heidegger, schmitt, strauss: the hidden monologue, or, conserving esotericism to justify the high...

7/28/2019 Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving Esotericism to Justify the High Hand of Violence

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Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving

Esotericism to Justify the High Hand of Violence

Geoff Waite

Cultural Critique, 69, Spring 2008, pp. 113-140 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

DOI: 10.1353/cul.0.0006

For additional information about this article

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Cultural Critique 69Spring 2008Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSSTHE HIDDEN MONOLOGUE, OR, CONSERVING ESOTERICISM TO

JUSTIFY THE HIGH HAND OF VIOLENCE

Geoff Waite

For Karl Dahlquist and Rick Joines

Law [], lord of all things, mortals and immortals, holds everything withhigh hand, justifying the extreme of violence [ ].

Pindar, Fragments (Boeckh/Donaldson 169[151])

War [] is the father of all things, the king of all, for some he has made

gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others freemen.Heraclitus, Fragments (Diels/Kranz 22B53)

There is no way to learn the soul and thought and judgment of a man until he hasbeen seen in the practice of power and law [ ].

Sophocles, Antigone (ll.17577)

The same goes for Heidegger: . . . It is necessary to know how to listen to thesilences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.

Althusser, Du ct de la philosophie

It must be stressed that it is precisely the Wrst elements, the most elementarythings, that are the Wrst to be forgotten. . . . In the development of leaders, onepremise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, oris the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence ofthis division disappears?

Gramsci, Quaderni del cacere (15[4])


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GEOFF WAITE114

INTRODUCTION TO ELOQUENT SILENCE

A dual premise. First, it is primarily in the sphere of military historythat 1945 demarcates a radical break between whatever precededand followed it, by far the most salutary consequence being the ter-mination of the shoah, holocaust, or Wnal solution. In the capital-ist economy and its superstructural effects (which did not producenecessarily but maximally accelerated the shoah), the termination ofthis one manifestation of the father of all things necessitated noth-ing less or more than retuning the global distribution of capitalist

power, which ever renders some slaves, others freemen.Second, but concomitantly, from the point of view that Iwithmuch help from Leo Strauss albeit to radically opposed ends1iden-tify as the transhistorical conservation of esotericism (the almost un-

broken philosophical and political tradition dating from archaic andancient Greece),2 1945 could effect nothing less or more than thealways already anticipated necessity to retune the exoteric form ofexpression of an esoteric substance that forever remains the same.

This substance (or Wesen) is indeed the intention that there alwaysbe rulers and ruled, hereby conserving the version of natural lawor right called order of rank (Rangordnung in Nietzschean and NaziGerman, gerachia in Fascist Italian, and with a precise equivalent inImperial Japanese) by means of the perpetual retuning necessitated

by tactical and strategic considerations exclusively. Yet, as Spinozajustly saw in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670): The applicationof the word law to things of nature is merelyWgurative, and the ordi-

nary signiWcation of law is simply a human command that men caneither obey or disobey (Spinoza opera, 3: 38; TPT P4). In the Hobbes-ian variant reafWrmed by Carl Schmitt, Autoritas, non veritas facitlegem (Schmitt, Begriff des Politischen, 122). It is to prevent somepeople from disobeying this command and law, understood to bethe truth about all crucial things, which has been the transhistori-cal (never a-historical) mission of the conservers of esotericism, whohave every right to feel persecuted by us always rambunctious, poten-

tially really disobedient men and women.Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, andtherewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about allcrucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature


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is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligentreaders only. It has all the advantages of private communication with-out having its greatest disadvantagethat it reaches only the writersacquaintances. It has all the advantages of pubic communication withouthaving its greatest disadvantagecapital punishment for the author.(Strauss, Persecution, 25)

Accordingly, Martin Heidegger remarks in 1951, Only once or twicein my thirty to thirty-Wve years of teaching have I ever spoken whatreally matters to me [meine Sache] (Gesamtausgabe, 15: 426), withoutsaying whether this was one of those only two occasions. As Bthius

wrote in prison just before his brutal execution in 524 CE (for havingviolated his very dictum), You are a true philosopher only if youcan be silent [si tacuisses] (Philosophi consolationis, 2: 7477). As forcapitalism, You know capitalism is above the law. . . . / Democracydont rule the world, youd better get that through your head. / Thisworld is ruled by violence, but I guess thats better left unsaid (DylanUnion Sundown, l. 38, ll. 5861). With regard to the expression ofthe hegemonic Christian rule and law within which Heidegger and

Schmitt (neither of whom unambiguously opposed the shoah, to beas charitable as possible, at the time or thereafter) wrote (no matterhow reluctantly or enthusiastically), Jesus Christ spoke himself ex-clusively in parables in order that (Greek ) some men be savedand lest () disobedient people turn against them (Mark4:1112; see Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 2347).3I stand with thedisobedient.

Thus, there are most excellent dual groundspolitico-economic

with the conservation of esotericismfor Heidegger to pronounce,also in 1951, the only scandalous-sounding sentence: This world warhas decided nothing [dieser Weltkrieg hat nichts entschieden] (Heideg-ger, Was heisst Denken? 65). Schmitt, I will also argue, changed hismind about both Heidegger and esotericism due in certain measureto what Heinrich Meier seminally has called Schmitts hidden dia-logue with Strauss (see Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss), butthe Strauss who, in the perennial debate between Athens and Jeru-

salem, ultimately takes the side of the former, albeit prudently. Myappreciation of Meiers thesis is severely qualiWed, however, inas-much as all three menHeidegger, Schmitt, Straussare more prop-erly viewed in terms of their hidden monologue, which is built upon

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bedrock agreement on the necessity of esotericism to conserve orderof rank, including by the high hand of violence. Yet this monologue is

barely audible, written preeminently only between their lines.

STALINGRAD AND THE CONCEALED

STYLE-LAW OF THE GERMANS

Regarding 1945which is to say that date when something calledconservative thought in West Germany purportedly changed (read:

precisely did not change) from whatever it had been beforewe arereminded that the National Socialist political leaders themselves (e.g.,Goebbels in his private diaries, Rosenberg in his last public and pub-lished speech, delivered on October 15, 1944 in Weimar at the cen-tennial of Nietzsches birth) had been preparing the rhetoric mostsuitable for the Cold War substantially prior to the impending mili-tary defeata rhetoric increasingly attuned against communism evenmore than Judaism. Just as Rosenberg asserts, in the 1944 Gtterdmer-

ungsstimmung, that Nietzsche earned the right to call himself a goodEuropean just like us National Socialists, so also Hitlers Wght-to-the-last-bullet orders to the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad in thewinter of 194243 had declared Germany to be Wghting to conserveno longer just itself but now European civilization (see Waite andCorngold, Question of Responsibility). For the conservers of esoter-icism, however, the peculiar technique of writing hereby requiredhad been available since archaic and ancient Greece.

