Viva la Muerte. Heidegger, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Anarchic Drive.

It is a great honor for me to have been invited to address you—and I want to thank those responsible for the invitation, for having assumed its risk. First, let me attempt to clarify for you the title I have used, or the phrase in the title that says “Viva la Muerte.” It is a phrase that has intrigued me for a long time for one autobiographical or semi-autobiographical reason. I had always heard it was invented as the motto of the Spanish Foreign Legion when it was founded by General José Millán-Astray in 1920 to help the Spanish Army fight the Rif Rebels in Morocco. A few years later Millán Astray became my mother’s godfather, and this would eventually have some powerful effect on me as a child. But never mind that. I have recently run across that phrase again studying a text published in 1998 by the French psychoanalyst Nathalie Zaltzman, “La pulsion anarchiste.” Zaltzman says:

I will say more about the two destinies of the death drive later: a mortiferous one and one in the service of life forces, and in fact I would like to bring them to bear more or less tangentially on the existential analytic in Heidegger’s Being and Time.¹ Please hold that remark for now. Let me offer the initial thought that, when Heidegger writes in “Remarks III,” one of his black notebooks from circa 1947, a note presumably addressed to others that says “You still seek to re-tune the human to—you do not know yourself what” (Remarks, 186) and then adds, presumably in the first person, “we would like to attune the human to what ‘is’” and “only Seyn is,” he is not primarily announcing a political endeavor or making a political statement. We need to wonder why the attunement to das Seyn is such a final objective. Of course, if Heidegger could figure out, or tell us, what the goal of the re-tuning is, the for-the-sake-of which of the goal, the thought could perhaps open political pathways. Or not: it could also lead to an alternative configuration of human action, a non-political praxis. My point is, the experienced need, the urge or predilection (to use two interesting terms from the analysis of care in Being and Time) for the re-tuning is not always already and immediately political. It is something else, even if defining or even imagining what that something else is or might be may remain hard for our hyperpolitical times. Even presuming Heidegger himself knew what his Seyn lassen would lead to.

And yet—re-tuning. For the sake of an undefined and obscure goal that it remains for us to think about. The goal has received names in Heidegger’s past and will continue to receive them in the future, and yet it has remained, and probably will remain, elusive.² Now, circa 1947, he says: “Being and: Beyng and Beyng [crossed out]: this crossing out was always intended to operate alongside the earlier use of the name, thought as letting be (Seyn lassen): beyng” (Remarks, 186). We must certainly connect that thought to Heidegger’s insistence on thinking as remembrance, and remembrance of the unthought. Another quotation from “Remarks III” might help:

Seynlassen as a form of remembrance of the unthought as the goal of re-tuning: it is a formulation, perhaps not the final one, and yet we may assume Heidegger himself does not quite know what Seynlassen might mean or lead to, a non-knowing he accuses others of. We, at least some of us, re-tune or would like to re-tune for the sake of Seynlassen, but we do that, we let beyng be, for the sake of what? Of remembrance. Of the unthought.³ What is the connection of death and the unthought? Of death and oblivion, which must be remembered? We might be touching upon a limit here. We cannot clarify the point of letting Seyn be, it must clarify itself, if it ever will. In Country Path Conversations Heidegger will have said that it is a matter of “waiting without awaiting” for that event to manifest. In “Evening Conversation,” for instance, the waiting without awaiting is a releasement “to the coming,” and the coming is “presumably that before which nothing more can be thought: the unprethinkable” (150). This unprethinkable is perhaps the point of the most extreme figuration of the re-tuning. Will it arrive? And will it bring with it freedom? (a freedom beyond power and impotence: “Freedom rests in being able to let, not in ordering and dominating. . . . This freedom alone is the true superiority, which does not need to have something under it, on which it must support itself in order to remain above” [149]). Is this a political goal? Can it be, when we realize it depends on the coming, and the welcoming, of the unprethinkable? Waiting for the freedom the unprethinkable might bestow on us implies a radical return to the first inception, the radical point in history before which nothing could be thought. If this is not sheer madness, positing an impossible goal, unfeasible, impracticable, then it might be worthwhile to dwell on it and reflect on its implications: the re-tuning promises freedom, it is a promise, and it is, as such, as a promise, an always already political promise. Even if we must bracket the notion of political promise at the same time we mention it.

Our agency can only be preparatory. We could only attune ourselves to the possibility of a re-tuning—a probable or improbable, in any case an uncertain and elusive possibility that probably contains within itself a lot of what we still find enigmatic in Heidegger’s thought. The thought of Seyn, crossed out or not, has always ever been only preparatory. So my question—it is an infinite question—has to do with the nature of that preparation—call it an infrapolitical preparation, since it is prior to any politics and their very condition. I would not have the time to rehearse here the different ways in which Heidegger himself understood that task. There is a long history here, which I will have to bypass for this talk, while remaining painfully aware that without retracing that path what Heidegger will have been calling and will continue to call an other beginning of thought remains obscure. The re-tuning is an other beginning. I would not want to be reductive, and yet I must cut to some kind of chase in order to present to you what I want to present. Let me offer a simple thesis, perhaps ridiculously simple: the re-tuning, for the sake of an other beginning, is a reaction. But a reaction to what? We could talk about a limit-experience in the sense explained by Maurice Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation. Heidegger already felt himself there, and in fact he thought the entire West was confronting it. And by now, in our present, things may have gotten worse in some senses.

