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275 Chapter 14 Conclusion IN OPENING UP A productive dialogue concerning Marx and Heidegger, a central question in this book has been that of the fate of Europe and that very being of Europe which has become a global affair. The taking into hand of the entire globe became a concern of the nineteenth century through the expansion of capital and production, and then through the political mastery of technology and its effects. Marx’s understanding of that “taking in hand” as the positing of a humanity that steps into the productive place of God persists as the most powerful account of production and its effects. Marx’s understanding of the subjectivity of the subject, and the persistent drive for equalization among subjects, is the persistent thinking of our age, whether we think ourselves to be Marxists or not. In this Marx’s thinking, and his description of action, possesses an essential force. As the management of the taking in hand of the whole planet, and the fate of the human person with it, has become an ever-more urgent drive, the postwar situation has given way to successive “crises”—financial, political, ecological, humanitarian. Counterposed to Europe has been Heidegger’s discussion of the fate, and fatedness, of the Occident—of that thinking which he argues arises in the Greece of antiquity, and which was renewed in the voice assumed by Hölderlin, and which concerned the destiny of Germany. Although Heidegger has been attacked repeatedly for his nationalism, not only Heidegger, but also Marx (and even Lenin) also reserved a special place for Germany in relation to the fate of her neighbors (if without reference to Hölderlin). At the time of writing this book, a reluctant and resistant Germany has again been called to the fore to secure, if not the fate of the West, then the fate of the fragile unity of a faltering Europe. We can only ask: is the place occupied by Germany in this question only by accident? To this question , conventional “political science,” “economics,” and even contemporary philosophy has barely any answer. Both Marx and Heidegger have supplied one: they do not speak the same, but they speak from out of the same. This book has attempted to open up why that might be and how. We have attempted to open up what Heidegger had named in relation Chapter 14 276 to Marx as the dimension “within which a productive conversation with Marxism becomes possible.” If on the one hand Marx has been understood as the founder of “communism,” a politics now largely discredited by the history of its actual practice, and by the collapse of its Soviet forms, on the other hand Heidegger’s politics have been almost always construed as a purely personal and individual affair, and discredits any understanding of him as a “political” thinker. With only one or two exceptions—Kostas Axelos would be one, Fred Dallmayr another (both only in brief or relatively short discussions)—what attempts there have been to place Heidegger and Marx into dialogue have already appeared within the domain of a very specific political thinking—most ordinarily the presuppositions of liberal democracy. This thinking already takes for granted that it “knows” or understands the ways in which Marx, or Heidegger, are to be understood, and it does so on the basis of a very specific understanding of the human being or human “essence.” This thinking, as we have seen, has concentrated on interpreting Heidegger’s word Dasein as a name for the individuality of the subjectivity of the (human) subject, rather than understanding the range of meanings the term Dasein has— used in the same way as Hegel, Kant, and Marx use it—of “existence.” As we have seen, Heidegger adds to this the more specific interpretation of “herebeing ” (rather than “being-there”). The “politics” that has followed after Marx in the twentieth and in our own centuries has remained resolutely within the domain that Heidegger names as humanism. In this, as I have sought to show throughout, it remains within the province of “metaphysics”—that thinking that arises with Plato and Aristotle, and that finds its fulfillment in the thought of Hegel and of Nietzsche. Increasingly this manner of “political” thinking—of liberalism taken in the widest sense—is concerned with the freedom of the human subject. The struggle to define and defend this freedom oscillates between a negative conception, exemplified by the thinking of Rousseau and the notion of the radical individualism...

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