Heideggers response to the defeat at Stalingrad was thus as in-direct as it was powerful. He had prepared its structure at the begin-ning of his academic itinerary, in the bleak aftermath of World War I,and it remained intact until his death in 1976. In medias res, recallhis 194243 Freiburg seminar on Parmenides and his 1943 lectureon Hlderlins elegy Heimkunft / An die Verwandten (Homecom-ing / To the Relatives). Heideggers course on Parmenides was begun

shortly after the siege of Stalingrad (August 1942) and was concludeda few weeks after the surrender of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS atStalingrad (February 1943), when the Red Armys massive counter-offensive (with its ally, General Winter, American matriel belatedly

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assisting) had deWnitively begun repelling the Germans (includingHeideggers two sons, before their capture) and their allies (Finnish,

Hungarian, Italian, Romanian) back across the 3,000-kilometer frontfrom the White Sea to the Black Sea towards the fatherland.4

Here is what Heidegger told his students reading Parmenides(among them disabled veterans) in spring 1943 (I cite the standardEnglish translation to make two points, marked by [sic]):

He who has ears to hear, i.e., to grasp the metaphysical foundations andabysses of history and to take them seriously as metaphysical, couldalready hear two decades ago the word of Lenin: Bolshevism [sic] isSoviet power + electriWcation. That means: Bolshevism is the organic,i.e., organized, calculating (and as +) conclusion of the unconditionalpower of the party along with complete technization. The bourgeoisworld has not seen and in part still does not want to see that in Lenin-ism, as Stalin calls this metaphysics, a metaphysical projection forwardhas occurred from out of which in a certain way the metaphysical pas-sion of the current Russian for technology Wrst becomes intelligible, andout of which it brings the technological world into power. That the Rus-sians, e.g., build ever more tractor factories is not what is primarily deci-sive, but instead that the total technological organization of the world isthe metaphysical ground of planning and of all operations, and that thisground is experienced from the ground up and unconditionally into theworking completion. Insight into the metaphysical essence of tech-nology becomes for us historically necessary, if the essence of Westernhistorical man is to be saved [sic]. (Heidegger, Parmenides, 86; cf. Gesam-tausgabe 54: 127)5

Before showing that Heidegger maintained this position long afterWorld War II, note two things in this translated passage, in additionto the facts that the Russians (read: Soviets) were forced to buildrather more than farm tractors, and that, for the postwar Schmitt,too, Lenins ideal was the electriWcation of the earth (Schmitt, Glos-sarium, 273). First, in citing Lenin, Heidegger commits a telling (andquite common) lapsus by substituting Bolshevism for Leninsoriginal Communism. In the desperate civil war year 1920, at the

Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Lenin had stated, Commu-nism is Soviet power plus electriWcation, adding of the whole coun-tryprecisely because (pace, Heidegger) he did not intend this to bea deWnition applicable generally. Lenin continued:



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Otherwise, the country will remain a small-peasant country, and wemust realize that. We are weaker than capitalism, not only on the worldscale, but also within the country. That is common knowledge. (CollectedWorks 31: 461)

In the Wrst and last instance (though not always tactically), commu-nism for Lenin is precisely irreducible to the Bolshevik party. Hei-deggers lapsus is telling not only because one motivation to joinhis Party (ofWcially on May Day 1934, unofWcially by New Yearseve 193132) was his hope to install social and ideological brakeson runaway technology. Even in 1943, Heidegger remained at least

partially committed to his National Socialist German Workers Party,and so his lapsus also projects his adhesion to that Party onto LeninsspeciWcation of an entire political, economic, philosophical, and mili-tary project incepted to combat not only Heideggers party but theentire capitalist system at its base, with electriWcation being a neces-sary but insufWcient prerequisite.6 Of course, Heideggers critiqueof technology could still stand today, as could Schmitts. Therefore,what is more important to note, second, is that the English translation

of Heideggers phrase at the end of the cited paragraph renders theGerman gerettet bleiben soll to have him saying that the essenceof Western historical man is to be saved. In fact, Heidegger is imply-ing, in early 1943, right after Stalingrad, that we in Nazi Germanyhave already begun the process of saving that historical man, and thatthis project must be conservedto Wght another day.

Heideggers lecture on Hlderlins elegy Homecoming / To theRelatives, was Wrst delivered in the main auditorium of Freiburg

University on June 6, 1943, the centennial of Hlderlins death, dur-ing the deWnitive German retreat from the USSR. Heideggers con-cepts of Heimat and Heimkunft now welcome the Wehrmacht andWaffen SS home as those relatives who are hereby readied to Wghtanother dayif no longer (only) in military battle, then (also) in spir-itual. He asks rhetorically,

Are not then the sons of the Fatherland, who, far from the soil of thehomeland though with their gaze into the gaiety of the homeland shin-ing toward them, and devoting their life for the still reservedWnd [Fund]and expending their life for itare not then these sons of the homelandthe nearest relatives of the poet? Their sacriWce shelters in itself thepoetic call to the dearest ones in the homeland, so that the reserved Wnd

GEOFF WAITE118


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may remain reserved. . . . It is then that homecoming is. This home-coming is however the future of the historical essencing [Wesen] of theGermans. (Heimkunft / An die Verwandten, Erluterungen, 2930)7

A scant year later, in the even more desperate summer of 1944, theconclusion of his seminar on Heraclitus Wnds Heidegger posing thenow less rhetorical question, whether the Germans, in harmonywith the truth ofSeyn, are strong enough, above and beyond thereadiness for death, to save, from the petty mindedness of the mod-ern world, that which begins in its inconspicuous embellishment(Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 55: 181). Less than two years later, after the

war, in his open letter of 1946 (published in 1949 as ber den Human-ismus [On Humanism]) to Jean Beaufret, his anti-Semite French lackey,Hlderlin is for Heidegger the sole thinker and writer whose relationto Greece was something essentially different than humanismatwhich point Heidegger avers that the young Germans who knew ofHlderlin thought and experienced when facing death Other [Anderes]than what the public sphere held to be the German opinion (ber denHumanismus, 30). Presumably, on this same logic, those young German

soldiers also thought and experienced differently when they were forc-ing others to face death, rape, or mutilation.

What matters here is the continuity of Heideggers thought suchthat any mere historical dateeven 1945is epiphenomenal com-pared to the task of conserving esotericism. In 1922, Heidegger hadconWded to Karl Jaspers the pressing need not only for their ownconsciousness of a rare and independent battle action group [einerseltenen und eigenstndigen Kampfgemeinschaft] but also, Heideggerstressed, for an invisible society [einer unsichtbaren Gesellschaft] (Hei-degger and Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 29, 42). Still in this neo-Pietisticregard, two decades after World War II, near the end of the famousSpiegel interview (1966; published by mutual agreement only post-humously, in 1976), Heideggers interlocutors recite from the Freiburgseminar on Nietzsche in which Heidegger had spoken of the oppo-sition [Widerstreit] of the Dionysian and the Apollonian [NietzschestermsG.W.], of holy passion and of sober representation [HlderlinstermsG.W.], adding that this opposition constitutes

A concealed style-law of the historical determination of the Germans[ein vorborgenes Stilgesetz der geschichtlichen Bestimmung der Deutschen],



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and one day we will have to Wnd ourselves ready and prepared to giveit form [und uns eines Tages bereit und vorbereitet Wnden mu zu seinerGestaltung]. (Heidegger, Antwort, 1067)

Der Spiegel continues to quote verbatim:

This contradiction is no formula with the help of which we are allowed todescribe mere culture. Hlderlin and Nietzsche, with this opposition,have erected a question mark on the task of the Germans, to Wnd theiressence historically. Will we understand these signs? One thing is cer-tain: History will take its revenge on us, if we do not understand it. (107)

At this juncture, the Spiegel interviewers look up from their notes toremark, We dont know the year when you wrote that; wed guess itwas 1935. Heidegger had a prodigious (if appropriately selective)memory and accurately he corrects them: Presumably that quotation

belongs in the Nietzsche lecture The Will to Power as Art, 193637(indeed, see Gesamtausgabe, 43: 12223). But then he adds, crucially, Itcould also have been said in the following years. With this shrewdtwist, Heidegger can mean: still today and into the distant future. Over-

hearing this innuendo, Der Spiegel tried to press Heidegger on the con-tinuity between a remark made in 193637 and reafWrmed in 1966.To press him, moreover, on his unreconstructed conviction that theGermans have a unique historical task, indeed a speciWc qualiW-cation for a fundamental reversal [Umkehr] of world history, whichnecessarily includes conversing with Hlderlin (Antwort, 107). Whathis interlocutors likewise, but more crucially, ignored was what Hei-degger had and still meant by a concealed style-law. This law long

predates and postdates any merely historical conjuncture. At stake isthe esotericism that must be perpetually conserved.