Granted that we are still in the grips of what Heidegger used to call the Grossfaschismus he associated with the Christian churches and what “calls itself democracy in America and Russia” (Remarks, 211, 212), I am referring to the combined threats, for the future of humanity, of the Anthropocene and the advancement of digital technology into artificial intelligence, said to be close to breaking into the production of so-called superintelligence. But I also want to point out the havoc social media are causing in our collective psyche. I hope you can restrain yourselves from what I suppose is the natural tendency to flee, in average everydayness, from these developments. I hope you do not consider them trivial, banal, ultimately unimportant. When Sigmund Freud wrote on social anthropology issues, usually with a heavy reference to religion, he generally concluded that society, the society of his time, was, and had been for centuries, a neurotic production.⁴ But we may find ourselves now in the early stages of a transition from collective social neurosis to collective social psychosis. It is not just post-truth that defines our historical moment (the negationism involved in the systematic dismantling of environmental regulations and the refusal to implement regulations concerning AI at a political level are post-truth phenomena), but rather, as Jean Vioulac puts it, we are entering post-reality in our seemingly unstoppable unleashing of the death drive.⁵ If you need an example to make this concrete, please watch the HBO Max documentary Neighbors. Or, from a different perspective, you should watch the two seasons of The Capture, a British series streamed in Peacock.

If artificial intelligence is moving toward turning what a recent New York Times article called our “technologically contingent institutional complex” into a technologically necessary, or closured, institutional complex, with the consequent reduction of whatever certain amount of freedom of movement that has depended up to now on not being exhaustively caught in the technical (including the juridical) apparatus, if social networks continue to provide, in an increasing manner, our primary access to the so-called world, and if climate change becomes unavoidably recognizable, visible, and ineluctable, we are in for some interesting years ahead.⁶ I do not think the enforced leisure that will come to us as a consequence of massive unemployment will necessarily make us more reflective or less insane. On the contrary, I think psychotic tendencies will increase as a result. Let me mention in passing, as I would not want to be misunderstood here, that of course all of these developments are capitalist developments, and they are therefore entrenched in our history and do not come to us coincidentally or out of the blue.

If we contemplate all of this as a consequence of modern, post-Industrial Revolution socio-economic development, that is, of the onset, accomplishment, and potentially final triumph of the machinic age, well, perhaps some of us will hold off on, and reconsider, our secular belief in progress; perhaps even we will hold off on our conscious or unconscious belief in what is now for the most part a secularized understanding of Providence, with a capital P. From the old political-theological notion that every modern concept of the political is a secularized theological concept, the Colombian reactionary thinker Nicolás Gómez Dávila makes his position clear when he says that either we believe in God or we believe in chance, and nothing in between can ever be persuasive enough.⁷ Technology is undoubtedly oriented, and made possible, by a secularized belief in God, or you may want to call it the World Spirit in Hegelian terms. The goal of the world spirit for Hegel was freedom, and for the Christians, for instance, God will lead the world to a final apocalyptic Parousia where the salvation of the just will be enacted. It may be easier by now to accept the latter than the former: universal freedom does not seem to lurk in the horizon of the world night, given present conditions. Even liberal democracy, which only a generation or two ago was presented as the final realization of the end of history, is now in deep crisis, as technofeudalism, financial capitalism, or general economic predation, call it what you want, take over the planet with only token resistance. Meanwhile, there are those who claim that even that token resistance to universal progress toward the seemingly total devastation of the human should be understood as the Antichrist.⁸

But chance does not seem to promise better outcomes—not when chance is precisely what the technological closure of institutional life aims to reduce (let me offer a perhaps minor, perhaps merely anecdotal example of this: at Texas A&M our syllabi must now be censored, and thereby approved or corrected, by Artificial Intelligence, which seeks and enforces conformity between what we claim we would like to teach and the goals of university government, which they like to call “values;” universities, at least public universities in the United States, are perhaps also on the way to becoming slaveholders for the Great Fascism). In that context, I think we need to take a second look at the concept of reaction, that is, of what used to be called reactionary-ism, politically and socially speaking. With a caveat. As is well known, the very understanding of modern politics in terms of left versus right is a product of the French Revolution, which also invented the notion of what is politically reactionary. I think the left-right distinction is still operative as a descriptor of different pragmatic options within what is possible, but I think we should endeavor—we no longer have a choice, it seems to me—to come up with an alternative understanding of political reaction, that is, of what is reactionary, since it has become possible and perhaps even necessary to say that only a general reaction to what is already upon us and will continue to arrive might contain the catastrophe of human and planetary devastation. But this other reaction, this re-tuning, does not have to be mortiferous.

