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Heidegger Supplement


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***LINKS


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link: data

Data revealed by technology is inherently used for calculative purposes.Antolick 2 [Matthew Anolick; August 20, 2002; Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology; MV]

What technology is, says Heidegger, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentalityback to fourfold causality.8 Of fourfold causality, he states they differ from one another, yet they belong together.9Weare questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence

of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing.Bringing- forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning causality and rules them throughout.Within its domain belongends and means, belong instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic oftechnology. If we inquire step by step, into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shallarrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealingTechnology is thereforeno mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. Technology, as instrumental (and causal) is a bringing-forth. That is,technology is a way of bringing things to presence in an instrumental (means-ends) manner. But such bringing-forth is not merely instrumental. All bringing-forth, says Heidegger, is poiesis,11 through which the growing things of nature as well aswhatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance. Within the questioning span betweencausality and revealing [aletheia], Heidegger progresses through a trail of concepts: 1) Legein to consider carefully, which, he claims13, hasits roots in aphophainesthai to bring forward into appearance14; 2) Hypokeisthai lying before and lying ready as that for whichthe four causes, as four ways of being responsible, are responsible, insofar as such characterizes the presencing of something that presences15; 3) Ver-an-lassen an occasioning or inducing to go forward of something into its complete arrival16; which leads to 4) Physis the arising of somethingfrom out of itself which is also a bringin


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link: empiricism

Mistaking empiricism for truth embodies the technological thought that reduces all ofhumanity to standing reserve.Spanos, 93 Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature atBinghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of WisconsinMadison [1993, William V.Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of MinnesotaPress, ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 174-7, Accessed through Ebrary]

I have in the foregoing reading of Heidegger with Foucault suggested the weakness of Heidegger's discourse as an instrument of sociopolitical critique: itstendency, despite its essence, to separate theory from practice, thinking from politics, or, at worst, to distort the representation of the latter. It will be thepurpose of this concluding section, then, to suggest the weakness of Foucault's discourse disclosed by a reading of Foucault with Heidegger. To put itprovisionally, what is missing or underdeveloped in Foucault's genealogy of modern power relations is explicit and sustained reference to the ultimateontotheological origins of "panopticism" or "the regime of truth": this historically specific and concrete technology of discreet power in which the subject(the individual) is constituted in order to better serve a privileged sociopolitical identity. To thematize and thus bring to bear on the critique of modernitywhat his discourse more or less leaves unsaid in what I take to be a disabling way, it will be necessary to repeat Heidegger's more inclusive, if rarefied,but finally not radically different thematization of the metaphorics of the centered circle informing the philosophical discourse of the ontotheologicaltradition. This time, however, I will emphasize the consequences of this inscribed figural complex for the modern age, which, after all, no less than

Foucault's genealogy, is the primary concern of Heidegger's destruction of the ontotheological tradition.According to Heidegger, we recall, themetaphysical mode of inquiry decisively inaugurated by the Roman translation of the Greek a-letheia to veritasextends through the Patristic theologians and exegetes not only to modern empirical philosophers like Descartes, Locke, andBenthambut also to idealists like Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. In the process of this history, it eventually hardened into a derivative or

secondary discursive practice, a viciously circular thinking about temporal phenomena, that reduced being,including Da-sein, being-in-the-world, to the status of a thing that is present-to-hand (vorhanden).What this process of reificationmeans in terms of Western history is that the hardening culminates has its fulfillment and end (in both senses of the word)in thecomplete "technologization" (understood in a broader sense than merely the empirical scientific) of the continuum of being: not only the earth

but also human being in its individual and social capacity. Put figuratively, it ends in the re-presentation of being as totally spatializedobject in the modern period. For Heidegger, in other words, the triumph of humanism or alternatively, of "anthropology"in the post-Enlightenment (what Foucault analogously refers to as the triumph of "panopticism") precipitates "the age of the world picture" (die Zeit desWeltbildes): The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive that the world is transformed into a picture and man intosubjectum throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history.... Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the worldstands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does thesubjectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology.

It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture. . . . Humanism, therefore, in the more stricthistoriographical sense, is nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. The name "anthropology" as used here . . . designates that philosophicalinterpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man. . . . The fundamental event ofthe modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structuredimage [Gebild] that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before [des vorstellenden Herstellens]. In suchproducing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure anddraws up the guidelines for everything that is.52 Like Foucault's analysis of the panopticism of the disciplinary society, Heidegger'sanalysis of the "age of the world picture" exposes the "calculative thinking" (rechnende Denken) of anthropologicalrepresentation (Vorstellung) to be a problematic that constitutes ("produces") the subject as "technological"consciousness. In turn, this subject, as Heidegger puts it elsewhere, "enframes" (Ge-stell) the temporality of being in its own(anthropological) image.And by thus achieving such a deceptive representational technique of mastery over physis inthe modern age, this subjected subject has come perilously close to reducing "its" dynamic and "proliferating"its differential processes, including human being, into not simply knowable objects, but objects as "standingreserve" (Bestand), as "docile and useful bodies," as it were. This technological "achievement" of humanistic retro-spection or, what is thesame thing, re-collection, is not simply the blindness of the anthropological version of metaphysical oversight.It is a forgetting of the be-ing

of being (the ontological difference)with a vengeance: an amnesia, no less repressive than the super-vision that , according toFoucault, is the essential agent of discipline in the "regime of truth." This retrieval of Heidegger's version of the origins of themodern age of the world picture suggests that Foucault's limitation of his genealogy of the disciplinary society to the site of a historically specific politicsobscures and minimizes what in Heidegger's interrogation of the ontotheological tradition constitutes a persuasive enabling disclosure, however limitedin the opposite direction, about the essence of modernity. I mean the prominence of the ideal figure of the centered circle and its discreetly repressiveoperations in the discursive practices of modernity at large. The disclosure of the complicity between knowledge and power enabled by Heidegger'sinterrogation of the ontotheological tradition, that is, is not finally limited to the site of the positive sciences precipitated in and by the Enlightenment asthe predominant documentary evidence Foucault brings to bear on the question in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, andThe History of Sexuality, Vol. I seems to suggest. It also includes the site of the so-called litterae humaniores philosophy, literature, the arts, and so on privileged by thecultural memory of modern humanism.


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link: democracy promotion

Terrorism is a manifestation of the American project to homogenize Being through democracypromotion.Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell.Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: 2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs,Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM, (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford)).

Terrorism will take place in the withdrawal of being, in the unworld of machination. The modernconfiguration of war is surpassed by the technological plan of homogenized circulation, and thedistinction between war and peace falls away in their mutual commitment to furthering thecycle of production and consumption. The abandonment of being that forms this unworld by drainingthe world of its being does not occur without a trace, however, and terror in its trembling corresponds to thattrace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-or, "becoming-desert," Verwstung-ofthe world; terrorism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is metaphysical because it touches everything,every particular being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The circulation of the standing-reserve sets an equivalence of value among things with a resulting worldlessness whereexistence is another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially.They are not fully present when here. Terrorism names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could bethe effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an absence in and through presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a change in being would lack acorresponding change in beings. This change in the nature of being shows itself in the fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of destruction via terrorist acts. There

would be no terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be no possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only "effect" of this absence in presence;Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this regard. Terrorism's claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat.Insofar as it calls into question all beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical determination of bang. Terrorism makes everything a possible object of terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it.Everything is a possible target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible targets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now

threatened with destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature of the being itself. The being can no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction does not resideoutside of the being. Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the essence of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as though destroyed. Terrorbrings about an alteration in the very mode of being of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the change has already taken place, and this regardless of whether an attack comes

or not. Beings exist as endangered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It means that, interms of pure presence,beings exist as already destroyed. Destruction is not something that comes at alater date, nor is it something that may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists now as threat.

