Broken Hegemonies

CHAPTER 5: On the Historial Differend

CHAPTER 5 On the Historial Differend On the late modern pathology: the self as other “By the event alone do we become ourselves.” (BzP 230) In this remark, Heidegger pushes modern hegemony to its extreme limit. We must try to grasp this “our selves” (wir selbst) as pointing toward the self (das Selbst), and we must try to grasp the event—strangely instrumentalized here by the self—as the strife between appropriation (Ereignung) and expropriation (enteignet, ibid.). Instrumentalization pulls the event under the modern hegemony, where everything becomes a tool for self-assertion. At the same time, if the strife in question is in one way or another the condition of the self, then “to become oneself” must have been an agonistic pursuit ever since the institution of modernity. The text moves to the limits of the subjectivist dynasty, where its “principle” (BzP 336) becomes monstrous. This movement to the limits can easily be traced. It follows a chain of excesses that leads toward a possible Da-sein. The regime that constituted modernity obviously gets disfigured by the giganticism of technocratic rationality. But it gets disfigured more essentially by a movement that is excessive in a different way, in a way that is still guided by the principial economy even while rendering it unrecognizable from within: monstrous. The giganticism where the uniformity imposed by archai triumphs thus is not to be confused with the monstrous, where the archic is altered by the anarchic. This alteration alone prefigures another economy, with a broken arché. The denial of that break has moved and still moves totalizing phenomenalization as the condition for its apogee—the condition, if there truly is an apogee, for its perigee as well. What remains to be understood is the self, without denying the originary double bind. The focal meaning having served since the Enlightenment in order to take stock of phenomena found itself pushed aside from its very emergence, as was seen, by counter-strategies to which the focal meaning itself gave rise. Their linkage reveals, at the heart of the grip {saisie} making up the epoch, a diremption {dessaisie} Heidegger later will say marks the end of all epochal history.28 This end can best be understood by following the modern pathos to its limit. A last warning before attempting to link together the steps by which Heidegger proceeds to disfigure self-consciousness as well as the self. Here it is a matter of a 530 PART THREE. THE MODERN HEGEMONIC FANTASM topical sequence in his very own text, not a thematic concatenation of statements “about” the self and the topoi it occupies as the egoʼs non-generic other. At that level of themes and places {lieux dits}, to the contrary, Heidegger hardly misses an opportunity to refute whoever would dwell on modern self-consciousness as a springboard toward another thinking (BzP 67ff.). No matter that this “whoever” is Heidegger himself. . . . Indeed, the text speaks at times from a topos which can only be called subjectivist and at times from another, event-like, topos. Hence the difficulty in reading these Contributions. Hence, too, their incomparable symptomatic status. Here, then, are some of the displacements by which Heidegger works on the selfconscious subject, and pushes its regime to the limit where it becomes unrecognizable . At first he speaks from the place where a certain collective subject becomes problematic to itself—a subject of the imaginary institution circumscribed by the Meuse, Memel, the Adige, and the Baelt; a place involving Berlin and a time measured by a span of three or four years; a problem, lastly, that concerns the identity of that subject. It is a “proper” place in the strict sense of that word, a universal “idiot” as is all identi fication with that subjectivist idion that is most difficult to shake, most unreflective and most murderous: “my” people. This proper place exceeds itself as soon as it is inscribed within the history of principial representations. The reign of the conscious, reflexive, rational subject, whether intimate or collective, amounts to an “illusory reign” (Scheinherrschaft). This Schein will have to be examined more closely, for here is the referent that has caused our age to be included among the fantasms. Just as one had to dispel the transcendental illusion of certain earlier totalizing fantasms in order to establish the modern focal sense of being, so “this illusory reign must some day be broken” so as to destitute it (BzP 336...