With the phrase concealed style-law, Heidegger was silently andafWrmatively appropriating one of Nietzsches most programmaticarticulations, viz., of Greek thought and political economy with theiresoteric implementation under modern conditions. In his early andpurloined essay The Greek State (1872), Nietzsche had explicitlypromoted at once the modern version of slavery (Sklaverei), the

necessity for its conscious or unconscious acceptance by slaves orworkers in their expropriated surplus labor (Mehrarbeit), and theconcomitant anti-Liberal necessity for an esoteric writing (Geheim-schrift) appropriate to the esoteric doctrine of the relation between

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the State and genius [Geheimlehre vom Zusammenhang zwischen Staatund Genius] (Kritische Studienausgabe, 1: 767, 777). Whatever his quar-

rel with Nietzsche could ever be on metaphysical or ontologicalgrounds, Heidegger always afWrmed, in principle, this complex artic-ulation of esoteric doctrine or concealed style-law of the histori-cal determination of the Germans with the conservation, today, ofsocial, political, intellectual, spiritual, and economic order of rank.No one writing in this transhistorical framework need worry, ulti-mately, about any merely historical phenomenon, since it is epiphe-nomenal in relation to esotericism.

SI TACUISSES PHILOSOPHUS MANSISSES

It follows with ruthless logic, in the words of the postwar Heideg-ger cited earlier, that this world war has decided nothingwhichappears scandalous only to his mostly uncomprehending readers orlisteners. They should pay attention to Heidegger when, in 1935 and

again in 1953, he states bluntly:

Only when we grasp that the use of violence [Gewaltbrauchen] in lan-guage, in understanding, in educating, in building, co-creates [mit-schafft] the violent-act [Gewalt-tat] of clearing paths into surrounding

beingonly then do we understand the uncanniness of all that doesviolence. (Einfhrung, 12021)

In related, well-nigh Schmittian terms (for . . . against), Heidegger

writes to Ernst Jnger in 1955 on the occasion of the latters forty-third birthday:

Nietzsche, whose light or shadow every contemporary thinks and poet-icizes for him or against him, heard a calling that demands thathumans prepare for the assumption of a domination of the earth. Hesaw and understood the erupting battle for domination. . . . This isno war, but the that Wrst lets gods and humans, freemen andslaves, appear in their respective essence and leads to a critical en-counter [Aus-einandersetzung] of Being. Compared to this, world warsremain superWcial. They are ever less and less capable of deciding, themore technological their armaments [Sie vermgen immer weniger zuentscheiden, je technischer die sich rsten]. (Wegmarken, 252)



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In short, Mein Lieber Ernst, if one wants not simply to understandso-called modernity but to maintain social order of rank, we must

read Nietzsche and, better yet, Heraclitus in Greek. Note, crucially,that the (polemos) for the Greeks designated ever-welcomed(masculine) war against an external adversary, in contrast to (stasis), the ever-dreaded (feminized) civil war (see Loraux, Experi-ences, 23140; Divided City, 926; also Tragic Ways, passim), which has

been and mutatis mutandis remains, I say, partisan, proletarian,or Spartacist. Long before World War II, Schmitt was supremelyaware of this decisive distinction (see, e.g., Begriff des Politischen,

2829). After the war, in his U.S.guarded prison cell, in Ex CaptivitateSalus (1946), he writes, Many quote Heraclitus sentence: war is thefather of all things. But few dare to think thereby of civil insurrection[Brgerkrieg] (Ex Captivitate, 26; also 5657).

Four years later, in 1950, Schmitt conWdes to his diary:

My Nomos der Erde is arriving at the right historical moment. The timeis coming (said Nietzsche in 188182), when the battle for the domina-tion of the earth will be waged; it will be waged in the name of funda-

mental philosophical doctrines; i.e., an ideological battle for unity. TheKellog [sic] Pact is creating a free path; war as means of rational politicsis despised, condemned; war as means of global domination of the earthis the just war. The world becomes an object, says Martin Heidegger.(Glossarium, 309)

The part of the KelloggBriand Pact of 1928 Schmitt doubtless stillhas in his sights was its stated and quixotic renunciation of war asan instrument of national policy (see also Schmitt, Begriff des Politi-

schen, 3752), but note that, just like Heidegger, Schmitt operateswithin a perceived seamless continuity between the Weimar and theFederal Republics, in the just-cited case from 1928 to 1950. From thisperspective, period dates such as 193345 are obviously just as epi-phenomenal as those extending from Heraclitus sixth century BCEinto any foreseeable future.

Heidegger had already shared the allegedly Heraclitian hope, ex-pressed publicly on Jngers birthday in 1955, with Schmitt privately

on August 22, 1933, in their only extant correspondence, a half-yearafter they had joined the Nazi Movement. In this letter, Heideggerthanks Schmitt for sending him a copy of a text (presumably The Con-cept of the Political), which I already know in the second printing,

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and lauds Schmitt for not having forgotten the (king, ruler)when citing Heraclitus Fragment 53 (War is the father of all things,

the king of all, for some he has made gods, others men; some he hasmade slaves, others freemen), which, Heidegger adds, is solelywhat gives the entire saying its full meaning (Gesamtausgabe, 16: 156).Then, as ever, all this is only prudently ever said in public, however,and then never in its full implications, especially regarding that ulti-mately feared terror, which for both men is stasis.

The continuity of Heideggers position is evident in his textPlatons Lehre von der Wahrheit (Platos Doctrine of Truth), inas-

much as it was written before the war (193031) and published dur-ing the war (1942) and thereafter (1947), bound with the Letter onHumanism, and again in 1967. Here Heidegger avows: The doc-trine of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man isexposed so that he might expend himself for it (Wegmarken, 109)and by exposed (ausgesetzt) he means mortally unto death, includ-ing not only killed by others but by killing them.

Detouring and hijacking Strausss phrase for Machiavelli, all cap-

tains without an army can recruit only by means of books (Thoughtson Machiavelli, 154). However, this must be done between the lines,prudently, in order to recruit the right army and reject the wrong.It must be done silently, recalling Bthius phrase, so crucial forNietzsche.8 Theimportance of Nietzsche to Heidegger and to Strausshardly needs reiterationthough rarely in precisely this regard (seeWaite, Nietzsches Corps/e; Radio Nietzsche; Salutations).

