June 2004

One is absolutely right in not throwing away subjectivity before acquiring something else. There's no point in returning to a new kind of dogmatic metaphysics
- sure. After 'Being and Time' Heidegger keeps on coming back to Kant and subjectivity -- compare for instance Jud Evans' (nominalistic) 'world': the same objective monster as the Being of so many Heideggerians, while to Kant world is differentiated: on the one hand the theoretical realm of a causality, that rules everything and everyone, on the other a practical world of people.

But Heidegger was taking subjectivity more serious than anyone, so he DIDN'T let it go by 'overcoming' it. That's what the Heideggerians do, who are simply bourgeois subjectivists in a very late phase. There is indeed nothing gained by replacing 'subject' by 'Dasein'. Rather everything is lost, when Da- sein is substantiated. The hyphen is not a trick, it points exactly to the how of its being understood (if that is English): without *being* it oneself, it's all less than nothing.

And because also this is not enough he writes: Da-seyn, to discern it from a metaphysically understood Da-sein. One could name this heightened subjectivity, but with the warning that subjectivity is here not to be understood from that one and same eternity.

(Like with Hoelderlin's or Trakl's bread and wine, which in their cases is not just another variation of the Christian theme. Or Beethoven's missa solemnis, Berlioz' requiem)

But it's nothing dreamlike. In fact - in a normal situation I would never say this - in my subjective life, it has proven quite effective. Without holding a mirror in front of the dictatorship of subjectivity and its representations, I would never have gotten my self again, nor would those who are with me. Again, normally I would never say this, but I don't see any alternative left than showing the living proofs. And the others show their proofs, and they're unmistakably utgaardian: the decomposition of the only reality left: the bodysubject. The discrepancy of the words/images used for justification, and the rottenness that presents itself, get more and more frightening.

But that at the same time points to where a solution, or the beginning of it, might lie: that the lies, not only Iraq, but the whole god- and earthforlorn mess that is intensifying, rob away our last humanity, make it ugly and endlessly usable. If one has nothing left to resist this ultimate form of subjectivism, which is a sort of evil beyond good and evil, if one has lost any possibility to be (the) Da, one is lost. But that is not what the intellectual chatterers want to hear -but look when and how they run away, there's a lesson in it- and now is the time to say it a bit more clearly than Heidegger himself could afford. So I'm afraid we meet on the crossroads of Verelendung. The *Verelendung* however is the eternity, and humans only used for It. (also Bush's and Kerry's.) But what if there's no one left to expose them TO?

As Heidegger often writes: where are the ears to hear? The ears and the hearing (hoeren) might be missing, but what never can be left out wholly, insofar the current type of man is still human, is the suspicion that there's something missing, that they still belong to... (ge-hoeren) And that those who are said to be less civilized, are in fact superior, and the only way to fight that is to destroy them, waste them. Turn them into dwarfs and ants, in order to crush them, like was done
60 years ago to the Jews. I like Erdogan, the Turkish leader. Very calm and dignified, he states clearly the impossible and suicidal tactics of Israel.

As to Malthus and eternity: first the oil seemed to outclass nuclear energy, the switch of which, as you once wrote, was simply turned off. But now it will come back again, so that Heidegger is right any way. That is not coincidental: first there is (meaninglessness, then:) will to will, energy for the sake of energy, and only then coal, oil, or nuclear energy. It is essential not to interpret this as essentialism. It is the essential end of essentialism. Another kind of essence therefore. Just like another kind of
(inter)subjectivity, no longer one that can be constituted, as Husserl still tried.

Rene de Bakker