Corey Robin, who is a scholar of reactionary thought, maintains that reaction, politically understood, is always “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back” (Robin, 4). It always involves an “animus against the agency of the subordinate classes” (7), however you define them, and it always affects “the private life of power” (10) for every one of its partisans. Political reaction is beyond traditionalism in the sense that the reactionary makes “a deliberate, conscious effort to preserve or recall ‘those forms of experience which can no longer be had in an authentic way’” (23). Reaction is therefore, for Robin, always militant and not just belligerent. In his book Hyperpolitics Anton Jäger studies the recent past, from the 1990s understood as a moment of what he calls “postpolitics,” through the “antipolitical decade” of the 2010s to our “hyperpolitical” time. And Jäger could be said to offer a different understanding of reaction. He says: “Hyperpolitics presents a redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage. Visibly, the terrain of postpolitics shared many key features with the hyperpolitics that would finally come to supplant it: a demobilization and critical weakening of civil society, the hollowing out of parties, the increasing insulation of the state from popular pressure” (Jäger, 75). Antipolitics, postpolitics, and hyperpolitics are themselves forms of reaction to a political scene or state of affairs that leaves a lot to be desired, from the left or from the right, even if those categories—left and right—are themselves radically damaged in the wash. Thinking about how to repair “the loss of the libidinal object” (94), that is, politics in its usual neurotic rather than psychotic form, Jäger tells a good joke: “A tourist couple . . . ask an Irish farmer how to get to Dublin; the farmer replies: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’” (93). And we may be in a situation where politics is no longer thinkable along the lines of a libidinal object—that is, politics for us may have moved from the register of Eros to the register of Thanatos, or it may be getting there: from the register of desire to the register of need in some radical existential sense that we must still think about and come to terms with. What would the implications be? In any case I think we can find in Heidegger this very possibility: the possibility of moving to the register of need for the sake of a non-mortiferous projection of existence.

Let us take it all on board. Heidegger’s reaction, if one follows carefully his life as presented in, for instance, Guillaume Payen’s biography, could be effectively associated to reaction in Robin’s sense, and we know where that would take Heidegger in the 1930s and beyond.⁹ I will say it briefly: he misinterpreted things, to the point of madness and delusion, in my opinion, as any number of pages in the thirty-four extant black notebooks indicate to the reader. We can only pick up what remains behind all of it, in spite of all of it, what we may find inspiring, and to that extent it is also possible if not likely that Heidegger, through his very misinterpretations, overdetermined his own understanding of political reaction toward antipolitical and postpolitical positions (which Christian Sommer, by the way, summarizes in his notion of a Heideggerian metapolitics).¹⁰ At the beginning of “Ponderings XII,” a black notebook from 1939, Heidegger says:

Perhaps here we are already abandoning metapolitics. Heidegger is clearly denouncing the hyperpolitics of his time, and the tendency to misrepresent the care existential in exclusively or perhaps only dominantly political terms. Heidegger’s antipolitical position could be understood in the sense that any possible revolution would be in the first place a revolution (or a counter-revolution) against politics. Reaction means here that what is “to be decided is the truth of beyng itself: whether the blindness of power (taken not morally, but as an event of the history of beyng) can be experienced as the forgottenness of beyng—or whether the human being is deemed worthy by beyng to be installed beyond power and impotence” (14). Beyond power and impotence: that is, beyond politics. Heidegger will immediately add a further precision that I can only understand as both antipolitical and infrapolitical. The following paragraph perhaps sums up in certain ways what I would like to discuss with you today:

I think that is a crucial passage that I cannot but connect to the analysis in Being and Time of average everydayness and its existentiell modification through the notion of authenticity, Eigentlichkeit. The thinker, namely, the authentic thinker, the essential thinker, must prepare a decision having to do with the devastation machination has brought upon the world. But machination is a function of the animality of animal rationale, not just of the animal’s power of reason, science, and technology, which are derivative. Machination is on the verge of releasing the death drive epochally in an unprecedented way for the human herd, whose Mitda-sein will continue to produce executors of the devastation as a matter of course. The decision is to oppose all of it, to oppose the kingdom of predatory devastation through initially a simple recognition of the plight of the human. But the plight of the human, Heidegger says somewhere, is Seyn. This is the re-tuning in one of its formulations, which implies the necessity of, as he puts it, “a downgoing which is the beginning of the last god.” We can call it desecularization, for instance, a word Heidegger does not use: the path that might open itself to the arrival of the last god, as Heidegger indicates, a thinking path which calls for a radical revision of our association with the “institutional animal” of an unleashed death drive and its fundamentally confused libidinal object of desire. This is the reaction Heidegger calls for: the decision of thinking is a reaction for the sake of a re-tuning toward Seyn. But even if we accept that the re-tuning moves through the recognition of the plight of radical secularization in the absence of the gods the goal of the re-tuning, its for-the-sake-of-what, rests unspecified.

Let me propose what to some of you might seem implausible: I think we can benefit from a reference to the analysis of the who of everydayness in Heidegger’s existential analytics in order to understand the death drive of unleashed machination, which defines the “swift institutional animal of the best-ordered herding” in Heidegger’s words as quoted. The who, says Heidegger, is “the neuter, the they” (Being and Time, 119 {123}). And “the they” is “‘the others,’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship” (119).