PASSING THE COMEBACK TEST

But what, then, about the Schmitt who often asserted, beginning inPolitische Romantik (Political Romanticism) in 1919, that he was not afollower of the atheist Nietzschejust another of those high priestsand, simultaneously, sacriWcial lambs of the private priesthood (Poli-tische Romantik, 21)and the Schmitt who harbored serious reserva-

tions, in this theological regard, about his former Nazi Party comrade,Heidegger? What was Schmitts partwith but beyond Strausss in-terventionin the hidden monologue to conserve esotericism?

From Glossarium, his posthumously published (and in this sense



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esoteric) intellectual diary, we know that the postwar Schmitt con-tinued both to think fondly of poor Adolf Hitler (Glossarium, 155),

but also of Heidegger as my dear friend and my honored enemy(263; em.). The latter distinction, at least, is the highest possible, giventhe dual axiom Schmitt had penned two years earlier in his prisoncell (citing Theodor Dubler): (1) The enemy is our own questionas Gestalt (Ex Captivitate, 90; also Glossarium, 243); and (2) the trueenemy does not allow himself to be deceived (Ex Captivitate, 89). Thefact that Martin des Heideggers or the blind Samson (Glossarium,236), as he also dubs Heidegger, would be Schmitts theological enemy

simpliciter is obvious, assuming that the following two fundamentalpositions in the Glossarium are incommensurate:

I know the Psalm and read in my Bible: The Lord is my shepherd, Ishall not want. I know the modern philosophy and read in Heidegger:Man is the shepherd (of Being). (232)9

Enough said, except that Schmitt adds immediately: Preferably theenmity of Adolf Hitler than the friendship of the returning emigrants

and humanitarians (232). This apparent non sequitur is elaboratedand clariWed politically in the same diary in reference to Heidegger:

Heidegger passes the Comeback test [die Probe des Comeback] with agrade of entirely satisfactory, Gottfried Benn with outstanding; andErnst Jnger fails miserably. We will have to wait and see how I willgrade out (You are never capable of making a Comeback, because Youare always changing, never walk through the same river twice). (297)

From this Heraclitian perspective in 1950, but expressed as earlyas Political Theology in 1922, Heideggers shepherd of Beingorbourgeois who wants God, though He must not be active (Schmitt,Politische Theologie, 64)was always precariously close to driftingoff (if he has not irretrievably drifted already) into liberalism (nevermind conservatism) inasmuch as, for Schmitt, the bourgeois is he whonot only fears violent death (as remarked by Hobbes, Locke, Rous-seau, and Hegel)10 but also (following Donoso Corts) is a charter

member of that clasa discutidora which, when asked, Christ or Barab-bas? responds with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a committeeof investigation; moreover, such a position is not by chance, it isgrounded in liberal metaphysics (Glossarium, 66).11 It is understood

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that, for Schmitt, it was the speciWcally Jewish rabble that decidedagainst Jesus Christ for Jesus Barabbas, the (thief or insurrec-

tionist in stasis).The resolutely anti-Semitic and Catholic Schmitt privately dis-misses, in 1948, what many liberals and conservatives alike regard asone of the lapsed Catholic Heideggers great politicalphilosophicalstrengths: his ontologicalexistential method of interpretation inBeing and Time of das Man (Zarathustras average or last man), ofdas Alltgliche (the everyday), ofGerede (idle chatter), and ofdasUnheimliche (the uncanny; forget Freud). Schmitt now dismisses all

that analysis in his diary as the Kitschig-banal and as patheticallyethical-characteristic (Glossarium, 10910). Not to mention the sac-rilege, pretentiousness, or naivet of a political ontology (as opposedto political theology proper) grounded neither in revealed faith nor ina theory and practice of Law or Nomos. For, as Schmitt puts it with theleast violence he can muster in camera in 1949:

Power is Being; Being is Power; this is concealed behind every word ofBeing [Macht ist Sein; Sein ist Macht; das steckt hinter jedem Wort vom

Sein]. (242)

Not God but the Devil is concealed in the detail.12

Or, as Nietzsche had written in Beyond Good and Evil, for thosewith eyes to see, Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; everyopinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask (Kritische Stu-dienausgabe, 5: 234). What, then, could simultaneously make Heideg-ger into Schmitts my dear friend? Not what Heidegger says,

Schmitt avows, but what he does not say, his properly philosophical(Bthian) capacity to be silent. Hence, as distinct from all of Heideg-gers Kitschig-banal, Schmitt has foundand by 1949 adopted ashis ownthe very beautiful sentences [in Being and Time], such assilence is the essential possibility of speech (Glossarium, 109; citingHeidegger, Sein und Zeit, 164, 296).

InWne silentium ultimately articulates Schmitt and Heidegger andboth of them to the authentically political (and authentically Greek)

conservation of esotericism, and to their rejection a priori of the lib-eral or conservative phantasm that 1945, understood as mere mili-tary defeat, could mark anything like an authentic event. And so itis Strauss (fortiWed by his experience of Heidegger and reading of



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The Schmittian critique of the purportedly Machiavellian render-ing exoteric of what ought to have remained esoteric (in the psycho-

analytic discourse, uncanny) and of exposing that (truthqua revealingconcealing) which articulates ontology or theologywith the politicalthis discursive order of rank is ultimately the mostfundamental premise not only of Heideggers critique of Nietzsche butalso of Strausss critique of Nietzsche and of Heidegger and of Schmitt.

In Schmitts admission to himself on April Fools Day, 1950:

Heideggerizing: In the very fact that I publish at all, that is, in the factthat I allow my thoughts to be type set and printed, I am already mis-

placed [verstellt], distorted [entstellt], commanded [bestellt] and employed[angestellt], engag. (Glossarium, 299)

It is with this lesson learned from Strauss and from Heidegger thatSchmitt becomeswhen properly disguised [verstellt]a conserverof esotericism. This one remark irrevocably bound Schmitt not onlyto Heidegger and Strauss, in that single battle action group or in-visible society that Heidegger strove to instaurate in the 1920s, but

also to the ancients and to all foreseeable future.The question whether Schmitt and Heidegger were fascists cannow be answered from the perspective of conserving esotericism.That both men (unlike Strauss, obviously) were National Socialistsat least in the sense of being party members in The Movement (DieBewegung), as the Nazis called themselvesshould go without re-minder. We might quibble about the extent to which they ever leftThe Movement, just as we might split hairs about their motivation in

joining, or the role of anti-Semitism in their decisions. On the latterpoint, Heidegger is an anti-Semite in some but not all of his interper-sonal relationships (Hannah Arendt most notably), if not necessarilyin politico-ontological principle. Schmitt is a principled theologico-political and practicing anti-Semite, though perhaps not also a biolog-ical racist in the speciWc Nazi sense. He does loathe, incandescently,Benjamin Disraelis sentence that Christianity is Judaism for the mul-titude, but it is still Judaism (cit. Meier, Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 157)

but mainly, I say, because of any insinuation that Christianity playsexoteric handmaiden to Judaisms esotericism.

But we must put the question ofNational Socialism in phenome-nological brackets, in order to focus on the more germane matter of



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fascism, which was not as explicitly racist, but above all to focus onthe tertium quid of both movements. Fascism is Wrst and foremost

an ideology generated by modern industrial capitalism; andquaa politics implicit in modern capitalism is exactly like NationalSocialismracism must not be used to differentiate between theItalian and the German cases (Neocleous, Fascism, xi).13

Crucial here to note is that Mussolini, in his 1921 article inIl PopolodItalia (a year before the March on Rome), programmatically and pub-licly deWned fascism as the super-relativist movement [movementosuper-relativista], the end of all scientism, the downfall of the myth of

science (intended as bearer of absolute truths), and as antiteleologi-cal historicism in action. Nothing proves that capitalism, along withthe type of society it produces, must ultimately end up in socialism,and the succession of economies and cultures, which is thought to benatural and logical, is instead purely arbitrary. This essay, entitledNel solco delle grandi WlosoWe: Relativismo e Fascismo (In the Fur-row of the Great Philosophies: Relativism and Fascism), announcedthe inglorious end of all the so-called democratic achievements.