Positing democracy as the system that will end all conflict makes alternative modes of thinkingimpossible. If only one mode of Being is correctthat of the liberal capitalist managerthen allof humanity becomes a disposable standing reserve.Spanos, (Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton) 03 (The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis inthe Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics,William V. Spanos, boundary 2 30.3(2003) 29-66).

What I want to underscore, in other words, is that the dominant liberal democratic/capitalist culturesrepresentation of the postcold war as the advent of the peace of the new world order must be understood notsimply as the global triumph of an economic-political system. Equally, if not more, important for the presenthistorical conjuncture, though more difficult to perceive, it must also be understood, as the alignment of thisend-of-history discourse with the new (political) world order clearly suggests, as the global triumph of anindissolubly related ontology and its banalizing instrumentalist language. It must be understood, that is, notsimply as the Pax Americana but also, and perhaps above all, as the Pax Metaphysica: that teleologicalrepresentation of being which, unlike all other past representations, now, at the end of the dialecticalhistorical process, claims to be noncontradictory, that is, devoid of conflict, and which, therefore,renders any alternative representation of truthand of the truth of historyin the futureimpossible. In short, it should be understood as the completion of the perennial Occidental project that is

and, however unevenly in any historically specific moment, always has been simultaneously and indissolublyan imperial political practice and an imperial practice of thinking as such, a polyvalent praxis, inother words, the end of which is the enframement, colonization, and reduction of the differential humanmind as well as the differential human community to disposable reserve. In his late essays, Heideggerinsistently called for the rethinking of thinking itself as the first praxis in a destitute time,14 because it liesunder a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that iscoming.15 In the process, Heidegger proleptically referred to this representation of being in modernity as theplanetary triumph of technology in the age of the world picture. By world picture, he meant theglobal triumph of a mode of knowledge productionand the language, the saying, inherent in itinaugurated by the imperial Romans that reduces the differential force of the being about which it is inquiringinto an inclusive and naturalized spatial trope: a world picture (Weltbild), or, to invoke an undeveloped but extremely suggestive motifin Foucaults thought, a domain, an area, a region, a field, a territory to be conquered and colonized, as the (Roman/Latin) etymologies of these metaphors make
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=318&pmid=13174&TS=1137771668&clientId=9803&VType=PQD&VName=PQD&VInst=PRODhttp://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=572&VType=PQD&VName=PQD&VInst=PROD&pmid=13174&pcid=16292731&SrchMode=3http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#authbiohttp://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE14http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE15http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=318&pmid=13174&TS=1137771668&clientId=9803&VType=PQD&VName=PQD&VInst=PRODhttp://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=572&VType=PQD&VName=PQD&VInst=PROD&pmid=13174&pcid=16292731&SrchMode=3http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#authbiohttp://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE14http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE15


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forcefully clear. Region (of knowledge), for example, derives from the Latin regere, to command; domain, from dominus, master or lord; province, from vincere, toconquer.17 This is what Heidegger meant when, in response to his Japanese interlocutors reference to the Easts increasing temptation to rely on European ways ofrepresentation, he said that this temptation is reinforced by a process which I would call the complete Europeanization of the earth and man.18 It is this fulfillment, or,rather, consummation, of the logical economy of metaphysics that, despite the failure of the opposition to hear its claimsnot to say the haunting silence on which they are

basedannounces itself at the end of the cold war as the end of the dialectical historical process and the advent of the end of history. And it is this consummationthis end ofphilosophy, as it werethat calls for the retrieval of Heideggers project, or, at any rate, the retrieval of the de-structive or deconstructive initiative instigated by hisinterrogation of instrumental thinking, the anthropological or post-Enlightenment modality of the end-oriented or retro-spective calculative thinking privileged by theOccidental tradition. This time around, however, the deconstructive initiative should be undertaken with fuller awareness than in the 1960s and 1970s of the indissolublerelationship between being and the world, between thinking/language and praxis. For it is not simply that the triumph of metaphysical/technological thought in the postcold war era has universalized thinking from above or after the-things-themselveswhich, say, with Heidegger, has demonized as unreason any thinking which rejects the

claim of reason as not originary.19In thus delegitimizing every other kind of thinking, actual or imaginable, thanthe dialectical/instrumentaland inexorably reductivethinking allegedly precipitated by History itself,

or, to invoke a language usually and disablingly restricted to geopolitics, in thus totally colonizing thinking ingeneral, this metaphysical/technological thought has also, as Antonio Gramsci anticipated in thinking thepolitical defeat of his antifascist emancipatory movement in the early part of this century as the interregnum,made it virtually impossible for an adversarial constituency to oppose the imperial discourse inother than the latters terms. To be recognized, an adversarial discourse and practice must be answerable to thetriumphant imperial mode of instrumental thinking.
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE17http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE18http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE19http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE17http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE18http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/boundary/v027/27.1spanos.html#NOTE19


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link: reading a 1AC

The affirmatives snapshot of the world poses them as the subjects and the world as theirobject. This enframing mission makes the world the standing reserve and every part of itreplaceable.Mitchell, 5 - , Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University(Andrew J, Heidegger andTerrorism, Research in Phenomenology, 35, http://www.technischedaten.com/view/mitchell-heidegger-and-terrorism-(2005)/45247219/207zwqqe8tjq9369ypv6/)

Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology has served to eradicate the distance that would separate the supposedlyopposed parties. The analysis of technology in Heideggers work is guided by the (phenomenological) insight that All distances in time and space are

shrinking (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165). 13 Airplanes, microwaves, e-mail, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure, but there is ametaphysical distance that has likewise been reduced, that between subject and object. This modern dualismhas been surpassed by what Heidegger terms the standing-reserve (Bestand), the eerie companion of technologicaldominance and enframing. Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a subject,objects can no longer be found. What stands by in the sense of standing-reserve, no longer stands over againstus as object (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17).A present object could stand over against another; the standing-reserve, however,precisely does not stand; instead, it circulates, and in this circulation it eludes the modern determination ofthinghood. It is simply not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing, which names the dominance ofposition, positing, and posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were. Everything

becomes an item for ordering (bestellen) and delivering (zustellen); everything is ready in place (auf der

Stelle zur Stelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve exists within this cycleof order and delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not merely a development external to modern objects,

but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in its circulation along these supply channels, where one item is just as good asany other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any other. Replaceability is the being of things today. Today being is being-replaceable (VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in 1969. The transformation is such that what is here now is not really here now, since there is an itemidentical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle of ordering and delivery does not operate serially, since we are nolonger dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead, there is only a steady circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is there in storage. The standing-reserve spreads itself throughoutthe entirety of its replacement cycle, without being fully present at any point along the circuit . But it is notmerely a matter of mass produced products being replaceable. To complete Heideggers view of the enframedstanding reserve, we have to take into consideration the global role of value, a complementary determination of being: Being has become value(GA 5: 258/192). The Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the preponderance of

value is so far from preserving differences and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further level theranks and establish the identity of everything with its replacement.When everything has a value, anexchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents, languages, and difference, with greathomogenizing and globalizing effect. The standing-reserve collapses opposition.
http://www.technischedaten.com/view/mitchell-heidegger-and-terrorism-(2005)/45247219/207zwqqe8tjq9369ypv6/http://www.technischedaten.com/view/mitchell-heidegger-and-terrorism-(2005)/45247219/207zwqqe8tjq9369ypv6/http://www.technischedaten.com/view/mitchell-heidegger-and-terrorism-(2005)/45247219/207zwqqe8tjq9369ypv6/http://www.technischedaten.com/view/mitchell-heidegger-and-terrorism-(2005)/45247219/207zwqqe8tjq9369ypv6/