No decision is possible: “the they . . . has always already stolen away when Da-sein presses for a decision” (119 {124}). The average Da-sein is therefore the ens realissimum that operates the radical “disburdening” of everyday Da-sein (cf. Being and Time, 120 {124}). “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another” (120 {124}). A few pages later, when analysing the attunement existential, Heidegger returns to the notion of disburdening. He says: “The often persistent, smooth, and pallid lack of mood, which must not be confused with a bad mood, is far from being nothing. Rather, in this Da-sein becomes tired of itself. Being has become manifest as a burden” (126-27 {131}).

We, in our condition of average everydayness, must flee from being. “In the evasion itself the there is something disclosed” (127 {131}); “disclosed does not, as such, mean to be known. Just in the most indifferent and harmless everydayness the being of Da-sein can burst forth as the naked ‘that it is and has to be.’ The pure ‘that it is’ shows itself, the whence and the whither remain obscure” (127). But let me propose that the conjunction of the radical assumption of the burden and its equally radical disavowal is precisely the unbinding of the death drive in its mortiferous sense. In his recent book Philosophie de la catastrophe Vioulac argues that contemporary humanity is moving increasingly in the direction of a capitulation of existence that has everything to do with the death drive in the mortiferous sense:

It is a form of negative narcissism. Vioulac quotes André Green: “progression leads towards the one ego (le Moi Un). Regression leads sometimes further: towards the Zero of the illusion of non-investment, making of this regressive withdrawal a positive aspiration, a progress” (Green quoted by Vioulac, 630). There is “an ontological fatigue at the heart of existence” (630), an aversion to existence that we should not confuse with a desire to die, since “there are ways of being of the existant that satisfy this desire not to be” (631). The death drive, Vioulac concludes, is neither violence nor aggression, it is on the contrary passivity and submission, not a desire for the nothing, but a desire to be disburdened of life, not a desire no longer to be but a desire to be without life ” (632). The Jesuits would have called it a life perinde ac cadaver, that is, a life in the manner of a corpse: zombie life. The organization of life as voluntary servitude is already a consequence of the existential renunciation embedded in the notion of the death drive. If we understand this drift of average everydayness toward mortiferous death drive, a viva la muerte that is perhaps the primary consequence of contemporary conditions, we must consider the alternative. The question is whether the alternative opens a path for the last god, and what it might mean. The question is then whether Heidegger’s work offers us the possibility of a non-mortiferous relation to the death drive (and of course this is a question whose proper elucidation would require many lengthy textual analyses).

The plight of radical secularization has long been recognized as the plight of nihilism. In “Reflections on Nihilism,” which is a section of The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot says, discussing Nietzsche: “The unique force of his thought consists in its being not a metaphysical doctrine among others, but the final completion of metaphysics: that region where for a long time the central event that Nietzsche himself named nihilism has announced itself” (Blanchot, Infinite, 141). And he goes on:

Blanchot adds that these things are by now so familiar that they fail to move us and we find ourselves in flight from them. But then he notes that the thought of the Eternal Return came to Nietzsche as the tragic realization that nihilism would return eternally: “It is the nihilist thought par excellence, the thought by which nihilism surpasses itself absolutely by making itself definitely unsurpassable” (148). Given that all-too-familiar and yet extraordinary situation, it is little wonder that people may choose to deny all of it, or to ignore it. It is a reaction, but it is a reaction in Corey Robin’s sense: the reactionary makes “a deliberate, conscious effort to preserve or recall ‘those forms of experience which can no longer be had in an authentic way.’” I will call this ontotheological reaction. And I think it is mortiferous.

Heidegger defines ontotheology in the following manner: “metaphysics thinks of the Being of beings both in the ground-giving unity of what is most general, what is indifferently valid everywhere, and also in the unity of the all that accounts for the ground, that is, of the All-Highest” (Heidegger, “Onto-Theo-Logical,” 58). If metaphysics describes the world, and if “the essential constitution of metaphysics is based on the unity of beings as such in the universal and that which is highest” (“Onto-Theo-Logical,” 61), then the ground is set for an unbreakable principle of hierarchy and domination. The name for the All-Highest is God, the holder of single rule. This is ostensibly the god of the Church, the god of metaphysics, the god of Western history. Heidegger adds: “Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god. The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy . . . is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit” (“Onto-Theo-Logical,” 72). If ontotheological reaction holds valid for the conventional reactionary mind in Robin’s definition, it seems clear that Heidegger is here pointing to an alternative possibility of reaction. I will call it anontotheological reaction, following an indication Elliot Wolfson gives in the wake of an observation by John Krummel.¹¹

