THE FAILURE THAT SAVES US

The decisive moment in human development is everlasting

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Is Heidegger’s Nazi engagement just a stupid error or is it grounded in his basic philosophical stance? Or, even worse, what if his very basic philosophical stance is grounded in his Nazi engagement? The only way to clarify this topic is to turn the question around and analyze the implicit philosophical foundations of Hitler’s work itself. (This, of course, doesn’t mean that we should elevate Hitler into a serious philosopher – the task is just to explore the implicit ontological foundations of Hitler’s “thought.”) Peter Trawny’s Hitler, Philosophy and Hatred: Notes on the discourse on identity politics[1] risks this daring step which is deeply justified, although it will appear problematic to many, especially in today’s electrified atmosphere; the book’s approach is best rendered by the publisher’s summary:

“To believe that European discourse can keep National Socialism at a distance, like an object, is at best a naïve hypothesis, but at worst a political mistake. One then pretends that National Socialism had no contact with the rest of Europe, with other philosophers, with other political and religious languages. This is why Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is still considered a book unworthy of philosophical discussion. This attitude sheds light on philosophy itself. Does it possibly find too much of itself in Mein Kampf? And what is it exactly that it finds there? Trawny's reading of Hitler's book does not avoid the possibility of a continuity between philosophy and National Socialism. It is an encounter with a hatred that threatens us simply because it once seized power and dominated the life of a society. There is no reason to think that the hatred has passed away.”[2]

With regard to Heidegger, the result that imposes itself from such a reading – for those who, in spite of all counter-arguments, continue to hold Heidegger for a great philosophical figure – is more than just paradoxical, it is painful. Yes, there are two facts that we should accept: Heidegger was an engaged Nazi and he was a mega-figure of philosophy, he formulated some crucial philosophical insights. But what if Heidegger saw certain crucial things not in spite of but precisely because of his problematic political stance? This absolutely doesn’t imply that there is a deeper truth in Nazism; it means that to see something at the level of ontology, one has to “err” at the ontic level – not just err in the sense of mistakes but err in the sense of terrifying monstrosity. A Jewish friend of mine who is close to Heidegger and simultaneously deeply immersed in Jewish spirituality[3], claimed that some Talmudic texts indicate how some painful truths can only be said from the position of Satan. This, of course, should not remain our final position: one should pass through Heidegger and supplement his thought so that it no longer requires the Nazi link (to simplify it something, so that the three authentic spiritual positions are no longer those of a poet, a warrior, and a farmer).

For all these reasons, one should agree with Michael Millerman who, in his “Alexander Dugin’s Heideggerianism”[4], argues that the infamous Aleksandr Dugin is a legitimate Heidegger pupil: Heidegger is not just one of the sources or inspirations of Dugin’s philosophy, a proper understanding of his thought plays a key role in determining Russia’s future: to master Heidegger’s thought is “the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society,” and “the key to the Russian tomorrow.”[5] How, then, does Heidegger become “Khaydegger” (his name written in Russian)? To what subtle changes does Dugin submit Heidegger’s edifice?

For Dugin, the transcendental-ontological analysis of Dasein that Heidegger deploys in his Being and Time is not universal: every civilization gives birth to its specific form rooted in a specific collective spirituality. There are many figures of Dasein, the Russian one is different from the German one, it is focused on “narod,” the people in the sense of German Volk, not state, not just nation (nationalism), not race (Fascism), not class (Marxism), and especially not liberal individualism. “Narod” is thus an ontological category, it designates a historically-specific form of the disclosure of Being, of how its members perceive what matters in their lives, what gives their lives meaning, what freedom and dignity mean in their spiritual universe. For an authentic Russian, “freedom” is something different from the liberal notion of human rights and freedoms, it is a mode of free immersion into the spiritual substance of one’s people which only provides dignity to him.

For Dugin, philosophy is thus immanently political, inclusive of advocating war: war in Ukraine is a war between Western global modernism and the Eurasian spirituality. There is war because (as Heidegger saw) the West reached its deepest decline in global liberal hegemony, Western modernity is Evil embodied, while Russia did not yet fully articulate its Eurasian spiritual identity – this task still lies ahead, and only Russian philosophy grounded in Heidegger can do it. Here Dugin replaces Germany (as, for Heidegger, the unique spiritual nation) with Russia: a “new beginning” - the awakening expected by Heidegger, a new Ereignis - will take place in Russia, not in Germany, not even in the West. Dugin refers here even to Russian language itself: he notes how the terms that sound artificial in Heidegger’s German (like “in-der-Welt-sein,” being-in-the-world) have much more natural everyday equivalents in Russian.