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link: technology

The drive to develop tech without questioning our relationship with it changes the world intostanding reserve.Heidegger 49 [Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, December 1, 1949,http://www.wright.edu/cola/Dept/PHL/Class/P.Internet/PITexts/QCT.html, MV]

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, wherealetheia, truth, happens. In opposition to this definition of the essential domain of technology, one can object that it indeed holds for Greek thought andthat at best it might apply to the techniques of the handcraftsman, but that it simply does not fit modern machine-powered technology. And it is precisely

the latter and it alone that is the disturbing thing, that moves us to ask the question concerning technology per se. It is said that moderntechnology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modernphysics as an exact science. Meanwhilewe have come to understand more clearly that the reverse holds true as well :Modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building ofapparatus. The establishing of this mutual relationship between technology and physics is correct. But it remains a merely historiographicalestablishing of facts and says nothing about that in which this mutual relationship is grounded. The decisive question still remains : Of what essence ismodern technology that it happens to think of putting exact science to use?What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new inmodern technology show itself to us.

And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealingthat rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern] ,13which puts to nature the unreasonable demandthat it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sailsdo indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.

In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district,the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appearsdifferently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does notchallenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase.Butmeanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, whichsets upon [stellt] nature.It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized foodindustry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example;uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.This setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting [Fordern] , and in two ways. It expeditesin that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning towardfurthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. The coal thathas been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present

somewhere or other.It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun's warmth that is stored in it.

The sun's warmth ischallenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep afactory running.

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link: policy making

Debating about what to do is the wrong approach and guarantees the enforcement ofsovereignty discourseexamining what is going on and how we should understand the worldhas to come first.Shaw, 99 (Poli Sci Professor University of Victoria), 99 (Karena, 9 Transnational Law & ContemporaryProblems 569, lexis).

Consequently, politics today is at least as much about probing and rearticulating the limits of how weconceptualize the political as it is about mobilizing resources to include people in existing politicalarrangements.We cannot assume (and leave others to document) what is going on politically. Nor can weassume how we should come to understand what is going on, or consider it to be obvious, andonly debate "what to do." In an important sense it is the obvious that is our greatest enemy. It is in theobvious that our most deeply held assumptions are lodged. Thus, we must simultaneously pursue the questionsof what is going on and how we should understand what is going on. We can only pursue these questionsthrough a critical relation to our own categories and assumptions. More precisely, our work must come to grips

with the spatial and temporal preconditions for the constitution of subjectivity, political authority andsovereignty. We must come to grips with the architecture articulated by Hobbes, as it is instantiated today. It isthrough seeing how the spatial and temporal preconditions for the constitution of subjectivity and sovereigntyare already being reconstituted and rearticulated that we can come to develop a critical perspective on the

categories through which we discipline the political.

Avoiding ontological questioning for the sake of management turns all life into standingreserve.Thiele, 97, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heideggeron Boredom and Technology, Polity, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 489-517, jstor]

Busy-ness is the chief means by which everyday life evades ontological questioning. The everyday achieves itsescape from anxious thought in heightened worldly activity. The "tranquillity" of inauthentic Being "drives oneinto ininhibited 'hustle.' "41 Boredom does not preclude such activity. Indeed, a continuous flurry of activity often becomes

boredom's chief defense against thoughtful anxiety. The engines of convention and coping that propel our

everyday busy-ness find a particularly powerful fuel in modem technology.Technology, for Heidegger, does notrefer to the development of machines, tools, or skills but to the "enframing" (Gestell) of the world under theimperial mandate of efficient exploitation. Deep boredom evidences itself today not so much in Hamlet-like brooding as in this fast-pacedenframing of the world Heidegger observes that we are increasingly reluctant to "station ourselves in the storm of Being.

Yet everything today betrays the fact that we bestir ourselves only to drive storms away. We organize allavailable means for cloudseeding and storm dispersal in order to have calm in the face of the storm.But thiscalm is no tranquillity. It is onlyanesthesia; more precisely, the narcotization of anxiety in the face of thinking."42 Inother words, technological hyperactivity ensures that philosophic thought seldom surfaces and that existentialanxiety never gains sway. Vast in its reach and furious in its pace, modern technological activity proves the most effective means of dissipatingthe storm of Being. It also allows us to bear the burden of boredom in relative comfort, even with a heightened sense of excitement. Each age, Heideggerindicates, is dominated by a basic mood that structures its development. Boredom is the basic mood of the technological age. It accompanies anotherbasic mood of the times-horror-a state of spiritual shell-shock that, no less than boredom, paralyzes one in the face of utter meaninglessness.Horror( Erschreckungi) is an appropriate, but often repressed, reaction to the experience of a nihilistic world in which everything is permitted. Its

relationship to boredom is complementary.A deep, pervasive boredom, a boredom with life and being, may induce formsof nihilistic behavior-as Dostoevsky graphically observes-to which horror seems the only appropriate, ifineffective, response.43 John Stuart Mill described his own own time as "destitute of faith, but terrified at skepticism." Faith may indeed bescarce today. But terror at skepticism is increasingly absent in the postmodern world. Such terror has been largely replaced with technological

preoccupations. From an ontic perspective, technology is tremendously creative and its productive capacities giveno indication of abating. From an ontological viewpoint, however, the totalizing reach of modern technologyreveals a nihilistic core. Modern technology belies a vast and powerful ordering of an absence, an absence that canfind no corrective in the over-production of things. "The emptiness of Being," Heidegger writes, "can never be filled up by the fullness of beings,

especially when this emptiness can never be experienced as such, the only way to escape it is incessantlyto arrange beings in theconstant possibility of being ordered as the form of guaranteeing aimless activity. Viewed in this way, technology is theorganization of a lack."44 Technology replaces the emptiness of Being revealed in the mood of boredom

with the production and consumption of artifacts and the unrelenting manipulation of theworld. It reduces the world to a "standing reserve" (Bestand).


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link: truth claims

Our hubristic assumption that we can know the world inherently justifies domination.Spanos, 93 Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature atBinghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of WisconsinMadison [1993, William V.Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of MinnesotaPress, ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 138-9, Accessed through Ebrary]

Understood in the context of this destructive reading of history, then, the temporal "progress" of Western civilization, including the cultural andpolitical narrative paradigms it has elaborated to legitimate its particular allotropes, has in a general, however uneven, wayinvolved the eventualrecognition and exploitation of the indissoluble relationship between visual (spatial) perception of things-as-they-are and cultural, economic, and sociopolitical power.What from the beginning of the Western tradition was atentative, discontinuous, and unevenly developed intuition of this relationship coalesced in the episteme variouslycalled the Enlightenment, the age of reason, or bourgeois capitalism, (and, not incidentally, the Augustan Age). According to Heidegger, this is thehistorical conjuncture that bore witness to the triumph of "re-presentation," the thinking of being as "worldpicture": the hardening of metaphysical speculation into a calculative technology of "enframing" (Gestell), in which

being (including Dasein [being-in-the-world]) has been reduced to "standing reserve" (Bestand). According to Foucault's remarkably analogous, ifmore decisively concrete diagnosis, it is the episteme that bore witness to the emergence of the "panoptic" schema, the microphysics of power that constitutedthe subject (the sovereign individual) to facilitate the achievement of sociopolitical consensus (identity) in the volatile social context precipitated by arapidly changing demography. To anticipate the affiliative relationship between Heidegger's and Foucault's discourses that I will treat more fully, this"progress" has involved the eventual recognition and exploitation of the integral relation-ship between the perennially and increasingly privileged figureof the centered circle as the image of beauty and perfection and the centered circle as the ideal instrument of a totalized sociopolitical domination. Post-

