I AM ALSO SOMEHOW GOING TO BRING IN hEIDEGGER & KIERKEGAARD BY HOOK OR CROOK.

Your real ass has to be in a real bind of real pain to write out what is truly in you.  Now, “truly in you” is a very troublesome phrase because I am the only “you” I know and there is absolutely nothing in me. I have looked several times now and all I have found are cobwebs, mice, and cockroaches, nothing else. Where are the spiders? Do you remember Dostoyevsky’s spiders? The ultimate essences of evil?) Both the notion of ‘sincerity’ and the notion of evasion of the factual situation through generalized, abstract, and totally ungrounded and irrational, totally arbitrary though traditional ethical boundaries and de facto judgments that everyone is supposed, by some divine fiat, to know the real truth of -- I suppose -- because it is in the human DNA or instilled in the soul directly by God or the ubiquitous “other” at the end of all questionnaires.  Not only is everyone suppose to know the difference between right and wrong but, within their ‘sincere’ selves, they perfectly agree on what that is. They may, however, express judgments conflicting with that perfectly conscious inherent knowledge for their own political purposes of the moment. Since there is no rational justification for such a ridiculous assumption of an absolute ethic applicable to each and all exactly the same way and never has been, as Aristotle’s purely situational and relative ethics is ample testimony to, we need to drop this. But that is the problem. How do we truly realize what we truly are, that is, in essence wholly unethical?

In this regard, no one has questioned the ‘sincerity’ of Heidegger’s Rector’s speech at the time he gave it. His later evasions of what he said are obvious for the everyday inauthentic ‘They’ self reasons which are, of course, his ‘true’ self. That situation is black and white, “black” as when he said it there is no question he meant it, “white” insofar as he was afterwards conducting a whitewash job. But a white wash job exactly to what purpose? From what starting point? To what end? To whitewash what for whom exactly? Would Heidegger have been more admirable if he had maintained a consistent attitude of ‘sincerity’ from his Rector’s speech till the day he died? And what exactly is it he would have been consistent with? But before you say “yes” or “no” you would have to justify this consistency as a political virtue because Heidegger’s ‘equivocations’ were purely political. Political thinking, even when one blunders into it like he did, is a whole different thing from our mutual and naïve philosophical thinking. His ass was in a real bind, and several different times. For it is absolutely certain that, though he was a ‘sincere’ Nazi, he was in no way privileged or even protected from the actual and specific Nazis that seized power June 20, 1934. please notice the date. You must ask yourself, Has your ass ever been in such literal “clear and present danger” as Heidegger’s was after he resigned from the rectorship, or when he was volunteered for forced labor on the Siegfried Line by the local Nazi boss as “the least valuable teacher” at Freiburg, or even when he was up before the Denazification tribunal, his teaching privileges at stake, and even his best friends denouncing him? This is not asking for sympathy, but an attempt to understand one like a thief caught in the act, what such a person feels and thinks. This asks for an explanation, not a justification because “justification” is only meaningful among people with the same acknowledged values.  One fact that we now definitely do not even understand is the political insecurity of Germany in the early 1930’s where the vast majority of Germans, including Jews, would have ‘justified’ any action that stabilized the situation. Some Jews even thought Hitler might be a blessing in disguise for the first few hours of his reign, that is, until the atrocities by the SA on German Jews began to be reported in the newspapers, ax murders, throwing them out their fourth story windows into the street in broad daylight, and before Hitler stopped this random anarchy and open reportage in the newspapers. On the one hand, the nature of Nazism had been made perfectly clear on day one. On the other hand, two very different factions in the Nazi party had been revealed. To say one was ‘better’ than the other is ridiculous from any point of view. That Heidegger deserved what he got doesn’t hold water unless you can prove an absolutely binding code of ethics applicable to everybody all the time like Kant’s categorical imperative. Or, actually, to be ‘sincere,’ not like Kant’s categorical imperative because Kant himself, unlike the people who teach Kant, allowed for difference of education and experience and situations.

Now, for some strange reason ya’ll are wondering what this has to do with Bakhtin and Rabelais and Heidegger? Simple. Telling the political truth can destroy you as it almost did Heidegger or Bakhtin or Rabelais. Just because you are in opposition to the powers that be does not make you ‘good’ except to a specific and very limited group of people. Stalinism should have taught us that. Personally, being a hero is not my ideal of public behavior. I have never found real honesty to be to my advantage so I don’t even try. But connecting the “extermination of the Palestinians” with the nature of reading per se is, as fill in the blank said, is a total bunch of crap. One reads and writes as one must, according to one’s situation. There is nothing obscure or even problematic about it once you understand the specific author’s real, personal situation! It is not a matter of abstract speculation but of praxis, action, which as action is necessarily committed action, whether you admire the reasons or not, even if it is your own act.  You write the way you have to, within the boundaries imposed on you by external reality that considers your ass grass and it is the lawnmower, and, supposedly, that you ‘sincerely’ love to write and feel incomplete if you cannot. There is absolutely no need to bring in purely artificial constraints and concepts when these two are enough by themselves to create a whole maze of mirrors through deviated and evasive intents. To repeat, 'Your real ass has to be in a real bind of real pain to write out what is truly in you.' And, if there is nothing there like me, then you write about nothing. What this pain is can take many forms and may be none of your goddamn business. Nonetheless, it always applies, or what you write is crap.