Dugin is not simply a Rightist against the Left, he notices how at a certain point Bolshevism itself took an Eurasian turn.[6] One should mention here Aleksandr Blok, the great Russian poet who wrote TheTwelve, the great ode to the October revolution: he was quickly disappointed by the Bolshevik Revolution and his last work before his early death in 1921 was a patriotic poem “Scythians” which advocates a kind of “pan-Mongolism,” a clear precursor to today’s Eurasianism - Russia should mediate not only between the East and the West but also politically between the Reds and the Whites to end the self-destructive civil war. This is also why Dugin prefers Stalin to Lenin: in 1921 Lenin conceived the task of Bolsheviks to bring Russia as fast as possible to Western modernity, while this reference to the West disappears with Stalin.

Dugin is not simply opposed to the West: his target is modernity which culminates in liberal individualism. One should note here that a similar reading of Heidegger as a tool to keep at a distance global Western modernization is practiced not only in Russia or some other Slavic countries but also in non-Slavic countries from Romania to Iran. (In my own country, Slovenia, some Heideggerians were interpreting Dostoyevski - whom otherwise Dugin rejects - as a case of overcoming Western nihilism.) Dugin solicits every country, every people, to get rid of the liberal-individualist yoke of global modernity and discover its own specific spirituality. The role of Russia is to defeat the global West and thus to give each country, the Western ones included, the freedom to discover its own spirituality – one may say that Dugin provides a philosophical version of the idea of multipolar world embodied in the political notion of BRICS.

Do we, in the “liberal” West, have an alternative to oppose to this dark prospect? Any reference to the “complexity” of the situation is a fake here – the answer is a simple NO. The parallel between today’s pro-Palestinian student protests and the 1968 anti-Vietnam-war protests are often noted; however, Franco Berardi also noted an important difference between the two. Rhetorically, at least, the 1968 protesters identified with anti-imperialist defense of Vietcong and with a socialist project, but today’s protesters very rarely identify with Hamas. What, then, do they identify with? Berardi’s bitter hypothesis is that

“Students are identifying with despair. Despair is the psychological and also cultural trait that explains the wide identification of young people with the Palestinians. I think that the majority of the students today are consciously or unconsciously expecting the irreversible worsening of the conditions of life, irreversible climate change, a long lasting period of war, and the looming danger of a nuclear precipitation of the conflicts that are underway in many points of the geopolitical map.”[7]

It is difficult to put it better than Berardi. The first step towards hope is to fully admit our desperate predicament in all its dimensions. What Adorno wrote decades ago - “Nothing but despair can save us.”[8] – is today more true than ever. Adorno’s line echoes Kafka’s basic idea that the only success, the only solution, is the failure of failure itself. Does this amount to a version of Beckett’s famous formula from his 1983 story “Worstward Ho”: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”? One can read Lacan’s entire theoretical development in this sense: all his attempts to find the right word (or formula) for his theoretical edifice failed, and he then move to another attempt to “fail better” – from four discourses to mathems, from mathems to knots… - and, in his very brief last seminar session he openly admits that all these attempts failed. But with Kafka the “failure of the failure” does involve a kind of negation of negation which ends the infinite line of failures, although not the usual pseudo-Hegelian one of negating the failure and succeeding. The failure of failure means that when we fail we should not just approach the same goal in a different more realistic or more efficient way: what we should renounce is the very standard-ideal-goal we tried to achieve. The unsurpassable model of the Kafkaesque failure of a failure is, of course, the situation described in the last lines of his “parable” on the door of the Law from The Trial: the man from the country fails to enter the door of the Law, and this failure fails when he is told that door was there just for him:

“The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. ‘What do you still want to know, then?’ asks the gatekeeper. ‘You are insatiable.’ ‘Everyone strives after the law,’ says the man, ‘so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?’ The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, ‘Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.’”[9]

Do we not get something similar on the southern side of the demilitarized zone that divides North from South Korea? South Koreans built there a unique visitor’s site: a theatre with a large screen-like window in front, opening up onto the North. The spectacle the public observes when they take seats and look through the window is reality itself (or, rather, a kind of “desert of the real”): the barren demilitarized zone with walls etc., and, beyond, a glimpse of North Korea. However, as if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theatre a pure fake, a model village with beautiful houses; in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, people area given good dresses and are obliged to take a stroll every evening… One can easily imagine a Kafkaesque conclusion of this show:  all of a sudden, the lights in the model village are turned off and a voice from the North says: “This spectacle was assigned only to you. North Korea is now going to close it.”