Mussolinis decisive performative speech act (archaic Greek krainein)14

continued:

Nothing is more relativistic than fascist mentality and mobilism [attivit].If universal relativism and action are equivalent, then we are fascist, wewho have always boasted that we dont give a damn about the nomi-nalisms to which the bigots of the other parties always cling as batson rafters; we, who had the courage to smash all the traditional politi-cal categories and to call ourselves from time to time: aristocrats anddemocrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti-proletarians, paciWsts and anti-paciWstswe are truly the relativist parexcellence, and our movement calls upon the most current trends of theEuropean spirit. (Mussolini, Opera omnia, 17: 26769)15

By these trends, Mussolini (who did not for nothing anticipate tool-box philosophy and multicultural relativism and historicism) aversthat his WlosoWa della forza derives directly, he states, from Hans Vai-hingers neo-Kantian (As If) interpretation of Nietzsche. Il Duce

concludes, Italian Fascism was and is the most formidable creationof an individual and national Will to Power (269). Butand thiswill be one of my main theses regarding Schmittfascism is all thisopenly, in public, exoterically.

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Through this pellucid Mussolinian lens, Heidegger might appearexactly one-third fascist. As remarked above, he, too, rejected runaway

technology and scientism (though not per se) and hoped that NationalSocialism would brake and steer them.16 However, he afWrmed esoter-icism and simultaneously rejected philosophical and political relativ-ism. Heidegger makes this sufWciently clear in his Freiburg lectureson Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (Logic as theQuestion of the Essence of Language) in the summer of 1934 (the verymoment the postwar Heidegger would have us believe that he hadentered into so-called inner immigration). He tells his charges:

It does not follow from the statement There is no absolute truth thatthis statement is itself absolutely true. Rather, it is true for us [wahr fruns]. But this new supplement, true for us is not itself essentially rel-ativist. (Gesamtausgabe, 38: 80)

He here concludes, as is his politico-ontological wont, by precipitousshift from philosophical to political emphasis:

It is often argued that philosophy as highest science must be standpoint-

free. But there must be a standpoint, for without a standpoint onecannot stand. The essential matter is thus not about being free from astandpoint, but rather that a standpoint must be fought for. It is a mat-ter of a decision for a standpoint [Es handelt sich um eine Standpunktent-scheidung]. (80)

In other words, just as not all Cretans are liars, many in both campsremain powerful political thinkers, politicians even. Alternatively, wemight say that Heidegger here defends a more reWned philosophical

version of Mussolinis more explicitly political standpoint and pointof attack against scientism and liberalism. But their common frontis in essence one and the same, to detour Heideggers key term,and not just in the obvious matter of their shared antiscientism, thatis, their shared desire for certain social or ideological controls on sci-ence and technology, not to mention smashing parliamentary busi-ness as usual. Mussolini and Heidegger both afWrm the natural Isand Ought ofRandordnung or gerachia in all spheres with its concomi-

tant Fhrerpinzip (leader principle). The only real difference is thatMussolinis Fascism is at least in principle exoterically fully open toview, exoteric, whereas Schmitts Tolstoyan Heidegger is in princi-ple eso/esotericwith the upshot being that of these two, Mussolini



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and Heidegger, only the latter can possibly conserve esotericism,according to the ever-prudent Strauss and now duly warned but still

less prudent Schmitt.Schmitts warm embrace of Italian Fascism, in the late 1920s, isquite explicit and public, and is different from Heideggers alwaysmore lukewarm and implicit relation. As expressed in his extremelysigniWcant review essay in 1929, Wesen und Werden des fascisti-schen Staates (Essence and Becoming of the Fascist State), the reasonSchmitt embraces Mussolinis stato totalitario is not only because itoffers the most radically resolute antithesis to scientism or liberalism,

with all its economic monetary interests. Schmitt now embraces thisState on the grounds that it is the antithesis to the dominion of invis-ible, private, and so-called indirect power (potestas indirecta)in Wne,the antithesis to esotericism. In Schmitts own words in 1929, Withancient probity the Fascist State wants to be a State again, with visible

bearers of power and representatives, but not the faade and ante-chamber of invisible and irresponsible rulers and Wnancial backers(Positionen, 113; em.). Franz Neumanns thesis in Behemoth (written

during the siege of Stalingrad) holds true then and now:The Wght against banking capital is not anti-capitalism; it is, on thecontrary, capitalism and indeed often fascist capitalism, not only in Ger-many but in almost every other country. Those who do not tire of attack-ing the supremacy ofWnance capital (by which they always understand

banking capital) thereby play into the hands of the industrial monopo-lists. Whenever the outcry against the sovereignty of banking capital isinjected into a popular movement, it is the surest sign that fascism is onits way. (Behemoth, 322)

Elsewhere (time is of smallest import), Schmitt makes clear that withsuch backers he has in his sights the general situation of the Jew,

based in his parasitic, tactical, and merchant relation to German in-tellectual treasures, and he throws Spinoza into this mix (cit. Meier,Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 152 with n. 78). Schmitt apparently sought tofoist this anti-Semitism on Jnger (see 158 with n. 95), though withapparently inconclusive result. After the war, Schmitt persists in the

Glossarium with his racialist or simply racist spin on the claim thatSpinoza was the Wrst to subintroduce himself[sich subintroduzierte](Glossarium, 290), in other words, was illicit and remains to be outedqua esotericist by all properly fascist exotericists.

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Schmitts assertion that probity in the sense of exoteric trans-parency is ancient is obviously the very opposite of the truth, as

can be read in Platos Seventh Letter or his defense of noble lyingin the Republic or in any subsequent raison dtat, not to mentionvirtually anything by Heidegger on the Greeks, if read between thelines. It was instead Mussolini (i.e., his WlosoWa della forza) who hadafWrmed exotericism in 1921 in his Relativism and Fascism. Whatis Wnally signiWcant about Schmitts 1929 essay, Essence and Becom-ing of the Fascist State, is that he offers his own version of the oldpincer or convergence theory (Europe or Germany clamped in the

Heideggerian pincers between Americanism and Bolshevism), forhe argues la Mussolini that The fascist state does not decide as aneutral but as a higher third. Therein lies its supremacy (Positionen,113; also Meier, Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 137 n. 40). This higher thirdthe high hand of violenceentails for Schmitt, in 1929, the superiorityof Fascism over economic interests, whether those of the employersor of the employees, and, one can say, the heroic attempt to grasp andassert the dignity of the State and national identity over the pluralism

of economic interests (cit. Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 137).Regarding the speciWcallyand violently fascisteconomic pre-suppositions and ideology behind Jngers Der Arbeiter (The Worker)in 1932, behind Schmitts Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of thePolitical) in that same year, and behind Heideggers Recorate Addressone year later: all those texts are in accord (just before and just afterthe fact, respectively) not only with the Wrst Nazi Labor Service poli-cies but also the policies of the American New Deal (see Patel, Soldiers

of Labour, 32829). (At this moment, Antonio Gramsci, in his fascistprison cell, was desperately analyzing this tripartite articulationthese pincers: Italian Fascism and German National Socialism and Cap-italismfrom the communist perspective, which remains my own.)

