The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason

Chapter 4: Project

c h a p t e r 4 Project Ambiguity of Terminology What do we mean by the term project? The question seems just as super- fluous as it is normal-sounding in our language. Its basic emphasis is similar to technology. One only truly disposes of the world when there are paradigms at one’s disposal that make it available. The present dominion has actual value only insofar as it is productive of future dominion. Producing and project are joint terms representing, in our language, a single family . The project is understood as intrinsically productive: it elaborates models of production. Producing is included in the project whose meaning and purpose it illuminates. In the project, therefore, it is question of a strategy on whose basis something must be produced, something must be brought out, to presence. The project foresees, so to speak, this future presence; it unfolds its character in advance. But in the project, precisely, one is not limited to ‘‘project’’ (ideare) this presence; one also has to show with what means and in what ways presence is actually producible. The tone of the project, therefore, is that of anticipation, of prediction and of concrete production. Let us keep this point firmly in mind—whereby in the term project we mean essentially the techno-scientific project—before returning to it critically. It is also necessary to realize how the anticipating 122 123 Project emphasis of the ‘‘pro’’ tends to conceal a presupposition. It is as if in the project a predictive-productive force was being expressed free from any presupposition (the German term Gesetz, law, is the exact translation of presupposition), a way-in-the-future without a way-from. As we will see, this connects since its inception the term project and its family to that of ‘‘freedom.’’ It is easy to realize that the essential content of freedom consists for us in being able to project. And so much richer this freedom appears to us, as the projecting ability seems free from any presupposition. But this is not to be taken entirely for granted. If we analyze, for example, the German term Entwurf, then the root of the project reemerges with force. In the ent-, the anticipation, the before (avanti) do not resound; what resounds, rather, is the way-from, the separation-from, the departing —not so much the constructive-productive in its advance, as much as the destructive or the overcoming. In Entwurf one perceives the ‘‘pull’’ (strappo) of the ‘‘throw’’ (lancio), not its eventual prefiguring, predictive force. Thus, in terms such as Entwicklung or Entfaltung, the techné of unfolding , of unwinding, of developing is portrayed with its eyes turned backward: to the ‘‘already developed’’ that must be newly unfolded, to the refolded, to the ‘‘congealed’’ that must be disentangled, unraveled, analyzed.1 It is in the Fortschritt (progress), in any case, that we find the tone of the project. The term project is proper to the overall aura of progress , while in Entwurf this tonality is extremely faded, if not absent. In it one thinks the hardness of the presupposition to be removed, the laborious flowing toward the presence beginning from an obscure, an unknown. This presupposition is precisely the compact, the immediate, to be deconstructed , mediated, analyzed. And in the ent- resounds exactly this de-: the dramatics of an analytic-deconstructive work, suspended on the ‘‘beyond’’ that in the term project instead is announced, predicted, prefigured, anticipated with so much certainty. Because of these considerations, too, Heidegger’s Entwurf does not seem to be translatable as ‘‘project.’’ Heidegger asks, ‘‘Why does the understanding —whatever may be the essential dimensions of that which can be disclosed in it—always press forward into possibilities?’’2 Why in the understanding (Verstehen) the mode of being of Dasein is potentiality-forBeing ? (And here potentiality-for-Being does not indicate a fluctuating libertas indifferentiae, but ‘‘the most original and extremely positive ontological determination of Dasein’’). ‘‘It is because the understanding has in itself the existential structure which we call projection (Entwurf).’’ Understanding has projecting character. Dasein is ‘‘thrown in to the kind of being which we call projecting.’’ Therefore, the project itself, so understood, 124 Project belongs to that ‘‘ontologico-existential constitution of being precisely within the sphere of the actual potentiality-for-being.’’ Heidegger’s Entwurf has nothing to do with a techno-scientific plan, with the anticipating predictive-productive dimension...