathos* of Heidegger’s 1933 address seem so inappropriate in the eyes of all those who have a sense of philosophical dignity, namely, a sense of their dignity as philosophers: the same people who acclaimed the philosophically stylized pathos of Being and Time as a philosophical event.

It is through the ‘elevated* style of a discourse that its status in the hierarchy of discourses and the respect due to its status are invoked. A phrase such as, ‘The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell,’³⁷ is not treated in the same way as a statement in ordinary language, such as, ‘the housing crisis is worsening,’ or even a proposition in technical language, such as, ‘In the Hauxvogteiplutz, the business district of Berlin, the price of land per square metre was 115 Marks in 1865, 344 Marks in 1880 and 990 Marks in 19K5.‘^M As a discourse with its own form, philosophical discourse dictates the

conditions of its perception.”¹ The imposition of form which keeps the lay person at a respectful distance protects the text from ‘trivialization’ (as Heidegger calls it), by reserving it for an internal reading, in both senses: that of a reading confined within the limits of the text itself, and concomitantly, that of a reading reserved for the closed group of professional readers who accept as self-evident an ‘internalist’ definition of reading. Wc have only to observe social custom to see that the philosophical text is defined as one which can only be read (in fact) by ‘philosophers', i.e. by readers who are ready to recognize and grant recognition to a philosophical discourse, and to read it as it demands to be read: ‘philosophically’, in accordance with a pure and purely philosophical intention, excluding all reference to anything other than the discourse itself, which, being its own foundation, admits of nothing outside of itself.

The institutionalized circle of collective misrecognition, which is the basis of belief in the value of an ideological discourse, is established only when the structure of the field of production and circulation of this discourse is such that the negation it effects (by saying what it says only in a form which suggests that it is not saying it) is brought together with interpreters who are able, as it were, to misrecognize again the negated message: in other words, the circle is established only when what is denied by the form is 're-misrecognized', that is, known and recognized in the form, and only in the form, in which it is realized by denying itself. In short, a discourse of denial calls for a formal (or formalist) reading which recognizes and reproduces the initial denial, instead of denying it in order to discover what it denies. The symbolic violence that any ideological discourse implies, in so far as it based on misrecognition which calls for re-misrecognition. is only operative inasmuch as it is able to make its addressees treat it the way it demands to be treated, namely, with all due respect, observing the proper formalities required by its formal properties. Ideological production is all the more successful W’hen it is able to put in the wrong anyone who attempts to reduce it to its objective truth. The ability to accuse the science of ideology of being ideological is a specific characteristic of the dominant ideology: uttering the hidden truth of a discourse is scandalous because it says something which was ‘the last thing to be said’.

The most sophisticated symbolic strategies can never produce completely the conditions of their own success and would be doomed to failure if they could not count on the active complicity of a whole body of individuals who defend orthodoxy and orchestrate - by

amplifying it - the initial condemnation of reductive readings/⁰

Heidegger need only assert that ‘philosophy is essentially untimely because it is one of the few things that can never find an immediate echo in the present¹/¹ or. as he suggests in his introduction to Nietzsche, that *it belongs to the essence of every genuine philosophy that its contemporaries invariably misunderstand it'⁴² * variations on the theme of the ‘accursed philosopher' which are particularly colourful in his account -for all the commentators immediately to follow* suit/⁵ ll is the fate of all philosophical thought, once it has achieved a certain degree of strength and rigour, to be misunderstood by the contemporaries it challenges. To classify as an apostle of pathos, an advocate of nihilism and an opponent of logic and of science, a philosopher whose unique and constant concern has been the problem of truth, is one of the strangest travesties of which a frivolous age is guilty/⁴⁴ ‘His thought appears as something alien to out times and everything contemporary/⁴⁵

Thus the ’Letter on humanism/ most striking and most quoted of all the interventions aimed at strategically manipulating the relation between overt and latent systems, and thereby manipulating the public image of the work, has functioned as a kind of pastoral letter, an infinite source of commentaries enabling the simple evangelists of Being to reproduce for themselves the precautions inscribed in each of the master's warnings and thus to stand on the right side of the barrier between the sacred and the profane, between the initiated and the lay person As the waves of dissemination progress, expanding in ever-widening circles from authorized interpretations and inspired commentaries to scholarly theses, introductory' studies and finally textbooks, as one slides down the scale of interpretations, matched by the decline in the loftiness of the phrasing or paraphrasing, the exoteric discourse tends increasingly to return to basic truths; but, as in cmanationist philosophies, this dissemination is accompanied by a loss of value, if not of substance, and the ’trivialized' and vulgarized’ discourse carries the mark of its degradation, thus adding even more to the value of the original or founding discourse.