Nothing new, one could add: the spectators from the South knew this all the time – but the enigma remains: if they knew it all the time (i.e., if they knew that North Korea built that model village just for them be see it), why are they so fascinated by it that they enjoy looking at it? This brings us to a further difference between Kafka and North Korea: Kafka’s man from the country desperately wants to pass through door of the Law (probably to resolve some legal problem he is caught in), while the observers from the South don’t want to effectively visit the model village in the North – they know well they are just watching a spectacle staged for them. It is more like a cinema performance where what we see on the screen is reality itself staged for us. The true enigma resides elsewhere, in the Other’s desire: why is North Korea, with its ideology of self-sufficiency (juche), so keen to impress a foreign gaze, i.e., the gaze of its mortal enemies? Why doesn’t id simply decide to ignore the foreign view? What if North Korea is – in its very impenetrability – already caught into a libidinal economy which includes us?

Another unexpected link emerges here: what about Kafka and quantum mechanics? Is the doorkeeper’s final message (“the door is here only for you”) not similar to the basic claim of quantum mechanics about how an observer is always included into (what we experience as) objective reality which exists independently of our observation? Theorists like Carlo Rovelli pointed out convincingly that this claim (the inclusion of the observer) does not imply some sort of subjective idealism (“my mind creates reality”) – on the contrary, it implies a materialist axiom that we (observers) are also part of the world, that we do not observe it from some privileged external position… Yet another unexpected link: with the ongoing war in Gaza, do we not get from both sides - Hamas and IDF – horrors which are (partially, at least) also committed for the observers (witnesses, cameras, digital media)? The devastation of Gaza was also made to impress on the observers the strength of the IDF and Israel’s capacity to destroy those whom they perceive as threats to its existence.

With the explosive development of Artificial Intelligence, we are approaching the obverse of the situation described by Kafka: in my interaction with a digital agent, I act as if I am a partner in an actual dialogue (AI can easily program a partner who looks and acts like a human), but the AI system opposite is just a blind mechanism ignoring my subjectivity – the doors are not just for me, they are for anyone… The circle so nicely described by Schuster – the obscure and all-powerful agency which appears to dominate the Kafkaesque subject (the Court, the Castle…) is in reality his symptom, his unconscious formation onto which he projects his repressed traumas and antagonisms, so that his destruction is a self-destruction – can no longer be applied here: the AI mega-machine does not function as an obstacle which is simultaneously a positive condition to the emergence of a subject.

It is even very problematic to turn this relationship around and say that humans become symptoms of the AI machines, the embodiments of the machines’ inner inconsistencies and impossibilities – this holds more for our common language which subjectivizes itself through the subject that gives body to the lack of a “true Word”… Will then an all-powerful AI apparatus induce in a subject caught in it a real psychosis, not just a paranoia? Will the big Other become a real object, not just a virtual/inexistent agent? However, it may happen that if AI will develop not human consciousness but a radically new form of self-awareness, its absolute strangeness will give rise to neurosis, to a questioning of “what does AI want”…

But, again, how does all this affect the notion of a revolution? One thing is sure: we should leave behind the standard paradigm/excuse of “next time we’ll do it in a better, totally different way.” We, the agents, should begin from the zero-point, and this zero-point does not mean a radical destruction/reconstruction of social reality but a radical destruction/reconstruction of ourselves, of our innermost subjectivity. This is what Kafka meant when he wrote in a letter to Max Brod: “There is infinite hope - just not for us.”[10] An ambiguous statement which can also mean: not for us as we are now, so we have to change radically, to be reborn. How are we to understand this? Lacan said in 1969 (a year after the fateful 1968): “You are, however strange this may appear, the cause of yourself. Only there is no self. Rather there is a divided self.”[11] Lacan’s logic is here clear: objet a is the object-cause of desire, but this weird object is the subject itself in its objectivized form, so the subject causes itself through objet a, and the basic division of the subject is this very division between $ and a which are the same thing in the form of lack and excess. All the paradoxes are grounded in this incompatibility of subject and a: a is the obstacle to my identity, a foreign stain in me, but this very obstacle causes me as the subject of desire…

