Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question Book

Derrida opens with the premise that Heidegger warns against using the term 'spirit,' geist, both in 1927's Sein und Zeit and then in 1953: but "How are we to explain that in twenty-five years, between these two warning signals ('avoid,' 'avoid using'), Heidegger made a frequent, regular, marked (if not remarked) use of all this vocabulary, including the adjective geistig?" (1). This manner of avoiding is perhaps not signature Heidegger'though it does summon the sous rature concept: "modalities of 'avoiding' which come down to saying without saying: in quotation marks, for example, under a non-negative cross-shaped crossing out (kreuzweise Durchstreichung), or again in propositions of the type: 'If I were yet to write a theology, as I am sometimes tempted to do, the word 'Being' ought not to appear in it'" (2)'classical rhetorical antiphrasis, surely, but much more.

Despite his usage, "spirit, so it seems at least, is not a great word of Heidegger's. It is not his theme. It would seem that he was able, precisely, to avoid it" (3). However, "to the precise extent that it does not appear at the forefront of the scene, it seems to withdraw itself from any destruction or deconstruction, as if it did not belong to a history of ontology'and the problem will be just that" (5). That said, "this motif is regularly inscribed in contexts that are highly charged politically" (id.)'such as how Heidegger "draws abundantly in the years 1933-35" (id.). The inference to be drawn is that "it is not only inscribed in contexts with a high political context" but "perhaps decides as to the very meaning of the political as such" (6).

Perhaps incongruous with his writings elsewhere equating deconstruction with justice, Derrida suggests that "spirit seems to designate, beyond a deconstruction, the very resource for any deconstruction and the possibility of any evaluation" (15). This is because the quoted language is itself a grammatological ghost, a hauntological moment: "Between the quotation marks, through the grid they impose, one sees a double of spirit announcing itself. More precisely, spirit visible in its letter, scarcely legible, becomes as it were the spectral silhouette'but already legible, this one'of another" (24). This is "the law of quotation marks. Two by two they stand guard: at the frontier or before the door, assigned to the threshold in any case, and these places are always dramatic" (31). NB "in German 'quotation mark' is Anfuhrungsstriche or Anfuhrungszeichen, to conduct, to take the head, but also to dupe, to make fun of or brainwash" (66). Eventually we see that "Heidegger here inscribes invisible quotation marks in the use of the same word. This word is thus divided by an internal difference" (95).

He proceeds to "the opening to the question of Being. Even if Being must be given to us for that to be the case, we are only at this point, and know of 'us' only this: the power or rather the possibility of questioning, the experience of questioning" (17)'which seems to be the primary operativity of Dasein. The consequence here is that "a few years later, when the references to spirit are no longer held in the discourse of Destruktion and in the analytic of Dasein, when the words Geist and geistig are no longer avoided, but rather celebrated, spirit itself will be defined by this manifestation and this force of the question" (18)'which reduces Dasein to the language that is to be avoided: "in the pure concept, the essence of spirit, a difference of difference" (26).

He explains further: "The word 'order' designating both the value of command, of leading, duction or conduction, the Fuhrung, and the value of mission: sending, an order given. Self-affirmation wants to be (we must emphasize this wanting) the affirmation of spirit through Fuhrung. This is spiritual conducting, of course, but the Fuhrer, the guide'here, the Rector'says he can only lead if he is himself led by the inflexibility of an order, the rigor or even the directive rigidity of a mission" (32). These terms are drawn from the Rectorship Address, FFS (cf. 34-38 )'a "typological motif, and even an onto-typological motif" (id.). Heidegger "spiritualizes National Socialism" but also "by taking the risk of spiritualizing Nazism, he might have been trying to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation" (39). If Heidegger's program in the Rectorship Address seems diabolical, it is because, without there being anything fortuitous in this, it capitalizes on the worst, that is on both evils at once: the sanctioning of Nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical. Behind the ruse of quotation marks of which there is never the right amount (always too many or too few of them), this equivocation has to do with the fact that Geist is always haunted by its Geist: a spirit, or in other words, in French as in German, a phantom, always surprises by returning to be the other's ventriloquist. Metaphysics always returns (40 )'which constitutes complete failure of Heidegger's primary philosophical project. Heidegger "denounces, then, a 'spiritual decadence'" (45)'similar to the NSDAP's 'spiritual socialism.'