The fundamental difference between Schmitt and Heidegger inthis and any other ultimately important regard was that Heideggeralways holds the esoteric card as close to his chest as possible, exceptfor a year or so ca. 193334, and that Schmitt showed his hand, more

than Heidegger did, in 1929 and in 193334, and somewhat longer.So it then was, in archaic Greek terms, that Jurist Schmitt conWrmedand even outstripped Rector Heidegger in embodying Creons dic-tum: There is no way to learn the soul and thought and judgment



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of a man until he has been seen in the practice of power and law.Finally, however, none of our clear-sighted troika, in their hidden

monologue, is opposed to violence in principle or tout court. To theprecise contrary, theirs is war (polemos) against our war (stasis)bothoften being violent. It is precisely here that Strausss voice in the hid-den monologue is crucial.

DECEIVING GENIUS

Strausss well-known 1932 critique ofThe Concept of the Political mustnow be read as a very friendly amendment (or supplment) becauseit exposes the relativistic (or moral) aspect of Schmitts argument.This amendment is all the more remarkable given that Strauss hadnot yet fully discovered esotericism, which apparently occurred whilereading Lessing ca. 193637 (see Zank, Introduction, 34, 43 n. 54),though his contretemps with Schmitt Wve years earlier had preparedhim well for that discovery, and Strauss had studied Spinoza and

the Spinoziana in depth (partly under Ernst Cassirers less or morereluctant guidance). In any event, Strausss corrective (or hiddendialogue) was intended, I argue, to have the dual effect of savingSchmitt from merely current fascism (deWned with Mussolini as super-relativism), though not necessarily from National Socialist racism(against which Strauss at the time was not nearly eloquent enough),in order to rescue the shared antiliberal and transhistorical kernelof Schmitts project so that it, too, might Wght another day. After all is

said and done, and for worse or better, Schmitt was right (never mindRight, now): there is a liberal politics qua polemic antithesis to state,church, or other restrictions on individual freedom, qua commer-cial, ecclesiastic or educational politics, but no liberal politics per se,

but instead always merely a liberal critique of politics (Begriff desPolitischen, 69), inasmuch as liberalism per deWnitionem can never havesovereignty, that is, the monopoly of decision over the friendenemy distinction and hence over who can kill and who must die.

(On this point, Jngers much less consequential contribution to ourmonologue was to pose the question of how, or if, such sovereigntycould be restored in what he identiWed, in 1932, as the transition fromliberal democracy to the Work-State [Arbeitsstaat] [Arbeiter, 24681].)

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In an only apparently different register, I am arguing that Strausswas struggling in 1932 to teach, in dialogue with Schmitt, the les-

son that the legal theorist was an antiliberal or indeed fascist lessby being a relativist against his will than by being excessively exo-teric. Concomitantly, Schmitt was rendering the ground of sover-eignty (which friends must kill, which enemies exceptionally mustdie?) excessively exoteric. This is the reason why Schmitt, in the Wrstmonths after World War II, condemns Machiavellibecause Machi-avelli could not keep his trap shutand simultaneously embracesHeideggerbecause Heidegger had provided such a beautiful

philosophical defense of silence in the interwar period, in Being andTime. Strauss duly cautions Schmitt in 1932 regarding The Concept ofthe Political:

The afWrmation of the political as such can therefore be only SchmittsWrst word against liberalism; that afWrmation can only prepare for theradical critique of liberalism. In an earlier text [1922G.W.], Schmittsays of Donoso Corts: he despises the liberals, whereas he respectsatheisticanarchistic socialism as his mortal enemy. . . . (Politische Theo-logie, 55). The battle occurs only between mortal enemies: with totaldisdainhurling crude insults or maintaining the rules of politeness,depending on temperamentthey shove aside the neutral who seeksto mediate, to maneuver, between them. Disdain [VerachtungG.W.]is to be taken literally [i.e., as ver-achten, not-deigningG.W.]; they donot deign to notice the neutral; each looks intently at his enemy; in orderto gain a free line ofWre, with a sweep of the hand they wave asidewithout looking atthe neutral who lingers in the middle, interruptingthe view of the enemy. (Strauss, Notes on Carl Schmitt, 11718)

This is also an excellent strategy for us communists to retain for aclear line ofWre at capitalists and their apologists, be they so-calledconservative or liberal. To that precise end, however, what we mustnot overlook in Strausss critique of Schmitt is the monologue of con-serving esotericism.

For his part in the (our) monologue, Strauss rightly remarks:That Schmitt does not display his views in moralizing fashion butendeavors to conceal them only makes his polemic the more effec-

tive (111). In other words, Schmitt would better achieve his aimby following the injunction on Spinozas signet ring with the rose onit: Caute!the sub-rosa Spinoza critiqued by Strauss, disdained bySchmitt, and skirted around by Heidegger.17



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Now, little or nothing of what Ive argued regarding Heideggersappropriation of what the ancient Greeks called sigeticsinclud-

ing the capacity to use it to tell falsehoodswould have surprisedHeideggers most attentive students, from the end of World War Ionward. In his Marburg lectures, Einfhrung in die phnomeno-logische Forschung (Introduction to Phenomenological Research) in192324, Heidegger analyzed the sections in Aristotles Metaphysics(1024b171025a13) on the multifaceted relation of to .According to Heidegger: , man, and are three regardsthat appeal to a fundamental phenomenon not seen by Aristotle, adding,

in order to understand our analysis, one state of affairs [Tatbestand]must be maintained. It is this:

The factic Dasein of speaking as such, insofar as it is and simply inso-far as it is as speaking, is the authentic source of deception. This means,the Dasein of speaking carries in itself the possibility of deception.(Gesamtausgabe, 17: 5)

Moreover, it is only in this context of silence, Heidegger stresses, that

we are to keep in mind that the Greeks see existence as existence in thepolis (35). Strauss, who had experienced Heideggers Marburg lecturesin the mid-1920s, would still be driving home Heideggers politicalphilosophical point decades later (as in his 1943 essay The Law ofReason in the Kuzari): The essential purpose of any exoteric teachingis government of the lower by the higher, and hence in particular theguidance of political communities (Persecution, 121). Therefore, I add,Gramsci is precisely right to have reminded us at the outset: It must

be stressed that it is precisely the Wrst elements, the most elementarythings, that are the Wrst to be forgotten. . . . In the development ofleaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that therealways be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditionsin which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?

That eloquent silence (Althusser) is indeed absolutely funda-mental to Heidegger should be audible enough in all his lecturesand texts: from 1919, through the Third Reich, and after 1945 until his

death in 1976. One mention of silence bears especial recall here. Itis in the Wrst lecture series (and last) he was permitted to deliver atthe University of Freiburg after the war, Was heisst Denken? (What IsCalled Thinking? or What Is Thinkings Call?), also to be the last such

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lectures before his formal retirement in 1952. Having ostensibly longago returned (like Plato before him) from his version of Syracuse, it is

here that Heidegger asks in 1951 (and today) for all with ears to hear:What did the Second World War really decide, not to mention its ter-rible consequences for our fatherland, especially the Wssure throughits middle? [im besonderen vom Ri durch seine Mitte, zu schweigen?].A deafening silence. Germany, once the en-pincered heart of Europe,is now itself ripped through its cardiac middle. Heideggers afore-mentioned answer is quick to follow and takes no prisoners: DieserWeltkrieg hat nichts entschieden (Was heisst Denken? 65)the bedrock

position of all our three deceiving geniuses.