The essential model of the ontotheological reactionary may well be the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevski’s portrayal of the old Cardinal in The Brothers Karamazov. It is said that Dostoyevski found a source for his character in Friedrich Schiller’s play Don Carlos. Unfortunately I do not have the time to analyse Schiller’s play, so I will only say that the Cardinal Inquisitor is a spokesman for ontotheology understood in the Heideggerian way as the essence of metaphysics, which is also the essence of reactionary politics in Robin’s sense. Schiller has already glimpsed that the god of ontotheology is also the god of nihilism. Dostoyevski will make it abundantly clear in Chapter 5 of Book V in The Brothers Karamazov. It is entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” Once again I must refrain, for lack of time, from a proper analysis of this text. Please take my word for it. In it, a transfer of sovereignty has taken place absolutely, and ontotheology, together with ontotheology’s domination, has now become a matter of representation. We may choose to read this also as a politico-theological allegory—the sovereignty transfer is not only from God to the Church but also from God to the State, so that the Grand Inquisitor, under this key, speaks for the modern State. But obviously, not only: in any case the State would have inherited powers once held by the Church as the power within the State superior to the State itself. There is now, in the novel’s present, a new power within the State superior to the State itself, which, in the representation of the Grand Inquisitor, accrues to the ruling class even if the ruling class itself is not responsible for it. It is after all the power of the devil:

“Eight centuries” ago is a reference to Pope Stephen II’s assumption of secular power in AD 755. The sovereignty transfer from God to the Church is now potentially completed with its politico-theological continuation into secular power, a task not yet consummated in the 16^th century but well on its way when Dostoyevski writes. Modernity is the time when the Inquisitors and their inheritors will have taken upon themselves the task of universal happiness: “Oh, this task is as yet only at its beginning, but it has begun. The world will have to wait for its accomplishment for a long time yet, and it will have to suffer much, but we shall reach our goal and shall be Caesars and then we shall give thought to the universal happiness of human beings” (335), “a quiet, reconciled happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures” (337). Think about the happiness promised as a possibility by people such as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, in the wake of artificial superintelligence. In any case, this could be a good explanation for Heidegger’s startling remark that “the Christian churches are the slaveholders for Great Fascism” (Remarks, 211).

The Inquisitor claims to have corrected Jesus’ great deed for the love of the millions. And now, the Inquisitor says, “tomorrow I am going to burn you” (339). He is the modern nihilist against the background of ontotheological reaction. Does that make him a progressive? The Grand Inquisitor is not speaking in favor of liberal democracy as we have come to know it; nor is he speaking in favor of any kind of democracy, unless he is precisely talking about “democracy” in the sense it has been perverted in our own societies: democracies of equivalence and leveling-down ruled by an authority that disavows itself as such: what Heidegger was calling Great Fascism. He sees modernity, in other words, for him, the future that would come to the world and mankind, as a move toward increased despotism, when freedom would only be the freedom to obey. But those who are to be obeyed are the priestly ones, those endowed by fate with the power to command. Against them Dostoyevski offers only the quiet acquiescence of Jesus himself, which is obviously also a form of silent refusal: “The old man would like the Other to say something to him, even if it is bitter, terrible. But He suddenly draws near to the old man without saying anything and quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips. That is His only response” (Dostoyevski, 342). Dostoyevski’s tale is, precisely, a tale, a fiction. As such it fulfills a need, the need for an alternative. We as readers would like to believe we can preserve the faith in the Christ, which is a faith in freedom, if we are resolutely opposed to the presumptuous cruelty of the Grand Inquisitor and his dystopia. In that sense, anticlericalism protects the purity of the faith and offers an exit. Following the theologico-political extension of Dostoyevski’s argument, we can reformulate anticlericalism as anticapitalism or as hatred of the dominant class. What seems important is to preserve the possibility of an otherwise, that is, of an alternative future for the world and mankind.

Heidegger himself engages in that structure of thought in his Black Notebooks from 1942-48. He first makes a distinction between Christianity and Christianness: “Christianity is metaphysics that presents Christian faith as knowledge. Christianness is faith in Christ in the figure of Christ” (Heidegger, Remarks, 172). He goes on:

Heidegger had stopped considering himself a Christian many years earlier, hence his remark about not necessarily speaking for Christianness when one speaks against Christianity. He leaves an opening for faith, particularly the faith of the pious, where he includes the “rural-peasant Christian and maternal element” (144), but he says: “I am not Christian for the sole reason that I cannot be Christian. I cannot be it because I do not have mercy [Gnade] in the Christian sense. I will never have mercy as long as my way is determined by thinking. Thinking itself is the fissure to faith” (168). It is hard to determine what the latter phrase might mean, but I think it needs to be understood, at any rate half-understood, in the context of Heidegger’s reflections on the “remembrance of the unthought.”¹² For the time being let us simply retain the notion that thinking, now understood as something with “poetic character,” must open itself to the “sojourn of the last god:” “What appears to be nothing more than the utopia of failed poetry could one day become the topology of beyng. In loyal adherence to its essence, thinking would remain what it is: the rigidity of a poetizing that lets the sojourn of the last god within the locale of beyng come to language” (170).