The relations which are established between the work of a great interpreter and the interpretations or over-interpretations it solicits. or between the self-interpretations aimed at correcting and preventing misinformed or malicious interpretations and legitimizing authorized ones, resemble perfectly - apart from their lack of a sense of humour - those which, since Duchamp, have developed between the artist and the group of his interpreters: in both cases, the production anticipates the interpretation, and. in the double-guessing game played by its interpreters, invites over-interpretation, while still

reserving the right to repudiate this in the name of the essential inexhaustibility of the work, which may lead one to accept or, equally, to reject any interpretation, by virtue of the transcendent power of its creative force, which is also expressed as a power of criticism and self-criticism. Heidegger’s philosophy is unquestionably the first and the most accomplished of the ready-made philosophical creations, works made to be interpreted and made by interpretation or, more precisely, by the interactions between the interpreter who necessarily proceeds by excess and the producer who, through his refutations, amendments and corrections, establishes an unbridgeable gulf between the work and any particular interpretation.⁴*

The analogy is less artificial than it appears at first sight: by establishing that the sense of the ’ontological difference' which separates his thought from all previous thought⁴⁷ is also what separates ‘popular’, pre-ontological and naively ‘anthropological’ interpretations (as is Sartre’s, according to Heidegger) from authentic ones, Heidegger places his work out of reach and condemns in advance any reading which, whether intentionally or not, would limit itself to its vulgar meaning and which would, for example, reduce the analysis of 'inauthentic' existence to a sociological description, as some well-intentioned but wrong-headed interpreters have done, and as the sociologist also does, but with a totally different purpose. By positing within the work itself a distinction between two different readings of it. Heidegger finds himself well placed to persuade the consenting reader, when faced with the most disconcerting puns or the most blatant platitudes, to seek guidance from the master. The reader may of course understand only too well, but he is persuaded to doubt the authenticity of his own understanding, and to prohibit himself from judging a work which has been set up once and for all as the yardstick of its own comprehension. Like a priest who. as Weber observes, has the means to make the lay person carry the responsibility for the failure of the cultural enterprise, the great priestly prophecy thus guarantees the complicity of the interpreters who have no option but to pursue and recognize the necessity of the work, even through accidents, shifts and lapses, or find themselves cast out into the darkness of ‘error’ or, even better, ‘errance'.

Here, in passing, is a remarkable example of interpretation mania, calling on the combined resources of the international interpreters’ guild, in order to avoid the simplistic, as denounced in advance by a magisterial pun: ‘In English this term (errance) is an artefact with the following

warrant: The primary sense of the Latin errare is “to wander", the secondary sense "to go astray" or "to err”, in the sense of "to wander from the right path". This double sense is retained in the French errer. Jn English, the two senses are retained in the adjectival form, "errant": the first sense (“to wander") being used to describe persons who wander about searching for adventure (vg. “knights errant"); the second sense signifying "deviating from the true or correct", “erring". The noun form, “errance", is not justified by normal English usage, but we introduce it ourselves (following the example of the French translators, pp. 96 ff.). intending to suggest both nuances of "wandering about” and of "going astray" ("erring"), the former the fundament of the latter. This seems to be faithful to the author's intentions and to avoid as much as possible the simplest interpretations that would spontaneously arise by translating as "error".'⁴’’

As the source of authority and guarantees, texts are naturally the object of strategies which, in these domains, are effective only if they are concealed as such, and especially - that is the function of belief -in the eyes of their own authors; sharing in their symbolic capital is granted in exchange for that respect for the proprieties which define in each case, according to the objective distance between the work and the interpreter, the style of the relation to be established between them. What is required is a more complete analysis, in each particular case, of the specific interests of the interpreter, whether researcher, official spokesperson, inspired commentator or straightforward teacher, according to the relative position of the work being interpreted and the interpreter in their respective hierarchies at a given moment; and to determine how and where they guide the interpretation. It would thus be very difficult to understand a position as apparently paradoxical as that of the French Heideggerian Marxists - followers of Marcuse⁴⁹ and Hobert⁵⁰ - without bearing in mind that the Heideggerian whitewashing exercise came just in time to meet the expectations of those Marxists who were most concerned to let themselves off the hook by linking the pleibeia philosophia par excellence, then strongly suspected of being 'trivial', with the most prestigious of contemporary philosophies.⁵¹ Of all the manipulative devices hidden in the ‘Letter on humanism’,^w none was able to influence ‘distinguished’ Marxists more effectively than the second-degree strategy which involved re-interpreting for a new political context - committed to talking the language of ‘a fruitful dialogue with Marxism' - the typically Heideggerian strategy of an (artificial) overcoming through radicalization which the early Heidegger directed against the Marxist concept of alienation (Ent-

fremdung): ‘the fundamental ontology’ which grounds what Marx described as ’the experience of alienation' (albeit in a manner that remained too ‘anthropological’) in the most radical and fundamental alienation of human beings, i.e. their forgetting of the truth of Being, surely represents the nec plus ultra of radicalism.⁵³

