9
decisively separate the Heidegger who joined the Nazi party (and was silent if not
unrepentant about doing so after the war) from another Heidegger who allegedly gives us
the best resources to critique the first and everything for which he stands. This project of
imminent critique--or, perhaps better, deconstruction--obliges him to look for political
resources in Heidegger’s thought other than the notion of Germany as the most
metaphysical nation and the site of the decisive encounter between technology and
modern man.
9
In so doing he is naturally led to closely follow Arendt’s thought, which is
one of the first and still most significant attempts to build upon Heideggerian premises in
developing an alternative phenomenology of public space and the political.
10
But if
Arendt builds upon Heidegger, she is interested in developing neither a sustained critique
of her former teacher nor a purer, truer version of what he did in his own work. Just as
the Arendtian vita activa and vita contemplativa occupy different spaces that do not stand
in a hierarchical relation to one another, so Arendt’s work on the political supplements
rather than engages Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and his Destruktion of the
tradition.
11
While Arendt appropriates Heideggerian analyses to argue that modernity is
characterized by a neglect of political action in a condition of plurality and a tendency to
misconstrue politics as a form of making or poiesis, she will go no further than to allege
that this connection to the political is one that Heidegger, as an essentially apolitical
philosopher, did not make. As Dana Villa puts it, Arendt’s “goal is not to reveal a
9
See Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (London: Yale University Press,
1959), 38, 42, and 199. The language and notion of critique is of course an object of those who, like
Nancy, practice or follow Derridean deconstruction. But at this level of generality, such terminological
scruples can be set aside can, I think, be set aside with no very grave danger.
10
Hence Reiner Schürmann’s dedication to her of his own outstanding contribution to this field, Heidegger
on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. C. Gros and R. Schürmann (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990).
Convention