Antisemitism, The Left, and Ethically Grounded Critique

Notes

Should we continue to consider Heidegger

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we should all be at the very least weary of Heidegger’s presence in theory & philosophy.

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his commitment to antisemitism, or anti-Judaism (which is the typological suggestion of David Nirenberg [2013] and Domenico Losurdo [2001][4]) was more than just a convenient public facing praxis meant to ride out the wave of the period of Nazi political power.

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“his obstinate and thus decided silence” (2007, 481) with regards to the Shoah and other Nazi atrocities towards the Jewish people after the War rings out defiantly in its present absence.

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say something more about the content and form of left-critical theoretical and philosophical thought and production itself, and of Marxism in particular, than Heidegger

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I have come to think of as the easy path: this is the attempt to simply relegate Heidegger and his thought to the rubbish pile

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There is no leap in logic here present, nor complex moral quagmires to be waded through, only a recognition of history

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opposition to fascism is, to the extent to which we may speak of such a thing, “common sense.”

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might call “easy” because it activates common political positions and allegiances without necessitating much in regard to critical thought.

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much of the left lacks what we might be inclined to refer to as the moral or ethical footing from which to critique Heidegger’s antisemitism due to very real, and quite often unconfronted, problems internal to its own historical development vis-à-vis antisemitism.

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perhaps then the most unsettling moment of Marxian antisemitism was Marx’s own, best displayed in his inarguably antisemitic tract “On the Jewish Question” (1978).

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“All forms of racism and anti-Semitism are as culpable and undesirable as the virulent, pedestrian, and unthinking forms we have painfully learned to immediately reject and denounce”

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“offer him up completely” to the condemnatory antisemitic reading. Again, as Trawny and Mitchell note, “this is not exoneration so much as a crucible

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Heidegger as a fundamentally anti-modernist thinker from the perspective of a left-critical theoretical and philosophical tendency which identifies itself, principally, with some form of modernity, the “Enlightenment,” rationality, science, and all similar such things, and specifically the entangled relationship between this kind of defence of modernity, whether implicit or explicit, with the geopolitical, epistemological, and metaphysical problem of colonialism, coloniality, and the political economy of the world-system.

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colonial relations of force and domination provide the prerequisite materialist underpinning for the emergence of both Heideggerian conservatism and Marxian critical theory.

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Coloniality, oftentimes referred to as the “colonial matrix of power,” refers to something different. What it denotes is the long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, and thus it is often remarked that coloniality survives colonialism.

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colonialism and coloniality are increasingly taken to be understood as constitutive of modernity, or, as Enrique Dussel puts it, is the underside of modernity (1996)

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plea for an alternative rationality that is different from the instrumental reason which characterized the illiberal rise of fascism

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while being critical of a certain kind of rationality and Enlightenment thinking is largely unable, or unwilling, to situate the development of such thought broadly within the development of the capitalist world-system.

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this is a problem that Badiou, and here we could also add Adorno, does not “seem to have thought much about, because on some level he believes in global designs, he believes in the progressive power of modernity, the subtraction of the particular and so on”

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while concerned with Heidegger’s overt fascistic political commitments might rather be argued to be more deeply concerned with his essential conservatism and nostalgia

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in as much as the conservative philosophical wing of euro-modernism represented by the figure of Heidegger is a eurocentric critique of euro-western modernity, so is the Marxian critique and the poststructural/postmodern critique as well

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euro-western modernity attempting to launch a criticism of itself.

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Marxism either can, or in fact already has, solved the problems bound up in consideration by Black, decolonial, Native, and subaltern critique (as well as feminist and queer critique)

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Black, decolonial, Native, and subaltern critique are ultimately form of identity-related struggle and theoretical production which serve, even if unintentionally, to undermine, to detract from, other supposedly more universal struggles (or, in the Maoist parlance “principal contradictions”) centred around class and capital

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Marxism, whether it be deemed a science or something else, should be surrendered fully to the decolonial critique, to the Black critique, the Native critique, and the subaltern critique. The goal here should not be to see whether or not Marxism can be saved in the face of the critique from the underside of modernity, the underside of history, but whether or not it survives. Or what of it survives.

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be left only with those parts of Marxism that work

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be prepared to sit and meditate within their own intellectual discomfort

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