This decadence is perhaps definitional, as spirit is a matter of humanity; accordingly "Animality is not of spirit" (47). What's at stake is the striking out of 'rock' when discussing it from the lizard's perspective, say: "Erasure of the name, then, here of the name of the rock which would designate the possibility of naming the rock itself, as such and accessible in its being-rock. The erasing would mark in our language, by avoiding the word, this inability of the animal to name" (53). Derrida explains the "inability to name" as deriving "from the properly phenomenological impossibility of speaking the phenomenon whose phenomenality as such, or whose very as such, does not appear to the animal and does not unveil the Being of the entity" (id.). Ultimately, there can be "no animal Dasein, since Dasein is characterized by access to the 'as such' of the entity and to the correlative possibility of questioning. It is clear that the animal can be after a prey, it can calculate, hesitate, follow or try out a track, but it cannot properly question. In the same way, it can use things, even instrumentalize them, but it cannot gain access to a tekhne" (57)'spirit then as a sub rosa marker of Dasein. Animal or human, a threshold of indistinction, in the "instrumentalization of spirit" (64)?

Derrida thinks that the "whole deconstruction of ontology" that Heidegger proposes, "insofar as it unseats, as it were, the Cartesian-Hegelian spiritus in the existential analytic" is here "compromised rather by a thesis on animality which presupposes'this is the irreducible and I believe dogmatic hypothesis of the thesis'that there is one thing, one domain, one homogenous type of entity, which is called animality in general, for which any example would do the job," which "remains fundamentally teleological and traditional" (57). These things "bring the consequences of a serious mortgaging to weight upon the whole of his thought" (id.) (mortgage as a cool metaphor, incidentally).

Heidegger otherwise sees a "darkening of the world," as though we lived in a fucking fantasy novel, arising out of a "destitution of spirit" (59). The "discourse on the crisis might constitute one of the symptoms of the destitution" (61) (cf. Moretti on the German tragic vision, crisis as moment of truth, etc.). Part of his problem is that "the degradation of the spiritual into the 'rational,' 'intellectual,' 'ideological' is indeed what Heidegger was condemning in 1935" (96).

Spectres of Gobineau in "the thought of race [Rassengedanke] is interpreted in metaphysical and not biological terms" (74). "Is a metaphysics of race more or less serious than a naturalism or a biologism of race?" (id.). Also shades of Gobs in the notion of decline: "The azure becomes crepuscular 'spiritually,' geistlich. Now this becoming-crepuscular, this Dammerung, which does not signify a decline (Untergang) nor an occidentalization, is of an essential nature" (88).

Derrida's hypothesis is "to recognize in it, in its very equivocation or indecision [NB], the edging or dividing path which ought, according to Heidegger, to pass between a Greek or Christian'even onto-theological'determination of pneuma or spiritus, and a thinking of Geist which would be other and more originary. Seized by German idiom, Geist would rather, earlier, give to think flame" (82). That is, 'Doch was ist der Geist?' Heidegger asks. What is spirit? Reply: 'Der Geist is das Flammende. How to translate? Spirit is what inflames? Rather, what inflames itself, setting itself on fire, setting fire to itself? Spirit is flame. A flame which inflames, or which inflames itself: both at once, the one and the other, the one the other. Conflagration of the two in the very conflagration. (84) NB: "Nothing is more foreign [!] to Heidegger than commentary in its ordinary sense" (85).

"Does it not remain open from its origin and by its very structure onto what Greek and then Latin had to translate by pneuma and spiritus, that is, the Hebrew ruah?" (100): Nazism was not born in the desert. We all know this, but it has to be constantly recalled. And even if, far from any desert, it had grown like a mushroom in the silence of a European forest, it would have done so in the shadow of big trees, in the shelter of their silence or their indifference but in the same soil. I will not list the trees which in Europe people an immense black forest, I will not count the species. For essential reasons, the presentation of them defies tabular layout. In their bushy taxonomy, they would bear the names of religions, philosophies, political regimes, economic structures, religious or academic institutions. In short, what is just as confusedly called culture, or the world of spirit. (109-10)"Spirit'in flames'deploys its essence (west), says Heidegger, according to the possibility of gentleness (des Sanften) and of destruction (des Zerstorerischen)" (102).