I will claim that this “sojourn of the last god” must be understood as the possibility of an anontotheological reaction, certainly based on a rejection of modernity in Dostoyevski’s sense and beyond, as developed or intimated by Heidegger in the wake of his “decisive experience” of beyng in 1921 and as a continuation of the insights gained through Being and Time. ¹³ In the 1942-43 lecture course on Parmenides a different understanding of divinity or the deity is pursued through an elucidation of the Greek understanding of truth as Aletheia. The Greeks, according to Heidegger, dwelled in a daimonios topos which also determined their understanding of time. The Greek understanding of truth would also determine the possibility of an understanding of the divinity, and with it of an understanding of thinking, which metaphysics could only betray already in classical Greek times:

The metaphysical distinction between religion and atheism is rejected in the same way as the difference between theory and praxis as distinctions not efficient at the time of the first beginning. If metaphysics is the introduction of the Occident into inauthentic entanglement, and the consequent abandonment of the daimonios topos as the essential dwelling place of the human, this is perhaps the place to continue our reference to Being and Time’s existential analytic in order to focus, all too briefly, in the existentiell modification of average everydayness towards authentic Da-sein, and to present this modification in the context of Nathalie Zaltzman’s understanding of what she calls la pulsion anarchiste, the anarchic drive, itself one of the essential existentiell modifications of the death drive. Just before his analysis of anxiety Heidegger has clarified that “the absorption of Da-sein in the they and in the ‘world’ taken care of reveals something like a flight of Da-sein from itself as an authentic potentiality for being itself (172-73). Da-sein is entangled: “It is true that existentially the authenticity of being a self is closed off and repressed in entanglement, but this closing off is only the privation of a disclosedness which reveals itself phenomenally in the fact that the flight of Da-sein is a flight from itself” (174). The following passage is as good an introduction as any to Zaltzman’s anarchic drive (she calls it “anarquiste,” but I prefer “anarchic”):

This “being-possible” is the beginning of freedom. For Zaltzman “the anarchic drive works to open an exit for life there where a critical situation closes upon a subject and avows it to death” (Zaltzman, 137). It is a response to death given. When Da-sein is riveted to a limit-situation that cannot not be confronted, Da-sein finds itself deprived of an “impersonal right to life and exposed to a constant possibility of death” (138). Zaltzman explains that, there where a limit-situation kills or seems to kill every possible decision, the anarchic drive “saves the essential possibility of a decision” (13). It is a decision for survival: “there where the threat of death is exceptionally present, the principle of survival is the highest law” (148); “surviving becomes, free from every ideology, the pure political act, an act for the restoration of the human condition” (152). Zaltzman quotes Blanchot: “When the human . . . has no need of anything but need itself” the denial of that which denies it “is immediately the need of life” (154-55). The register of need provides the possibility of a decision that the register of desire has always already killed through its entanglements. Now it is only ever a question of survival, in confrontation with death, and the pure political act—the need to live on--can therefore manifest itself. I will offer the risky hypothesis that the sojourn of the last god and the pure political act of the decision to live on are one and the same thing. Insofar as the decision to live on is, however, an existentiell modification of the death drive, of being-toward-death, what is being posited in “the sojourn of the last god” and in such formulations as the retrieval or remembrance of oblivion as the fundamental task of thinking is a reversal of the mortiferous relation to death for the sake of an other relationship to it.

Heidegger’s “other beginning” is premised on a renewed, post-metaphysical retrieval of the Greek experience of Seyn, which remains unthought and must be remembered as unthought. This is the basis of the Heideggerian reaction to metaphysical and nihilistic modernity: if we are ever going to find a way out of our late-modern predicament, it will be through an abjuration, or a destruction, of our history, which includes in a major way the history of the Christian church. The Inquisition shows up in Heidegger’s Parmenides for the first and only time in his work, but it is not just a casual appearance. It is rooted in the Roman domination of the Greek world during the Hellenistic period. Heidegger says: “What is decisive is that the Latinization occurs as a transformation of the essence of truth and Being within the essence of the Greco-Roman domain of history . . . This transformation of the essence of truth and Being is the genuine event of history” (42). This has led to a particular understanding of politics: “We think the ‘political’ as Romans, i.e., imperially” (42). On the right and on the left. Heidegger presents in these pages his own theory of political hegemony following Roman-imperial terms on the basis of the betrayal of the Greek notion of truth as aletheia into veritas, and the consequent substitution of the Greek notion of the counteressence to truth as pseudos into the Latin falsum:

Heidegger will say a few years later that “aletheia is not a name for veritas, rather for esse” (Remarks, 219). The Roman betrayal of being into veritas, with the falsum as counteressence, prevents the possibility of commemorative thinking as remembrance of the unthought—ultimately of death as oblivion--and blocks the passage to the immanent divine, the theion. I don’t have the time to belabor these thoughts, which are perhaps already clear enough, but let me just say that they are thoroughly consistent to my mind with Dostoyevski’s tale and with the Grand Inquisitor’s claim that, in the fullness of time, “we shall reach our goals and shall be Caesars.” Heidegger goes on to say that the Roman imperial accomplishment finds its operating force, after the fall of the Roman empire, in