Rabelais, Bakhtin, and Heidegger lived in times when great numbers of people were utterly silenced for even hinting at what they ‘sincerely’ politically believed, even when that ‘belief’ may really have had no practical and causally effective point at all. Rabelais and Bakhtin equivocated and downright lied just as much as Heidegger to save their asses. (Another example is Paul de Man. On reading his ‘anti-Semitic’ newspaper article, I, maybe mistakenly, was struck by what seemed its irony as a parody of anti-Semitism. It seemed to me very similar to Eisenstein’s portrayal of Stalin’s hero IVAN THE TERRIBLE. In the first part, by those desiring to do so, it could be understood as adulation of the father of his country. Stalin loved it. But even in Part 1 there are many equivocal symbols that could easily be read in two opposite ways. In Part 2, the equivocity became so obvious that not even Stalin could miss it, and he called Eisenstein in and personally berated him. He said, "Of course Ivan was cruel. But you need to show why Ivan was cruel! This should make you think twice about who and what Stalin was. Part 2 was not released in Eisenstein’s or Stalin’s lifetime, and Part 3 only had a few reels shot. As to Paul de Man, his motivation for writing the article was explicit. He wanted official approval by fascist authorities as a writer so he would not have to go to Germany as forced labor in the factories being bombed into oblivion by the Allies.) As to Heidegger, he knew very well that the officially empowered Nazis considered him a Nazi gone bad, and however much he may have changed his mind about the party when it was still in power – it is fact that he changed his mind, but a total mystery as to what this really means – even a tiny change made public could have got him killed – Heidegger was very aware about what “the night of the long knives” was all about. And who could have been a better or more vicious Nazi than Ernst Röhm? In some ways he was more “Nazi’ than Hitler. 

Heidegger only denied his Nazism when it was safe to do so. During the Nazi regime, his only public ‘defiance’ was his harsh criticism of the Nazi version of Nietzsche. But that was a subject the Nazi hierarchy could care less about. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche tried for years to get Hitler to visit the Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, and was finally able to get a picture of him next to Nietzsche’s bust. Hitler wasn’t even paying attention, and literally in less than five minutes was gone. I think Heidegger admired Ernst Röhm much more. The SA chief was the perfect Aryan warrior, a front-line captain in WWI, with a scar from his dueling fraternity of the type Nietzsche despised, a “blond beast” as Nietzsche actually envisioned it in THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, that is, a stupid brute, a whole-hearted believer in anarchistic Fascism somewhat like the much more intelligent Curzio Malaparte (He was born “Kurt Erich Suckert.” Supposedly Hitler personally made Mussolini put him in jail – Malaparte was causing Mussolini all sorts of political trouble by exporting his drastic fascism to neighboring countries - only to be released to become a war correspondent on the Russian front. Again he became persona non grata to the Nazis because he reported what he ‘supposedly’ saw (“Of course, Germans were not killing Jews wholesale. Of course, Russian POWs were not reduced to cannibalism. [Malaparte says he told about this to an SS officer, and he, with uproarious laughter, replied, “Did they enjoy it?”]. Of course, the German army did not maintain brothels of Jewish girls. The result? He was transferred to the Finnish front [Malaparte wrote an incredibly funny story about the President of Finland and his cabinet ministers, in a state of total drunkenness during one midnight, trying to rescue a reindeer that had wandered on a pond of flat ice and kept slipping and falling down.] After the war, he wrote incredibly strange KAPUTT. Malaparte is the exemplary example of absolute Italian cynicism that could be easily Fascist one moment and Communist the next. Literally. In THE SKIN, a supposed novel showing him working for the occupying Americans, he out-Hemingways Ernest Hemingway’s cynicism. He also, after stating his two novels were thoroughly based on fact, then also said they were completely made up out of nothing. Read them yourselves and make up your own mind.). Anything anarchistic was hated and loathed by the German General Staff and Hitler. ¶ The point is, Heidegger sympathized with the anarchistic wing of the party! He sympathized precisely with those that neither Hitler nor the German general staff could live with. Martin Heidegger had a definite apocalyptic strain in his thinking concerning Geschick, an apocalyptism that is a release from all ethical bonds in the rapture of the end of the world. One might even say it reflects the inherent atheism in monotheism as related to Ivan Karamazov’s phrase, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” Martin Heidegger’s brother Fritz, as far as I can discern, reflects an obvious carnivalism and benign anarchism that is much more acceptable but only because it was anti-Nazi. Fritz never expressed his anarchism or rejection of Nazism politically, but more as a matter of being in bad taste and mean spirit and the general butt of his jokes. (It would be interesting to know what the brothers discussed politically. After all, stating that there is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ anarchism or that anarchism has moral principles is absurd.). Whether or how ‘sincere’ this deviance of Heidegger’s was, I think, is pointless to debate till we get, if ever, explicit information. And by “explicit” I mean a statement in depth without fear of spies or public coercion. As in Hamlet, POLONIUS (of the newly arrived actors): My lord, I will use them according to their desert. HAMLET: God’s bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. (2.2, 528-533).