RenaissanceMan intuited the inherent "strength" (which from a destructive perspective discloses the essential weakness) of metaphysicalepistemology: its ability to see or re-present the differential temporal process as integral andinclusive picture (table, blueprint, grid, design, strategic map, etc.) or, negatively, to lose sight of and forget difference, in thepursuit of the certainty(distance) of logocentric order. This intuition, in turn, enabled the transformation of the over-sight of the metaphysical overview(survey) into a pervasive methodological or disciplinary instrument for thediscreet coercion of difference into identity all through the field of forces that constitute being, from theontological and epistemological sites through language and culture to economics and sociopolitics (gender, race,family, state, etc.). In the "age of the world picture," more accurately, metaphysical speculation was transformed into adisciplinary instrument positively capable of colonizing the "other," of harnessing difference (the individual entity) in

behalf of normalization and utility: that is, exploitation. This centered "speculative instrument," which has inscribed itsrecollective/visual interpretive imperatives into all phases of Western culture, was and continues to be defined

by that dominant social formation that benefits most from the circumscription and colonization of the earth. Ittherefore also serves, however inadvertently in some instances, to legitimate the dominant political/economic power structure(and its hegemonic purposes)now become the computerized late capitalist establishment that has largely determined the societies oEurope (including, until recently, the Soviet bloc) and America and their extraterritorial (colonial) ends since the Enlightenment. The difference betweenpast and present is not ontologically substantive: whereas before the Enlightenment the center or eye that dominated was visible, in the age of the worldpicture or, alternatively, of panoplies, it has become "a center elsewhere . . . beyond the reach of [free] play": in Gramsci's term, "hegemonic."

The humanist claim to know justifies Western management and imperial domination.Spanos, 93 Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature atBinghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of WisconsinMadison [1993, William V.Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of MinnesotaPress, ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 140-2, Accessed through Ebrary]

Indeed, this possibility of destructive hermeneutics is reflected, however minimally thought in terms of its historical specificity, in several crucial, albeit largely overlooked,

moments in Heidegger's texts, especially after his realization that the Nazi project to which he had committed his energies in the period of the rectorshipwas itself "caught up in the consummation of nihilism." 11 Thus, for example, in "Letter on Humanism," written in 1947, Heidegger extends hisontological/epistemological genealogy of the "truth" of modernity the truth of disinterested inquiry in Being and Time to encompass its affiliativerelationship to sociopolitics. In this essay, Heidegger shows that the epochal Roman translation of the Greek aletheia to veritas enabled not only the truthof the ontotheological tradition at large but also and contrary to its modern apologists, who trace its origins to Greek thought the truth of humanistmodernity. In so doing, he implicates the discourse of humanism and the sociopolitical practice of modern democratic/humanist states with Rome'simperial project. According to Heidegger's genealogy of humanist truth, we recall, the decisive event in the historical process of the Occident's self-representation occurred when the Romans translated the Greek understanding of truth as aletheia (unconcealment) to veritas as adequaetio intellectuset rei, which, whether understood as " 'the correspondence of the matter to knowledge' or 'the correspondence of knowledge to the matter' hascontinually in view a conforming to ... and hence think[s] truth as correctness [Richtigkeit]." 12 The epochal turning point occurred when the Romansbegan to think temporal phenomena "technologically": on the basis of aground achieved by originary Greek thinking. The "translation of Greek namesinto Latin," Heidegger writes, "is in no way the innocent process it is considered to be to this day. Beneath the seeming and thus faithful translation thereis concealed, rather, a translation, of Greek experience into a different way of thinking." Roman thought emphatically and insistently "takes over Creekwords without a corresponding, equally original experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins withthis translation." 13 Henceforth and increasingly, "the ontology which . . . has thus arisen has deteriorated to a tradition in which it gets reduced tosomething self-evident merely material for reworking, as it was for Hegel." Greek ontology thus uprooted becomes "a fixed body of doctrine," 14 a


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"free-floating" discourse that, remote from the historicity of being-in-the-world, nevertheless determines history from that remoteness. 15 Truth asveritas involves the transformation of the uncentered originary and errant thinking of the Greeks into a secondary and derivative and calculativetechnology, in which the end determines the process of inquiry. To invoke the visual metaphorics underlying Heidegger's differentiation between aletheiand veritas the metaphorics that brings Heidegger's interrogation of modernity into convergence with Foucault's the Greek aletheia Heidegger wouldretrieve enables the always already de-structuring process of inquiry that he calls "repetition" (Wiederholung). This is the paradoxical circular movementhat always already dis-closes (brings to light/liberates) the difference ordinarily closed off and concealed (by being "spoken for") by the identicaldiscourse of "structure." It is the movement that precipitates an Erwiderung: a "reciprocal rejoinder" (which is a "disavowal") of what has been handeddown (now understood as "forestructure," as opposed to "presupposition," that necessarily begins inquiry). Repetition, [we recall], is handing downexplicitly that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that have-been-there. But when one has, by repetition, handed down to oneself apossibility that has been, the Dasein that has-been-there is not disclosed in order to be actualized over again. The repeating of that which is possible doesnot bring down again [ Wiederbringen] something that is "past," nor does it bind the "Present" back to that which has already been "outstripped." . . .Rather, the repetition makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence which has-been-there. But when such a rejoinder is made to this

possibility in a resolution, it is made in a moment of vision [Augenblick]; and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the "today" isworking itself out as the "past."16 The Roman veritas as adequaetio intellects et rei involves a derivative mode of inquiry in whichthe principle that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference is determinative. It is a logocentrismthat begins inquiry into the differential phenomena (objects and events) disseminated by a temporality "grounded" innothing (das Nichts) from the end. To emphasize its visual orientation, inquiry understood as adequation of mind and thing proceeds from above (meta-ta-physika): from a fixed transcendental vantage point a "Transcendental Signified" or "center elsewhere," in Derrida's terms, which is beyond the reach of free play. In thusprivileging the surveying and globalizing eye of vision, it has as its ultimate purpose the coercion ofdifference into the circumference of the identical circle.The center spatializes and reifies thedisseminations of temporality in order to "comprehend" them: not simply to know but to "take holdof" or "manage," that is, dominate and use them . The comportment toward phenomena the centerenables is thus that of the commanding eye, that is to say, the panoptic gaze. It is a visual comportment thatrepresents the force of difference as that which truth is not, as false (falsum) and thus as a threat to truth that must

be domesticated or pacified ,willfully reduced to the same in the name of this justice. From this genealogy ofthe conceptof the "truth" of modernity of the humanist post-Enlightenmentwhich discloses its origins in the Roman translation of theGreek aletheia to veritas, the hermeneutic circle (repetition) to the drculus vitiosus (recollection) that would pacify theforce of difference (of that which is "outside" the boundary of the centered circle), Heidegger proceeds to implicate this Romanized"truth" explicitly with modern cultural production specifically humanist paideia and implicitly with the modern