The Grand Inquisitor had no choice but to be consistent. And in his words, now nuanced by Heidegger, we gain an understanding of the entire political trajectory of the West as a movement toward domination as hegemony, certainly accomplished in our contemporary liberal democracies: when the people “are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination.” If reactionary-ism can be understood, then, as a rejection of hegemony in that sense, as ontotheological imperium, then reactionary-ism is anontotheological. When reactionary-ism is however understood only in the sense of modifying the conditions of hegemony in favor of a ruling class, however it is understood, and even if it is understood only in terms of meritocracy, the domination of intelligence, then reactionary-ism is incomplete nihilism, which makes it all the more insidious. Ontotheological reactionary-ism is insidious incomplete nihilism: a merely reactive nihilism that has failed to understand itself properly.¹⁵

Interpreting the other inception as a re-tuning to the unprethinkable as the divine, the remembrance of the divine unthought, of the unthought as the divine, implies for Heidegger the promise of freedom in and through an abandonment of politics understood as an imperial enterprise of hegemonic domination. This is not a call for us to reinstitute a new transcendental dimension as some form of a return to religion. The encounter with the unprethinkable is strictly immanent, if the word immanence retains any meaning once we have given up on transcendence. Heidegger says:

But the refusal of transcendence is also the refusal of obedience to the Caesar, a refusal of Roman-imperial politics. We can call it the presumptive enactment of a posthegemonic, anarchic politics that must first be thought as anarchic infrapolitics. And we can understand it as an existentiell modification of the death drive that abandons its mortiferous element in favor of the authentic decision for life in the face of death. This is the anarchist viva la muerte— let death be life’s spur, and a politics in the register of need and no longer of desire. For the sake of what? For the sake of a passage to freedom, which is also at the same time the reencounter with the daimonios topos where the last god dwells. Desecularization for the sake of anarchic freedom as the possibility of survival. But I do not know whether we will ever be ready for it. Unless we already are, secretly enough, because we are all all-too-painfully aware that the drift of our time is unsustainable and that something will give. An anarchic reaction is, or has become, the last possibility for humanity.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated and Foreword by Susan Hanson.

Dostoyevski, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated with an Introduction and Notes

Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Translated and Edited by James Strachey. With a

Gómez Dávila, Nicolás. Escolios a un texto implícito. With a Preface by Franco Volpi.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.

beyng.com: The 1993 edition of B&T is no longer in print. The corresponding pages in the 2010 edition are appended in curly braces to citations.

---. Contributions to Philosophy. (Of the Event). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and

---. Country Path Conversations . Translated by Bret W. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana UP,

---. Metaphysics and Nihilism. 1. The Overcoming of Metaphysics. 2. The Essence of

---. Nietzsche. Volumes One and Two. Translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco:

---. “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics.” In Identity and Difference.

Translated with an Introduction by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.

---. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington:

---. Ponderings XII-XV. Black Notebooks 1939-1941. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz.

---. Remarks I-V. Black Notebooks 1942-1948. Translated by Adam Knowles. Bloomington:

---. What is Called Thinking. Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper Perennial,

Jäger, Anton. Hyperpolitics. Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.

Klein, Ezra. “Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic.” New York Times , March 6, 2015.

Schiller, Friedrich. Don Carlos and Mary Stuart. Translated by Hilary Collier Sy-Quia and

Payen, Guillaume. Martin Heidegger. Catholicisme, revolution, nazisme. Paris: Perrin,

Povoledo, Elisabetta. “Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist is Coming. In Rome, Some Call This

Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind. Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.

Sommer, Christian. Heidegger 1933. Le programme platonicien du Discours de rectorat.

---. Mythologie de l’événement. Heidegger avec Hölderlin. Paris: PUF, 2017.

Vioulac, Jean. Philosophie de la catastrophe. L’esprit du nihilisme et son destin. Paris:

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. Translated by Ros Schwartz. With an Introduction by

Wolfson, Elliot. “The Nihil That Is: Mystical Nihilism and the Skepticism of Faith.” Política

Zaltzman, Nathalie. “La pulsión anarchiste.” In De la guérison psychanalytique. Paris:

1 I am hesitant to annotate here a paragraph from Remarks only because I am not sure I fully understand it. But Heidegger speaks in it of two dimensions of death. If nothing else, this note should be a reminder that further thought is necessary: “What use is it to think death positively when one has forgotten to first contemplate the negative and thus to take heed that here both the negative and the positive limp along behind the matter in an equally painstaking way?” (217).

2 See, as just one example, the reaction proposed in Contributions to Philosophy : it is a reaction against “the increasing authority of calculation, speed, and the claim of the massive . The obstinately distorted essence of the abandonment by being is hidden away under this cloak, and it makes the abandonment unassailable” (Contributions, 95).

3 Elliot Wolfson traces this back already to Being and Time: “as he put it in his comments on Sein und Zeit, written in July-August 1936, the retrieval of the question of being ( die Wieder-holung der Seinsfrage ) is a ‘thoughtful remembrance’ (denkerische Erinnerung) or a ‘creative thinking that recollects’ (andenkendes Erdenken), which means ‘bringing it afresh into our actualization,’ but the retrieval of the ‘again’ is ‘not merely a cheap imitation of the same’ because we can never be the earlier ones as the distance that lies between us necessarily makes us different. Nevertheless, the retrieval is a ‘transformation’ (Verwandlung) that imbibes the paradox of being ‘the same and yet not the same’ (das selbe und doch nicht). Hence, the retrieval, properly speaking, is ‘the will to the second inception,’ which is a return to what is yet to be, the ground whence beings unfold ‘out of themselves, above and beyond themselves’ in the truth of beyng” (Wolfson, “Nihil,” 4).