In his Seminar XIV[12], Lacan mentions the “weird correspondence between subject and object” (“l’etrange correspondance entre sujet et objet”) – why is this correspondence strange? For two interconnected reasons. First, this correspondence is not what philosophers usually mean by the correlation between subject and object – it is almost its opposite, a kind of negative correlation, since subject is defined precisely by being a non-object. Subject and object are two sides of the same coin, lack and excess; they cannot be “synthesized” so that excess will fill in the lack because they are strictly co-existent, one and the same thing at two different levels – if the lack were to be filled in, there would no longer be a subject, the subject would fall into reality as one of the objects. Second, this correspondence is not properly dialectical but a non-dialectical foundation, a gap which opens up and sustains the very space of dialectics, in some sense even its non-dialectical presupposition… But, again, what has this to do with revolution? Lacan goes on: “Entering onto this path is where the only true political revolution may flow from.”[13] Kafka noticed apropos the October Revolution:

“The decisive moment in human development is everlasting. For this reason the revolutionary movements of intellect/spirit that declare everything before them to be null and void are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.”[14]

Here is Schuster’s comment on these lines:

“It’s not that history has ended, as so many Hegel-inspired critics have repeated in various contexts. Rather, the end has already occurred, and the real question is whether, and when, history will begin. Kafka’s universe is marked by an unbearable tension between extreme closure and boundless openness, between the end that has already taken place and the beginning that is yet to start.”[15]

This brings us to the well-known Gramsci’s remark from his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms /fenomeni morbosi/ appear.”[16] From today’s Kafkaesque experience, this remark appears all too naïve: our present is ALWAYS the one in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In social change, capitalism is disintegrating but the new socialist order cannot be born and we get morbid symptoms (like techno-feudalism); in sexual economy the old patriarchy is disintegrating and the new free sexuality cannot be born, so we are getting morbid symptoms; etc. The worst (Stalinist or Fascist) illusion is that a direct smooth passage from the Old to the New is possible and that we just missed it due to our contingent limitations (like: we got Stalinism because the first revolution happens in a wrong place, in a retarded Russia and not in the developed West).

In view of the recent worldwide rise of fascisms as the reaction to the crisis of global capitalism, Todd McGowan[17] suggested that we should reverse the well-known Walter Benjamin’s line: “It’s not that every fascism is the result of a failed revolution but that fascism is the natural response that capitalism engenders.” The new logical order is thus: capitalism reacts to a crisis with some form of fascism, and the emancipatory resistance is then a reaction to this fascist threat.

So what if, in fidelity to Kafka’s vision, we turn the things around: the true “morbid symptom” is our image of the proper New that we expected to emerge, and the solution is precisely and only to be sought in new “morbid” solutions that we improvise to avoid the catastrophe at the horizon. The only thing to add here is that “unbearable tension between extreme closure and boundless openness” is already present in Hegel’s thought where extreme closure (the closed circle of the Hegelian system where the end coincides with the beginning) coincides with radical openness: the system cannot say anything about the future, there is no deeper “historical necessity” indicating the way.

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[1] Peter Trawny, Hitler, die Philosophie und der Hass: Anmerkungen zum identitätspolitischen Diskurs, Berlin: Matthes&Seitz 2022.

[2] Hitler, Philosophy and Hatred - Verlag Matthes & Seitz Berlin (matthes-seitz-berlin.de).

[3] To avoid embarrassment to him, I will of course not name him.

[4] IJPT Vol. 3. No. 1. 10.22609/3.1.2. AUTHOR PROOFS (philpapers.org).

[5] Dugin quoted from op.cit.

[6] See Aleksandr Dugin, Templars of the Proletariat, London: Arktos 2023, whose topic is the metaphysics of national Bolshevism.

[7] Sabotage and Self-Organization • Ill Will.

[8] Quoted from Steven Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press 2005, p. 438.

[9] Before the Law by Franz Kafka - page 2 (kafka-online.info).

[10] This saying was first reported by Max Brod, in “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” Die Neue Rundschau 32 (November 1921), p. 1213.

[11] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, session of June 25, 1969, Staferla edition, http://staferla.free.fr/S16/S16.htm; quoted from the unpublished Cormac Gallagher’s translation.

[12] See S14 LOGIQUE.docx (live.com)

[13] Op.cit., ibid.

[14] Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. by Max Brod, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change 1991, p. 41.

[15] Schuster, op.cit., p. 193.

[16] Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, vol. 1, Quaderni 1–5, Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore 1977), p. 311. English translation quoted from Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971, p. 276.

[17] Personal communication.