CONCLUSION TO SOPHROSYNE

According to Hermann Heideggerlong since returned from Sovietcaptivity, now in his capacity as editor ofGesamtausgabe volume 16(published 2000)a handwritten text entitled Meine Beseitigung

was found, at some unspeciWed point, among his fathers literaryremains. The eminently Schmittian phrase meine Beseitigung couldbe translated as my removal, even elimination or eradication.More literally: My (being) pushed to one side. This is what alwaystends to happen to the best conservers of esotericism, by consciousdesign, though this text has something else in mind, and Schmittsaforementioned asseverations in the Glossarium about his and hisgenerations postwar comebacks in West Germany are congruent.

Heideggers text is undated and Hermann Heidegger provides noreason for asserting that it was written presumably in 1946. Hethereby implies that the text is reducible to the occasional, which isa common and big mistake whenever reading his father, or any prac-titioner of the art of writing under persecution. The text is fourpages, and his editor son suggests it was the draft of a letter to a nowunknown correspondent, addressed with the familiar Du. But theapparent fact that Heidegger supplied it a title indicates that its sig-

niWcance exceeds any one event, any event. The text begins:You marvel with many others about the fact that my de-NaziWcation isstill not settled. This can be easily explained. My Beseitigung has essen-tially nothing to do with Nazism. One senses in my thinking something



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uncomfortable, perhaps even uncanny [sogar Unheimliches], which onewould like to have disappear. The fact that one is simultaneously inter-ested in it is only proof of this. (Gesamtausgabe, 16: 421)

After a few pages of partial, appropriately convoluted elaboration,Heidegger concludes:

I am silent in my thinking not merely since 1927, since the publicationofBeing and Time, but instead in this thinking itself and indeed prior tothat, constantly. This silence is the preparation for the Say of what-is-to-be-thought [der Sage des Zu-denkenden], and this preparing is the ex-perience [Er-fahren], which is a doing and acting. To be sure, existing

without engagement being necessary. (42122)

If the rest is silence, as one says, then that silence is eloquent, but wecan read it only between the lines, ifat all.

It should now go without saying that our engagement with thehidden monologue of Heidegger, Schmitt, Strausstheir conserva-tion of esotericism and the order of rank that is capitalismis all themore necessary for being by design undecidable, if not impossible even.

And yet. As short-lived Achilles said to much-wandering andmuch-deceiving Odysseus:

As detestable in my eyes as the portal of Hades is that man who conceals[or occludes: ] one thing in his heart and mind and says another.Therefore, it is that I shall speak what I think the best. (Iliad, 9: 31214)

But in that case, we must speak also of the worst.As Pindar of Botia sang over two and a half millennia ago,

, the lord of all, mortals and immortals, carries everythingwith high hand, justifying the extreme of violence. Today, the philo-sophical nucleus of current U.S. foreign and domestic policyandhence the Bulldog tail that greater hound wagsis contained inStrausss 1970 tendentious translation and afWrmation ofsophrosyneas prudence.

I arrived at the conclusion [in 1925 after hearing Heidegger lectureG.W.] that I can state in the form of a syllogism: Philosophy is the attemptto replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city,hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write insuch a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city. In otherwords, the virtue of the philosophers thought is a certain kind ofmania,

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while the virtue of the philosophers public speech is sophrosyne. Philos-ophy is as such transpolitical, transreligious, and transmoral, but thecity is and ought to be moral and religious. (Giving of Accounts, 463)

In duly violent, conclusive response, I hereby enucleate this nucleusby citing classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet onthe originary Greek ritual ofsophrosyne:

The young boys had to practice a virtue in silence in the streets, handshidden behind their cloaks, never glancing to right or left but keepingtheir eyes Wxed on the ground. They were never to answer back, neverto raise their voices. They were expected to show that, even where mod-

esty was concerned, the male sex was superior to the female. Xenophonreports that they could truly be taken for girls. But in conjunction withthis chaste, reserved, as it were hyper-feminine demeanor, they had todo things that were normally forbidden: steal from the adults tables,plot and scheme, sneak in and Wlch food without getting caught. InWerce collective Wghts in which no holds were barredbiting, scratch-ing, kicking all allowedthey were expected to demonstrate the mostviolent brutality, behave as total savages, attaining the extreme limits ofthe speciWcally male virtue known as andreia: the frenzy of the warrior

bent on victory at all costs, prepared to devour the enemys very heartand brain, the [warriorsG.W.] face assuming the frightful mask ofGorgo: here, hyper-virility, swinging over into animality, the savageryof the wild beast. (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 19899)

Notes

A gist of this essay was produced in May 2006 for a Cornell University conferencewhose title had been announced as Conservative Thought in West Germanyafter 1945: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jnger. This essays cur-rent form is indebted to conversations that summer with the two to whom it isdedicated, and its ongoing impulse to Francesca Cernia Slovin. Shortly beforethe 2006 conference had begun, the titular date was changed to 1940. I retain1945 as my point of departure for reasons that will be apparent, but still arguingthat no historical date is sufWcient or necessary to identify and analyze what Icall conserving esotericism. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted(refer to Works Cited), including from the Greek and Latin texts, cited here instandard notation.

1. I have recently been called, at the annual meeting of the American Politi-cal Science Association in 2006, the only Straussian Maoist. This lonesome dub-

bing is not my own, but I here before it bow.



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2. For a good (pre-Marxist) discussion of the Straussian brief against his-toricism and relativism and for esotericism, see Melzer, Esotericism. By archaicGreece, I designate the period between 750 and 480 BCE, and by ancient Greecethat between 480 and 323 BCE. Following the brilliant work of Nicole Loraux, Idate the beginning of occidental democratic polit ics (as confronted by Heidegger,Schmitt, Strauss, and us) from 403 BCE, that is, from the Athenian oath (whichmust be continually repeated, on pain of death) not to recall the misfortunes ofthe past, namely, that democracy is ultimately founded on violence, as its ety-mology (demo-kratos) intimates (see Loraux, Divided City, 962).

3. As Robert Frosts poem Directive (1947) suggests, alluding to SaintMarks Jesus, grails are hidden in order that some of us not Wnd them, and thus not

be resurrected (see Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, xv).

4. To get a vague idea of the magnitude of this forced march, imagineCharles Joseph Minards classic 1869 carteWgurative of Napoleons disastrous cam-paign in 1812 ampliWed tenfold (see Tufte, Visual Explanations and Visual Display).As the Hegelian Ruse of Reason and Slaughter Bench of History both dictate,I add, Hitler planned the invasion of the USSR to coincide with the exact dateof Napoleons invasion of Russia.

5. Compare Heideggers deprecatory use of the mathematical plus sign (+),to French Fascist Georges Valoiss afWrmative variant in the 1920s: Nationalism+ Socialism = Fascism (Valois, Empty Portfolio, 198).