Western state: Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in the age of the Roman Republic. Homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus.Homo humanus here means the Romans, who exalted and honored Roman virtus through the "embodiment" of the paideia [education] taken over from the Greeks. These

were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture was acquired in the schools of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio et institutio in bonas artes [scholarship andtraining in good conduct]. Paideia thus understood was translated as humanitas. The genuine romanitas of homo romanus consisted in such humanitas. We encounter the firshumanism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman phenomenon which emerges from the encounter of Roman civilization with the culture of late Greekcivilization. The so-called Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy is a renascentia romanitatis. Because romanitas is what matters, it is concerned withhumanitas and therefore with Greek paideia. But Greek civilization is always seen in its later form and this itself is seen from a Roman point of view. 17

Modernitys quest for truth is tied to the creation of hegemonic empire.Spanos, 93 Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at

Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of WisconsinMadison [1993, William V.Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of MinnesotaPress, ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 143-4, Accessed through Ebrary]

In this very resonant, but largely neglected, passage from "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger ostensibly restricts the genealogy of modernity to the complicity between

humanist ontology and humanist pedagogy: the logocentrism (and its will to power) informing Roman veritas also informs the Roman paideia. Truth andknowledge production in the anthropological tradition, according to Heidegger, are, however unevenly developed, coextensive. But if we read this essayin the historically specific context in which it was written the catastrophe of Europe precipitated by the Third Reich a further extension in the relay of power

disclosed bythe discourse and practice of humanist modernityannounces itself, one that implicates truth and knowledgewith the politics of imperialism. For clearly, what Heidegger is saying here is not simply that the "disinterested truth" and the "liberal" culturalapparatuses of the post-Enlightenment tradition (humanism) have their origins in a pedagogical technology designed to produce "Romans," a "manly"citizenry, which, as the embodiment of a paideia that "exalted and honored Roman virtus" would constitute a disciplined and dependable (or inFoucault's terms, "useful and docile") collective of individuals. As the resonant opposition between homo humanus, which "here means the Romans,"

and homo barbarus makes clear, the ultimate purpose of the logocentric Roman veritas and its paideia was the production

of a disciplined and dependable citizenrycommitted to the achievement of the hegemonic empire, anefficient army of citizens, as it were. To put this relay of knowledge/power relations in terms of the metaphorics of the centered circleprivileged by the humanist tradition, the self-present subject as citizen/soldier produced by the discourse of veritas and its paideia became the structural

model of the Civitas. Just as the humanist anthropologos justifies the domestication by "cultivation" of thedifferential "provincial" energies of immature and deviant youth, so the self-present Capitol , or the Metropolis,

justifies the colonization of the barbarian energies of the provincial peoples, who , as "other," threaten itscivilized space. It is no accident, I would add to Heidegger's genealogy of humanism, that the English words "cultivate" and "culture"privileged by this tradition, especially since the Enlightenment, are cognates of "colonize" (from the Latin colonus, "tiller,""cultivator," "planter," "settler") and colere (to cultivate or plant). Nor is it accidental that these privileged counters have theirideological origin not in ancient Greekwords referring to such agents and practices, but in the Latin circulus: the figure appropriated from the Greek wordsKOKXos (cycle) or KipKos (ring) to represent and symbolize beauty, truth, and perfection. In sum, the Roman ideological reduction and codification of the"errancy" and "prodigality" of originary (aletheiological) Greek thinking their circumscription, cultivation, and colonization of truth-as-always-alreadyaletheia gave rise to its disciplinary educational project, and also legitimated the Romans' will to power over the peripheral and lowly provincial


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"barbarians." In short, the Roman translation of Greek thinking enabled in some fundamental way the Roman "imperium sine jini" (as Virgil puts it inthe Aeneid), which goes by the duplicitous name of the Pax Romana. It is, according to Heidegger's genealogy, this relay of repressions at the sites of thesubject, cultural production, and the City, and enabled by the idealization of the circle, the center of which is both inside and outside (above) thatconstitutes the origins of the discourse and practice of the modern West. 18 The circle and the affiliated metaphors constellated around its center thepolarities of light/darkness, high/low, prelapsarian/fallen, and so on are polyvalent in their material applications. To put Heidegger's genealogy of thediscourse, cultural institutions, and sociopolitical practices of humanist modernity in terms of the legacy of imperial Rome is to indicate how near,however more generalized, it is to Michel Foucault's genealogy of the modern disciplinary society. I mean specifically the panoptic society eventuallyprecipitated by an Enlightenment that deliberately appropriated the Roman model (specifically, the diagram of the military camp structure) to articulateits disciplinary epistemology, pedagogy, cultural agenda, and internal and external politics.

Truth and power are co-productiveto claim to know is to enable imperial domination.Spanos, 93 Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature atBinghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of WisconsinMadison [1993, William V.Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of MinnesotaPress, ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 147-8, Accessed through Ebrary]

The relay in this extraordinary passage between Roman truth (and falsehood), Roman cultural production, and Roman politics determined by the metaphorics of thesupervisory gaze and the transcendental center is obvious. What should not be overlooked, however, is the historically specific context Heidegger's Parmenides addresses. At

its most general level, it constitutes a genealogy of modern power relations. More specifically, it demonstrates that the "strong" discursive practices ofwhathe calls "humanism" in his postwar "Letter on Humanism" have their origins, not in Greek thought, as it is assumed in modern Europe at large, but in thecircular (anthropo)logic, the disciplinary pedagogy, and the imperial practice of Rome. It is no accident that in the latter half ofthe passage Heidegger carefully distinguishes between two kinds of domination that have a single origin. One kind of power over the fallen "other"operates directly(is immediate) and is thus visible; the other operates by indirection or detour (Hintergehung), is mediate, and

is thus invisible. The "bringing-down-to-ground" can be accomplished in a direct assault (Sturm) or repressiveconquest; or it can be achieved by discursive practices that are deceptively benign. But what is crucial is not simply that they areboth determined by a fixed center that is above or beyond the reach of free play of "reciprocal rejoinder," as it were but also, and above all, that it is the latterspecifically,the discourse enabled by the Roman veritas/fahum opposition that characterizes the developed form of"imperial" domination: "It is not in war, but in the fallen of deceptive outflanking and its appropriation to theservice of dominion that the proper and 'great' trait of the imperial reveals itself." However generalized Heidegger's formulation,

we are not far here from the poststructuralist and neo-Marxist interrogation of power relations in modernity: Foucault's analysis of the repressive hypothesis determining thepractices of the disciplinary society, Gramsci's analogous analysis of capitalist hegemony, Althusser's analysis of the ideological state apparatuses, 23 and Said's analysis of theeffects of the "strong languages" of the West vis-a-vis the "weak languages" of the "Third World," all of which implicate the "truth" of the dominant discursive practices withpower and domination over the threatening "other." Indeed, if, as there is every justification to do, we conflate the passages from the lectures on the Parmenides and the

"Letter on Humanism" addressing the Roman reduction of Greek thinking, we arrive at the following proposition: Truth and power, knowledgeproduction and repression, according to Heidegger, are not external to each other (as they are assumed to be in the discursivepractices of humanism),but continuous and complicitous with each other . To put it in terms of the figure informing this relation, the circleof truth/beauty/perfection is also the circle of domination. The violence that accompanies overt imperialism is

not incommensurate with but latent in the truth of humanism. Remarkably like Foucault, the benign discursive practicesof humanism collectively constitute a "regime of truth."