One only has to reread the account of a discussion between Jean Beaufret. Henri Lefebvre and Kostas Axclos^M in order to convince oneself that this unexpected philosophical combination owes little to what may be called strictly ‘internal' arguments: *1 was enchanted and seized by a vision - not a particularly exact description - that was all the more striking for the way it contrasted with the triviality of most of the philosophical texts that have appeared over the years’ (H. Lefebvre); ‘There is no antagonism between Heidegger’s cosmic-historical vision and Marx's historical-practical conception' (H. Lefebvre): ‘What provided the common ground and I believe links Marx and Heidegger is the era itself in which we live, the era of highly advanced industrial civilization and of the global diffusion of technology ... Ultimately, the two thinkers do at least share the same objective ... Unlike, for example, the sociologists who analyse only specific manifestations here and there’ (F. Chatclei);⁵⁵ 'Marx and Heidegger both proceed to a radical critique of the world of the present as well as the past, and they share a common concent to plan lor the future of the planet' (K. Ax-elos); 'Heidegger’s essential contribution is to help us understand what Marx has said’ (J. Beaufret); ‘The impossibility of being Nazi is part and parcel of the reversal between Being and Time and Time and Being. If Being and Time did not preserve Heidegger from Nazism. Time and Being, which is not a book but the sum of his reflections since 1930 and his publications since 1946, distanced him from it for good' (J. Beaufret): ‘Heidegger is well and truly materialistic' (11. Lefebvre); 'Heidegger, in a very different style, continues Marx's work’ (F. Chatelet).

The specific interests of ihe interpreters, and the very logic of the field which conveys the most prestigious works to the readers with the greatest vocation and talent for hermeneutic hagiography, do not explain how, at a certain point. Heideggerian philosophy came to be recognized in the most diverse sectors of the philosophical field as the most distinguished fulfilment of the philosophical ambition. This social destiny could only be realized on the basis of a pre-existing affinity of dispositions, itself deriving from the logic of recruitment and training of the body of philosophy professors and from the position of the philosophical field in the structure of the university field and intellectual field, etc. The petit-bourgeois elitism of this ’cream' of the professorial body constituted by philosophy professors

(who have often come from the lower strata of the petite bourgeoisie and who, by their academic prowess, have conquered the peaks of the hierarchy of humanist disciplines to reach the topmost ivory tower of the educational system, high above the world and any worldly power) could hardly fail to resonate harmoniously with Heidegger’s thought, that exemplary product of an homologous disposition.

All of the effects which appear most specific to Heideggerian language, notably all of the effects which constitute the flabby rhetoric of the homily, a variation on the words of a sacred text which serves as the source of an unending and unremitting commentary, guided by the intention to exhaust a subject which is by definition inexhaustible, represent the exemplary limit and therefore the absolute legitimation of the professional tics and tricks which allow the ’ex-cathedra prophets' (Kathederpropheten), as Weber called them, to re-produce mundanely the illusion of being above the mundane. These effects of priestly prophecy therefore succeed fully only if they rest on the profound complicity that links the author and his interpreters in an acceptance of the presuppositions implied by a sociological definition of the function of ‘the lesser ministerial prophet’, as Weber again put it; and none of these presuppositions serves Heidegger’s interests better than the divinization of the text conferred by any self-respectingly literate reader. It required a transgression of the academic imperative of neutrality as extraordinary’ as enrolment in the Nazi Party for the question of Heidegger’s ’political thought' to be raised, and then it was immediately set aside again, as it seemed an improper suggestion, which is yet another form of neutralization: the definition which excludes any overt reference to politics in philosophy has been so profoundly internalized by professors of philosophy that they have managed to forget that Heidegger’s philosophy is political from beginning to end.

But comprehension within established forms would remain empty and formal if it did not often mask a kind of understanding which is both more profound and more obscure, and which is built on the more or less perfect homology of positions and the affinity of the habitus. To understand also means to understand without having to be told, to read between the lines, by re-enacting in the mode of practice (in most cases unconsciously) the linguistic associations and substitutions initially set up by the producer: this is how a solution is found to the specific contradiction of ideological discourse, which draws its efficacy from its duplicity, and can only legitimately express social interest in forms which dissimulate or betray it. The homology

of positions and the largely successful orchestration of divergent habitus encourage a practical recognition of the interests which the reader represents and the specific form of censorship which prohibits their direct expression, and this recognition gives direct access, independently of any conscious act of decoding, to what discourse means,⁵⁽¹ This pre-verbal understanding is engendered by the encounter between an as yet unspoken, indeed repressed, expressive interest, and its accepted mode of expression, which is already articulated according to the norms of a field.⁵⁷

Part III

Symbolic Power and the Political Field