6. Immediately after World War II, in the 1946 Letter on Humanism, Hei-degger appears to anticipate my criticism when he states that, just as American-ism is irreducible to a speciWc lifestyle, communism is irreducible to only aParty or a worldview, and that, preeminently in the latter case, an elementalexperience expresses itself which is world-historical, having just asserted thatthe Marxist view of history [Geschichte] is superior to other historicism [Historie](Wegmarken, 17071). On this occasion, however, he is addressing a (predomi-nantly anti-American) French intelligentsia debating the relationships amongMarxism, existentialism, and humanism. As I have argued elsewhere, Heidegger

hereby successfully interpellates a Left-Heideggerianism that he can control (seeWaite, Lefebvre without Heidegger). His only apparent shift of opinion oncommunism (from 1943 to 1946) is anything but opportunism insofar as theessential thinkers always think the Same, which however is not to say the identi-cal (Wegmarken, 193). Unlike Schmitt, occasionally, and contrary to receivedopinion, Heidigger and Strauss are opportunists never, and only appear as such

because they consistently speak the esoteric Same exoterically.7. It is essential whenever reading Heidegger to know that the signiWer

Deutsch should never be translated as German automatically because the lattersigniWer (just like Anglo-Saxon, Frank, or Visigoth) is an ethnic designationmerely. By contrast, Deutsch not only is etymologically related to deuten (indi-cate, show, translate, e.g., from Latin into a vulgate) but also derives from Ger-manic *peud: whence German Volk, English folk. Volk additionally derives fromthe sheerly quantitative signiWers viel (many) and voll (full). Middle High German

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volc signiWed a mass of armed men. The today all-too-commonplace notion thatVolk has to do with ethnicity, language, geography, or nationality is a humanistdeformation. For notable example, the original Spartacists in 74 BCE (revived byRosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) consisted of women and men from allparts of the Roman Empire and yet were a volc because they were a large armed

band (German: Kriegsvolk)among the most devastating and laudable in recordedhistory. The 1871 Communards are among the other most notable examples, andwe communists always with and among them.

8. Nietzsche alluded to this Bthian precaution in public only once andindirectly, of course, at the end of the new, 1886 preface to volume one ofHuman,

All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spiritsostensibly his most positivistic, scientiWc,and democratic work of 1878. His sibylline conclusion now reads: my philoso-

phy advises me to keep silent and to ask no more; especially in certain cases, asthe saying goes, one remains a philosopher only bybeing silent (Kritische Stu-dienausgabe, 2: 22).

9. A third of a year later, Schmitt writes: I am really a shepherd of Being.That Ernst Jnger can take up Lon Bloy today as his own is, for example, an effectof my pastoral work. That Theodor Haecker converted to Catholicism has nothappened without me as shepherd (Glossarium, 264). The symbolist and Catho-lic writer Len Bloy (18461917) had been instrumental in reconciling famousfriends (including the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault,

and the philosopher Jacques Maritan) with Catholicism. Theodor Haecker (18791945) was an inXuential cultural historian, a translator of Kierkegaard and Car-dinal Newman, an opponent of the National Socialist regime (an inspiration forthe White Rose), and a convert to Roman Catholicism in 1921. Heinrich Meier isthus precisely wrong to aver that Schmitts contrast of the God of the Psalms toHeideggers shepherd of Being in the Letter on Humanism exhausts Schmittsattitude towards the solitary inhabitant of the Black Forest (Lesson of Carl Schmitt,99 n. 98).

10. See Allan Blooms introduction to his translation of Rousseaus mile

(Bloom, introduction to Emile, 5). Ad-usum-delphini Straussian that he is, Bloomconceals the fact that he is simultaneously plagiarizing and euphemizingSchmitts The Concept of the Political (see Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 6263).

11. In his private Glossarium, Schmitt blames some of what he Wnds exis-tentially at fault in Heidegger on his seduction by the Hlderlin cult beginningat the turn of the century: Heidegger interprets Hlderlin. The decisive steparound 1900 was the transition for the Goethean to the Hlderlinian geniality inwhich Heidegger remains stuck. What a betrayal of Kierkegaard, of Bruno Bauer,of the Christianity that was discovered but also recognized anew around 1840!(Glossarium, 151). Bruno Bauer, along with Max Stirner especially, were more truefriends than enemies for Schmitt.

12. The Wnest discussion of this famous phrase or rather phrases (includ-ing the contretemps between Benedetto Croce and Aby Warburg on the matter)is in Slovins superb book Obsessed by Art (18889), wherein she also cites the



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extraordinary remark by Warburgs maternal grandmother, Sara GinsburgWarburg: God has no concern for human sorrow on the day devoted to him(Obsessed by Art, 54).

13. In this matter, Neocleous also points out an important difference betweenFascism and National Socialism: In the Italian case, with its focus on the stateas the unifying mechanism behind the nation and the juridical orientation thisentailed, the institutional thrust took on a corporate form. In Germany, by con-trast, the emphasis on the organic Volk meant that the institutional thrust tookthe form of organizingin the sense of making organiclabor and capital intoa unity (Neocleous, Fascism, 44). We might glimpse here a certain difference

between Schmitt and Strauss (gravitation towards fascism) and Heidegger andJnger (gravitation towards National Socialism) in this difference, but we must

not allow it to obscure their similarities with regard to both anticommunism andthe conservation of esotericism. This is hardly the place to enter into discussionof the third major modern case, that of the Japanese Empire system (seeHarootunian, Overcome), on which both Heidegger and Schmitt had a substantialimpact; sufWce it here to say that it combined features of both fascism andNational Socialism as adumbrated by Neocleous.

14. On which see Detiennes path-breaking book, Les matres de vrit dans legrce archaque (passim).

15. In Mussolinis title, solco (wake or furrow) alludes to the Fascist grafWto

that then appeared (and is increasingly reappearing, or so Andrea Righi and AnnaPaparcone inform me) on walls throughout Italy: The plough cuts the furrow,the sword defends it.

16. In Heideggers 1936 lecture course on Schelling, in a passage he sup-presses from the Wrst postwar publication in 1971, he writes: It is also known thatthe two men who have launched the countermovements [against nihilismG.W.]in Europe based on the political organization of the nation, that is, on the VolkHitler and Mussoliniwere, by reaction and in different ways, inXuenced byNietzsche in an essential manner and this, without the speciWc metaphysical

sphere of Nietzschean thought being directly implicated (Gesamtausgabe, 43:4041). This omission was Wrst noted by one of Heideggers former students,Karl Ulmer, in a letter to Der Spiegel in May 1977, but is not mentioned by JoanStambaugh in 1985, in her characteristically whitewashing translation. Recently,Slavoj iek has written: The true problem of this passage lies not where itappears to lie (Heideggers all-too-mild critique of Hitler and Mussolini, whichsuggests a positive attitude towards them) but, rather, in the question: whatwould a politics exposed to the authentic metaphysical domain of Nietzscheanthought be? (Parallax View, 275; though the endnote to his citation is confused).iek cannot answer his own question, in my view, because he has inadequatelyformulated it, that is, cannot read Heideggers esotericism, his deceptions andconcealments.

17. Schmitts antipathy to Spinoza clearly has much to do with anti-Semitism, but inXected, Ive argued above, by Schmitts changing relation to

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esotericism (which, as weve seen, he calls or relates to what he calls sub-introduction). Less clear is the role of Heideggers anti-Semitism in his engage-ment with Spinoza, which is much deeper than Heidegger ever admits (see, butonly for starters, Balibar, Heidegger et Spinoza). Strausss view of Spinoza

just like his view of Nietzsche and Heideggeris duly prudent because it so per-ilously gnaws towards the Straussian bone, spinal cord.

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