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link: hegemony

Acting as if our military can guarantee world peace is inherently colonialist and ensuresdomination.Spanos 8 [William V. Spanos, 2008, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, Chapter 1 Pages 19-22, MV]

Given the glaring visibility of Fukuyamas invisibilizing of the Vietnam Wara process further abetted by Richard Haass's, and, as l will show later,Samuel P. Huntington's and the numerous Straussian neoconservatives' "realisitic" representation of the post-9/11 worldit is surprising, in other

words, that these oppositional discourses should have been blind to his arrogant (or incredibly naive) re-visionary/recuperative strategy, to the factthat this end-of-history discourse of what, since then, has come to be called "the American Century" relies ona now anachronistic ontological justification. I mean a rationale that reverts to the very epistemethe ground of legitimacythat thesingular event of the Vietnam War and the "theory" it precipitated had decisively delegitimized by revealing the truth discourse of liberal capitalistdemocracy to be a social constructionthat of the "Anglo-Protestant core culture," as Huntington will put it after 9/11-infused by a totalizing will topower that is characterized by its suppression or accommodation, the colonization, as it were, of the entire relay of Others composing the continuum ofbeing to its polyvalent Identity. To put that which these oppositional discourses overlook succinctly, Fukuyama's representation of the end of the Cold

War or, to emphasize that it is the hegemonization of this end-of-history discourse with which l am concerned, themediatization of his representation, is informed by a metaphysical ontology that willfully subdues actualhistory, its differential dynamics, to its secularized transcendental Logos. In short, thecalculative/instrumentalist thinking it privileges as the agency of truth is essentially imperial. It is not so muchliberal capitalism's practical colonization of the planet as such that this end-of-history discourse is celebrating.After all, Fukuyama, Haass, and the culture they and their neoconservative col- leagues represent acknowledge thepossibility of future setbacks and dis- appointments in this geopolitical "American" project. lt is, rather, itsplanetary colonization of thinking in its technological/instrumentalist mode, though the two are not mutuallyexclusive, indeed, are indissolubly related. The fundamental ideological purpose of this discourse is to delegitimize every other form ofthinking than that dialectical/instrumental reasoning that, according to the Kojevian/Hegelian perspective informing it, History's Aufhebung hasprecipitated as the planetary absolute-the Pax Metaphysica, as it were.This total "victory of a historically "perfected" calculative metaphysics means, of course, the decisive preclusion as a viable option of the kind ofontological political thinking precipitated as an imperative by the recognition of the Vietnam War as a radical contradiction in the discursive practices ofliberal capitalist democracy, the kind of differential thinking, that is, that haunts the legitimacy of the latter's "benign" global narrative. The massivepost-Cold War representation of every manifestation of such thinking first as "politically correct." a "new McCarthyism of the Left, by the "victors" hascontributed significantly to the demise of the little authority it originally achieved, indeed, as I will show, to their demonization after 9/11 as complicitouswith, if not acts of, terrorism as such. It thus bears emphatic witness to the success of the dominant culture's recuperative project of delegitimizing-whichis to say, of colonizing-a thinking that would think the spectral difference that cannot finally be contained by the imperial (onto)logic of liberaldemocracy.


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link: avoiding impacts

The impact claims of the affirmative present us with an opportunity to NOT act in the face offear. This confronts us with dread and enables ontological grappling.Thiele, 97, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, Postmodernity and theRoutinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology, Polity, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp.489-517, jstor]

The mood Heidegger is best known for investigating, which became the basis for much existentialist interest in him, is anxietyor dread (Angst).Anxiety is the disposition in which thrownness is made self-conscious and experienced mostprofoundly.Anxiety disallows our everyday turning away from thrownness, maintaining the relation of Being-in as problematic. Heidegger states succinctly that "anxiousness as a state-of-mind is a way of Being-in-the-world; thatin the face of which we have anxiety is thrown Being-in-the-world."29 When anxious, one fears nothing inparticular, nothing identifiable. Yet there remains a certain foreboding.A dread of confronting one's finitude,one's ungroundedness, persists. The worldly stage is nervously sensed as not of one's making or choos- ing. Onefinds oneself cast in a role beyond one's power fully to direct or control. Anxiety is perhaps best described asthe state of unease in which one's "there" is revealed to be not fully one's own. One feels displaced. The world is disclosed as foreign.

Anxiety is the foreboding of homelessness.Heidegger describes anxiety as "unheimlich." Translators have gen- erallyrendered this as uncanny. The connotation of uneasy strangeness is also present in the German. Literally, however, unheimlich means unhomelike.

Anxiety brings us back from our absorption in the world such that everyday familiarity collapses. This collapseof routine worldliness is ontologically definitive of human being. Anxiety, then, is the mood of homelessness

that tears one away from moods of habitual coping. Anxiety is neither a deprived state of human being nor a deficient state of mind.On the contrary, from an ontological perspective, anxiety is a fundamental disposition, a home(less) base from which other moods depart.30 Being athome in the world, in the manner of feeling comfortable within the weave of convention, signals a fleeing into ontic familiarity in the face of ontologicaluncanniness. What is dangerous, Heidegger maintains, is not that this flight occurs. We all necessarily live in the manner of everydayness as a conditionof human being, shifting for ourselves and with others. Life itself, one might fairly say, depends upon this ingenious or routine self-management. At the

same time, anxiety should not be deprecated. It brings to light the ontological reality of our thrown, ungrounded,and contingent nature. We cannot achieve and should not seek a permanent escape from ourexistential homelessness and the anxiety it engenders.31 Indeed, the uniqueness and greatness of human

being lies in its capacity reflectively to experience its ungrounded contingency. What is dangerous, Heideggermaintains, is the systematic effort to forego the struggle with contingency.32 Human being oscillates

between an ontic ensconcing in the world and an ontological alienation from it. While one never truly secures ahome on this earth, the effort to discover a home (in homelessness) is imperative . To abandon this effort.Heidegger suggests, is to embrace nihilism. Heidegger challenges us to dwell in the homelessness that

anxiety brings to light. Indeed, the "becoming at home in not being home" (das Heimisch werden im Unheimischsein) isannounced as the meaning of our worldly dwelling.What is truly dangerous, then, is not our ungrounded thrownness orcontingent finitude, but our lack of concern for these states of homelessness.What is dangerous is not the mood ofanxi- ety that brings us to contemplate nothingness,but the nihilistic refusal to engage in suchcontemplation.


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***ALT


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Alt solves global domination

Releasement creates an ethical engagement with the world that can break us from the quest forglobal domination.Thiele, 4, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, August, Review: A(Political) Philosopher by Any Other Name: The Roots of Heidegger's Thought, jstor]