4 Religion is for Freud essentially an illusion needed as compensation for the pain and insecurities of social life. So religion is one, perhaps the most important historically, of the neurotic compensations for repression and anxiety. See for instance: “Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father” (Freud, Future, 55).

5 “L’automatisation totale rend possible la soumission à des protocols de guidage en même temps que l’univers virtual propose un monde fantasmatique conforme aux désirs de chacun qui permet d’en finir avec la réalité: l’ére de la post-vérité est déjà devenue celle de la post-réalité” (Vioulac, Philosophie, 647).

6 Dean Bell, in an interview with Ezra Klein says that “the entire technocratic nation-state that we currently have in the advanced capitalist countries is a technologically contingent institutional complex” (Klein, “Why the Pentagon,” 6). But, he adds, “the problem that AI presents is that it changes the technological contingencies quite profoundly” (7). The institutional complex, in other words, is moving towards a potential closure of the contingencies.

11 “Perhaps it would be more suitable to speak of the anontological, to borrow the neologism that John Krummel has applied to the appropriation of Buddhist concepts by Nishitani, prominent member of the Kyoto school of philosophy and disciple of its founder Kitarō Nishida, to signify the midpoint between the affirmation of being and the negation of nonbeing, thereby avoiding the polarities of ontological reification and meontological disintegration” (Wolfson, “The Nihil That Is,” 24).

13 In Remarks I-V, around 1948, Heidegger insists on what he calls his “decisive experience of the oblivion of being in 1921” (117): “The fundamental experience of my thinking since the preparation for Being and Time (1921) is the experience that being itself remains in oblivion, that this remaining is somehow proper to being itself, and that the uncontemplated of the human is only a consequence” (19).

14 Perhaps unexpectedly, roughly around the same time Heidegger was giving his last lectures on Parmenides in 1943, Simone Weil was finishing her last book, The Need for Roots. Her position on Rome and the Roman heritage is quite similar to Heidegger’s: “What took place in Rome was the relationship between master and slave. Cicero already admitted with shame that he considered himself as being half Caesar’s slave. Apart from Augustus, the emperor was regarded as the master of all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, in the sense of a slave owner” (212). Weil’s diatribe against Rome continues for a few pages, and Weil analyzes politico-theological repercussions: for instance, “The Roman conception of God still persists today,” and “to attribute to God a sovereign right without obligations is to make Him the infinite equivalent of a slave owner in Rome. This only allows for servile devotion” (215). And then Weil says: “In the mystic tradition of the Catholic Church, one of the main purposes of the purifications through which the soul must pass is the total abolition of the Roman conception of God” (215), which, needless to say, inflects the politics of the West up to the present through politico-theological developments.

15 I do not have the space to examine here the vexed issue of nihilism in Heidegger’s work, but let me refer you, just to mark the complication, once again to Wolfson’s “The Nihil That Is,” where he says, among other things: “The only way to reflect on the essence of nihilism is through a discussion of the essence of being, which alone sets one on the path to discuss the question of the nothing, a discussion that requires relinquishing the language of metaphysics because the latter prevents one from thinking the question concerning the essence of being, which is the essence of the nothing” (7). Overcoming nihilism would then be “a thinking that distends beyond thinking, a thinking of the unthinkable” (7). See also: “the ‘genuine overcoming of nihilism’ is thus the ‘realization that refusal pertains intrinsically to the essence of beyng,’ which is the knowledge that ‘thinks nihilism still more originarily, all the way down to the abandonment by being.’ The overcoming of nihilism so conceived anticipates Heidegger’s resolve that the event of appropriation is concomitantly a disappropriation (Ereignis ist Enteignis), the remembrance (Gedächtnis) that is the essence of thinking comporting as the ‘responsive conjoining’ (Fügsamkeit) that ambles ‘towards the countering secret’ (entgegen des Gegnendes Hehls), the way (Weg) of the footbridge (Steg) that ‘opens itself at the proper time.’” (9-10). Obviously no understanding of Heidegger’s work on nihilism can avoid the study of “What is Metaphysics?” (1929) and the adjacent but later texts “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” (1943) and “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” (1949), all of them included in Pathmarks, the essay “The Essence of Nihilism” (1946-48), published in Metaphysics and Nihilism, and “On the Question of Being” (1955), also in Pathmarks. Volume 2 of Nietzsche is also essential.

Alberto Moreiras - Viva la Muerte. Heidegger, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Anarchic Drive.
Keynote at Heidegger Circle Meeting, Atlanta, May 2026

Viva la Muerte Heidegger, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Anarchic Drive

Viva la Muerte
Heidegger, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Anarchic Drive