Heidegger & Althusser
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude IX. Standing in the sun + Cynics
Martin Heidegger.
I'm at the point where he covers Martin Heidegger and you couldn’t make this shit up. In 1933 Heidegger is a fanboy of Hitler (or maybe not ). In 1940 Jean-Paul Sartre is imprisoned by the Nazi’s when he reads Heidegger’s Being and Time and decides this provides him with a route to a moral existentialism. In 1943 Sartre publishes Being and Nothingness and, in 1945, praises Heidegger for pointing him in the right direction in a lecture called "Existentialism is a Humanism." Heidegger publishes an outraged "Letter on 'Humanism'" denouncing Sartre’s interpretation of his work -- at least that’s probably what it is as no one seems to really have much of an idea what the man is saying most of the time. He’s a sort of philosophical inkblot. (If the English quotations I’ve seen are anything to go by his prose makes Kant’s look like Hemingway.) Next, all the embryonic French philosophers (like Foucault) notice the slap-down of Sartre and try to join in. In 1946 Heidegger is booted from his university chair by the French military authorities in occupied Germany.
Continued from The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
p 49
...a darker, more disquieting note was also sounded repeatedly in Heidegger’s letter -- and it was this note that would resonate most deeply with Foucault, who already knew from Sade and Goya something about dark and disquieting visions of the world. For a human being committed neither to reason nor to purposive action must, as it were, be prepared to let itself go. To surrender one’s customary inhibitions and descend into what Heidegger called the “unthought,” the thinker had first to “learn to exist in the nameless.” To accomplish this paradoxical task, it was not philosophy but poetry and art that might light the way. “Language,” as Heidegger famously asserts, “is the house of Being”; but the metaphor is deceptive. For to inhabit, however contemplatively, the world revealed by the language of Sade, for example, was as likely to disturb as it was to comfort. “Concealed in the step back,” away from logic and conscious action, is “a thinking that is shattered.” Probing beyond the limits of reason, thinking sooner or later finds itself without statute or rule, structure or order, and face-to-face with nothing. To thus discover, as Heidegger puts it, that “Being” and “the nothing” are “the Same” is to “risk discord.” Heidegger’s new way of thinking might bring about a healing “ascent into grace,” but by the same token it might also unleash “evil,” “the malice of rage,” and the “compulsion to malignancy” with uncertain and potentially fatal consequences...”
p 54
...”In 1948, he [Foucault] attempted to commit suicide. Over the next few years, more suicide attempts followed -- how many is unclear...”
“To the end of his life, Foucault defended “everyone’s right to kill himself,” as he cheerfully told a startled interviewer in 1983. Suicide, he wrote in another essay, published in 1979, was “the simplest of pleasures...” In his 1979 essay, he imagines “suicide-festivals” and “suicide-orgies”... That dying is sensuous (just as Sade, for one, had said) Foucault insists: to die, he writes, is to experience the “formless form of an absolute simple pleasure.” a “limitless pleasure whose patient preparation, with neither rest nor predetermination, will illuminate the entirety of your life.”
p56
...”Up until 1970,” Foucault later recalled, “one knew very well that the patrons of [gay] bars and of baths [in Paris] were harassed by the police and that there was a complex, efficient, and burdensome spiral of police repression.” But Foucault also later claimed that he loved the games that had to be played in those dark times before gay liberation: belonging to an underground fraternity was exciting as well as dangerous.
Louis Althusser.
p 57
In 1948, just as the young Foucault began to struggle in earnest with his own suicidal impulses, a flashy new figure arrived at the École Normale [École normale supérieure]. His name was Louis Althusser, and in the years that followed he managed to open up new doors for the unhappy student from Poitiers, suggesting new ways to apply philosophy to the study of history and the understanding of psychology -- and also new ways to work on changing a world that in certain respects Foucault evidently found intolerable.
...A fiery spirit of fierce discipline and Jesuitical craftiness, Althusser was on his way out of the Catholic church and into the Communist Party. Already afflicted with the recurrent manic-depressive episodes that would lead to his permanent commitment to a mental hospital after strangling his wife in 1981... he proved to be a spellbinding teacher, a quality that helped him recruit an unprecedented number of normaliens, including Foucault, into the Communist Party.
Foucault’s 3 year membership in the Parti communiste francais (PCF) sound amazingly similar to Heidegger’s participation in the Nazi party starting in 1933. Both seem to have been swept up in the optimism of the moment and both were soon let down by the reality of party life. (Althusser could be the closest model -- after the fact -- for Naphtha in The Magic Mountain I've run into so far.)
If nothing else, his experience during the roughly three years he spent in the party taught him something about the pliability of the truth -- and also about the ability of the trained mind to believe, and find reasons for believing, almost anything. Learning to toe the party’s line on everything from international affairs to reflex psychology, Foucault learned how to lend credence to the incredible. “Being obliged to stand behind a fact that was totally beyond credibility,” he later explained, “was part of the ‘dissolution of the self,’ of the quest for a way to be ‘other.’” Still, as Foucault discovered, being a Communist was not quite the “other” way of life he was looking for... “I was never really integrated into the Communist Party because I was homosexual,” he later said. “It was an institution that reinforced all the values of the most traditional bourgeois life” -- all the values he now wanted to jettison.
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