In a 1955 address delivered at his birth town of Messkirch, Heidegger discussed the significance of "homeland." Avoiding nationalist overtones butfocused on place, Heidegger was revisiting a concern for Bodenstandigkeit, or "rootedness," that occupied him since the early 1920s and rose to political

prominence the following decade. Homelessness, Heidegger continued to lament after the war, was becoming the global destiny of humankind.Technology and its socio-political handmaid, liberal cosmopolitanism, were depicted as the chief threats.A recovery from the enframinggrasp of technology was to be gained, if it was to be gained, only through a (re)discovery of our capacity forrootedness and releasement (Gelassenheit). Releasement-a 'letting-be' and a bearing witness-would serve along

with rootedness as antidotes to the will to mastery over space and time that was tightening technology's grip . Tothe extent that moral systems remain characterized by the willful ordering of the world, they were depicted as(just) another form of enframing. In their stead, Heidegger asked that we shift our attention back to theHeraclitean notion of ethics as ethos or dwelling place. The alternative to humanistic ethics in a cosmopolitan ageof technology is an "originary ethics" marked by the rediscovery of our potential for dwelling in place, poeticallyand politically. Stuart Elden's Mapping the Present is a lively discussion of the importance of place in the writings of Heidegger and Foucault.Though the least compelling of the books examined here, Mapping the Present is rightly directed in its recommendation that theorists" spatialize historyand not simply historicize space" (p. 153). Elden argues that Heidegger shaped Foucault's historical approach, and, more specifically, helped him developa concern for spatial history, understood not in terms of physical extension through a series of chronological moments (a la Descartes), but as a concern

for a place of dwelling that is experienced historically, which is to say, authentically. As Elden observes, Dasein is the point of collision of ahistorical being with a futural orientation in a situated present. In the Augenblick, an authentic grappling with thespace-time of Dasein, one effectively maps the present. Heidegger's effort to overcome metaphysics chieflyconstituted the rejection of a modern understanding of time and space, an understanding Heidegger deemed fitonly for world domination. In Hilderlin's tributes to journey and place, Heidegger found the voice for a new, orrediscovered, relationship. Elden argues that Foucault's concern with space demonstrates his indebtedness to Heidegger. This assertion isthinly documented, notwithstanding Foucault's own high estimate of Heidegger. To be sure, Foucault analyzed the geography of power. He investigatedthe policing of modern spaces, whether these were the collective places of surveillance-madhouses, prisons, and clinics-or the compartmentso f the soulwhere disciplineb ecomes internalized. But describing Foucault as a thinker interested in the exercise of power within and between bodies, psyches, andsocial networks does not go very far in demonstrating his Heideggerian roots.


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Alt solves ethics

Ontological questioning is grounded in a radical notion of human freedom that demands deepreflection on ethics.Dallmayr, 84 - Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of NotreDame, [Fred, may, Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2(May, 1984), pp. 204-234, jstor]

The implications of Heidegger's conception of freedom for contemporary political and social theory arenumerous and, I believe, far-reaching. Clearly the most important feature is the dislodging of freedom from human willfulness and subjectivity-adecentering deviating radically from the modern tendency to treat freedom as individual (or collective) property and thus as a particular quality ofindividual (or collective) decisions. From his earliest to his latest writings, Heidegger has tried to explore the presubjective or ontological grounding offreedom an exploration, however, that did not sacrifice free initiative or action to a blind fate or to the mechanical operation of environmental and

structural constraints. In addition to challenging the traditional doctrine of free will, his conception also implies adeparture from the conventional framework of causality and especially from the view that willing, as the core offreedom, signifies the causation or causal production of effects.In light of the frequent charge of amoralism (ifnot immoralism), it is important to note the ethical connotations of Heidegger's perspective-although this perspectiveis patently incompatible with both naturalistic and voluntaristic versions of ethics. As it seems to me, instead of simply perpetuating (orabolishing) traditional value theories, Heidegger's work seeks to uncover the ontological conditions ofpossibility of valuing or-more appropriately phrased-of "goodness" and "evil."37 Particularly his lectures on Schellingadumbrate the intimate connection between freedom and the "capacity for good and evil." From this vantage point, the genuine or unpervertedexercise of freedom is shown to be a persistent tendency or inclination toward the good life, that is, towardhuman reconciliation and peace-an aspect that casts a stark new light on such customary ideological antithesesas liberalism and socialism.Instead of vouchsafing individual isolation and selfishness, freedom in this view isnot merely an accidental ingredient, but the essential grounding of human solidarity(or socialism)-just as solidarityproperly construed denotes a reciprocal effort of liberation or a mutual "letting-be."


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Alt solves technological thought

A refusal to act enables us to break from technological thought.Thiele, 97, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heideggeron Boredom and Technology, Polity, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 489-517, jstor]

To avoid this reduction, Heidegger writes, we must "overcome the compulsion to lay our hands on everything."45 Though Heidegger is frequently misinterpreted on this point, refusing to lay our hands on everything does not signal a retreatfrom the world, nor even an end to the use and development of machines or other products of technology. The

problem is not the human creation and use of machines but rather the creation and use ofhuman machines-the making of ourselves into mere extensions of technological forces andprocesses. Refusing to lay our hands on everything simply means a halt to the imperial attitude whichenframes everything, everywhere, as raw material awaiting exploitation. The link between modern technology and deepboredom is perhaps best illustrated by examining their common relation to time. The essence of technological activity is efficiency. Itsgoal is to achieve given ends such as the production of energy, artifacts, knowledge, wealth, power, or pleasure-with a minimum expenditure of

resources. Foremost among these resources is time itself. Modern technology assails time in its effort to speed through atomic,global, and cosmic space, and by accelerating daily routines and functions. This victory over time bears a price:humanity comes to relate to time as an obstacle and antagonist, as a recalcitrant force that demandsharnessing. The effect of technological innovation, in other words, is not so much the saving of time as itsconquest. Human being is a dwelling in time, a disclosive being-in-the-word. Human being's "letting-becomepresent," Heidegger writes, "is nothing other than time itself."46 Yet one can not truly dwell in time if one orients

oneself to it as a hostile force to be overcome or a fleeting externality to be captured and put to work.47I n fosteringan antagonistic orientation to time, technology disrupts our worldliness. In the same vein, boredom makes our timely Being-in-the-world onerous andthe world's potential for timely disclosure a matter of indifference. Consequently time weighs most heavily on the bored. It is an object of resistance andresentment. Profound boredom signifies an unwillingness, timidity, or incapacity to experience Being as time.


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Alt solves terrorism

The critique turns terrorism:a) The will to control the world through security planning is what creates terrorism,

b) The drive for security is simultaneously an effort at total surveillance and calculationthis makes all life into meaningless standing reserve, andc) Governments create threats to justify their drive for power.

The alternative alone is the only way to solve because the frenzy of management eclipsesontological questions.Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford)Research Phenomenology. Pittsburgh:2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM).

Modern metaphysics itself, according to Heidegger, "means the securing of the human being byitself and for itself(GA 67: 167). Such a policy must be abandoned as the human becomes moreand more a piece of the standing-reserve like everything else. This postmodern security is accomplishedthrough bestowal and appraisal of value, "securement, as the obtaining of security, is a grounding in valuation"(GA 5: 262/195; tm). What is valued can be replaced by something of equal value, and this fact lies at the centerof our conception of security today. Securement, as a giving of value, assures us against loss by making the

world replaceable. In this respect, security is nothing other than total availability, imagined as a world of uttertransparency where all resources, human and otherwise, are constantly surveilled and traced through theirpaths of circulation. The transformation in being coincident with the end of modern warfare likewise puts an

end to modern politics and establishes in its place an impersonal commitment to the furthering of plannedreplacement. Security is only possible when everything works according to these plans, and this requires "leaders," whose truefunction now becomes evident. For the plan, "the necessity of 'leadership', that is, the planned calculation of the securing of the whole of beings, is required" (GA 7: 89-90/EP,105; tm). The demand for security is always a call for such Fuhrers. Planning is a matter of ensuring the smooth and "frictionless" circulation of resources along channels andpipelines of order and delivery. The plan's success is-assured from the outset, because beings are now in essence planable. The mathematical tracking of stock and supplies

becomes a total tracking when things have become completely available. Nothing is concealed from this taking of inventory, with the ellcct that the mathematical model of QICtiling is no different from the thing itself. The mathematical modeling of things, an operation that Heidegger traces back to Ockham and the nominalist split between word andthing (see VS, 30-31/13-14), is paradigmatic for the disappearance of identifiably discrete beings under the rule of technology. The model is no longer a representation of whatis modeled but, in a paradoxical manner, the thing itself. Nothing beyond the thing's mathematical model is recognized. Everything essential to the thing is contained in themodel, without remainder. Such is the truth of the standing-reserve; it is a collapse of the distances that made possible representation. Without that spacing, there is only thesuffocating rush of the standing-reserve along the circuitry of the plan. The plan makes manifest the self-willing nature of technology, in that the plan has no purpose other

than to assure its own expansion and increase. For the plan to function, it is therefore necessary that beings be consumed andtheir replacements follow right upon them. The plan plans for consumption, outlining the paths and channelsthat the standing-reserve will occupy in its compelled obedience to order. The world wars have pointed towardsthis end, according to Heidegger, for "They press toward a securing of resources [Bestandsicherung] for a

constant form of consumption" (GA 7: 88; EP, 103-4; tm). This consumption is synonymous with replacement,since there is nothing lost in consumption that is not immediately replaced. The plan is to protect itself fromloss by completely insulating itself from uncertainty. The plan seeks "the 'all-inclusive' [restlose] securing of theordering of order" (GA 7: 92; EP, 107; tm). Order is only secured when there is nothing that resists it, nothingthat remains in "disorder." Any remainder would stand outside of the prevailing order, as would any difference,in complete disorder. There is another Nietzschean intimation in this, as Heidegger reads the will to power as adrive to secure and order all chaos. Without remainder (restlose), without rest, the standing-reservethreatens to encompass everything in a monotonous, swirling sameness. The more secure die world

becomes, the greater is the abandonment of being as it is further enframed within the plan. Homelandsecurity is thus an oxymoron, since one of the most prominent effects of planning is the elimination ofnational differences and "homelands." Security itself is precisely the planned elimination of differences, and as for "homeland," it is ever more difficult toconceive of a homeland that would be nationally distinct from another. This is not to be understood as a complaint against internationalism either, for 'Just as the distinction

between war and peace has become untenable, the distinction between 'national' and 'international' has also collapsed" (GA 7: 92; EP, 107). We have already seen thatHeidegger attributes a will to the annihilation of homeland to Americanism; what needs to be added to this view is that there is not one form of government any different; eachis run by leaders: The uniformity of beings arising from the emptiness of the abandonment of Being, in which it is only a matter of the calculable security of its order, an order

which it subjugates to the will to will, this uniformity also conditions everywhere in advance of all national differences the uniformity of leadership [Fhrerschaft], for which alforms of government are only one instrument of leadership among others. (GA 7: 93; EP, 108; tm) Government and politics are simply further means of directing ways of lifeaccording to plan; and no one, neither terrorist nor politician, should be able to alter these carefully constructed ways of life. Ways of life are themselves effects of the plan, andthe predominant way of life today is that of an all-consuming Americanism. National differences fall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded, can only

appear as commodified quaintness. All governments participate in the eradication of national differences. Insofar as Americanism represents the attemptto annihilate the "homeland," then under the aegis of the abandonment of being, all governments and forms ofleadership become Americanism. The loss of national differences is accordant with the advent of terrorism, since terrorism knows no national bounds but,rather, threatens difference and boundaries as such. Terrorism is everywhere, where "everywhere" no longer refers to a collection of distinct places and locations but instead to

a "here" that is the same as there, as every "there." The threat of terrorism is not international, but antinational or, to strain a Heideggerian formulation, unnational.Homeland security, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it claims to protect, is nothingopposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its threat. Our leaders, in their attempt tosecure the world against terrorism, only serve to further drive the world towards its homogenized state. Theelimination of difference in the standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to identify the threat of terrorism with the quest for security. The
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absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If a threat isnot perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no need for security. Security is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be damaged. Does

America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a recognition of one's own vulnerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment of one's threatened

condition, and this means that it can only be found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason, all of the plannedsecurities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Securityrequires that we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in the office of preservers

As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not challenge it forth intotechnological availability, to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is noisolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being. Heidegger will name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrheit) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves(bawahrf). When a thing truthfally is, when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truthof being is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is

complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish terrorism.For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain

skeptical of all the various measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so manyattempts to do away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can only draw out more and

more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending supply. The will can only devastate the earth. Ratherthan approaching the world in terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in thepreservation of the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security measures and thefrantic organization of resources that we directly assault the things we would preserve. The threat of beinggoes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, andsurveilled. The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest .

Terrorism is a product of the quest for security. We are not faced with outside aggressors butwith the flip side of our drive to create global homogeneity. The result is a withdrawal of Being,

a fate worse than death. Only turning away from the slavery of pragmatic utilitarianism cansolve.Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell.Research in Phenomenology. (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford)Pittsburgh:2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs, Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM).

Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from simple presence and absence. It thinks whatHeidegger calls "the between" (das Zwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence.

Annihilation is impossible for this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a clue to thewithdrawal of being. The world is denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the dangeronly ever increases. Dasein flees to a metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there tofind security. But security cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it. Dasein guards the truth of

being in the experience of terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls forterrorism and for terrorists.With the enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve,

what is has already been destroyed. Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. Aswe have seen, being does not linger behind the scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorize-if,in other words, this is an age of terrorism-then being must call for terrorists. They are simply more "slaves ofthe history of being" (614 69: 209) and, in Heidegger's eyes, no different from the politicians of the day inservice to the cause of Americanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the politiciansare not. Granting this objection despite its obvious navet, we can nonetheless see that both politicians andterrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence, that the plan will reacheveryone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into circulation

by the threat of destruction. In this regard, "human resources" are no different from "livestock,"and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place . Human resources do not die, they perish. Insofar as it is

Americanism that is identified with technological domination and the spread of the unworld, then it is no wonder that America is the place where the question of terrorism canand must be posed. Instead of turning from terror, we are called to respond to it. Not by sealing ourselves off from it in a single-minded deafness, but by preserving the trace of

being in its withdrawal. America is distinct in this because America most faces the challenge of Americanism. America is today fighting the shadow of itself, it yearns to leap

over its shadow and into a state of pure visibility and security.America is not faced with an outside aggressor, but with itsown photographic negative in Americanism/terrorism. America's challenge is to not recognize itself in Americanism and topreserve its difference from this ogre. For America to believe that it is the driving force behind Americanism is for America to believe that it is in control of being. Americanismis a movement of being; it is nothing "American." America's other is neither Greece nor Rome, but Americanism. America must distinguish itself from Americanism in order to

confront Americanism as its ownmost other. Terror can teach us this and lead us to preserve what is our own. Is this to say that we should remainforever terrorized? exist forever in a state of terror? Is this supposed to provide a solution to theproblem of terrorism? Surely that would be an outrageous demand (arge Zumutung) to place uponthinking. The older man says the same thing about malevolence as a basic trait of being; it places an outrageousdemand upon thinking. A first step away from the imposed convenience of Americanism might be heard in the

words of the younger man, "That this should be easy, namely to think the essential, is also a demand whichonly arises from the spirit of devastation" (GA 77: 215). If we are to think the essential, to think what withdrawsin concealment before the total availability of the unworld around us, then our thinking itself will have to
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change. Thinking the essential, this is a thinking that we can never be done with, a thinking that is never to beaccomplished, a thinking that concerns what can never be thought through. Rather than think from out of thesp

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